PM Modi meets Turkish President Erdogan.

[Valkyrie]

Any analogy towards that can be akin to MA Jinnah and MK Gandhi being complicit in the murder of millions at the time of partition, or the murder of thousands in then East Pakistan and the whole population of Pakistan being complicit.

This has to be the most ludicrous analogy I've seen in weeks.

 

[Finer]

If i was Turkey PM, i would toy with Modi's feeling for a while, and then, next chapter we call 'used gf' for Modi.

This has to be the most ludicrous analogy I've seen in weeks.

That shows most Indians have officially lost their plot. To the extent, they are blinded to the official confession of Ajit Doval, in-charge of Indian NSA, sponsoring terrorism in Balochistan and the rest of Pakistan which claimed the lives of women, children, older and all kind of people.

I dread the future India is heading towards to. India is fast becoming example of rape-capital and anti-humanity in form of genocide, oppression, minority intolerance. Who would have thunk.

 

[Hellfire]

Alright. So by extension of your argument, Hafiz Saeed is innocent of the accusations your govt keeps hurling at him since he's been vindicated by High Court in Pakistan after due legal procedure.

Nope. He is a founder of a terror organisation, which is proscribed. I don't really know what 'vindication' has been done for him. No idea about that. Use of smart words does not necessarily convey the meaning you want and you come out sounding a confused person at best.

Let us post a neutral write up on why Hafeez Saeed is an issue.

Australian National Security
Lashkar-e-Tayyiba


(Also known as: al Mansooreen; al Mansoorian; Army of Medina;
Army of the Pure; Army of the Pure and Righteous; Army of the Righteous;
Falah‑e‑Insaniyat Foundation; Idara Khidmat‑e‑Khalq; Jama'at al‑Dawa;
Jama'at‑i‑Dawat; Jamaati‑ud‑Dawa; Jamaat ud‑Daawa; Jama'at‑ud‑Da'awa;
Jama'at‑ud‑Da'awah; Jamaat‑ud‑Dawa; Jama’at ul‑Da’awa;
Jamaat‑ul‑Dawa; Jamaat ul‑Dawah; Jamaiat‑ud‑ Dawa; JuD; JUD; Lashkar‑e‑Taiba;
Lashkar‑e‑Tayyaba; Lashkar‑e‑Toiba; Lashkar‑i‑Tayyaba;
Lashkar ‑i‑Toiba; Lashkar‑Tayyiba; LeT; LT; Paasban‑e‑Ahle‑Hadis;
Paasban‑e‑Kashmir; Paasban‑i‑Ahle‑ Hadith; Party of the Calling;
Party of Preachers; Pasban‑e‑Ahle‑Hadith; Pasban‑e‑Kashmir;
Soldiers of the Pure; and Tehreek‑e‑Tahafuz Qibla Awal)

This statement is based on publicly available information about Lashkar‑e‑Tayyiba (LeT). To the Australian Government’s knowledge, these details are accurate and reliable and have been corroborated by classified information.

Basis for listing a terrorist organisation

Division 102 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 provides that for an organisation to be listed as a terrorist organisation, the Attorney‑General must be satisfied on reasonable grounds that the organisation:

is directly or indirectly engaged in, preparing, planning, assisting in or fostering the doing of a terrorist act; or

advocates the doing of a terrorist act.

Details of the organisation

Objectives

LeT is a Pakistan‑based Sunni Islamic extremist organisation that uses violence in pursuit of its stated objective of uniting Indian administered Kashmir (IaK) with Pakistan under a radical interpretation of Islamic law. LeT’s broader objectives include establishing an Islamic Caliphate across the Indian subcontinent. To this end, LeT intends to pursue the ‘liberation’, not only of Muslim‑majority Kashmir, but of all India’s Muslim population, even in areas where they do not form a majority. LeT has declared that democracy is antithetical to Islamic law and that LeT’s jihad requires it to work toward turning Pakistan itself into a purely Islamic state.

LeT was formed circa 1989 as the military wing of the Pakistan‑based Islamist fundamentalist movement Markaz al‑Dawa wal Irshad (MDI—meaning, the Centre for Religious Learning and Propagation and also known as the Jamaat al‑Dawa). Originally formed to wage militant jihad against the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, LeT shifted its focus to the insurgency in IaK in the 1990s, after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan.

In 2002, LeT was banned by the Pakistani government but the group continues to operate in Pakistan under the alias Jamaat ud‑Dawa (JuD). Ostensibly created as a charitable organisation by LeT founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed immediately prior to LeT being banned, JuD functions as a front organisation for LeT to mask its activities and to continue to solicit funds. The United Nations Security Council listed JuD as a LeT alias on 10 December 2008.

While IaK and broader Indian interests remain LeT’s primary focus, there is potential for splinter groups to emerge who want to re‑focus their activities and bring them more into line with al‑Qa’ida’s ‘global jihad’ against the United States and Israel and their allies. However, LeT’s primary objective remains the ‘liberation’ of Muslims in IaK.

Leadership and membership

Leadership

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the current head of JuD, is the founder and Emir of LeT. On 10 December 2008, the United Nations Security Council 1267 Committee approved the addition of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed to its consolidated list of individuals and entities subject to assets freeze, travel bans and arms embargo measures. Also in December 2008, the then United States Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, identified Saeed as responsible for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai which killed more than 170 people.

In April 2012, the United States State Department announced a US$10 million reward for the capture or information leading to the arrest and conviction of Saeed. Saeed has been detained and subsequently released by Pakistani authorities on several occasions and continues to operate freely in Pakistan.

Zaki‑ur Rehman Lakhvi is LeT’s chief of operations. Lakhvi was arrested, along with several other LeT members, on 7 December 2009 for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Lakhvi was able to communicate with LeT members and co‑ordinate LeT activities while incarcerated in Central Jail Rawalpindi (commonly known as Adiala Jail). Lakhvi’s orders from Adiala Jail included directing LeT fighters to increase violence in the Kashmir Valley. On 10 April 2015, Lakhvi was released from Adiala Jail on bail and is yet to stand trial for his role in the Mumbai attacks.

Recruitment and funding

LeT’s current strength is unknown; however, it is reported to include several thousand active members. The majority of LeT’s membership comprises jihadists from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

LeT receives funding from donors in the Middle East, mainly Saudi Arabia, and through charitable donations collected from sympathisers in Pakistan. Private donations from across South Asia, Gulf nations and Europe also contribute to LeT’s finances.

Terrorist activity of the organization

Directly or indirectly engaged in the doing of terrorist acts

LeT has directly engaged in, prepared and planned numerous terrorist attacks against Indian security force personnel, government and transport infrastructure and civilians in IaK as well as in India more broadly. LeT militants are also present in Afghanistan and suspected of supporting the insurgency there.

High profile LeT terrorist attacks in India have resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of people. In November 2008, LeT militants carried out coordinated attacks in Mumbai killing more than 170 people, including two Australians. In July 2006, LeT militants in conjunction with Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) operatives detonated a series of bombs on trains in Mumbai killing more than 200 people.

LeT continues to engage in terrorist acts and/or their facilitation—most prominently in IaK and India but also in Afghanistan. Recent attacks which can be reliably attributed to LeT, include but are not limited to:

On 5 December 2014, six militants wearing army uniforms attacked an >Indian Army base in Uri, Kashmir. This was the first incident in a series of coordinated attacks undertaken that day which resulted in the death of eleven security force personnel, eight militants and two civilians—as well as multiple persons injured. One of the militants killed during the attacks was identified as a LeT district commander. Media reporting indicated LeT claimed responsibility for the attack against the army base.

On 23 May 2014, heavily armed militants attacked the Indian consulate in Herat, Afghanistan. The attack occurred a few days before Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, took office. Afghan and United States officials attributed responsibility for the attack to LeT.

On 24 June 2013, militants attacked a security force convoy on the Jammu‑Srinagar‑ Muzaffarabad Highway in Srinagar, Kashmir, killing eight and injuring several others. The attack occurred just prior to a visit by then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. While the attack was claimed by Hizbul Mujahideen, Indian officials indicated the attack was directed by LeT.

On 13 March 2013, gunmen attacked a police camp in Srinagar, Kashmir killing five paramilitary police officers and wounding a number of civilians and police. Indian officials attributed the attack to LeT militants.

Directly or indirectly preparing and/or planning terrorist acts

LeT has ongoing intent to undertake terrorist attacks—in India and IaK in particular—and seek opportunities for surveillance, attack facilitation and recruitment in the furtherance of future attacks. Recent examples of this include:

On 14 April 2015, Indian intelligence agencies issued an alert to Mumbai police indicating a possible terrorist attack by LeT targeting hotels and railway stations. The attack would comprise eight to 10 LeT operatives entering Mumbai via a sea route.

March 2015 Indian intelligence reporting indicated LeT had ten launching camps established in the border area of Jammu and Kashmir ready to infiltrate trained operatives into India.

As of mid‑March 2015, LeT was reported to have numerous camps in Pakistan‑occupied Kashmir where operatives were being trained for special operations under the direction of LeT chief of operations, Lakhvi. Indian intelligence agencies further indicated they held evidence of Lakhvi planning for a major terrorist operation in India.

In late December 2014, Indian security agencies issued a public warning indicating that LeT was planning a terrorist attack in India. Security was subsequently increased at Metro stations and other public areas in New Delhi.

In October 2014, police arrested eight LeT militants in North Kashmir alleged to have been planning a terrorist attack. Police seized small arms, ammunition and grenades. The militants were alleged to have been in contact with an LeT handler in Pakistan.

On 19 June 2013, Indian security agencies issued a warning for the coastal areas of Goa, following the receipt of intelligence which indicated intent by LeT to undertake a terrorist attack there.

In June 2012, police in Srinagar, Kashmir arrested five LeT operatives alleged to have been behind a May 2012disrupted car bomb attack. The operatives had acquired a vehicle, explosives and ignition devices.

Directly or indirectly assisting in or fostering the doing of terrorist acts

LeT provides support to domestic terrorist groups in India including the Indian Mujahideen. In early 2013, Indian officials stated LeT provided assistance to the Indian Mujahideen to undertake surveillance in preparation for an explosives attack in Hyderabad, India. On 21 February 2013, Indian Mujahideen operatives detonated two improvised explosive devices in Dilsukhnagar, Hyderabad killing 16 and injuring over 100. LeT training camps in Pakistan provide religious indoctrination and militant instruction to both LeT operatives and non‑LeT aligned jihadists.

LeT is known to have trained foreigners to conduct terrorist operations. British citizens trained by LeT include Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a trans‑Atlantic flight in 2001, and Dhiren Barot, who was convicted in 2006 of planning a bombing in London. Investigations indicate one of the British‑born suicide bombers responsible for the 7 July 2005 attacks in London, Shehzad Tanweer, may have received training at a LeT camp in Pakistan. LeT is also suspected of providing some funding and logistical support to the disrupted British trans‑Atlantic plane bombing plot in August 2006 using JuD as a cover. In 2009, LeT suspected chief of external operations Sajid Mir worked with now‑detained United States extremist, David Headley, on an aborted plot to attack a newspaper office in Copenhagen, Denmark. Aside from facilitating training, it is unclear if LeT sanctioned the terrorist activities of any of these foreign‑born individuals.

Advocating the doing of terrorist acts

During a television interview in April 2015, LeT Emir, Hafiz Saeed publicly confirmed his backing of jihad in Kashmir—with assistance from the Pakistan Government and army—asserting that freedom for Muslims in Kashmir could only be attained through jihad.


During a JuD convention in Lahore, Pakistan over 4‑5 December 2014, LeT Emir, Hafiz Saeed publicly asserted that Pakistani Mujahideen had a right to enter IaK for the purpose of liberating Kashmiris from Indian oppression. Further, Saeed has called for jihad in support of oppressed Muslims everywhere.

In August 2013, Indian intelligence agencies issued a warning of possible LeT attacks in Delhi. The alert was in response to calls from LeT Emir, Hafiz Saeed of his intent to spread jihad to all corners of India. Saeed allegedly stated that a Red Fort‑type attack needed to be carried out again—a probable reference to the LeT attack in 2000 on the Red Fort.

Conclusion

On the basis of the above information, ASIO assess LeT continues to directly and/or indirectly engage in, preparing, planning, assisting in, fostering or advocating the doing of terrorist acts. This assessment is corroborated by information provided by reliable and credible intelligence sources.

In the course of pursuing its objectives, LeT is known to have committed or threatened actions that:

cause serious damage to property or the death of persons, or endangers a person’s life or creates a serious risk to a person’s safety;

are intended to have those effects;

are done with the intention of advancing LeT’s political, religious or ideological causes;

are done with the intention of coercing or influencing by intimidation the government of a foreign country; and

are done with the intention of creating a serious risk to the safety of the public globally.

Other relevant information

Links to other terrorist groups or networks

LeT is known to maintain and foster links with a variety of Islamist extremist groups including the Afghan Taliban, al‑Qa‘ida, Harkat ul‑Jihad al‑Islami and Jaish‑e‑Mohammad. LeT receives and provides support to domestic based groups and networks in India most notably the Indian Mujahideen and the Students Islamic Movement of India—as well as militant groups in Kashmir.

Additionally, LeT reportedly has been involved in conflicts involving threats to Muslims outside of South Asia including Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo.

Links to Australia

In 2007, a French court convicted French national Willie Brigitte, for planning terrorist attacks in Australia in 2003 in conjunction with LeT suspected chief of external operations, Sajid Mir. Brigitte’s Australian associate, Faheem Khalid Lodhi, was also convicted of planning acts of terrorism by a New South Wales Supreme Court jury in June 2006. In June 2008, Lodhi lost an appeal to the High Court of Australia to have his case overturned.

Threat to Australian interests

LeT terrorist attacks in India have impacted Western interests there—including Australian interests—two Australians were killed in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. While LeT may not specifically target Australian interests, Australian interests may be impacted in LeT attacks directed at others—particularly mass casualty attacks against soft targets such as hotels, transport infrastructure and tourist sites.

Other designations

The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Pakistan and India have listed LeT as a terrorist organisation. LeT is listed in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee’s consolidated list. This listing has been adopted on the Consolidated List maintained in Australia by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, under the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945.




https://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/Listedterroristorganisations/Pages/Lashkar-e-Tayyiba.aspx




Seriously, get a better logic and rationale. It is quite irritating when kids spawn up trying to make points which are irrelevant. Or, leave it, you would not have used this line if you had anything better.

Meanwhile, your country continues to support terror for 37th year in Afghanistan. So, seriously, can your crying.


Cheers and have a great day

This has to be the most ludicrous analogy I've seen in weeks.

I don't know who to laugh at - you, your ignorance or the systematised denial that exists both in India and Pakistan? See the parallel? The analogy? And why it is ludicrous?

Read and use your higher mental faculties to understand what I have said so far and why you are right that it is the most ludicrous statement because the responsibility in either case rests with the respective leaders as an extension of policies followed by them resulting in the actions of wanton killing.


BOOKS

JUNE 29, 2015 ISSUE

THE GREAT DIVIDE

The violent legacy of Indian Partition

By William Dalrymple





Partition displaced fifteen million people and killed more than a million.PHOTOGRAPH BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE / LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION / GETTY


In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never made it.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered.

Nisid Hajari, in “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), his fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”

By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead. The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched as it may seem. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost unimaginable violence. The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal has called Partition “the central historical event in twentieth century South Asia.” She writes, “A defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”

After the Second World War, Britain simply no longer had the resources with which to control its greatest imperial asset, and its exit from India was messy, hasty, and clumsily improvised. From the vantage point of the retreating colonizers, however, it was in one way fairly successful. Whereas British rule in India had long been marked by violent revolts and brutal suppressions, the British Army was able to march out of the country with barely a shot fired and only seven casualties. Equally unexpected was the ferocity of the ensuing bloodbath.

The question of how India’s deeply intermixed and profoundly syncretic culture unravelled so quickly has spawned a vast literature. The polarization of Hindus and Muslims occurred during just a couple of decades of the twentieth century, but by the middle of the century it was so complete that many on both sides believed that it was impossible for adherents of the two religions to live together peacefully. Recently, a spate of new work has challenged seventy years of nationalist mythmaking. There has also been a widespread attempt to record oral memories of Partition before the dwindling generation that experienced it takes its memories to the grave.

The first Islamic conquests of India happened in the eleventh century, with the capture of Lahore, in 1021. Persianized Turks from what is now central Afghanistan seized Delhi from its Hindu rulers in 1192. By 1323, they had established a sultanate as far south as Madurai, toward the tip of the peninsula, and there were other sultanates all the way from Gujarat, in the west, to Bengal, in the east.

Today, these conquests are usually perceived as having been made by “Muslims,” but medieval Sanskrit inscriptions don’t identify the Central Asian invaders by that term. Instead, the newcomers are identified by linguistic and ethnic affiliation, most typically as Turushka—Turks—which suggests that they were not seen primarily in terms of their religious identity. Similarly, although the conquests themselves were marked by carnage and by the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist sites, India soon embraced and transformed the new arrivals. Within a few centuries, a hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged, along with hybrid languages—notably Deccani and Urdu—which mixed the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of India with Turkish, Persian, and Arabic words.

Eventually, around a fifth of South Asia’s population came to identify itself as Muslim. The Sufi mystics associated with the spread of Islam often regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired. Some even took on the yogic practices of Hindu sadhus, rubbing their bodies with ashes, or hanging upside down while praying. In village folk traditions, the practice of the two faiths came close to blending into one. Hindus would visit the graves of Sufi masters and Muslims would leave offerings at Hindu shrines. Sufis were especially numerous in Punjab and Bengal—the same regions that, centuries later, saw the worst of the violence—and there were mass conversions among the peasants there.

The cultural mixing took place throughout the subcontinent. In medieval Hindu texts from South India, the Sultan of Delhi is sometimes talked about as the incarnation of the god Vishnu. In the seventeenth century, the Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh had the Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the central text of Hinduism, translated into Persian, and composed a study of Hinduism and Islam, “The Mingling of Two Oceans,” which stressed the affinities of the two faiths. Not all Mughal rulers were so open-minded. The atrocities wrought by Dara’s bigoted and puritanical brother Aurangzeb have not been forgotten by Hindus. But the last Mughal emperor, enthroned in 1837, wrote that Hinduism and Islam “share the same essence,” and his court lived out this ideal at every level.

In the nineteenth century, India was still a place where traditions, languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and where people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith. A Sunni Muslim weaver from Bengal would have had far more in common in his language, his outlook, and his fondness for fish with one of his Hindu colleagues than he would with a Karachi Shia or a Pashtun Sufi from the North-West Frontier.

Many writers persuasively blame the British for the gradual erosion of these shared traditions. As Alex von Tunzelmann observes in her history “Indian Summer,” when “the British started to define ‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.” Indeed, the British scholar Yasmin Khan, in her acclaimed history “The Great Partition,” judges that Partition “stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths.”


Other assessments, however, emphasize that Partition, far from emerging inevitably out of a policy of divide-and-rule, was largely a contingent development. As late as 1940, it might still have been avoided. Some earlier work, such as that of the British historian Patrick French, in “Liberty or Death,” shows how much came down to a clash of personalities among the politicians of the period, particularly between Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, and Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the two most prominent leaders of the Hindu-dominated Congress Party. All three men were Anglicized lawyers who had received at least part of their education in England. Jinnah and Gandhi were both Gujarati. Potentially, they could have been close allies. But by the early nineteen-forties their relationship had grown so poisonous that they could barely be persuaded to sit in the same room.

At the center of the debates lies the personality of Jinnah, the man most responsible for the creation of Pakistan. In Indian-nationalist accounts, he appears as the villain of the story; for Pakistanis, he is the Father of the Nation. As French points out, “Neither side seems especially keen to claim him as a real human being, the Pakistanis restricting him to an appearance on banknotes in demure Islamic costume.” One of the virtues of Hajari’s new history is its more balanced portrait of Jinnah. He was certainly a tough, determined negotiator and a chilly personality; the Congress Party politician Sarojini Naidu joked that she needed to put on a fur coat in his presence. Yet Jinnah was in many ways a surprising architect for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. A staunch secularist, he drank whiskey, rarely went to a mosque, and was clean-shaven and stylish, favoring beautifully cut Savile Row suits and silk ties. Significantly, he chose to marry a non-Muslim woman, the glamorous daughter of a Parsi businessman. She was famous for her revealing saris and for once bringing her husband ham sandwiches on voting day.

Jinnah, far from wishing to introduce religion into South Asian politics, deeply resented the way Gandhi brought spiritual sensibilities into the political discussion, and once told him, as recorded by one colonial governor, that “it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done.” He believed that doing so emboldened religious chauvinists on all sides. Indeed, he had spent the early part of his political career, around the time of the First World War, striving to bring together the Muslim League and the Congress Party. “I say to my Musalman friends: Fear not!” he said, and he described the idea of Hindu domination as “a bogey, put before you by your enemies to frighten you, to scare you away from cooperation and unity, which are essential for the establishment of self-government.” In 1916, Jinnah, who, at the time, belonged to both parties, even succeeded in getting them to present the British with a common set of demands, the Lucknow Pact. He was hailed as “the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.”

But Jinnah felt eclipsed by the rise of Gandhi and Nehru, after the First World War. In December, 1920, he was booed off a Congress Party stage when he insisted on calling his rival “Mr. Gandhi” rather than referring to him by his spiritual title, Mahatma—Great Soul. Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the mutual dislike grew, and by 1940 Jinnah had steered the Muslim League toward demanding a separate homeland for the Muslim minority of South Asia. This was a position that he had previously opposed, and, according to Hajari, he privately “reassured skeptical colleagues that Partition was only a bargaining chip.” Even after his demands for the creation of Pakistan were met, he insisted that his new country would guarantee freedom of religious expression. In August, 1947, in his first address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, he said, “You may belong to any religion, or caste, or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State.” But it was too late: by the time the speech was delivered, violence between Hindus and Muslims had spiralled beyond anyone’s ability to control it.

In March, 1947, a glamorous minor royal named Lord Louis Mountbatten flew into Delhi as Britain’s final Viceroy, his mission to hand over power and get out of India as quickly as possible. 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,” Mountbatten deployed his considerable charm to persuade all the parties to agree to Partition as the only remaining option.

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.

None of the disputants were happy with the compromise that Mountbatten had forced on them. Jinnah, who had succeeded in creating a new country, regarded the truncated state he was given—a slice of India’s eastern and western extremities, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory—as “a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten” travesty of the land he had fought for. He warned that the partition of Punjab and Bengal “will be sowing the seeds of future serious trouble.”

On the evening of August 14, 1947, in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, Mountbatten and his wife settled down to watch a Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” A short distance away, at the bottom of Raisina Hill, in India’s Constituent Assembly, Nehru rose to his feet to make his most famous speech. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny,” he declaimed. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

But outside the well-guarded enclaves of New Delhi the horror was well under way. That same evening, as the remaining British officials in Lahore set off for the railway station, they had to pick their way through streets littered with dead bodies. On the platforms, they found the railway staff hosing down pools of blood. Hours earlier, a group of Hindus fleeing the city had been massacred by a Muslim mob as they sat waiting for a train. As the Bombay Express pulled out of Lahore and began its journey south, the officials could see that Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from village after village.

What followed, especially in Punjab, the principal center of the violence, was one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth century. As Nisid Hajari writes, “Foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas burst out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors.”


Within a few months, the landscape of South Asia had changed irrevocably. In 1941, Karachi, designated the first capital of Pakistan, was 47.6 per cent Hindu. Delhi, the capital of independent India, was one-third Muslim. By the end of the decade, almost all the Hindus of Karachi had fled, while two hundred thousand Muslims had been forced out of Delhi. The changes made in a matter of months remain indelible seventy years later.

More than twenty years ago, I visited the novelist Ahmed Ali. Ali was the author of “Twilight in Delhi,” which was published, in 1940, with the support of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, and is probably still the finest novel written about the Indian capital. Ali had grown up in the mixed world of old Delhi, but by the time I visited him he was living in exile in Karachi. “The civilization of Delhi came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim,” he told me. Now “Delhi is dead. . . . All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed.” He lamented especially the fact that the refinement of Delhi Urdu had been destroyed: “Now the language has shrunk. So many words are lost.”

Like Ali, the Bombay-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto saw the creation of Pakistan as both a personal and a communal disaster. The tragedy of Partition, he wrote, was not that there were now two countries instead of one but the realization that “human beings in both countries were slaves, slaves of bigotry . . . slaves of religious passions, slaves of animal instincts and barbarity.” The madness he witnessed and the trauma he experienced in the process of leaving Bombay and emigrating to Lahore marked him for the rest of his life. Yet it also transformed him into the supreme master of the Urdu short story. Before Partition, Manto was an essayist, screenwriter, and journalist of varying artistic attainment. Afterward, during several years of frenzied creativity, he became an author worthy of comparison with Chekhov, Zola, and Maupassant—all of whom he translated and adopted as models. Although his work is still little known outside South Asia, a number of fine new translations—by Aatish Taseer, Matt Reeck, and Aftab Ahmad—promise to bring him a wider audience.

As recently illuminated in Ayesha Jalal’s “The Pity of Partition”—Jalal is Manto’s great-niece—he was baffled by the logic of Partition. “Despite trying,” he wrote, “I could not separate India from Pakistan, and Pakistan from India.” Who, he asked, owned the literature that had been written in undivided India? Although he faced criticism and censorship, he wrote obsessively about the sexual violence that accompanied Partition. “When I think of the recovered women, I think only of their bloated bellies—what will happen to those bellies?” he asked. Would the children so conceived “belong to Pakistan or Hindustan?”

The most extraordinary feature of Manto’s writing is that, for all his feeling, he never judges. Instead, he urges us to try to understand what is going on in the minds of all his characters, the murderers as well as the murdered, the rapists as well as the raped. In the short story “Colder Than Ice,” we enter the bedroom of Ishwar Singh, a Sikh murderer and rapist, who has suffered from impotence ever since his abduction of a beautiful Muslim girl. As he tries to explain his affliction to Kalwant Kaur, his current lover, he tells the story of discovering the girl after breaking into a house and killing her family:

“I could have slashed her throat, but I didn’t. . . . I thought she had gone into a faint, so I carried her over my shoulder all the way to the canal which runs outside the city. . . . Then I laid her down on the grass, behind some bushes and . . . first I thought I would shuffle her a bit . . . but then I decided to trump her right away. . . . ”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I threw the trump . . . but, but . . . ”

His voice sank.

Kalwant Kaur shook him violently. “What happened?”

Ishwar Singh opened his eyes. “She was dead. . . . I had carried a dead body . . . a heap of cold flesh . . . jani, [my beloved] give me your hand.”


Kalwant Kaur placed her hand on his. It was colder than ice.

Manto’s most celebrated Partition story, “Toba Tek Singh,” proceeds from a simple premise, laid out in the opening lines:

Two or three years after the 1947 Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums were to be handed over to India.

It was difficult to say whether the proposal made any sense or not. However, the decision had been taken at the topmost level on both sides.

In a few thousand darkly satirical words, Manto manages to convey that the lunatics are much saner than those making the decision for their removal, and that, as Jalal puts it, “the madness of Partition was far greater than the insanity of all the inmates put together.” The tale ends with the eponymous hero stranded between the two borders: “On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”

Manto’s life after Partition forms a tragic parallel with the institutional insanity depicted in “Toba Tek Singh.” Far from being welcomed in Pakistan, he was disowned as reactionary by its Marxist-leaning literary set. After the publication of “Colder Than Ice,” he was charged with obscenity and sentenced to prison with hard labor, although he was acquitted on appeal. The need to earn a living forced Manto into a state of hyper-productivity; for a period in 1951, he was writing a book a month, at the rate of one story a day. Under this stress, he fell into a depression and became an alcoholic. His family had him committed to a mental asylum in an attempt to curb his drinking, but he died of its effects in 1955, at the age of forty-two.

For all the elements of tragic farce in Manto’s stories, and the tormented state of mind of Manto himself, the reality of Partition was no less filled with absurdity. Vazira Zamindar’s excellent recent study, “The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia,” opens with an account of Ghulam Ali, a Muslim from Lucknow, a city in central North India, who specialized in making artificial limbs. He opted to live in India, but at the moment when Partition was announced he happened to be at a military workshop on the Pakistan side of the border. Within months, the two new countries were at war over Kashmir, and Ali was pressed into service by the Pakistani Army and prevented from returning to his home, in India. In 1950, the Army discharged him on the ground that he had become a citizen of India. Yet when he got to the frontier he was not recognized as Indian, and was arrested for entering without a travel permit. In 1951, after serving a prison sentence in India, he was deported back to Pakistan. Six years later, he was still being deported back and forth, shuttling between the prisons and refugee camps of the two new states. His official file closes with the Muslim soldier under arrest in a camp for Hindu prisoners on the Pakistani side of the border.

Ever since 1947, India and Pakistan have nourished a deep-rooted mutual antipathy. They have fought two inconclusive wars over the disputed region of Kashmir—the only Muslim-majority area to remain within India. In 1971, they fought over the secession of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. In 1999, after Pakistani troops crossed into an area of Kashmir called Kargil, the two countries came alarmingly close to a nuclear exchange. Despite periodic gestures toward peace negotiations and moments of rapprochement, the Indo-Pak conflict remains the dominant geopolitical reality of the region. In Kashmir, a prolonged insurgency against Indian rule has left thousands dead and still gives rise to intermittent violence. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, where half the female population remains illiterate, defense eats up a fifth of the budget, dwarfing the money available for health, education, infrastructure, and development.

It is easy to understand why Pakistan might feel insecure: India’s population, its defense budget, and its economy are seven times as large as Pakistan’s. But the route that Pakistan has taken to defend itself against Indian demographic and military superiority has been disastrous for both countries. For more than thirty years, Pakistan’s Army and its secret service, the I.S.I., have relied on jihadi proxies to carry out their aims. These groups have been creating as much—if not more—trouble for Pakistan as they have for the neighbors the I.S.I. hopes to undermine: Afghanistan and India.

Today, both India and Pakistan remain crippled by the narratives built around memories of the crimes of Partition, as politicians (particularly in India) and the military (particularly in Pakistan) continue to stoke the hatreds of 1947 for their own ends. Nisid Hajari ends his book by pointing out that the rivalry between India and Pakistan “is getting more, rather than less, dangerous: the two countries’ nuclear arsenals are growing, militant groups are becoming more capable, and rabid media outlets on both sides are shrinking the scope for moderate voices.” Moreover, Pakistan, nuclear-armed and deeply unstable, is not a threat only to India; it is now the world’s problem, the epicenter of many of today’s most alarming security risks. It was out of madrassas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged. That regime, which was then the most retrograde in modern Islamic history, provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda’s leadership even after 9/11.

It is difficult to disagree with Hajari’s conclusion: “It is well past time that the heirs to Nehru and Jinnah finally put 1947’s furies to rest.” But the current picture is not encouraging. In Delhi, a hard-line right-wing government rejects dialogue with Islamabad. Both countries find themselves more vulnerable than ever to religious extremism. In a sense, 1947 has yet to come to an end.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple


@PaklovesTurkiye read this. An interesting write up.

@nair @Spectre



@Joe Shearer

 

[noksss]

Beta, there isn't much difference between YOUR "politicians" and OUR "politicians". Both are the same breed.

Stop being a Sheep and open your eyes.

Difference between YOUR "politicians" and OUR "politicians" is that yours report to the army and ours don't

 

[-blitzkrieg-]

"A picture is worth a thousand words" - a Chinese proverb
"For Aklman, Isharet is Kafi" - a Persian proverb

View attachment 332059

Thanks for bringing this up brother. People need to know this. And we also know what the green flag signifies there..
It wasnt really a coincidence .We borrowed the flag from the Ottoman coat of Arms, it was done with best niyat and our nations have a grand task ahead , may Allah bestow his blessings on us in our future endeavors.
.

 

[third eye]

The work he has done in Gujrat (Kilings of Muslims) was enough to hang him. But you Dumb nuts made him your PM. It is not something to be proud of. Shame on you people.

We are neither proud of modi nor do we decry him.

He has become the PM following laws of the land. It's just that he is more aggressive in his approach to issues when compared with his predecessor.

Comes next election, if he does not deliver by then ,he goes too.

You guys are so fixated in your hate for him that you cannot understand what it takes to run a nation STRICTLY by its constitution.

 

[salarsikander]

India might have a warm relationship with Russia. That does not mean Indians do not get screwed on a defense deal or two.

Right now Pakistan has a relatively warm relationship with Turkey. Over the past 60 years there have been ups and downs. No fault of Pakistan's. That is not telling much because your relations with other countries are really poor or non-existent.

You are more than welcome to post the list of countries with who we have poor relations

 

[wiseone2]

You are more than welcome to post the list of countries with who we have poor relations

you missed the 2nd part
"really poor or non-existent"

 

[salarsikander]

you missed the 2nd part
"really poor or non-existent"

Again please present the list of such countries. As far as I know we have god relations with any country that can prove to be useful for our interest. Now you cant expect us to have good relations let alone relations with papua new guinea

 

[raj76]

Again please present the list of such countries. As far as I know we have god relations with any country that can prove to be useful for our interest. Now you cant expect us to have good relations let alone relations with papua new guinea

see no one will say that on u r face lets take our passports and try get visas for few countries will not paint whole picture but will give u a glimpse of it

 

[salarsikander]

see no one will say that on u r face lets take our passports and try get visas for few countries will not paint whole picture but will give u a glimpse of it

UM TRIED and done. As long as all your docs are complete and genuine it is not much of a problem.

 

[ChennaiDude]

Past possess the key to the future...

Exactly!....Now read through the link....its from your own news paper.

https://www.turkeytribune.com/2015/12/turkey-and-india-at-a-crossroads-relationship/

 

[wiseone2]

Again please present the list of such countries. As far as I know we have god relations with any country that can prove to be useful for our interest. Now you cant expect us to have good relations let alone relations with papua new guinea

precisely ...

precisely ...

Pakistan does not have diplomatic relations with 100+ countries

 

[footmarks]

I dread the future India is heading towards to. India is fast becoming example of rape-capital and anti-humanity in form of genocide, oppression, minority intolerance. Who would have thunk.

Thanks for your concern. You though Pakistan would be the sole world leader in these vices. No need to worry though, pakistan will remain the leader in these, far into the future.

 

[Valkyrie]

I don't really know what 'vindication' has been done for him. No idea about that. Use of smart words does not necessarily convey the meaning you want and you come out sounding a confused person at best.

I've read the lengthy post you've so conveniently posted and I have a few questions.

Are you by any chance a hormone driven teenager? (The way you're getting personal, and engaging me in tangential matters like the meaning of vindicate does make you sound like one).

In all seriousness though, if you really are of an immature mind, kindly stop wasting my time by quoting me again. I understand that you may have self-conceived notions of super-intelligence about yourself but copy-pasting first thing that comes up after a quick google search doesn't really do a good job at making an impressing on me or the community here.

Learn to disagree without launching a smear campaign on the dissenter. It'll make you more more suffer-able in life.

Lashkar-e-Tayyiba


(Also known as: al Mansooreen; al Mansoorian; Army of Medina;
Army of the Pure; Army of the Pure and Righteous; Army of the Righteous;
Falah‑e‑Insaniyat Foundation; Idara Khidmat‑e‑Khalq; Jama'at al‑Dawa;
Jama'at‑i‑Dawat; Jamaati‑ud‑Dawa; Jamaat ud‑Daawa; Jama'at‑ud‑Da'awa;
Jama'at‑ud‑Da'awah; Jamaat‑ud‑Dawa; Jama’at ul‑Da’awa;
Jamaat‑ul‑Dawa; Jamaat ul‑Dawah; Jamaiat‑ud‑ Dawa; JuD; JUD; Lashkar‑e‑Taiba;
Lashkar‑e‑Tayyaba; Lashkar‑e‑Toiba; Lashkar‑i‑Tayyaba;
Lashkar ‑i‑Toiba; Lashkar‑Tayyiba; LeT; LT; Paasban‑e‑Ahle‑Hadis;
Paasban‑e‑Kashmir; Paasban‑i‑Ahle‑ Hadith; Party of the Calling;
Party of Preachers; Pasban‑e‑Ahle‑Hadith; Pasban‑e‑Kashmir;
Soldiers of the Pure; and Tehreek‑e‑Tahafuz Qibla Awal)

This statement is based on publicly available information about Lashkar‑e‑Tayyiba (LeT). To the Australian Government’s knowledge, these details are accurate and reliable and have been corroborated by classified information.

Basis for listing a terrorist organisation

Division 102 of the Criminal Code Act 1995 provides that for an organisation to be listed as a terrorist organisation, the Attorney‑General must be satisfied on reasonable grounds that the organisation:

is directly or indirectly engaged in, preparing, planning, assisting in or fostering the doing of a terrorist act; or

advocates the doing of a terrorist act.

Details of the organisation

Objectives

LeT is a Pakistan‑based Sunni Islamic extremist organisation that uses violence in pursuit of its stated objective of uniting Indian administered Kashmir (IaK) with Pakistan under a radical interpretation of Islamic law. LeT’s broader objectives include establishing an Islamic Caliphate across the Indian subcontinent. To this end, LeT intends to pursue the ‘liberation’, not only of Muslim‑majority Kashmir, but of all India’s Muslim population, even in areas where they do not form a majority. LeT has declared that democracy is antithetical to Islamic law and that LeT’s jihad requires it to work toward turning Pakistan itself into a purely Islamic state.

LeT was formed circa 1989 as the military wing of the Pakistan‑based Islamist fundamentalist movement Markaz al‑Dawa wal Irshad (MDI—meaning, the Centre for Religious Learning and Propagation and also known as the Jamaat al‑Dawa). Originally formed to wage militant jihad against the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union, LeT shifted its focus to the insurgency in IaK in the 1990s, after Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan.

In 2002, LeT was banned by the Pakistani government but the group continues to operate in Pakistan under the alias Jamaat ud‑Dawa (JuD). Ostensibly created as a charitable organisation by LeT founder Hafiz Muhammad Saeed immediately prior to LeT being banned, JuD functions as a front organisation for LeT to mask its activities and to continue to solicit funds. The United Nations Security Council listed JuD as a LeT alias on 10 December 2008.

While IaK and broader Indian interests remain LeT’s primary focus, there is potential for splinter groups to emerge who want to re‑focus their activities and bring them more into line with al‑Qa’ida’s ‘global jihad’ against the United States and Israel and their allies. However, LeT’s primary objective remains the ‘liberation’ of Muslims in IaK.

Leadership and membership

Leadership

Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the current head of JuD, is the founder and Emir of LeT. On 10 December 2008, the United Nations Security Council 1267 Committee approved the addition of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed to its consolidated list of individuals and entities subject to assets freeze, travel bans and arms embargo measures. Also in December 2008, the then United States Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, identified Saeed as responsible for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai which killed more than 170 people.

In April 2012, the United States State Department announced a US$10 million reward for the capture or information leading to the arrest and conviction of Saeed. Saeed has been detained and subsequently released by Pakistani authorities on several occasions and continues to operate freely in Pakistan.

Zaki‑ur Rehman Lakhvi is LeT’s chief of operations. Lakhvi was arrested, along with several other LeT members, on 7 December 2009 for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Lakhvi was able to communicate with LeT members and co‑ordinate LeT activities while incarcerated in Central Jail Rawalpindi (commonly known as Adiala Jail). Lakhvi’s orders from Adiala Jail included directing LeT fighters to increase violence in the Kashmir Valley. On 10 April 2015, Lakhvi was released from Adiala Jail on bail and is yet to stand trial for his role in the Mumbai attacks.

Recruitment and funding

LeT’s current strength is unknown; however, it is reported to include several thousand active members. The majority of LeT’s membership comprises jihadists from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

LeT receives funding from donors in the Middle East, mainly Saudi Arabia, and through charitable donations collected from sympathisers in Pakistan. Private donations from across South Asia, Gulf nations and Europe also contribute to LeT’s finances.

Terrorist activity of the organization

Directly or indirectly engaged in the doing of terrorist acts

LeT has directly engaged in, prepared and planned numerous terrorist attacks against Indian security force personnel, government and transport infrastructure and civilians in IaK as well as in India more broadly. LeT militants are also present in Afghanistan and suspected of supporting the insurgency there.

High profile LeT terrorist attacks in India have resulted in the death and injury of hundreds of people. In November 2008, LeT militants carried out coordinated attacks in Mumbai killing more than 170 people, including two Australians. In July 2006, LeT militants in conjunction with Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) operatives detonated a series of bombs on trains in Mumbai killing more than 200 people.

LeT continues to engage in terrorist acts and/or their facilitation—most prominently in IaK and India but also in Afghanistan. Recent attacks which can be reliably attributed to LeT, include but are not limited to:

On 5 December 2014, six militants wearing army uniforms attacked an >Indian Army base in Uri, Kashmir. This was the first incident in a series of coordinated attacks undertaken that day which resulted in the death of eleven security force personnel, eight militants and two civilians—as well as multiple persons injured. One of the militants killed during the attacks was identified as a LeT district commander. Media reporting indicated LeT claimed responsibility for the attack against the army base.

On 23 May 2014, heavily armed militants attacked the Indian consulate in Herat, Afghanistan. The attack occurred a few days before Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, took office. Afghan and United States officials attributed responsibility for the attack to LeT.

On 24 June 2013, militants attacked a security force convoy on the Jammu‑Srinagar‑ Muzaffarabad Highway in Srinagar, Kashmir, killing eight and injuring several others. The attack occurred just prior to a visit by then Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. While the attack was claimed by Hizbul Mujahideen, Indian officials indicated the attack was directed by LeT.

On 13 March 2013, gunmen attacked a police camp in Srinagar, Kashmir killing five paramilitary police officers and wounding a number of civilians and police. Indian officials attributed the attack to LeT militants.

Directly or indirectly preparing and/or planning terrorist acts

LeT has ongoing intent to undertake terrorist attacks—in India and IaK in particular—and seek opportunities for surveillance, attack facilitation and recruitment in the furtherance of future attacks. Recent examples of this include:

On 14 April 2015, Indian intelligence agencies issued an alert to Mumbai police indicating a possible terrorist attack by LeT targeting hotels and railway stations. The attack would comprise eight to 10 LeT operatives entering Mumbai via a sea route.

March 2015 Indian intelligence reporting indicated LeT had ten launching camps established in the border area of Jammu and Kashmir ready to infiltrate trained operatives into India.

As of mid‑March 2015, LeT was reported to have numerous camps in Pakistan‑occupied Kashmir where operatives were being trained for special operations under the direction of LeT chief of operations, Lakhvi. Indian intelligence agencies further indicated they held evidence of Lakhvi planning for a major terrorist operation in India.

In late December 2014, Indian security agencies issued a public warning indicating that LeT was planning a terrorist attack in India. Security was subsequently increased at Metro stations and other public areas in New Delhi.

In October 2014, police arrested eight LeT militants in North Kashmir alleged to have been planning a terrorist attack. Police seized small arms, ammunition and grenades. The militants were alleged to have been in contact with an LeT handler in Pakistan.

On 19 June 2013, Indian security agencies issued a warning for the coastal areas of Goa, following the receipt of intelligence which indicated intent by LeT to undertake a terrorist attack there.

In June 2012, police in Srinagar, Kashmir arrested five LeT operatives alleged to have been behind a May 2012disrupted car bomb attack. The operatives had acquired a vehicle, explosives and ignition devices.

Directly or indirectly assisting in or fostering the doing of terrorist acts

LeT provides support to domestic terrorist groups in India including the Indian Mujahideen. In early 2013, Indian officials stated LeT provided assistance to the Indian Mujahideen to undertake surveillance in preparation for an explosives attack in Hyderabad, India. On 21 February 2013, Indian Mujahideen operatives detonated two improvised explosive devices in Dilsukhnagar, Hyderabad killing 16 and injuring over 100. LeT training camps in Pakistan provide religious indoctrination and militant instruction to both LeT operatives and non‑LeT aligned jihadists.

LeT is known to have trained foreigners to conduct terrorist operations. British citizens trained by LeT include Richard Reid, who tried to blow up a trans‑Atlantic flight in 2001, and Dhiren Barot, who was convicted in 2006 of planning a bombing in London. Investigations indicate one of the British‑born suicide bombers responsible for the 7 July 2005 attacks in London, Shehzad Tanweer, may have received training at a LeT camp in Pakistan. LeT is also suspected of providing some funding and logistical support to the disrupted British trans‑Atlantic plane bombing plot in August 2006 using JuD as a cover. In 2009, LeT suspected chief of external operations Sajid Mir worked with now‑detained United States extremist, David Headley, on an aborted plot to attack a newspaper office in Copenhagen, Denmark. Aside from facilitating training, it is unclear if LeT sanctioned the terrorist activities of any of these foreign‑born individuals.

Advocating the doing of terrorist acts

During a television interview in April 2015, LeT Emir, Hafiz Saeed publicly confirmed his backing of jihad in Kashmir—with assistance from the Pakistan Government and army—asserting that freedom for Muslims in Kashmir could only be attained through jihad.


During a JuD convention in Lahore, Pakistan over 4‑5 December 2014, LeT Emir, Hafiz Saeed publicly asserted that Pakistani Mujahideen had a right to enter IaK for the purpose of liberating Kashmiris from Indian oppression. Further, Saeed has called for jihad in support of oppressed Muslims everywhere.

In August 2013, Indian intelligence agencies issued a warning of possible LeT attacks in Delhi. The alert was in response to calls from LeT Emir, Hafiz Saeed of his intent to spread jihad to all corners of India. Saeed allegedly stated that a Red Fort‑type attack needed to be carried out again—a probable reference to the LeT attack in 2000 on the Red Fort.

Conclusion

On the basis of the above information, ASIO assess LeT continues to directly and/or indirectly engage in, preparing, planning, assisting in, fostering or advocating the doing of terrorist acts. This assessment is corroborated by information provided by reliable and credible intelligence sources.

In the course of pursuing its objectives, LeT is known to have committed or threatened actions that:

cause serious damage to property or the death of persons, or endangers a person’s life or creates a serious risk to a person’s safety;

are intended to have those effects;

are done with the intention of advancing LeT’s political, religious or ideological causes;

are done with the intention of coercing or influencing by intimidation the government of a foreign country; and

are done with the intention of creating a serious risk to the safety of the public globally.

Other relevant information

Links to other terrorist groups or networks

LeT is known to maintain and foster links with a variety of Islamist extremist groups including the Afghan Taliban, al‑Qa‘ida, Harkat ul‑Jihad al‑Islami and Jaish‑e‑Mohammad. LeT receives and provides support to domestic based groups and networks in India most notably the Indian Mujahideen and the Students Islamic Movement of India—as well as militant groups in Kashmir.

Additionally, LeT reportedly has been involved in conflicts involving threats to Muslims outside of South Asia including Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo.

Links to Australia

In 2007, a French court convicted French national Willie Brigitte, for planning terrorist attacks in Australia in 2003 in conjunction with LeT suspected chief of external operations, Sajid Mir. Brigitte’s Australian associate, Faheem Khalid Lodhi, was also convicted of planning acts of terrorism by a New South Wales Supreme Court jury in June 2006. In June 2008, Lodhi lost an appeal to the High Court of Australia to have his case overturned.

Threat to Australian interests

LeT terrorist attacks in India have impacted Western interests there—including Australian interests—two Australians were killed in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. While LeT may not specifically target Australian interests, Australian interests may be impacted in LeT attacks directed at others—particularly mass casualty attacks against soft targets such as hotels, transport infrastructure and tourist sites.

Other designations

The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Pakistan and India have listed LeT as a terrorist organisation. LeT is listed in the UN Security Council 1267 Committee’s consolidated list. This listing has been adopted on the Consolidated List maintained in Australia by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, under the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945.

Posting articles like this is your method of convincing your own self of how right you are or principled your stance is. It has little effect on those who're already relatively informed about the subject.

I'm not going to indulge in your game of posting "feel-insightful" articles from web. If i'm ever in the mood of playing this game, I'll flood this thread with articles affirming how your Modi was guilty of tacit approval, condoning, and even facilitating the massacre of Muslims in Gujrat, all from neutral sources. If I decide to elaborate here Modi's long-standing ideological, political, and emotional attachment with an internationally recognized Hindu supremacist orgnaizaion RSS, even your incessant denial will be exhausted.

For the record, I'm aware of LeT and JuD's profiles and agree with you in that they've been involved in violence directed at Indian assets and interests. Although, I personally reject all of their activities that harm Indian security forces inside India, or Indian public anywhere, but seeing as how your security agencies are involved in brutal repression of Kashmiris (blinding them, torturing them, extrajudicial killings etc.), I'm of the opinion that they're made themselves justified targets and any retaliatory action against them is only fair.

Seriously, get a better logic and rationale. It is quite irritating when kids spawn up trying to make points which are irrelevant. Or, leave it, you would not have used this line if you had anything better.

Again, you seem to be severely lacking in terms of having the basics of etiquette of conversation. Geo-politics is good and all, but general civilities are important too. Try spending some part of your online time on developing these traits too because currently you're projecting yourself as a very crude person.

Also, remember personal insults only expose insecurities of the person who utters them. You've demeaned only yourself by making these remarks.

THE GREAT DIVIDE

The violent legacy of Indian Partition

By William Dalrymple





Partition displaced fifteen million people and killed more than a million.PHOTOGRAPH BY MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE / LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION / GETTY


In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never made it.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered.

Nisid Hajari, in “Midnight’s Furies” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), his fast-paced new narrative history of Partition and its aftermath, writes, “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”

By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead. The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched as it may seem. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost unimaginable violence. The acclaimed Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal has called Partition “the central historical event in twentieth century South Asia.” She writes, “A defining moment that is neither beginning nor end, partition continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”

After the Second World War, Britain simply no longer had the resources with which to control its greatest imperial asset, and its exit from India was messy, hasty, and clumsily improvised. From the vantage point of the retreating colonizers, however, it was in one way fairly successful. Whereas British rule in India had long been marked by violent revolts and brutal suppressions, the British Army was able to march out of the country with barely a shot fired and only seven casualties. Equally unexpected was the ferocity of the ensuing bloodbath.

The question of how India’s deeply intermixed and profoundly syncretic culture unravelled so quickly has spawned a vast literature. The polarization of Hindus and Muslims occurred during just a couple of decades of the twentieth century, but by the middle of the century it was so complete that many on both sides believed that it was impossible for adherents of the two religions to live together peacefully. Recently, a spate of new work has challenged seventy years of nationalist mythmaking. There has also been a widespread attempt to record oral memories of Partition before the dwindling generation that experienced it takes its memories to the grave.

The first Islamic conquests of India happened in the eleventh century, with the capture of Lahore, in 1021. Persianized Turks from what is now central Afghanistan seized Delhi from its Hindu rulers in 1192. By 1323, they had established a sultanate as far south as Madurai, toward the tip of the peninsula, and there were other sultanates all the way from Gujarat, in the west, to Bengal, in the east.

Today, these conquests are usually perceived as having been made by “Muslims,” but medieval Sanskrit inscriptions don’t identify the Central Asian invaders by that term. Instead, the newcomers are identified by linguistic and ethnic affiliation, most typically as Turushka—Turks—which suggests that they were not seen primarily in terms of their religious identity. Similarly, although the conquests themselves were marked by carnage and by the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist sites, India soon embraced and transformed the new arrivals. Within a few centuries, a hybrid Indo-Islamic civilization emerged, along with hybrid languages—notably Deccani and Urdu—which mixed the Sanskrit-derived vernaculars of India with Turkish, Persian, and Arabic words.

Eventually, around a fifth of South Asia’s population came to identify itself as Muslim. The Sufi mystics associated with the spread of Islam often regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired. Some even took on the yogic practices of Hindu sadhus, rubbing their bodies with ashes, or hanging upside down while praying. In village folk traditions, the practice of the two faiths came close to blending into one. Hindus would visit the graves of Sufi masters and Muslims would leave offerings at Hindu shrines. Sufis were especially numerous in Punjab and Bengal—the same regions that, centuries later, saw the worst of the violence—and there were mass conversions among the peasants there.

The cultural mixing took place throughout the subcontinent. In medieval Hindu texts from South India, the Sultan of Delhi is sometimes talked about as the incarnation of the god Vishnu. In the seventeenth century, the Mughal crown prince Dara Shikoh had the Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the central text of Hinduism, translated into Persian, and composed a study of Hinduism and Islam, “The Mingling of Two Oceans,” which stressed the affinities of the two faiths. Not all Mughal rulers were so open-minded. The atrocities wrought by Dara’s bigoted and puritanical brother Aurangzeb have not been forgotten by Hindus. But the last Mughal emperor, enthroned in 1837, wrote that Hinduism and Islam “share the same essence,” and his court lived out this ideal at every level.

In the nineteenth century, India was still a place where traditions, languages, and cultures cut across religious groupings, and where people did not define themselves primarily through their religious faith. A Sunni Muslim weaver from Bengal would have had far more in common in his language, his outlook, and his fondness for fish with one of his Hindu colleagues than he would with a Karachi Shia or a Pashtun Sufi from the North-West Frontier.

Many writers persuasively blame the British for the gradual erosion of these shared traditions. As Alex von Tunzelmann observes in her history “Indian Summer,” when “the British started to define ‘communities’ based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged.” Indeed, the British scholar Yasmin Khan, in her acclaimed history “The Great Partition,” judges that Partition “stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths.”


Other assessments, however, emphasize that Partition, far from emerging inevitably out of a policy of divide-and-rule, was largely a contingent development. As late as 1940, it might still have been avoided. Some earlier work, such as that of the British historian Patrick French, in “Liberty or Death,” shows how much came down to a clash of personalities among the politicians of the period, particularly between Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, and Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, the two most prominent leaders of the Hindu-dominated Congress Party. All three men were Anglicized lawyers who had received at least part of their education in England. Jinnah and Gandhi were both Gujarati. Potentially, they could have been close allies. But by the early nineteen-forties their relationship had grown so poisonous that they could barely be persuaded to sit in the same room.

At the center of the debates lies the personality of Jinnah, the man most responsible for the creation of Pakistan. In Indian-nationalist accounts, he appears as the villain of the story; for Pakistanis, he is the Father of the Nation. As French points out, “Neither side seems especially keen to claim him as a real human being, the Pakistanis restricting him to an appearance on banknotes in demure Islamic costume.” One of the virtues of Hajari’s new history is its more balanced portrait of Jinnah. He was certainly a tough, determined negotiator and a chilly personality; the Congress Party politician Sarojini Naidu joked that she needed to put on a fur coat in his presence. Yet Jinnah was in many ways a surprising architect for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. A staunch secularist, he drank whiskey, rarely went to a mosque, and was clean-shaven and stylish, favoring beautifully cut Savile Row suits and silk ties. Significantly, he chose to marry a non-Muslim woman, the glamorous daughter of a Parsi businessman. She was famous for her revealing saris and for once bringing her husband ham sandwiches on voting day.

Jinnah, far from wishing to introduce religion into South Asian politics, deeply resented the way Gandhi brought spiritual sensibilities into the political discussion, and once told him, as recorded by one colonial governor, that “it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done.” He believed that doing so emboldened religious chauvinists on all sides. Indeed, he had spent the early part of his political career, around the time of the First World War, striving to bring together the Muslim League and the Congress Party. “I say to my Musalman friends: Fear not!” he said, and he described the idea of Hindu domination as “a bogey, put before you by your enemies to frighten you, to scare you away from cooperation and unity, which are essential for the establishment of self-government.” In 1916, Jinnah, who, at the time, belonged to both parties, even succeeded in getting them to present the British with a common set of demands, the Lucknow Pact. He was hailed as “the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.”

But Jinnah felt eclipsed by the rise of Gandhi and Nehru, after the First World War. In December, 1920, he was booed off a Congress Party stage when he insisted on calling his rival “Mr. Gandhi” rather than referring to him by his spiritual title, Mahatma—Great Soul. Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the mutual dislike grew, and by 1940 Jinnah had steered the Muslim League toward demanding a separate homeland for the Muslim minority of South Asia. This was a position that he had previously opposed, and, according to Hajari, he privately “reassured skeptical colleagues that Partition was only a bargaining chip.” Even after his demands for the creation of Pakistan were met, he insisted that his new country would guarantee freedom of religious expression. In August, 1947, in his first address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, he said, “You may belong to any religion, or caste, or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State.” But it was too late: by the time the speech was delivered, violence between Hindus and Muslims had spiralled beyond anyone’s ability to control it.

In March, 1947, a glamorous minor royal named Lord Louis Mountbatten flew into Delhi as Britain’s final Viceroy, his mission to hand over power and get out of India as quickly as possible. 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,” Mountbatten deployed his considerable charm to persuade all the parties to agree to Partition as the only remaining option.

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.

None of the disputants were happy with the compromise that Mountbatten had forced on them. Jinnah, who had succeeded in creating a new country, regarded the truncated state he was given—a slice of India’s eastern and western extremities, separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory—as “a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten” travesty of the land he had fought for. He warned that the partition of Punjab and Bengal “will be sowing the seeds of future serious trouble.”

On the evening of August 14, 1947, in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, Mountbatten and his wife settled down to watch a Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette.” A short distance away, at the bottom of Raisina Hill, in India’s Constituent Assembly, Nehru rose to his feet to make his most famous speech. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny,” he declaimed. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

But outside the well-guarded enclaves of New Delhi the horror was well under way. That same evening, as the remaining British officials in Lahore set off for the railway station, they had to pick their way through streets littered with dead bodies. On the platforms, they found the railway staff hosing down pools of blood. Hours earlier, a group of Hindus fleeing the city had been massacred by a Muslim mob as they sat waiting for a train. As the Bombay Express pulled out of Lahore and began its journey south, the officials could see that Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from village after village.

What followed, especially in Punjab, the principal center of the violence, was one of the great human tragedies of the twentieth century. As Nisid Hajari writes, “Foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas burst out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors.”


Within a few months, the landscape of South Asia had changed irrevocably. In 1941, Karachi, designated the first capital of Pakistan, was 47.6 per cent Hindu. Delhi, the capital of independent India, was one-third Muslim. By the end of the decade, almost all the Hindus of Karachi had fled, while two hundred thousand Muslims had been forced out of Delhi. The changes made in a matter of months remain indelible seventy years later.

More than twenty years ago, I visited the novelist Ahmed Ali. Ali was the author of “Twilight in Delhi,” which was published, in 1940, with the support of Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, and is probably still the finest novel written about the Indian capital. Ali had grown up in the mixed world of old Delhi, but by the time I visited him he was living in exile in Karachi. “The civilization of Delhi came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim,” he told me. Now “Delhi is dead. . . . All that made Delhi special has been uprooted and dispersed.” He lamented especially the fact that the refinement of Delhi Urdu had been destroyed: “Now the language has shrunk. So many words are lost.”

Like Ali, the Bombay-based writer Saadat Hasan Manto saw the creation of Pakistan as both a personal and a communal disaster. The tragedy of Partition, he wrote, was not that there were now two countries instead of one but the realization that “human beings in both countries were slaves, slaves of bigotry . . . slaves of religious passions, slaves of animal instincts and barbarity.” The madness he witnessed and the trauma he experienced in the process of leaving Bombay and emigrating to Lahore marked him for the rest of his life. Yet it also transformed him into the supreme master of the Urdu short story. Before Partition, Manto was an essayist, screenwriter, and journalist of varying artistic attainment. Afterward, during several years of frenzied creativity, he became an author worthy of comparison with Chekhov, Zola, and Maupassant—all of whom he translated and adopted as models. Although his work is still little known outside South Asia, a number of fine new translations—by Aatish Taseer, Matt Reeck, and Aftab Ahmad—promise to bring him a wider audience.

As recently illuminated in Ayesha Jalal’s “The Pity of Partition”—Jalal is Manto’s great-niece—he was baffled by the logic of Partition. “Despite trying,” he wrote, “I could not separate India from Pakistan, and Pakistan from India.” Who, he asked, owned the literature that had been written in undivided India? Although he faced criticism and censorship, he wrote obsessively about the sexual violence that accompanied Partition. “When I think of the recovered women, I think only of their bloated bellies—what will happen to those bellies?” he asked. Would the children so conceived “belong to Pakistan or Hindustan?”

The most extraordinary feature of Manto’s writing is that, for all his feeling, he never judges. Instead, he urges us to try to understand what is going on in the minds of all his characters, the murderers as well as the murdered, the rapists as well as the raped. In the short story “Colder Than Ice,” we enter the bedroom of Ishwar Singh, a Sikh murderer and rapist, who has suffered from impotence ever since his abduction of a beautiful Muslim girl. As he tries to explain his affliction to Kalwant Kaur, his current lover, he tells the story of discovering the girl after breaking into a house and killing her family:

“I could have slashed her throat, but I didn’t. . . . I thought she had gone into a faint, so I carried her over my shoulder all the way to the canal which runs outside the city. . . . Then I laid her down on the grass, behind some bushes and . . . first I thought I would shuffle her a bit . . . but then I decided to trump her right away. . . . ”

“What happened?” she asked.

“I threw the trump . . . but, but . . . ”

His voice sank.

Kalwant Kaur shook him violently. “What happened?”

Ishwar Singh opened his eyes. “She was dead. . . . I had carried a dead body . . . a heap of cold flesh . . . jani, [my beloved] give me your hand.”


Kalwant Kaur placed her hand on his. It was colder than ice.

Manto’s most celebrated Partition story, “Toba Tek Singh,” proceeds from a simple premise, laid out in the opening lines:

Two or three years after the 1947 Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums were to be handed over to India.

It was difficult to say whether the proposal made any sense or not. However, the decision had been taken at the topmost level on both sides.

In a few thousand darkly satirical words, Manto manages to convey that the lunatics are much saner than those making the decision for their removal, and that, as Jalal puts it, “the madness of Partition was far greater than the insanity of all the inmates put together.” The tale ends with the eponymous hero stranded between the two borders: “On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.”

Manto’s life after Partition forms a tragic parallel with the institutional insanity depicted in “Toba Tek Singh.” Far from being welcomed in Pakistan, he was disowned as reactionary by its Marxist-leaning literary set. After the publication of “Colder Than Ice,” he was charged with obscenity and sentenced to prison with hard labor, although he was acquitted on appeal. The need to earn a living forced Manto into a state of hyper-productivity; for a period in 1951, he was writing a book a month, at the rate of one story a day. Under this stress, he fell into a depression and became an alcoholic. His family had him committed to a mental asylum in an attempt to curb his drinking, but he died of its effects in 1955, at the age of forty-two.

For all the elements of tragic farce in Manto’s stories, and the tormented state of mind of Manto himself, the reality of Partition was no less filled with absurdity. Vazira Zamindar’s excellent recent study, “The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia,” opens with an account of Ghulam Ali, a Muslim from Lucknow, a city in central North India, who specialized in making artificial limbs. He opted to live in India, but at the moment when Partition was announced he happened to be at a military workshop on the Pakistan side of the border. Within months, the two new countries were at war over Kashmir, and Ali was pressed into service by the Pakistani Army and prevented from returning to his home, in India. In 1950, the Army discharged him on the ground that he had become a citizen of India. Yet when he got to the frontier he was not recognized as Indian, and was arrested for entering without a travel permit. In 1951, after serving a prison sentence in India, he was deported back to Pakistan. Six years later, he was still being deported back and forth, shuttling between the prisons and refugee camps of the two new states. His official file closes with the Muslim soldier under arrest in a camp for Hindu prisoners on the Pakistani side of the border.

Ever since 1947, India and Pakistan have nourished a deep-rooted mutual antipathy. They have fought two inconclusive wars over the disputed region of Kashmir—the only Muslim-majority area to remain within India. In 1971, they fought over the secession of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh. In 1999, after Pakistani troops crossed into an area of Kashmir called Kargil, the two countries came alarmingly close to a nuclear exchange. Despite periodic gestures toward peace negotiations and moments of rapprochement, the Indo-Pak conflict remains the dominant geopolitical reality of the region. In Kashmir, a prolonged insurgency against Indian rule has left thousands dead and still gives rise to intermittent violence. Meanwhile, in Pakistan, where half the female population remains illiterate, defense eats up a fifth of the budget, dwarfing the money available for health, education, infrastructure, and development.

It is easy to understand why Pakistan might feel insecure: India’s population, its defense budget, and its economy are seven times as large as Pakistan’s. But the route that Pakistan has taken to defend itself against Indian demographic and military superiority has been disastrous for both countries. For more than thirty years, Pakistan’s Army and its secret service, the I.S.I., have relied on jihadi proxies to carry out their aims. These groups have been creating as much—if not more—trouble for Pakistan as they have for the neighbors the I.S.I. hopes to undermine: Afghanistan and India.

Today, both India and Pakistan remain crippled by the narratives built around memories of the crimes of Partition, as politicians (particularly in India) and the military (particularly in Pakistan) continue to stoke the hatreds of 1947 for their own ends. Nisid Hajari ends his book by pointing out that the rivalry between India and Pakistan “is getting more, rather than less, dangerous: the two countries’ nuclear arsenals are growing, militant groups are becoming more capable, and rabid media outlets on both sides are shrinking the scope for moderate voices.” Moreover, Pakistan, nuclear-armed and deeply unstable, is not a threat only to India; it is now the world’s problem, the epicenter of many of today’s most alarming security risks. It was out of madrassas in Pakistan that the Taliban emerged. That regime, which was then the most retrograde in modern Islamic history, provided sanctuary to Al Qaeda’s leadership even after 9/11.

It is difficult to disagree with Hajari’s conclusion: “It is well past time that the heirs to Nehru and Jinnah finally put 1947’s furies to rest.” But the current picture is not encouraging. In Delhi, a hard-line right-wing government rejects dialogue with Islamabad. Both countries find themselves more vulnerable than ever to religious extremism. In a sense, 1947 has yet to come to an end.

Nice read. It's unclear whether this is supposed to emphasize something that isn't already well established.

The reason why I called your impulsive attempt at comparing Modi with Jinnah and Gandhi ludicrous was because it simply is, ummm, ludicrous. The whole concept that in some manner Modi's Hindu Nationalist authority's crimes (or condoning of crimes) are equivalent to Jinnah and Gandhi's method and means of politics (that supposedly resulted in tragedies of partition) is full of logical holes.

Jinnah and Gandhi didn't not participate in or promote politics of hate. Although Mahatama Gandhi would later be criticized by some to have indulged in a strain of sub-nationalistic politics with Hindu religious hues, M A Jinnah's record was spotless as far as the use of religion as a tool to motivate and mobilize masses was concerned. The partition and the horrors lying therein are simply outcomes of bludgeoning intolerance between two largest communities on undivided India, Hindus and Muslims, whose seeds were sown as far back as late nineteenth century. There was hardly anything, if at all, that both Jinnah and Gandhi had personally or directly done that led to the humanitarian crisis following partition, even smaller was their capability to prevent it.

Modi, on the other hand, has had long and deep association with established Hindu extremist organization RSS and is often regarded to draw ideological inspiration from the fascist group. His tacit approval, facilitation, and the act of allowing the carnage in state of Gujrat (of which he was Chief Minister at the time) to proceed unhindered makes him directly complicit of these crimes and sufficiently establishes his guilt.

The courts in our part of the world off-course are extremely prone to political pressure, coercion, and manipulation through financial means. Their verdict in matters such as these, for any informed and rational mind, would essentially be good for nothing - to put it bluntly.