Mobocracy

Ever since India won its independence from the British, Indians have spent much of their time plotting and battling to be free of other Indians. Each of the 14 major language groups demands a state of its own, and for two years a state commission has been earnestly redrawing boundaries to oblige them. From the start, the biggest trouble was expected from the state of Bombay's 16 million Maha-rashtrians, who reluctantly share a state the size of California with 11 million Gujaratis. Last week trouble came.

The Maharashtrians were warriors and once ruled central India from coast to coast. They looked down on the Gujaratis, who by caste and occupation were shopkeepers. But the British conquered the warriors and encouraged the shopkeepers. The proud Maharashtrians became the laborers of India's West Coast; the Gujaratis gradually gained control of the business life of Bombay, the nation's wealthiest, most modern and second-biggest city. The Maharashtrians, who outnumber the Gujaratis in the city two to one, work for them and dislike them.

The Gujaratis were willing to accept a bilingual state. Not the Maharashtrians. They demanded their own state, with the city of Bombay as its capital. Last week Nehru proposed a compromise: the state of Bombay would be divided to give each language group a state of its own; the city of Bombay would become a separate, bilingual area administered by the federal government in New Delhi.

Smash, Burn, Kill. It was a moment the Communists had been preparing for, a fact well known to Chief Minister Morarji Desai of Bombay State, who is often spoken of as Nehru's heir apparent. Before dawn, on Desai's orders, police arrested 435 Communist, Socialist and United Maharashtra Party leaders. The Communists had prepared for this eventuality, too. Secretly trained alternates swiftly swung into action. At their direction, hundreds of thousands of Maharashtrian workers dropped their work and swarmed out of dockyards, textile mills and railroad shops into the streets, shouting "Death to Nehru!" The rioters blocked streets with boulders and gasoline drums, tore up lampposts, ripped down fences. They smashed statues of Mahatma Gandhi (a Gujarati himself), burned Desai in effigy, flourished pictures of Nehru hung with old shoes as a gesture of despisal. Mobs, sometimes 10,000 strong, stormed police stations, looted Gujarati shops, flung electric light bulbs filled with nitric acid in the faces of police and passersby. Saboteurs derailed trains, hurled stones at buses, set fire to cars.

Waving black flags of protest and flourishing improvised spears, mobs roamed Bombay's streets.* One grey-bearded Gujarati shopkeeper hastily tried to bar his shop door. He was too late. One rioter knocked the old man down, beat his head in with a large rock. The shopkeeper's little daughter ran screaming to her father's side. The rioter smashed the rock into the child's face, and she collapsed in a small heap over her father's body.

On major corners, embattled police drew up their trucks in a tight circle, like so many covered wagons in a western movie, and fought pitched battles with stone-throwing rioters. From the circle's protection, they launched quick sorties into nearby alleys and houses, scooped up scores of rioters, and retreated with their prisoners to the corrals.

At the end of six days' rioting, 56 were dead by official admission; unofficial estimates were nearer 250. Thousands were injured, other thousands in prison.

Calcutta, Too. In his house above the city, Chief Minister Desai sadly looked over burning Bombay. Desai, who is a Gujarati, had warned Nehru against dividing India by lingual groups. "Maharashtrians have made a mockery of India's preaching to the world to be nonviolent," he mourned. "If the government yields to Maharashtrian violence, democracy in India becomes mobocracy, and India will be cut to pieces."

Nothing could please the Communists more, and at week's end they were pressing their advantage. They paralyzed Calcutta with a strike of 2,000,000 workers to demand a bigger chunk of Bihar State for West Bengal. Across India, Sikhs rioted in Amritsar, and a Sikh leader told a cheering audience: "If Sikh demands are not met, the Bombay drama may be repeated in the Punjab."

At week's end, Prime Minister Nehru, defending the necessity for firing into the Bombay crowds, made an emotional appeal to Congress leaders, moving many to tears. Cried Nehru: "Who lives if India dies, and who dies if India lives?"

* TIME Correspondent Alexander Campbell was caught in the riots, cabled: "One prancing rioter screamed defiance and, hurling stones at the police, dropped riddled at my feet, spouting blood, which spattered my shoes."

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