[NON BLOG] The Flu

Just coming off of it now. Fine generally, but my neck hurts.

[BRIEF NOTE] Two Views on South Asia's Past and Present

Recently, Jonathan Edelstein wrote an essay on his blog about India's partition. He concluded that as horrible as Partition was--millions of dead, continuing Indo-Pakistani conflict--it might have been a necessary evil:

Partition exacted a heavy price, both in the initial blood toll and the subsequent decades of border conflict, but a unitary solution might have resulted in a colossal failed state rather than a smaller failing state and two others that more or less work. I have no more proof of this than Amitava Kumar or Ainslie Embree [links here] have of their more hopeful scenarios, but it's arguable that, for all the tragedy it exacted, partitioning the Raj was actually the lesser evil.

Conrad Barwa responds, blaming the poor internalization of democratic norms on the part of the Congress Party, specifically

the failure to accept the interim proposals of constitutional safeguards and the actual record of Congress provincial governments in the period of dyarchy; particularly in the United Provinces in the late 1930s indicated that as Nehru remarked ‘there lurked many a Communalist underneath a Congressman’s cloak’ and that Congress was quite cavalier in reaching an accommodation or sharing power with the Muslim League. This pattern was repeated several times right up to the Quit India Movement’s launch in 1942 and it bespoke more than anything else not Hindu Communalism but the arrogance and the blindness of Congress elites and leadership; the problem wasn’t that Congress saw itself as a Hindu movement but the nationalist movement of Hindus and Muslims and laid a claim to speak for both the Hindu and Muslim masses. Ultimately whatever one thinks of this, such an attitude led Congress to take stands which it couldn’t back up in the politics of day and given the immensely restricted electorates that operated then; any strategy that relied on mass movements might have been good when confronting a colonial occupying power but were handicaps in an arena where the primary constituency were the landed and propertied classes of the countryside and the town. It is worth remembering that these decisions were taken on the basis of extremely restricted franchises; less than 10% of the population were eligible to vote and this meant that in the case of Partition effectively 6% of Muslims took decisions that decided the fate of the other 90%. Moreover, as Patrick French has observed, most voters were quite misled as to what they were voting for, preconceptions at the time were that Punjab and Bengal, Muslim majority provinces would go to Pakistan and that Delhi, then a Muslim-dominated one demographically would do so as well. No one voted for Partition as such, which was the outcome of a decision taken by the political elites and by the administrative colonial power.

I'll just observe that Bacha Khan, leader of what are now the Northwest Frontier Provinces of Pakistan at the time of Partition, strongly favoured his region's continued allegiance to India and rejected Pakistan and the two-nation theory. Perhaps something was possible. Then again, the NWFP isn't all of Pakistan.

[BRIEF NOTE] pompe's Livejournal

I just thought I'd mention pompe. A new participant on Livejournal, he's got a wide array of interesting insights on everything from science-fiction stereotypes to methods of generating scientifically realistic worlds, manifested in his well-reviewed world-generation system.