---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Teesta Setalvad <teestaatulsetalvad@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 6:12 PM
Subject: Teesta Setalvad is being framed by Gujarat govt; but where’s the outrage?
To: Teesta Setalvad <teestateesta@gmail.com>

http://www.firstpost.com/politics/teesta-setalvad-is-being-framed-by-gujarat-govt-but-wheres-the-outrage-2097117.html

Teesta Setalvad is being framed by Gujarat govt; but where’s the outrage?

by G Pramod Kumar  Feb 13, 2015 13:17 IST

The Gujarat Police's overt enthusiasm to arrest Teesta Setalvad and her husband Javed Anand no sooner than the state high court rejected their plea for anticipatory bail in a curious "embezzlement" case didn't raise any eyebrows, but justified the perception that the BJP government was on a hot pursuit of the activist.

The BJP leaders and their proxies found nothing extraordinary in the action of Gujarat Police, which landed up at the doorstep of Setalvad in Mumbai in no time, because, according to them, the police was at liberty to arrest the accused when the courts refuse anticipatory bail. Some would even say that the police was duty-bound to pursue the case.

But what was unsaid was the deviousness in the police's insistence of custodial interrogation of the couple for alleged diversion of funds collected by her NGO to convert Gulbarg Society in Ahmedabad, where 69 people were killed in the 2002 riots, into a museum. The charge was that the couple had transferred Rs 14.2 lakhs from the NGO's account to clear their credit card bills and had transferred large sums of money to their personal accounts. The police said that the expenses included payments for wine and groceries.

Setalvad had clarified that credit card expenses that the NGO paid for were not personal, but official such as travel. It’s not unusual for people to use personal credit card for official purposes and then get the official expenses reimbursed. But by conflating the personal (wine, groceries, books etc.) and official, the police tried to besmirch their reputation and make out a case. Similarly, additional money used from the account was for salaries and legal expenses.

That despite an official clarification from the Gulbarg Society, the police went ahead with the case looked clearly motivated. And now their overzealousness in seeking custodial interrogation of the couple nails their intent.

One cannot clearly miss the police targeting Setalvad, but what makes one more worried about their motive is their track record in foisting spurious cases against her. In 2012, the Supreme Court came down heavily on the state for initiating a probe for "illegal exhumation" of the 2002 riot victims. "This is a hundred percent spurious case to victimise the petitioner (Setalvad)," said the court. 

"This type of case does no credit to the state of Gujarat in any way," it further said.

A year later, the police came up with the embezzlement case, despite the official representatives of the Gulbarg Society affirming that they had no complaint, and wanted to arrest Setalvad.

The police's dogged pursuit brings us to the question of who Setalvad is. She is an exceptional character in India’s human rights campaigns - she is the principal reason for getting justice, although partial, to the victims of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat. For the first time in India, 117 perpetrators of communal violence, including a minister in the then Modi state cabinet, had been convicted. Had it not been for her and other rights activists, the victims would been gagged to submission. She is also the biggest obstacle to Modi’s image management efforts.

Obviously, Setalvad is a marked person because she is refusing to give up, along with Zakia Jafri, the complainant in the Gulbarg Society massacre case, against the Gujarat state government and the then chief minister Narendra Modi although a Special Investigation Team had found no prosecutable evidence against him. Setalvad and her supporters, point to the dissenting notes by the Supreme Court appointed amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran, who had said that the evidence against Modi was significant.
Setalvad may be particularly unsparing of Modi, as some allege, but that doesn’t allow for continuous police harassment. The victimisation of Setalvad is too evident to ignore. And it hadn’t started yesterday. In 2005, she was accused of pressuring Zaheera Sheikh in the Best Bakery Case to given evidence against the government. The SC had later absolved Setalvad and sent Zaheera Sheikh to jail for a year. "This is a classic example of a case where evidence were tampered with and witnesses won over," the court had then said.

This record of victimisation against Setalvad for the simple reason that she is standing up for her fellow citizens’ battle for justice is a warning to human rights activists and a reminder of the abominable misuse of power by the state.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sc-stays-teesta-setalvads-arrest-till-february-19/article6890867.ece?homepage=trueThe

SC stays Teesta Setalvad's arrest till February 19

Supreme Court on Friday extended its stay on the arrest of activist Teesta Setalvad in the Gulbarg society embezzlement case funds, even as her counsel Kapil Sibal tried to convince the court that there are very few people out there like her who can take on the might of the State.

The Bench led by Justice S.J. Mukhopadhaya ordered the continuation of the stay till February 19, the next date of hearing on her plea for anticipatory bail against arrest.

The Gujarat High Court had dismissed her plea on Thursday, following which she urgently moved the supreme court. The supreme court had stayed the arrest till the matter was heard today.

The bench said it will consider her plea for anticipatory bail "independently" and asked Mr. Sibal to not convert this into a political issue.

"We will not go by any name, we will consider this like any other anticipatory bail plea. On the next date, rest assured we will give justice for both (Teesta's side and the State of Gujarat), but there will be relief for only one of you," Justice Mukhopadhaya said.

Starting his arguments, Mr. Sibal read out the allegations against Teesta and her husband, Javed Anand.

He said the Gujarat police claims to have found evidence that she enticed foreign donors to contribute in heavily by showing the photographs of the 2002 post-Godhra riot victims.

"We provided the investigating agencies and the high court with 1500 pages of documents on every entry made by us. If one of these entries is wrong or false, I am prepared to go in. But the high court did not even refer to these documents before dismissing my bail plea . Why did not these so-called 'wealthy foreigners' lodge any complaints against us?" Mr. Sibal submitted.

He said "we stand here before Your Lordships with the passion of our convictions. Don't allow the mighty State to destroy us. This court is our last resort."

Mr. Sibal said how the police had reached Teesta's residence at 2.30 pm, even before the high court dismissed her bail plea at 4 pm. "If this is the case, none of us are safe anymore," Mr. Sibbal said.

Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta for Gujarat government said the evidence found against Teesta was "shocking" and revealed "foreign travels, branded clothes."

My tweet of today, after Delhi Assembly results came out completely demolishing Narendra Modi's credentials as a giant in Indian politics: Ghulam Muhammed

My tweet of today, after Delhi Assembly results came out completely demolishing Narendra Modi's credentials as a giant in Indian politics:

Ghulam Muhammed ‏@GhulamMuhammed 11m11 minutes ago

With so huge humiliation heaped on Modi over Delhi loss, if he is not a politician, he would have felt shame to even live in Delhi.

6:45 AM - 10 Feb 2015 · Details

The victory of Kejriwal opens a new era of Indian politics - Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

The victory of Kejriwal opens a new era of Indian politics. The Brahmin political formulations have fooled the people of India with their fraud in the name of secularism, Hindutva and Marxism. India needs new rulers for whom each and every Indian is a proud citizen of India; period.

Kejriwal has moral strength to clean up the dirty politics and heaven knows how much the people hate the old corrupt rulers at all levels in this great nation. India is not being mortgaged to Kejriwal, he should hold his office of trust with humility, honesty, generosity and justice for all.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>




.

Barack’s message - By Sudheendra Kulkarni - The Indian Express, Mumbai, INDIA

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/baracks-message/99/

The Indian EXPRESS

Barack’s message

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with US President Barack Obama.

Written by Sudheendra Kulkarni | New Delhi | Posted: February 9, 2015 12:04 am

What was the most important outcome of US President Barack Obama’s recent visit to India? Certainly not the civil nuclear deal, even though Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at his joint press conference with Obama, described it as the “centrepiece” of the transformed relationship between the two countries. The contribution of nuclear power to India’s energy basket is going to remain small even after 20 years.

Had Obama come to India mainly to secure some business for his country’s nuclear power companies, he would have been viewed by Indians as a mere salesman. However, going by the adulation his wife Michelle and he received in India, which was much more than what his previous visit in 2010 witnessed, there is no doubt that Obama struck a chord in the minds and hearts of Indian people of diverse backgrounds. And when they saw that he and Modi had forged a bond of uncommon conviviality – Obama calling our PM “friend Modi” and the latter addressing him by his first name — one thing became obvious. The most important outcome of Obama’s visit was not the promise of nuclear power, but the promise of the power of mutual friendship and trust between India and the US, despite significant differences.  And precisely because Obama came across as a genuine friend and admirer of India, even his parting comment – “India will continue to succeed so long as it is not splintered on religious lines” – did not sound like an overbearing American president’s gratuitous interference in our internal affairs. On the contrary, it resonated with the idea of India, didn’t it?

Now, within a fortnight of his departure from India, Modi’s friend Barack has spoken again. Speaking in Washington DC at the National Prayer Breakfast, an apt occasion indeed, he has lamented that the “acts of intolerance experienced by religious faiths of all types in India in the past few years would have shocked Mahatma Gandhi”.

We Indians generally disapprove of foreigners making critical remarks about our country. And imperious America does have the unmatched habit of telling other countries what they should or should not do. Indeed, Obama himself needs to be told that Mahatma Gandhi would have been shocked even more at the US’s immoral and illegitimate acts of militaristic violence, which has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The moot point here is not America’s wrong deeds, but the wrongs happening in our own country. If we love India, and all of us do, we must introspect over the growing religious intolerance in our society. The responsibility of introspection falls primarily on Modi and his party. To be fair to him, he has not uttered anything objectionable on religion-related matters since becoming PM in May 2014. Indeed, in his Independence Day address, he wisely appealed to the people to “put a moratorium for 10 years” on communalism and casteism. Yet, he has not deemed it necessary to publicly rebuke communal voices in the Sangh Parivar, of which his own party continues to be a member. It is not enough for him to convey, behind closed doors, his displeasure over the “ghar wapsi” campaign launched by VHP functionaries, which was endorsed by none other than Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief. As PM, it is his duty to let the nation know that both conversions and reconversions which use fraudulent means and spread bigotry are illegal, unacceptable and heavily punishable. He must also announce a zero-tolerance approach to attacks on churches.

Many sensible leaders in the BJP abhor the utterances and activities of the extremists in their parivar. However, they are loath to recognise that the ideological roots of Hindu intolerance lie in the parivar’s pet concept of “Hindu rashtra”, which violates the letter and spirit of the Indian Constitution and has given rise to understandable concern and ire among non-Hindus. BJP leaders’ inability and unwillingness to confront the core of the RSS ideology is the cause of their split personality. Take Modi’s own example. He has surprised his critics as well as his supporters by repeatedly invoking the name of Mahatma Gandhi, even making him the icon of his flagship Swachh Bharat mission. Yet, neither he nor any of his colleagues in the party or the government has publicly praised Gandhiji’s lifelong mission for communal harmony, for which he sacrificed his life. Perversely, some BJP supporters have been emboldened to eulogise Godse.

Modi should know that the stakes are high, very high. To his credit, he has, in a very short time, emerged as a leader with global stature, building a personal chemistry as much with Obama as with Chinese President Xi Jinping. But he must know that the international community wants to see multifaith India, the land of Buddha and Gandhi, become a beacon of tolerance and peace, at a time when fanaticism is spilling so much blood around the world.

This requires Modi to act boldly. He may have been an RSS pracharak in the past. But today he is India’s prime minister, who has the constitutional duty to disown a Hindu rashtra and defend secularism. Any hesitation on his part, and on the part of the BJP, to publicly delegitimise the RSS’s concept of, and its strident call for, a Hindu rashtra is bound to hurt his government’s efficacy and global image, and undermine his promise of development, for which (and not for Hindutva) the people have given him a decisive mandate.

In this context, the role of non-Hindu communal forces in spreading religious intolerance should neither be denied nor belittled. It is the responsibility of the leaders of the Muslim community to denounce, without any ifs and buts, acts of terrorism in the name of Islam taking place in different parts of the world. In particular, they must wean away the small section of the Indian Muslim youth that is getting radicalised by religious extremism. Similarly, leaders of the Christian community must acknowledge that the conversion of poor and indigent Hindus by foreign-funded evangelical organisations in the name of social or religious service (they dare not convert poor Muslims) is creating a backlash from Hindu bigots. Obama has provoked Indians to do soul searching. Let’s ponder over his message and not shoot the messenger.

The writer was an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee

express@expressindia.com

-------

The Muslims of Early America - By PETER MANSEAU -- The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/the-founding-muslims.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150209&nlid=28904237&tntemail0=y&_r=0

The Muslims of Early America

By PETER MANSEAU 

FEB. 9, 2015

Photo

Credit Andrea Mongia
IT was not the imam’s first time at the rodeo.

Scheduled to deliver an invocation at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo last week, Moujahed Bakhach of the local Islamic Association of Tarrant County canceled his appearance because of the backlash brought on by a prayer he had offered a few days before. The imam had been asked to confer a blessing on horses, riders and members of the military. He was met with gasps from the audience and social media complaints: “Outraged at a Muslim prayer at an all American event!” “Cowboys don’t want it!”

Vocal anti-Islamic sentiment is undergoing a revival. Four days before the imam’s canceled benediction, protesters at the State Capitol in Austin shouted down Muslim speakers, claiming Texas in the name of Jesus alone. In North Carolina two weeks earlier, Duke University’s plan to broadcast a Muslim call to prayer was abandoned amid threats of violence. Meanwhile Gov. Bobby Jindal, Republican of Louisiana claimed that if American Muslims “want to set up their own culture and values, that’s not immigration, that’s really invasion.”

No matter how anxious people may be about Islam, the notion of a Muslim invasion of this majority Christian country has no basis in fact. Moreover, there is an inconvenient footnote to the assertion that Islam is anti-American: Muslims arrived here before the founding of the United States — not just a few, but thousands.

They have been largely overlooked because they were not free to practice their faith. They were not free themselves and so they were for the most part unable to leave records of their beliefs. They left just enough to confirm that Islam in America is not an immigrant religion lately making itself known, but a tradition with deep roots here, despite being among the most suppressed in the nation’s history.

In 1528, a Moroccan slave called Estevanico was shipwrecked along with a band of Spanish explorers near the future city of Galveston, Tex. The city of Azemmour, in which he was raised, had been a Muslim stronghold against European invasion until it fell during his youth. While given a Christian name after his enslavement, he eventually escaped his Christian captors and set off on his own through much of the Southwest.

Two hundred years later, plantation owners in Louisiana made it a point to add enslaved Muslims to their labor force, relying on their experience with the cultivation of indigo and rice. Scholars have noted Muslim names and Islamic religious titles in the colony’s slave inventories and death records.

The best known Muslim to pass through the port at New Orleans was Abdul-Rahman Ibrahim ibn Sori, a prince in his homeland whose plight drew wide attention. As one newspaper account noted, he had read the Bible and admired its precepts, but added, “His principal objections are that Christians do not follow them.”

Among the enslaved Muslims in North Carolina was a religious teacher named Omar ibn Said. Recaptured in 1810 after running away from a cruel master he called a kafir (an infidel), he became known for inscribing the walls of his jail cell with Arabic script. He wrote an account of his life in 1831, describing how in freedom he had loved to read the Quran, but in slavery his owners had converted him to Christianity.

The story of Islam in early America is not merely one of isolated individuals. An estimated 20 percent of enslaved Africans were Muslims, and many sought to recreate the communities they had known. In Georgia, which has joined more than a dozen states in the political theater of debating a restriction on judges’ consulting Shariah, Muslims on a secluded plantation are known to have lived under the guidance of a religious leader who wrote a manuscript on Islamic law so that traditional knowledge might survive.

A clue to what happened to these forgotten American Muslims can be found in the words of a missionary traveling through the South to preach the gospel on slave plantations. Many “Mohammedan Africans,” he noted, had found ways to “accommodate” Islam to the new beliefs imposed upon them. “God, say they, is Allah, and Jesus Christ is Mohammed. The religion is the same, but different countries have different names.”
The missionary considered this to be lamentable evidence of Muslims’ inability to recognize the importance of religious truths. But in fact it proves just the opposite. They understood that their faith was important enough that they should listen for it everywhere, even in a country so distant from the places where they had once heard the call to prayer.

Islam is part of our common history — a resilient faith not just of the enslaved, but of Arab immigrants in the late 19th century, and in the 20th century of many African-Americans reclaiming and remaking it as their own. For generations, its adherents have straddled a nation that jolts from promises of religious freedom to events that give the lie to those promises.

In a sense, Islam is as American as the rodeo. It, too, was imported, but is now undeniably part of the culture. Whether or not protesters in Texas and elsewhere are ready for it, it is inevitable that some Muslims will let their babies grow up to be cowboys. A few cowboys may grow up to be Muslims as well.
 
Peter Manseau is the author, most recently, of “One Nation Under Gods: A New American History.” 
 
A version of this op-ed appears in print on February 9, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: The Muslims of Early America. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

Kiran Bedi's 'Foreign Bank' Account with Sixteen Million+ dollar deposit : Can this be true? - Clip with DainikBhaskar.com image

http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2015/02/muslim-leaders-in-bjp/

From A Jamia Alumnus To BJP’s Contractors – Leave Our University Alone!

 MahtabNama

 

 February 6, 2015

 

 Politics

By Mahtab Alam:

Last week, a friend from Jamia Millia Islamia sent a text message asking “Muslim Youth For India kya organization hai (What organization is this, Muslim Youth For India)?”, “Pahli baar suna hai (I have heard the name for the first time)”. Indeed, I was hearing the name for the first time. An invitation card floating on the internet showed that this ‘organisation’ was organizing a national symposium on “Educating & Mainstreaming of Indian Muslims” in association with Jamia Millia Islamia on 2nd of February. The chief guest was HRD Minister Smriti Zubin Irani, while Narendra Modi’s close aide and newly appointed Chancellor of Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU), Zafar Sareshwala, was going to be the guest of honour. Among the prominent speakers were the Vice Chancellor of Jamia, Dr. Talat Ahmad, Prof. Akhtarul Wasey, and Prof. Mujtaba Khan. Among the lesser-known names were one Akhtar Ali Farooqui, Dr. Midhat Hussain, Tanweer Ahmed and Asifa Khan. Nonetheless, they were projected in a way as if they were the ‘who’s who’ of the Indian Muslim community, if not all of India.

As a former student of Jamia, I find this to be one of the rarest (and lowest) moments in Jamia’s history. I don’t remember any comparable situation – where the University officials in collaborations with some outsiders of shady background had rolled out a red carpet to please political people, and that too those whose politics is based entirely on hate.

The crowning glory of the event was the comparison drawn between the country’s first education minister, the great leader of freedom struggle, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and the current HRD Minister, by Prof. Akhtarul Wasey. That the comparison was bizarre and untenable was not lost on anyone. After all, these crude forms of chaploosi aren’t such a big deal if they can help you to become the vice chancellor of some university, or get some favours from the sarkaar – or shall we say saheb? But never before has a senior professor of the university brought such disrepute to Jamia as Prof. Mujtaba Khan managed with his inappropriate and sexist shayari replete with ‘haseen’ and ‘mehfil’ while addressing the HRD Minister.

The response was acidic and swift as she cut short his speech, asking him to focus on introducing Sareshwala, and in her speech also reprimanded him for using such words to address a woman. As someone with deep emotional attachment to Jamia, I hang my head in shame.

All hail Zafar Shareshwala

While some in the audience may have cringed at the good reputation of the university being tattered, it was a perfect day for Zafar Sareshwala. Every speaker made a point to do his qasida khwani (read extreme form of eulogizing). My friend and journalist M Reyaz puts it vividly –“Zafar Sareshwala, who was the Guest of Honour, appeared to be the star of the programme as none of the speakers forgot to mention his name and eulogised him several times, as he smiled and nodded every time his name was taken.” Dr. Midhat Hussain, one of the organisers associated with Muslim Youth For India (MYFI) thanked Sareshwala for his so-called efforts for the community development. He in fact went on to ‘innocently’ announce that, “When Modi ji was still a CM of Gujarat but was nominated the PM candidate of BJP, with the help of Zafar Bhai, we went to meet him.” Interestingly, this was the same person who was talking about “Political Slavery of Indian Muslims” in an event organized by another dubious outfit, United Muslim Front, on 7th November 2013 at India Islamic Centre (A short video of the event can be seenhere).

A brief history of ‘Muslim Youth For India‘

Coming to the obvious, what is this organization, Muslim Youth For India? While most of us had never heard of it before, a cursory glance at the profiles and background of the people behind it put things in perspective. Let’s start with Dr. Midhat Hussain. He (though with a different hat ‘Muslims For National Integration’) was one the lead speakers, along with Zafar Sareshwala and some junior lackeys, at the launch of the propaganda book ‘Modi, Muslims & Media Voices from Narendra Modi’s Gujarat’, written by Narendra Modi’s cheerleader Madhu Purnima Kishwar. Not only that, a news story before the general elections quotes him on his change of heart after meeting Modi in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. “We’ll be going from door to door, meeting person to person and telling them how Modiji is more reasonable and good for the community than the rest,” he told a reporter. Other members with identical sentiments were also quoted in the news report. These members, also mentioned in the Jamia invite as key organisers, vouched for Modi’s “sincerity” and desire to work for Muslims.

And who is Asifa Khan, another star speaker at the symposium? The invite described her as a“noted political analyst”. Her Wikipedia page though introduces her as a BJP leader. “Asifa Khan is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She has emerged as a prominent Muslim face of BJP. She is now considered amongst the very close persons to the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and also as the leading and emerging face of Muslims in the party. She represents and defends the BJP as well as put forward the views of the party on print and electronic media and also on leading TV channels.”

Similarly, another speaker Tanweer Ahmad was the Chairman of the Hajj Committee during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government and a member of national executive committee of BJP.

The movers and shakers of ‘Muslim Youth For India’ are clearly a front of BJP/Modi, assigned with the task of making inroads into the Muslim community. Can we cry foul at a political party trying to reach out to a community, even if the same has hitherto been suspicious in its politics? Hardly. However, the party’s representatives must first stop pretending to be leaders of the community. A recent meeting in Batla House held by BJP’s minority cell could barely attract 18 students, and these too remained skeptical of the party. Sareshwala’s show required students of Jamia School and University to fill up the Jamia auditorium.

If these TV friendly socialites, about-to-retire professors, eyeing some sarkari posts and other sundry thekedaars want to become the leaders of the community, they must communicate the grievances, anxieties and demands of the community to the political leadership, instead of being the goodwill ambassadors of a party that goes about spreading hate and venom in the name of love jihad, conversions, ghar wapsi, etc. Why was ‘ghar wapsi’ not uttered a single time by any of the so-called stellar Muslim leadership present at Jamia? Is it not the Sangh Parivar’s idea of mainstreaming Muslims?

To those who wish to curry favours with Modi and his government, and to contractors assigned the tough task of bringing over Muslims to BJP’s side, I say, all the best, but please leave our university alone.

Mahtab Alam is a civil rights activist and writer. He studied at Jamia Millia Islamia between 2001-2008. His twitter handle is @MahtabNama

The dark side of Winston Churchill’s legacy no one should forget - Ishaan Tharoor - The Washington Post / The legacy of Indian partition - By Pankaj Mishra - The New Yorker

How history is covered up!

 

It is unpardonable that while recounting Churchill's role in India's partition, both very accomplished scholars, Ishaan Tharoor and Pankaj Mishra, writing in American journals, have not referred to the excellent researched book of Narendra Singh Sarila, that had exposed and documented how Churchill, Lord Wavell and Jinnah conspired to 'keep a part of India for the defense strategies of the WEST against Communist Russia and to safeguard oil wells of 'Persian Gulf'. Hindu Muslim divide and Muslim League's demand for a separate Muslim homeland, came in very conveniently handy for the conspirators. To unite both communities on the subcontinent, the conspiracy should be exposed and widely addressed.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>
-----

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/03/the-dark-side-of-winston-churchills-legacy-no-one-should-forget/

THE WASHINGTON POST

WorldViews

The dark side of Winston Churchill’s legacy no one should forget

By Ishaan Tharoor February 3 Follow @ishaantharoor

The statue of Britain's former Prime Minister Winston Churchill is silhouetted in front of the Houses of Parliament in London, January 30, 2015. (Eddie Keogh/Reuters)

There's no Western statesmen — at least in the English-speaking world — more routinely lionized than Winston Churchill. Last Friday marked a half century since his funeral, an occasion that itself led to numerous commemorations and paeans to the British Bulldog, whose moral courage and patriotism helped steer his nation through World War II.

Today we remember our greatest ever Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who saved our country. pic.twitter.com/uRkfSAy7ya

— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) January 30, 2015

Churchill, after all, has been posthumously voted by his countrymen as the greatest Briton. The presence (and absence) of his bust in the White House was enough to create political scandal on both sides of the pond. The allure of his name is so strong that it launches a thousand quotations, many of which are apocryphal. At its core, Churchill's myth serves as a ready-made metaphor for boldness and leadership, no matter how vacuous the context in which said metaphor is deployed.

For example, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair earned comparisons to Churchill after dragging his country into the much-maligned 2003 Iraq war. So too Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose tough stance on Iran's nuclear ambitions has been cast by some in Churchill's heroic mold — the Israeli premier's uncompromising resolve a foil to the supposed "appeasement" tendencies of President Obama.

In the West, Churchill is a freedom fighter, the man who grimly withstood Nazism and helped save Western liberal democracy. It's a civilizational legacy that has been polished and placed on a mantle for decades. Churchill "launched the lifeboats," declared Time magazine, on the cover of its Jan. 2, 1950 issue that hailed the British leader as the "man of the half century."

But there's another side to Churchill's politics and career that should not be forgotten amid the endless parade of eulogies.  To many outside the West, he remains a grotesque racist and a stubborn imperialist, forever on the wrong side of history.

Churchill's detractors point to his well-documented bigotry, articulated often with shocking callousness and contempt. "I hate Indians," he once trumpeted. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

He referred to Palestinians as "barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung." When quashing insurgents in Sudan in the earlier days of his imperial career, Churchill boasted of killing three "savages." Contemplating restive populations in northwest Asia, he infamously lamented the "squeamishness" of his colleagues, who were not in "favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes."

At this point, you may say, so what? Churchill's attitudes were hardly unique for the age in which he expounded them. All great men have flaws and contradictions — some of America's founding fathers, those paragons of liberty, were slave owners. One of Churchill's biographers, cited by my colleague Karla Adam, insists that his failings were ultimately "unimportant, all of them, compared to the centrality of the point of Winston Churchill, which is that he saved [Britain] from being invaded by the Nazis."

But that should not obscure the dangers of his worldview. Churchill's racism was wrapped up in his Tory zeal for empire, one which irked his wartime ally, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a junior member of parliament, Churchill had cheered on Britain's plan for more conquests, insisting that its "Aryan stock is bound to triumph."

It's strange to celebrate his bravado in the face of Hitler's war machine and not consider his wider thinking on other parts of the world. After all, these are places that, just like Europe and the West, still live with the legacy of Churchill's and Britain's actions at the time.

India, Britain's most important colonial possession, most animated Churchill. He despised the Indian independence movement and its spiritual leader, Mahatma Gandhi, whom he described as "half-naked" and labeled a "seditious fakir," or holy man. Most notoriously, Churchill presided over the hideous 1943 famine in Bengal, where some 3 million Indians perished, largely as a result of British imperial mismanagement. Churchill was both indifferent to the Indian plight and even mocked the millions suffering, chuckling over the culling of a population that bred "like rabbits."

Leopold Amery, Churchill's own Secretary of State for India, likened his boss's understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. Amery vented in his private diaries, writing "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he didn't "see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's."

When Churchill did apply his attention to the subcontinent, it had other dire effects. As the Indian writer Pankaj Mishra explains in the New Yorker, Churchill was one of a coterie of imperial rulers who worked to create sectarian fissures within India's independence movement between Indian Hindus and Muslims, which led to the brutal partition of India when the former colony finally did win its freedom in 1947. Millions died or were displaced in an orgy of bloodshed that still echoes in the region's tense politics to this day. (India, it should be noted, was far from the only corner of the British empire victim to such divide-and-rule tactics.)

"The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena," writes Mishra, gesturing to the spread and growth of political Islam in parts of South Asia and the Middle East. "And the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades."

When measuring up Churchill's legacy, that tally must be taken into account.

 

Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor at TIME, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

•   Share on Facebook
•   Share on Twitter

629 Comments

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/exit-wounds

The New Yorker

Exit Wounds

The legacy of Indian partition

By Pankaj Mishra

A convoy of Sikhs migrating to East Punjab in October, 1947. Photograph by Margaret Bourke-White. Credit GETTY IMAGES
Sixty years ago, on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in New Delhi to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” Large parts of the subcontinent were descending into chaos, as the implications of partitioning the Indian Empire along religious lines became clear to the millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs caught on the wrong side of the border. In the next few months, some twelve million people would be uprooted and as many as a million murdered. But on that night in mid-August the bloodbath—and the fuller consequences of hasty imperial retreat—still lay in the future, and the Mountbattens probably felt they had earned their evening’s entertainment.

Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, had arrived in New Delhi in March, 1947, charged with an almost impossible task. Irrevocably enfeebled by the Second World War, the British belatedly realized that they had to leave the subcontinent, which had spiralled out of their control through the nineteen-forties. But plans for brisk disengagement ignored messy realities on the ground. Mountbatten had a clear remit to transfer power to the Indians within fifteen months. Leaving India to God, or anarchy, as Mohandas Gandhi, the foremost Indian leader, exhorted, wasn’t a political option, however tempting. Mountbatten had to work hard to figure out how and to whom power was to be transferred.

The dominant political party, the Congress Party, took inspiration from Gandhi in claiming to be a secular organization, representing all four hundred million Indians. But many Muslim politicians saw it as a party of upper-caste Hindus and demanded a separate homeland for their hundred million co-religionists, who were intermingled with non-Muslim populations across the subcontinent’s villages, towns, and cities. Eventually, as in Palestine, the British saw partition along religious lines as the quickest way to the exit.

But sectarian riots in Punjab and Bengal dimmed hopes for a quick and dignified British withdrawal, and boded ill for India’s assumption of power. Not surprisingly, there were some notable absences at the Independence Day celebrations in New Delhi on August 15th. Gandhi, denouncing freedom from imperial rule as a “wooden loaf,” had remained in Calcutta, trying, with the force of his moral authority, to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing each other. His great rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who had fought bitterly for a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, was in Karachi, trying to hold together the precarious nation-state of Pakistan.

Nevertheless, the significance of the occasion was not lost on many. While the Mountbattens were sitting down to their Bob Hope movie, India’s constituent assembly was convening in New Delhi. The moment demanded grandiloquence, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s closest disciple and soon to be India’s first Prime Minister, provided it. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny,” he said. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awaken to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”

Posterity has enshrined this speech, as Nehru clearly intended. But today his quaint phrase “tryst with destiny” resonates ominously, so enduring have been the political and psychological scars of partition. The souls of the two new nation-states immediately found utterance in brutal enmity. In Punjab, armed vigilante groups, organized along religious lines and incited by local politicians, murdered countless people, abducting and raping thousands of women. Soon, India and Pakistan were fighting a war—the first of three—over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Gandhi, reduced to despair by the seemingly endless cycle of retaliatory mass murders and displacement, was shot dead in January, 1948, by a Hindu extremist who believed that the father of the Indian nation was too soft on Muslims. Jinnah, racked with tuberculosis and overwork, died a few months later, his dream of a secular Pakistan apparently buried with him.

Many of the seeds of postcolonial disorder in South Asia were sown much earlier, in two centuries of direct and indirect British rule, but, as book after book has demonstrated, nothing in the complex tragedy of partition was inevitable. In “Indian Summer” (Henry Holt; $30), Alex von Tunzelmann pays particular attention to how negotiations were shaped by an interplay of personalities. Von Tunzelmann goes on a bit too much about the Mountbattens’ open marriage and their connections to various British royals, toffs, and fops, but her account, unlike those of some of her fellow British historians, isn’t filtered by nostalgia. She summarizes bluntly the economic record of the British overlords, who, though never as rapacious and destructive as the Belgians in the Congo, damaged agriculture and retarded industrial growth in India through a blind faith in the “invisible hand” that supposedly regulated markets. Von Tunzelmann echoes Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the East India Company when she terms the empire’s corporate forerunner a “beast” whose “only object was money”; and she reminds readers that, in 1877, the year that Queen Victoria officially became Empress of India, a famine in the south killed five million people even as the Queen’s viceroy remained adamant that famine relief was a misguided policy.

Politically, too, British rule in India was deeply conservative, limiting Indian access to higher education, industry, and the civil service. Writing in the New York Tribune in the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx predicted that British colonials would prove to be the “unconscious tool” of a “social revolution” in a subcontinent stagnating under “Oriental despotism.” As it turned out, the British, while restricting an educated middle class, empowered a multitude of petty Oriental despots. (In 1947, there were five hundred and sixty-five of these feudatories, often called maharajas, running states as large as Belgium and as small as Central Park.)

Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. As the recent experience of Iraq proves, elections in a country where the rights and responsibilities of secular and democratic citizenship are largely unknown do little more than crudely assert the majority’s right to rule. British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Hindu-dominated Congress won easily, only hardened Muslim identity, and made partition inevitable.

This was a deeper tragedy than is commonly realized—and not only because India today has almost as many Muslims as Pakistan. In a land where cultures, traditions, and beliefs cut across religious communities, few people had defined themselves exclusively through their ancestral faith. The Pashto-speaking Muslim in the North-West Frontier province (later the nursery of the Taliban and Al Qaeda) had little in common with the Bangla-speaking Muslim in the eastern province of Bengal. (Even today, a Sunni Muslim from Lahore has less in common with a Sunni Muslim from Dhaka than he has with a Hindu Brahmin from New Delhi, who, in turn, may find alien the language, food, and dress of a low-caste Hindu from Chennai.) The British policy of defining communities based on religious identity radically altered Indian self-perceptions, as von Tunzelmann points out: “Many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.”

Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries. As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain “a bulwark of British rule in India.” Certainly Churchill, who did not want his views on India to be “disturbed by any bloody Indians,” was disinclined to recognize the upsurge of nationalism in India. Imperial authority in India rested on the claim that the British, as representatives of a superior civilization, were essentially benign custodians of a fractious country. But as an Indian middle-class élite trained in Western institutions became politicized—more aware of the nature and scale of Indian political and economic subjugation to Britain—self-serving British rhetoric about benevolent masters and volatile natives was bound to be challenged. And no one undermined British assumptions of moral and legal custodianship better than Gandhi, who was adept both at galvanizing the Indian masses and at alerting the British to the gap between their high claims and the reality of their rule. With a series of imaginative, often carefully choreographed campaigns of civil disobedience throughout the nineteen-twenties, Gandhi shook the confidence of the British, becoming, by 1931, as India’s viceroy Lord Willingdon put it in a letter to King George V, a “terribly difficult little person.” Once such middle-class nationalists as Gandhi and Nehru acquired a popular following, independence was only a matter of time. If anything, Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolence probably reduced the threat that a nationwide uprising would force an early and bloody exit for the British.

Through the nineteen-thirties, Gandhi had a few perceptive and sympathetic British interlocutors, such as the viceroy Lord Irwin, who when asked if he thought Gandhi was tiresome retorted, “Some people thought Our Lord very tiresome.” For the most part, though, Gandhi dealt with such hidebound members of Britain’s landowning class as Lord Linlithgow, who, as viceroy of India in the crucial period from 1936 to 1943, liked to be accompanied into dinner every evening by a band playing “The Roast Beef of Old England”—a tactless choice of preprandial music in the land of the holy cow. In 1939, without consulting any Indian leaders, Linlithgow declared war on Germany on behalf of India, committing two and a half million Indian soldiers to the Allied cause. Convinced that independence for India was many decades away, he found an equally obdurate ally in London once Churchill came to power, in 1940.

In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Churchill had been loudest among the reactionaries who were determined not to lose India, “the jewel in the crown,” and, as Prime Minister during the Second World War, he tried every tactic to thwart Indian independence. “I hate Indians,” he declared. “They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He had a special animus for Gandhi, describing him as a “rascal” and a “half-naked” “fakir.” (In a letter to Churchill, Gandhi took the latter as a compliment, claiming that he was striving for even greater renunciation.) According to his own Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, Churchill knew “as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies.”

In 1942, as the Japanese Army advanced on India, the Congress Party was willing to offer war support in return for immediate self-government. But Churchill was in no mood to negotiate. Frustrated by his stonewalling tactics, the Congress Party launched a vigorous “Quit India” campaign in August of 1942. The British suppressed it ruthlessly, imprisoning tens of thousands, including Gandhi and Nehru. Meanwhile, Churchill’s indispensable quartermaster Franklin D. Roosevelt was aware of the contradiction in claiming to fight for freedom and democracy while keeping India under foreign occupation. In letters and telegrams, he continually urged Churchill to move India toward self-government, only to receive replies that waffled and prevaricated. Muslims, Churchill once claimed, made up seventy-five per cent of the Indian Army (the actual figure was close to thirty-five), and none of them wanted to be ruled by the “Hindu priesthood.”

Von Tunzelmann judges that Churchill, hoping to forestall independence by opportunistically supporting Muslim separatism, instead became “instrumental in creating the world’s first modern Islamic state.” This is a bit unfair—not to Churchill but to Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Though always keen to incite Muslim disaffection in his last years, the Anglicized, whiskey-drinking Jinnah was far from being an Islamic theocrat; he wanted a secular Pakistan, in which Muslims, Hindus, and Christians were equal before the law. (In fact, political Islam found only intermittent support within Pakistan until the nineteen-eighties, when the country’s military dictator, working with the Saudis and the C.I.A., turned the North-West Frontier province into the base of a global jihad against the Soviet occupation of neighboring Afghanistan.)
What Leopold Amery denounced as Churchill’s “Hitler-like attitude” to India manifested itself most starkly during a famine, caused by a combination of war and mismanagement, that claimed between one and two million lives in Bengal in 1943. Urgently beseeched by Amery and the Indian viceroy to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.

“It is strange,” George Orwell wrote in his diary in August, 1942, “but quite truly the way the British government is now behaving in India upsets me more than a military defeat.” Orwell, who produced many BBC broadcasts from London to India during the war, feared that “if these repressive measures in India are seemingly successful, the effects in this country will be very bad. All seems set for a big comeback by the reactionaries.” But in the British elections at the end of the war, the reactionaries unexpectedly lost to the Labour Party, and a new era in British politics began.

As von Tunzelmann writes, “By 1946, the subcontinent was a mess, with British civil and military officers desperate to leave, and a growing hostility to their presence among Indians.” In an authoritative recent two-volume account of the end of the British Empire in Asia—“Forgotten Armies” and “Forgotten Wars”—the Cambridge University historians Tim Harper and Christopher Bayly describe how quickly the Japanese had humiliated the British in Malaya and Burma, threatening their hold over India. With their mystique of power gone, Asia’s British masters depended on what Bayly and Harper term the “temporary sufferance of Asians.”

Although Churchill had rejected the Congress Party’s offer of military support in exchange for independence, Bayley and Harper write that, ultimately, “it was Indian soldiers, civilian laborers and businessmen who made possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of India.”

The British could not now rely on brute force without imperilling their own sense of legitimacy. Besides, however much they “preferred the illusion of imperial might to the admission of imperial failure,” as von Tunzelmann puts it, the country, deep in wartime debt, simply couldn’t afford to hold on to its increasingly unstable empire. Imperial disengagement appeared not just inevitable but urgent.

But Churchill’s divisive policies had already produced a disastrous effect on the Indian political scene. Congress Party leaders had refused to share power with Jinnah, confident that they did not need Muslim support in order to win a majority vote in elections.

These attitudes stoked Muslim fears that the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru was a cover for Hindu dominance. While the Congress leaders were in prison, Jinnah, with Churchill’s encouragement, steadily consolidated Muslim opinion behind him. By 1946, this secularist politician had managed to present himself as the best defender of Muslim interests in a Hindu-dominated India. Religion was never so deeply and enduringly politicized in India as it was in the last years of imperial rule.

At first, Nehru and other Congress Party leaders dismissed the idea of Pakistan as a joke. Jinnah demonstrated his newfound power by ordering mass strikes across India, many of which degenerated into Hindu-Muslim riots. In just three days in August, 1946, four thousand residents of Calcutta died. Retaliatory killings around the country further envenomed political attitudes. A heartbroken Gandhi found fewer and fewer takers for nonviolence, even among his Congress Party, many of whose leaders spoke openly of civil war.

When the improbably handsome Mountbatten arrived, in March of 1947, with his rich and beautiful wife, he did not initially seem up to the task of supervising British withdrawal and giving a viable postcolonial shape to the subcontinent. Not everyone had been impressed by his elevation, in 1943, to the post of the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in South-East Asia. His American deputy, General Joseph Stilwell, concluded, “The Glamour Boy is just that. Enormous staff, endless walla-walla, but damned little fighting.” It was probably just as well that Mountbatten did little fighting. Early in the war, he had sailed the destroyer H.M.S. Kelly into a minefield before ramming it into another British ship. After exposing his ship to German torpedo fire (“That’s going to kill an awful lot of chaps,” he recalled thinking as he saw the metal streaking toward him), Mountbatten finally saw it sunk by German dive-bombers off the coast of Crete.

Known in the British Admiralty as the Master of Disaster, Mountbatten nonetheless displayed astonishing political maturity as the war ended in the Asian countries under his command. He realized that prolonged Japanese occupation of Malaya, Burma, Indonesia, and Indochina had unleashed nationalistic aspirations that exhausted European empires would not be able to suppress. He advised the French that war with the Viet Minh, who had declared an independent Vietnam soon after the Japanese surrender, was pointless, and he even supported an ambitious plan by the British Labour politician Tom Driberg to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh. He had little sympathy for the efforts of the Dutch to reassert their authority in Indonesia, and in Burma he infuriated the old imperialist guard by promoting the nationalist radical Aung San (the father of the long-imprisoned activist Aung San Suu Kyi).

The awesome task Mountbatten faced in India may have appealed to his ego. Though he knew little of the intricacies of Indian politics, he deployed a great deal of personal charm; and he had an effective ally in his estranged wife, Edwina. Together, this “power couple” went to work on Indian leaders. Gandhi succumbed, as did the Anglophilic Nehru, who grew particularly close to Edwina. Jinnah, however, remained difficult to please.

New problems arose every day. British concessions to Muslim separatism emboldened other religious and ethnic minorities. The fiercely tribalist Pashtuns of the North-West Frontier province, wary of Jinnah, asked for Pathanistan; the Naga tribes in the northeastern hills, who had been armed by the British to fight the Japanese, demanded Nagastan; the Sikhs proposed Sikhistan; the Baluchis went ahead and declared an independent Baluchistan. Mountbatten defused most of these would-be secessionists with a mixture of sweet-talking and bluster. His aristocratic connections came in particularly handy as he placated maharajas who were abruptly forced to choose between India and Pakistan. The trickiest of them, the Hindu ruler of Kashmir, who presided over a Muslim-majority population, was later to accede to India in circumstances that remain controversial and have preserved Pakistan’s claims on the state.

Eventually, after wrangling and recriminations, Mountbatten got Indian leaders to agree to partition. Then, abruptly, in early June, he announced August 15, 1947, as the date for the transfer of power, bringing forward the British government’s original schedule by nine months. The reason for this rush is not known. Mountbatten may have wanted to inject some urgency into the tortuous negotiations about who would get what—even ink pots were to be divided between the new nation-states. He may also have simply wanted to cut and run. In any case, his decision is partly to blame for the disasters that followed.

Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, was flown to Delhi and given forty days to define precisely the strange political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called Pakistan. He did not visit the villages, communities, rivers, or forests divided by the lines he drew on paper. Ill-informed about the relation between agricultural hinterlands and industrial centers, he made a mistake of enormous economic consequence when, dividing Bengal on religious lines, he deprived the Muslim majority in the eastern region of its major city, Calcutta, condemning East Pakistan—and, later, Bangladesh—to decades of rural backwardness.

It was in Punjab that Radcliffe’s mapmaking sparked the biggest conflagration. As Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs on either side of the new border suddenly found themselves reduced to a religious minority, the tensions of the preceding months exploded into the violence of ethnic cleansing. It seems extraordinary today that so few among the cabal of Indian leaders whom Mountbatten consulted anticipated that the drawing of borders and the crystallizing of national identities along religious lines would plunge millions into bewilderment, panic, and murderous rage. If the British were eager to divide and quit, their successors wanted to savor power. No one had prepared for a massive transfer of population. Even as armed militias roamed the countryside, looking for people to kidnap, rape, and kill, houses to loot, and trains to derail and burn, the only force capable of restoring order, the British Indian Army, was itself being divided along religious lines—Muslim soldiers to Pakistan, Hindus to India. Soon, many of the communalized soldiers would join their co-religionists in killing sprees, giving the violence of partition its genocidal cast. Radcliffe never returned to India. Just before his death, in 1977, he told a journalist, “I suspect they’d shoot me out of hand—both sides.”

Trains carrying nothing but corpses through a desolate countryside became the totemic image of the savagery of partition. British soldiers confined to their barracks, ordered by Mountbatten to save only British lives, may prove to be the most enduring image of imperial retreat. With this act of moral dereliction, the British Empire finally disowned its noble sense of mission. As Paul Scott put it in “The Raj Quartet,” the epic of imperial exhaustion and disillusion, India in 1947 was where the empire’s high idea of itself collapsed and “the British came to the end of themselves as they were.”

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. The millions of Muslims who chose to stay in India never ceased to be hostages to Hindu extremists. As recently as 2002, Hindu nationalists massacred more than two thousand Muslims in the state of Gujarat. The dispute over Kashmir, the biggest unfinished business of partition, committed countries with mostly poor and illiterate populations to a nuclear arms race and nourished extremists in both countries: Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, Hindu nationalists in India. It also damaged India’s fragile democracy—Indian soldiers and policemen in Kashmir routinely execute and torture Pakistan-backed Muslim insurgents—and helped cement the military’s extra-constitutional influence over Pakistan’s inherently weaker state. Tens of thousands have died in Kashmir in the past decade and a half, and since 1947 sectarian conflicts in India and Pakistan have killed thousands more.

Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled. At least one group—Bengali Muslims—succeeded in establishing their own nation-state (Bangladesh), though only after suffering another round of ethnic cleansing, this time by fellow-Muslims. Other minorities demanding political autonomy—Nagas, Sikhs, Kashmiris, Baluchis—were quelled, often with greater brutality than the British had ever used against their subjects.

Meeting Mountbatten a few months after partition, Churchill assailed him for helping Britain’s “enemies,” “Hindustan,” against “Britain’s friends,” the Muslims. Little did Churchill know that his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades. ♦

•