In 1946, just months before independence, carnage unimaginable in ferocity and unprecedented in scale broke out against Hindus in Muslim-dominated East Bengal and against Muslims in Hindu-majority Bihar. The great campaigner for freedom from Britain's imperial yoke, Mohandas Gandhi, spent weeks in both theaters of what he described as “almost a civil war.” He was determined to quell sectarian violence with his own life if need be.
Gandhi never accepted the “Two Nations” theory, which saw a sanctuary for the subcontinent's Muslims in a future Pakistan and a natural home for its Hindus in a Hindu rashtra, a Hindu nation. On Aug. 15, 1947, as India won its freedom and the new nation celebrated its new dawn, Gandhi did not join the celebrations in New Delhi. He was in Calcutta, where sectarian riots had disfigured life, even as bloody carnage had left hundreds of Hindus dead in East Bengal and Muslims, likewise, in Bihar.
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