GHANDI'S QUAGMIRE:

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan: A new book maps the partition of the Indian subcontinent and evocatively captures what it meant for the millions swept up in the tide of violence, migration, and the ensuing loss and confusion. (Neha Inamdar, October 16 , 2007, Mother Jones)

In August 1947, Great Britain relinquished its grip on 1.8 million square miles of the Indian subcontinent. For 400 million newly independent Indians, the twilight of British rule was both liberating and painful: British and Indian politicians had decreed the creation of India and a new nation, Pakistan, based on the notion that Hindus and Muslims were fundamentally incompatible. The result was the division of the subcontinent into two rivals and the largest transfer of population in history. What came to be known as "partition" forced an estimated 15 million people to leave their homes and left as many as 1 million dead.

In The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, Yasmin Khan, a politics lecturer at the University of London, powerfully captures how this decision affected the lives of ordinary people. Across India and Pakistan, religious cleansing forced people to migrate to the other side. Khan relates one eyewitness account in which a group of Punjabi Muslims who had resisted pressure to go to Pakistan were removed by the military. But many Indians believed that partition would be a temporary measure. Some buried their jewels near their ancestral homes, expecting to return to them once the violence died down. Ultimately, many refugees ended up losing not only their homes and property but loved ones as well. When Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had supported partition, visited a squalid refugee camp, an anguished young man slapped his face and yelled, "Give my mother back to me! Bring my sisters to me!" Fikr Taunsvi, a writer in Lahore, witnessed a washerman's baby progressively sicken from hunger because local shops and hospitals were inaccessible due to communal tensions and a curfew. Angrily, he remarked that politicians should ask "great brains like Jawaharlal Nehru" to put themselves in this illiterate washerman’s shoes and imagine the real effects of partition; once they understood this, he wrote, then they could "request the British to give you freedom" and "demand Pakistan and Hindustan."

Presumably the Left thinks India would have been better off under Saddam than liberated?

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 16, 2007 8:13 PM