The English didn't exactly make it very easy, negotiable, comfortable or convenient for either side ... plus they were the ones who arbitrarily drew territorial lines and didn't make it easy for anyone to negotiate. Almost as if the English wanted it all to fail from the start.

The English had a play toy that they owned for a long time but when it was finally taken away from them, they decided to just burn and break their toy rather than let the other kids enjoy it.

[–] PugJesus@piefed.social 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I mean, you aren't completely wrong here - the British absolutely fucked up India for their own profit, and when they realized they were going to lose control, tossed aside all their responsibilities (that they had forcibly seized from the people living there in the first place) aside with all the care and gentleness of a bored toddler. They stripped India (the subcontinent) to the bone in terms of government institutions, ran them as ethnic British enclaves as much as they could, and harvested India's wealth even as its people starved. The British contribution is definitely not marginal to the partition.

But at the same time, the core issue of the partition is a long-running one in the history of the Indian subcontinent, a legitimate issue of the past thousand years. While I'm sure the Brits felt smug seeing all of their intentionally-flimsy institutions collapsing sabotaging people who had 'ungratefully' thrown off the yoke of the British Empire, the Brits had the most success with "Divide and Rule" in demographics which would not end up nearly as problematic for Pakistan or India. The artificiality of the divisions, after all, was the point - they could be sustained and withdrawn according to the needs (or whims) of the British Empire.

The division between Hindu and Muslim, on the other hand, was much more... deeply rooted.

The end territorial lines that were negotiated were largely according to plebiscites by the people living in the relevant areas - something which caused a great deal of violence as each side attempted to Yugoslav each other out of the area. :/

I have many gripes with Gandhi, but I absolutely agree with him that India should never have been divided. It solved nothing, prevented very little violence, and both weakened and morally degraded both polities for all future affairs.

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social -1 points 3 weeks ago

Hindus and Muslims coexisted in the sub-continent well enough before the Brits arrived. There was always tension, same as anywhere else that has millions of people of different ethnicities living together, but the Brits applied the typical divide and conquer technique of all colonial powers and spent 2 centuries prying at those religious divides. There's a reason that the most famous building in India was built by a Muslim.