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Divide and Rule - Cost of Partition
 Lord
Canning (1812 - 1862) Governor General of India from 1856 - 1862 and
the first Viceroy in India. In the middle of the 1857 uprising, he wrote to a
British official:
“As
we must rule 150 millions of people by a handful (more or less small) of
Englishmen, let us do it in the manner best calculated to leave them divided (as
in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the
greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our
motives.”
(source:
The
Muslims of British India - By P Hardy p. 72). Refer to chapters
on Aryan Invasion Theory
and First
Indologist.
***
 "The institution of separate
electorates for the Muslims was the first expression of the pernicious
two-nation theory, which ultimately resulted in the foundation of Pakistan.
Published documents fully establish the fact that this was created by deliberate
policy as an effective method to keep the Hindus and Muslims apart.
Lady
Minto,
the wife of the Viceroy who was responsible for this piece of political
Machiavellianism, noted with glee that her husband
had by this act ensured for a
long time the authority of the British in India.
The system of separate
electorate was a simple device. It provided that Muslims should be represented
only by Muslims, that no Muslim could represent a Hindu constituency or vice
versa.
By this expedient the Muslims in India from Cape Comorin to Kashmir
became a separate political entity, perpetually at odds with the Hindus and
judging all issues from the point of view of a religious community.
As the
Muslim candidates to the legislatures had to depend on a religious franchise,
their views and policies, came to be molded by considerations of religious
fanaticism. India took over forty years to be rid of this vicious system and
that, too, at the terrible cost of a partition."
(source: Asia
and Western Dominance - By K. M. Panikkar p. 120).
Winston
Churchill and Ravaging of India
Winston Churchill
abhorred unity among Indians of different faiths – for
it would be “fundamentally injurious to the British interests.”
Churchill continued: “I am not at
all attracted by the prospect of one united India, which will show us the
door.”
Promoting harmony between Hindus and
Muslims was “to my mind distressing and repugnant in the last degree.” Instead,
Churchill hoped that the Muslims of the northwest would combine into a front to
combat the “anti-British tendencies of the Congress. Strife between Hindus and
Muslims would bolster the rationale that British rule in India was as necessary
as it had always been.’
(source:
Churchill’s Secret War: The
British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II
- By Madhushree Mukherjee
p. 10).
Ratcheting
up the Hindu-Muslim “riots” that destroyed Indian unity
Writing about this period, the American journalist
William
Shirer
noted that it was difficult to find out how many of India’s communal riots “were
incited by the British in their effort to keep both communities at each other’s
throats so that they could not unite in their drive for self-rule.”
He quoted the British Chief of Police in Bombay saying “almost as a joke – that
it was very easy to provoke a Hindu-Muslim riot. For a hundred dollars, he said,
you could start something really savage. Pay some Muslims to throw the carcass
of a cow into a Hindu temple, or some Hindus to toss a dead pig into a mosque,
and you could have, he said, a bloody mess, in which a lot of people would be
knifed, beaten and killed.”
(source:
Why Britain Failed to Subvert the Hindu Narrative – By Bhaskar Menon).
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