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Secret Affairs

Metadata

  • Author: Mark Curtis
  • ASIN: B073V21V7H
  • ISBN: 1788160223
  • Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B073V21V7H
  • Kindle link

Highlights

The formal empire, along with Britain’s ‘protectorates’ (colonies in all but name where Britain controlled defence and external relations) encompassed more than half the Muslim peoples of the world. — location: 238 ^ref-44481

By also reaching out to Hindu nationalists, the Khilafat movement became for a time the greatest protest movement against British rule since the rebellion by Indian troops and civilians during the ‘mutiny’, or civil war, of 1857.4 — location: 255 ^ref-22418

the Raj showered official patronage on favoured Muslim leaders in the community, seeing Muslim India partly as a counter to Hindu nationalism. — location: 274 ^ref-34107

should so plan the educational textbooks that the differences between community and community are further strengthened … If we could break educated Indians into two sections holding widely different views, we should, by such a division, strengthen our position against the subtle and continuous attack which the spread of education must make upon our system of government. — location: 279 ^ref-53905

‘What we want’, it stated, ‘is not a United Arabia, but a weak and disunited Arabia, split up into little principalities so far as possible under our suzerainty – but incapable of coordinated action against us, forming a buffer against the Powers in the West.’ — location: 383 ^ref-8710

up to a million people lost their lives in the communal violence that accompanied partition. — location: 671 ^ref-40571

there is considerable evidence to support the view that Britain indeed used the ‘Muslim card’ for its own purposes. — location: 674 ^ref-13889

Aligarh movement gave birth to the Muslim League, whose first article was ‘to promote among the Mussalmans of India, feelings of loyalty to the British government’. — location: 684 ^ref-20845

Lord Linlithgow, worked with Muslim League leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, to try to counter the Congress Party’s demand for full Indian independence from British rule and to urge the League to come up with an alternative. — location: 691 ^ref-33441

Linlithgow considered that the demand for a separate Pakistan might give the British some useful leverage over the Hindu nationalists, who feared any break-up of India, and was, as Patrick French notes, ‘playing a complex game of political brinkmanship which was to have lasting consequences for the future of Asia’. — location: 696 ^ref-32515

backed by the British secretary of state for India, Lord Zetland, the Muslim League adopted the Lahore resolution, declaring as its official policy the establishment of a separate Muslim state in northern India. — location: 699 ^ref-17723

London sought to detach the northwest part of the country to establish a separate Muslim state. — location: 704 ^ref-6081

By 1944, Wavell was determined to build up Jinnah’s Muslim League — location: 709 ^ref-56816

by March 1945, Wavell remarked that Churchill’s position was shifting: he ‘seems to favour partition of India into Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan’ — location: 712 ^ref-38220

although Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, has often been blamed for partition by decisions made in 1947, the division of India appears to have already been shaped two years earlier. — location: 717 ^ref-55525

When it became plain that Congress would not support partition, Attlee went ahead anyway, in April 1946 authorising the government to work towards the creation of Pakistan, ‘if it seems to be the only chance of an agreed settlement’. — location: 721 ^ref-40095

by the time it became obvious that Britain would not obtain an agreement on its terms – i.e., a united India which would preserve strong ties with Britain – planners quickly opted to promote a separate Pakistan. — location: 742 ^ref-18119

British had long tried to use the Muslim card to exert leverage over the Hindu nationalists, since they had few other means to maintain British power in the face of a popular movement against it — location: 744 ^ref-54937

throughout the ensuing border war with India, Britain maintained a strongly pro-Pakistan stance. — location: 748 ^ref-50775

‘the main issue was who would control the main artery leading into Central Asia.’ — location: 752 ^ref-8778

an estimated 20 million people crossing the new border in both directions, in search of new homes, — location: 765 ^ref-44950

In the 1980s, it was to act as a forward base for intervention in Afghanistan – precisely its utility as seen by British military chiefs over thirty years earlier. — location: 769 ^ref-8959

clerics of the revivalist Deobandi movement, which would be patronised by Pakistan’s later military rulers and would back jihadist forces in Pakistan, largely opposed the creation of Pakistan at the time, arguing that a Muslim national state was not needed to create their Islamic world. — location: 776 ^ref-14456