Ek Ho!

India was ready for a spark. Drought wrote a warning of famine across the country; Russia at UNO had fanned the winds of Asiatic nationalism. A trivial incident at Bombay touched off the British Empire's worst rebellion since the great Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.

Indians said that a British officer had used "insulting language" to a native seaman on a training ship. The British said that the officers had refused to let a political speaker address the crew. Before the sun went down, 12,000 seamen of the Royal Indian Navy had seized a score of ships, 18 naval shore stations and a naval dockyard in Bombay Harbor. For two days their ships, deployed in battle line along the harbor wall, defied the British. At Castle Barracks, where besieging British troops fought barricaded Indians, the mutineers turned their artillery on the Bombay Yacht Club (the very symbol of British racial supremacy), where no Indian may enter. At Karachi, Indian naval ratings seized the sloop Hindustan, dueled with British batteries along the waterfront for 25 minutes before running up the white flag.

Quelled or Quiescent? British troops, ships and planes converged on Bombay, as rioters swept through the town, setting fire to banks, government grain shops, a cotton mill, a train, British cars, British stores. Night & day they fought police and Tommies, stoned British civilians. British authorities declared a state of "absolute rebellion," ordered loyal troops to "shoot to kill" anyone moving on the streets at night. Before the mutiny ended, casualties mounted to 240 killed, more than 1,300 injured. On the other side of India, demonstrators surged through the streets of Calcutta, and sympathy strikers tied up transportation.

India's Britons recalled the horror stories of 1857, when Army mutineers seized seven of India's cities, including Delhi. Would Indian Army troops revolt again? Already Indian Air Force men had staged sympathy "strikes." Like the Navy mutineers, soldiers demand better pay, better food, faster demobilization. Indian troops, the bulk of British overseas forces, are scattered wide in the world's trouble spots: Greece, Indonesia, Syria, Burma, Egypt, Malaya, Iraq and Hong Kong. If the mutiny should spread among them, Britain's weakened voice in the world's councils would scarcely be able to whisper. The Army remained quiescent, but even trusted veterans were attending secret meetings of extreme nationalist groups. The British Government would have to act fast.

Pakistan or War? Last week London announced that three Cabinet ministers--Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade--would go to India to repeat and perhaps to better Cripps's 1942 efforts to reach an agreement with Hindus and Moslems on dominion status for India.

The 1946 negotiations might prove more difficult than the first Cripps mission. Moslem and Hindu had drawn much more closely together in the last few months--but only in their opposition to the British Raj. On the issue of Pakistan --the Moslem demand for a separate state in north India--the Congress party and the Moslem League were still poles apart. Mahomed AH Jinnah, head of the Moslem League, threatened civil war for Pakistan.

The Cabinet delegation will negotiate against a background of famine. The monsoons failed to bring India's seasonal heavy rains; cyclones and tidal waves ravaged fertile Madras Province. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, blaming the British for the food failure, called on peasants to "rebel against the political and social conditions that brought [the famine] about. ... If we have to die, let us die like men and not like rats in a hole."

Not Mutiny but Unity. This was not the normal language of Congress party leaders. Nehru and his fellows no longer denounced violence as if they meant it. They sensed a new mood in India's masses, and swung toward extreme methods lest new leaders arise more in tune with the spirit of rebellion.

In the Calcutta riots the Congress tricolor and the Moslem green flag (and sometimes the hammer & sickle) had floated side by side from windows, from taxicabs, over the heads of marching throngs. Together they had flown from the masts of the mutinous ships at Bombay. At Karachi mutineers scrawled on their ships: "Not mutiny but unity among Indian sailors." A new slogan was heard in India: "Ek Ho!" (We Are One).

If, improbably, Moslem and Hindu rebels could remain one, the British Raj was doomed to go down in violence.

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