Acharya Kripalani: On The Orgy of Violence in 1947

Acharya Kripalani and Sardar Patel

During his speech before the Congress Working Committee on 15 June 1947, Acharya Kripalani talked about the terrible atrocities perpetrated on women and children in the orgy of communal violence that had engulfed the Indian subcontinent. He said:

“I have seen a well where women with their children, 107 in all, threw themselves to save their honor. In another place, a place of worship, fifty young women were killed by their menfolk for the same reason. I have seen heaps of bones in a house where 307 persons, mainly women and children, were driven, locked up and then burnt alive by the invading mob… The fear is not for the lives lost, or of the widows’ wail, or the orphans’ cry, or of the many houses burned. The fear is that if we go on like this, retaliating and heaping indignities on each other, we shall progressively reduce ourselves to a stage of cannibalism and worse. In every fresh communal fight the most brutal and degraded acts of the previous fight become the norm.” (History and Culture of the Indian People: Struggle for Freedom, by R. C. Majumdar; Page 781)

Historians have described this violence as the birth pangs of two nations, India and Pakistan. More than one million people died. Close to two million lost their homes. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped and mutilated. There was a massive exchange of population in the two new countries: between 10 to 20 million people were displaced. 

It can be argued that the violence that India experienced in this period was minor in face of the 120 million lives consumed in Europe during the First and the Second World Wars, and the tens of millions of lives consumed by Stalinism in the Soviet Union and by Maoism in China. But there was something exceptionally macabre about the Indian violence—it was not orchestrated by state level actors; it was orchestrated by the masses who were filled with anger, suspicion, and fear. Ordinary people, most of them armed with homemade weapons, were in the streets to kill those who were of another religion.

In his book, R. C. Majumdar blames the Islamic supremacist doctrines of the Muslim leaders and the naive utopianism of the Hindu political leadership for the violence. He notes that while Mahatma Gandhi was preaching “Hindu-Muslim” brotherhood, the Muslim ideologues like Mohammad Iqbal were preaching the doctrine of Islamic supremacy. Blinded by their idealism, Gandhi and other Hindu politicians failed to make an objective assessment of the radicalization that was happening in the Muslim communities. They failed to take measures for defending the Hindu communities. Here’s an excerpt (page 792 of Majumdar’s book):

“It would, perhaps, not be unreasonable to hold that an important contributing factor to the tragic events that took place was the failure of Hindu leaders to make a proper assessment of the feelings and attitude of the Muslims and a realistic, instead of idealistic, approach to the Hindu-Muslim problem, to which attention has been repeatedly drawn in this volume. The difference between these two kinds of approach may be best illustrated by the ‘Hindu-Muslim Brotherhood’ preached by Gandhi and the ‘requisites of Indian nationality’ from the Muslim point of view, as expounded by Muhammad Iqbal.”