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Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Politics
- Irish Times
Shattered Lands. Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia: Wonderful telling of a sad history
Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia Author : Sam Dalrymple ISBN-13 : 978-0008466817 Publisher : William Collins Guideline Price : £25 The very title of Sam Dalrymple's magnificent book underlines how vital a portrayal of the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century it provides. Many people will probably do a double take when seeing 'partition' in the plural in the subtitle, even more so as it refers to five of them. For most of us, the partition of India no doubt refers to the 1947 division of British-controlled India into the modern Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan . But there are other divisions that have cross-hatched what was once the world's largest imperial holding – the division, and perpetual provisional status, of Jammu and Kashmir between the two newly independent countries; the 1971 secession of East Pakistan to become Bangladesh; and also the separation of two other places whose history as part of the Indian Empire is mostly forgotten: Britain's Arabian territories, including Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, Oman and Aden, which split on Britain's orders in 1931, and Burma, which became a separate crown colony six years later. Dalrymple's richly documented history provides an excellent refresher course for anybody in need of one. The better-known partition naturally looms largest in the book, one of the most dismaying humanitarian catastrophes of a bleak century, spurred by the rise of ethnonationalism, the gross incompetence and racist indifference of the colonial administration and crucially, the proximity to a global conflict that created a heavily militarised society, particularly in the Punjab, the historic home of the British Indian Army. Beginning with the Calcutta Riots of August 16th, 1946, the day the All-India Muslim League called a general strike to demand a separate Muslim homeland, India's Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs slaughtered each other in what Dalrymple calls a 'mutual genocide'. The bloodshed resulted in the deaths of up to two million people and the displacement of between 12 and 20 million, culminating in 'population transfers' between India and Pakistan that are considered the biggest movement of humans in history. READ MORE Panicked populations, driven by fear, distrust and rampant misinformation, killed their neighbours and fellow citizens, often in out-of-body frenzies of violence that would, in some accounts Dalrymple cites, shock and traumatise even the perpetrators for the rest of their lives. 'Firing a village is a normal occurrence like having breakfast, murder is like having a cigarette,' one contemporary account put it. There were many instances of Hindus and Sikhs protecting Muslim friends and strangers, and vice versa, but even these kindly acts would ultimately be powerless against the massive force of genocidal violence, leading people on both sides of the divide to migrate. These included the Hindu Urdu poet and satirist Fikr Taunsvi, who reluctantly left his beloved native Lahore for Delhi after his daughter was murdered by a neighbour. The uprooting of populations also diminished cultures, with the Delhi novelist Ahmed Ali lamenting the 'shrinking of his city's language' after partition. It was only the assassination of Gandhi by the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse in November 1949 that, Dalrymple says, 'shocked the two nations to their senses' and brought an end to the violence. But the book deals with a lot more than just the events of 1947–1949. Dalrymple begins his account with the bumptious visit of the Simon Commission to India in 1928. The commission was tasked with writing a constitution for British India and was led by Lord John Simon, selected because he had a 'virgin mind on Indian affairs'. It was a perfect exemplification of Britain's mishandling of India and the commission members were shocked to find they were not overly welcome in the colony, where anti-colonial sentiment was rife. One of those members was a young Clement Attlee, who would, two decades later as prime minister, preside over India's leaving the empire. The first cleavage, and the first signs of ethnic strife, occurred in Burma, where there were two big pogroms of Indians in the 1930s. Though it might seem strange to think of present-day Myanmar as being part of India, there was, even among progressive Burmese, support for remaining attached to it. [ Understanding the hidden history of Myanmar Opens in new window ] Burma would later become a front line of the second World War, occupied by the Japanese, with local nationalists, including Aung San, father of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi , collaborating with the occupiers in the hope of getting independence. The former congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose would do the same, establishing the Indian national army, which fought the Allies alongside the Japanese. The British looked warily on the indifference to the war effort of other Indian nationalists, imprisoning most of them, including Jawaharlal Nehru, for much of the war. Only the Muslim League leader, and later founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stayed out of prison on account of his support for the Allies. Still, the British knew independence would be inevitable when the war ended, as was acknowledged by the wartime viceroy Archibald Wavell. The Bengal famine, caused by a rise in the price of rice after Burmese imports disappeared, and exacerbated by Churchill 's callous racism, brought the impending break-up only closer. [ Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine Opens in new window ] Few of the chief architects of partition emerge with much credit. Nehru and Jinnah are portrayed as self-serving opportunists detached from the reality of life for ordinary Indians. Wavell's successor, Mountbatten, was, even among his contemporaries in India, widely viewed as incompetent although he was inexplicably left in charge of the process of handing over the colony, which was planned with an insanely irresponsible deadline of just 77 days. Even Gandhi, though not particularly venal in Dalrymple's nuanced telling, is far from the facile totem of saintliness he is viewed as in the West. [ Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire Opens in new window ] Still, Dalrymple gives them their due, acknowledging that partition was viewed at the time as a way to put an end to the ethnic violence already under way, even though it only ended up exacerbating it. He quotes John Keenan, an Anglo-Indian army officer of Irish descent, who surmises that the rush to get partition completed was due to fears on Nehru's part that the Tories would return to power in the UK and that Churchill would put a stop to decolonisation. India might even have been partitioned further: 584 princely states existed in India before 1947, with no constitutional link to the British empire. The best-known of these were Jammu and Kashmir, Hyderabad and Travancore, the latter of which made an ill-fated attempt at declaring independence in 1947. Almost all the princely states were subsumed into either India or Pakistan, with rare peripheral exceptions, such as Nepal and Bhutan, living on as independent states. There were also losers in the shake-up who failed to see their aspirations to independent homelands realised, such as the Naga and the Mizo, two Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups who live either side of the India-Myanmar border. Pakistan also continues to face insurgencies from separatists in its southwestern Balochistan province. The final partition occurred in 1971 when East Pakistan – following horrendous massacres by Pakistani forces that were an echo of the violence of the late 1940s, and a subsequent war with India – gained its independence as Bangladesh. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that a non-contiguous state, its two entities 2,000km apart and speaking different languages, would struggle to last. The fact the Karachi government refused to make Bengali an official language, despite it being spoken by 55 per cent of the population, made things only more fractious. Even so, the violence when it came was no less shocking than 24 years previously. Though relinquishing the colonies was undoubtedly the right thing to do, the precipitous manner in which it was done was much to Britain's discredit, and was done as much out of economic expediency as anything else. With Britain financially crippled after the war, Attlee was determined to let go of India. Britain would similarly give up its Arabian holdings in 1971 when inflation at home made running them far too costly. Oil money meant decolonisation was relatively smooth in Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the Trucial States (now the UAE) but Aden, which was plunged into civil war, fared less well. Though nationalists across the various countries will surely disagree, Dalrymple is in no doubt the partitions left all countries, on the subcontinent at least, worse off. Travel between the three countries, two of which are belligerent nuclear powers, is now heavily restricted and he notes that it is easier for Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to meet in England, their former colonial power, than to meet in the subcontinent itself. The economies of all three countries suffered, particularly Pakistan and Bangladesh, which inherited little of the pre-partition structures or personnel of governance. The scope and verve of Shattered Lands makes it a wonderful read. Dalrymple, who grew up in Delhi, draws on a range of superb memoirs and testimonies of partition, including from the poet Taunsvi, the brigadier Keenan, and the Harvard graduate-turned-Bangladeshi freedom fighter Salahdin Imam, and also an impressive amount of documentation. He tells an extremely sad tale very well. Further reading From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra (Penguin, 2013) Mishra's history of the responses of Asian intellectuals, from India, China and the Arab world, to colonialism is a landmark work that provides invaluable insight into the underpinnings of anti-colonial action, which have been often obscured in western narratives. The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973) Farrell wrote of nothing but empire in his short but glorious career, which encompassed three novels. The Siege of Krishnapur brilliantly details the siege of a fictional British garrison town in India during the 1857 Mutiny. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1973, it lost out in the 2008 Best of the Booker, perhaps in an act of postcolonial poetic justice, to Midnight's Children. [ JG Farrell: plagued by disease Opens in new window ] Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Review, 2005) The Indian-American Suketu Mehta was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for this ambitiously sprawling nonfiction book about Mumbai, the city he lived in as a child before emigrating to the US. An important addition to city literature.
Times of Oman
a day ago
- Politics
- Times of Oman
Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh highlights terrorism's threat to world at SCO meeting in China
Qingdao: Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has condemned terrorism at a meeting on Thursday of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in China's Qingdao, emphasizing the need to hold perpetrators, organizers, financiers, and sponsors of terrorist acts accountable and bring them to justice. "We reiterate the need to hold the perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of reprehensible acts of terrorism, including cross border terrorism accountable and bring them to justice. Any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable regardless of their motivation, whenever, wherever and by whomever committed. SCO members must condemn this evil unequivocally," said Rajnath Singh. He highlighted the recent Pahalgam terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, which was carried out by 'The Resistance Front' (TRF), a proxy of the UN-designated terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). "On 22 April 2025, the terror group 'The Resistance Front' (TRF) carried out a dastardly and heinous attack on innocent tourists at Pahalgam in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. 26 innocent civilans, including a Nepali national, were killed. Victims were shot at after they were profiled based on religious identity. The Resistance Front which is a proxy of UN designated terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) claimed responsibility for the attack," added Singh. He said that India successfully launched Operation Sindoor on May 7, 2025, to dismant cross-border terrorist infrastructure. "The pattern of Pahalgam terror attack matches with LeT's previous terror attacks in India. In exercising its right to defend against terrorism and pre-empt as well as deter further cross border terrorist attacks, India on 07th May 2025 successfully launched Op Sindoor to dismantle cross border terrorist infrastructure," said Singh. At the SCO meeting, the Defence Minister reaffirmed India's resolve to fight terrorism in all its forms and manifestations, adding that terrorism is a transnational threat that demands a unified response from nations. "These threats do not respect national boundaries, and they demand a unified response rooted in transparency, mutual trust, and collaboration." He emphasised the need to counter the technology used by terrorists, including drones, for cross-border smuggling of weapons and drugs. The Minister highlighted the complexity of modern threats, which include transnational terrorism, cyber-attacks, and hybrid warfare. "We should seek to counter the technology used by terrorists, including drones, for cross-border smuggling of weapons and drugs. In our interconnected world, traditional borders are no longer the sole barriers against threats. Instead, we face an intricate web of challenges that range from transnational terrorism and cyber-attacks to hybrid warfare," said Singh. He emphasised the need for proactive steps to prevent the spread of radicalization among youth. The Minister highlighted the significant role played by the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) mechanism of the SCO in this regard. "We should also take proactive steps to prevent the spread of radicalization among our youth. The RATS mechanism of SCO has played a significant role in this regard. The joint statement of the Council of SCO Heads of State on 'Countering Radicalization leading to Terrorism, Separatism and Extremism' issued during India's Chairmanship symbolises our shared commitment," added Singh. He highlighted India's proactive approach to defending itself against terrorist threats and emphasised that India will not hesitate to target epicentres of terrorism, ensuring that those who sponsor and perpetrate terrorism are held accountable. "India's zero tolerance for terrorism is manifest today through its actions. This includes our right to defend ourselves against terrorism. We have shown that epicentres of terrorism are no longer safe and we will not hesitate to target them," added Rajnath Singh. He emphasised the need for countries that sponsor, nurture, and utilize terrorism for their own interests to be held accountable for their actions and criticized the practice of using cross-border terrorism as a policy tool and providing shelter to terrorists, calling for an end to such double standards. "It is imperative that those who sponsor, nurture and utilize terrorism for their narrow and selfish ends must bear the consequences. Some countries use cross-border terrorism as an instrument of policy and provide shelter to terrorists. There should be no place for such double standards. SCO should not hesitate to criticise such nations," added Singh. He said that peace and prosperity are incompatible with terrorism and the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the hands of non-state actors and terror groups. "Peace and prosperity cannot co-exist with terrorism and proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) in the hands of non-state actors and terror groups. Dealing with these challenges require decisive action and we must unite in our fight against these evils for our collective safety and security," said Singh. The Defence Minister identified the biggest challenges facing the region as peace, security, and trust-deficit issues. According to him, these problems are primarily caused by increasing radicalization, extremism, and terrorism. "I believe that the biggest challenges that we are facing in our region are related to peace, security and trust-deficit. And the root cause of these problems is increasing radicalization, extremism and terrorism," added Singh. The SCO Defence Ministers' Meeting is being held from June 25 to 26 in Qingdao, bringing together defence leaders from member states including India, China, Russia, and several Central Asian nations to discuss issues related to regional and international peace and security. At the SCO meeting, Rajnath Singh also welcomed Belarus, which joined the SCO family as a new member. The SCO, established in 2001, is an intergovernmental organisation aimed at promoting regional stability and security through cooperation and dialogue. India became a full member in 2017 and held the rotating Chairmanship in 2023. China has assumed the Chair for 2025 under the theme 'Upholding the Shanghai Spirit: SCO on the Move.' (
Arab News
2 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
Pakistan warns global order under ‘immense strain' at UN Charter anniversary
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Wednesday warned of a global order under 'immense strain' as it raised concern over growing violations of international norms and rising unilateral military actions, while addressing the Forum of Small States in New York to mark the 80th anniversary of the United Nations Charter. The UN Charter, signed in San Francisco on June 26, 1945, laid the foundation for international peace, sovereignty and justice following World War II. Pakistan's remarks come as the world witnessed two major military crises in South Asia and the Middle East in the last two months. In May, nuclear-armed neighbors India and Pakistan exchanged artillery fire, drones and missiles in a brief but intense conflict before reaching a ceasefire. Weeks later, Israel launched a large-scale military campaign against Iran, targeting uranium enrichment facilities and nuclear infrastructure in what Tehran called an unprovoked act of war. 'The UN Charter remains our moral compass and legal foundation,' Pakistan's Counsellor at the UN, Saima Saleem, said. 'Yet today, we confront a global order under immense strain— marked by a growing disregard for international law, persistent and emerging conflicts, and a disturbing resurgence of unilateralism.' 'The voices of the vulnerable— especially peoples under foreign occupation, like the people of Jammu and Kashmir and Palestine— remain marginalized and their right to self-determination denied, despite the solemn promises of the Charter,' she added. Calling for 'inclusive multilateralism that delivers,' Saleem urged reforms to strengthen the UN's effectiveness, including revitalizing the General Assembly's authority and ensuring impartial implementation of Security Council resolutions. 'Selective application of international law and the UN Charter erodes faith in global governance. Its equal enforcement restores it,' Saleem said. She also called for concrete action to ensure sustainable development, digital cooperation, youth and gender inclusion, climate resilience and peaceful dispute resolution. 'Multilateralism remains humanity's best hope,' she said. 'It must be re-energized, not replaced.' The Forum of Small States is an informal group founded by Singapore in 1992. It offers a platform for smaller UN member states to coordinate positions and amplify their voices in global diplomacy. With over 100 members, it is now one of the largest informal blocs at the UN.
The Independent
6 days ago
- The Independent
US updates travel advice for India with new warnings
The US State Department updated its travel advisory for India, maintaining a Level 2 classification but escalating warnings for various risks. New do not travel directives were issued for Manipur due to ongoing ethnic violence and for land border crossings from Nepal due to immigration issues. The advisory emphasises increased risks of violent crime, sexual violence, and potential terrorist attacks, especially for solo female travelers and in public venues. Warnings for northeastern states and the Jammu and Kashmir region, excluding Leh and eastern Ladakh, were strengthened or reiterated, reflecting recent incidents like the Pahalgam terrorist attack. Other retained cautions include prohibitions on satellite phones and GPS devices, risks in Maoist insurgency areas, and a continued warning about sexual violence.
Arab News
6 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
Pakistan urges OIC to transform its pronouncements on Kashmir into ‘tangible actions'
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan's deputy prime minister has urged the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to transform its pronouncements on the disputed Kashmir region into 'tangible actions,' the Pakistani foreign office said on Sunday, following a meeting of the OIC Contact Group on Jammu and Kashmir. The meeting took place on the sidelines of the 51st session of the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers in Istanbul, which came in the backdrop of Israeli military campaign against Iran and Pakistan's recent military conflict with India. While Pakistan's brief standoff with India ended in a ceasefire last month, Israel's attacks on Iran were followed by US airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities, raising fears of further instability in an already volatile region. Addressing envoys of OIC member states, Pakistan's deputy premier and foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, described New Delhi's actions in Indian-administered Kashmir as a replication of the Israeli designs in Palestine, referring to alleged human rights violations and attempts to change demographics of the disputed Himalayan territory. 'The OIC's pronouncements on Jammu and Kashmir are a major source of support to the Kashmir cause,' Dar said. 'However, in view of the mounting challenges to the Kashmiri struggle, the OIC should transform its pronouncements into tangible actions. The Organization should scale up its efforts for mitigation of the Kashmiri people's sufferings and finding a just settlement of the Jammu and Kashmir dispute.' Kashmir has been divided between Pakistan and India since their independence from Britain in 1947. Both countries have fought two of their four wars over the disputed region, which is ruled in part but claimed in its entirety by both India and Pakistan. The latest conflict between the two neighbors was also triggered by a militant attack in Indian-administered Kashmir's Pahalgam resort town, which killed 26 tourists on April 22. India blamed the attack on Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denies. New Delhi has long accused Pakistan of fanning an insurgency on its side of Kashmir. Islamabad denies this and maintains that it only offers moral, political and diplomatic support to the Kashmiris. Dar said Indian authorities exploited the Pahalgam attack to launch a massive crackdown in Kashmir. 'There are reports that over 2800 Kashmiris were arrested or questioned in the immediate aftermath of the attack,' he said. 'The draconian Public Safety Act was slapped on at least 75 of them. The police carried out extensive searches at multiple residences of the locals. Around three dozen houses were razed to ground through the use of explosives.' The Pakistani deputy PM said the disturbing developments in Indian-administered Kashmir have once again shown that a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute is imperative for a lasting peace in South Asia. 'The region is home to over one-fifth of the world population. It could ill-afford the consequences of irresponsible Indian actions,' he said, urging the OIC and its members to use their influence to urge India to improve the human rights situation, release political prisoners and implement relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions in Indian-administered Kashmir.
