I hate that I’m typing English. Can Xi uncle help out Endia by sharing local social media stack? Time to make glorious Mandarin the international language instead of island English.
Context for the images: Apparently Congress dug its heels in about a formal promise of Independence before the WW2 started, so there was no repeat WW1 like withdrawal of oral promises.
Congress was not able to get this, so they resigned and Jinnah used the opportunity to cozy up with the viceroy.
The idea is that British government of the time used Jinnah (as Jinnah was using them to further his two-nation theory which was not yet popular) to ensure the declaration could be put off. They encouraged it to create a facade of popular support for British government while the war was beginning. So our partition was most likely a power play among players than a real organic struggle in the subcontinent.
Because apparently they considered the North West Frontier (modern Pakistan) an important strategic position to counter imperial Russia and later to have control of the oil fields of west Asia. Supposedly Jinnah promised Brits that a Muslim state would support continued British military presence in the region (though the premier of pubjab, Sikander Hayat Khan, found Jinnah to be stirring up dangerous communal tensions amongst people who had until then lived in harmony and he was sidelined). The Bombay based Jinnah was then backed and made a bigger player in politics. Jinnah was rewarded with veto over any congress proposal for his “aid in getting Muslim support for the British people war”, which he later used to veto all the co-existence plans congress came up with.
There have been declassified documents that suggest that the strategic importance of NWFP was discussed a lot and played a major role in British tactics in the time of our independence. The military stationed in Barrackpore was not deployed for the first two days of the Great Kolkata Killings (which is the line in the sand event that set off the partition).
So my conclusion is that the partition was a strategic plan that worked out. How true is this and is there any other evidence to support this?
Nobody can hate a South Asian like another South Asian 😌