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It was a boon economically but people died. Millions of people died due to the actions of a few aristocrats and religious zealots. Probably the greatest humanit
by anon291 4mo ago
It was a boon economically but people died. Millions of people died due to the actions of a few aristocrats and religious zealots. Probably the greatest humanitarian crisis in the last millennium.
And the partition of India is the well accepted term for the event. I'm not going to be drawn into some post colonial syntactic argument in a discussion about the very real deaths if very real people as well as the human tragedy of the subsequent forced displacement from land people had lived in for thousands of years.
Jinnahs argument with the Indian Congress was because someone sang a song once referencing a Hindu goddess from a novel. It's honestly bananas and difficult to understand especially when his own daughter lived in India after partition
- rayiner 4mo agoThe idea of a unified, secular India was an elite notion imported from the west that elides how much sectarian animosity there was and is among ordinary people. I’m a fan of this essay on India that addresses this disconnect: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial-india/ https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...
- anon291 4mo agoSure we can argue about that as well but that doesn't change the mind numbing amount of bloodshed caused by the chosen solution and the resulting successor state that harbored and continues to harbor terrorists hell bent on destroying America. Ideally India would have balkanized into ethnolinguistic nations with a common union like the EU. That would have probably been the best outcome but the religious partition has led to increased religious extremism on both sides, seemingly unsolvable instability for 1/4 of the world population, and again, millions of deaths.