Quote Originally Posted by anonymouse View Post
So the bottom line here is the Partitioning of India may well have been the worst thing the British could ever have done.
Don’t get me started on this. The British? Who requested partition? Was it us? NO. Although some of them are still held under wraps, the archives prove interesting reading when it comes to the negotiations regarding independence and partition. And say we had forced an un-partitioned super-India upon the peoples there...how would history look upon us as the authors of the most internally violent nation on Earth...for that is surely what it would have been. Constant, massive civil conflict...bombings, wholesale genocide, constant waves of refugee movements, political deadlock and probable collapse of democracy would have been our legacy.

Partition was a vile horrendous process but to say it was wrong is to ignore the alternatives AND the wishes of the major political figures (Ghandi aside) at the time.

Imagine the genocide of Rwanda/Burundi multiplied by several hundred million.