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PAKISTAN : HINDU ALTERNATIVE TO PAKISTAN
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to accept assurances of the tribal chiefs but leaving one person from each family behind to watch over their interests. All told, between four hundred and fifty Hindus, men, women and children, had come into Peshawar by the Middle of August, when the trouble was definitely on the wane. Some of the Hindus were definitely expelled, some were induced to leave their homes by threats, some left from fear, some no doubt from sympathy with their neighbours. This expulsion and voluntary exodus from tribal territory were without parallel. Hindus had lived there for more generations than most of them could record as valued and respected, and, indeed, as essential members of the tribal system, for whose protection the tribesmen had been jealous, and whose blood feuds they commonly made their own. In all, about 450 Hindus left the Khyber during the excitement; of these, about 330 had returned to their homes in tribal territory by the close of the year 1927. Most of the remainder had decided to settle, at any rate for the present, amid the more secure conditions of British India.
The year 1928-29 was comparatively more peaceful than the year 1927-28. His Excellency Lord Irwin, by his speeches to the Central Legislature and outside, had given a strong impetus to the attempts to find some basis for agreement between the two communities, on those questions of political importance, which were responsible for the strained relations between them. Fortunately the issues arising out of the inquiry by the Simon Commission which was appointed in 1929, absorbed a large part of the energy and attention of the different communities, with the result that less importance came to be attached to local causes of conflict, and more importance to the broad question of constitutional policy. Moreover, the legislation passed during the autumn session of the Indian Legislature in 1927 penalising the instigation of inter-communal hostility by the press, had some effect in improving the inter-communal disturbances. The number of riots during the twelve months ending with March 31st, 1929, was 22. Though the number of riots was comparatively small, the casualties,—swelled heavily by the Bombay riots,—were very serious, no fewer than 204 persons having been killed and nearly a thousand injured. Of these, the fortnight’s rioting in Bombay accounts for 149 killed and 739 injured. Seven of these 22 riots,