ABSTRACT
During the closing days of the British raj, officials in the imposing secretariat buildings designed by Lutyens resembled apprentice sorcerers who had let loose forces they could barely understand, much less fully control. It is over fifty years ago the raj came to its end amidst political and social convulsions in which Hindu and Muslim as well as Muslim and Sikh engaged in an orgy of murder, rape and plunder on an unprecedented scale. Some seventeen million people were shunted across frontiers of a subcontinent ostensibly divided along religious lines for the first time in its history. In the more than half century that has elapsed India and Pakistan have been to war over the north Indian princely state of Kashmir on two separate occasions. A third war in 1971, preceded by the slaughter of Muslims by Muslims, marked the breakaway of Bangladesh. This bloody baptism of the states which replaced the British raj has wreaked havoc on inter-state relations in the subcontinent. Since the 1990s, India has witnessed the rise of Hindu majoritarian nationalism and the resurgence of Hindu-Muslim violence in the north and west of the country, which exploded in Gujarat in early 2002 with the systematic brutalization of the Muslim community. There has been a recurrence of centre-region problems in nearly all South Asia, the repression of a popularly backed armed insurgency in Kashmir and the ravages of an array of violent social and political conflicts in Pakistan involving, in particular, the Urdu-speaking migrants from India. Today the legacy of 1947 is looming larger than ever before, at both the domestic and the regional levels. The scars of partition have proven to be deeper than the healing touch of independence from colonial rule.
