 legacy of India's partition. Folks who are in the book writing business have these grand ideas about how their book is going to be launched and who's going to review it and how it's going to be received by the critics. And most of that never happens the way that one envisions. Except in Nisid's case, an act actually has happened. In that way, some of you may have listened to his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air and NPR last week. Just yesterday, there was a very lengthy review of the book in The New Yorker by William Dowrymple. Ahmed Rashid reviewed the book in The New York Review of Books, calling it a superb and highly readable account of not just the mayhem, but the political machinations that preceded partition. My favorite endorsement of the book is from New York Magazine. I don't know if any of you guys read New York Magazine. There's something in the back of the magazine called The Approval Matrix. And they rank cultural items on two dimensions. One is whether or not they're high-brow or low-brow. And the other is whether or not they're good or bad. And Nisid's book claimed the coveted spot of being both high-brow and good. So I think it's probably unprecedented for a book of nonfiction. About partition to have landed in that. So congratulations, first of all, on this great launch. We're really grateful that you came here to talk to all of us today. Nisid, for those of you who don't know, is currently based in Singapore as the Asia Editor for Bloomberg View. Prior to joining Bloomberg, he spent about a decade, I think, at Newsweek as Asia Editor, foreign editor, and eventually as co-editor. And the book is, which will be for sale after this event, we're going to talk for about 20 or 25 minutes up here. Then just open it up to your questions. At around five, we're gonna end promptly. And well, there'll be a reception with beer and wine and hope all of you can stay. He'll be signing books. You all can procure books. This is also being webcast live. So I just ask that when time comes for Q&A, there'll be mic circulating. Please just identify who you are and keep your questions really short and concise. So why don't we get started? Let me just ask you a question that I didn't really have the guts to ask you two years ago when we first met in Singapore and you told me you were writing this book, which is, why write a book about partition, right? I mean, in some sense, this is a period that lots of historians have covered. There've been some really interesting and fascinating accounts of this tumultuous period and the subcontinent. Why did you decide, aha, this is the issue that I wanna tackle? Well, it's sort of, first of all, thanks for having me here. This is great to be here. It really grew out of my time at Newsweek. That decade that I spent there coincided with the American War in Afghanistan after 9-11. And I was in charge of our coverage of that conflict. And the question I kept getting asked by readers, by colleagues even, was why did Pakistan, the sustainable ally in the war on terror, accept billions of dollars in aid from the US government and yet still allegedly provides safe havens to the Taliban and some degree of support, depending upon who you believe. And it made no sense to someone sitting in New York City. If you look at it from the point of view of Pakistan and how the security establishment sees the world, where India poses this major central, potentially existential threat, some of their decisions become clearer. And what I wanted to do was sort of explain where the roots of that mindset began. Not, you can't say that it was all fixed in a few months in 1947, but certainly the two nations were set on a course at that moment that they haven't been able to get off of. And most of the accounts of partition up until now have either been, they're usually either stories, not really a partition, but of the freedom movement. And you know, so the movie Gandhi is about all the years leading up to partition and then partition's almost a footnote at the end. Or there are stories about partition itself and the riots and the horrible tragedies that took place during that time. What I wanted to look at was something a little different. I mean, ostensibly, you could have had partition without having the riots, if things had happened differently. You could have had the riots without creating a rivalry between two nations that you could not, you know, that would last nearly 70 years. So what happened in that time period that set these two nations on a sort of collision course as it were? What went wrong? What were the decisions made? How did things play out so that this is where we ended up? So set up the story a little bit for us. So, I mean, the book is very character-driven. You spend a lot of time trying to get inside the kind of minds of the several, the key protagonists, right? I mean, mainly Nehru on the Indian side and I think Jinnah. I mean, Gandhi figures, but I don't think quite as prominently as these two. You have a line towards the end of the book where you say that Nehru contributed very nearly as much as Jinnah to the poisoning of the political atmosphere on the subcontinent. Tell us a little bit about these two men and what you see is their kind of relative contributions to where the region sits today. Well, the strange thing is that they were actually quite similar. I think they had more in common with each other than either of them did with Gandhi. They were both secular men, they're British trained, you know, more comfortable in English than they were in any Indian languages. Rationalists, really, scientifically minded, not, you know, to both men, Gandhi at first seemed quite mystical and incomprehensible. And in this time period that I'm looking at, sort of 1946 to 48, when I think the key decisions were made, it really was these two men who were making the decisions. And what was important to understand is that they came to this moment after a 30-year rivalry. They had started out in the teens where Jinnah was a political ally of Nehru's father and was trying to bring the Muslim League and the Congress Party together to create a unified set of demands to make up the British. And over those 30 years, they sort of fell out, Nehru followed Gandhi's course. Jinnah went his own way. And that's when their differences really started to come out where Jinnah was a very cold, logical, he's a lawyer, very good at negotiations, and very fixated on sort of precise constitutional details and arguing over this and that. Nehru hated these negotiations. He would just get frustrated in these hours of talks and would oftentimes come out with some impetuous outburst that would then destroy things. So what I meant by that line was not that either men was responsible for inciting violence, neither of them intended to do that. But with their sort of the fact that they couldn't argue, negotiate on the same level, they contributed to the embittering of relations among both their followers and then more broadly the communities. But you sort of make the claim in several places that had the Congress been savvier, more inclusive, had Congress leaders kind of played their hand in a slightly different way. They could have gone a long way towards avoiding perhaps some of the partition and some of the consequences. Where exactly did they in your judgment go wrong? What were the major missteps? Well, the obvious one is the cabinet mission plan. So one year, about a year and a half before independence, the British put out this last ditch compromise that would have kept India as a united country. But with a very weak federal government in Delhi and very strong provincial governments. And then the added innovation was that in the areas where Muslims were in a majority in the Northwest and Northeast, sort of the areas but not exactly which would eventually become Pakistan, that these provinces could if they wanted to form a sort of regional government that would have certain powers. And this was something that Jinnah accepted. Perhaps reluctantly, but he had been convinced at that point, this was the beginning of the Cold War, he was convinced that Pakistan on its own would not be able to defend itself against the Soviet Union. It wouldn't have an economy strong enough to pay for its military. And so he accepted it, Congress eventually accepted it, and Nehru, who was facing pressure from his own left wing for having given up on the idea of a strong central government that would impose socialist policies on the rest of the subcontinent, came out in a press conference with a sort of, again one of these impestuous outbursts where he said something to the effect of that none of this matter, once the British were gone, we would do whatever we wanted to do. And whether he meant it or not, he said it publicly. And this back jinn into a corner and in front of his own followers, he couldn't accept this. And he also legitimately would have a hard time trusting anything that the Congress leaders would say from that point on. And it's at that moment that I think partition became almost inevitable. But were there certain things that the Congress leadership did in terms of using religious symbolism, Hindu appeals that jinn redeemed were just completely exclusionary, right? Yeah, I mean this was Gandhi's great innovation, right? He was able to speak to the Indian masses in a language that they understood. But because they were predominantly Hindu, obviously the language involved Hindu iconography, Hindu mythology, you know, Gandhi himself was personally not prejudiced and he read from the Quran at his prayer meetings and things like this. But not all this followers were so high-minded. And when, for instance, in the 1930s, when the British held elections and allowed Indians to control provincial governments, the Congress, because they represented the majority of the country, won most of the provinces. And the people that they brought in were their own followers and they were, of course, predominantly Hindu. And again, I'm not saying that some or many or all were prejudiced, but if you're a Muslim politician and all of a sudden the entire provincial government is controlled by Hindus who belong to Congress and they're giving jobs to their followers or their political supporters and so on and you're completely cut out. That gave, that fetus of insecurity that Jinnah was able to exploit. And he could say, look, this is what's going to happen if India remains united and Congress dominates the central government, you'll always be cut out. You'll always be a minority. And Congress didn't really, because figures like Nehru and Jinnah were so unprejudiced and really did believe that Congress was a party that included all communities, I don't know that they understood these fears enough that their Muslim friends weren't afraid of them, so why should anybody else? So there was a sort of, I think there was more they could have done to assuage the fear, legitimate fears of a minority. In India. So there's some really revealing sections where you quote what some of the actors privately said and felt about sort of Jinnah. So if you turn that kind of lens around and think about what were his failings or things he could have done better. I mean, you say that according to Nehru, Jinnah's Pakistan was mad and foolish and fantastic and criminal, a huge barrier to all progress. His profile was due to quote, opportunism raised to the nth degree, pomposity and filthy language abuse, a capacity for what is considered quote, clever politics, vulgarity, total incomprehension of the events and forces that are shaping the world, et cetera, et cetera. Mountbatten, who's the last British viceroy, says that Jinnah was a psychopathic case, unable to quote, adduce one single feasible argument in favor of Pakistan. In fact, he had offered no counterarguments. He gave the impression that he simply was not listening. And you wonder why they couldn't negotiate, right? This is, no, I mean, that quote from Nehru was from 1943. It was well before he even got to the partition period. He just could not, it's a little unclear about what exactly Jinnah was trying to get. There's a debate, an ongoing debate, about whether he really wanted an independent Pakistan or whether this was a bargaining chip in order to get a certain degree of political power as under that British compromise. And it's impossible to say with certainty because he never made it clear himself either in his private writings or to his friends or whatnot. So he had to, he was in a position where he had to bluff a little bit. He, Pakistan, there's a great quote from the CIA actually from World War II where they describe Pakistan or the idea of Pakistan as a Muslim fairy land. That there's this vague thing that means everything to everybody. So to Muslim farmer, it'll mean that your Hindu landlord will be booted out or if you're a mullah, it would mean that it would be a theocracy. If it was, if you were a landowner, it would mean that you'd get to keep all your fields and so on. And it was, he had to remain vague about it in order to keep this strange coalition together. And that frustrated people like Nehru and Baton to no end and quite understandably so. I mean, he was a chilly, chilly personality. One of his friends, one of his good friends, said that you needed a fur coat to be friends with him. So was his insistence on a full independent Pakistan bluff? I think it may have been a bluff at first when he started making it in 1940. But then it's, I would say by 1946, by the time he gives up on this British compromise, then it's a little more unclear. It's he, I think at that point, if he could have gotten the full Pakistan he wanted, which would have involved all of the province of Punjab and all of the province of Bengal, which also would have meant that he got the city of Calcutta, which at that time had 85% of India's industrial capacity as the biggest port. I mean, it would have made a major difference to the Pakistan economy. If he could have gotten all that, then yes, I think it was no longer a bluff at that point, he wanted it. But up until the very end, when he had to accept a Trump-cated Pakistan, it's really unclear. It was the night that he was supposed to make his decision, he was still sort of hedging a little bit about it. So let me sort of bring this forward a bit. So a couple of weeks ago, before the book was released, you wrote a piece for Foreign Policy Magazine. And I know you don't, authors don't come up with the headlines, but the headline was, why is Pakistan such a mess? Question mark, blame India. And the subtitle was- I also didn't write. Right. But now you have to live with. After a year in office, Modi's gestures of conciliation towards Islamabad have gone nowhere. That's because India's founding fathers set Pakistan up to fail. What do you mean by that? So yeah, this is my karma for being an editor for many years, writing provocative headlines for authors who are asleep in Asia. Now, the only point I was trying to make with that piece is that in this drama, a partition, there are no pure saints, there are no pure villains. It's very easy to make Jinnah out to be a villain, and I could list the things he did wrong and things he was negligent about and so on. But you don't hear as much about what people like Gandhi and Nehru did wrong because they were personally quite admirable people. But I'm not talking about their personal characteristics but what their decisions did. And in that sense, they strove to, as I said, truncate Pakistan to make it smaller. They had no real interest in making it sort of viable economically or stable because there was this feeling that, and Mount Batten said this openly, Sardar Patel said this openly, even Nehru would say it privately, there was this feeling that if Pakistan failed in a couple years, it would then come back to India and that this was just a way to get rid of Jinnah. He was an old man, he was ill. And Mount Batten in the negotiations actually wrote a letter to his provincial governor saying, the key thing to do here is to make Pakistan as weak as possible so that it fails on its own merits and they will return to reason and realize that a united India is better for everyone else. And so there was no great interest in making it stronger and so you ended up with, and Jinnah would say, look, if you have this much of an imbalance, if you have this great power divide, you'll have this Pakistan that's always weak and insecure and will be a destabilizing force in the region and that's exactly what we've ended up with today. Now you can't, I would not blame all of Pakistan's dysfunctions on India, let me just make that clear. 70 years have passed and many people have made many mistakes since then, but it was in its moment of formation I think things could have been handled differently. But you do sort of point to a decision that Pakistan made early on which has had direct ramifications 70 years later and that's its position vis-a-vis Kashmir and you have a very interesting section where you talk about their use of proxy warriors back in 1947 and fast forward to today and we're still dealing with this issue. You write Pakistan's unofficial support for the Kashmir attacks, the insurgents was hardly a secret and it marked the first use of armed proxies that Pakistan's leaders would employ throughout the country's history. Tell us a little bit about the decision-making going into that and sort of help us kind of play it forward till today. What's interesting, I mean there's another like highly contested episode in the partition drama where in October of 47 tribesmen from the Pashtun areas along the border with Afghanistan went across Pakistan and into Kashmir which was then ruled by Hindu Maharaja who had not decided whether his Muslim majority state would join Pakistan or India but he was starting to lean towards India and signs of this would become a parent Jinnah had sent envoys there who were reporting back to him that the Maharaja was definitely going to exceed to India. So these tribesmen, the logic of this still escapes me a little bit but the idea was that they would go in and spur a local uprising against the Maharaja and that somehow that would then bring the state into Pakistan's embrace. And this was, there was a degree of organization to this, this wasn't entirely spontaneous. It's pretty clear that Jinnah himself did not order it but people as senior as his prime minister, Lekad Ali Khan, probably were involved. And the feeling, it wasn't a sort of they were trying to avoid an overt war with India. The idea was we'll use these proxy warriors, we'll maintain deniability and we will gain at least enough time to improve our negotiating position with India. I guess I should back up a little bit. Once this invasion happened, India sent troops almost immediately and at that point Jinnah decided, yes we are gonna provide covert support to these fighters and but the idea was that they would provide it for about three months and at that point someone, the UN or someone would intervene and they would be able to negotiate a better deal. And for a state that is inherently weaker, the appeal of these asymmetric forces is obvious. It's, I think Pakistan is now starting to find out the repercussions of this and why it's dangerous to do and why it's counterproductive in the long run but you can see why they would turn to it as a tactic. And it just got out of control. It did because then it's, over the next 70 years it got tied up with a lot more. So then this was, once you're involved it wasn't resolved in three months. Then you start pouring more resources into it and then you start to think that you can actually win this way and then they injected regular troops and then Kashmir of course just becomes this great cause to unify Pakistanis as a way to, when Jinnah passed away about a year after independence and at this point you've got a state that's still like half formed. You've never built up a clear identity for what this country's supposed to be. It's still separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory between East Pakistan and West Pakistan and you need a unifying force and this is when you start to get the idea that India is the enemy. This is, we're an Islamic state, not a secular state. Kashmir is this cause that we have to fight for. It's been ripped out of our hands by India. It becomes useful to a lot of political actors and people with security establishment to continue this. So you say something very interesting about why Kashmir mattered so much to India and mattered so much to Nehru in particular. And you say that much like Afghanistan would serve for the US many decades later, Kashmir became the stage for a morality play. At stake was a particular idea of India. If Nehru could facilitate the integration of Kashmir into India, it would prove both Jinnah and Patel wrong. What was the idea of India that he was trying to sort of preserve? That India would be a multi-faith society where Muslims would be equal citizens and would be welcomed. And there were obviously, there was a huge Muslim minority within India, it spread all throughout the country, but this was the only Muslim majority state and the political leader at the time was an ally of Nehru's. And if the state would voluntarily join India, if it's people voted in a referendum and said that this is, you know, we prefer to join India, this would validate Nehru's vision. And it was a vision that Jinnah had fought against. Jinnah's idea was that Kashmir was a Muslim majority state. It inherently belonged with Pakistan. And then Patel, him and Nehru had been, through the riots, under the great pressure they were under, they also developed a bit of a rivalry and Patel was more unsentimental about this and sort of felt he didn't entirely trust the Muslim population within India, many of whom had supported Jinnah and had supported the Pakistan demand and felt like they were a potential fifth column and that if anyone expressed support for Pakistan, then they should just go there and move there. And Nehru had to fight very hard to make clear that that was not the India he wanted to see. You know, his position at the time was not popular. He risked his life by going out and speaking in front of angry crowds in Delhi, many of whom were refugees who'd come from the Punjab, who'd had relatives killed and insisting that India had to be a state where Muslims would be full citizens. So to him, in fact, the quote was he used to, he described Jinnah's vision of Pakistan as a medieval vision, as a poisonous plant and he described Kashmir as a sort of thorn to prick and draw that poison out. That was his vision for it. And was the rivalry between Nehru and Patel, you know, the Home Minister, his deputy, the kind of other leading light of the Congress party along with Gandhi and Nehru, as fraught as it's often made out to be, because there's a very interesting fight which continues in India, but appropriating these figures, right? So in the current political context, Nehru is often seen as this kind of urbane kind of secular nationalist who was kind of, you know, a Congressite through and through, and Patel, even though he was a member of the Congress, is, you know, being embraced by the BJP as a kind of Hindu nationalist and somebody who is sort of more genuine in some ways and more rustic and sort of tougher, this kind of Iron Man, sort of, how much of that is overblown or how much of it is actually was borne out by the research that you did for the book? It was definitely borne out, you know, now within limits because Patel, there were always fears and rumors at the time that Patel was gonna stage a coup and that because he controlled the connections to the Hindu industrialists, he controlled the money bags, and he was more popular at the time. I mean, it was not, Nehru's position was not popular in the fall of 1947, early 48, and if Patel had decided to stage a coup, everyone expected that it would succeed, that he would take over the government. Now, he never did and never threatened to, but he did find Nehru to be a frustrating figure to work with, he was too flighty, he was impetuous, he didn't, he wasn't a realist in a way, he had sort of had these kind of high-fluting ideas about how things should be, and Patel cared about stability, he wanted it to end the riots, he wanted, you know, he was worried about the stability of the Indian government and riots in Delhi in early September nearly brought down the government for a few days. So they would fight over, the fights were real, they fought over whether Sikhs, for instance, should be allowed to carry the ceremonial daggers, which were being used to kill people, and Nehru argued against it, Patel argued for it, Patel won, and in each of these cases, Patel would generally win, but in the end he remained loyal, and he did treat Nehru as the prime minister, when he couldn't take it, at the very end, he was going to resign. The day Gandhi was assassinated, he told him just before that he was gonna leave the government, and take probably half the ministers with him, and changed his mind after the assassination. And did their relationship prove after that? It did, and then there were tensions again later too, there were tensions over the state of Hyderabad, which is a Hindu majority state ruled by a Muslim ruler, and Patel just was, again, he was the realist, he wanted to go in with tanks, and take care of it quickly, and Nehru had more patience with the negotiations, but eventually came around to Patel's point of view. So let me just ask one more question, and we'll just open it up to the group here. So fast forward till today, and we're kind of at a, I don't know, sort of interesting point in the Pakistan relations, I mean, not much is happening on the surface, right? I mean, after a lot of hope and kind of goodwill, when Prime Minister Modi invited the leaders of the Sark governments, including Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to his inauguration, subsequently talks between the two governments were canceled, there seems to be no real movement in terms of rapprochement between the two governments. How do you evaluate kind of where the two governments sit, vis-a-vis one another, and what do you think the case is for them to actually do things slightly differently? Well, it's a hard case to make in India right now. Modi did reach out. The talks were derail because Pakistani officials met with Kashmiri separatists and so on, sort of usual thing, and it is true, there's a sense in India, I think, that there's no point in trying to heal this rift because it serves the Pakistani military for it to exist. This is, you know, having the India threat is useful to them, it earns them a huge share of the budget, it gives them a central role in the governance of Pakistan, and they don't want it to end. And there may be some degree of truth to that, but that doesn't mean that you should just throw up your hands and ignore the second biggest country in the region that has nuclear weapons and sort of make up with Bangladesh and Nepal and Bhutan, all of which is positive and good, but you can't just ignore Pakistan. And it is true that, you know, partition happened almost 70 years ago, a lot of people say this is just history, most of the vast majority of the population was born after this, but the conditions on the ground, I don't think are getting, I think they're getting less stable, not more. I mean, you have nationalists on both sides. You just saw two weeks ago flare up of, you know, rhetoric, but still, you know, threats back and forth. You've got 24-7 satellite media that, you know, just like channels here, elevates the loudest, most obnoxious voices. And you do have, you know, two nuclear arms states that don't have a very good sense of how each of them would react to a particular crisis, which is very scary and very dangerous. And I think the longer this drifts without trying to solve, without you trying to solve it, just the more dangerous it gets. But you made the point that you think Pakistan is perhaps changing in interesting ways in terms of its strategic posture. What's the evidence for that? In terms of, you know, the use of proxy warriors, of using supporting militant groups, that things that have aggravated India and Kashmir and elsewhere, that perhaps there's now a realization that this is not actually in our long-term interest. And maybe this is changing. Well, I'm not sure if it's changing. I know that they say it's changing. And, you know, I will take them at their word. It does seem, to take one example, it does seem like Chinese pressure has encouraged them to be less tolerant of the Afghan Taliban. But have they eliminated the safe havens that these militants have not yet? Will they do so? You know, they say that this is the threat that they hold over them, that, you know, go to the negotiating table or else we're going to do this, you know, time will tell. They, you know, they say all the right things. The general say the right things about how they understand militants are the main threat now. India isn't the main threat. This is, you know, this violence, you know, throughout Pakistan is incredibly destabilizing. I would hope they mean it, but still need to see. So let's open it up. My colleagues, AJ here and Rachel have mics and we'll just start with you in the first row. And just please identify yourself and keep your question very short so we can take as many as possible. We have about 25 minutes. Thanks. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Rajdeep Singh. I'm with the Sikh Coalition, which is a domestic civil and human rights organization. Thank you so much for writing the book. I have a question from sort of a human rights perspective, which is perhaps a little naive, but the question is, what do you think the prospects are for some kind of truth and reconciliation process on the subcontinent? If it's not led by government, do you think there's scope for something like this to be led by civil society to help heal the wounds and also open up conversations about free trade and people-to-people contact and this kind of thing? I definitely think so. I think, like I said, there are elements of the state that have a vested interest in continued tensions. But I think if you ask most average Indians and Pakistanis how they feel about one another, not about each other's government, the feelings are very warm. And I think people understand that this conflict doesn't really serve anyone's long-term interests. And there are scholars on both sides who have done incredible work with developing oral histories and preserving memories. And what you need is for those efforts to be joined, right? And so that people can understand what each side went through. But I think at a people-to-people level, there's definitely scope for that. And it should be encouraged because it is conflict will continue until you create enough of a constituency on both sides that has more invested in peace than they do in war. And if governments won't lead that effort, then I think people should. Deepa, yeah. Hi, I'm Deepa Olakoli from Georgia Washington University. And if I could go back to a slightly historical context and then bring it to today. And specifically, my question relates to what you said about the Jinnah relying on the Pakistan military in the first Indo-Pakistan war with the tribesmen and how Pakistan military, ultimately the regulars went in. And it became sort of the regular proxy war strategy down the road. Did you during your research find any evidence at that time of how the power balance in the political environment in Pakistan was sort of shifting from the political to the military? Or did you see any signs or any evidence that this was going to somehow give the Pakistani military the kind of outsized role that it's always had? Was there any inkling at all at that time? It's a really good question. The short answer is not really because, in the period I was looking at, it was a very tight period, just 46 to 48. And I sort of end with Jinnah's death. That entire time, the Pakistan's commander in chief was British. I was two different people, but they were both still British officers. And there actually weren't that many high-ranking Pakistani military officers. So in fact, if you wanted the only evidence I came across of military officers threatening or even thinking about a coup were Hindu generals on the other side who thought that the civilians weren't, couldn't handle the chaos and thought perhaps the military should take over. So you did have complaints when they signed a ceasefire at the end of 1948. Generals on both sides all thought, well, if you had just given us two more months, we would have finished this off. So there was frustration and some of the, one of the military officers who was involved in that tribal invasion was also attempted the first coup in Pakistan in 1951, it failed. But it was his frustration over that whole experience that had caused that. So it wasn't, you didn't see that evidence there, but it was clear that at that time, the military was the most organized and most established force in Pakistan. I mean, the government had just been created out of nothing in August, in July and August. And the military was still the British-run military. They still had its training and its orders and so on. And so you could perhaps have foreseen that this would be the case. But I didn't come across evidence of actual Pakistani generals thinking. Yes, right here in the middle. Hi, my name is Malika. I'm a graduate student at Harvard and I study religion and politics. So this topic is endlessly fascinating and heartbreaking. Mike, your book description says the partition created not only a physical barrier but a psychological barrier as well. And I think that's true not between India and Pakistan only but also for Muslim communities who stayed behind in India. And my question is, do you think the government in India, any government, not especially the Modi government which comes with its own set of packages around this question, do you think the government has a role in dispelling those suspicions? And if so, what do they look like? That's also a good question that I'll have to put on my Bloomberg hat rather than my... Because I've written about this for Bloomberg but not in the book. And the point that I made in an editorial for Bloomberg was precisely this, that I think Prime Minister Modi did a very good job within the campaign of keeping the debate, the rhetoric focused on economic opportunity and reform and economic growth. And he's done a pretty good job since, you know, while in power doing that. And so it's hard to point to something he said or done that you could criticize. But I do think that there is a special responsibility that the government and particularly a leader as powerful as he does has to reach out to a community that forms a major part of the country that does have obvious fears and that it does suffer from lower education rates, lower health, all sorts of issues that can't be brushed under the carpet. As I say, you can't blame him for things that he hasn't said but yet you can because I think it's any leader's duty to make all of your citizens feel included in the country and particularly given his past and given the suspicions of him and given the feelings about him, it behooves him to, it would have behooved him to do more early on. I mean, it's hard to say what he could do right now. I think it's something that I would have loved to have seen him come out in the first month or so and just put this issue to rest with a speech with actions. But it's hard to imagine it happening now. But what about your assessment on, I mean, there have been various statements by any number of BJP leaders, members of parliament, members of the RSS, the VHP, which have been quite majoritarian in nature and inflammatory from the perspective of minority community. Should he have done more in those cases where again, it wasn't he who said those words or made those statements or. He's responsible, yeah. No, I totally agree. I mean, the example I use, and I'm not saying this to curry favor with my employers, but I don't know if you remember after, when there was a whole controversy about the ground zero mosque up in New York and Mayor Bloomberg came out and gave a speech about essentially a civics lesson about how what it meant to be a citizen in the US and how all different faiths needed to be part of it and so on. That's a speech that Modi has never given and that takes a degree of political courage that he should have had. I mean, he had virtually no opposition in his first six months and so I think it was a failing in his part not to have done it and he's paid a little bit of a political price for it because it's these statements that his underlings have made that have given the opposition a handle to attack him in the upper house of parliament and so on. So he's, there is a crude political cost to it as well but I think on a sort of higher moral plan I think that there's more he could have done as a leader. Any questions? Yes, in the back here on the left side. My name's Lyakad Ahmed, I'm Brookings trustee. A historical question. I've always been struck by the fact that Jinnah died only a year after independence. So two questions. One is how closely guarded a secret was his illness and I know it's difficult to sort of do counterfactuals in history but if someone had known, if Mountbatten had known and had delayed independence would events have turned out differently? Yeah. And on the second question, you raised the prospect in your book that the deadline which was set was actually a deadline set for India not necessarily for Pakistan in terms of this mid-August date. The handover. Yeah, it was incredibly vague. You know, when everyone complains Mountbatten moved up the date of the handover from June of 1948 to August of 47 and it seemed a little crazy even at the time but the day he was in India announcing this, the British Prime Minister was meeting with the US ambassador in London and he told him that, you know, don't worry, that date is just for India because obviously India has a government, they could take over immediately but we're not sure about Pakistan, we might do this later in the year, it might take longer than that. So, you know, this was never thought through properly. Nobody ever asked the Pakistanis how they would feel about being ruled by the British for another six months but it tells you something about the British mentality at the time. And on Jenna's illness, everyone knew he was a sickly man. He'd been over the course of the previous 10 years have been several times when he had to retire to a hill station for a month at a time because of his illness. He was a two-pack of days smoker, incredibly thin and, you know, I don't think anyone knew that he was, well, you know, a year before, when this was all happening, he wasn't necessarily near death. He was as sick as he was ever before. He wasn't diagnosed with tuberculosis until the summer of 1948, just a few months before he died. And whether it would have made a difference is a question that comes up all the time and I find it impossible to answer. If he had died, say in 1946, I'm not sure there was anybody else within the Muslim League who could have taken up the Pakistan demand and stuck with it as firmly as he did. And I imagine there probably would have been some sort of compromise to keep India united. Now, whether that would have been a good thing or not is that's another counterfactual that is impossible to answer. I mean, there are many, many scenarios you can imagine where that would have led to violence later down the line, separatist movements, religious tensions. We just don't know what would have happened. But what about Nero's health? I mean, at one point, you know, Mountbatten sort of muses that, you know, Nero is overworking himself to such a degree that he practically is not sleeping at night and is having real difficulty in controlling himself at meetings. He may be heading for a nervous breakdown, right? And you document these amazing images in the book where, you know, at one point he gets out a pistol and starts branching around when he gets enraged. He, of course, has that famous scene, which is in the movie Gandhi, right, where someone kind of makes a derogatory statement about the Mahatma and he gets out and sort of challenges them, you know, saying like, you want to kill me first, you know, come attack me. And so there are these real moments of, you know, we think of him as this kind of calm and statesman. But I mean, there was real kind of fire. He was a firebrand, yeah. He was more comfortable as a firebrand. You know, when he came out of college, he was, you know, European radical and he always preferred action to sitting behind a desk or sitting at a negotiating table. And he'd also never run anything, right? I mean, none of these guys had ever held any executive positions. They were all lawyers. And so I don't think, and the bureaucracy that he now led had always been a British led bureaucracy that the Congress party had been fighting against for three decades. And these were, you know, toadies of the British. And, you know, it took a while before he, you know, felt like this was his government. So his first instinct was to handle everything himself. You know, the scene with the pistol is there were riots happening in Delhi and a friend told him about a particular area where Muslims who were trying to flee to a refugee camp were being killed. And instead of ordering troops to go there or police, you know, he controlled the government of the second biggest country in the world, he grabbed this old dusty pistol and was about to go out there himself and handle the problem. You know, that was just his kind of first instinct with these things. But again, it's sort of admirable, except for the fact that that's not what the leader 400 million people should be doing. That's not how to be most effective. I mean, it meant that he was getting no sleep, that he was, you know, his house was full of refugees. He was, you know, it makes you realize too just what pressure these leaders were under because they were surrounded by chaos without any real institutional sense of how to deal with it at the time. Yes, in the back here. Jerry Hyman at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, thank you very much. I was wondering if you could look forward a bit. Can you imagine how this could possibly de-escalate? What kinds of situations can you imagine that would create enough interest so that these vested interests in conflict would maybe turn differently if you can? And secondly, is there anything, talk about missed opportunities of various non-Pakistan and non-Indian actors, are there any things that you could imagine outside actors doing that would make any reasonable difference? It's interesting. Well, my answer to the first question is sort of the common one, which is that you have to increase economic and trade and energy linkages between the two countries that, South Asia, as everyone knows, is among the least integrated regions in the world. There are constituency on both sides who would like greater trade. Trade is something like two and a half billion dollars a year now, it could be 10 times that. Punjab in particular would benefit from a shared energy grid. There are logistical and infrastructure roadblocks to greater trade. These are issues. Deng Xiaoping's attitude towards insoluble conflicts over sovereignty was just to put them aside and focus on the things you can do, which is making money. And I think if you concentrate on that, that would at least give you a few building blocks to move on from. And in that sense, I think the party that could be of most use here is China. You see that they're investing billions of dollars in Pakistani infrastructure for their own purposes, their own mercantilist purposes, but also while they benefit from a certain degree of tension between India and Pakistan, they don't want it to get out of control. They think they would prefer an India-Pakistan relationship that resembled the China-U.S. relationship where there was cooperation and competition and there remained some mutual suspicions but that both sides understood that conflict would be worse for them than cooperation. And I think if you can start to integrate Pakistan and India with Afghanistan and with China through roads and power plants and so on, that could start to bind people together. And I think China would have an interest in that. Certainly the Chinese, even though they've helped the Pakistani missile program and the nuclear program, they are as worried as anybody else about the security of the Pakistan nuclear program. And I think they would prefer a more stable environment for them. Just to play devil's advocate for a second, I mean, from the perspective of the present Indian government, right? And their view is we are doing what we can. I mean, we're working with those partners in the region who want to work with us. And that may be Nepal and Bangladesh and Bhutan and Sri Lanka and others. And we're working on, there was this deal which was recently signed about auto movement, auto trade. And we're going to move forward on energy and a host of other infrastructure projects. And eventually we hope that our brothers and sisters in Pakistan will see it fit to want to come to the table and change their behavior. And so, I mean, that is their way of doing something with what they have and hoping that that provides enough of a magnet, right? To bring Pakistan over, but you're not particularly sanguine about that working. I mean, I agree with that. I mean, I think the hold up here right now isn't the Indian government. But at the same time, while they're saying this, they're also issuing threats about how they're going to respond to this or that salvo across the border. And it's understandable politically why Modi and his government would want to appear tough towards Pakistan. But I don't think that gets you anywhere with Pakistan. They don't, that actually helps the army, this kind of rhetoric. So it would be, I think there are things they could do to change the rhetoric to sort of, some of the Indians already granted most favorite nation status to Pakistan, but there are other hurdles to trade, these sort of non-tariff barriers and so on that they could work on unilaterally that wouldn't really cost them that much. And just, I suppose, make it easier for civilians within Pakistan to who want to reach out. Now, whether they can or not with the opposition of the Pakistani military, I don't know. I mean, you have to be realistic about it, but that should be the goal, I think. Any other questions? Yes, right here in the front. Oh, Dan Leibman, I'm a writer. Did the Cold War warriors play any role in the partition or try to play any role? It's an interesting question because that was my original angle I pursued in my research. And I discovered after a few months that the answer was actually no. So I had to change my research a bit. It was a context that I think influenced decisions. I don't think that there was a direct relationship, but for instance, when Jinnah agreed to this compromise plan for United India, it was right after he had asked one of the British generals of the Indian Army to do a strategy paper for him about how Pakistan could survive, particularly vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. And this general wrote in his report that it wouldn't survive, that it would never be able to defend itself. And that helped convince Jinnah at that moment that he was better off with the United India. Later on, he tried to play up the threat from the Soviet Union to get money from the US. I mean, this is a pattern with Pakistan since the 50s, but it started as early as 47. He was trying to get a $2 billion loan from Washington, and his argument was that Pakistan was on the border of Afghanistan and Kashmir kind of touched the Soviet Union barely, but that they would be the US's bulwark against communist infiltration in South Asia. Now, the argument didn't work because the Americans were trying to be even-handed with both sides, but he definitely had that in his mind. And then, sorry, one last point. There's often a feeling that the British intentionally divided the subcontinent because they wanted to weaken both India and Pakistan, which is not true at all. I mean, the British can be blamed for a whole lot of things, but they very clearly, at this point, wanted to unite India precisely because they thought it would be a better ally against the Soviets. It would have a united army. They could use air bases in what is now Pakistan to attack the Soviet Union, and it would be a great source of men, and material, and so on. So their interest at that point was very much in the United India, not because they naturally supported one side or the other, but for strategic reasons. We have time for one more, yeah, right here. Hi, I'm Sherry Arnabian with the Express Tribune. And so, yeah, you just mentioned how Jinnah was prepared to accept United India, and that was at a point where the idea of Pakistan had gotten a lot of fervor already. And so, Jinnah's story on his stance on Muslim nationalism is interesting, that he started out not wanting to be a spokesperson for the Muslim community, and then he becomes the spokesperson. So how would you explain his shifting positions? In terms of how he became a spokesman for the... Right, right, and then, you know... Well, you know, I think he... The turning point, which many people have pointed out was in these elections in 1936, 37, where at the time there were these separate electorates for Muslims, only Muslims could vote for Muslim candidates, and he had come back from England to lead the Muslim League in the campaign. And his idea was that the Muslim League would win the Muslim vote, and then form coalitions in various provinces with the Congress. And Nehru, who was leading Congress at the time, just said, you know, why would we want to do that? He had this idea that coalitions had brought down the Spanish government in the Civil War, and they wanted to avoid factionalism and so on. And he said, if you want to join our government, you have to join Congress. And it was at this point that Jinnah decided that Muslims, if they wanted to have a voice, needed a sort of separate champion. And also remember, he lost these elections badly. So he had been a very powerful figure in the early part of the century. His political fortunes had gone down to the point where he was driven out of India and went into exile, came back, tried to make this comeback, lost massively in these elections, and faced no political future. And what he did is he created a future for himself by seizing upon these Muslim fears and anxieties and using them to say, look, I'll be your champion and so forth. By the time in 46 when he agreed to the United India, it still is unclear, as we were saying, whether he really wanted an independent state or thought an independent state was viable or whether he just wanted protections for Muslims within a United India. And it was sort of near his comments that forced him into a corner and forced him to sort of go for the more radical part of that equation, that he couldn't face up to his own followers and say, no, a negotiated solution will be okay because they could point to what the Congress party was saying and say it's not going to be. But I mean, we'll never, I mean, he left no diary. He left very few papers of value, right? So in some sense, your book is the final answer, right? Will we ever be able to shed more light on this? It's the difference between the papers that Nehru and Gandhi left, which are like extended volume upon volume upon volume and they're very honest and open and then trying to read through the collected works of Jinnah, which is not something I would recommend. Just buy the book. That's all you need to, you know, the most interesting exchange of letters I found was his argument with the electricity company over how much they charge him for replacing a light bulb. You know, he didn't put his thoughts down on paper. So there is an element of guesswork. Yeah, I mean, you know, you try and you substantiate it by saying, you know, what he was saying to people privately and what he did, but it is impossible to know for sure. Let me thank you, Nisd, for coming here to do this today. I just finished reading this book on Sunday and this is the most unlikely of Beach Reads. I mean, it's like, it really is, you can feel good about yourself because it's a literary but it actually is, as William Dowdympel said in New Yorker, reads like a fast-paced thriller. We're gonna now convene in the next room. Hope you guys can join us for refreshment. Nisd will sign some books. You guys can buy some books. Thanks for coming. Thank you.