What Two Nations Are Formed When the British Leave India
- Op april 18, 2022
- Door Jouke
- 0
There are different interpretations of the theory of the two nations, based on the question of whether or not the two postulated nationalities can coexist on a territory, with radically different implications. One interpretation argued for sovereign autonomy, including the right to secession, for Muslim-majority areas of the Indian subcontinent, but without any population transfer (i.e., Hindus and Muslims would continue to live together). Another interpretation states that Hindus and Muslims “represent two distinct and often antagonistic ways of life and therefore cannot coexist in a single nation.” [30] In this version, a population transfer (i.e. the complete withdrawal of Hindus from Muslim-majority areas and the complete withdrawal of Muslims from Hindu-majority areas) is a desirable step towards a complete separation of two incompatible nations that “cannot coexist in a harmonious relationship.” [31] [32] Almost immediately after independence, tensions between India and Pakistan began to boil. The first of the three great wars between the two nations broke out over the princely state of Kashmir. The Maharaja was reluctant to join India or Pakistan. Pakistan therefore sponsored a tribal invasion aimed at annexing the state. “The population of undivided India in 1947 was about 390 million. After partition, there were 330 million people in India, 30 million in West Pakistan and 30 million people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). [Citation needed] Once the borders were set, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to reach what they hoped would be the relative security of the religious majority. The 1951 census in Pakistan identified the number of displaced persons in Pakistan at 7,226,600, presumably all Muslims who had entered Pakistan from India; The 1951 census in India counted 7,295,870 displaced persons, apparently all Hindus and Sikhs who had left Pakistan for India immediately after partition. [2] The total therefore amounts to about 14.5 million, although both censuses were carried out about 4 years after the division, these figures include the net increase in the population after mass migration. [94] Gokhale immediately took advantage of the crucial new parliamentary procedures by introducing a measure for free and compulsory primary education throughout British India.
Although he was defeated, he was repeatedly brought back by Gokhale, who used the platform of the government`s highest state council as a sounding board for nationalist demands. Before the 1909 law, as Gokhale told his Congress party colleagues in Madras this year, Indian nationalists were involved in agitation “from the outside,” but “from now on,” he said, they would be “engaged in responsible association with the government.” In August 1947, when the British finally withdrew after three hundred years in India, the subcontinent was divided into two independent nation-states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, one of the largest migrations in human history began when millions of Muslims migrated west and east of Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh), while millions of Hindus and Sikhs went in the opposite direction. Several hundred thousand people never made it. Gandhi was released from prison in February 1924, four years before the end of his prison sentence, after an operation. After that, he focused on what he called his “constructive program” of spinning and hand weaving and the entire village of “uprising,” as well as Hindu “purification” to advance the cause of the Harijans, especially by granting them access to Hindu temples from which they had always been banished. Gandhi himself lived in village ashrams (religious retreats) that served more as models for his socio-economic ideals than centers of political power, although Congress leaders flocked to his remote rural retreats to regularly discuss strategy. Large sums of money were offered in payment for raw materials when British demand was high, as was the case throughout the American Civil War (1861-65), but after the end of the Civil War, the Indian market collapsed when raw cotton returned to factories in southern Lancashire. Millions of farmers who had been weaned from grain production have now found themselves on the boom and bust of a global market economy.
They were unable to convert their commercial agricultural surplus into food during the depression years, and from 1865 to 1900, India experienced a series of prolonged famines, complicated in 1896 by the introduction of the bubonic plague (spread of Bombay, where infected rats were brought from China). Although the population of the subcontinent increased considerably, from about 200 million in 1872 (the year of the first near-universal census) to more than 319 million in 1921, the population may have decreased slightly between 1895 and 1905. Britain`s most important contribution to India`s economic development during Crown rule was the railway network, which spread across the subcontinent so quickly after 1858, when there were barely 200 miles (320 km) of track across India. By 1869, more than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) of steel railway had been completed by British railway companies, and by 1900 about 25,000 miles (40,000 km) of railway had been laid. By the beginning of the First World War (1914-18), the total had reached 35,000 miles (56,000 km), almost the full growth of British India`s railway network. Initially, the railways proved to be a mixed blessing for most Indians, as by connecting the agricultural and village heart of India to the British imperial port cities of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, they served both to accelerate the pace of extraction of India`s raw materials and to accelerate the transition from subsistence food to commercial agricultural production. Middlemen hired by the port city`s agencies took the trains inland and led village chiefs to convert large parts of the grain-producing land into cash crops. Bihar`s rich coal deposits were mined during this period to power imported British locomotives, and coal production increased from about 500,000 tons in 1868 to about 6,000,000 tons in 1900 and more than 20,000,000 tons in 1920. Coal was used for iron smelting in India as early as 1875, but the Tata Iron and Steel Company (now part of the Tata Group), which received no government aid, did not begin production until 1911, when it launched India`s modern steel industry in Bihar. Tata grew rapidly after the First World War and had become the largest steel complex in the British Commonwealth by world War II.
The jute textile industry, Bengal`s equivalent to Bombay`s cotton industry, developed in the wake of the Crimean War (1853-56), which boosted the export of raw jute from Calcutta to Dundee by disrupting Russia`s supply of raw hemp to jute factories in Scotland. In 1863 there were only two jute factories in Bengal, but by 1882 there were 20 employing more than 20,000 workers. The British entrusted this task to the East India Company, which first settled in India by obtaining permission from the local authorities to own land, fortify its possessions, and engage in duty-free trade in mutually beneficial relations. The company`s territorial supremacy began after being involved in hostilities, marginalizing rival European companies, and eventually overthrowing the Nawab of Bengal in 1757 and installing a puppet. The company`s control over Bengal was effectively consolidated in the 1770s when Warren Hastings brought the administrative offices of the Nawab to Calcutta (now Kolkata) under his supervision. Around the same time, the British Parliament began to regulate the East India Company through successive Indian acts, placing Bengal under the indirect control of the British government. Over the next eight decades, a series of wars, treaties, and annexations extended the company`s dominance across the subcontinent, subjecting most of India to the determination of British governors and merchants. .