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"It has long been held that mass killing is the work of states, not of peoples. War, some say, is caused by professional militarism, the existence of large arsenals and the itch of governments to exercise their most spectacular function. Similarly, the killing of 6,000,000 Jews in Europe was the work of a state, mad with its organized power. Are you suggesting that the Indian killing sprang out of the people themselves, out of the evil which you call Kali?"
The Prosecutor's answer: "Although leaders of the two states are, in different degrees, responsible for agitating or at least for misunderstanding the communal hatred, the appalling fact is that most of the killing was unorganized and spontaneous. In this case, a rare and significant one, the state power was not guilty. As for armaments, the massacres in India and Pakistan were as far removed as possible from modern war or from the gas chambers of Maidanek. The murderers with whom we are dealing used knives, chisels, ropes, hockey sticks, screwdrivers, bricks and slender fingers."
The Half Innocent. At least half innocent of the killing are the leaders who had demanded liberty or death for India and got, by Kali's black grace, both.
"When tragedy runs amok blame is universal, inextricable and irrelevant. That the horror was deeper than the ideals or ambitions of the leaders was ironically demonstrated when they tried to stop it. Mohamed Ali Jinnah urged restraint, but the killing did not cease. Gandhi fasted in Calcutta with ultimate local effect, but elsewhere the killing did not cease. When he visited their sanctuary, 30,000 groaning Moslems virtually adored him, but the killing did not cease. Nehru personally rescued two Moslem girls from a gang of Sikhs, but the killing did not cease. A conference between Nehru and Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan ended in complete accord and the Joint Defense Council ordered troops to fire on all rioters and looters, but the killing did not cease. The newly communalized police force proved ineffectual and sometimes took part in the riots, and the killing did not cease. The newly communalized armies, now that the British troops were inactivated, were like bodies from which the bones had been drawn.
"At length, by no outward control or rational cause, but only because destruction itself sickens, the violence quieted, for the time being, at least."
Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Governor General of Pakistan, did not testify. Seeing few, taking advice from none, he sulked in Karachi, the raddled capital of his already half-ruined country. Of him, the Prosecutor said:
"Jinnah is far too easy a villain: conceivably an obsessed child of Mohamed conceivably a man seized in his declining years by that most dangerous form of satyriasis which longs for naked power alone, Jinnah has beyond question done more than any other man in India to exacerbate the sores of communalism and to tease and torment their rawness; and this purely to secure his nation, and a torn body for India.