Recently, the British aircraft carrier formation that sails to the Asia-Pacific region has made frequent moves and flaunted its might, which has attracted the attention of the world. This old colonial country still has difficulty abandoning the "imperial dreams" of the old era, so that it is willing to be the "pawn" of the superpower and play for the tiger.
It was mid-August, and the partition of India and Pakistan, a disaster created by the British in its colonial history, needed to be revived and liquidated.
August 14 and 15 are the Independence Days for Pakistan and India, respectively. On August 14 and 15, 1948, two independent Commonwealth "Dominions" of Pakistan and India were proclaimed. Subsequently, India and Pakistan proclaimed republics in January 1950 and March 1956, respectively.
The independence of India and Pakistan ended the 190-year-long direct rule of the British colonialists over the Indian subcontinent. This is the result of the long-term struggle of the people of the Indian subcontinent and has had a far-reaching impact on the development of the national independence movement in the vast number of colonies after World War II.
However, the old British colonialists, who were not willing to fail, left a serious curse on India and Pakistan after independence.
After World War II, for the British colonial authorities, the national liberation movement in India at that time was at an all-time high, "like a ship full of ammunition and on fire in the ocean"; the first problem was "to extinguish the fire before the fire burned the ammunition". If suppressed by the army, it is estimated that at least 500,000 occupying troops will be needed, which is simply impossible for Britain, which was severely weakened by World War II. The only way out was to compromise with the Indian bourgeoisie, to preserve as many British interests as possible through the transfer of power, while preserving the British Commonwealth.
On 3 June 1947, in Delhi and London, a plan for the transfer of power, named after the then Governor-General of India, Mountbatten, was simultaneously announced, the famous Mountbatten Plan. On 18 July, the British Parliament formally passed the India Independence Act, announcing that from 15 August 1947, two independent dominions would be established in India in accordance with religious beliefs: India and Pakistan.
In preparing for the transfer of power, Britain continued to use its traditional "divide and rule" approach: it tried to exploit and provoke contradictions between Hindus and Muslims, and to widen the differences between the future ruling parties of India and Pakistan, the Congress Party and the Muslim League.
After the promulgation of the India Independence Act, the British only left less than 2 months to prepare for the independence of India and Pakistan. In such a short period of time, it is very difficult to divide a country and its assets, which is equal to the sum of Western Europe, Southern Europe and Central Europe, and its assets.
Later historians commented: "Never before in the history of the world has the legal community heard such a comprehensive and complex divorce case: the division of a family of four hundred million people, the distribution of the property they have accumulated over centuries living together on the same land." ”
Just like most "divorce" cases, the various "separation" problems that have quickly fermented in a short period of time have suddenly caused extremely fierce disputes and conflicts:
The distribution of property often leads to endless debates, sometimes even big fights. The office became a noisy market. Officials managed to fish for a typewriter with a good texture and leave the crumbling chairs to each other. In Lahore, British police officer Patrick Richard was responsible for distributing property to two Muslim and Hindu subordinates. He saw with trepidation that in order to possess the trombone, the two former brothers and sisters had twisted into a ball, and each did not give in to each other.
The distribution of books also caused a fierce and unusual quarrel. The entire encyclopædia Britannica is also divided into two volumes, with two volumes belonging to one country and a single volume owned by another. Even dictionaries have suffered bad luck: India has a division of letters from A to K, and the other letters belong to Pakistan. If only rare copies of a work exist, arbitration must be conducted by the librarian, and if the book is most useful to a state, it is distributed to that state. Many erudite, intelligent and wise people actually pushed me and shoved me, using their hands and feet, and competing to grab a copy of Alice in Wonderland, or a copy of Wuthering Heights.
- At the time of dividing up ancestral family property, the old religious feuds of the past have re-emerged. Muslims demanded the demolition of the Taj Mahal and the transport of the mausoleum's masonry to Pakistan, as the famous mausoleum was built by muslim Mughal emperors.
The Indian Brahmins believed that the Indus River, which flowed through the hinterland of the future Pakistan, should belong to them, because the sacred Vedas arose on the banks of the Indus River 2500 years ago...
The most tragic thing is the popular vendetta and national confrontation caused by the border issue.
In less than 2 months, Sir Cyril Radcliffe of The United Kingdom, a royal lawyer from the London Law School who knew nothing about the Indian subcontinent, used only abstract demographic data to mark the India-Pakistan border with a pencil on a military map of the Royal Sappers. In strict accordance with the instructions of his superiors, he allocated the Hindu-majority areas to India and the Muslim-majority areas to Pakistan. But Radcliffe himself knew in his heart that in many parts of British India, Hindus and Muslims lived together; the date the map was issued was when bloodshed broke out.
After the Radcliffe Plan was announced on August 17, hell on earth quickly descended on the Indian subcontinent. The crime of "genocide" is often found in the media today, and it would be appropriate to apply it to ethnic strife during the partition of India and Pakistan. More than 10 million Hindus and Muslims have just celebrated their independence fanatically, only to be amazed to find themselves living in another country! Their first reaction was to wriggle wildly and fight each other. One crime gives rise to another, terror against terror, death against death.
Both Hindus and Muslims embarked on a "purge of infidels" in areas where their forces were dominant, with massacres, house burnings and rapes everywhere, and the South Asian subcontinent plunged into a catastrophe of blood and fire, plunging millions of people into a murderous frenzy. According to Western statistics, about 600,000 people died in mutual fighting and carnage, which is comparable to the number of French people who died in World War II. Hundreds of thousands of women have been taken into captivity and used by infidels to sexually assault them to vent their hatred. Gandhi, the Mahatma, who campaigned to quell religious disputes, was also killed by Hindu extremists on January 30, 1948.
From one end of the Indian subcontinent to the other, people frightened by violence, or on foot, or in horse-drawn carriages, trolleys, trains, or bicycles, fled for their lives, taking as much as they could: a cow, a bag of wheat, a baggage, or a few pots. With no end in sight, more than 10 million people have changed their homes in less than 3 months. Authorities estimate that from the dawn of the Mountbatten Plan to 1951, some 7.2 million Muslims moved to Pakistan in droves; some 8.9 million Hindus in Pakistan also moved to India with their children and children. They have left their homes, lost their homes, had no food, clothing, and living on the streets, forming a long-standing problem of Indian and Pakistani refugees. This unprecedented flight caused 10 times more refugees than the first middle East war the following year and four times more than the second world war. On the way to escape, millions more died of illness, starvation or were killed. Former Pakistani President Musharraf was born in New Delhi, and when India and Pakistan were divided, his family of 10 fled to Pakistan, and 5 people died on the way. For decades, many Pakistanis have harbored a deep hatred for Hindus, and many Indian politicians have regarded Pakistan and the entire Muslim world as enemies, which is precisely the result of that historical grievance.
In addition, East and West Pakistan are separated by 1,600 kilometers, and the Ganges and Indus rivers pass through India and Pakistan, which in turn has caused the issue of India-Pakistan border disputes and river water disputes. In particular, the issue of the ownership of the Kashmiri state has caused serious antagonism between India and Pakistan, laying the fuse for three large-scale local wars and countless conflicts between India and Pakistan in the future.
In the process of colonial retreat, Britain has left many disasters for the world; the India-Pakistan issue is only a typical case, but it is enough for future generations to remember!