Latest news with #CyrilRadcliffe
Time of India
14 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
We treat India-Pak hostility as inevitable but these divides formed within living memory
Sam Dalrymple was set for a career in particle physics, until a family trip to Afghanistan to visit the remains of the Bamiyan Buddha rerouted him into history. He started a virtual reality project connecting Partition survivors which, in turn, inspired, his debut book ' Shattered Lands ' tracing the unravelling of the Indian empire. In an interview with Sunday Times, he talks about why our complex pasts shouldn't be ignored Several years ago, you co-founded Project Dastaan connecting those displaced by the 1947 Partition through virtual reality. Was it Dastaan that sparked off this deep dive into five partitions or something else? Dastaan was very much the origin of the book. In 2018, my college friends and I began reconnecting individuals displaced in the 1947 Partition of India, the largest forced migration in history, to their ancestral villages through VR. It was while researching the impact of Partition on Tripura and Northeast India for Dastaan that the book idea first came together. I was chatting with an academic in the region and when I asked about Partition, he said, 'Which one? Burma in 1937, Pakistan in 1947 or Bangladesh in 1971.' That conversation made me think about the multiple ruptures and borders that have carved their way through the subcontinent. The five partitions you write about are the separation of Burma, Arabia and Pakistan from India, the division of 500 princely states, and finally, the creation of Bangladesh. Why did you want to tell this story? by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 오스템 임플란트 받아가세요 임플란터 더 알아보기 Undo We live the consequences of these partitions every day. Just look at the recent war between India and Pakistan. Today, South Asia is one of the most bordered regions in the world, and you can actually see its borders from space. However, 100 years ago none of these borders were foreseen. Demands for 'independence' were widespread, but no one could have suspected that the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen and Burma would soon emerge from the wreckage of British India. Nor would anyone have imagined that tiny princely states like Bhutan and Dubai would last until the end of the century while massive states like Hyderabad would not. Your book challenges some widely held beliefs— like the idea that India's borders were drawn solely by Cyril Radcliffe. Could you tell us more about that? Cyril Radcliffe was famously charged with drawing the Partition border that would slice through British India. Jinnah had suggested his name because he had never been east of Paris and supposedly his obliviousness would make him impartial. This, of course, had deadly consequences. But what we often forget is that he only drew the lines dividing Punjab and Bengal. Both the LoC and the entire stretch of the India-Pakistan Border from the Arabian Sea to Sri Ganganagar — collectively 81% of the present India-Pakistan border fence — result from the decisions of seven local princes and have nothing to do with Radcliffe. Thirty-six per cent of the border with East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh) was made by another ten. Had states like Jodhpur joined Pakistan, or had states like Bahawalpur joined India, the border would look very, very different. The chapter on the Arabian Peninsula ties a global moment — the British withdrawal from Aden (now in Yemen) — to a personal story about Dhirubhai Ambani. How did that shape the trajectory of Reliance? We often forget today that Aden was the Dubai of the 1960s. It was the great business hub of its time, and this remained the case right until 1967 when the British pulled out and the revolutionary NLF took over. Dhirubhai Ambani had worked in Aden until the late 1950s, and after the British evacuation from Aden, he found himself perfectly placed to hire his dispossessed colleagues and found use of 'a ready-made source of educated managers, accountants and salesmen, drilled to European standards'. He had just ended a business partnership with his cousin and gone solo, forming a new company called the Reliance Commercial Corporation. Reliance ballooned in the years after the fall of Aden, underpinned by a generation of Indian-origin Adenis versed in free market capitalism rather than Nehruvian socialism. Given that your book comes out against the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions, what is the perspective you hope readers will take away? So often we treat the hostility between India and Pakistan as inevitable. Even President Trump chimed in, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that India and Pakistan had been fighting 'for a thousand years, probably longer than that.' But this really isn't the case. These divisions were formed within living memory — as were the divisions between India and Bangladesh, Burma and Yemen etc. Today, the region's borders have become so embedded in our subconscious that it is easy to forget there were other possibilities for a post-colonial South Asia. Several prominent nationalist figures including PM Nehru and Burma's founding father Aung San had once spoken of an 'Asiatic federation' in the 'not very, very distant future', a 'United Nations of South Asia' encompassing India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma. Long after the British departed, many still hoped the new borders might prove temporary. Yet in every single one of these countries, govts have made sure to paper over the shared cross-border heritage of their peoples. The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India's partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold. Your dad, historian William Dalrymple , sparked a lot of debate recently saying that academics don't make their work as accessible as popular historians. Where do you stand on this? I don't think they have to stand in opposition at all. We obviously need both.
India.com
15-05-2025
- Business
- India.com
Did you know Reserve Bank of India once printed currency for Pakistan? State Bank of Pakistan acknowledged by..., UAE, Oman also...
Reserve Bank of India New Delhi: The Radcliffe Line refers to the boundary drawn by British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe during the 1947 partition of British India. This line divided the provinces of Punjab and Bengal into two separate territories: India and Pakistan. The partition was a result of the Indian Independence Act of 1947, which aimed to create two independent nations, India and Pakistan, based on religious lines. But did this Radcliffe Line actually provide the resources both countries truly needed? In fact, the British man who drew this line, Radcliffe, had never even visited India. After the partition, Pakistan especially lacked essential resources. In such a situation, it was India that extended full support. Since 1947, India has provided a slew of assistance to bankrupt Pakistan. The Reserve Bank of India even printed currency notes for its neighboring country between August 1947 and September 1948. At the time of Partition, Pakistan had no infrastructure. According to a media report quoting current affairs commentator Aamir Khokhar wrote that Pakistan was unable to establish a central bank. It was then decided that the Reserve Bank would function as the state bank for both India and Pakistan. Since the Reserve Bank already existed in India, it helped Pakistan without any hesitation. State Bank of Pakistan Acknowledged the Role It is important to note that the official website of the State Bank of Pakistan has acknowledged the services of the Reserve Bank of India. In 1947, during the India-Pakistan partition, the Reserve Bank of India acted as the central bank for both countries. Soon after the partition, the Reserve Bank of India took the responsibility of currency circulation since establishing a central bank in Pakistan was not an easy task. According to media reports, the State Bank of Pakistan states that the Governor-General of undivided India issued the 'Pakistan (Monetary System and Reserve Bank) Order, 1947' on 14 August 1947. This order stated that until a central bank was established in Pakistan, the RBI would handle all currency-related matters. Until September 30, 1948, the Reserve Bank was made the common authority for both India and Pakistan. In this way, until 30 September 1948, the RBI fulfilled all of Pakistan's financial needs and managed its monetary system. RBI Printed Notes for These Countries Too The Reserve Bank of India not only printed notes for Pakistan but also for several Gulf countries like the UAE, Oman, and Bahrain. This practice continued until 1967, and until then, the Gulf countries used the Indian Rupee. It is also recorded in the history of the RBI that it printed currency notes for Pakistan for nearly a year. At that time, the Reserve Bank had an office in Lahore, which was later closed down.
Mail & Guardian
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Mail & Guardian
India, Pakistan and the theatre of nationalist violence
The conflict between India and Pakistan goes back to Partition in 1947. Conflict has flared up regularly in Kashmir since then including in 2019 (above) and now in 2025. Photo:A tentative ceasefire has been declared between India and Pakistan after one of the most intense cross-border escalations in recent years, with both sides claiming victory and the underlying tensions far from resolved. Those tensions run deep into the region's history — back to the very moment of India's birth as an independent postcolonial state, when the British drew borders not to liberate but to exit, quickly and violently. In 1947, the partition of British India tore through Punjab and Bengal, slicing apart villages, families, and centuries of shared life. Cyril Radcliffe, the man assigned to divide the land, had never set foot on the subcontinent. He drew the new boundaries in just five weeks, with no knowledge of the people they would divide. The Punjab partition on both sides was particularly brutal: more than a million people were killed in pogroms, reprisal attacks and mass forced displacements. Trains arrived full of corpses. Families were severed. Children went missing. Entire villages were razed. The violence was not spontaneous; it was a political catastrophe born of imperial haste and communal mobilisation. Partition was not simply the creation of two states. It was the violent birth of religious nationalism in South Asia. The demand for Pakistan, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, had initially emerged as a response to the Congress's failure to accommodate Muslim political identity within a united India. But what was tactical soon became existential. And in the process, new majoritarian identities were forged on both sides of the new border. The very idea of India as a secular republic came under attack not only from the Muslim right but from its Hindu counterpart, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the organisation from which the BJP would later emerge. On 30 January 1948, less than six months after Partition, Mohandas Gandhi was assassinated by Nathuram Godse. Godse was a former RSS member and editor of a Hindu nationalist newspaper. He believed Gandhi had betrayed Hindus by pushing for peace with Pakistan and insisting on the rights of Muslims within India. In his own words, he killed Gandhi not out of hatred, but out of political conviction. That assassination was not a footnote to Partition — it was a culmination of the violent ideological rift that had opened up in the region. It revealed that the project of religious nationalism, once unleashed, would not stop at borders or treaties. It would seep into the very imagination of the nation. The state of Jammu and Kashmir, though majority-Muslim, had a Hindu ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, who delayed accession until he sought Indian military assistance in the face of an armed incursion by Pashtun clans mobilised from Pakistan's North-West Frontier province. His decision to join India provoked the first war between the two new nations in 1947-48. That war ended with the Line of Control, a jagged military ceasefire line that cuts through Kashmir to this day. It does not follow rivers or mountains — it follows war. It divides lives, languages, kinship networks and histories. The Line of Control remains one of the most militarised borders in the world, a space of bunkers, barbed wire, and surveillance drones. It is the bleeding edge of the unfinished violence of Partition. What we are seeing now is the reactivation of a partitioned wound, a wound that the rulers of both India and Pakistan exploit and weaponise for their own ends. In the wake of this year's 22 April attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir — which left 26 civilians dead, most of them Hindu pilgrims — India responded with a military operation named Sindoor. The choice of the name for the operation was not incidental. Sindoor, the red powder applied by Hindu women to mark their marital status, is not just a religious or cultural symbol. It is a deeply gendered marker of purity, belonging and sacrificial duty. To name a military operation Sindoor is to summon not only the language of possession and honour. In a country where women's bodies are often the terrain on which religious identity is violently policed, this choice reveals much about the state's ideological orientation. The Bharatiya Janata Party's deployment of such imagery aligns perfectly with the fascist project of Hindutva, where the Indian nation is imagined as a Hindu motherland under siege from minorities and militarism is framed as devotional duty. The operation itself involved the bombing of alleged militant camps across the Line of Control. But, as with so many military operations in South Asia, it is not clear what exactly was achieved — except, perhaps, a surge in nationalist fervour on Indian television and the silencing of domestic dissent. In response, Pakistan launched what it called Operation Bunyan-ul-Marsoos, a phrase lifted from the Qur'an meaning 'a wall of solid lead'. The religious framing of Pakistan's retaliation is no less symbolic than India's. It calls forth images of spiritual defence, of a righteous fortress holding back invasion. In both cases, religious metaphor is used to elevate state violence into sacred obligation. The cycle is as predictable as it is dangerous. Each side performs strength for its own people, invoking blood, soil and god to mask the failures of governance. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, facing unemployment, rural despair and growing global scrutiny of his authoritarianism, finds in conflict the perfect distraction. The Pakistani military, long the most powerful institution in the country, reasserts its role as the guardian of the nation even as economic crisis and political instability threaten to unseat it. In this dance of shadows, it is the people who pay. It is Kashmiri children who flinch at the sound of drones. It is poor and working-class families who bury their dead. It is women, always, who bear the weight and heat of honour-based nationalism on their skin. To understand how we arrived here, we must return not just to Partition but to the Cold War, to the entrenchment of militant infrastructures funded by states and intelligence agencies across borders. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group India holds responsible for the Pahalgam attack, was born in a context where Pakistan's military sought strategic depth in Kashmir and where the United States turned a blind eye so long as the fight aligned with its own regional interests. The more recent face of this militancy, The Resistance Front (TRF), emerged after the revocation of Kashmir's special status by India in 2019. The TRF presented itself as a local, secular force but has been widely linked to Lashkar's networks. It was a rebranding, a tactical shift in a long war of proxies. That war has always been waged not just between nations but between ideologies — secularism versus theocracy, democracy versus militarism, but more often, elite nationalism versus popular emancipation. What is striking about this current moment is not only the violence but the symbolism. That symbolism is a language, and in the Global South, we must learn to read it. When Modi invokes ancient Hindu symbols to justify airstrikes, he is not merely speaking to voters. He is attempting to rewrite the secular fabric of the Indian republic itself, bending history and myth to serve the logic of Hindu supremacy. When Pakistan replies in Quranic verse, it too is using the divine to authorise state power, even as journalists are jailed and dissent is choked. These are not strategies of defence. They are strategies of domination. Tariq Ali, writing recently in Counterfire , reminds us that war between India and Pakistan has always served elite interests and rarely the people's. He notes that in every conflict since 1947, it is the poor who are sacrificed and the powerful who emerge stronger. That analysis remains true today. As military budgets swell, public health collapses. As nuclear rhetoric builds, schools crumble. The people of South Asia deserve better than to be pawns in the nationalist theatre of men who never fight on the front lines. And beyond the subcontinent, the rest of the Global South should take heed. The India-Pakistan conflict is not a local affair. It is a reminder that borders are often lines carved into the earth with colonial violence, that militarism still shapes the post-colony, and that solidarity among the oppressed is always under threat from nationalist mythologies wielded by rapacious elites. Every rupee spent on war is a rupee not spent on rebuilding public education systems, on confronting the debt regimes imposed by international finance, or on expanding worker-controlled alternatives to extractive economics. Nationalist and religious fervour is an all too effective form of social control. The Global South is not only linked by diplomacy or trade, but by a shared inheritance of violence and a struggle to end it. The ceasefire now in place is not a sign of peace but of pause. Both India and Pakistan have claimed victory, yet neither has offered a path forward for the people most affected by this crisis — Kashmiris, civilians living near the Line of Control and the working poor across both countries. What has been gained is not resolution, but rearmament. The temporary silencing of missiles will probably give way to louder internal repression, intensified surveillance and renewed investment in militarised nationalism. In the absence of structural change, accountability and demilitarisation, this ceasefire merely resets the cycle. The challenge before the region — and before the Global South more broadly — is not how to manage nationalist conflict, but how to dismantle the political economies that rely on it. Vashna Jagarnath is a historian, political risk and DEI consultant, labour expert, pan-African and South Asian political analyst and curriculum specialist.
Telegraph
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The water dispute that goes to the heart of the tensions between India and Pakistan
SIR – The real bone of contention between India and Pakistan is not Kashmir per se (report, May 9), but its water. If Kashmir did not have water, it would not have been a problem. It is sad that when Cyril Radcliffe, the man who drew the India-Pakistan boundary in August 1947, approached Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah with his Indus Waters proposal, he was snubbed by both. Radcliffe wanted both leaders to run the river-canal system as a joint Indo-Pakistan venture. However, Jinnah told him that he would 'rather have Pakistan deserts than fertile fields watered by courtesy of Hindus', while Nehru curtly informed him that what India did with its rivers was India's affair. The issue of shared waters between the two neighbours has remained contentious ever since. Simren Kaur Jalandhar City, Punjab, India SIR – Unless the long-standing Kashmir dispute is resolved there will be no lasting peace or friendship between India and Pakistan. Britain should be part of the dialogue because the origin of the disagreement goes back to the messy and unplanned borders that were the result of partition in 1947. The plebiscite recommended by the United Nations never took place. It should be held now. Hyder Ali Pirwany Okehampton, Devon SIR – Rising tensions and the prospect of war between India and Pakistan highlight the indispensable nature of the British Indian Ocean Territory, which gives Britain a strategic presence in a region of global interest. In light of the changing situation, will the Government finally suspend the giveaway of the Chagos Islands? Robert Frazer Salford, Lancashire SIR – The escalation of the dispute between India and Pakistan shows the sheer stupidity of allowing unstable regimes to have nuclear weapons. We have the same situation with North Korea, and potentially Iran. Weak governments in the West have let this happen and we are now seeing the potential for nuclear Armageddon in these countries. We must never permit Iran to gain access to nuclear weapons, or we could see mass destruction in the Middle East, with dire consequences for oil and gas supplies. Stan Kirby West Malling, Kent SIR – The Australian journalist Murray Sayle, who covered the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, told of a press briefing given by the Indian Air Force, which reported that there had been intense activity, but that no planes had been shot down on either side. Afterwards, he asked the briefing officer why so much effort had achieved no result. 'My dear fellow, you can't shoot down your friends,' came the reply. 'We were all at RAF Cranwell together.' John Carter Shortlands, Kent
Telegraph
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Britain's tragic decision that sealed Kashmir's fate
On July 8 1947, a senior British barrister called Cyril Radcliffe arrived for the first time in India and was handed an impossible job. The British were leaving the subcontinent, and the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League – the parties led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah respectively – had agreed to partition India to allow the creation of Pakistan as a homeland for the sub-continent's Muslims. They could not agree on a border, and both they and Lord Mountbatten, the British viceroy, wanted one drawn by Independence, which was scheduled for August 15. Radcliffe, whose ignorance of the country was seen as a guarantee of his impartiality, had just five weeks to decide the fate of millions of people. In the West, Radcliffe drew a red line dividing Pakistan from India from the Arabian Sea to the top of Punjab. But when he reached the foothills of Kashmir and Jammu, he stopped. Technically, the highlands feeding the headwaters of the Indus river were in one of the princely states of British India. The principality of Kashmir and Jammu was inhabited mostly by Muslims and had once been part of the Sikh empire. But since the first Anglo-Sikh war a century earlier, Kashmir had been ruled by the Dogra dynasty of Hindu Rajputs, under the suzerainty of Britain. It was a strange arrangement with all kinds of odd contradictions. Hari Singh, the Maharajah in 1947, was still nominally sovereign ruler, but was British educated and often wore a British military uniform. He had sent troops from his small army to fight for the British in the Second World War and sat on Churchill's war cabinet. His army and police were mostly Muslims, but his officers – until Independence – were British. Singh was seen as a liberaliser. Before the war he set up the state's first legislature and adopted a constitution that outlawed child marriage, made primary education compulsory, and opened places of worship to the lower castes. But he was not exactly a democrat, with fewer than half of the seats in the new parliament elected. Now he, and the rulers of more than 500 other princely states across the subcontinent, faced a crucial choice created by the reality of partition: join India or Pakistan. For Singh, it was an impossible dilemma. Kashmir literally and figuratively straddled the fault-line of partition; more than three quarters of his subjects were Muslim and would never accept joining India. However, the significant Sikh and Hindu minorities would never feel secure in Pakistan, especially following the bloodletting across Punjab that took place throughout much of 1947. Further complicating things was a split between two Muslim-led parties – one pro-India, one pro-Pakistan, and both anti-Maharajah. Lord Mountbatten urged Singh to make up his mind quickly. But Singh and his prime minister, Ram Chandra Kak, played for time. By July 1947, the Maharajah had opted to stay independent from both India and Pakistan – for the time being at least. Three days before formal Indian and Pakistani Independence on Aug 15, Singh's government telegraphed the governments of both new nations asking for a 'standstill' agreement to maintain the status quo. Pakistan replied in the affirmative; India asked for talks to draw up an agreement. Amid the turmoil of partition, independence for Kashmir was never sustainable. Two days later, Radcliffe's partition line was published, and both new countries were submerged in bloodshed. Perhaps one million people were killed and more than 15 million displaced as Muslims in India fled to Pakistan and Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan fled the other way. Two months later, in October 1947, riots over taxation, unemployment for returning war veterans, and demands for accession to Pakistan broke out in Kashmir. There followed a brutal massacre of Muslims by Hindu militias. Shortly afterwards, Pakistan-backed tribal irregulars invaded the princely state. Singh appealed to India for help. Nehru, himself of Kashmiri descent, replied that help would come with a price: sign away independence and join India. On Oct 26, Singh signed the accession agreement and Indian troops began to land in Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital. Ali Jinnah, meanwhile, now the first leader of Pakistan, furiously denounced the accession deal as 'fraudulent' and a breach of the 'standstill' agreement. The first India-Pakistan war had begun. One year – and 27,000 casualties – later, it ended in stalemate with India in control of two-thirds of the province and Pakistan the remainder. There have been three more official Indian-Pakistani wars since then. The current crisis, if it spills into full-scale war, would be the fifth. If war is averted, it will merely become the latest entry in a much longer list of skirmishes, artillery duels and other lesser in all that time neither the shape of the territory, nor the basic grievances, have changed, and the line of control today still follows the same frontline where the fighting stopped in 1948. India insists that Kashmir is legally Indian, and accuses Pakistan's powerful intelligence agencies of sponsoring terrorist atrocities, including last month's attack in Pahalgam which triggered the current fighting. Pakistan claims the province was illegally signed over to India and that its Muslim majority have suffered repeated repression under Indian rule. For both, the high ground of the Himalayan foothills is strategically vital. Pakistan, which relies almost entirely on the waters of the Indus River, is loath to surrender the tributaries that pass through the mountains. But above all, the war in Kashmir has taken on existential dimensions. For Pakistan and India, mutual antagonism has become almost a defining feature of post-independence identity, and the events of those months in 1947 remaining bitterly contested. Pakistani commentators have long accused Mountbatten and Nehru of pressuring Singh to join India. One story holds that the Viceroy prevailed upon Radcliffe to change a section of the border to ensure that India, not Pakistan, controlled a crucial road into Kashmir. Debate still rages about whether Singh himself was complicit in the massacres of rebels in the early days of the war, or whether the massacres themselves were exaggerated by Pakistani propaganda. In Pakistan, perceived defeat in 1948 led, in 1951, to the first of many attempted military coups. In India, Nehru himself came under attack for appealing to the United Nations to adjudicate the peace in 1948. Narendra Modi, India's current prime minister, claimed in 2018 that 'all of Kashmir' would have been Indian if Nehru had not been prime minister at the time. Hari Singh left Kashmir in 1949, and afterwards proclaimed his son and heir, Karan Singh, to act as Prince Regent – an effective abdication apparently forced by Nehru. In 1952, Nehru's government abolished the Kashmiri monarchy altogether. And while Singh died in Mumbai in 1961, the conflict that he unwittingly helped initiate remains more explosive than ever.
