Bharat Kuang” and the Nijaden Mahatma and other Mahatma and saintly figures of the Mahatma’s time, were celebrated with great fondness. Though the period is not very far off, there have been a fair number of temples erected to these saints, both in India and abroad.

N. S. Krishnamurti said on hearing of the fact that the Indian nation had not been subjected to such treatment, that it was “unusual, especially for these countries to make such a demonstration on a day when Hindus would normally be attending to their own affairs…. When we find out how far such an extreme reaction as we have seen has been successfully spread, we shall be satisfied on this account.” The above was his last word on the question. He was born in Calcutta in 1906, and died in 1937.

In the first place, they were, after all, the people who in India had been singled out for the most terrible injustice. For the treatment they received during the long years when the NDA was in power, and which lasted till they were finally liberated from British rule after the war of Independence was won, there cannot, I think, be any such “extreme reaction” now, which is so much the worse for having been unleashed before they fell victim to the tyranny that was to follow.

Further, as far as we can see the British government and the British colonial administration were more determined to wipe out any kind of communal feeling than they were to maintain and promote any kind of rule of law for Hindu minorities, although this remained their paramount aim.

I am not saying that some of these so-called riots were really “unruly elements,” but as far as the record of the British record is concerned we have seen more than enough of that. We have, for example, the massacre of Sikhs, or the attack on Kashmiri Pandits, or the expulsion of refugees from the north-east, and as such there was a very marked difference between their attitude vis-a-vis the rights of Hindus and Muslims under the rule of the NDA. The NDA, although it never carried out the violent acts, still left India a more wretched place in which to live than it would have been under the B.P. in any of the previous years.

The attitude of the British, however, was that any Muslim who had gone into or over the territory of