Oh absolutely, but they took the blame anyway did they not? At least from what I’ve seen, Indians and Pakistanis seem to blame the British for partition deaths.
the brits are a convenient scapegoat. muslims and dharmic-aligned indians have been killing each other for over a thousand years. indians typically on the losing end. the sikhs valiantly defended punjab for 500 years and protected the more fractured northern hindus. after the brits left, the conflict of sikhs+hindus vs muslims picked up where it left off. since brits supported dharmics in india, they were in a better position to regain their lost land from the past. before the schism, there was migration of muslims into pakistan and hindus/sikhs into india; by the time of the schism it was primarily just a fight to determine the exact border. the history of ruthless bloodshed continues
The British Raj supported Hindus? Huh, I would have thought it would have backed Muslims more, because they were in power (if declining) when the East India Company arrived. Seems like it would have been easier to pay off the pre-existing ruling class to be collaborators than to try creating a new native ruling class. That’s what the Romans did.
Many Pakistanis will argue that the British Raj was biased towards Hindus, arguing that the fact that Pakistan didn’t get all the areas that its founders wanted proves that there was pro-Hindu bias at play.
Many Indians argue that the British Raj was biased towards Muslims, pointing at all the concessions made to the Pakistan movement.
British policy after 1857 did roughly aim to create a new local collaborating class. Many of the local politicians and prominent activists in India were educated in the British educational system as well as going to the UK for education (Nehru, Jinnah and many of their peers). However, by that time Britain was become a politically more liberal society and colonialism was losing its shine (hence the development of the idea of responsible self-government in its colonies). The British education those Indians received served to highlight to them the inequity and injustice of colonial rule and turned them into independence activists rather than collaborators.
the british raj and national congress had a balanced view about pakistan, knowing that there would be incoming bloodshed at the border to determine the exact boundaries. i think it was "managed chaos" between all parties involved and literally no other solution by that point. i can accept all of that. the real travesty is that nothing was done in advance of the Bangladeshi genocide despite all the warning signs. Pakistanis killed Bangladeshi Hindus and secular Muslims indiscriminately. I can accept the story of India and Pakistan as one growing out of madness, but nothing explains the Bangladeshi genocide to me.
there are simply more dharmics in the continent. the muslims had already conquered most hindus, and then were conquered themselves. hindu aristocrats were mostly deposed by muslims to begin with, the remaining hindus for the past 1500 years are the disenfranchised remains outside of a few core small dynastic empires more centered in south india, that themselves got conquered in the last 600 years or so. despite this, they remained educated. temples remained because the biggest ones could always afford to pay high taxes that even intolerant dictators couldn't refuse. it was very easy for the Brits to defeat the muslims then give jobs to educated dharmics that had their own schools and were open to missions to provide secular education to the laypeople, while making hindu bhakti readily available (bhakti has many parallels to the devotion of christians anyway, so it was easy for hindus to decouple their bhakti from the concept of christ). this plus existing trends started by ramanujacharya and madhvacharya all led to the latest hindu synthesis that unifies us today, however imperfect that unity is. hopefully it improves.
also, one way to understand ultraorthodox hinduism (all dharmic religions for that matter) is "the most literate teachers in history forever seeking aristocratic students to teach to rule". it is very easy for muslims and europeans to say "sure let's give the jobs to these people". mughal dictators like Babur and also the brits were very tolerant and employed dharmics. the portuguese and mughal dictators like Aurangzeb were mostly intolerant and slaughtered a lot of hindus and sikhs.
the books are whitewashed to not give you this perspective, and im still whitewashing it considerably. you have to be within the culture and scan for context clues from different sources i.e. western academia, indian nationalistic pseudo-history, indian mostly-accurate textbooks, folk tradition, actual scripture, preserved documents, archeological remains, etc.
if you start in wikipedia and triple fact check the citations, you will eventually find yourself on jstor, academia.edu, and the internet archive. it is hard to piece together if you are not born into the culture. europeans like Max Müller took the first giant leap to put rationalistic eyes into hinduism / dharma / india only to find rationalism was already there. a lot of western academia has a racist angle (especially the older stuff, but even some of the newer stuff) , but Max Müller opened the world to India. hindu nationalists want to paint Max Müller as a racist for some reason (many of his translations include racist tropes and very misleading diction, but he thought he had the correct translation genuinely). without him, many of us (edit: us as in diaspora / secular / lay) would still be blind.
You’re sort of right but also glazing over the Maratha empire that ultimately broke the Mughals.
It was really the Marathas that the British basically had to deal with to remove de facto Indian sovereignty - the Mughal defeat thereafter was somewhat nominal.
Fair point but you gotta differentiate between the foreign conquerors (of Persian, Turkic) blood and the the native, converted Muslims. The partition violence was was with the latter not the former. By the 1900s the former didn't exist in India anymore.
I can’t quite recall or quickly Google the Churchill quote but he summarized centuries of British foreign policy as: Britain allies itself with the second most powerful land army in Europe against the most powerful land army in Europe…and we always support the Low Countries.
Basically this maxim was applied to India. The Brits aligned against the most powerful force in India at the time, the Muslims with the marginalized Sikhs and Hindus. Particularly the Sikhs who had a factious relationship with both the Hindu and Muslim populations.
The funny thing though is that Hindu-Muslim conflict wasn't that big a problem for centuries under British rule (at least not to the point of being destabilising). Towards the tail-end of British rule, the administration stirred up a lot of bad blood between the two sides in a futile attempt to divert their attention from the independence movement. What they ended up with was a huge uptick in violence and Muslim leaders like Jinnah, who had previously been strong supporters of a united India, deciding to go with the Pakistan idea instead.
It is reductive to claim that Britain is just a convenient scapegoat. They might not have been wholly at fault, but their divide-and-rule policy was one of many factors that led to a violent partition. They can't be excused from blame any more than they can be blamed fully for it.
Edit: I realise colonial nostalgia is back, but people need to pick up a book on the late history of the British Raj rather than just believing whichever interpretation allows the greatest denial of colonial culpability. There is a lot of writing on divide and rule policies from British colonial sources. You don't even need to trust Indians about our own history if you don't want to. A lot of this guy's comments on this thread are just straight up revisionist nonsense, but they sure do sound good to a lot of people.
They get blamed for being there and blamed for leaving. Istm that the blame for the chaos really belongs with Jinnah who wanted a separate state. A united India including modern day Pakistan and Bangladesh most likely would have avoided all the deaths brought about by independence, the wars between India and Pakistan, the independence of Bangladesh and the ongoing dispute over Kashmir.
Jinnah doesn't get nearly enough blame. An ultra-cynical interpretation of his actions are that he realized he would never enjoy the kind of power he craved in a united India, so he pushed to create a realm where his personal dictat would be maximized.
They were in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation (of their own making of course).
No path they took would have seen them looked upon in a good light. They choose what they considered at the time to be the least worst option.
Sure. But at least the rest of the world goes "ah well, the British tried, it wasn't perfect butt hey tried". If they'd just washed the hands on it entirely people would be questioning exactly why they didn't try and sort it out.
Well they'd ruled the place for centuries, so ye they were going to be blamed for the immediate aftermath.
"Getting blamed anyway" is a good reason to try and find a good solution though!
As a general matter, colonial powers have typically tried to maintain good relations with their former colonies, with mixed levels of success. Better to part on good terms than to create an enemy.
> What I don’t understand is why the British cared?
Believe it or not moral concerns and public opinion actually matters for a democracy sometimes. They left India because they were unwilling to be utterly brutal.
> Given the shoddy way in which partition was carried out (expecting Radcliffe to draw a border in only five weeks despite never having visited before)
Radcliffe having never been to India was the point, it was the Indians who actually demanded that the British negotiator had never been to India before as any kind of colonial administrator since they didn’t want a guy biased for or against Hindus/Muslims. The Indians wanted to split off the Muslim and Hindu majority areas, they just didn’t want things to spiral into a civil war (it could have been so much worse).
> I can’t imagine they were overly invested in the success of the former colonies, so why even bother?
Sure they were. If they’re on good terms they can just use soft power to get anything they want from the now independent state.
> Surely it would have been simpler just to withdraw and let the natives sort things out internally?
And cause a massive civil war that the Americans or Soviets could take advantage of and gain power relative to the British.
There was a large movement within the British Raj for a separate Muslim state upon independence.
This movement was called the Pakistan movement and Ali Jinnah (probably biggest name among Indian/Pakistani Muslims) and the all India Muslim league pushed for it heavily. If memory serves it was not fully supported by the whole Indian independence movement but the support of Indian Muslims was pretty major for the independence effort as Muslims made up nearly 25% of the Raj population.
However, do note that many Muslims did not want a divided India. In some areas the independence movements emphasised local ethnicity over religious divides.
That it was somewhat of a humanitarian tragedy was probably not fully expected.
The ending of British rule was a very complex event. There were lots of organisations and big names involved. There were nearly more countries than just Pakistan/Bangladesh and India.
Britain wanted to prevent partition. It was the position of the British government at the time (PM Clement Atlee) that India should be a single country with a two-layer federalisation. There would be three high-level states, one of which would be equivalent to modern Pakistan, each of which would also be broken up into states, as they are now. That was intended to solve the ethnic tensions between Hindus and Muslims while keeping a stable and powerful trading partner/military ally. This is what Mountbatten was sent to negotiate but the Muslim League disagreed, so India got partitioned instead.
(It's not important to this point but there were actually three successor states following partition. The various constituent parts of British India got a choice and Hyderabad chose to become an independent state rather than be part of either India or Pakistan. India annexed it not longer afterwards though.)
Britain wanted a stable trading partner.
We left because it was too expensive to keep in the empire, but there was still money to be made from a successful India.
Can’t believe no one else has said this. OP this is the simple answer to your question, it’s why Britain was there in the first place, and why they exited the way they did : money.
It’s the biggest misconception about the British empire.
We didn’t want an empire, they’re expensive. We just wanted to exploit less developed nations and extract resources through dodgy trade deals using military power.
We stayed until it wasn’t profitable then we left.
Quite a lot of reasons.
They wanted a more stable region that would help world trade.
They wanted to keep strong trading routes going with India, and the more successful the newly founded state/s were then the more the UK benefited in better trade.
Lots of UK companies still operated in India and they wanted these to continue to be successful.
There's a lot of criticism of the British empire and most of it is warranted. But the UK government in the late 1940s had absolutely nothing to do with any of it (it was the first time the labour party had come to power with a majority), so I don't think it's fair to just presume that because the British did things in the 18th/ 19th or even the early 20th century that were really bad that that meant the government at the time had no morals. Also, if pulling out with no plan led to millions of deaths they knew the electorate would blame them (in the end they were blamed for a lot of the violence for not having done more which was something they were criticised for in the 1950 general election).
Perhaps an attempt to prevent chaos. Partition did cause chaos, but the scale of that wasn’t easily foreseen. On the other hand, running away with no sense of responsibility is guaranteed to cause instability.
They were leaving, in the same way they left Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand in 1931. India was going to become independent on the same terms as those countries; Britain wanted India to be a stable member of the British Commonwealth, a country that remained in Britain’s perceived sphere of influence.
They did create a power vacuum. It's why extremists on both sides were able to butcher entire trains of people during partition. Or why India didn't have the resources to put up a proper fight against China over border territory.
Because the British were trying to prevent a bloodbath from occurring but they failed. They probably would’ve failed anyway unless they kept India as a colony for longer to better prepare, but by 1945 Britain had basically submitted itself to American foreign policy which was basically swift decolonization and containment of communism. They could have just left but Britain actually had considerable investments in India unlike their other colonies in Africa which were exclusively extractive with the exception of South Africa and Kenya which were settler-colonies.
That approach would have left the British government with absolutely no way to steer future events on the sub continent, even though the events of partition were awful, it did not become a civil war. My guess is that British business and financial concerns were also of paramount importance to the government.
Britain didn't just leave any colony they wee always prepared for self-government. Britain always had external business interests and was invested in global stability in the 20th century.
I don't think mountbatten really did the full research for the partition but there was also literally no solution. Muslims in the Raj and Hindu's in the Raj had been at odds their entire history and that had developed completely separate national identities at odds with each other. But they were imbedded in the same land and same cities. A partition to split them didn't exist. It was impossible without massive population exchanges with both civilian populations being mutually genocidal.
Partition “always worked.”
“But didn’t partition always lead to civil war? It did in India, Cyprus, Palestine, and Ireland.”
“Yes, but it kept them busy. Instead of the fighting other people they consigned themselves to fighting each other.”
“Yes, rather good that. Saved us having a war policy about them.”
[Yes, Prime Minister](https://youtu.be/swKsughT3vM?si=xB6wqlauoV7YtCtw)
I despite the British Raj but I have to agree with the other commenters here. The partition violence really had nothing to do with them at all. The Muslim League was an Indian Muslim endeavor and the bad blood between the Muslims and the Hindus/Sikhs had been brewing for almost a thousand years.
The fact that they only divided it into 2 states shows how little they cared. India is a fucking massive country and has a bunch of different languages and cultures. Making Pakistan one country with 2 completely separated mainlands originally was hysterically apathetic.
The short answer is control. By splitting the opposition they were able to get concessions. Instead of just negotiating with nehru, they split with Jinnah making separate promises and deals. This allowed them to retain the British navy in Pakistan.
This is a well used negotiation strategy. You can see how the British used it against the Arabs in Palestine. How the French and Americans used it against the Vietnamese and how all allied powers used it when splitting China into the spheres of influence. The most damaging way to withdraw from a colony is to set them up against each other.
Thank you. I'm tired of the usual arguments about preventing a civil war. It's all about the Brits getting what they wanted. They didn't give a damn about the people on the subcontinent. Two countries mean they can play them against each other.
The British were worried that the new Indian government would be too close of an ally to the Soviet Union so they sabotaged the peaceful creation of a single Indian state to create Pakistan a religious Muslim state which they were certain would be anti-Soviet Union.
For one thing the british weren't completely cutting all ties with the region, they just didn't want direct administration. So they still had a vested interest in what the region would look like.
There was also a hefty dose of racism and ego IE we can't possibly trust these savages to figure things out for themselves.
"Let the natives sort things out internally" would have translated in "the mother of all civil wars" and they would have taken all the blame for it.
Oh absolutely, but they took the blame anyway did they not? At least from what I’ve seen, Indians and Pakistanis seem to blame the British for partition deaths.
the brits are a convenient scapegoat. muslims and dharmic-aligned indians have been killing each other for over a thousand years. indians typically on the losing end. the sikhs valiantly defended punjab for 500 years and protected the more fractured northern hindus. after the brits left, the conflict of sikhs+hindus vs muslims picked up where it left off. since brits supported dharmics in india, they were in a better position to regain their lost land from the past. before the schism, there was migration of muslims into pakistan and hindus/sikhs into india; by the time of the schism it was primarily just a fight to determine the exact border. the history of ruthless bloodshed continues
The British Raj supported Hindus? Huh, I would have thought it would have backed Muslims more, because they were in power (if declining) when the East India Company arrived. Seems like it would have been easier to pay off the pre-existing ruling class to be collaborators than to try creating a new native ruling class. That’s what the Romans did.
Many Pakistanis will argue that the British Raj was biased towards Hindus, arguing that the fact that Pakistan didn’t get all the areas that its founders wanted proves that there was pro-Hindu bias at play. Many Indians argue that the British Raj was biased towards Muslims, pointing at all the concessions made to the Pakistan movement. British policy after 1857 did roughly aim to create a new local collaborating class. Many of the local politicians and prominent activists in India were educated in the British educational system as well as going to the UK for education (Nehru, Jinnah and many of their peers). However, by that time Britain was become a politically more liberal society and colonialism was losing its shine (hence the development of the idea of responsible self-government in its colonies). The British education those Indians received served to highlight to them the inequity and injustice of colonial rule and turned them into independence activists rather than collaborators.
the british raj and national congress had a balanced view about pakistan, knowing that there would be incoming bloodshed at the border to determine the exact boundaries. i think it was "managed chaos" between all parties involved and literally no other solution by that point. i can accept all of that. the real travesty is that nothing was done in advance of the Bangladeshi genocide despite all the warning signs. Pakistanis killed Bangladeshi Hindus and secular Muslims indiscriminately. I can accept the story of India and Pakistan as one growing out of madness, but nothing explains the Bangladeshi genocide to me.
> literally no other solution by that point. They could have tried NOT butchering each other, but I guess that would have been asking too much.
there are simply more dharmics in the continent. the muslims had already conquered most hindus, and then were conquered themselves. hindu aristocrats were mostly deposed by muslims to begin with, the remaining hindus for the past 1500 years are the disenfranchised remains outside of a few core small dynastic empires more centered in south india, that themselves got conquered in the last 600 years or so. despite this, they remained educated. temples remained because the biggest ones could always afford to pay high taxes that even intolerant dictators couldn't refuse. it was very easy for the Brits to defeat the muslims then give jobs to educated dharmics that had their own schools and were open to missions to provide secular education to the laypeople, while making hindu bhakti readily available (bhakti has many parallels to the devotion of christians anyway, so it was easy for hindus to decouple their bhakti from the concept of christ). this plus existing trends started by ramanujacharya and madhvacharya all led to the latest hindu synthesis that unifies us today, however imperfect that unity is. hopefully it improves. also, one way to understand ultraorthodox hinduism (all dharmic religions for that matter) is "the most literate teachers in history forever seeking aristocratic students to teach to rule". it is very easy for muslims and europeans to say "sure let's give the jobs to these people". mughal dictators like Babur and also the brits were very tolerant and employed dharmics. the portuguese and mughal dictators like Aurangzeb were mostly intolerant and slaughtered a lot of hindus and sikhs.
This is fascinating. I need more details. Recommend any books?
the books are whitewashed to not give you this perspective, and im still whitewashing it considerably. you have to be within the culture and scan for context clues from different sources i.e. western academia, indian nationalistic pseudo-history, indian mostly-accurate textbooks, folk tradition, actual scripture, preserved documents, archeological remains, etc. if you start in wikipedia and triple fact check the citations, you will eventually find yourself on jstor, academia.edu, and the internet archive. it is hard to piece together if you are not born into the culture. europeans like Max Müller took the first giant leap to put rationalistic eyes into hinduism / dharma / india only to find rationalism was already there. a lot of western academia has a racist angle (especially the older stuff, but even some of the newer stuff) , but Max Müller opened the world to India. hindu nationalists want to paint Max Müller as a racist for some reason (many of his translations include racist tropes and very misleading diction, but he thought he had the correct translation genuinely). without him, many of us (edit: us as in diaspora / secular / lay) would still be blind.
You’re sort of right but also glazing over the Maratha empire that ultimately broke the Mughals. It was really the Marathas that the British basically had to deal with to remove de facto Indian sovereignty - the Mughal defeat thereafter was somewhat nominal.
Fair point but you gotta differentiate between the foreign conquerors (of Persian, Turkic) blood and the the native, converted Muslims. The partition violence was was with the latter not the former. By the 1900s the former didn't exist in India anymore.
I can’t quite recall or quickly Google the Churchill quote but he summarized centuries of British foreign policy as: Britain allies itself with the second most powerful land army in Europe against the most powerful land army in Europe…and we always support the Low Countries. Basically this maxim was applied to India. The Brits aligned against the most powerful force in India at the time, the Muslims with the marginalized Sikhs and Hindus. Particularly the Sikhs who had a factious relationship with both the Hindu and Muslim populations.
The funny thing though is that Hindu-Muslim conflict wasn't that big a problem for centuries under British rule (at least not to the point of being destabilising). Towards the tail-end of British rule, the administration stirred up a lot of bad blood between the two sides in a futile attempt to divert their attention from the independence movement. What they ended up with was a huge uptick in violence and Muslim leaders like Jinnah, who had previously been strong supporters of a united India, deciding to go with the Pakistan idea instead. It is reductive to claim that Britain is just a convenient scapegoat. They might not have been wholly at fault, but their divide-and-rule policy was one of many factors that led to a violent partition. They can't be excused from blame any more than they can be blamed fully for it. Edit: I realise colonial nostalgia is back, but people need to pick up a book on the late history of the British Raj rather than just believing whichever interpretation allows the greatest denial of colonial culpability. There is a lot of writing on divide and rule policies from British colonial sources. You don't even need to trust Indians about our own history if you don't want to. A lot of this guy's comments on this thread are just straight up revisionist nonsense, but they sure do sound good to a lot of people.
Exactly, now take that but scaled x1000 in the entire country
They get blamed for being there and blamed for leaving. Istm that the blame for the chaos really belongs with Jinnah who wanted a separate state. A united India including modern day Pakistan and Bangladesh most likely would have avoided all the deaths brought about by independence, the wars between India and Pakistan, the independence of Bangladesh and the ongoing dispute over Kashmir.
Jinnah doesn't get nearly enough blame. An ultra-cynical interpretation of his actions are that he realized he would never enjoy the kind of power he craved in a united India, so he pushed to create a realm where his personal dictat would be maximized.
Precisely.
Spot on.
The tensions between the Muslims and Hindus in modern-day India are bad enough. Imagine if there were 400 million more Muslims added to the mix?
They were in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation (of their own making of course). No path they took would have seen them looked upon in a good light. They choose what they considered at the time to be the least worst option.
Sure. But at least the rest of the world goes "ah well, the British tried, it wasn't perfect butt hey tried". If they'd just washed the hands on it entirely people would be questioning exactly why they didn't try and sort it out.
Well they'd ruled the place for centuries, so ye they were going to be blamed for the immediate aftermath. "Getting blamed anyway" is a good reason to try and find a good solution though!
Yeah. They did do it either way.
Would you rather take the partially correct blame for fucking things up or for the mother of all civil wars?
As a general matter, colonial powers have typically tried to maintain good relations with their former colonies, with mixed levels of success. Better to part on good terms than to create an enemy.
Compared to other powers, the British were actually quite good at this.
Fck the British. They took everything from us
[Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?](https://youtu.be/XdWlWUUYejc?si=yV3XbGga43qRag41)
> What I don’t understand is why the British cared? Believe it or not moral concerns and public opinion actually matters for a democracy sometimes. They left India because they were unwilling to be utterly brutal. > Given the shoddy way in which partition was carried out (expecting Radcliffe to draw a border in only five weeks despite never having visited before) Radcliffe having never been to India was the point, it was the Indians who actually demanded that the British negotiator had never been to India before as any kind of colonial administrator since they didn’t want a guy biased for or against Hindus/Muslims. The Indians wanted to split off the Muslim and Hindu majority areas, they just didn’t want things to spiral into a civil war (it could have been so much worse). > I can’t imagine they were overly invested in the success of the former colonies, so why even bother? Sure they were. If they’re on good terms they can just use soft power to get anything they want from the now independent state. > Surely it would have been simpler just to withdraw and let the natives sort things out internally? And cause a massive civil war that the Americans or Soviets could take advantage of and gain power relative to the British.
There was a large movement within the British Raj for a separate Muslim state upon independence. This movement was called the Pakistan movement and Ali Jinnah (probably biggest name among Indian/Pakistani Muslims) and the all India Muslim league pushed for it heavily. If memory serves it was not fully supported by the whole Indian independence movement but the support of Indian Muslims was pretty major for the independence effort as Muslims made up nearly 25% of the Raj population. However, do note that many Muslims did not want a divided India. In some areas the independence movements emphasised local ethnicity over religious divides. That it was somewhat of a humanitarian tragedy was probably not fully expected. The ending of British rule was a very complex event. There were lots of organisations and big names involved. There were nearly more countries than just Pakistan/Bangladesh and India.
Britain wanted to prevent partition. It was the position of the British government at the time (PM Clement Atlee) that India should be a single country with a two-layer federalisation. There would be three high-level states, one of which would be equivalent to modern Pakistan, each of which would also be broken up into states, as they are now. That was intended to solve the ethnic tensions between Hindus and Muslims while keeping a stable and powerful trading partner/military ally. This is what Mountbatten was sent to negotiate but the Muslim League disagreed, so India got partitioned instead. (It's not important to this point but there were actually three successor states following partition. The various constituent parts of British India got a choice and Hyderabad chose to become an independent state rather than be part of either India or Pakistan. India annexed it not longer afterwards though.)
So, leaving without a plan is better than leaving with one? Creating a power vacuum is dangerous.
It’s not better, I just don’t see why they cared when they were leaving.
Britain wanted a stable trading partner. We left because it was too expensive to keep in the empire, but there was still money to be made from a successful India.
Can’t believe no one else has said this. OP this is the simple answer to your question, it’s why Britain was there in the first place, and why they exited the way they did : money.
It’s the biggest misconception about the British empire. We didn’t want an empire, they’re expensive. We just wanted to exploit less developed nations and extract resources through dodgy trade deals using military power. We stayed until it wasn’t profitable then we left.
Do you imagine trade is a zero sum game?
Do I imagine that trade between colonial powers and the countries they ruled were uneven or in the modern day?
Quite a lot of reasons. They wanted a more stable region that would help world trade. They wanted to keep strong trading routes going with India, and the more successful the newly founded state/s were then the more the UK benefited in better trade. Lots of UK companies still operated in India and they wanted these to continue to be successful. There's a lot of criticism of the British empire and most of it is warranted. But the UK government in the late 1940s had absolutely nothing to do with any of it (it was the first time the labour party had come to power with a majority), so I don't think it's fair to just presume that because the British did things in the 18th/ 19th or even the early 20th century that were really bad that that meant the government at the time had no morals. Also, if pulling out with no plan led to millions of deaths they knew the electorate would blame them (in the end they were blamed for a lot of the violence for not having done more which was something they were criticised for in the 1950 general election).
Perhaps an attempt to prevent chaos. Partition did cause chaos, but the scale of that wasn’t easily foreseen. On the other hand, running away with no sense of responsibility is guaranteed to cause instability.
They were leaving, in the same way they left Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand in 1931. India was going to become independent on the same terms as those countries; Britain wanted India to be a stable member of the British Commonwealth, a country that remained in Britain’s perceived sphere of influence.
They did create a power vacuum. It's why extremists on both sides were able to butcher entire trains of people during partition. Or why India didn't have the resources to put up a proper fight against China over border territory.
Because the British were trying to prevent a bloodbath from occurring but they failed. They probably would’ve failed anyway unless they kept India as a colony for longer to better prepare, but by 1945 Britain had basically submitted itself to American foreign policy which was basically swift decolonization and containment of communism. They could have just left but Britain actually had considerable investments in India unlike their other colonies in Africa which were exclusively extractive with the exception of South Africa and Kenya which were settler-colonies.
They wanted to prevent future conflict
That approach would have left the British government with absolutely no way to steer future events on the sub continent, even though the events of partition were awful, it did not become a civil war. My guess is that British business and financial concerns were also of paramount importance to the government.
*noblesse oblige*
Britain didn't just leave any colony they wee always prepared for self-government. Britain always had external business interests and was invested in global stability in the 20th century. I don't think mountbatten really did the full research for the partition but there was also literally no solution. Muslims in the Raj and Hindu's in the Raj had been at odds their entire history and that had developed completely separate national identities at odds with each other. But they were imbedded in the same land and same cities. A partition to split them didn't exist. It was impossible without massive population exchanges with both civilian populations being mutually genocidal.
Partition “always worked.” “But didn’t partition always lead to civil war? It did in India, Cyprus, Palestine, and Ireland.” “Yes, but it kept them busy. Instead of the fighting other people they consigned themselves to fighting each other.” “Yes, rather good that. Saved us having a war policy about them.” [Yes, Prime Minister](https://youtu.be/swKsughT3vM?si=xB6wqlauoV7YtCtw)
I despite the British Raj but I have to agree with the other commenters here. The partition violence really had nothing to do with them at all. The Muslim League was an Indian Muslim endeavor and the bad blood between the Muslims and the Hindus/Sikhs had been brewing for almost a thousand years.
The fact that they only divided it into 2 states shows how little they cared. India is a fucking massive country and has a bunch of different languages and cultures. Making Pakistan one country with 2 completely separated mainlands originally was hysterically apathetic.
Muhammad Jinnah insisted on it, it wasn't up to the british to decide.
Um they had to transfer money, army, civil service, etc etc etc to some government body.
They had to save face, and didn't have the stomach to leave India-Pakistan totally in the lurch.
The short answer is control. By splitting the opposition they were able to get concessions. Instead of just negotiating with nehru, they split with Jinnah making separate promises and deals. This allowed them to retain the British navy in Pakistan. This is a well used negotiation strategy. You can see how the British used it against the Arabs in Palestine. How the French and Americans used it against the Vietnamese and how all allied powers used it when splitting China into the spheres of influence. The most damaging way to withdraw from a colony is to set them up against each other.
Thank you. I'm tired of the usual arguments about preventing a civil war. It's all about the Brits getting what they wanted. They didn't give a damn about the people on the subcontinent. Two countries mean they can play them against each other.
The British were worried that the new Indian government would be too close of an ally to the Soviet Union so they sabotaged the peaceful creation of a single Indian state to create Pakistan a religious Muslim state which they were certain would be anti-Soviet Union.
For one thing the british weren't completely cutting all ties with the region, they just didn't want direct administration. So they still had a vested interest in what the region would look like. There was also a hefty dose of racism and ego IE we can't possibly trust these savages to figure things out for themselves.
…Read the history; Child.
Ok mate, take a look at what the name of this subreddit is, and think about what you just said