Editorial India's bomb and the democratic process

Abstract

Like many of my generation I have had a lifelong love affair with India. During the second half of the 1940s (my teenage and impressionable years) I grew up in a household where left wing politics dominated our thinking and our conversations, and where our admiration for India's fight for freedom from British rule knew no bounds. Mahatma Gandhi was our hero, we shared his despair as it gradually became inevitable that his country would have to be partitioned, and like him we were horrified by the religious riots which followed independence and the million deaths which resulted. Then, to add to the horror, on his way to a prayer meeting in 1948 the Mahatma himself was assassinated.