Nehru

To the Editors:

….Not being a Hindu myself, I can afford to be amused by Barraclough’s attitude toward [Hindus] his efforts to paint the Congress as a “Hindu” organization, and to color Mr. Jinnah “compromiser.” It was this same kind of British analysis of the unreliability of the Hindu and the stalwart virtues of the Moslem that foisted on the world the Baghdad Pact and the still-continuing era of Pakistan armed to the teeth by the U. S. as an impregnable barrier to Communism, China and the USSR. Fortunately, the U. S. A. now has its own Asian historians and experts and need no longer rely on apologist for Empire as a way to keep the savages from slaughtering each other.

(I fear I have begun to splutter, so will stop here.)

Jaswant Krishnayya

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Geoffrey Barraclough replies:

Mr. Krishnayya is certainly “spluttering.” Nothing in my article, or in anything else I have ever written could be taken to imply that I am an apologist for the British Empire or the Bagdad Pact. Not even Mr. Krishnayya could deny that partition was a tragedy for millions at the time and may well prove the undoing of the whole subcontinent. For historians, the crucial question is whether this outcome was necessary. Unfortunately Mr. Krishnayya’s letter contributes nothing to an answer.