Subject: Re: Now That's a BAD Jobs Report
JCelebrating in the sense that he is claiming the ethnic cleansing of the partition was a reasonable solution to the problems of British decolonization.

Again, absolutely not. I have taken great pains - to the point of being annoyingly repetitive - to point out with every single mention of Partition how horrible the accompanying violence and dislocation was to people who experienced it.

The decision to have two countries, rather than one, after the British left was a reasonable solution. It resulted in a line between the two nations that was established by talking and negotiations, rather than being drawn in blood after a horrific civil war. Which would have inevitably resulted had Patel and Nehru and Gandhi rejected Partition.

I absolutely do not claim that the ethnic cleansing was a reasonable solution to the problems of decolonization, and I fervently wish that Partition had been able to happen without the people on the "wrong" side of the line being forced to or feeling they had to leave. But I also fervently believe that the ethnic cleansing wasn't caused by Partition, but rather the fundamental drive for self-determination by the Muslim community that led Partition to be adopted in the first place. It's like I mentioned in my last post. The ethnic cleansing wasn't caused by the structure of the nation-state - it was caused by the desire of the Muslim minority to have self-determination and autonomy and to live in a state where they, and not the Hindus, were the majority.

Your friend's Hindu family was forced to leave Pakistan, but that wasn't because Partition happened. Because had the Raj not been divided peacefully in 1947, they would have been forced to leave Pakistan when the horrifically violent civil war broke out in the area - or in whatever year after 1947 the Muslim separatists had won the horrifically violent civil war and set up the same government in that year that they would have in 1947.

Many (most) people want to live in a society that is governed with their community having majority control. This desire is not a product of the nation-state, or the political project of imagining a nation-state into being, or however you want to characterize it. Your friend's family would have had to leave Pakistan with or without Partition, because the "project" of a majority Muslim society was going to be pursued regardless of whether that involved a negotiated Partition or an all-out civil war. I don't know the particulars of the family's experience, and so I'll just assume it was horrific and not say that they particularly were better off with the negotiated Partition rather than the civil war. But I'm pretty confident that overall, the negotiated Partition caused less suffering (while still being terrible and traumatic) than a civil war would have been (which would have been a catastrophe).