Freedom at Midnight by Collins and Lapierre
Ref: Collins & Lapierre (1975). Freedom at Midnight. Williams Collins Pub.
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Summary
At the start of 1947, barely a thousand British members of the Indian Civil Service remained in India, still somehow holding 400 million people in their administrative grasp.
Partition Leaders
Indian National Congress: Represented by Nehru, Patel and its president Acharya Kripalani.
Moslem League: Represented by Jinnah, Liaqat Ali Khan and Rab Nishtar.
Sikh: Represented by Baldev Singh.
British: Represented by Louis Mountbatten.
They were now going to be called upon to unravel the web left behind by three centuries of common habitation of the sub-continent, to take to bits the product of three centuries of technology. The cash in the banks; stamps in the post offices; books in the libraries; debts; assets; the world's third largest railway; jails; prisoners; inkpots; brooms; research centres; hospitals; universities; institutions; articles staggering in number and variety would be theirs to divide.
Partition was not going to be the 'surgical operation' Jinnah had promised Mountbatten. It would be a sickening slaughter that would turn friend on friend, neighbor on neighbor, stranger on stranger, in thousands of villages. Their blood would be shed to achieve an abhorrent, useless end, the division of the sub-continent into two antagonistic parts condemned to gnaw at each other's entrails.
India and Pakistan would come into existence without the leaders of either nation being aware of two of the vital components of their nationhood, the number of citizens whose allegiance they commanded and the location of their most important frontiers. Thousands of people in hundreds of villages in the Punjab and Bengal would have to spend 15 August in fear and uncertainty, unable to celebrate because they would not know to which dominion they were going to belong.
Hindu, Moslem and Sikh, those refugees were the innocent and the unarmed, illiterate peasants whose only life had been the fields they worked, most of whom did not know what a Viceroy was, who were indifferent to the Congress Party and the Moslem League, who had never bothered with issues like partition or boundary lines or even the freedom in whose name they'd been plunged into despair.
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Islam
Major Beliefs
There is only one God, Allah.
The Koran forbids the Faithful to represent him in any shape or form.
Idols and idolatry are abhorrent; paintings and statues blasphemous. A mosque was a spare, solemn place in which the only decorations permitted were abstract designs and the repeated representations of the 99 names of God.
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Hinduism
Major Beliefs
The body is a temporary garment for the soul. Each life was only one of his soul's many incarnations in its journey through eternity, a chain beginning and ending in some nebulous merger with the cosmos.
Karma, the accumulated good and evil of each mortal lifetime, was a soul's continuing burden. It determined whether, in its next incarnation, that soul would move up or down in the hierarchy of caste.
Hindu ancients maintained that only by forcing sexual energy inward to fuel the furnace of spiritual force, could a man achieve the spiritual intensity necessary for self-realization.
Hindus worship God in almost any form he chose: in animals, ancestors, sages, spirits, natural forces, divine incarnations, the Absolute. He could find God manifested in snakes, phalli, water, fire, the planets and the stars.
The Central Trinity: Positive, Negative, Neutral forces, eternally in search of the perfect equilibrium, the attainment of the absolute.
Brahma: The Creator.
Shiva: The Destroyer.
Vishnu: The Preserver.
Practices
Brahmacharya: The curbing of sexual desires practiced by Hindus. To Ghandi, its meaning was expanded to the control of the senses- restraint in emotion, diet, speech, the suppression of anger, violence and hate.
Misc
Hinduism was brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the N. to wrest the subcontinent from its semi-aboriginal Dravidian inhabitants. Its sages had written their sacred Vedas on the banks of the Indus centuries before Christ's birth.
Kali: The Hindu Goddess of Destruction, a fiery-tongue ogress garlanded with coils of writhing snakes and human skulls.
Third Eye: An ancient Hindu symbol, which was reality behind appearances, a device to shelter its bearer from the influence of the evil eye or the malevolent designs of those who wished them ill.
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Caste System
Every occupation has a caste, splitting society into a myriad of closed guilds into which a man was condemned by his birth to work, live, marry and die. So precise are their definitions that an iron smelter is in a different caste as an ironsmith.
According too Vedic scripture, caste originated with Brahma, the Creator.
Brahmins, the highest caste, sprang from-his mouth; Kashtriyas, warriors and rulers, from his biceps; Vaishyas, traders and businessmen, from his thigh; Sudras, artisans and craftsmen, from his feet. Below them, were the outcasts, the Untouchables who had not sprang from divine soil.
The origins of the caste system, however, were notably less divine than those suggested by the Vedas. It had been a scheme employed by Hinduism's Aryan founders to perpetuate the enslavement of India's dark, Dravidian populations. The word for caste, varna, meant color, and centuries later, the dark skins of India's Untouchables gave graphic proof of the system's real origins.
Five Original Cast Divisions (subdivided into ~5000 sub-castes)
Brahmins: The Priestly Class.
Kshatriyas: The Warrior Class.
Vaishyas: Commoners conducting productive labor; money-lenders, merchants, landowners.
Sudras: The Worker class including artisans and laborers.
Untouchables: Comprise 1/6 of India’s population. Supposedly condemned by their sins in a previous incarnation to a casteless existence. Readily identifiable by the darkness of their skin, their cringing submissiveness, their ragged dress. Their name expressed the contamination which stained a caste Hindu at the slightest contact with them, a stain which had to be removed by a ritual, purifying bath. Even their footprints in the soil could defile some Brahmin neighborhoods. An Untouchable was obliged to shrink from the path of an approaching caste Hindu lest his shadow fall across his route and soil him. In some parts of India, Untouchables were allowed to leave their shacks only at night. There, they were known as Invisibles. No Hindu could eat in the presence of an Untouchable, drink water drawn from a well by his hands, use utensils he'd soiled by his touch. Many Hindu temples were closed to them. Their children were not accepted in schools. Even in death they remained pariahs. Untouchables were not allowed to use the common cremation ground. Invariably too poor to buy logs for their own funeral pyres, their corpses were usually consumed by vultures rather than flames. In some parts of India they were still bought and sold like serfs along with the estates they worked. A young Untouchable was generally assigned the same value as an ox. In a country of social progress, they enjoyed only one privilege. Whenever an epidemic struck down a sacred cow, the Untouchable who carted off the rotten carcass was allowed to sell the meat to his fellow outcasts.
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Sikhism
Sikhism was born of the impact of monotheistic Islam on polytheistic Hinduism along the warring frontiers of the Punjab where the two faiths had first collided.
The Guru baptized each with a name ending in Singh (‘lion’). They should, he said, stand out among the multitudes, men so instantly recognizable they could never deny their faith. They would have to develop the courage to defend it with their lives.
Sikhs follow the law of the five 'Ks':
Kesh: Let their bears and hair grow.
Kangha: Fix a steel comb in their uncut hair.
Kara: Carry a steel Bangle.
Kirpan: Carry a sword.
Kuccha: Wear shorts to have a warrior’s mobility.
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Moslem-Hindi-Sikh Issues
The root of India’s religious problem was the age-old antagonism between the countries 300M Hindus and 100M Moslems.
The greatest barrier to Hindu-Moslem understanding was the Caste system.
A spectre grew in Moslem minds: in an independent India they would be drowned by Hindu majority rule, condemned to the existence of a powerless minority in the land their Moghul forebears had once ruled.
The vast majority of India’s Moslems were Untouchables, seeking in the brotherhood of Islam an acceptance their own faith could offer them only in some distant incarnation. The Hindus did not forget that the mass of Moslems were the descendants of Untouchables who'd fled Hinduism to escape their misery.
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Partition & Pakistan
Jinnah was the overwhelming roadblock in attempts to keep India united. The basis of Jinnah's argument for Pakistan was that India's Moslem minority should not be ruled by its Hindu majority.
Jinnah and Nehru entrusted the responsibility to an Indo-Pakistani boundary commission, presided over by a British Lawyer with no experience of India.
To satisfy the exigent demands of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to be carved up. The result would make Pakistan a geographic aberration, a nation of two heads separated by 970 miles of Himalayan peaks and Indian territory.
No aspect of partition, however, was more illogical than the fact that, even if Jinnah's Pakistan were fully realized, it would still deliver barely half of India's Moslems from the alleged inequities of Hindu majority rule which justified the state in the first place. The remaining Moslems were so scattered throughout the rest of India that it was humanly impossible to separate them. Islands in a Hindu sea, they would be the first victims of a conflict between the countries, India's Moslem hostages to Pakistan's good behaviour. Indeed, even after the amputation, India would still harbour almost 50 million Moslems, a figure which would make her the third largest Moslem nation in the world, after Indonesia and the new state drawn from her own womb.
The 'k' in Pakistan was for Kashmir.
'We shall have India divided or we shall have India destroyed.'-Jinnah.
Partition is sheer madness,' and 'no one would ever induce me to agree to it were it not for this fantastic communal madness that has seized everybody and leaves no other course open'.-Mountbatten.
'For the love of God,' he wrote to Louis Mountbatten, 'do not give India her independence on 15 August. If floods, drought, famine and massacres follow, it will be because free India was born on a day cursed by the stars.'
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Kashmir
The UN has called repeatedly for a plebiscite on Kashmir’s future, a referendum which would almost certainly result in an overwhelming; majority for either independence or union with Pakistan. What makes the problem so intractable, however, is the near-certainty that any Indian government which would even contemplate either of those possibilities would risk unleashing violence by Hindu militants on India's Moslem minority, violence that would probably far exceed anything Kashmir has witnessed to date.
When tribesmen organized and armed by Pakistan descended on his capital, Srinagar, later that autumn, Singh sent out an SOS for help to New Delhi. At that point, it is true, Mountbatten, now Governor-General of the new Dominion of India, told Nehru that he could not legally order Indian troops into Kashmir unless the Maharaja signed a formal act acceding to India. An emissary was dispatched to Srinagar with an act of accession. Singh signed it in great haste and Indian troops were airlifted to Kashmir. They are still there today, and the problem born that autumn day continues to poison relations between the two nations.
The Moslems were worried that the infidel Hindu Maharaja was about to join his state to India. If something was not done urgently, India, he warned, would soon occupy Kashmir, and millions of their Moslem brothers would fall under Hindu rule.
'Well,' Mountbatten said, 'it's up to you, but I think you should consider it very carefully since after all almost 90% of your people are Moslem. But, if you don't, then you must join India. In that case, I will see that an infantry division is sent up here to preserve the integrity of your boundaries.' 'No,' replied the Maharaja, 'I don't wish to join India either. I wish to be independent.' Those were just the words the Viceroy did not want to hear. 'I'm sorry,' he exploded, 'you just can't be independent. You're a land-locked country. You're over-sized and under-populated. What I mind most though is that your attitude is bound to lead to strife between India and Pakistan. You're going to have two rival countries at daggers drawn for your neighbors. You'll be the cause of a tug-of-war between them. You'll end up being a battlefield. That's what'll happen. You'll lose your throne and your life, too, if you're not careful.'
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India’s Princes
The princes' anachronistic situation dated from Britain's haphazard conquest of India when rulers who received the English with open arms or proved worthy foes on the battlefield were allowed to remain on their thrones provided they acknowledged Britain as the paramount power.
In both practice and folklore, the elephant had been for generations the princes' preferred means of locomotion. Symbols of the cosmic order, born from the hand of Rama, they were in Hindu mythology the pillars of the universe, the supports of the sky and the clouds.
With all the revenue, duties and taxes amassed in their states at their disposal, the princes of India were uniquely equipped to indulge their personal eccentricities.
Whether Hindu or Moslem, the harem was an integral part of a real ruler's palace,
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India
Flag of India: Gandhi had designed that banner of a militant Congress himself. At the centre of its horizontal bands of saffron, white and green, he had placed his personal seal, the humble instrument he'd proposed to the masses of India as the instrument of their non-violent redemption, the spinning-wheel. However, the place of honour on the national flag was assigned to another wheel, the martial sign the conquering warriors of Ashoka, founder of the Hindu empire, had borne upon their shields. Framed by a pair of lions for force and courage, Ashoka's proud symbol of strength and authority, his dharma chakra, the wheel of the cosmic order, became the symbol of a new India.
Indus: River; which gave its name to the Indian sub-continent.
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People
Mohandas Karamchand 'Mahatma' (Great Soul) Ghandi (2 Oct, 1869- 30 Jan, 1948): Indian lawyer and anti-colonial nationalist who employed non-violent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India’s independence from British rule, later inspiring movements for civil rights and freedoms across the world.
Ghandi challenged almost all the Western ideals that had taken root in India. Science should not order human values; technology should not order society; and civilization was not the indefinite multiplication of human wants but their deliberate limitation, so that essentials could be equitably shared by all. His nightmare was a machine-dominated industrial society which would suck India's villagers from the countryside into her blighted urban slums, sever their contact with the social unit that was their natural environment, destroy their ties of family and religion, all for the faceless, miserable existence of an industrial complex spewing out goods men didn't really need.
Ghandi wanted each village to become self-sufficient units, able to produce its own food, cloth, milk, fruit and vegetables, to educate its young and nurse its ill.
Every minister, he said, should wear khadi exclusively and live in a simple bungalow with no servants. He should not own a car, should be free of the taint of caste, spend at least one hour a day in physical work, spinning, or growing food and vegetables to ease the food shortage. He should avoid 'foreign furniture, sofas, tables and chairs' and go around without bodyguards. Above all, Gandhi was sure 'no leader of an independent India will hesitate to give an example by cleaning out his own toilet box'.
The two doctrines that made Ghandi world-famous: non-violence and civil disobedience.
Gandhi sought a doctrine that would force change by the example of the good, reconcile men with the strength of God instead of dividing them by the strength of man.
Ghandi discovered his three teachers in S. Africa
Ruskin: Renounce all material possessions and live according to Ruskin's ideals. Riches, Ruskin wrote, were just a tool to secure power over men. A laborer with a spade served society as truly as a lawyer with a brief, and the life of labour, of the tiller of the soil, is the life worth living.
Tolstoy: Pacifism.
Thoreau: The individual's right to ignore unjust laws and refuse his allegiance to a government whose tyranny had become unbearable. To be right, he said, was more honorable than to be law-abiding.
Rabindranath Tagore, India's Nobel Prize winner, conferred on Gandhi the appellation he would carry for the rest of his life, 'Mahatnia'. 'The Great Soul in Beggar's Garb', he called him.
To follow him, his supporters did not have to break the law or brave police clubs. They had only to do nothing.
'Gandhiji's non-violence threw Hindus to the mercy of their enemies.
The lonely, miserable Gandhi decided the only way out of his agony was to become an English gentleman. He threw away his Bombay clothes and got a new wardrobe. It included a silk top-hat, an evening suit, patent-leather boots, white gloves and even a silver-tipped walking stick. He bought hair lotion to plaster his unwilling black hair on to his skull. He spent hours in front of a mirror contemplating his appearance and learning to tie a tie. To win the social acceptance he longed for, he bought a violin, joined a dancing class, hired a French tutor and an elocution teacher. The results of that poignant little charade were as disastrous as his earlier encounter with goat's meat. The only sound he learned to coax from his violin was a dissonant wail. His feet refused to acknowledge three-quarter time, his tongue the French language, and no amount of elocution lessons were going to free the spirit struggling to escape from under his crippling shyness. Even a visit to a brothel was a failure. Gandhi couldn't get past the parlour.
He denounced modern medicine for its emphasis on the body's physical aspects at the expense of the spirit, for counselling pills and drugs when what was needed was restraint and self-discipline, for being too concerned with money.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah (25 Dec, 1876-11 Sep, 1948): Barrister, Politician, and Founder of Pakistan. Jinnah served as the leader of the All-India Muslim League from 1913 to the inception of Pakistan on 14 Aug, 1947, and then as the Dominion of Pakistan’s first governor-general until his death.
A more improbable leader of India's Moslem masses could hardly be imagined. The only thing Moslem about Mohammed Ali Jinnah was his parents' religion. He drank, ate pork, religiously shaved his beard each morning and just as religiously avoided the mosque each Friday. God and the Koran had no place in Jinnah's vision of the world. His political foe, Gandhi, knew more verses of the Moslem Holy Book than he did. He had been able to achieve the remarkable feat of securing the allegiance of the vast majority of India's Moslems without being able to articulate more than a few sentences in their traditional tongue, Urdu.
Sir Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten (25 Jun, 1900- 27 Aug, 1979): 1st Earl of Burma, British Naval Officer, and Colonial administer who oversaw the end of British Colonial rule in India.
The pomp and panoply (that Mountbatten sought) designed to give him a viceregal aura of glamour and power, to provide him a framework which would give his actions an added dimension.
When Churchill had offered Mountbatten the Asian command, he had asked for 24 hours to ponder the offer. 'Why,' snarled Churchill, 'don't you think you can do it?' 'Sir,' replied Mountbatten, 'I suffer from the congenital weakness of believing I can do anything.'
In barely two months, virtually a one-man band, he had achieved the impossible, established a dialogue with India's leaders, set the basis of an agreement, persuaded his Indian interlocutors to accept it, extracted the wholehearted support of both the government and the opposition in London. He had skirted with dexterity and a little luck around the pitfalls barring his route. And as his final gesture he had entered the cage of the old lion himself, convinced Churchill to draw in his claws and left him, too, murmuring his approbation
Jawaharlal (Pandit) Nehru (14 Nov, 1889- 27 May, 1964): Indian anti-colonial nationalist, secular humanist, social democrat, and the first PM of an independent India.
Nehru was blackballed when he applied for membership in the local British Club. He might have been a product of Harrow and Cambridge, but to the all-white, all British-and devotedly middle-class-member of the Club, he was still a black Indian. The bitterness caused by that rejection haunted Nehru for years and hastened him towards the cause which became his life's work, the struggle for Indian independence. He joined the Congress Party, and his agitation on its behalf soon qualified him for admission to the finest political training school in the British Empire, British jails, where Nehru spent 9y of his life.
Nehru dreamed of reconciling on the soil of India his two political passions: the parliamentary democracy of England and the economic socialism of Karl Marx.
Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel (‘Unifier of India’) (1875-1950): Indian lawyer and senior leader of the India National Congress who served as the first Deputy PM of India and first Home Minister of India.
Capitalist society worked, the problem was to Indianize it, to make it work better, not jettison it for an impracticable ideal.-Patel.
Cyril John Radcliffe (1899-1977): British lawyer tasked to draw the line partitioning India and Pakistan. He was not able to visit a single one of the hundreds of villages through which his line would run, to contemplate its effect on the helpless peasants it might isolate from their fields, their wells or their roads. Communities were severed from the lands they tilled, factories from their freight depots, power plants from their grids, all because of the terrible haste India's leadership had imposed on Radcliffe, compelling him to demarcate, on an average, 30 miles of frontier every day.
Hari Singh (1895-1961): Maharaja of Kashmir at the time of partition; a Hindu of a High Brahmin sub-caste whose 4M subjects were overwhelmingly Moslem.
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (‘Veer’) (1883-1966): A leading figure in the Hindu Mahasabha, advocating for Hindu racial supremacy. His dream was of rebuilding a great Hindu empire from the sources of the Indus to those of the Brahmaputra, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas. He hated the Moslems. There was no place for them in the Hindu society he envisioned. Charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination of Ghandi, but was acquitted for lack of evidence.
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Misc Quotes
'Here is a mantra, a short one I give you. 'Do or die'. We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery.'-Ghandi (8 Aug, 1942).
Civil disobedience was for 'the ignorant and the illiterate'-Jinnah to Ghandi.
'If they answer not your call, walk alone, walk alone.'-Ghandi.
'Many a violent war in Asia could have been prevented by an extra bowl of rice'.-Ghandi.
The way to abolish privilege is to renounce it yourself.-Ghandi.
'My dear friend, you must remember that Hindu women had to burn themselves alive to escape the infamy of being raped by Muslims, and Gandhiji told them that the victim was the victor.’
The philosophy of an, eye for an eye led only to a world of the blind…You don't change a man's convictions by chopping off his head or infuse his heart with a new spirit by putting a bullet through it. Violence only brutalizes the violent and embitters its victims.-Ghandi.
'The difference between what we do and what we could do, would suffice to solve most of the world's problems.'-Ghandi.
'As we respect our own religion so must we respect other people's. What is just and right is just and right, whether it be inscribed in Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian or any other language. 'May God bestow sanity on us and the whole world. May He make us wiser and draw us closer to Him so that India and the whole world may be happy.'-Ghandi.
‘To know what is right and not to do it is cowardice.'-Confucius.
Put your left hand in a bowl of ice-cold water, then in a bowl of lukewarm water. The lukewarm water feels hot. Then put the right hand in a bowl of hot water and into the same bowl of lukewarm water. Now the lukewarm water feels cold; yet its temperature is constant. The absolute truth is the water's constant temperature, he would observe, but the relative truth, perceived by the human hand, varied.-Ghandi.
‘I have the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right thing, not because I am persuasive so much as because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favourable light'.-Mountbatten.
'Until I went to Kahuta, I had not appreciated the magnitude of the horrors that are going on.'-Mountbatten reporting to London.
There could be no hope for the emancipation of India, so long as India's women were not emancipated. Women were 'the suppressed half of humanity' and the roots of their servitude lay, he believed, in the harrow circle of domestic chores to which a male-dominated society condemned them. With the establishment of his first ashram in South Africa, he had decreed that men and women would share equally in domestic tasks. He abolished separate family kitchens in favour of a common mess. The women, thus unburdened of their household drudgery, would be free to participate equally with men in the community's social and political activities.-Ghandi.
‘Tell the British to go, no matter what the consequences of their departure might be. Tell them to leave India to God, to chaos, to anarchy, if you wish, but leave. We will go through fire, but the fire will purify us.'-Ghandi.
'If you don't nod your head, Mr Jinnah, then you're through, and there'll be nothing more I can do for you. Everything will collapse. This is not a threat. It's a prophecy. If you don't nod your head at that moment, my usefulness here will be ended, you will have lost your Pakistan, and as far as I am concerned, you can go to hell.'-Mountbatten to Jinnah.
Ghandi assailed Nehru's dream of a welfare state because of the centralization of power which it implied. That always led, he said, to the people 'becoming a herd of sheep, always relying on a shepherd to drive them to good pastures. The shepherd's staff soon turns to iron and the shepherds turn to wolves.'-Ghandi.
To preach love and non-violence to India's masses as a means of opposing her British rulers had been one thing: to preach love and forgiveness to men who'd witnessed the massacre of their children, the rape of their wives; to women who'd had their relatives' throats cut before their eyes; to people despairing in the totality of their loss; was something else. Gandhi desperately believed in the validity of his message as the only escape from the cycle of hatred. But it was a message for saints, and there were few saints in the refugee camps of India that autumn.
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Chronology
1999: Kargil Conflict; Pakistan backed rebels cross the disputed Kashmir border, seizing Indian military posts in the icy heights of the Kargil Mountains. Indian troops push the intruders back, ending the 10wk conflict, which kills. Nearly 1000 (Kashmirpost).
1989-1990: The Kashmir uprising against New Delhi rule; thousands are killed (Kashmirpost).
17 Aug, 1988: Assassination of Pakistan Dictator General ul-Haq in an explosion while aboard his presidential plane.-Freedom by Collins.
Summer, 1977: Pakistan Military Coup; General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq leads a coup deposing and executing Pakistan President Bhutto. Ul-Haq imposes martial law and allies Pakistan with the US and Saudia Rabia in the prosecution of the Afghan War. At the same time, he oversees the Islamization of Pakistan most important institutions and the nations adoption, in principle, of the sharia.-Freedom by Collins.
1974: India detonates its first atomic device (Kashmirpost).
1971- 1977: Pakistan is ruled by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.-Freedom by Collins.
1971: The Bangladesh war; E. Pakistan declares independence as Bangladesh, resulting in the deaths of 3M people (Kashmirpost).
1965: The 2nd War over Kashmir is fought between India and Pakistan. It ends inconclusively seven weeks later after a ceasefire is brokered by the USSR (Kashmirpost).
27 May, 1964: Death of Pandit Nehru, first PM of India.-Freedom by Collins.
20 Oct- 21 Nov, 1962: The Sino-Indian War; Chinese forces invade India’s frontier in Ladakh above Kashmir and in the NE Frontier Agency between Tibet and Assam.-Freedom by Collins.
1959: The Tibetan Uprising; Chinese forces violently quell calls for Tibetan Independence. The Dalai Lama is granted asylum in India (Wiki).
1958: Pakistan Military Coup; Field Marshal Ayub Khan ceases the presidency from Iskander Mirza and institutes an authoritarian regime.-Freedom by Collins.
15 Dec, 1950: Death of Indian Independence leader Patel from a heart-attack.-Freedom by Collins.
1949: A UN backed 770km ceasefire line becomes the defector frontier in Kashmir known as the Line of Control (Kashmirpost).
11 Sep, 1948: Death of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of modern-day Pakistan.-Freedom by Collins.
21 Apr, 1948: The UN passes UNSCR 47 calling for an immediate cease-fire ‘to secure the withdrawal from the state of Jammu and Kashmir of tribesmen and Pakistani nationals not normally resident therein who have entered the state for the purpose of fighting’ (Wiki).
Apr, 1948: Indian soldiers recapture Rajouri, Kashmir, the Rajouri Massacres end (Wiki).
30 Jan, 1948: Assassination of Mahatma Ghandi by Nathuram Godse and his accomplice Narayan Apte while in New Delhi. His murder ended the insensate communal killing of neighbour by neighbour which had followed Partition in India's villages and cities. The antagonisms of the sub-continent would remain, but they would henceforth be transformed primarily to the conventional plane of a conflict between nation states waged by regular armies on the battlefield.-Freedom by Collins.
Jan, 1948: At the bequest of Ghandi, The Indian Government orders the immediate payment to Pakistan of the 550M rupees promised under partition.-Freedom by Collins.
20 Jan, 1948: Attempted assassination of Ghandi in New Delhi by Madanlal Pahwa using an IED.-Freedom by Collins.
1155, 13 Jan, 1948: Mohandas Ghandi begins his last fast.-Freedom by Collins.
25 Nov, 1947: Pakistani soldiers capture Mirpur, Kashmir and institute the Mirpur massacres killing ~20K Hindus and Sikhs (Wiki).
Nov, 1947- Apr, 1948: The Rajouri (Kashmir) Massacres; 30K Hindus and Sikhs are murdered by Pakistani Soldiers (Wiki).
1 Nov, 1947: Pakistani soldiers and tribesmen capture Rajouri, Kashmir and institute the Rajouri Massacres (Wiki).
27 Oct, 1947: Indian troops land in Kashmir, securing the Srinagar airport. The Indian Army moves out to secure the city (Wiki). Seething with anger, Jinnah defied the British commanders of his army by sending Pakistani units disguised as irregulars to Kashmir to stiffen the demoralized raiders. More tribal levies were raised, and for months in the hostile cold of winter the war would rage on.-Freedom by Collins.
The state would remain divided along the battle lines of 1948, the Vale of Kashmir in Indian hands, the northern territories around Gilgit with Pakistan.-Freedom by Collins.
26 Oct, 1947: Kashmir signs the Act of Accession. The Indian Government adds a caveat that after the invaders are cleared from Kashmir, the Kashmiri people would vote for India or Pakistan (Wiki).
24 Oct, 1947: The news of the tribal invasions of Kashmir reach New Delhi, >48h after Sairab Khayat’s advance guard had seized its key bridge over the Jellum River. To the ten and a half million Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems who had fled their homes that autumn was added Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Kashmir.-Freedom by Collins.
22 Oct, 1947: Invasion of Jammu in N. India by Moslem forces under Sardar Ibrahim, taking control of most of the Western parts of the state and form a provisional Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) government based in Palandri two days later (Wiki).
Sep- Oct, 1947: Tribal militias invade Kashmir, the Maharaja’s troop are heavily outgunned and outnumbered. The Maharaja requests assistance from the government in Delhi. Mountbatten could not endorse the use of British soldiers on the soil of an independent Kashmir (Wiki).
Midnight, 15 Aug, 1947: Indian Independence Day; Lord Louis Mountbatten transfers power from English Colonial Rule to India.-Freedom by Collins.
15M people migrate and 1M are killed in the ensuing sectarian violence (Kashmirpost).
Aug, 1947: Punjab Massacres; the people of the Punjab set out to destroy each other with bamboo staves, hockey-sticks, icepicks, knives, clubs, swords, hammers, bricks and clawing fingers; a spontaneous, irrational slaughter.-Freedom by Collins.
Aug- Sep, 1947: Gandhi is appointed the ‘one man boundary force’ of Calcutta by Mountbatten.-Freedom by Collins.
3 Jun, 1947: India’s 4 key leaders formally announce their agreement to divide the sub-continent into India and Pakistan. 'The final Transfer of Power to Indian hands will take" place on 15 Aug, 1947’.-Freedom by Collins.
22 Mar, 1947: Operation Madhouse; the British evacuation of India, province by province, women and children first, then civilians, then soldiers, a move likely, in Gandhi's words, to 'leave India to chaos'.-Freedom by Collins.
Mar, 1947: Louis Mountbatten, British Naval Admiral, is appointed Viceroy of India with the mandate to oversee the British withdrawal from India. Mountbatten’s plan would allow each of India's 11 provinces to choose whether it wished to join Pakistan or remain in India; or, if a majority of both its Hindus and Moslems agreed, become independent.-Freedom by Collins.
Dawn, 16-18 Aug, 1946: The Great Calcutta Killings; the Moslem League slaughters 6000 Hindus in 72 hours. In a quasi-religious fervour, Moslem mobs came bursting from their slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of smashing in a human skull. They came in answer to a call issued by the Moslem League, proclaiming 16 August 'Direct Action Day', to prove to Britain and the Congress Party that India's Moslems were prepared 'to get Pakistan for themselves by "Direct Action" if necessary'. They savagely beat to sodden pulp any Hindus in their path and stuffed their remains in the city's open gutters. The terrified police simply disappeared. Soon tall pillars of black smoke stretched up from a score of spots in the city, Hindu bazaars in full blaze. Later, the Hindu mobs came storming out of their neighborhoods looking for defenseless Moslems to slaughter. The Killings triggered bloodshed in Noakhali, where Gandhi was; in Bihar; and on the other side of the sub-continent in Bombay.-Freedom by Collins.
26 Jul, 1945: British Elections; Clement Atlee is appointed PM of England. Atlee and his Labour Party publicly commit to dismembering the British Colonial Empire.-Freedom by Collins.
22 Feb, 1944: Death of Ghandi’s wife Kasturba, the woman he had married as an illiterate, 13yo child.-Freedom by Collins.
8 Aug 1942: Ghandi demands “freedom immediately…this very night, before dawn If it can be had” to his followers of the All-India Congress Committee in Bombay. He and the entire Congress leadership are arrested and imprisoned for the remainder of WWII by the British.-Freedom by Collins.
2 Dec, 1941: The first nuclear chain reaction is demonstrated by Enrico Fermi under the track at the University of Chicago. The Atomic Age begins.-Freedom by Collins.
1937: Indian Elections; the majority Hindu Indian Congress refuses to share the spoils of office with Indian provinces with a substantial Moslem minority. Moslem league leader Jinnah begins advocating for an independent ‘Pakistan’.-Freedom by Collins.
28 Jan, 1933: Rahmat Ali, a 40yo Indian- Moslem Grad Student in Cambridge pens the idea that India's Moslems should set up a state of their own. The idea that India formed a single nation, Ali wrote, was 'a preposterous falsehood'. He called for a Moslem nation carved from the provinces of NW India where the Moslems were predominant, the Punjab, Kashmir, Sind, the Frontier, and Baluchistan. Based on the names of the provinces that would compose it, it was 'Pakistan — 'land of the pure'.-Freedom by Collins.
12 Mar- 5 Apr, 1931: Ghandi leads the Great Salt March to the Sea.-Freedom by Collins.
0630, 12 March 1931: With his bamboo stave in hand, his back slightly bent, his loincloth around his hips, Gandhi marches out of his ashram at the head of a cortege of 79 disciples for the sea, 241 miles away.-Freedom by Collins.
31 Dec, 1929: Jawaharlal Nehru, In Lahore, at the stroke of midnight, raises the Indian Flag, leading his Congress in a vow for swaraj, nothing less than complete independence. 26 days later, in gatherings all across India, millions of Congressmen repeat the pledge.-Freedom by Collins.
1 Feb, 1922: Gandhi writes the British Viceroy of India to inform him he was escalating his action from non-cooperation to civil disobedience. The British arrest him and Gandhi pleads guilty to the charge of sedition, and in a moving appeal to the judge, asks for the maximum penalty. He is sentenced to six years in Yeravda prison.-Freedom by Collins.
13 Apr, 1919: The Jallianwala Bagh (‘Amritsar’) Massacre; 379 people are killed and over 1000 injured when British BGen Reginald Dyer orders his troops to fire their rifles into a crowd of thousands of Indians who had gathered in Jallianwala to protest against the restrictions clamped on their city.-Freedom by Collins.
7 Apr, 1919: A hartal (an Indian mass protest) against British rule is organized by Ghandi. It was his first overt act against the Government of India.-Freedom by Collins.
Feb, 1919: Britain passes the Rowlatt Act, repressing agitation for Indian freedom.-Freedom by Collins.
9 Jan, 1915: Ghandi returns to India from S. Africa, passing through the Gateway of India in Bombay to crowds of thousands.-Freedom by Collins.
Jul, 1914: Ghandi departs South Africa for India.-Freedom by Collins.
1914-1919: WWI; the UK loses 680K soldiers fighting the Germans on the W. Front at Flanders Fields.-Freedom by Collins.
28 June, 1914: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo.-Freedom by Collins.
1904: Ghandi reads John Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” while on a train from Johannesburg-Durban. By the time his train reached Durban the following morning, Gandhi had made an epic vow: he was going to renounce all his material possessions and live his life according to Ruskin's ideals. Riches, Ruskin wrote, were just a tool to secure power over men. A laborer with a spade served society as truly as a lawyer with a brief, and the life of labour, of the tiller of the soil, is the life worth living.-Freedom by Collins.
1894: Ghandi arrives in South Africa. A week after his arrival while on an overnight train ride from Durban to Pretoria, a white man ordered him from his first-class compartment to the baggage car. Ghandi, who held a first-class ticket, refused. At the next stop the white called a policeman and Gandhi with his luggage was unceremoniously thrown off the train in the middle of the night. All alone, shivering in the cold because he was too shy to ask the station master for the overcoat, locked in his luggage, Gandhi passed the night huddled in the unlit railroad station, pondering his first brutal confrontation with racial prejudice. Like a medieval youth during the vigil of his knighthood, Gandhi sat praying to the God of the Gita for courage and guidance. When dawn finally broke on the little station of Maritzburg, the timid, withdrawn youth was a changed person. The little lawyer had reached the most important decision of his life. Mohandas Gandhi was going to say 'no'. A week later, Gandhi delivered his first public speech to Pretoria's Indians. The advocate who'd been so painfully shy in the courtrooms of Bombay had begun to find his tongue. He urged the Indians to unite to defend their interests and, as a first step, to learn how to do it in their oppressors' English tongue. The following evening, without realizing it, Gandhi began the work that would ultimately bring India freedom by teaching English grammar to a barber, a clerk and a shopkeeper. Soon he had also won the first of the successes which would be his over the next half-century. He wrung from the railway authorities the right for well-dressed Indians to travel first-or second-class on South Africa's railways.-Freedom by Collins.
10 May, 1857- 1 Nov, 1858: The Indian Rebellion of 1857; a major uprising in Indian against British Rule is violently suppressed by British forces. The Rebellion results in the deaths of 6K British and some 800K Indians from both rebellion and in famines and epidemics of disease during the period (Wiki).
1849: Publication of “On Civil Disobedience” by Henry Thoreau, which protests against a USG that condoned slavery and was fighting an unjust war in Mexico. Thoreau asserts the individual's right to ignore unjust laws and refuse his allegiance to a government whose tyranny had become unbearable. To be right, he said, was more honorable than to be law-abiding.-Freedom by Collins.
1837-1857: Reign of the last Mughal Empire Bahadur Shah II, exiled by the British after his involvement with the Indian Mutiny of 1857-1858 (Britannica).
23 Jun, 1757: Battle of Plassey; British forces numbering 900 Englishmen of the 39th foot and 2000 Indian Sepoys led by General Robert Clive route the armies of the Nawab in the rice paddies outside a Bengali village called Plassey. Clive's victory opens the gates to N. India and with it, the British conquest of India begins.-Freedom by Collins.
1719-1748: Reign of Mughal Empire Muhammad Shah. Much of his territory falls under the control of the Marathas and then the British (Britannica).
24 Aug, 1600: Trade between India and Britain begins after the ship ‘HECTOR’, a 500t galleon captained by William Hawkins, drops anchor in the port of Suray, N. of Bombay, returning to London to trade spices, gum, sugar, raw silk, and cotton along the Thames. A deluge of dividends, some as high as 200%, came pouring down on the various UK East Indies firm's fortunate shareholders. 'Trade not territory', the Company's officers never ceased repeating, was their policy. Inevitably, however, as their trading activities grew, the Company's officers became enmeshed in local politics and forced, in order to protect their expanding commerce, to intervene in the squabbles of the petty sovereigns on whose territories they operated. Thus began the irreversible process which would lead England to conquer India almost by inadvertence.-Freedom by Collins.
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