To distance itself from last week's terror attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based organization now held responsible for the violence, issued a missive from "Mujahideen Hyderabad Deccan," a fake terror organization. As The Hindu, India's most circulated periodical, reports, Indian intelligence was not fooled.
• "Terror Mail Analysis Supports Claim of Lashkar Authorship," The Hindu, Dec. 1, 2008.
MUMBAI: Close textual analysis of a document issued by an until-now unknown terrorist group just after the recent massacre in Mumbai appears to vindicate claims by Indian intelligence experts that the document was generated by a non-Hindi speaker, using voice-recognition software....
In the document, its authors "warn the Indian government to stop atrocities against Muslims; that it return the states seized from Muslims; that it compensate, with interest, the cost of these atrocities."
"This attack," it states, "is a reaction to those actions which Hindus have taken since 1947 onwards. Now, there shall be no actions. There shall only be reactions, again and again. These shall continue until we have avenged each and every atrocity."
It proceeds to assert that the violence "shall continue until Muslims have their own independent land where they may live their lives in accordance with the Quran and the Hadith. They shall continue until all our occupied states are returned to us. They shall continue until every death has been avenged."
Owing mainly to his self-professed Anglophilia, Nirad C. Chaudhuri is considered one of the most controversial writers in Indian literature. Born in present-day Bangladesh in 1897, Chaudhuri grew up in Calcutta and witnessed the burgeoning hatred between Indian Muslims and Hindus.
• The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (excerpt), by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, 1951.
I shall cease generalizing at this point and relate some of the experiences of my boyhood. While living in Calcutta, as I have done for the greater part of my life, I hardly met any Muslims and became intimate with none. There I found an arrogant contempt for the Muslims and a deep-seated hostility towards them, which could have been produced only by a complete insulation of the two communities and absence of personal relations between their members. This inhuman antagonism could not exist in East Bengal, where, owing to the number of the Muslims and also to the fact that they were Bengali-speaking, the economic and social life of the two communities was interwoven. Even when there was no unity of moral and religious outlook, as for the most part there was not, the mere physical contiguity cold not be avoided; and when one has to meet another person at all times of the day on personal business, it is very difficult to visit on him the wrath generated by the supposed historical injuries inflicted by his community. The most serious and tragic aspect of the Hindu-Muslim discord in India today is the creation of a moral atmosphere in which it has become possible to extend the rancorous hatred which one can feel only for an abstract entity, or only for the foe who is of one's household, to the relations between man and man, neighbor and neighbor, friend and friend, playfellow and playfellow, fellow-worker and fellow-worker, when they happen to be of rival faiths. We began without this hatred. There was a number of Muslim lawyers in our street, whom we respected as much as any other colleague of my father. With their sons and nephews we were as friendly as with the children of our Hindu neighbors, and two boys, Akhtar and Karim, were my particular friends. A very large number of our school-fellows were Muslim, and in the whole school there were at least as many Muslim boys as Hindu. We worked, talked, and played with them quite naturally. We never associated them with the abstract entity labeled Muslim, existing in our historical consciousness, for which we had such hatred, and it never occurred to us that anything could happen which could make us modify our behavior towards our Muslim neighbors in the light of collective emotions generated by collective rivalries.
But the change inevitably came, and came very early. It was from the end of 1906 that we became conscious of a new kind of hatred for the Muslims, which sprang out of the present and showed signs of poisoning our personal relations with our Muslim neighbors and school-fellows. If the sprouting enmity did not go to the length of inducing us to give up all intercourse with them, it made us at all events treat them with a marked decline of cordiality. We began to hear angry comment in the mouths of the elders that the Muslims were coming out quite openly in favor of partition and on the side of the English. Nawab Salimullah of Dhaka, the protagonist of the Muslim League and new Muslim politics, because our particular bête noire--and we contemptuously called him "The One-eyed." We also noticed that our Muslim school-fellows were beginning to air the fact of their being Muslims rather more consciously than before and with a touch of assertiveness. Its first expression in our school was the protest of the Muslim students against acting certain scenes from a Bengali drama on the school anniversary day. We had always acted these scenes and saw no justification for the protest, but the Muslim boys said that the speeches were offensive to Muslim feeling, which of course they were, because no Bengali historical play written by a Hindu is complimentary to the former Muslim rulers of the country. The school authorities stopped the anniversary celebrations altogether, and we waited long in the hope of their revising their decision. But they did not, and we came back home almost in tears, leaving all the decorations of the hall, over which we had spent so much labor, as if the performance were to take place in the evening.
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