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"If this society, stable enough to breed 400 million men, is decomposed, then forces outside the peoples of India, not within them, must be to blame."
The Prosecutor answered: "Hindu and Sikh and Moslem tolerated each other, insofar as they did so, not through love or virtue but because each community was aware that its rival did not possess the power to coerce it into a hated way of living. Neither the Rajputs, nor the Moguls, nor the British ever established in India a state whose police reached out to the ordering of people's daily lives. Now, with independence, with the possibility of modern states, each community saw behind the other the shadow of the policeman and the propagandist. The Indian communities rushed into violence not to seize power, but out of the fear of the power that was about to fall into the hands of others. And this is a primal fear, deeper than rivalries between such nations as have already known and submitted to police power wielded in their own names."
The Guilt of Innocence. The Defense Attorney tried again. He recalled how the subcontinent had been brought to freedom by good men, nonviolent men, men above superstition and narrow sectarian hatred. How could such evil come from a victory won by moral force alone?
And how equally admirable, he said, was it that Britain, another great and ancient nation, even grander and far more benign in her twilight than Imperial Rome before her, had at length bowed before that moral force in a moral beauty as unprecedented and still more graceful. The Defense Attorney recalled the midnight ceremonies of India's manumission in New Delhi two months ago as extraordinarily touching, the action itself as one of history's rare moments of good will and good hope.
The Prosecutor did not deny the point. But, said he:
"Gandhi and Nehru and their like, innocently intent upon their lofty goal, ascribed communal strife to British machination, so blinding themselves that, in all good faith, they assumed that once liberty was achieved, communal violence would immediately cease, and brotherhood and British guilt prove themselves thenceforth.
"Thus, not in spite of innocence but because of it, blood appeared; and not the jubilant blood of birth alone, but blood more especially pleasing to Kali, who is both mother and demolisher. India tore herself in two in the womb as a condition to being born at all. Even in the womb, the two unborn nations tore at each other, and from the instant they were born they fell upon each other in maniacal fury."