The bitterest communal riots since the 1947 partition convulsed much of India last week and spread across the border to Pakistan. At least 23 Hindus and Moslems were dead, another 500 injured. The riots ripped the delicate fabric of peaceful Hindu-Moslem relations and dealt a cruel blow to Prime Minister Nehru's belief that in nine years of the "secular" state the ancient religious animosities of his people had been "healed and forgotten."
The trouble was caused, oddly enough, by an obscure book published in the U.S. 14 years ago. One day last month a rabble-rousing Moslem editor named Ishaq Almi from Kanpur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, chanced to find on a newsstand a cheap Indian reprint of Living Biographies of Religious Leaders by Henry and Dana Lee Thomas. Inside Almi found a foreword by Uttar Pradesh's Governor Kanialal M. Munshi, director of the Bombay firm which published the book in India, praising it as "worthwhile reading." He also found a biography of Mohammed with the following story:
Mohammed told Khadija, his wife, of his vision of God and asked, "Do you believe it was a good or an evil spirit that revealed itself to me?" Whereupon his practical wife put the matter to an infallible test. She invited Mohammed to sit upon her lap. And when he had sat down, she asked, "Do you still behold the vision?" And when he replied that he did she began seductively to disrobe herself. And then she asked him once more, "Do you still see the vision?" "I can no longer see it. The vision has fled in bashfulness at our intimacy." "Then rejoice," cried Khadija, "for by the Lord it was an angel and no devil that you have beheld."
"Take Up the Challenge!" PROPHET INSULTED IN GOVERNOR MUNSHl's PUBLICATION, shrieked the headline in Editor Almi's anti-Hindu newspaper Siyaset* "Has the Moslem world become so docile that it cannot take up the challenge?" Almi asked. Kanpur's Moslems, all too eager to blame Hindus for their frustrations and poverty, took up the challenge. Thousands who had not read the book trotted through the streets carrying signs that demanded: "Ban the Religious Leaders Book" and "Down with Governor Munshi." In Aligarh students of the Moslem University snaked through the college grounds with a chant: "Long live Pakistan! Death to India!" In neighboring Bhopal rioters burned Munshi in effigy.