Are we capable to defend national unity and integrity?
No body is interested to answer thi squestion as everyone is indulged in virtual reality of Hindu Super Power India!
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: alashbiswaskl@gmail.com">palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
http://ibnlive.com/videos/46513/andhra-mlas-lead-mob-attack-on-taslima.html
What a divided Geopolitics we have got thanks to Mountbattens, Muslim League and so called secular. Brahminical system rules the subcontinent irrespective of the religions predominent. War against Terrorism and Strategic regrouping with US Lead has converted entire Asia a free miltary zone ruled by comradors of Zionist Hindu manusmriti galaxy order.
Nationality question is not addressed at all!
Are we capable to defend national unity and integrity?
No body is interested to answer thi squestion as everyone is indulged in virtual reality of Hindu Super Power India!
MIM vows to implement `fatwa` against Taslima Nasreen
Zee News - 1 hour ago
Hyderabad/New Delhi, Aug 10: After attacking Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen here yesterday, the MIM today threatened today to implement a "fatwa" of death sentence against her even as Vice President-elect Hamid Ansari led Muslim intellectuals in ...
BOYCOTT
INDIA'S INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATIONS
AND
OBSERVE GENERAL STRIKE ON 15 AUGUST 2007
JOINT STATEMENT OF
1. Kamatapur Liberation Organisation (KLO)
2. Manipur People's Liberation Front (MPLF)
3. Tripura Peoples Democratic Front (TPDF)
4. United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA)
10 August 2007
The above-mentioned Revolutionary
Parties/Organizations call upon the peoples of our
Region to BOYCOTT and prevent the celebration, in any
manner, of India's Independence Day in our
Region on 15 August 2007 as a mark of solidarity
against Indian colonial occupation and repression. On
this day, a GENERAL STRIKE shall be observed
throughout the Region from 01:00 AM to 05:30 PM.
However, in view of the devastating floods in Assam
and Kamotapur, duration of the General Strike there
will be shortened as from 06:00 AM to 12:00 PM.
Yet another year has recorded the unrelenting
national liberation struggles in the Region gaining
the upper hand on the one hand and the failure of
one-sided 'peace talks' as a means for
conflict resolution on the other. This has
convincingly established the fact that the national
liberation struggles should be consolidated,
strengthened and intensified while the fragmentation
of the Region on exclusive ethnic lines should
consciously give way to a new process of inclusive
unity based on interdependent coexistence as
determined by the Region's reality.
Last year, we highlighted the historical
responsibility of the national liberation struggles in
the Region to consolidate the unity of their
respective peoples sincerely respecting the emotional
aspects of genuine ethnic aspirations. At the same
time, ethnic groups need to develop an inclusive
outlook in the search for unity in interdependence and
coexistence. This is a paramount necessity demanded by
the reality of our Region which is home to more than
hundreds of ethnic groups.
So far, India's all out effort has failed, and
is doomed to fail, to suppress our national struggles
because they have no justification whatsoever. Ours is
a just war to liberate the entire peoples of the
Region from India's colonial occupation while
India's war against us is an unjust war to
prolong their colonial rule. History has always been
on the side of just wars in defeating unjust wars.
Ours will be no exception. Time and unrelenting
struggles will bear testimony to our victory.
Keeping faith in the collective strength of our
Region, we appeal to all our peoples to once again
display their solidarity against India, the common
enemy, by making the Boycott and General Strike a
complete success.
Also in view of the devastating floods in Assam and
Kamotapur, we make a special appeal to the entire
peoples of the Region to stand by the flood affected
fraternal peoples.
"UNITE, TO FIGHT TOGETHER!"
"VICTORY TO OUR STRUGGLES!"
Untouchables, still subject to social taboo
By Jan Khaskheli
Karachi
The campaign launched by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Civil Society groups to release the 1.7 million peasants living in bondage has proved futile. Indigenous people continue to lead their lives in slavery and are unable to acquire feedom.
Dr Ghulam Haider of the Green Rural Development Organisation (GRDO) told The News that the 30,000 families that have been freed since 1992 continue to live in misery as the respective NGOs have failed to find jobs and shelter for them. The GRDO has purchased three plots near Hyderabad to accommodate 589 families, in localities known as Azad Nagar, Himatabad and Sukhpur. However, it has been able to accommodate only 250 families.
Sadly, while the world is celebrating the Indigenous People Day, we as a nation are compelled to acknowledge our own inability to provide safe shelter and livelihoods for a thousand people released from the camps of their landlords. Countless such families have to live in makeshift homes outside Hyderabad and other towns, without any basic amenities.
Bheel, Kolhi, Menghwar, Bagri and Karias are generally known as untouchable castes. Such castes also include the Hadwars (bone collectors), Gurgula, Shikari (hunters) and others who are forced to lead their lives like gypsies. In addition to this, they are not enrolled as voters and are not even recognised as citizens. Hence, they have no choice but to beg. Having homes, education and health benefits are facilities they cannot even dream of attaining. Only one, small village near Hyderabad, Kolhi founded by the late Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, can provide refuge to these wronged people.
The Scheduled Castes Federation of Pakistan (SCFP) hopes to receive a positive response to the letters it has written to the President of Pakistan and Chief Justice of Pakistan in order to ensure an end to caste discrimination, human inequality and humiliation”. He said that most Dalits live in lower Sindh and lower Punjab and have been deprived of their due share in government schemes, while all the benefits are enjoyed by Hindus of a high caste. This is so because of their poor representation in the parliament.
In order to undo the wrongs and injustices suffered by the indigenous people of Pakistan, President SCFP demands that separate seats be reserved for Dalits in parliament and the four provincial assemblies in accordance with their population ratio. Furthermore, they should receive special concessions in the economic, educational, social and political spheres. Other demands include the constitution of a National Commission on Scheduled Castes; allotment of land to landless Dalit peasants and state protection against harassment and discrimination.
Furthermore, he said that this form of discrimination exists in different parts of Pakistan. Information collected by The News through different sources reveals that at least two million people, 70 per cent of whom belong to communities of the untouchables have been living in Sindh. They do not have access to courts to demand justice for the discrimination they face in schools, hospitals, hotels and workplaces. Children belonging to these castes are not permitted to sit along with other boys and girls in schools. They are being deprived of health facilities in hospitals. Also, they are not allowed to enter barber shops.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=67618
Eight people have died in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam in an attack by separatist rebels against migrant workers, police say. The United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa) is suspected of carrying out Wednesday night's attack, they say.
Seventy Hindi-speaking migrants were killed in Assam in January.
Ulfa is fighting one of India's longest running insurgencies to establish an independent homeland in the north-eastern state. The rebels say India's central government exploits the state's rich resources, such as tea and natural gas, and does little for its people who are ethnically closer to Burma and China than to India.
Thousands of angry locals have been protesting against the resumption of military operations in India's north-eastern state of Assam after talks between the federal government and the leading separatist group in the state broke down. The United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), formed in 1979 to fight for Assam's independence, has carried out a series of campaigns including targeting oil and gas pipelines, transport and telecommunication facilities and security patrols.
In the past few decades, the dramatic shift of Indo-U.S. relations is surely one of the more remarkable developments in international relations. Indo-U.S. ties have moved from a chilly, cold peace to exceptionally warm ties, from mutual suspicion of each other's role in international affairs to a growing inclination to develop a common approach to global issues.
Today's Indo-U.S. relations make it seem inconceivable, but during India's 1965 war with Pakistan, the U.S. had a decided pro-Pakistan tilt, while during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war the Nixon administration sent its Seventh Fleet in the final days of the war.
You would have thought that two countries which shared so much in common - a history of fighting British imperialism, an abiding belief in democracy and the rule of law - would get along really well.Then there is the fact that India itself had changed from what the U.S. often considered a sanctimonious leader of the Third World to a real player in the global economy. The outsourcing boom was about to begin, and no small part was played by expatriate Indian Americans. This was a new wave of highly-educated Indians who immigrated to the U.S. after President Lyndon Johnson relaxed U.S. immigration law in the 1960s. In a few decades, the community had matured into one of the most educated, affluent and dynamic ethnic communities in the U.S.
Today, goodwill for India is overwhelming in the U.S., be it at the corridors of power or in the media. The feeling is reciprocated to some degree in India as well, if the reception provided to visiting U.S. presidents is anything to go by.
The Indo-U.S. nuclear deal still has hiccups, but the fact that the two nations have even come so far is a sign of the remarkable strides taken by both countries in improving bilateral ties.
The future of Indo-U.S. ties appears bright as well, but there are also potential challenges that are easy to overlook in the U.S.
The Indian polity is far more diverse ideologically than is realized here, and many of its grassroots populist movements have a profound suspicion of today's neo-liberal economic policy-driven globalization. Activists have a host of grievances: Coca-Cola plants accused of taking water away from farmers; the lack of adequate compensation for the 1984 Bhopal disaster (Dow Chemical now owns Union Carbide) and government land grab for Special Economic Zones. The protests, while significant, are still sporadic, but given India's alarming spate of nationwide farmer suicides, which critics say are a direct result of neo-liberal policies and entry of U.S. multinational agribusiness giants, the protests and unrest could coalesce into a larger movement that may take on an anti-U.S. tone.
Precisely how these developments will work their way through India's political system remains to be seen, but notwithstanding India's blistering growth rate, both Indian and U.S policymakers ignore them at their peril.
India's first prime minister, the Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru, was a Fabian socialist, and he looked at the world differently. Like many leaders of newly-independent Third World countries, his priority was development of his country, mitigating the horrendous disparity of rich and poor and eradicating mass poverty.
As in other Third World nations, leaders like Nehru as well as the Congress were particularly receptive to the cry of social justice by the leftists - including socialists and communists.
The shrill anti-communist hysteria of U.S. leaders like Secretary of State John Foster Dulles at that time, on the other hand, seemed unconvincing if not downright mendacious. After all, the memories of colonial rule were still fresh: Lofty words from the colonial masters often stood in stark contrast to the oppression and outright racism that was practiced.
Third World countries wanted to opt out of the Cold War altogether, and it was Nehru, Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser and erstwhile Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito who spearheaded the launching of the Non-Aligned Movement at the 1954 Bandung Conference in Indonesia.
Senior police official LR Bishnoi said nearly 30 armed militants raided a remote hamlet in Assam's Karbi Anglong district.
They herded the Hindi-speaking villagers together at gunpoint and then fired at them, he said.
Eight villagers were killed and three others injured in the attack.
'Threat'
Mr Bishnoi said the members of a local tribal militia, Karbi Longpi North-Cacher Liberation Front (Klnlf), may have helped the Ulfa to carry out the attack.
The Klnlf has been carrying on an armed struggle in the area for a homeland for Karbi tribals living in two hill districts of Assam, Karbi Anglong and North Cacher.
Quick guide: Partition
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6924732.stm
It was one of the world's largest mass migrations
Events after the end of British rule in India in August 1947 were momentous: two new countries were created to form predominantly Muslim West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) with Hindu-majority India wedged in between.
The break-up along religious lines resulted in the movement of about 14.5 million people - Muslims going to Pakistan from India and Hindus and Sikhs going in the opposite direction.
The new governments were ill-equipped to deal with such a massive migration - one of the largest of its kind in the world - and there was huge violence on both sides of the border.
The upheaval resulted in a breakdown of law and order: estimates of casualties vary, from between 200,000 up to a million people. Around 12 million people were left homeless and thousands were raped.
Who was to blame?
The British were accused of pulling out of India too quickly. Critics say that they failed to come up with a definitive map of the border, and failed to plan for the huge migration.
Britain argued it was forced to act speedily because of the breakdown of law and order, and that matters would have got worse the longer they remained.
Britain also argued that it had limited resources after World War II.
After partition
The two countries - already bitterly divided by the Kashmir question (see below) pursued differing alliances around the world.
India looked to Soviet Russia as its strategic ally, and did not liberalise its economy until the early 1990s.
Pakistan chose China and the US as its key foreign policy partners. But unlike India - which has had political stability apart from the state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 - Pakistan for most of its existence has been governed by the military.
The Kashmir question
The dispute over the Himalayan territory of Kashmir has been the spark for two of India and Pakistan's three wars.
Kashmir had a Muslim majority but a Hindu princely ruler who eventually acceded to India in return for military aid.
Within months of independence, India and Pakistan were at war in Kashmir and the sense of conflict has lingered ever since.
The nuclear issue
Nuclear tests by India in May 1998 and by Pakistan just weeks later provoked international concern.
India and Pakistan have had a rocky relationship over the years
In May 1999, there were fears of nuclear war between the two countries after Pakistani-backed forces entered a mountainous area of Indian-administered Kashmir.
In 2004, the leading Pakistani nuclear scientist, AQ Khan, confessed to selling nuclear weapons technology to Libya, Iran and North Korea.
The future
India is tipped to be a 21st Century superpower with a population that will overtake China's by 2050.
Sixty bitter years after Partition
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6926057.stm
As the 60th anniversary of Indian Partition approaches, the BBC's Andrew Whitehead looks back at how and why independence from Britain meant the creation of two separate countries, India and Pakistan.
Poor relations between Nehru (left) and Jinnah boded ill
"There can be no question of coercing any large areas in which one community has a majority to live against their will under a government in which another community has a majority. And the only alternative to coercion is partition."
With those words, the last Viceroy of British India, Lord Mountbatten, announced that Britain would be granting independence not to one nation, but to two. All Britain's attempts to devise a constitutional formula which preserved India's unity while offering safeguards for the large Muslim minority had failed.
Mountbatten's speech was made on 3 June 1947. Just 10 weeks later, he was presiding at twin independence ceremonies.
In Karachi on 14 August, he witnessed the birth of a nation with an explicit Muslim identity, Pakistan. The following day, he was in Delhi for India's independence ceremonies - a country more than three times the population of Pakistan and with a large Hindu majority.
ANNIVERSARY HIGHLIGHTS
The BBC News website's coverage of the anniversary of partition will include personal testimonies from survivors of the massacres, a focus on Muslims in India and on Kashmiri nationhood, and a stocktake of political and social conditions in the three successor nations of British India.
Society and economy
In those hectic weeks between the announcement of partition and the transfer of power, a British judge, Cyril Radcliffe, was brought in to devise the border between India and Pakistan. It meant cutting in half two of India's most powerful and populous provinces, Punjab and Bengal.
Radcliffe had never been to India before and never came again. Whatever line he had devised, tens of millions would have felt aggrieved. The hasty partition of these provinces triggered one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th Century.
Independence dream
Tens of millions of Muslims on one side, and Hindus and Sikhs on the other, found themselves on what they regarded as the wrong side of the boundary line. Amid the tension, the communal clashes and the panicked mass migration, there was huge loss of life. No one knows the exact number.
Partition saw as many as half a million people killed
Historians believe that upwards of half a million people were killed, tens of thousands of women were raped or abducted and more than 10 million people became refugees in a catastrophe which still haunts South Asian politics and diplomacy.
India's demands for self-rule dated back to the previous century, and gained particular force in the 1920s and 1930s under the leadership of the Hindu ascetic and campaigning genius, Mahatma Gandhi.
By 1945, and the end of World War II, it was clear that self-rule for India was imminent. The landslide victory of a radical-minded Labour party in Britain's 1945 elections hastened the process.
The complicating factor was that many in India's large Muslim minority felt they would be at a disadvantage in a mainly Hindu nation.
The Muslim League, led by austere lawyer Mohammed Ali Jinnah, took up this issue.
Religious split
It was as late as 1940 that the Muslim League started demanding a separate nation for the region's Muslims. But the League's strong showing in post-war provincial elections meant that their demand for a separate Pakistan could not be ignored.
A 1946 British cartoon depicts India's mainly Hindu Congress organisation and the Muslim League as two elephants ignoring each other.
In pictures
The terrible violence between communities which so tarnished independence began in Calcutta (now Kolkata) a year before the British transferred power and slowly spread.
But it was only after the independence ceremonies - and then, two days later, the announcement of where the boundary would run - that Punjab became engulfed in the worst of the Partition bloodletting.
Punjab was home to a large and influential Sikh population, who dominated much of the region's agriculture but there was hardly anywhere where Sikhs were in a majority and their lands and most important places of worship straddled the new Partition line.
Almost all Sikhs felt more comfortable in India than in Pakistan - hundreds of thousands moved in endless caravans, some 70 miles long, in the monsoon months of 1947. So did many Hindus. Roughly equal numbers of Muslims made their way to Pakistan.
There was little pattern to the violence. All communities suffered, all harboured perpetrators. It was vicious - almost unbelievably so. Columns of refugees were attacked, harried and sometimes slaughtered.
Trainloads of migrants were put to death, their bodies sometimes horribly butchered and disfigured. On both sides, women were particular targets for violence and impregnation.
Bad neighbours
The debate about whether Partition was right or wrong, whether it was inevitable or avoidable, has receded over the years.
THE PARTITION IN VERSE
...In seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided, A continent for better or worse divided
from Partition by WH Auden
Corpses lie strewn in your [the Punjab's] pastures and the Chenab [river] has turned crimson
from An Ode to Waris Shah by Amrita Pritam
Somewhere the wave of the slow night will meet the shore and somewhere will anchor the boat of the heart's grief
from Freedom's Dawn by Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Audio: Mountbatten's address
But historians in South Asia by and large agree that if Britain had sought a less hasty and better prepared transfer of power, much of the bloodshed could have been avoided.
Pakistan's founder, Jinnah, and India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, never got on well. The tension and appalling violence which overshadowed their nations' births made matters much worse. Countries which could have been good neighbours turned out to be enemies right from the start.
The Kashmir issue intensified the sense of conflict. Kashmir lay between India and Pakistan. It had a Muslim majority but a Hindu princely ruler had to make the decision about which country to join.
Pakistan tried to force the issue, encouraging first a local uprising and then an invasion by Pakistani tribesmen. The maharaja pleaded to India for help, and Indian troops airlifted into the Kashmir Valley succeeded in blocking the tribal army's advance.
India should never have been partitioned. The benefits of India's growth would have been shared by all and huge sums of defence money saved and redirected to better causes.
Peenal, London
Send your comments
Within months of independence, India and Pakistan were at war in Kashmir. The dispute has never been resolved. Kashmir has endured its own informal partition with the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heartland of Kashmiri culture, under Indian control but still claimed by Pakistan.
Pakistan had the acute problem of geography. It consisted of two wings, Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, and Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan, with 1,000 miles of Indian territory in between.
The East had just the larger population - but power and influence lay with the West. In 1971, Indian troops supported Bengali nationalists in prising East Pakistan free of West Pakistan's control, and the new nation of Bangladesh was born.
Defined by the differences
The wars and rivalry between India and Pakistan have encouraged both countries to build strong armies (in Pakistan, the army has repeatedly overthrown civilian governments) and to develop nuclear arsenals.
Pakistan went on to challenge India as a regional power
Regional co-operation in South Asia has been perpetually frustrated by this rivalry. India still has a large Muslim minority, about one in seven of the population, but the tension with Pakistan has put strain on the Indian tradition of secularism in public life and religious tolerance.
The start of a separatist insurgency in Kashmir from the end of the 1980s further worsened relations between the two countries.
Pakistan insisted it was only giving moral support to the separatists - India was convinced that Pakistan was arming, training and at times organising these Muslim militants.
Some were advocates of jihad who had been supported by Pakistan in fighting Soviet rule in Afghanistan and then turned their attention to Kashmir - and have also trained and encouraged Islamic radicals who have sought targets further afield.
Both India and Pakistan have struggled to escape the shadow of the violence amid which they gained nationhood. Kashmir is only one aspect of the unfinished business of Partition. Both national identities are defined in large part by contrast with the other.
Yet India and Pakistan have - hesitatingly, and sometimes painfully - been struggling towards building better links. If that happens, South Asia will finally have managed to supersede the bitter legacy of 1947.
Partition of India
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India
TBackground of the partition
[edit] Late 19th and early 20th century
[edit] 1920–1932
Train to Pakistan being given a warm send-off. New Delhi railway station, 1947
Train to Pakistan steaming out of New Delhi Railway Station, 1947.The All India Muslim League (AIML) was formed in Dhaka in 1906 by Muslims who were suspicious of the mainstream, secular but Hindu-majority Indian National Congress. A number of different scenarios were proposed at various times. Among the first to make the demand for a separate state was the writer/philosopher Allama Iqbal, who, in his presidential address to the 1930 convention of the Muslim League said that he felt a separate nation for Muslims was essential in an otherwise Hindu-dominated subcontinent. The Sindh Assembly passed a resolution making it a demand in 1935. Iqbal, Jouhar and others then worked hard to draft Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who had till then worked for Hindu-Muslim unity, to lead the movement for this new nation. By 1930, Jinnah had begun to despair of the fate of minority communities in a united India and had begun to argue that mainstream parties such as the Congress (of which he was once a member) were insensitive to Muslim interests. At the 1940 AIML conference in Lahore, Jinnah made clear his commitment to two separate states, a position from which the League never again wavered:
“ The Hindus and the Muslims belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs and literature… To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state. ”
[edit] 1932–1937
However, Hindu organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha, though against the division of the country, were also insisting on the same chasm between Hindus and Muslims. In 1937 at the 19th session of the Hindu Mahasabha held at Ahmedabad, Veer Savarkar in his presidential address asserted:[2]
“ India cannot be assumed today to be Unitarian and homogeneous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main — the Hindus and the Muslims. ”
[edit] 1937–1942
Rural Sikhs in a long oxcart train headed towards India. 1947. Margaret Bourke-White.Most of the Congress leaders were secularists and resolutely opposed the division of India on the lines of religion. Mohandas Gandhi was both religious and irenic, believing that Hindus and Muslims could and should live in amity. He opposed the partition, saying,
“ My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God. ”
An old Sikh man carrying his wife. Over 10 million people were uprooted from their homeland and travelled on foot, bullock carts and trains to their promised new home.For years, Gandhi and his adherents struggled to keep Muslims in the Congress Party (a major exit of many Muslim activists began in the 1930s), in the process enraging both Hindu Nationalists and Indian Muslim Nationalists. (Gandhi was assassinated soon after Partition by Hindu Nationalist Nathuram Godse, who believed that Gandhi was appeasing Muslims at the cost of Hindus.) Politicians and community leaders on both sides whipped up mutual suspicion and fear, culminating in dreadful events such as the riots during the Muslim League's Direct Action Day of August 1946 in Calcutta, in which more than 5,000 people were killed and many more injured. As public order broke down all across northern India and Bengal, the pressure increased to seek a political partition of territories as a way to avoid a full-scale civil war.
[edit] 1942–1946
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Cover Time Magazine, April 22, 1946.
Viceroy Louis Mountbatten with a countdown calender to the Transfer of Power in the backgroundUntil 1946, the definition of Pakistan as demanded by the League was so flexible that it could have been interpreted as a sovereign nation Pakistan, or as a member of a confederated India.
Some historians believe Jinnah (whose catch-phrase was that India would be "divided or destroyed") intended to use the threat of partition as a bargaining chip in order to gain more independence for the Muslim dominated provinces in the west from the Hindu dominated center.[3]
Other historians claim that Jinnah's real vision was for a Pakistan that extended into Hindu-majority areas of India, by demanding the inclusion of the East of Punjab and West of Bengal, including Assam, all Hindu-majority country. Jinnah also fought hard for the annexation of Kashmir a Muslim majority state with Hindu ruler; and the accession of Hyderabad and Junagadh Hindu-majority states with Muslim rulers. [citation needed]
The British colonial administration did not directly rule all of "India". There were several different political arrangements in existence: Provinces were ruled directly and the Princely States with varying legal arrangements, like paramountcy.
The British Colonial Administration consisted of Secretary of State for India, the India Office, the Governor-General of India, and the Indian Civil Service. The Indian Political Parties were (alphabetically) All India Muslim League, Communist Party of India, Hindu Mahasabha, Indian National Congress, and the Unionist Muslim League (mainly in the Punjab).
[edit] The partition: 1947
[edit] The Mountbatten Plan
The actual division between the two new dominions was done according to what has come to be known as the 3rd June Plan or Mountbatten Plan.
The border between India and Pakistan was determined by a British Government-commissioned report usually referred to as the Radcliffe Line after the London lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who wrote it. Pakistan came into being with two non-contiguous enclaves, East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, separated geographically by India. India was formed out of the majority Hindu regions of the colony, and Pakistan from the majority Muslim areas.
Countries of Modern Indian SubcontinentOn July 18, 1947, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act that finalized the partition arrangement. The Government of India Act 1935 was adapted to provide a legal framework for the two new dominions. Following partition, Pakistan was added as a new member of the United Nations, while the Republic of India assumed the seat of British India as a successor state.[4]
The 565 Princely States were given a choice of which country to join. Those states whose princes failed to accede to either country or chose a country at odds with their majority religion, such as Junagadh, Hyderabad, and especially Kashmir, became the subject of much dispute. All three were eventually annexed by India.
[edit] The geography of the partition: the Radcliffe Line
An aged and abandoned Muslim couple and their grand children sitting by the the roadside on this arduous journey. "The old man is dying of exhaustion. The caravan has gone on," wrote Bourke-White.The Punjab — the region of the five ri
