Victory for Good Sense

Moslems and Hindus have lived side by side in bitter, sometimes bloody enmity ever since Turkish invaders brought Islam to the Indian subcontinent 900 years ago. Last week, in a dramatic repudiation of the ancient animosity, a Moslem was elected for the first time to the presidency of predominantly Hindu India. He is Zakir Husain, 70, a former university chancellor who had been Vice President for five years under President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who did not seek reelection.

The election of a Moslem to India's highest, though largely ceremonial, post would have pleased Jawaharlal Nehru. As India's first Prime Minister, he insisted that religion and politics should be separated in the newly independent country, hoped that India would develop into a secular, Western-style nation rather than a religion-centered Hindu homeland. Fittingly, it was his daughter who engineered the election. Selecting Husain as her candidate, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi argued that other countries would not believe India's claim to ethnic and religious impartiality unless a Moslem could become head of state. She threw her whole prestige behind his election.

It was quite a risk, especially in the wake of February's nationwide elections, in which the Congress Party lost control of eight of India's 17 state governments and dropped 82 seats in the lower house of Parliament. Hoping to deal Indira yet another blow, seven opposition parties, ranging from far-rightists to Peking-lining leftists, rallied behind a single candidate, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Subba Rao, a staunch Hindu. But the vote, conducted in the state assemblies and na tional Parliament, went to Husain by a solid margin.

Outnumbered 7 to 1 by Hindus, India's 60 million Moslems live largely outside the country's mainstream. They tend to mix little with Hindus, cluster in separate urban ghettos, have a different written language (Urdu), and enjoy immunities from federal laws so that they, for example, may practice polygamy while other Indians must limit themselves to one wife at a time. Worst of all in Hindu eyes, Moslems are beef eaters, and they outrage their Hindu neighbors by slaughtering cows, which Hindus consider sacred. President Husain, whose own wife still wears a veil and lives in seclusion as the Prophet recommended, hopes to relax the vexing tensions between the two religious groups. "We must talk less, quarrel less, work hard and ever harder, and hold together," he said after his election. It was a sensible formula not only for India's Hindu-Moslem troubles but for the country's other problems as well.

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