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It worked so well the first time.... let's do it in Palestine!
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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More British accountability finally. First this, next the kohinoor diamond!
Plenty of Benin Bronzes to return too.
Oh yes! I mean just empty out the British Museum
The bronzes are so heartbreaking.
Britain
Britan: the tan you get by standing the the English rain.
This is rather naive. Do you think the fighting wouldn't have happened if they were kept as one big country?
This is rather a colonial narrative. Do you think the fighting would've lasted as long if the British never colonized that area?
Of course it would have lasted long. It had lasted basically the entire existence of human populated India up until then.
If the British had never come, I expect the situation would be very different. But I thought we were talking about partition.
Of course the situation might've been different. You wouldn't have dumb needless animosity on sectarian lines as they do today. Understand that by saying dumb shit like "The fighting would've happened anyway!" serves two purposes: a) to minimize the depravity of the British, the British Raj and colonialism in general and b) assumes that clashes on the basis of sectarianism is an inevitable pathway. Btw, partitioning is a tried-and-tested, colonial "divide and conquer" tactic.
Point is, a lot more lives could've been spared had it not been for colonialism that plagued the area, this is indisputable.
Basic divide and conquer strategy. Nigeria, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Israel/Palestine.
What, they were one big peaceful team until the British? Need a little background here
Scanned that, and it appears that the Muslim and Hindu peoples were fighting
As independence approached, the violence between Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of Punjab and Bengal continued unabated.
There's a statement earlier that the fighting was instigated by the British, but it lacks citation.
The Congress was secular and strongly opposed to having any religious state.[96] It insisted there was a natural unity to India, and repeatedly blamed the British for "divide and rule" tactics based on prompting Muslims to think of themselves as alien from Hindus.[citation needed]
I didn't downvote you, for the record lol.
The tl;dr is that India and Pakistan used to be a dozen different countries until foreigners showed up with guns and decided to redraw the map. All those international tensions didn't evaporate, and it's more or less the equivalent of trying to put angry cats together in the same bag. The British didn't cause the tensions, but their fuckery absolutely made it worse.
The article also doesn't cover the Sikh separatists, but they've also been around since the East India Trading Co merged their empire with India, and the current Indian government has been assassinating supporters.
You know what would improve Wikipedia? A "search this page" option.
I was looking to see if the formation (imposing) of Pakistan and India was around 1918 along with all those other great Treaty of Versailles decisions like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.
I gave up. With long articles, we need a search within the article.
Speaking about the app. I don't know about the website because all Wikipedia opens the app. I can't even go there deliberately in a browser.
Oh, lame, it asks which one I want to use on my phone. Their app is okay, but there's some rough spots still. It also doesn't help that you have to read multiple articles in order to get a full picture, since they split off the history of the British Raj from the overview.
The Treaty of Versailles shook it up a bit and there were various revolutions that softened British rule, but the Brits were there until the 40s and formed Pakistan on their way out.
The Empire podcast goes quite deep into some of the issues and roots of partition. It was very clear that the English wanted out ASAP. One reason was the sectarian violence they could no longer contain.
Sectarian violence that was fostered by the British thanks to their ‘divide and rule’ strategy.
oh britain.. one more thibg for your museum
Never attribute malice to that which can be easily explained by incompetence
No Britian very much partitioned things in a way to minimize local power. I don't know about Pakistan in particular but the province of west bengal and Bangladesh were intentionally split up to weaken what was a strong nationalistic group.
I thought Kashmir was run by a Hindu at the time and they chose to go with India rather than Pakistan.
Definitely we can blame imperialism for a lot but some of the disputed territory wasn't Brittain's fault, afaik
My history is lacking on the conflict but IIRC the area was 'run' as a monarchy under British rule. The monarchy was Hindu but the population was largely Muslim.
So you had a local population in conflict with a ruling class inheriting being a mechanism of the colonial apparatus.