Indians and Pakistanis, do you think partition was a mistake? What do you think should have happened?

BarqsHasBite@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 43 points –
14

Oh hey, it's a hornets nest! Let's give it a shake and see what happens!

It's a legit question.

Don't worry, I know it's a sensitive question and I'm not saying it's a shit one.

I was saying a couple of things at once.

  1. It's basically what the British were thinking/doing
  2. It takes a certain size of iron balls to ask Indians/Pakistanis a question like this

I've seen both indians and Pakistanis complain about how it was done but they also admit there was no way to do it cleanly and the religious differences would eventually spill over politics and cause the territory of India/Pakistan to be as unstable as the middle east

It’s a legit answer. Sounds like their answer is yes it was a mistake, and the implied thing to be done instead is to leave it alone

It isn’t clear that Britain’s carving up other peoples’ countries to make new ones ever worked out. Why would this be any different?

South Indian from a minority group here. The partition was pretty fucking stupid. I'd rather if there were no partition, but federation of power to states, divided on linguistic basis. India has a sub-nationalism problem. Kannada and Malayali chauvinists destroyed not just mine, but countless languages and cultures. Similarly, Bengali destroyed the tribal culture in Orissa and Jharkhand, and Hindi language in cow-belt areas.

When you say federation of power to states, do you mean you would want a federal government with several smaller states/provinces with substantial powers? Or several small countries?

European Union kind, but with the concept of India still being a country, governing not states, but sub-nationalities. Some amount of centralization should still exist with respect to defense, unequal fund allocation and the likes. Oh, and I forgot to add this - dual citizenship should be enforced compulsorily. Single citizenship is what's caused dangerous, destructive territorial nationalism primarily on the basis of Hindi and Hindu identity.

Lots of deaths leading up to it. Lots of deaths during partition. Not so many deaths since.

Slightly better than a civil war given how messy they tend to be probably.

Sometimes there's no good options (without a time machine for killing pedos 😉)

Nothing wpuld have made it better. Best thing would have been leaving them alone, that way when they fought, the UK wouldnt be blamed.

lmao after 400 years of brutal subjugation, destruction of local industry and colonialism, the UK was going to get blamed for it anyway, as they should be.

The universe handed you a golden opportunity to blame-Meta, and you...dropped the ball. 😉