Centrifugal Politics

Perhaps, after all, there would be no independent India; indeed, there might be no India.

By last week nine months of slaughter, pillage, and arson had killed nearly 15,000* Indians (according to low Government estimates), had all but persuaded Britons and Congress leaders that Moslems and Hindus could not cooperate in a unified nation. Almost everybody but Gandhi now accepts the principle of Pakistan (a separate Moslem state or states). Even Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru has said: "The Moslem League can have Pakistan if they wish to have it." But he served notice that if India was going to split along communal lines, Congress would not let Jinnah have non-Moslem territories which he claims. "If parts of Punjab and Bengal want to separate no one can compel them the other way."

Even the Moslem League's cold, uncompromising Mohamed Ali Jinnah was getting cold feet. He said: "The question of the partitioning of Bengal and Punjab is raised ... to unnerve the Moslems by . . . emphasizing that the Moslems will get truncated or mutilated in a moth-eaten Pakistan. . . . It's a mistake to compare the basic principle of demand for Pakistan [with] cutting up provinces throughout India into fragmentation."

Jinnah could not stop the centrifugal spin even if he wanted to. His Moslem followers had been whipped into an irreversible crusade for Pakistan. Their motives ran all the way from deep religious fervor to that of one Moslem politician who said: "In Hindustan I would be nothing, but in Pakistan I could be Secretary of State for Air."

Two men worked for unity. The Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten (who had just returned from a peace tour in the turbulent North-West Frontier Province), sent two emissaries to London. Their report stressed the danger of dissolution, but contained no suggestion that the British remain in India beyond next year's deadline.

Gandhi, dressed in a newly starched khadi loin cloth, with a white cotton shawl over his bare shoulders, drove in a new, green Studebaker to Jinnah's stucco house. Acting the part of Qaed-e-Azam (Head of the Nation), Jinnah sent his secretary to greet Gandhi at his car, waited inside the house for his first private meeting with the Hindu leader in three years.

When Gandhi left, two hours and 45 minutes later, Pakistan was closer than ever. Jinnah had not budged an inch. Neither had Gandhi. Said he: "I can never be a party to the division of India. I cannot bear the thought of it."

Perhaps the most discouraging sign in India was the fact that factional intolerance had invaded Gandhi's own prayer meetings. Some of his followers no longer allowed him to read the Koran along with the Hindu Bhagavadgita.

He might find a bitter prophecy in a poem by Mohamed Iqbal:

Why can I not manage this earthly

business?

Why is the religious sage a fool on

earth?

* Almost double the total of Americans killed in the War of Independence, the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.

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