SOCIAL SCIENTIST stake in exploiting the differences to serve its own vested interests, and in our own times, before Independence, we have seen how this incited separatism had assumed the form of a conflagration. I was a small boy, barely eleven years of age, when the first communal riot took place in my home-town of Rawalpindi. That wars way back in 1926. It is not coincidental that Lord Hardinge wrote that letter, cited above, in 1926. The grain market of my town was set on fire and I saw, at dead of night, half the sky turn copper-red from its glow. For me, at that time it was both a dreadful and a fascinating sight. I was to learn later that between the years 1922 and 1927, a series of communal riots had taken place in different towns of India. These riots had been engineered to break the back of the first Non-Co-operation Movement launched under Gandhiji's leadership against the British government. We know well enough how everytime the anti-British struggle gained momentum, it was drowned in blood. Who can forget the great Calcutta killings of 1946 or the ghastly Noakhali killings soon after on the eve of Independence? This continued till the holocaust of 1947 and the Partition of the country. Yet, despite such severe jolts from disruptive forces, both before and since Independence, our basic democratic polity, its pluralistic character, the goodwill among the communities and their desire to live in peace has not been vitiated and turned into hostility and blind hatred. I would like to cite here a small example. When the Partition of the country took place, millions were uprooted and turned into homeless refugees. The scars have still not healed. Yet people, by and large, have not harboured bitterness against people on the other side of the border. They have only deplored the fact of Partition. What is significant is that some of the most sensitive, humanistic writing on the theme of Partition has been done by Punjabis, the victims of Partition, whether it was Amrita Pritam in India or Saadat Hasan Manto, on the other side of the border, in Pakistan. It reveals clearly enough how, even in the midst of that holocaust, their faith in the humanistic values of our composite culture was not shaken. It is this vast reservoir of goodwill that still exists at the level of the common people. But it is certainly under great strain to-day. Sinister efforts are afoot to corrode this goodwill. Every other day some ghastly incident occurs that sends waves of shock throughout the country, whether it is the pulling down of the Babri Masjid, or the burning alive of the Australian Christian missionary and his two sons or the lynching of