surinder wrote:That is why the Partion process was especially heineous. People of India had been accustomed to state changes and border changes, but not ethnic relocation at such a mass scale. Not even Babr etc. induced large swathes of population to simply pack up and leave. One of the constant refrains I hear when I hear partion stories is the ordinary Punjabis saying, "Sarkaran taaN badaldia see, per lokan noo taa nayi kadd dindiya san." They were simply shocked that people would be asked to leave lands they had lived since the dawn of civilization. Most of them simply thought it cannot happen (British pulled a fast one and confused the hapless). They thought they would hand over the keys of their houses to their neighbors and go to "India" and come back back when the danga-baazi subsides. None did. The left unplanned: some had gone to work, not knowiing they will never come back to their houses, some had left cooked food and just fled.
This was a new low in how a state waged war & violence on hapless people.
I have met families who are deeply affected by the partition.
Read the book by Pat Buchanan Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
by Patrick J. Buchanan (Author)
You will understand some of the decisions by the imperial powers.
In 1946 before the Indian partition the WWII victors also divided Poland after the war. There was mass transfer of population and Churchill presided over it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expulsion_ ... rld_War_II
Potsdam Conference: Joseph Stalin (left), Harry Truman (center), Winston Churchill (right)
Refugees from Pomerania, West and East Prussia arrive in Berlin, 1945
The Soviet Union transferred the territory to the east of the Oder-Neisse line to Poland in July, 1945.[73] All Germans had their property confiscated and were placed under restrictive jurisdiction.[73][75] Subsequently, most remaining Germans were expelled from pre-war Poland and the Recovered Territories (formerly eastern Germany) to the territory west of the Oder-Neisse Line. Some, prior to their expulsion, were used as forced labor in communist-administered camps[41] such as those run by Salomon Morel and Czesław Gęborski. Examples of these include Central Labour Camp Jaworzno, Central Labour Camp Potulice, Łambinowice, Zgoda labour camp and others. Besides these large camps, numerous other forced labor, punitive, and internment camps, urban ghettos, and detention centers sometimes consisting only of a small cellar were set up.[75] Germans considered "indispensable" for the Polish economy were retained until the early 1950s,[75] though virtually all had left by 1960.[74]Close to 165,000 Germans were transported to the Soviet Union for forced labor, where most of them perished.[75]
Thomasz Kamusella cites estimates of 7 million expelled during both the "wild" and "legal" expulsions from the Recovered Territories from 1945-48, plus an additional 700,000 from areas of pre-war Poland.[75] Overy cites approximate totals of those evacuated, migrated, or expelled between 1944–1950 as: from East Prussia - 1.4 million to West Germany, 609,000 to East Germany; from West Prussia - 230,000 to West Germany, 61,000 to East Germany; from the former German provinces east of the Oder-Neisse, encompassing most of Silesia, Pomerania, and East Brandenburg - 3.2 million to West Germany, 2 million to East Germany.[77]
This is a must for all Indians to read.
Expelling the Germans: British Public Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context
Matthew FrankOxford: Oxford University Press, 2008
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-923364-9. ; 320 pp.; £55.00
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/clarksona.html
Frank is right to contend that the ambivalent response of the British towards population transfer in Eastern Europe led British governments to ultimately reject the idea that this was an acceptable means with which to end ethnic conflict in territories outside of their direct control. Yet the issue is less clear cut when it comes to the use of similar tactics against ideological opponents within the (shrinking) British sphere of influence. As Frank himself admits, throughout the decolonisation process massive shifts of population took place across the British Empire. Though he claims that the population exchanges that took place in India after partition had not been planned for by the Indian Civil Service, there is considerable evidence indicating that at least some British officials believed that the mass flight of Hindus to India and Muslims to Pakistan in the wake of the collapse of British control would ultimately lead to the creation of more ethnically homogeneous and stable states in South Asia.(3)
In stark contrast to Frank’s assertion that population transfer was a ‘limited solution but also a strictly Continental European one’ (p. 277), there is a considerable body of evidence pointing in the opposite direction. Even in situations in which the British had a much greater degree of control over the process of colonial withdrawal than was the case in India, officers and administrators were prepared to use forms of population transfer in order to achieve their long-term political goals. In the counterinsurgency campaigns against communist guerrillas in Malaya which began in the late 1940s and ended in 1957, British military commanders moved large numbers of Chinese and Malay peasants from their old villages into fortified encampments in order to achieve greater control over the countryside. This use of population transfer to win ‘hearts and minds’ and limit insurgent access to local populations was a strategy which was subsequently emulated by British as well as French and American officers in similar conflicts across the Third World.(4)
In his conclusion Frank claims that there were few connections between the ethnic conflicts caused by decolonisation and population transfer in Germany (p. 277). Yet many of the British officials and journalists stationed in Germany and Eastern Europe in the late 1940s went on to take a prominent part in the kind of conflicts in Asia and Africa in which the British forcibly relocated local populations in order to defeat their ideological opponents. For example, the Director of Civil Affairs and Military Government in the British zone, Major-General Gerald Templer, who witnessed the humanitarian consequences of the population transfer of ethnic Germans went on to become the commander of British forces in Malaya, where he initiated a ‘fortified encampments’ programme which led to another form of population transfer.(5)
#
# P. Brass, ‘The partition of India and retributive genocide in the Punjab, 1946–47: means, methods, and purposes’, Journal of Genocide Research, 5 (2003),
} Former deputy prime minister John Prescott had a toilet seat in his home repaired twice in two years at taxpayer expense.{Wonder what he was flushing down the tubes so much....} Spokeswomen for Messrs. Miliband and Prescott and a spokesman for Ms. Blears said they followed the rules laid out by parliamentary authorities. {No doubt, they did}