Vp menon narayani basu6/1/2023 Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the then home minister, gave immediate orders. They might have been on opposite sides of the political divide, but Nehru and Jinnah instinctively recognised that blood could not be the first brushstroke on the canvases of their new countries. "I don't care whether you shoot Muslims or not," Jinnah said, "It has got to be stopped." As the killings spread into 1947, MA Jinnah demanded that Louis Mountbatten be ruthless in clamping down on disorder. Politics did not matter in the face of bloodshed. He was known to fling himself into the breach if he thought he could prevent violence from breaking out.įrom Roy Bucher to HVR Iyengar to New York Times' correspondent George Jones, there was nobody who had not seen India's first prime minister charge headlong into a hostile crowd, or demand that the mobs murder him first before he saw a drop of blood being spilt in the name of religion. Nehru was the epitome of courage in the face of threatening mobs. He listened to harrowing tales of forcible conversions, of rape and bloodshed, but his message was simple: To shun violence and forgive. In 1946, Mahatma Gandhi spent four fraught months at Noakhali in Bengal (modern Bangladesh) - the scene of terrible communal violence.
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