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Most Indian political experts believe that the United Front will behave somewhat better this time in order to keep the Prime Minister from reimposing President's Rule on West Bengal. That may be overly optimistic. In all likelihood, the Communist victory there and the process of political fragmentation elsewhere in India forebode a period of increasing instability and chaos.
The Fires of Hatred
For four terrifying days, maddened rioters surged through the streets of Bombay, burning, looting and battling police for control of India's most westernized city. When calm was finally restored last week, 52 Indians lay dead, more than 650 were injured and nearly 3,500 were under arrest. Only eight days before, Moslems across the subcontinent in Calcutta, angered by what they felt was a newspaper's slur of Mohammed, exploded in a brief outburst of violence that cost five lives. The two clashes were the latest manifestations of the communal hatreds that have plagued India for generations—and are the chief obstacles to the long-cherished dream of Indian unity.
The coming of independence, which might have been expected to bring Indians together, instead exacerbated the problems of its linguistic, regional and religious animosities. In Indian parlance, the feuds are lumped together under the word communalism. The term once connoted a beneficial form of cooperation but in the last decades of the British Raj came to mean precisely the opposite. Communalism has long been one of India's paramount concerns, and there is every indication that the process of fragmentation is speeding up.
Border Dispute. The Bombay riots were a classic example of regional chauvinism. In recent years, at least 50 regional-minded organizations called senas (armies) have sprung up across India. The most potent of these is Bombay's Shiv Sena, formed in 1966 by a hot-tempered political cartoonist named Bal Thackeray.* A fierce anti-Communist who admits to an admiration for Adolf Hitler's nation-building abilities, Thackeray emerged as a political force in 1967, when he and his followers engineered the defeat of Krishna Menon's bid for re-election to Parliament. Since that time, Thackeray has fought hard to obtain a better break for the natives of Maharashtra State, of which Bombay is the capital; in particular, he worked to get more white-collar jobs for them, charging that outsiders from the neighboring states of Mysore and Kerala hold a disproportionate number of these eagerly sought posts in Bombay. His war cry is "Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians," and he has been pressing the Indian government for several months for a resolution of Maharashtra State's long-pending claim to 814 villages in Mysore.