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> When India gained independence Muslims and Hindus kicked eachother out. My understanding is that partition was driven by the British, starting with the 1905

• sieve 1y ago
  > partition was driven by the British The British absolutely had a role. One theory is the West needed a pliable state on India's west to guard the Arabian Sea from the Russians. A lot of Hindu politicians of the era were socialists. Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, was a Fabian Socialist. What if India allied with Russia? Pakistan soon became a CENTO treaty member. The thousand year Hindu-Muslim rivalry is the main driver, however. During the 16-18th centuries, European expeditions started hitting Indian shores, initially nibbling around the edges, and Muslim power on the subcontinent was comprehensively demolished by the Maratha Empire. The British drove out other European claimants and managed to wrest control over the subcontinent piece-by-piece. Muslim elites did not mind ruling over majority-Hindu provinces for centuries. But loss of power and membership of a numerical minority creates insecurities and the idea of a separate Muslim nation started post 1857. People can quibble about the origin of the idea and who is to blame. But no one can deny the fact that repeated massive riots between these communities (which are separate communities/religions, not ethnicities) in the decades leading to the partition signaled the inevitable.
  • netcan 1y ago
    > People can quibble about the origin of the idea and who is to blame. Look... I think there is a whole lot of extremely motivated reasoning. Even the British weren't that keen to defend British imperialism by the time of India's independence. The Brits being already responsible for so many sins, make an easy place to put "blame" that cannot be borne elsewhere. The alternative is to "blame" nationalism, self determination, liberalism. republicanism, and/or democracy. Everyone knew that India was going to civil war. It was a big factor delaying British decolonisation. Gandhi's whole ideology/rhetoric as independence loomed changed to try an prevent it. Naive in retrospect. This has always been the sticking point, for modern nationalism. People have strong, inconvenient notions of who the "nation" is.
• miohtama 1y ago
  Here is how the partition of India happened. It was not entirely linear process. https://youtu.be/4VMLTmksq3Y?si=G6rhRG21hnh-yaaW https://youtu.be/4VMLTmksq3Y?si=G6rhRG21hnh-yaaW
• netcan 1y ago
  > My understanding is that partition was driven by the British, starting with the 1905 partition of Bengal. So... this is why I said "blindspot." There have even been socio-political theories claiming that British rule created the Indian caste system. The modern (and understandable) bias is to find imperialism, colonialism, monarchy and whatnot culpable. To absolve nationalism, self determination and democracy. Circa 2000, the idea that Rwandan tribal divisions were actually created by colonial era racism. Both this and the colonial origin of caste dynamics were widely accepted on very little evidence and took mountains of very strong evidence to debunk... recently decided by genetics. Sykes-Picot and the demarcation of Africa are other "lines on maps" that yielded conflict. But... "The Great Sorting Out" occurred regardless of great powers drawing lines. Nation states have borders, and there is no "correct line" that could have been drawn to make them neat. Identities that became nations were all jumbled up. No great power drew lines in Yugoslavia, Cyprus or Turkey-Greece. Conflict and expulsion occurred regardless. "Lines on maps" started in europe, and these were an attempt to mitigate occurrences like 1994 Rwanda in the 1800s. The idea was borders that represented a feasible "nation." "Nation states" is a new concept. It had precursors, but the world was not divided into nation states until recently... by nationalism. Napoleon created French nationalism by creating it. Deleting all the local dialects and identities (including his own). Generating a standardized French language and identity. He did this through totalitarianism. The Osmans tried to do something similar. An Ottoman nation with distinct hats and whatnot. It failed because they did not manage to achieve "totalitarian" control over culture. The USSR, also inspired by Napoleon tried to create a "Soviet Nation." Here the problem was that the middle ages were over, even in Russia. Napoleon had widespread ignorance and illiteracy to work with. The idea that colonial era sins created postcolonial strife is national-liberal cope, IMO. Individual examples can be argued... but, these tend to be weak, hyper-local theories. The alternative is that nationalism is the cause of nationalist strife. Most of the old world "nations" were mixed, and civic nationalism almost never emerged cleanly from this substrate. Take Northern Ireland and Lebanon as examples. These countries cannot have "left and right wing" political dynamic, except as a euphemism for sect. In Lebanon, the political equivalent of "Democrat and Republican" is Sunni, Shite, Christian, etc. In NI, it's protestants and catholics. Alternatively (irish) nationalist and (british) unionists. They technically also adhere to left-right, but this is another euphemism. A different line would have yielded a different conflict, different migration patterns and suchlike... but not sect-blind civic nationalism.