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In the cities, as always, the warnings of conflict and disorder were sharpest. Throngs of wartime jobholders were idle. In sweltering Calcutta, it took but the flick of a Moslem cigaret butt against the flanks of a sacred Hindu cow, or a Hindu tonga driver's bumping a Moslem child, to start a fight that would engulf the city. Last week Calcutta was still divided into "Pakistan" and "Hindustan" quarters, with strong points bristling with .barbed wire and machine guns. A Hindu driver dared not cross into a Moslem quarter, nor a Moslem into "Hindustan." In Bombay, where Hindus and Moslems had formerly lived mixed in together, streetcar signs now said "Pakistan Bombay," meaning the Moslem quarter.
"Are You Happy?" With the political leaders' agreement to partition India had come a lull in communal fighting. But last week it flared again at Lahore in the Punjab. In the Gurgaon district near Delhi, Moslem and Hindu-Sikh tribes still burned and looted each other's villages. There, for the first time in communal riots, firearms were used on a big scale by each side. The embattled tribes had been turning out homemade wooden rifles, six feet long. In a divided India, where 38 million Moslems are still within the borders of Hindu India, 18 million Hindus and two million Sikhs within Pakistan, few supposed that political deals in Delhi could really repair the breach between religious communities.
One Moslem, who had lost his leather works in riots at Amritsar, no longer cared whether he was in Pakistan or Hindustan. Unshaven and ragged, Chaudhri Ahmen Hasan wandered aimlessly among the ruins of his property, carrying a big framed photograph of Jinnah. From time to time Hasan paused and addressed the picture: "Are you happy now, Qaid-e-Azam [Great Leader]? You have at last achieved Pakistan."
One Hindu, Mohandas Gandhi, still hoped to bring Hindus and Moslems together in a united India. If, in spite of divisive forces, India's 400 million really form themselves into a nation in the modern sense, Gandhi will have brought off (almost as a by-product of his larger purpose) a revolution greater than
Danton's, bigger than Lenin's. The subcontinent had never been a nation; its separate peoples had, however, tolerated each others' very different ways of life. As both a politician and a Great Soul. Gandhi knew that if tolerance was replaced by permanent hatred, there would be not just two Indias, but no India. For India's future, nonviolence was not a philosopher's dream, but a political necessity.
Far closer than Queen Victoria's little isle was the Soviet Union which might, like Britain before it, exploit the weakness of a divided India to win hegemony. Already Puran Chandra Jpshi, India's grinning Communist leader,' and other Russian agents had a small (50,000), growing, tightly organized machine within India. If dissension grew in India, Joshi's grin (and Russia's chance) would grow with it.