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An ancient Hindu holy book, the Vishnu Purana, he could recall, says that the life of man will run in four cycles. The last is to be the Age of Kali. It closes in, says the book, when "society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth, becomes the only source of virtue, passion, the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion."
Then the Prosecutor could turn to India: "Everywhere the armed and the many devoured the helpless and the few. In Calcutta, in Lahore, in Amritsar, in Old Delhi and New Delhi and throughout the magnificent plain of the dismembered Punjab, in homes and shops and factories and farms and villages and in the religious sanctuaries of all faiths, amid the clotting of the terrified in depots and on guarded trains and on lonely station platforms and in the vast shelterless encampments of refugees and their hypnotized columns across the land, the devastation raged alike among Hindus and Moslems and Sikhs.
"In the first six weeks of Independence, about half as many Indians were killed as Americans died during nearly four years of the second World War. There is still no possible numbering of the wounded and the mutilated who survived, or of those who must yet die for lack of the simplest medical facilities, or of so much as a roof over their heads. It is unbearable, and unwise as well, to cherish memory of the bestial atrocities which have been perpetrated by Moslem and Sikh and Hindu alike. It is beyond human competence to conceive, far less to endure the thought of, the massiveness of the mania of rage, the munificence of the anguish, the fecundity of hate breeding hate, perhaps for generations to come."
The Eyewitness. On this point, the witness Niranjan Singh, a Sikh, testified. Singh, a few weeks ago a prosperous merchant in the Montgomery district of the Punjab, now moves about New Delhi on crutches. He said:
"I shall never rest until revenge is taken upon the Moslems for all the wicked atrocities they have perpetrated upon innocent people. Moslems killed my old father, abducted my young daughter, slew my son and maimed my foot. No mercy whatsoever should be shown to them. I've always treated my Moslem laborers with kindness but the dirty swine have repaid me with brutality.
"I smelled trouble in my village when Moslems began gathering at the mosque every day for long conferences. One morning Moslems from all neighboring areas gathered around our village and attacked it. But although we were outnumbered, we held them for eight hours. We had only our kirpans [swords] and a few old rifles. They had modern weapons. When finally they broke through, there was not one among us who had not sustained some injury or other. The brutes killed my 90-year-old father and when my young son rushed to his defense, they speared him to death. I had been injured on my forehead and gushing blood had made me partly blind. A young, cowardly Moslem attacked me from behind with a hatchet, injuring my foot. Before I fell and fainted, I saw some Moslems carrying away my 16-year-old daughter, who put up stiff resistance.