Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎4r] (7/118)

saw British troops in camp in the field beside our house on the western
outskirts of the city. I was in and out of the soldiers' tents taking them
cigarettes and comforts and receiving in return an occasional taste of army
rations and tea brewed in billycans. It all seemed great fun to me until one
night my father's car was stopped on his way home by IRA men. He expected to
be kidnapped if not shot. In the end his Catholic chauffeur's urgent pleading
saved him. But as a marked man he was sent off across the Irish Channel for a
while until things quietened down.
After my Ulster childhood blooding in the constant running quarrel between
Catholic and Protestant the communal tensions I later found in India were
nothing new. I could not be surprised when Muslims provoked Hindus and vice
versa. Did Hindu marchers infuriate Muslims by playing music as they passed by
mosques which they could have avoided by taking a different route? I had seen
it all before each 12th of July in Londonderry when Protestants marched in their
thousands to trumpet their champion,William of Orange's victory in 1690 at the
Battle of the Boyne. I would see in the Hindu marchers bowler-hatted Orangemen
strutting to the blare of fife and drum in rousing Loyalist tunes and to the
bitter disgust of every Catholic along the line of march.
When Independence for India drew near I found it quite natural to think, afte
first-hand experience of the tensions between Muslim and Hindu, that the former
should not be obliged to accept domination by the latter. I did not share the
view of most of my colleagues that the preservation of an Indian unity which we
had imposed for only a century was paramount and to be pressed at the expense of
autonomous political and religious development for the minority community. For
me partition seemed the only solution we could with a good conscience offer,
whatever the practical difficulties of achieving it might be.