Partition Quotes



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.


Jinnah had whipped up his followers to violence so that Muslims were attacking Sikh and Hindu neighborhoods, burning them and murdering many occupants in different parts of India to intimidate the Indian Governmental Ruling Congress Party, The British Colonial Indian officials and the politicians in London to create a Muslim state—Pakistan—with all the territory that they demanded. Many Muslims were in turn killed in retaliatory attacks. The American diplomats and most English politicians tried to persuade Jinnah to compromise on the division of land and resources. Jinnah saw no reason at the time for compromise. However the internecine violence became so brutal and extensive that even Jinnah was shocked. The British would not be intimidated nor would the Indian Congress party and Jinnah was forced to compromise. Even with that, there were over 2 million Indians killed by the time the partition was complete. Jinnah and most other leaders were not willing to die themselves, but they were able to convince enough of their coreligionists to die.


This is one of the early calls for a partition of India which was to be so disastrous after the Second World War. The “free Muslim state of states” turned out to be Pakistan where they have been fighting amongst themselves about how much Sharia would prevail.


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.


Even into the 21st century, the problem was not solved and Muslims from Pakistan continue their futile but tragic terrorist tactics to try and acquire more territory from India." 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma


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


At the time France and Germany controlled different parts of the Ruhr Valley. Each believed that they should control it all and the other had no right to control any of it. This never did get settled and was one of the justifications Germany gave in WWII for invading the area. Haskins was one of only three assistants who were part of Woodrow Wilson’s team that negotiated the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI.


In the early part of Jinnah's career he was totally stable and regarded as one of the leading politicians in all of India. However, after some terrible personal tragedies he was changed and was no longer very influential. In his later years he reemerged as the Leader of the Muslim League which in itself was different as he had always represented Indians without regard to religion. He also had become very rigid, egotistical, and aloof and exhibited a number of unbalanced behaviors that led Mountbatten to conclude that Jinnah had become a psychopath in his elder years. In negotiations he was very aggressive, unbending and was not interested in any compromise in negotiations which made them unfruitful and often useless. He was then 70." 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma


The Sikhs had lived for hundreds of years in the Mughal Empire—under Muslim domination where they had been not only like second class citizens but they were periodically persecuted for practicing their religion, including the torture and murder of their Guru. Jinnah himself was a strong advocate of religious toleration and freedom of religion, and proclaimed that for Pakistan. He promised that to the Sikhs as well as total equality with no second class citizenship. However Master Tara Singh was very familiar with the Koran itself and the history of minorities in Islamic nations. The only Muslim country in all of history that had not treated minorities as Second Class Citizens and curtailed the minorities' ability to practice their religion on an equal status was Turkey after the Ataturk revolution, and he knew that most orthodox Islamic clerics considered Ataturk a heretic. They did not see Jinnah as an Ataturk who could revolutionize not only a country but a culture as well. As it turned out, even in the 21st century every month or so another minority person was killed in Pakistan for violating some Koranic prescription—actual of imaginary. The Sikhs turned Jinnah down and he then had Sikhs targeted for mass terrorist attacks and murders.