Foreign News: Zindabad & Murdabad

The Punjab, athwart the historic northern invasion route, has long been India's political thermometer. Last week it read "high fever." In Lahore, Amritsar, Rawalpindi and over the intervening countryside, Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus slew and burned in wholesale lawlessness unsurpassed in British India in 90 years.

The Punjab riots ended a period of peace that has been jittery ever since the Moslem League's Mohamed Ali Jinnah spurned participation with the All-India Congress in the Constituent Assembly (TIME, Feb. 10). The bearded, sword-carrying Sikhs sided with the Hindus, eventually exceeded them in uncompromising denunciation of the Moslem cry for Pakistan (a separate Moslem...