Midnight's Furies

April 20, 2015
Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru—these towering figures of South Asian independence are widely familiar today for the outsize impact they had on the shape of the modern world. But Hajari, Asia editor for Bloomberg View, turns away from them to deliver the story of the grassroots: faceless actors operating in secret as they overwhelm ideologies and official pronouncements, fomenting chaos to an extent no leader could have predicted. In a region as complex and densely populated as South Asia, events on the ground—often leaderless and seemingly random—can make short work of any policy or plan. Hajari highlights the insufficiency of governments to curb the passions of their populations, devoting a large portion of the book to the contested territory of Kashmir, just one of a multitude of flashpoints at the time of the 1947 partition, albeit the one that arguably inspired the most passion in the dueling leaders. “Given the paucity of unbiased accounts,” he notes, “the question —while endlessly debated over the last six decades—is impossible to answer.” The failure to come to any resolution on that issue has haunted the Indian subcontinent ever since, and Hajari laments that the cycle of recriminations has hardened into a permanent obstacle to peace.

April 15, 2015

The August 1947 granting of independence to India (previously a British colony) and the creation of Pakistan was not supposed to be a bloodbath. However, even before independence, violence erupted in Calcutta and tore apart the Punjab region. Within weeks of the partition, fighting took root in Kashmir, which straddles India and Pakistan. Somewhere between 200,000 and one million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were ethnically cleansed as brutality spread across the Indian subcontinent. Trying to understand how these events could have created such a wide gulf between India and Pakistan, Hajari (Asia editor, Bloomberg View) skillfully chronicles these occurrences in a fast-paced narrative that is framed by the political ambitions of Pakistan's Mohammed Ali Jinnah and India's Jawaharlal Nehru. If ever a situation demanded truly effective leadership, partition was such an instance. Unfortunately, both Jinnah and Nehru frequently come across as ineffectual. Their personal shortcomings surfaced at precisely the wrong moments and repeatedly triggered tumult on the subcontinent as extremists on all sides seized the account and sparked one spasm of bloodshed after another. VERDICT This harrowing tale of political miscalculation and misunderstanding is recommended for all readers of history, politics, and current affairs.--Chris Sauder, Round Rock P.L., TX

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2015
Hajari, who writes editorials on Asia for Bloomberg View, teases out the history behind the Partition, out of which Pakistan was created with the departure of the British from India in 1947. While there were certainly massive political forces at work among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and the British Raj, Hajari shows how much the interpersonal dynamics among those constituencies' leadersespecially between the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress party's Jawaharlal Nehru, tasked with holding the country together, and the All-India Muslim League's Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who voiced the resentments of underrepresented Muslimsexaggerated differences between the two groups, leading to the split and resultant bloodletting. The book's subtitle notwithstanding, Hajari does not really cover the region's history from Partition to 2015. Still, a fine unwinding of an epic event.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)