Evan Meredith Jenkins Quotes
We will do our best to keep the trouble out of the rural areas, but if we fail, widespread massacres are inevitable.
The "trouble" was the terrorist attacks to gain an independent Pakistan that the Punjab Muslims were perpetrating against the Sikhs and the Hindus and the retaliations. At first organized in the cities they had become spontaneous and spread to the countryside. It turned out to be impossible for Governor Jenkins and the limited British troops and police to stop the violence in most places. By the end of the Partition of India hundreds of thousands of Punjabis had been killed.
Evan Meredith Jenkins, 1896—1985, British colonial administrator and the last British governor of the Indian Punjab, Dispatch to the British Viceroy, March 9, 1947
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had stirred up the Muslims to violence to put pressure on all the parties to accede to Jinnah's Muslim League's demand of an independent Muslim nation—Pakistan. Messervy was very sympathetic to the Muslim leadership as he had been feuding with and frustrated by the predominantly Hindu ruling Congress Party. After partition he accepted the mercenary position of Commander in Chief of the Pakistani Army. Then he was shocked and horrified at the slaughter of the terrorist attacks by the Muslims—about 4,000 Sikh men, women and children had been beaten and cut to death. The Sikhs had been targeted largely because Sikh leaders had recently announced that if there were a Partition, Sikhs would refuse to live in nation under Muslim control.
Two months earlier, Jinnah and the Muslim League had, behind the scenes, orchestrated and abetted vicious, murderous, terrorist attacks on Sikhs by Muslim tribesman brought into the Punjab for the purpose." Master Tara Singh
The Partition was accompanied by over 2 million murdered Indians as India was divided into a smaller India with almost all the Hindus and Sikhs and a slight majority of the Muslims and Pakistan with all Muslims who made that choice. Pakistan has been trying to de stabilize the area ever since to gain control of more land and became a theocracy and military dictatorship—sometimes de facto and sometimes de juro.
This famous quotation, from this important address, at such a critical time in history has been admired for years. Despite his great oratory, the next months were to see almost 2 million Indians of all faiths killed in what was probably the worst internecine violence in human history. Ironically, the politically motivated terrorism had stopped since all the decisions had been made. The motivation for the frightful atrocities that took place from then on was vengeance and fear of more vengeance." 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma
The throwing of flaming torches to burn out members of the other religion got out of control and the fires spread to the homes of all residents. The fires were so prevalent that the riot was then and has since been referred to as the "Shahalmi Gate Blaze". At the time Jinnah was horrified at the violence, but by the following year he and other Muslim League leaders were aiding and abetting Muslim terrorist attacks to put pressure on the government to create a separate Muslim state upon Indian independence—Pakistan. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.
Churchill was reported to be so angry and exasperated that his face turned red and he was sputtering. During World War II, Gandhi, Nehru and other Indian Nationalists were leading protests against British control of India. This not only bogged down British soldiers surprising the nationalists rather than fighting in Burma or in other war theaters, but India supplied a huge number of battalions to the British Army the world over and if that manpower dried up, the allied war effort would suffer. The American State Department wanted Churchill to announce that after Japan was defeated, there would be a process toward self-government. This way, they thought, the Indians would redouble their effort to defeat the Japanese and stop the then current protests and strikes. Churchill was strongly opposed to any diminution of the British Empire, but beyond that, he knew India quite well and realized that at any hint of Independence the large Muslim minority in India would insist on autonomy or a partition of the country and use sectarian violence and terror to intimidate the Indian Congress party and the British, but the major victims of the terror—the Hindus and the Sikhs would not remain passive, but would retaliate in kind. President Roosevelt was in the midst of planning the Normandy Landings of the D-Day invasion and did not want to pressure Churchill and the British at this point in time, so the door to independence was not opened during the war and Britain had to deal with the protests throughout. However, when, after the war, the Labor Government, started a process toward Indian independence which resulted in exactly what Churchill predicted. At least 2 million Indians were slaughtered in the internecine terrorist cycles of fear and retaliation motivated terror attacks what were so extensive that the British military could not really control it.
The Muslim League was demanding that the Punjab become a part of Pakistan when independence was granted later. However, the Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians were all adamant that they would not live in a Muslim nation which would soon become a de facto theocracy if the British could not control them. The Punjab was divided between India and Pakistan, and hundreds of thousands died in Sikh-Muslim attacks and then Hindu-Muslim conflict in the Punjab.
A 'kirpan' is a type of knife—a weapon—which all male Sikhs are religiously obligated to have in his possession and on his body at all times. Singh was a Sikh Maharaja (King) of an area that had about an equal number of Muslims and Sikhs. The Sikh's had a long history of living under Muslim domination and wanted no part of any more. Patiala was within the Punjab and Jinnah was insisting that the Punjab should be a Province of the new Pakistan because the Punjab was majority Muslim. However, there were many Sikhs, as well as some Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians and virtually none of these wanted to be a part of Pakistan. Further, a significant portion of the Muslim Punjab population also preferred to join India for many reasons, not the least of which was that they had become used to a democracy where they had complete freedom of religion and civil rights as well, and with the exception of Turkey none of the Muslim countries were democratic. Based on the history, actions, inactions, and statements of the Muslim League which did not democratically elect its leaders, Pakistan would not likely be a democracy that guaranteed civil rights—especially religious rights—to their citizens (and they were right). So the majority of the people of the Punjab were opposed to becoming a part of Pakistan. The Sikhs were passionate opponents of being a part of Pakistan as they knew their Muslim neighbors one of whose major reasons for wanting a Muslim state was that everyone could then be forced to be Muslim or be expelled or ethnically cleansed.
He was echoing proposals that he made in the Delhi Emergency Committee that had been called to cope with the butchery and murder when the Hindus and Sikhs were trying to leave the areas that were to be part of Pakistan under the Partition and the retaliations against the Delhi Muslims who were trying to flee to the new Pakistan. Unfortunately, the Muslim leadership did not want such a truce as while the land had been partitioned, Indian Money, military equipment, and other resources were yet to be divided and the Muslim leaders who had been so successful playing the violence card to gain and independent Pakistan, did not want to give up that option in the remainder of the division of India. Also, it was not at all clear that the Muslim political leaders could even then control the mobs who they had already whipped up to violence.
Bosnian Serbs took United Nations peace keepers hostage in 1995.
There are many who disagree with Stewart on two grounds. First, the failed state sill not use the aid reasonably and it will wind up in the pockets of war lords of terrorist groups. Second, the failed state often becomes a safe haven for terrorist groups to operate and train from.
Sir Evan Meredith Jenkins GCIE KCSI was a British colonial administrator and the last governor of the Punjab in the British Empire.