Word: hindus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Indians scarcely represented a nation at all. Chiefly Hindus and Moslems, they were members of violently hostile religious communities, mutually contemptuous, mutually recriminatory. But if they did not represent a nation, in the modern political sense, they represented something much greater. They represented India, one of the supreme symbols on the cultural horizon of mankind...
...centuries tiny, remote Britain ruled India by the policy of divide and conquer. The differences between India's Hindus (256 million) and India's Moslems (92 million) were more than religious; they were almost organic. Says Moslem Dr. Aziz of the Hindus in E. M. Forster's A Passage to India'. "I wish they did not remind me of cow dung." Britain was suspected of setting the Moslem League against the Hindus, slowly acquiring political maturity as the majority in the All-India National Congress. Against the caste Hindus she played the 40 million Untouchables, whose...
...presented to Congress and Moslem leaders, the Wavell Plan awarded to Indians all posts (except Defense) in India's Executive Council-the equivalent of a national cabinet-"on a balanced representation of the main communities, including equal proportions of Moslems and caste Hindus." The door was left open for the native states, but there would be no coercion. Dominion status, as promised in the Cripps proposals, was still the goal. The Wavell Plan brought it almost within reach...
...Viceroy and Lady Wavell shook hands with the delegates, chatted about the delightful weather. This was not just chitchat. Astrologers had claimed that the conference's opening day (June 25) was inauspicious, since there would be a partial eclipse of the moon. Hindus believe that anything begun on the day of an eclipse is doomed to failure...
Permanent Minority? But Mohamed Ali Jinnah was uncompromising. At press interviews after the adjournment, he disapproved the Wavell Plan's proposal for parity between caste Hindus and Moslems in the new government. He charged that the Untouchables and Sikhs would always vote with the Hindus, thus putting the Moslems in a permanent minority. Said Jinnah: "We cannot accept the Congress party's right to choose the Moslem ministers either on principle or on the facts before us." (The Moslem League claims to represent 99% of India's Moslems). But he left the door to reconciliation open...