08-31-2009, 07:14 PM
Blaming the British in my mind is a way of deflecting from dealing with unpleasent truths facing India today, among them is the fact that most Indian Muslims supported Partition.
The British fanned the flames but they never started it, separation from kaffirs is built into Muslim theology, partition was seen as another hijra in the tradition of Muhammad who migrated to Medina from Mecca where he found more support and used it as a base to then conquer Mecca.
Indians don't like to deal with this because it would then mean confronting the problem of Islam, its far safer to keep blaming the long dead Brit empire, look at how an otherwise scholarly Dharampal tried to shift the blame for the origins of cow slaughter as a way to insult Hindus to the British when tons of evidence showing it's Islamic origins was staring him right in the face. It's the same symptom at work when much bravado is exhibited in changing Brit colonial names of cities but which disappers when it comes to changing a single Islamic imperialist name, one of the holiest Hindu places such as prayAga still carries the name "Allahabad" officially, yet no one has the guts to do anything about that.
I think Elst is wrong when he says that Brits didn't favour partition but what they certainly didn't do is come up with the whole idea in the first place & partition certainly wasn't possible without the willingness of the common Muslim to riot, murder Hindus & rape Hindu women.
The British fanned the flames but they never started it, separation from kaffirs is built into Muslim theology, partition was seen as another hijra in the tradition of Muhammad who migrated to Medina from Mecca where he found more support and used it as a base to then conquer Mecca.
Indians don't like to deal with this because it would then mean confronting the problem of Islam, its far safer to keep blaming the long dead Brit empire, look at how an otherwise scholarly Dharampal tried to shift the blame for the origins of cow slaughter as a way to insult Hindus to the British when tons of evidence showing it's Islamic origins was staring him right in the face. It's the same symptom at work when much bravado is exhibited in changing Brit colonial names of cities but which disappers when it comes to changing a single Islamic imperialist name, one of the holiest Hindu places such as prayAga still carries the name "Allahabad" officially, yet no one has the guts to do anything about that.
I think Elst is wrong when he says that Brits didn't favour partition but what they certainly didn't do is come up with the whole idea in the first place & partition certainly wasn't possible without the willingness of the common Muslim to riot, murder Hindus & rape Hindu women.