India's 1947 Partition And The 'Deadly Legacy' That Persists To This Day
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British Maj. T.J. Monaghan (left) and Pvt. H. Farabrother of the Inniskilling Regiment of Northern Ireland, walk through wreckage after riots destroyed parts of the Punjab suburb of Amritsar, India, in March 1947.
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On how Muslims felt alienated from the independence movement
Part of [Gandhi's] genius was he was able to broaden out the appeal of the independence movement, which, until that movement, had been restricted to fairly wealthy lawyers and landowners and so on, who would debate things like percentages in these legislatures ... but he broadened it out to the masses. But the way he did it was by using Hindu iconography and stories, mythology, every evening he would have a prayer meeting where they would chant Hindu hymns but also read from the Quran and so forth. He was personally very unprejudiced about this, but his natural background was Hindu and his audience was almost entirely Hindu and he appealed to them in the language that they understood. But for Muslims, ordinary Muslims, who would see this and listen to these speeches and so forth, he seemed like a Hindu figure more than a national figure — not all Muslims, of course, but a great many of them.
http://www.npr.org/2015/06/09/413121135/indias-1947-partition-and-the-deadly-legacy-that-persists-to-this-day
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