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Remembering PartitionThe parallels between India '47 and Iraq '07.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Aug. 9, 2007, at 6:39 PM ET
Partition of India. Click image to expand.

Next week marks the 60th anniversary of the partition of India. Two new books on the subject—Yasmin Khan's The Great Partition and Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer—are reviewed in recent issues of the Economist and The New Yorker, respectively. And though neither review mentions today's Iraq, (except, at most, in passing), the parallels are ominous and inescapable.

Anyone who believes that U.S. troops can simply and suddenly leave Iraq without risk of unleashing great horror—or who regards religious or ethnic partition as a solution instead of a desperate ploy—should look back at the summer of 1947, when the British Empire packed up and India fulfilled its "tryst with destiny" (as Jawaharlal Nehru described its awakening to independence), only to plunge into a monstrous spree of ethnic cleansing (12 million people uprooted, as many as 1 million murdered) that continues to take its toll today.

As India's independence and Britain's withdrawal seemed inevitable in the wake of World War II, the country's long-suppressed internal fissures began to rumble like a reawakened volcano. Gandhi's followers in the Congress Party campaigned as a secular movement. But Muslims saw it as a cover for Hindu domination, and Gandhi's rival, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, though a secular Muslim, played the religion card to the hilt to attract fundamentalists' favor.

The Muslims demanded an independent state. In their haste to get out, the British complied. They negotiated the establishment of Pakistan, drew the boundaries in a careless manner, and unavoidably created more problems than they solved.

On Aug. 15, when the British pulled out, millions of Hindus on Muslim land and Muslims on Hindu land—and lots of Sikhs on either—were brutalized, raped, or killed. Many packed their belongings and moved, but, unprotected, they were slaughtered along the way. The Indian Army, which had been created by Britain, also divided along religious lines, and, as the New Yorker review notes, "many of the communalized soldiers would join their coreligionists in killing sprees, giving the violence of partition its genocidal cast."

Before long, India and Pakistan went to war over the contested territory of Kashmir. Two more wars followed in as many decades. Another war nearly broke out a mere five years ago. That same year, in the state of Gujarat, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed by Hindu nationalists.

The initial clashes were fomented by the British, chiefly Churchill, who boosted the Muslims in order to weaken the grip of Gandhi's party. It was a classic case, the New Yorker review notes, of "the human costs of imperial overreach." Yet "the disasters that followed," it argues, might have been mitigated had the British not been in such a rush to pull out. The House of Commons voted for independence and partition on June 3; by Aug. 15, the British were gone; the troops still in their garrisons were expressly forbidden to protect Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs dashing for cover, or new homes, amid the ensuing fray.

The parallels with contemporary Iraq are far from exact. The British Empire ruled India for nearly a century and, at the end, drew the boundaries that spawned decades of conflict; they should have felt an obligation to keep the place from collapsing before they departed. India was also a real country before the British colonized it, whereas Iraq was a colonial contrivance from the outset. (For the amazing story of how the British invented Iraq, and messed up the Middle East for all time to boot, see David Fromkin's A Peace To End All Peace.)

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Muslim refugees by AP.
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