Communists and the Making of Pakistan

if Hindus planted the seed of Two nation theory why did Jinnah bought it lock stock and barrel.

And if TNT was Jinnahs own baby how did it help ALL muslims of he subcontinent.
Muslims lived intimately woven into the fabric of indian villages for thousand of years.


Jinnah is a villain for all Indian Muslims: writer
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE
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NEW DELHI, April 18: ``Indian Muslims would shed every last drop of their blood before allowing Pakistan to take over Kashmir. There would be a virtual genocide in case of such an eventuality.''
Speaking on the `Challenge before the Indian Muslim in the next millennium', writer Dr Rafiq Zakaria said in these changing times, if the Indian Muslims want to survive, then they have to take help from all quarters.

They have to stop wallowing in their misery and have to give priority to education and upliftment of their community.

Describing Mohammad Ali Jinnah as the `villain of the Independence movement', he said Jinnah had done more damage to India and Indian Muslims than any other medieval ruler and generations of Muslims would curse him.``Jinnah divided the Muslims into three categories -- Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indian Muslims.

The Biharis in Bangladesh are persecuted and there are frequent reports of massacres of those who migrated to Pakistan and their leader lives in London. The Indian Muslimsare not much better off since the Hindus think that their loyalties lie with Pakistan. In fact, the Indian Muslims hate Pakistan more than the Hindus because they have suffered a lot because of it,'' he pointed out.

He added that a perusal of history showed that the two communities were very close and it was only in the past 150 years that relations between the two communities soured. To restore harmony between the two communities, the Muslim community should reassure the Hindus that they are an integral part of India, who have played an important role in the development of the country and are as proud, as they are, of being Indians.

Also, shah, Muslim-Communist unity in India certainly tends to be very helpful to Muslims (many if not most of the communists being Hindus). Yet working with communists is/has always been a double-edged sword.

Communists are nice people, but their collective approach tends to be distinctly anti-national (unless one can imagine something like a communist nation) since their entire ideology is 'internationally-focused.' They too can't see nations as valid groups except communist nations.

Shah, when Hindus and Muslims could not overcome their imagined mutual insecurities, despite living together for centuries, speaking the same language(s), eating the same foods, and belonging to the same racials stock, it seems very odd of Mr. Guha to expect that the British would not/ should not have had their insecurities with respect to us....

Or to demand that the British should not have left so soon when they were being clearly told to leave, and Hindus and Muslims did not appear to be in very peaceful mood.

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More to the point, Mountbatten's biographer too raises the point that has been made earlier here:

Given what Hindus and Muslims were doing and saying in those days, what is the basis of the holier-than-thou belief (except liberal wish for Hindu-Muslim brotherhood) that violence would have abated or lessened had the British delayed their withdrawl, and not actually much worsened and become geographically more widespread?

PAST & PRESENT

Could Partition have been made less bloody?

RAMACHANDRA GUHA

It could be one of the most tantalising questions of modern Indian history.

THE most tantalising question of modern Indian history undoubtedly is: "could the Partition of India have been avoided?" Ever since August 15,1947, this question has been asked by all kinds of Indians, who, naturally, have given all kinds of answers. An equally important question, yet one much less frequently asked, is the following: "Even if Partition was, by 1946 or so, inescapable, could it have come about with less loss of life?"

In February 1947, the Labour Government in London announced that the British would quit India by June 1948. Three months later, the new Viceory, Lord Mountbatten, decided to dramatically foreshorten the date of departure, bringing it forward to August 1947. His official biographer, Philip Ziegler, has justified the decision in the following words: "Once the principle of Partition had been accepted, it was inevitable that communalism would rage freely. The longer the period before the transfer of power, the worse the tension and the greater the threat that violence would spread. Today it was the Punjab, tomorrow Bengal, Hyderabad, or any of the myriad societies in the sub-continent where Hindu and Muslim lived cheek by jowl. Two hundred thousand could have become two million, even 20 million."

Blistering attack


In fact, even while Ziegler wrote (in 1985) the toll of the Partition violence was estimated at one million dead; some later scholars have suggested the figure is closer to two million. How many would it have been if the British had left, as planned, in June 1948? In a blistering attack on Mountbatten's reputation, Andrew Roberts accuses him of softness and vacillation — "whenever he had to exhibit toughness, Mountbatten took the most invertebrate line possible" — of being unwilling to crack down effectively on communal violence and, more specifically, of understaffing the Punjab Boundary Force and not supplying it with air cover. Contra Ziegler, Roberts is convinced that the "over-hasty withdrawal" led "to more rather than fewer deaths".

Mountbatten had been warned by officials who knew the province that the Punjab was where the worst violence would occur. If, when the time came, there weren't enough troops to deal with rioters, one reason was that the British were paranoid that they, the rulers, would be attacked as soon as the decision to leave was made public. This feeling was widespread among British officials, priests, planters, and merchants. In the summer of 1946, a young officer wrote to his family of how he thought that when the British left, "we shall virtually have the whole country against us (for long enough at all events to wipe out our scattered European population) before the show becomes, as inevitably it will, a communal scrap between Hindus and Muslims".

The policy of the Raj in its last days was to make the protection of British lives top priority. In February 1947, the Governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burrows, stated that his "first action in the event of an announcement of a date for withdrawal of British power ... would be to have the troops `standing to' and prepare for a concentration of outlying Europeans at very short notice as soon as hostile reactions began to show themselves". In fact, in the summer of 1947, a white man (or woman) was the safest person in India. No one was interested in killing them. But their imagined insecurity meant that many army units were placed near European settlements, instead of being freed for riot control elsewhere.

Postponed


The instinct of self-preservation also lay behind the decision to postpone the Punjab Boundary Award until after the date of Independence. The Punjab Governor, Sir Ewans Jenkins, was very keen that the award be announced as soon as it was ready, so that district officers could be placed in their respective Dominions, Indians in India and Pakistanis in Pakistan; and troops moved to key locations in advance of the transfer of power. The man charged with drawing the boundary lines, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, was ready with the award on August 9 itself. Yet Lord Mountbatten chose to make the award public only after August 15. The Viceroy's explanation for the delay was strange, to say the least: "Without question, the earlier it was published, the more the British would have to bear responsibility for the disturbances which would undoubtedly result". By the same token, "the later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British".

In other words, let the natives cop the blame for the horrible fall-out of Independence and Partition.

As a rule, one must only write of history how it happened, not of how it might have happened. Would a more extended time frame — an announcement in April 1947 that the British would quit in a year's time — allow for a less painful process of division? Would more active troop deployments and an earlier announcement of the Radcliffe Award have led to less violence in the Punjab? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. As it turned out, the most appropriate epitaph on the last days of the Raj was provided by the Punjab official who told a young social worker from Oxford: "You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it".

E-mail: ramguha@vsnl.com

What else is new.The rt Wing hindu mahasabha etc already blame Left for Pakistan creation .
And the fundamentalists in India Lump 'Pinko' with muslims 'I fact some one have said India has new religion of left with Muslims!!