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I’ll just add that Ayasha Jalal’ ideas in Sole Spokespan were pretty much accord with my family’s stories of politics before and after partition (my grandparents fled North India for Karachi). They pin the blame on Nehru for refusing compromises to a centralized state that would have allowed a United India. When I started reading Indian versions of history that painted Jinnah as a bad guy, I was pretty shocked — doesn’t everyone know that Jinnah was a secular Muslim leader and the Nehru caused partition?

I’ve read a bit more now, enough to refrain from commenting on the causes of partition here. I will add that I used to think partition was a mistake and a disaster, but reading SepiaMutiny (among other things) and encountering more Hindu Indians has made me think that partition may, on net, be OK. No offense intended.

Ismay expressed his own belief that “the dominating feature in Mr. Jinnah’s mental structure was his loathing and contempt of the Hindus. He apparently thought that all Hindus were sub-human creatures with whom it was impossible for Muslims to live.”

Nothing more need be said.

Tens of thousands of refugees began pouring into Rawalpindi from ravaged villages in the country side. “Attacks on non-Muslims have been organized with extreme savagery,” Jenkins {British governor of Punjab} wired {the Viceroy} on March 17. “Deputy Commissioner Rawalpindi believes that in his district alone there may be 5,000 casualties.” As information flowed in from outlying regions of the Punjab a pattern of “organisation and conspiracy” seemed to emerge, wrote the governor, “in parts of Rawalpindi outbreaks..have occurred almost simultaneously…carefully planned and carried out. All Muslims in the affected districts seems to be involved in or sympathetic to the movement. The Commander 7th Division told me when I saw him yesterday that attacks on non-Muslims had been led in some cases by retired Army officers – some of them pensioners…The Muslim section of the local notables, to whom I spoke…were extremely sulky…non-Muslims are vehemently bitter against the civil services and particularly against the Police.”

Don’t give me historical revisionist cr** that the British government and intelligence apparatus did not know what was happening and what would happen.

“I resigned myself fatalisitically to the coming disaster,” Penderal Moon wrote that July [1947]. “It was easy to predict disaster but what was the exact form that it would take? … The Senior Superintendent of Police, Delhi…asked for his opinion as to what would happen…replied crudely but tersely: ‘Once a line of division is drawn in the Punjab all Sikhs to the west of it and all Muslims to the east of it will have their —- chopped off”.

whether jinnah meant this or that, whether he was bluffing or not, he was playing with fire, stoking communal feelings. the regular people are as powerful as anyone else, but since they are regular, they have to react to circumstances beyond their control, and sometimes when a mess is made for them, it’s they who have to live with it. I doubt highly jinnah or nehru was any more intelligent than my grandfather. My grandfather and the people he lived with had to sit back and watch madness become stoked and boiled on the stove and then they had to see what they could do in the flames. that’s the horror of Partition to me. Not that Jinnah or Nehru was misunderstood, or anyone else for that matter.

Great men are great because they organize the emotions, passions, desires, and rational plans of others. They can do this for good or ill, with good or ill means. Blatantly playing to communalism in the atmosphere of the time was to organize the worst impluses of the time, not the best. To say that Hindus and Muslims were so distinct as to never inter-marry….that seems a statement a British ivory tower commentator would say. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs mingled all the time……there is no closer mingling than getting it on, and all three do that to this day if given a chance. So that statement right there implies to me someone who is just playing with people’s fear and prejudices to organize one segment of society to a given purpose. Its the whole vote bank idea. Look at what Udham Singh called himself…Ram Mohamed Singh Azad. He went to the UK and was in massive solidarity with the regular british people. Compare this to Jinnah or Nehru. In that light I think Gandhi was a better leader. Say what you will about mystics and all that, but at least Gandhi’s primary actions were usually centered around organizing people for harmony and not hatred