Madness

[Bob G]

"OUR PEOPLE HAVE GONE MAD"

The Punjab, August-September 1947

It would be unique, a cataclysm without precedent, unforeseen in magnitude, unordered in pattern, unreasoned in savagery. For six terrible weeks, like the mysterious ravages of a medieval plague, a mania for murder would sweep across the face of northern India. There would be no sanctuary from its scourge, no corner free from the contagion of its terrible virus. Half as many Indians would lose their lives in that slaughter as Americans in four years of combat in World War II.

Everywhere the many and the strong assaulted the weak and the few. In the stately homes of New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road, the silver souks of Old Delhi’s Chandi Chowk, in the mahallas of Amritsar, in the elegant suburbs of Lahore, the bazaar of Rawalpindi, the walled city of Peshawar; in shops, stalls, mud huts, village alleyways; in brick kilns, factories and fields; in railroad stations and teahouses, communities that had lived side by side for generations fell upon one another in an orgy of hate. It was not a war; it was not a civil war; it was not a guerilla campaign. It was a convulsion, the sudden shattering collapse of a society. One act provoked another, one horror fed another, each slaughter begot its successor, each rumor its imitator, each atrocity its counterpart, until, like the slow-motion images of a building disintegrating under the impact of an explosion, the walls of the Punjab’s society crumbled in upon each other.

The disaster was easily explained. Radcliffe’s line had left five million Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan’s half of the Punjab, over five million Moslems in India’s half. Prodded by the demagoguery of Jinnah and the leaders of the Moslem League, the Punjab’s exploited Moslems had convinced themselves that, somehow, in Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, Hindu moneylenders, shopkeepers and zamindars (aggressive Sikh landlords) would disappear. Yet, there they were on the aftermath of independence, still ready to collect their rents, still occupying their shops and farms. Inevitably, a simple thought swept the Moslem masses: if Pakistan is ours, so too are shops, farms, houses and factories of the Hindus and Sikhs. Across the border, the militant Sikhs prepared to drive the Moslems from their midst so that they could gather onto their abandoned lands their brothers whom Radcliffe’s scalpel had left in Pakistan.

And so, in a bewildering frenzy, Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems turned on one another. India was ever a land of extravagant dimensions, and the horror of the Punjab’s killings, the abundance of human anguish and suffering that they would produce would not fail that ancient tradition. Europe’s people had slaughtered one another with V-bombs, howitzers and the calculated horrors of the gas chambers; the people of the Punjab set out to destroy themselves with bamboo staves, field hockey sticks, ice picks, knives, clubs, swords, hammers, bricks and clawing fingers. Theirs was a spontaneous, irrational, unpredictable slaughter. Appalled at the emotions that they had inadvertently unleashed, their desperate leaders tried to call them back to reason. It was a hopeless cry. There was no reason in that brief and cruel season when India went mad.

(excerpt from "Freedom at Midnight" by Collins and Lapierre 1975)

[Bob G]

There is a "Why" as to what happened in the first post in this string (which is only one of the countless of examples of same) but no one can really tell another person in words what it is, for we must also face that part of Why inside ourselves, eye to eye...without fear.