A conversation with a colleague sent me down a rabbit hole of research that took weeks to surface from. What I found confirmed a suspicion I had carried since childhood but never had the language to articulate. This essay is an attempt: on the partition of India, the coloniser’s playbook, and the cost of borders drawn by Strangers in a hurry.
One of the quiet gifts of living abroad is the way it broadens your perspective. I have been fortunate enough to live in Britain and Germany—both countries home to people from vastly different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Being surrounded by such a range of experiences, traditions, and ways of seeing the world has expanded my own perspective in a way few other things can. It was in Germany, during a casual conversation with a colleague of mine—Algerian by heritage, raised in Spain, fluent in five languages, the kind of person whose biography makes you feel stationary—who said something that stopped me mid-sentence.
I had joked about the animosity between Algeria and Morocco. Neighbour rivalry, being born and raised in the sub-continent, I know it well. The world knows Indo-Pak rivalry perhaps better than any other. But her answer to my casual question was not casual at all. She told me that when France left its colonised territories, it left behind a disputed border region between Algeria and Morocco—a contested stretch of desert that has fuelled tension, a brief war in 1963, and closed borders for decades ever since.
I almost choked.
Because I had heard this story before. I had grown up inside it. Kashmir—that unresolved wound between India and Pakistan, that bone of contention festering for over seventy years—was the story I knew. And here was the same story, different geography, different names, same architect. The British did it to us. The French did it to them. And the question that formed itself, unbidden, in the middle of that conversation was the one this essay attempts to answer: do all colonisers follow the same playbook?
“The British did it to us. The French did it to them. Same wound, different geography, same architect.”
But there was another thing that hit harder still. Unlike India and Pakistan, Algeria and Morocco are both Muslim-majority countries. There is no religious line between them. Their animosity was not born of theological difference—it was born of a border drawn by a foreign power departing in its own interests. And that observation detonates one of the foundational myths of the Indian partition: that the division of the subcontinent was the inevitable consequence of irreconcilable religious difference. Religion could intensify a political conflict, certainly. But perhaps it could not, by itself, explain why a border had become necessary in the first place. If two Muslim nations can inherit the same toxic rivalry from colonial cartography, then maybe religion was never the root cause. It was the excuse.
India: What the British Found, and What they Chose to Do with it
When the British East India Company arrived in India in the early 18th century, they did not arrive in a poor country. According to economic historian Angus Maddison’s foundational research—cited extensively by Indian MP and author Shashi Tharoor in his landmark work An Era of Darkness—India’s share of the global economy stood at approximately 23 to 27 percent in 1700. As large, in Tharoor’s words, as all of Europe put together.
What the British left behind, two centuries later, was a country accounting for just over 3 percent of global GDP. A literacy rate below 17 percent. A life expectancy barely above 30 years. Ninety percent of the population living below the poverty line. These are not nationalist grievances dressed as statistics—they are the numbers.
The mechanism was not mysterious. India was systematically deindustrialised. The textile industry—which had made India the world’s leading exporter of cloth for two millennia—was deliberately destroyed.
The American historian Will Durant, travelling India as late as 1930, observed that the entire British expenditure on education across India—from nursery to university—was less than half the high school budget of the state of New York. The British, as Durant concluded, had no interest in educating the people they were extracting from.
The First Resistance, and Why Unity had to be Broken
The first serious organised military resistance to British expansion came from Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, known as the Tiger of Mysore. Tipu fought the British across four Anglo-Mysore Wars spanning decades. He innovated militarily—his iron-cased Mysorean rockets were a direct precursor to British rocketry. He died in 1799 defending Seringapatam rather than surrender, and is remembered with reverence on both sides of the India-Pakistan border to this day.
What is less often noted is what his army looked like. Tipu Sultan’s administration included Hindu officials. He made documented grants to Hindu temples. His resistance to British occupation was not a Muslim cause—it was a territorial one, a human one, a cause belonging to the people of Mysore regardless of faith—against a usurping enemy. This is the precise quality that made him dangerous to the coloniser: he was unifying, not dividing. He was building coalition, not exploiting fracture.
The last thing a colonial power wants is a unified population. A people who see themselves as one—across religion, across caste, across ethnicity—cannot be governed by a small foreign force through manipulation. They must first be made to see themselves as many. The British, through policies they eventually institutionalised as “divide and rule”—ost visibly in the deliberate religious partition of Bengal in 1905 and the introduction of separate Muslim and Hindu electorates in 1909—systematically hardened distinctions between communities that had, for centuries, lived in complex but functional coexistence.
“The last thing a colonial power wants is a unified population. They must first be made to see themselves as many.”
The Partition: A Border Drawn in Five Weeks by a Man who had Never been to India
By 1947, Britain had decided to leave India. The decision was driven not by moral awakening but by economic exhaustion—the Second World War had bankrupted the empire, and the costs of maintaining India were no longer justifiable. What followed was one of the most consequential acts of administrative negligence—or maybe just a deliberate crime, in modern history.
Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, accelerated the independence timeline from June 1948 to August 1947. To draw the borders of two new nations, he appointed Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never set foot in India before his appointment, who had no cartographic experience of the subcontinent, and who was given five weeks to complete the task. Five weeks to draw a line through Punjab and Bengal—provinces with interwoven populations, shared rivers, mixed villages, and centuries of interconnected life.
Radcliffe himself, after submitting his boundary award, left India immediately, reportedly fearing for his life. He burned his papers. He never returned. He never spoke publicly about his work in India again. The Radcliffe Line, as it became known, satisfied no one and infuriated everyone. Mountbatten delayed its publication until after the independence ceremonies—meaning that millions of people celebrated independence on August 14 and 15 without knowing which country they were in.
What followed was one of the largest and most violent forced migrations in human history. Approximately 15 million people were displaced. Estimates of the death toll range from 200,000 to 2 million. Women faced systematic sexual violence—violence so widespread it has been described by historians as a weapon of partition itself. Entire communities that had coexisted for generations found themselves on the wrong side of a line drawn by a stranger in a hurry. That was the human cost, and here is the irony: the people in whose name it was done didn’t unanimously ask for it. India is home to the World’s 3rd largest Muslim population. Pew Research Center estimates that about 213 million Muslims lived in India in 2020, compared with roughly 227 million in Pakistan. The difference, in a subcontinent of over a billion people, is negligible. Millions of Muslims chose to remain in India. They were not a people unanimously convinced that their survival required separation.
The Catastrophe within the Catastrophe: What Pakistan Did to its Own
The violence of partition did not end with the Radcliffe Line. It continued, in slower and more institutional forms, within the new state of Pakistan itself.
The people of East Pakistan—Bengali Muslims who had contributed enormously to the movement for a separate homeland—were rewarded with systematic discrimination. West Pakistani military and bureaucratic elites, dominated by Punjabis, regarded Bengalis with open contempt rooted in ethnic and racial prejudice. General Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s military dictator from 1958 to 1969, wrote in his private diaries that the “Bengali temperament is mercurial and highly unstable.” (Mohammad Ayub Khan, Diaries of Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan, 1966–1972, ed. Craig Baxter (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007)) He correlated their supposed character deficiencies with their climate and geography, replicating, almost word for word, the colonial racial logic the British had applied to Indians generally.
Brigadier Abdurrahman Siddiqi, Director-General of Inter-Services Public Relations during the 1971 war, admitted openly that Operation Searchlight—the Pakistani military’s campaign in East Pakistan—was not a temporary pacification mission but “one of conversion and transformation of the Bengalis into true Muslims and Pakistanis.” The top military leadership, he said, was “hell-bent on cleansing the Bengali race and culture.” (A. R. Siddiqi, East Pakistan: The Endgame: An Onlooker’s Journal 1969–1971 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
The result was a genocide. The scale of the atrocities has been the subject of international documentation. The Hamoodur Rahman Commission—Pakistan’s own official inquiry—acknowledged widespread killings and sexual violence. Independent scholars and the United Nations have consistently recognised 1971 as one of the gravest humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century, with hundreds of thousands killed and thousands of women subjected to sexual violence. The country that had been created in the name of Muslim brotherhood carried out one of the most devastating acts of violence against Muslim people in modern history—because they were the wrong kind of Muslim, the wrong ethnicity, the wrong shade.
Bangladesh was born from that horror. There is no comfortable way for me, as a Pakistani, to write the following sentence. There shouldn’t be. Pakistan has, to this day, never officially acknowledged it as a genocide.
The Muhajirs—Urdu-speaking Muslims who had migrated from India at partition, who had arguably contributed most ideologically to the creation of Pakistan—fared little better over decades. Their city, Karachi, once the nation’s capital and its greatest port, with natural advantages that should have made it one of Asia’s great metropolises, was stripped of its status as capital by the same military dictator General Ayub Khan because he wanted the capital to be closer to the military headquarters. The city was later abandoned to power struggles that would plunge it into ethnic and political violence, and left to decay. The infrastructure even today, cannot deliver something as basic as water to millions of people. Water tankers roam its choked roads, during the rush hour, crushing people to death. Children fall into open gutter manholes to their tragic demise. This is the city I am from. Its streets are a daily insult to the memory of people like my grandfather, who migrated at sixteen with nothing, making sacrifices he could not have named, trusting that the country being built would honour that sacrifice in the generations that followed. It did not. The city that was supposed to be a jewel of the new nation became a monument to what happens when ethnicity and political exclusion replace merit and governance.
The Wound that was Left Open: Kashmir and the Question of Minorities
No honest account of partition’s aftermath can ignore what has unfolded on the Indian side of the line, which is no exception to the atrocities. The Kashmir Valley — claimed by both India and Pakistan, inhabited by a Muslim majority that was never meaningfully consulted on its own fate—has for decades lived under an extraordinarily heavy security presence amid insurgency, cross-border conflict and political unrest. The United Nations has documented thousands of civilian deaths at the hands of security forces over decades of conflict. Human rights organisations including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have recorded enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings as systematic features of the occupation, not aberrations.
The condition of Muslim minorities within India more broadly has deteriorated in measurable ways in recent years. Mob lynchings, often targeting Muslims accused of transporting or consuming beef, have been documented across multiple Indian states.
The point is not to adjudicate which side has behaved worse—that is a competition with no winners. The point is that the partition, rather than resolving the question of how Hindus and Muslims would coexist on the subcontinent, simply redistributed and intensified it. The violence did not end in 1947. It changed address.
The Expat Revelation: What Distance Teaches
Here is what living in Britain and Germany taught me that living in Pakistan never could: Indians and Pakistanis, removed from the machinery of state-manufactured enmity, become friends with remarkable ease. There is something both beautiful and deeply sad about discovering, thousands of kilometres from home, how little effort it takes to love people you were supposedly born to distrust. I have made some of my closest friends from India—in London, in German offices, over shared meals in restaurants named Gandhi House or Namaste India, halal-certified, serving both communities without incident or tension. The religious harmony that is supposedly impossible back home is entirely unremarkable in the diaspora.
This observation is not sentimental. It is diagnostic. When the state apparatus—with its textbooks, its propaganda, its cultivated grievances—is removed from the equation, the people find each other without difficulty. This suggests, rather forcefully, that the enmity is not natural. It was manufactured. And it was manufactured for a purpose—by the British, initially, and then maintained by successor elites on both sides who found it useful.
There is a psychological phenomenon—sometimes called a self-fulfilling cycle of justification—in which two populations, having been separated in violence, point to the subsequent poverty, instability, and communal tension on each other’s side as proof that the separation was necessary. Look, they say, at how they treat their minorities. Look at the violence. Look at the radicalism. What they do not ask is whether that poverty, that instability, that radicalism, is itself a product of the partition—of the economic devastation, the educational collapse, the governance failure that colonialism left behind and division compounded. The effect is mistaken for the justification. The wound is mistaken for evidence that cutting was correct.
The Playbook: Kashmir, Western Sahara
A colonial power, having extracted what it came for, leaves. But it does not leave cleanly. It leaves borders drawn to its own strategic advantage. It leaves disputed territories that guarantee its former colonies will be too busy fighting each other to build the unity that might challenge Western dominance. It leaves behind administrative and legal systems designed for extraction, not governance. It leaves behind elites educated in its own image, more loyal to its values than to their own people.
And then it leaves the hard-working people of those former colonies—impoverished by centuries of extraction, denied education by design, forced to migrate in search of the prosperity their own lands once held—to face racism in the cities of their former colonisers, while being looked down upon at home by systems that are themselves remnants of colonial architecture. The circle is complete. The wound is profitable.
Conclusion: Love, and What Survives
There is one thing, in the end, that the coloniser’s playbook cannot permanently defeat. My Indian and Pakistani friends eating together in Berlin and in London. The halal restaurant called Gandhi House. The ease with which people who were told they were irreconcilable enemies discover, over a shared meal in a foreign city, that they were lied to.
The partition of India was not inevitable. It was not the natural consequence of religious difference—Algeria and Morocco taught me that in a single sentence. It was a political decision, made in haste, by people who had no stake in the consequences and left before the blood dried.
A million people died. Fifteen million were displaced. Two nations have spent seventy-five years and billions of dollars on military arsenals pointed at each other—money that might have built schools, hospitals, water systems, the infrastructure of human dignity. And the disputed territory of Kashmir remains unresolved, a wound kept deliberately open, its people caught between two states that cannot agree on who is entitled to govern their suffering.
This was not an accident. It was not inevitable. It was a choice—made by strangers, for strangers’ reasons.
In the end, love wins—not in the greeting-card sense, but in the stubborn, daily, undramatic sense of people choosing to see each other across borders that were drawn to keep them apart. That is not nothing. That is, perhaps, everything.
