1947 Indian War
...became independent in 1947 amidst the trauma of partition. The nationalist movement, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, aimed to gather what was then British India along with the 562 princely states under British dominant into a secular and democratic state. But Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a leader of the Muslim League, feared that his coreligionists, who made up almost a quarter of the country’s population, would find themselves a permanent minority in a Hindu-dominated land. For Jinnah, India was two nations, Hindu and Muslim, and he was determined that Muslims should secure protection in an Islamic state of Pakistan, made up of the Muslim majority areas of India. In the violence that accomplished partition, approximately half a million people were killed, while eleven million Hindus and Muslims crossed the newly created borders as refugees. But even all this bloodshed and suffering did not settle matters, for the creation of Pakistan left nearly half of the country’s Muslims in India. Most of the Muslim population left in India now occupies the northern state of Jammu-Kashmir, which put people with widely differing religions and historical backgrounds under one political roof. The following paper will closely examine the situation India and Pakistan were left in during the partition in 1947, then go on to list possible reasons for the unending conflict and finally scrutinize the first Indo-Pakistan war. The detailed study of the first war and a brief tour of the other two Indo- Pakistan wars will be used to prove that the never-ending conflict between India and Pakistan is a direct result of the false optimism within both of the countries and the unnecessary involvement of the foreign powers.
1) http://freespace.virgin.net/andrew.randall1/india.htm
As mentioned above, at the time of independence and partition in 1947, two divergent conceptions...
View Full Essay
