Look at India right now with the growth of the BJP, you've seen an increase of violence against Muslims.Īnd in Pakistan, an Islamization of the country that goes back to when General Zia was in charge in the 1970s, and he kind of promoted the Islamization of Pakistan, which ended up supporting the Taliban, and passing anti-blasphemy laws and so on. If you look at how both India and Pakistan deal with religious minorities, neither of them has a good track record on that. How has Partition shaped sectarian attitudes in the two countries? They used to be able to travel freely between those two cities, and there was even visa free travel between the two countries until the late 1960s.īut for my grandmother, as a newlywed young mother, some of her earliest memories of that time were of hosting Partition refugees from Pakistan in Delhi. ![]() ![]() My grandfather was born in Lahore and my grandmother was in Amritsar, which is in Punjab, in today’s India. You are from India – are there any Partition stories that you grew up hearing or that you remember from your family?Įvery family has some sort of story of the Partition or of the terrorism and violence that came after. So as the British departure from Indian territories became more likely, those divisions provided fertile ground for more ideological ideas of nationhood: you had Muslims for a Muslim-majority Pakistan, and Hindus in India who believed that because you were going to have a Muslim-majority Pakistan, then India should also be a Hindu majority country.Īnd of course, when Partition arrived, you had fanatics on both sides taking advantage of the situation to carry out violence. But the British had long practiced a deliberate policy of divide and rule, selectively playing sectarian groups off each other as a way to undermine any anti-British movements in India. I mean, you had Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, for the most part coexisting peacefully. Until the mid 1940s, British India was a multi-ethnic, multicultural country. That history of violence is what gave birth to India and Pakistan. But when the dust settled in 1948, some 15 million people had been displaced from their homes, and the conservative estimate is that at least 2 million people died. It was a small percentage of the population who engaged in these things, of course – most people were bystanders. You had Hindus and Sikhs versus Muslims, and vice versa. You had mobs burning villages, attacking people. So it was just a mess, villages were split in half and so on. But he did all of this from England, using outdated census information. Well, Radcliffe had been to India – once. He charged a prominent lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, with partitioning India along sectarian lines: a Hindu-majority India on one side, and Pakistan, for Muslims, on the other.Īnd let me guess, this imperial Englishman didn’t draw such a great map? Then in 1947, after World War Two, Lord Mountbatten came to India as the new viceroy, and his mandate was to end the British Raj. But that sort of became the rallying cry for Muslims. There's some debate about whether that was an actual goal or whether it was just a negotiating tactic. And due to their minority status, they were guaranteed a certain amount of representation in various legislative bodies.Īs the calls for independence from the British grew louder, there was a fear that Muslims would lose these protections, especially in a Hindu-dominated India, and so there were calls for a separate Muslim state. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Īlex Kliment: Let's start at the beginning, Akhil – what was Partition, and why did it happen?Īkhil Bery: Under the British Empire, Muslims were the largest religious minority in India, accounting for about 25% of the population. To learn more about why Partition happened, and how it continues to shape the troubled relationship between these two countries, we sat down with Akhil Bery, a former analyst at Eurasia Group who is now Director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute. It also laid the groundwork for sectarian conflicts and enmity between India and Pakistan that have lasted to this day. The event, known as “Partition,” tore apart families, villages, and whole regions, sparking violence that left millions dead and displaced. ![]() 15, 1947, British India was divided - along an inexpertly drawn line - into a sprawling, Hindu-majority India, and a smaller, Muslim-majority Pakistan. At the stroke of midnight that separated Aug. Seventy-five years ago this week, two of the most powerful countries in Asia were born in a bloodbath.
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