The Great Ganesha

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On the 60th anniversary of India’s and Pakistan’s independence (and partition), here’s a quote? from Pankaj Mishra’s recent article in the New Yorker.

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.

[...]

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. … 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. [link]

Happy sixtieth, kiddo. Sometimes it feels like we never learn from the past. Here’s looking to a significantly brighter sixty to come.

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