[rayiner]

Calling it the “partition of India” makes it seem like it was imposed on India rather than being a product of the 1940 Lahore Resolution where Jinnah led calls for a separate Pakistan.

And in retrospect, it was a huge boon to India and Bangladesh to separate themselves from Pakistan.

[applicative]

Two million dead Hindu; ten million forcible refugees; thousands of ancient villages burned to the ground — it ‘was a huge boon to India’

[rayiner]

In 2026, it’s a huge boon to India to not have Pakistan within its body politic. It’s like having broken up with a finance who ended up becoming a self destructive addict. Same for Bangladesh, even with all the people who died in the independence war.

[holistio]

What I meant is that British India didn't exactly spawn out of a handshake between Allah & Mahavishnu.

[rayiner]

Yes, India is a rather artificial construct imposed by the British.

[anon291]

It was a boon economically but people died. Millions of people died due to the actions of a few aristocrats and religious zealots. Probably the greatest humanitarian crisis in the last millennium.

And the partition of India is the well accepted term for the event. I'm not going to be drawn into some post colonial syntactic argument in a discussion about the very real deaths if very real people as well as the human tragedy of the subsequent forced displacement from land people had lived in for thousands of years.

Jinnahs argument with the Indian Congress was because someone sang a song once referencing a Hindu goddess from a novel. It's honestly bananas and difficult to understand especially when his own daughter lived in India after partition

[rayiner]

The idea of a unified, secular India was an elite notion imported from the west that elides how much sectarian animosity there was and is among ordinary people. I’m a fan of this essay on India that addresses this disconnect: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...