Rohinton Mistry Quotes

Churchill was reported to be so angry and exasperated that his face turned red and he was sputtering. During World War II, Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian Nationalists were leading protests against British control of India. This not only bogged down British soldiers surprising the nationalists rather than fighting in Burma or in other war theaters, but India supplied a huge number of battalions to the British Army the world over and if that manpower dried up, the allied war effort would suffer. The American State Department wanted Churchill to announce that after Japan was defeated, there would be a process toward self-government. This way, they thought, the Indians would redouble their effort to defeat the Japanese and stop the then current protests and strikes. Churchill was strongly opposed to any diminution of the British Empire, but beyond that, he knew India quite well and realized that at any hint of Independence the large Muslim minority in India would insist on autonomy or a partition of the country and use sectarian violence and terror to intimidate the Indian Congress party and the British, but the major victims of the terror—the Hindus and the Sikhs would not remain passive, but would retaliate in kind. President Roosevelt was in the midst of planning the Normandy Landings of the D-Day invasion and did not want to pressure Churchill and the British at this point in time, so the door to independence was not opened during the war and Britain had to deal with the protests throughout. However, when, after the war, the Labor Government, started a process toward Indian independence which resulted in exactly what Churchill predicted. At least 2 million Indians were slaughtered in the internecine terrorist cycles of fear and retaliation motivated terror attacks what were so extensive that the British military could not really control it.

Two months earlier, Jinnah and the Muslim League had, behind the scenes, orchestrated and abetted vicious, murderous, terrorist attacks on Sikhs by Muslim tribesman brought into the Punjab for the purpose." Master Tara Singh

John Mason led a force of 90 Pilgrims and 70 Mohegan Allies quietly surrounded the Pequot village at Mystic. Then they fired their guns into the village and charged the Pequot houses, setting them on fire and killing all those who tried to escape. Over 400 Pequot were killed. The Mohegan allies were so shocked at the carnage that they shouted, “Stop! Stop! It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men.” Prior to the massacre of Mystic Village, there had been many battles and villages destroyed, but this marked the first time that entire populations of men, women and children were exterminated in the English Colonization. After Mystic village both whites and Indians participated in terrible massacres inflicted on each other. This was not the first massacre in America as the Spanish in the South and West commonly used the tactic.