Page 67 - Social Science.docx

The fall of the raj
use the partition as a scapegoat for every ethnolinguistic conflict these nations suffer through that is due to how ineffective it truly was. The complete and total disregard for creating permanent future borders in a well thought out thorough way dominated the partition process.6
While the British Empire might have seen simply finding simple religious majorities and creating states based on that one distinction as enough in reality there are more complex ethnolinguistic connections that drive the creations of national identities.7 While that is not to say the British should have removed their assistance entirely as decolonization is a process that should be treated with extreme care and caution. The partition plan of 1947 was forced to be completed only 5 weeks after the man deciding the final borders arrived on the subcontinent. This extremely rushed process is what seems to be responsible for the large number of people who were seemingly left out of representation and became second class citizens of states based on religions they did not follow. This led to a massive population exchange of over 15 million people who were forced to choose between India and Pakistan. Around 2 million died in the ensuing violence that erupted across the entire subcontinent. The rushed partition plan was inefficient at properly representing the ethno-linguistic distribution of the continent that 100’s of millions of people called home at the time of the partition. Looking back on the effects the partition had on the subcontinent it is easy to point out how the British Empire failed by pointing out everything they did wrong in hindsight. However while this might be the case it is still astounding while still obvious to see that the most powerful and well established imperial power in the world at the time treated the
6 Gita 7 Alf
Dharampal-Frick, Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach, Rachel Dwyer, and Jahnavi Phalkey, eds. Key Concepts in
Modern Indian Studies (NY: New York University Press, 2015).
Nilsen, Kenneth Bo Nielsen, and Anand Vaidya, eds., Indian Democracy: Origins, Trajectories, Contestations
(London: Pluto Press, 2019).
63