Blood in the Streets

In 1947 the partition of India into two independent nations unleashed such bitter religious strife between Moslem and Hindu that the subcontinent nearly drowned in blood. More than 100,000 people were killed and 12 million left homeless in an orgy of butchery, rape and destruction. Last week the horrible memories of those ugly days came back to India as mobs ran loose in Kashmir, East Pakistan and West Bengal.

First came the troubles in Indian Kashmir's capital of Srinagar, where the loss of a treasured Moslem relic kindled anti-Hindu feelings (TIME, Jan. 10). As rumors spread, Moslem mobs in East Pakistan sacked Hindu shops and homes, left 29 dead before the army restored order. Panic-stricken, hundreds of Hindu families poured across the East Pakistan border into West Bengal, then headed for Calcutta, 35 miles away.

Spreading Infection. Calcutta's explosive social conditions had already brought relations between the city's Hindu majority and its 1,000,000 Moslems to the boiling point. Tens of thousands sleep on the streets or in abandoned sewer pipes and gutters are clogged with garbage, cow dung and human excrement; the water is polluted, epidemics frequent, poverty rampant, and unemployment endemic. In this morass of 6,500,000 people, the Hindu refugees' Moslem-atrocity stories spread like an infection. Inevitably, Calcutta's Hindus retaliated.

Pouring into the streets, Hindu mobs tossed kerosene-soaked rags into Moslem shops, then lit them with fireworks. Looters paraded their booty in handcarts for public view. In one outlying district, four police constables stood off hundreds of looters until their ammunition ran out. One constable escaped; the rest were killed on the spot. Moslem pedestrians were grabbed in the streets and beaten to death, and knifings were so numerous that Calcutta police simply released the total of stabbing deaths each day without giving details.

Swinging Pendulum. For four days smoke billowed over Calcutta's skyline. Finally, Home Minister G. L. Nanda ordered two army battalions into the city, told them to show "no mercy in quelling the disorder." The army clamped martial law on five of the city's 25 police districts, gunned down looters and arsonists in the streets, threw more than 10,000 demonstrators into jail. By the time order was restored, 200 were dead, 600 wounded, 73,000 homeless, and whole portions of the city razed. Hoping to minimize the religious aspect of the rioting, West Bengal officials took pains to claim that the death total was evenly distributed between Hindus and Moslems. But the pendulum had already swung back the other way. More than 5,000 Moslems left West Bengal and fled across the border to East Pakistan. At week's end, in the East Pakistan capital of Dacca, mobs killed 50 Hindus.

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