President's religion

I am writing in response to Masli Arman's letter of Oct. 28. He wrote: "By analogy, to expect a non-Moslem to be the next President of Indonesia is as unrealistic as to expect a Moslem to be the prime minister of Hindu India..." The reference to India as "Hindu India" is unfortunate. Though Hinduism is the religion of the majority of the people living in that country, India is a secular and democratic country, where the prime minister is elected on the basis of his or her capability and not on account of his or her religion.

Emerging from colonialism with several princely states, India has always had Hindu prime ministers to date. However, with democracy maturing, the chance of a Moslem, Christian or Buddhist becoming prime minister cannot be ruled out. Today, the president of the Congress party of India, Sonia Gandhi, is Italian-born, and if Congress wins, she could become the next prime minister of India. Being Italian-born, she could never be Hindu, and orthodox Hindus would never consider accepting a non-Hindu to become a Hindu. The major hurdle, if any, to her becoming prime minister is the performance of her party itself and not her nationality or religion.

Masli Arman's letter reminded me of India's partition. The British Empire was in a mad dash to leave India and was primarily concerned about the safety of the officers of the Empire. The British Empire played tricks, as is evident from the report of the director of Central Intelligence to the viceroy of India: "The game so far has been well played... The Indian problem has been thrust onto its appropriate plane of communalism... a natural, if ghastly, process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem. Grave communal disorder must not disturb us into action which would reintroduce anti-British agitation."

Unfortunately, both Hindus and Moslems fell into the trap well laid by the British Empire. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, president of the Moslem League was no exception. When Jinnah was president of the Indian National Congress, he was the first architect of Hindu- Moslem unity. Twice, Moslem fanatics tried to assassinate him for his religious tolerance.

In their epic drama, Freedom at Midnight, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre write: "Mahatma Gandhi begged Mountbatten, 'Don't partition India.' Gandhi was so desperate to avoid partition that he was prepared for a Solomonic judgment. Gandhi said to Mountbatten, 'Give the Moslems the baby instead cutting it in half.' Place three hundred million Hindus under Moslem rule by asking his rival Jinnah and his Moslem League to form a government."

I never admired Gandhi as he was an implacable foe of technology. Nevertheless, I had the highest regard for him for this stand. I further quote a paragraph from Freedom at Midnight: "Gandhi did not oppose partition simply out of some mystical devotion to Indian unity. His years in the villages of India had given him an intuitive feeling for the soul of his country. Partition, that intuition told him, was not going to be the 'surgical operation' Jinnah had promised Mountbatten. It would be a sickening slaughter that would turn friend on friend, neighbor on neighbor, stranger on stranger, in thousands of those villages he knew so well. Their blood would be shed to achieve an abhorrent, useless end, the division of the subcontinent into two antagonistic parts condemned to gnaw at each other's entrails. Generations of Indians for decades to come, Gandhi believed, would pay the price for the error they were preparing to commit."

How prophetic Mahatma Gandhi was!

D. PRABHAKAR

Jakarta