(EDITORIAL) Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Congress’s irrepressible enfant terrible and incorrigible communal trouble-maker, continues to poison the fount of Muslim-Hindu relations by wild, unrestrained and often insulting utterances. Speeches lately made by him during his Assam tour were of a nature calculated to make the communal gulf more hopelessly unbridgeable than ever.... In the course of one speech he described the “hard things which Muslim Leaguers sometimes say of the British” as insincere and more than hinted that in spite of the fact that Britishers also sometimes “say hard things about the Muslim League”, there is a clandestine understanding between the two and “both are standing in the way of India’s independence”.

In another speech he declared: “The Congress will have no truck with the Muslim League under its present leadership, irrespective of whether they win the coming elections or not.” (Italics ours.) In yet another speech he told Muslims they would never get Pakistan and asked them to “work for the good of Hindustan”. (Italics again ours.) This … libelling of Muslims … this open and totalitarian refusal to abide by the verdict of elections … where can all this lead?

Published in Dawn, December 20th, 2020