Sardar Patel's remarks have an edge of sorrow. "I feel that if we do not accept Partition, India will be split into many bits and be completely ruined. My experience of office for one year has convinced me that the way we have been proceeding leads to disaster. We shall not have one Pakistan but many. We shall have Pakistan cells in every office." This, remember, was the voice of one who later distinguished himself as the rugged architect of the integration of princely India. Could there be a more eloquent expression of the mood of helplessness in which Partition was agreed to?

The difficulty was rooted in the cardinal fact of Indian life that members of the two major communities had over the centuries learned to live together as brothers regardless of religion. There was a certain homogeneity about the Indian social fabric that made the Hindu indistinguishable from the Muslim. Apart from the matter of worship the two lived a common life, social, economic, cultural and intellectual. Fear of each other had once been absent almost completely. The pre-partition riots had come with a cataclysmic suddenness, disrupting a harmony that had prevailed since as far back as human memory could reach.

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