Nehru divided India, not Jinnah: Jaswant Singh

[r3alist]

This Jinnah talk is HINDU propaganda.

They are laying the groundwork to assimilate pakistan into india via proxy, the way they do this is a "quid pro quo".

In this instance it is to give a so called ideological or historical concession with the hope of softening the pakistani populace to be more sympathetic, basically they are trying to appropriate our "god" into THEIR culture with the aim of conquering US.


PLEASE IGNORE THIS NEWS STORY.

 

[sensenreason]

This Jinnah talk is HINDU propaganda.

They are laying the groundwork to assimilate pakistan into india via proxy, the way they do this is a "quid pro quo".

In this instance it is to give a so called ideological or historical concession with the hope of softening the pakistani populace to be more sympathetic, basically they are trying to appropriate our "god" into THEIR culture with the aim of conquering US.

PLEASE IGNORE THIS NEWS STORY.

Please INGORE the above post.

 

[arihant]

Jaswant wants that Nehru should be credited with Establishment of Pakistan. This is really funny.

 

[r3alist]

Jaswant wants that Nehru should be credited with Establishment of Pakistan. This is really funny.

and that jinnah should be appropriated into hindustani idolatary, its an attempt at conquest by the ultra right wing hindu nationalists, please we aware of this.

 

[arihant]

and that jinnah should be appropriated into hindustani idolatary, its an attempt at conquest by the ultra right wing hindu nationalists, please we aware of this.

This is propaganda to sell more books. It's "be aware".

 

[r3alist]

This is propaganda to sell more books. It's "be aware".

well done, you spotted a typo.

 

[arihant]

well done, you spotted a typo.

No, "I mean be aware against such books"

 

[Gin ka Pakistan]

NEW DELHI: Conventional wisdom in India that holds Mohammed Ali Jinnah as a communal leader who caused the bloody partition of the subcontinent is expected to receive a body blow when a new book on the Quaid-i-Azam by former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh is released here on Monday.

‘If I were not drawn to the personality I wouldn’t have written the book. It’s an intricate, complex personality, of great character, determination,’ Mr Jaswant Singh told an Indian TV channel ahead of the release of the book, ‘Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence.’ It took five years to research.

By all accounts Mr Singh’s narrative is being seen by those who have seen glimpses of the book as the most important statement, verging on adulation, by a leading Indian public figure of a man otherwise seen as a villain by the Indian middle classes.

It was historically not tenable to see Mr Jinnah as the villain of 1947, Mr Singh said. ‘It is not borne out of the facts… we need to correct it… Muslims saw that unless they had a voice in their own economic, political and social destiny they will be obliterated.’

Mr Singh said the 1946 election was a good example to show the fear held by Muslims. That year, he said: ‘Jinnah’s Muslim League wins all the Muslim seats and yet they don’t have sufficient numbers to be in office because the Congress Party has, without even a single Muslim, enough to form a government and they are outside of the government.

‘So it was realised that simply contesting elections was not enough… All of this was a search for some kind of autonomy of decision making in their own social and economy destiny.’

Mr Jinnah was a great man because he created something out of nothing, Mr Singh said of his newfound hero.

‘He single-handedly stood against the might of the Congress Party and against the British who didn’t really like him ... Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don’t we recognise that? Why don’t we see (and try to understand) why he called him that?’

Mr Jinnah was as much a nationalist as any leader in India.
‘He fought the British for an independent India but also fought resolutely and relentlessly for the interest of the Muslims of India … the acme of his nationalistic achievement was the 1916 Lucknow Pact of Hindu-Muslim unity.’

Among the aspects of Mr Jinnah’s personality Mr Singh said he admired his determination and will to rise. ‘He was a self-made man. Mahatma Gandhi was the son of a Diwan. All these (people) — Nehru and others — were born to wealth and position. Jinnah created for himself a position. He carved in Bombay, a metropolitan city, a position for himself.
‘He was so poor he had to walk to work … he told one of his biographers there was always room at the top but there’s no lift. And he never sought a lift.’

Demolishing the belief that Mr Jinnah hated or disliked Hindus, Mr Singh said the claim was totally wrong. ‘His principal disagreement was with the Congress Party.’

Going by his interview shown on CNN-IBN on Sunday, Mr Singh holds Mr Jawaharlal Nehru as more culpable than anyone else for the division of the country.

DAWN.COM | World | Book on Jinnah likely to change discourse in India

 

[EjazR]

True. I dont see anything wrong with what Jaswant Singh told before the media. The book may border on adulation which is generally the case with all biographies. But the basic point against Nehru was true.
I learned about the federal- unionist conflict for the first time in
Partition, The day India burned[BBC] 14th Aug 2007
a documentary.

We Indians were taught half truths about this matter, which I believe was because Congress was in power for too long and so shaped our academic teaching. It is not the only sin of Congress and Nehru-Gandhi family that was covered up. In fact many Indians today blame Gandhi instead for accepting partition. It was just Nehru's blind fancy with the Soviet structure and Jinnah's paranoia. Nothing more that reflection of this in people around them.

The partition of India was not just on the federalist/unionist issue, it was much larger than that. There were some unreasonable demands IMO that were made that were too big a price to pay to keep India united. Some of these were that the Muslim league should be the sole representative of Muslims - even when there were many other non-Congress muslim parties that had popular support, Communal veto - where a community could veto legislations over the majority, seperate electorates where muslims could vote for muslims and hindu only for hindus, cumpolsory grouping of provinces, even if a province did not want to be part of the grouping (e.g. NWFP).

All of these factors and ofcourse the strategic considerations of the British to have a foothold against the USSR in the subcontinent played a part. There was ofcourse the similar role played by Hindu communalist groups like the Hindu Mahasabha (which later morphed to Bhartiya Jana Sangh and again to BJP) that would reinforce British and Muslim league demands and insist on the partition as well.

The period of 1937-47 was very complicated and full of confusion and to put the blame squarely on one person or group is wrong.I think the arabic word 'fitna' would be apt to describe that situation.

Unfortunately even today there are people in India especially the elderly who still associate Congress with freedom movement and feel it is their duty to vote for Congress. Today's Congress is a political party just as opportunistic as any other. God bless my fellow Indians with power to see beyond the blinds.

I doubt anyone votes for Congress now because it won freedom for India, otherwise all they would have to put in their manifesto is this. Everybody understands its an opputunistic party. Infact, many of the old Congress members were against INC to go into politics and wanted it to become a voluteer organisations of sort.

If anyone votes for Congress today is probably because it is the least bad option among the worst

 

[salman nedian]

Partition of India had to happen. I think we cannot hold one responsible for the partition. The idea of Hindu-Muslim unity was so unworkable that even Qaid-e-Azam could not remain onto it. Actually the way of life for both the nations is so different that they cannot live together as one nation. If we talk about democracy than 66% Muslims of sub-continent live in Pakistan and Bangladesh, still there is a huge population of Indian Muslims who supported Pakistan. So at least 75-80% Muslims of sub-continent were in favor of Pakistan and that shows that we cannot live together in a manner which Hindus wanted us to live. Few Muslims celebrities are being shown by India to show that we can co-exist in Hindu way but the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that way of life.

 

[s90]

Search for the real villain of Partition divides India again

The bloody birth of Pakistan has always been blamed on its first leader Jinnah. No longer, reports Andrew Buncombe.

Tuesday, 18 August 2009

In Pakistan he is known as Quaid-e-Azam or "Great leader". But in India, and beyond, there are those who have considered Mohammad Ali Jinnah as little more than a criminal, a man whose unyielding insistence on a separate country for Muslims led to the brutal division of a nation and the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.


Now, however, 62 years after the partition of India, Jinnah's legacy is receiving an overhaul from an unlikely quarter. A controversial new book by a senior politician from India's Hindu nationalist party suggests that Mr Jinnah, a secular man who drank and smoked but rarely visited the mosque, has too long been demonised by Indian society. Furthermore, it argues that he only raised the prospect of a separate Pakistan with independence leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi as a bargaining tool and that it was the inflexibility of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who became independent India's first prime minister, that ultimately led to the division of the sub-continent.

"I think we have misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon," the book's author, Jaswant Singh, a veteran politician, told the CNN-IBN television channel. "We needed a demon because, in the 20th century, the most telling event in the sub-continent was the partition of the country."

The partition of India in August 1947, when both Pakistan and an independent India won independence from Britain, resulted in one of the largest forced migrations of people in history. As millions of Hindus travelled east into the new India and millions of Muslims travelled West into the new country of Pakistan – there were perhaps 15 million refugees in total – there was also terrible violence. Some estimates suggest that up to one million people may have lost their lives in sectarian killings.

Though the struggle for the independence of India had taken place over decades, the British authorities' decision to grant sovereignty and ultimately to divide the country was rushed through in a matter of months. A British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, headed a committee that had the unenviable task of hurriedly deciding which territories should go to the new Pakistan and which should form part of India. The eventual border – the Radcliffe Line – split communities and divided families, the ramifications of which are still strongly felt today. The urbane and cultivated Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, has most often been cast as the villain of the process, unyielding in his demand that the Muslims of the sub-continent required a separate country. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of the British Indian empire, whose task was to oversee the granting of independence and whose wife is widely believed to have had a long-running affair with Nehru, once remarked: "I tried every trick I could play to shake Jinnah's resolve. Nothing would move him from his consuming determination to realise the dream of Pakistan."

But the 71-year-old Mr Singh, a former foreign minister, says that the claim is "paralysing in its insensitivity and... [for] the sheer horror of Mountbatten's casual untruthfulness". He argues that far from being set on a separate Pakistan, Jinnah's overwhelming concern was the well-being of his fellow Muslims, who were in a minority. He wanted to ensure they would have "space in a reassuring system".

He said Jinnah envisaged that some areas of the new country would have Muslim majority areas and some Hindu majority areas and believed a federal system that kept the country as one was desirable. Nehru, by contrast, demanded a system that was centralised. "Nehru believed in a highly centralised policy. That's what he wanted India to be," Mr Singh went on. "Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That, even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn't. Consistently he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India."

Mr Singh went on to say that the tragedy of Partition is still evident today in the experience of India's Muslim population of around 160 million. "Look into the eyes of the Muslims that live in India and you truly see the pain with which they live. We treat them as aliens. Without doubt Muslims have paid the price of Partition. They could have been significantly stronger in a united India."

Mr Singh, a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP who represents the north-east Indian district of Darjeeling, is not the first writer to have produced a revisionist history of Jinnah. Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani-American historian, for instance, has previously argued that he had no desire to split India and that partition was, in truth, a vast error. She too, says Jinnah was merely trying to strengthen his hand.

But in India, whose relationship with the "breakaway" nation of Pakistan remains fraught, the questioning of received truths by such a leading figure has sparked a degree of controversy. In 2005, the BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani was forced to stand down as party chief after he wrote in the visitors' book at Jinnah's tomb in Karachi that Pakistan's founder was "an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". Mr Singh says he has not written his book, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, the product of five years research, on behalf of the BJP and is prepared for any controversy it creates. Yesterday, however, it was the Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru and his descendants who appeared most angry. A party spokesman told local newspapers that the BJP ought to be known as the Bharatiya Jinnah Party because of its repeated praise of the Pakistani leader.

In Pakistan, where Jinnah died from the effects of tuberculosis barely a year after the country secured independence, news of this reassessment of the country's founder has been gladly seized upon. Mr Singh's book has become front page news and the subject of television talk shows and opinion columns. The book's publisher, Delhi-based Rupa and Co, said an initial order of books from Pakistan had already been tripled prior to publication.

Birth of two nations: The great carve-up

*The notion of dividing the Indian subcontinent into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority areas, the brainchild of Jinnah's Muslim League, went through various stages of evolution. At one stage, more than a half- dozen federated Muslim statelets were proposed, taking account of the fact that Muslims were scattered right across the country.

*Until late in negotiations Jinnah demanded a corridor linking West Pakistan (today's Pakistan) with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Jinnah complained bitterly that the final settlement agreed with the Viceroy, Mountbatten, and Nehru was "moth-eaten", and his decision to sign it remains a mystery.

Search for the real villain of Partition divides India again - Asia, World - The Independent

 

[garibnawaz]

There is a quote in a movie called Sarfarosh where Nasiruddin Shah playes a Muhajir Pakistani Gazal Singer.

He says these basterds divide a country since they couldn't decide which idiot will become PM. Some got Pakistan Some got Hindustan, hum kahi ke nahi rahe (as his ancestrial home remains in India).

Although a Bollywood movie quite true quote.

 

[sensenreason]

Partition of India had to happen. I think we cannot hold one responsible for the partition. The idea of Hindu-Muslim unity was so unworkable that even Qaid-e-Azam could not remain onto it. Actually the way of life for both the nations is so different that they cannot live together as one nation. If we talk about democracy than 66% Muslims of sub-continent live in Pakistan and Bangladesh, still there is a huge population of Indian Muslims who supported Pakistan. So at least 75-80% Muslims of sub-continent were in favor of Pakistan and that shows that we cannot live together in a manner which Hindus wanted us to live. Few Muslims celebrities are being shown by India to show that we can co-exist in Hindu way but the overwhelming majority of Muslims reject that way of life.

When the Moghuls ruled India, was Hindu-Muslim unity raised as a problem big enuf for them to leave India? When the British ruled they ruled over both Hindus and Muslims.

But if a Hindu rules or the 'way of life' is Hindu centric, there seems to be problem for Muslims to accept the same.

If the way oflife was so different why did Persians or others come here in the first place. The point being, why was it okay to come, plunder and stay...and assimilate. However, not okay the moment the power is lost.

Patently racist and unfair.

 

[niaz]

Jaswant Singh is correct in his assertion that Nehru was responsible for the partition of India. Gandhiji had offered Quaide Azam to become Prime Minister of united India if Muslim League dropped their demand for a separate homeland. In 1946 Muslim League agreed to accept united India for a probationary period of 10 years. However, Nehru was intransigent in his insistence of becoming Prime Minister himself which resulted in the partition. Indians are now howling for Jaswant Singh’s blood despite the fact that he wrote what is essentially correct.

It is a fact that both the Pakistanis as well as Indians find it difficult to accept the truth if it doesn’t suit them. Result is a highly vociferous sectarian society where ordinary citizens think nothing of murdering innocents. Secular India in the state of peace loving Gandhi elect the butcher Narendar Modi who blatantly engineers massacre of thousands of innocent Muslims. Pakistanis on their part ignore the famous 11th August address of the Quaid to the Pakistan’s first Legislative Assembly and we have incidents such as Gojra where Christians are murdered on mere suspicion of desecrating the holy text.

 

[Halaku Khan]

Jinnah pursued Pakistan for power
Jaswant disappoints; ignores British designs
The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Opinions

by Narendra Singh Sarila

I am disappointed with Jaswant Singh’s 660-page book on Jinnah and Partition, released earlier this week. At the end he says: “I still fail to understand why India was partitioned in 1947? Or the manner in which it was done.” If even after his massive research and hard work, he did not get to the bottom of his subject, there is a reason for it. It is because he has ignored the most important element that was responsible for Partition, namely British strategic interests that required the creation of Pakistan. The British top secret documents on Partition have now been unsealed and there was no excuse for ignoring them. I myself showed these to him some years back. The whole story is there in those documents.

The Labour government that came to power in Britain in mid-1945 was willing to grant independence to India but was worried about losing its 60-year-old military base here from which the British controlled the whole Indian Ocean area, including the eastern Middle-East that contained oil wells — The Wells of Power — of increasing importance in war and peace and which Stalin, with his rising ambition after his victory over Germany, the British feared, might seize. In the last two great wars it was from their Indian base that the British deployed Indian and British forces in Iran and Iraq and the British Chiefs of Staff were adamant on keeping a foothold in India. But Atlee, the British Prime Minister, knew that the government of a free India under the Congress party’s rule would neither give them a military base nor join their team against the Soviet Union in the fresh Great Game. What were they to do?

Towards the end of 1945, Field Marshal Wavell, the Viceroy of India, came up with a possible wayout of their quandary. After the Congress party had refused to cooperate in the war effort in 1939, unless Britain announced that it would give freedom to India after the war, Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, had encouraged Jinnah to formulate the Pakistan scheme, informing London that Jinnah was in his pocket. “He represents a minority and a minority can only hold its own with our assistance,” the Viceroy told London.

Wavell now suggested that they use Jinnah’s demand to create a separate state in the north-west — not give him all he wanted in the west but territories along Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang with the port of Karachi — and Pakistan would cooperate with them on defence matters. On being asked by London to give them a clear picture of the areas that could go to Pakistan, Wavell in a historic dispatch on February 6, 1946, sent a map delineating the boundaries of Pakistan he had in mind, which were exactly the boundaries that Radcliff drew 18 months later.

So, what Pakistan was going to be was already decided in early 1946 and the time between then and August 15 was used by Atlee, Cripps and Wavell and later Mountbatten to make Jinnah accept the smaller Pakistan and the Congress party to accept Partition, while Atlee kept proclaiming from housetops that they were working to preserve India’s unity. All the British manoeuvring can be discerned by studying the British top secret files. It is a myth that Jinnah founded Pakistan. President Roosevelt had posted his representative in Delhi after1942 and his dispatches in the US archives also tell us much.

Some of the assessments in the book are also mistaken. To believe that the Cabinet Mission Plan would have resulted in a united India is moonshine. After 10 years Punjab, Sindh and the NWFP had the option to break away on one side and Bengal and Assam on the other side. That would give the League a much larger Pakistan after 10 years and certainly, in the meanwhile, it would fan the flames of communalism to prepare the ground for the above. And what about the princely states? They had the option to break away too . So, possibly Hyderabad would join Pakistan and would help reach Tripura and Manipur, which would be swallowed up. The Plan would have balkanised India and Nehru, despite the many mistakes he made, was correct in striking it down.

The Congress made many mistakes in the struggle, but Gandhiji united a heterogeneous and largely uneducated people, without which Independence was not possible.

I agree with Jaswant Singh that Jinnah at heart was a nationalist and a secularist. And he remained so for the first 60 years of his life — a long time. Jinnah opposed satyagrah, calling it an extreme programme that would lead to disaster. He was shunned by Gandhiji. And Motilal Nehru feared that this brilliant man would eclipse his son, Jawaharlal. In 1928 Jinnah proposed to convince the Muslims to give up separate electorates — that were preventing Hindu-Muslim political interdependence and unity — suggesting in return that Muslim representation in the Central Assembly be raised from 27 per cent to 33 per cent — a very minor concession compared to the possibility of ending the pernicious separate electorates. But he was pooh-poohed, and virtually driven out from the Congress party.

After the Congress refused to cooperate in the war effort in 1939, the Viceroy sought out Jinnah. The doctors had earlier the same year told him that he had terminal TB. Jinnah had always wanted to be the first in every thing. There are many instances in history of people abandoning their principles to achieve power and glory. So, for him it was now or never. His Pakistan scheme, launching Direct Action — the precursor of today’s terrorism — and mobilising Muslims against the Hindus, were all in the persuit of power and glory. He did not believe in what he was doing. After Pakistan had been achieved, he spoke in Karachi advocating secularism. But he quickly retreated when opposed by his followers.

Chagla, who worked with him in his law firm in Bombay, once told me that he was a man of great integrity. But it was tragic that at the end he lost it. And no man can be great without integrity. I also feel sympathy for Jinnah, for his humiliation and suffering. But at the end of his life he did many bad things, and inflicted incalculable harm. To believe that he was great just because he fought the mighty Congress party is nonsence. Do we call Hitler great because he fought the mighty Allies?n

The writer is a former Ambassador of India to France and Switzerland. Earlier, he was ADC to Lord Mountbatten. He has authored “The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition.”

---------- Post added at 01:46 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:45 AM ----------

The Three Blind Men...
www.outlookindia.com | The Three Blind Men...

Jaswant Singh’s book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which has become a talking point across India, has revived the old debate about Partition. Time for a reality check before we decide on heroes and villains

Rajinder Puri

Jaswant Singh, former cabinet minister, has written a book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah which has become a talking point across India . I have not read the book. I have heard Jaswant Singh on TV expounding his views on Jinnah. The main thrust of his work seems to be:

1) Jinnah has been unnecessarily demonised. He was a great man and not wholly responsible for the Partition of the subcontinent.

2) Pandit Nehru was primarily responsible for the Partition because he believed in a centralized India which left no space for the Muslims to protect themselves against Hindu domination.

3) Mahatma Gandhi, and other Congress leaders were opposed to the Partition and would not have allowed it if it were not for Nehru.

The view about Nehru’s role in the Partition is not new. This scribe wrote about it in a book of just 107 text pages, not over 600 pages, which were published 20 ago. Others, such as former ADC to Lord Mountbatten and later India ’s ambassador abroad, Narendra Singh Sarila, wrote on the subject of the Partition at greater length.

Let us consider the three main postulates of Jaswant Singh’s views outlined above.

1) Jinnah was not a “great” man. He was articulate, highly intelligent and focused. He missed greatness by a wide margin because he willingly colluded with the British to create a Pakistan about which he had not even determined boundaries or shape. He mainly fulfilled British goals while satisfying his own vanity.

Independence came first; the boundaries of the divided nations came later. The British had decided on Partition to serve their own strategic ends. On 29 March 1945, after Viceroy Lord Wavell met Prime Minister Churchill in London he recorded: “He (Churchill) seems to favour partition of India into Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan.”

Sir Martin Gilbert, the British biographer of Winston Churchill revealed that Churchill had asked Jinnah to dispatch secret letters to him by addressing them to a lady, Elizabeth Giliat, who had been Churchill’s secretary. This secret interaction continued for years. Jinnah’s key decisions between 1940 and 1946, including the demand for Pakistan in 1940, were taken after getting the nod from Churchill or Lord Linlithgow and Wavell, both Churchill's admirers.

Jinnah admitted during the Simla Conference in 1945 that he was receiving advice from London . In other words, Jinnah was as much a British puppet on a string as were the top Indian leaders.

2) Yes, Pandit Nehru was primarily responsible for the Partition. This was not because he was emotionally committed to a centralised India but because he too was thoroughly programmed by the British since his school days. His proximity to Lord Mountbatten has been recorded by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and historian Shashi Joshi among others. Even before Mountbatten’s arrival in India Lord Wavell had complained that Nehru was often informed by Whitehall before he was!

3) Mahatma Gandhi and other Congress leaders may have been unhappy about the Partition. They did not oppose it. When the resolution to accept Partition was taken by the Congress on June 3, 1947 Gandhi observed his day of silence. He assured Mountbatten on June 2 that he would not oppose Partition.

It can be nobody’s case that Nehru was so powerful that he could override Gandhi and the rest. The truth was that Gandhi lacked the gumption to oppose Partition when it came to the crunch because he knew that his adversary was not Nehru but Britain . At Mountbatten’s bidding he could undertake a fast unto death to compel the Indian government to pay adequate compensation to Pakistan . He made no such protest when his life’s work of creating a united independent India was being destroyed.

Gandhi’s belated attempt to undo his mistake by wanting to settle in Pakistan and by demanding the dissolution of the Congress in his last will and testament was aborted by his death.

These judgments may appear cruel. Truth is seldom kind. Any assessment about the causes that led to the Partition of India would be flawed unless the central role of the British in creating it, and the compliant role of the Indian and Pakistani leaders in accepting it, are recognized.

The most clinching evidence of this is provided by the recorded views of Christopher Beaumont who was private secretary to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission. His private papers were recently released by his son, Robert Beaumont. The elder Beaumont wrote in 1947:

“The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished…The handover of power was done too quickly."

Christopher Beaumont was most scathing about how partition affected the Punjab . He wrote:

“"The Punjab partition was a disaster… Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment… The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation… Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war… By the end of 1947 there were virtually no Hindus or Sikhs living in west Punjab - now part of Pakistan - and no Muslims in the Indian east… The British government and Mountbatten must bear a large part of the blame for this tragedy."

A few Britons are beginning to confront the truth. Will Indians ever start doing the same?