UKC

Last night we watched the film on BBC2 about Lord Mountbatten's time as Viceroy went he was sent to oversee Indian independence. The film dealt with the problems that arose between the Hindu and Sikh populations and the Muslims that eventually led to partition.

It left me wondering how the different religious factions in India got on with each other BEFORE the days of the East India Company and the beginnings of British rule. Were they at each others throats then?

My understanding about the more recent events is that Jinnah wanted a totally Islamic India. One wonders what the result of that would have been? As much, if not more, bloodshed?

You might want to investigate Akbar the Great.  

He was Muslim and succeeded in bringing together and ruling a multicultural and religiously tolerant India from the age of 13.  He appears to have had quite a lot of wives and some of them were Hindu.  He said that all the religions were free to build temples etc.  He abolished a tax on non Muslims and permitted conversions.  He brought together the common threads of the religions such as the basic be nice to each other idea.  

By and large, a long history of factional violence and political leaders manipulating and dividing the population on sectarian lines. Just like the rest of the world since forever.

It's a long time since I read Indian history but my memories are he never believed that India could be Muslim, he wanted a homeland for India's Muslims and that resulted in Pakistan.

The BJP is currently restructuring Indian education, from primary to university, to obscure the impact of Islam and other religions on the country to only leave a 'glorious' Hindustan. Quite scary for a nuclear armed state.

I think that, for Mountbatten, it was something of a poisoned chalice with Nehru et al on the one side and Jinnah on the other. Which ever way he went was bound to lead to violence. I presume the portrayal of the massacre of Sikhs and Hindus who had chosen to go to Pakistan was factual.

So what went wrong?

According to Wikipedia the Indians of various religous beliefs have spent the last thousand years attacking and massacring each other.

His grandson (mainly famous for building the Taj Mahal) was a bit of a fundie and repealed the laws his grandfather made.  

Yes, some were literally Thugs.

Are you confident that they were motivated by religion or religious belief?

Whereas in Europe we’ve managed to mostly live in peace and prosperity for a good 70 years. 

Except for former Yugoslavia.

Leave Pakistan surely?

Muslims leaving India going west were massacred too. The death trains ran in both directions - often it was just the crews who were often Anglo-Indian and Christian who were left alive.

I’ve just investigated Akbar. Most successful of the Murghal emperors. Outsiders who came into India to build an empire at the point of a sword. Akbar was notable mainly for his military expertise, tolerance of other faiths and extensive public works.

If those are the yardsticks by which rulers of India should be measured, then surely the British Raj was a resounding success?

I'm liking your work there.

Lifted from Wiki "a member of an organization of robbers and assassins in India. Devotees of the goddess Kali, the Thugs waylaid and strangled their victims, usually travellers, in a ritually prescribed manner. They were suppressed by the British in the 1830s."

"The Deceivers" by John Masters is an excellent novel about India in the 1820s and English settlers being caught up in the cult of the Thugee

It does not help that Hinduism is an ancient syncretic religion that has, in its long history, assembled some of the most bizarre concepts out there.

Never mind the suppression of other faiths, most suffering caused either directly or indirectly by Hinduism, has been afflicted on Hindus. The caste system derived from and justified by it is just one example of many.

CB

Mountbatten gets far too much of a free pass in the UK because he is a Royal: a million people died when he was in charge.  He had a Brexiteer like lack of concern for obvious problems and focus on getting done and out of India quickly no matter what.   The FBI thought he was incompetent, immoral and unfit for military leadership.

https://www.irishcentral.com/news/lord-mountbatten-pedophile-allegations

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrym...

Easily said after the chap has been murdered.

Especially when he was murdered by Irishmen financially supported by Americans.

One should question the background of the 2 references put forward on this by "Tom in Edinburgh".

And if he was so bad, then surely he would not have been portrayed at all sympathetically in the film, which was directed etc. by someone who is a descendant of people badly affected by the murderous goings-on.

Far too easy to blame "the Colonial British", when the real blame is on the murdering little sh*ts who did the deeds "in the name of religion".

Here is a quote from one of the references:

"In early June, Mountbatten stunned everyone by announcing August 15, 1947, as the date for the transfer of power—ten months earlier than expected. The reasons for this haste are still the subject of debate, but it is probable that Mountbatten wanted to shock the quarrelling parties into realizing that they were hurtling toward a sectarian precipice. However, the rush only exacerbated the chaos. Cyril Radcliffe, a British judge assigned to draw the borders of the two new states, was given barely forty days to remake the map of South Asia. The borders were finally announced two days after India’s Independence."

This is an absolutely stunning example of the colonial arrogance of the UK ruling class and exactly the same ignorant 'it will all be fine' attitude towards difficult and intractable problems as Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers.

When you behave like that and more than a million people die then you shouldn't get a free pass from history.   Royal or not.

It is incredibly likely that Mountbatten was guilty of colonial arrogance, and his decision to accelerate the British departure was done for the benefit of the UK, rather than a duty to the people of India, but I don't know think you can safely assume that it made the situation worse.

I wasn't alive at the time of the partition, but I do remember the revolutions of 1989. In Europe and Russia, the moment that the heavy hand of the communist party was removed, events took on a life of their own, and any controlled transformation was impossible. (In contrast, China changed the economy but did not reduce the authoritarianism.) In India, the moment our departure was pronounced, the scrabble for power was unstoppable. The violence had already started and was one of the reasons for the truncated timetable. Would there have been fewer deaths if it had taken a year? 

I don't think Mountbatten deserves a whole lot of credit, but I don't see that he deserves all the blame either.

  Here is one of the bits that you missed out: "A series of disastrous meetings with an intransigent Jinnah soon convinced him that the Muslim League leader was “a psychopathic case,” impervious to negotiation. Worried that, if he didn’t move rapidly, Britain might, as Hajari writes, end up “refereeing a civil war....,”

  The point being that that sectarian violence had been building up since 1946. Britain had no troops to deal with it and they would possibly only have inflamed the situation had they existed. It's true that the British skidaddled less than honourably to protect their own people, but what would you had them do given the mounting tensions and violence associated? Even with hindsight it's difficult to see a solution.

So why did those who made the film portray him to a great degree as the victim of circumstance, with the likes of Jinnah and Churchill (amongst others) who stitched things up and left him with his name on what was effectively a plan of their making ?

Those who made the film are a darn sight more connected to losing family members in the racial/religious massacres that went on than any of us with our British upbringing thousands of miles from the bloodshed, and are therefore rather unlikely to whitewash anyone who was REALLY responsible for the carnage.

Mountbatten didn’t get a free pass, he got a shed load of criticism, even though his priority was a one state India. Chronic intransigence on the parts of Nehru and especially Jinnah ensured partition had become an inevitability, even more so in light of the thousands killed in pre-partition violence resulting from Muslim and Hindu politicians ramping up the rhetoric as they sought to build their respective power bases.

It seems reasonable to judge Mountbatten as being well out of his depth, but there are at least two more deserving candidates when apportioning blame for the post partition massacres.

Sectarianism at that point was a direct result of British policy to divide and rule.  

“The British had been horrified, during the Revolt of 1857, to see Hindus and Muslims fighting side by side and under each other’s command against the foreign oppressor. They vowed this would not happen again. “Divide et impera was an old Roman maxim, and it shall be ours”, wrote Lord Elphinstone. A systematic policy of fomenting separate consciousness among the two communities was launched, with overt British sponsorship. When restricted franchise was grudgingly granted to Indians, the British created separate communal electorates, so that Muslim voters could vote for Muslim candidates for Muslim seats. The seeds of division were sown, to prevent a unified nationalist movement that could overthrow the British.”

It was a disaster of British making.  

The British did ok until they unleashed disaster by encouraging sectarianism.  They certainly get no points for religious tolerance.   

On BBC2?   The Brexit Broadcasting Corporation isn't unbiased when it comes to its portrayal of the UK royal family.   Mountbatten gets a free pass from the BBC because he's related to the queen and the English audience doesn't like people tearing into the royals no matter how richly they deserve it.  Prince Andrew is getting the same deal.  Can you imagine how the BBC would treat politicians it doesn't like such as Jeremy Corbyn or Alex Salmond if they were seen on camera opening the door at Jeffrey Epstein's house?

  Tripe. The film wasn't even commissioned by the BBC. It was an independent film based largely on the history by Narendra Singh Sarila and directed by Gurinder Chada (the clue to their heritage is in the names). The evil mastermind was painted as Churchill!

What PostmanPat said.

So up thread you highlight how Akbar was lauded for his tolerance of other religions. Then how his tolerant laws were revoked by his descendants. Yet it was Britain that was to blame for encouraging sectarianism? India had seen hundreds of years of religious violence from the initial Mughal incursions in the early 1500s onwards. Seems a little harsh to blame Britain for unleashing sectarian violence when it predated by 350 years the British Raj which only lasted from 1858 to 1947.

Would you give either the Moslems or Hindus in India glowing references for their religious tolerance ?

Or for that matter Hindus for their egalitarianism regarding the caste system ?

This was going on long before the British had stuck a single toe into the area, so to try and blame Britain entirely is way off the mark. Certainly some aspects of British rule most probably exacerbated matters in some areas but the religious intolerance here is something far bigger and with a much longer history, in which British rule is just a chapter.

It was there to some already but the British quite deliberately stirred it up and encouraged tensions and divided communites which were functioning together despite the differences.  They divided laws to apply differently and segregated voting by religion.  

 The outrageous scale of death and hate seen at partition was a result of the successful and deliberate winding up of the 2 communities in order to prevent future resistance from a combined Hindu/Muslim force which the British wouldn't be able to beat.  It was never aimed at large scale death but it got out of hand as these things do when hate is spread.  

Undoubtedly the Raj made use of sectarian divisions (pre-dating British involvement by many hundreds of years) following the events of 1857. It’s worth pointing out the the unity of the sub-continent was purely a product of British rule and partition was entirely down to homegrown Politicians against the wishes of the British government. To lay the blame for the resultant massacres solely at the feet of the British administration seems unfair to say the least.

Edit: what are your thoughts on the BJP’s recent treatment of Kashmir? Are the special dispensations brokered by the British for the Muslim majority and subsequently cast aside 70 years later also somehow the result of British policy 170 years after the fact?

Often the case on UKC that there is no sell by date on the misdeeds of Britain’s colonial past. Thank God we don’t hold every other nations to such impossible standards

They're not mutually exclusive occurrences, though, in that they were all bad,and they all happened, so that whatever else happened the British encouraged sectarianism in India. It's pretty straight forward that it's not either/or I'd have thought.

You break it, you own it.

Giving a problem of this magnitude to a minor royal is like handing the EU negotiations to Prince Andrew.  Absolutely bound to be a total f*ck up.   When there is a potential for millions of people to be killed you need to put the most talented and qualified people onto handling the situation and resource them appropriately.   Fundamentally, London didn't care enough.

And you are so one-eyed when it comes to the Beeb.

He was Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia during the war, so presumably had ability, (and knowledge of the region)  although I see from Wiki he likely got the job because of perceived Labour sympathies!

To be honest it was going to happen anyway. The only person who cared about a peaceful solution was Gandhi and he was assasinated

And of course not a member of the Royal Family either but why let truth get in the way.

"As with many royal relatives, Louis Mountbatten was related to both Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth. A great-grandson of Queen Victoria, he was both a distant cousin of the Queen's and Prince Philip's uncle. Philip's mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was Louis's sister. Philip also lived with the Mountbattens for several years following his mother's institutionalization."

https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a14409174/lord-mountbat...

As I said.