35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
the process of shipping arms and any other form of assistance from
Britain to the Punjab. With tacit approval from the British
government, the only problem would be Indian customs officials,
which, in Amritsar, of course, meant Sikh customs officials.
‘Divide and conquer’ had been the imperialist modus operandi
on entering and on quitting India. An overly simple answer to
communal strife between Hindus and Muslims then threatening
to escalate toward civil war, the Partition of 1947 displaced eleven
and a half million refugees all over India, and created a Muslim
nation in two parts separated by a thousand miles, West Pakistan
and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Nowhere was this upheaval,
created by a cartographer’s almost arbitrary line, more acutely felt
than in the Punjab, which was ripped in half. While very many
Muslims elected, tellingly enough, to remain in India, virtually no
Sikhs or Hindus imagined they would be safe in Pakistan. As a result,
entire villages emigrated overnight, hundreds of thousands of their
inhabitants murdered as they tried to escape, or caught in bloody
attacks on the overcrowded trains and buses that were supposed to
carry them out of harm’s way. And before long India and Pakistan
were continuing this ‘communal strife’ anyway. By 1965, it was an
international issue – one called war.
Nehru and his daughter always favoured the Soviet Union over
the US. With India’s alleged nonalignment then, and Pakistan’s
duplicitous foreign policy, opportunistic but sliding ever more
steeply toward the arms of oil-rich and fundamentalist coreligionists,
Britain, the old puppet master, and its eager American apprentice,
sought a buffer zone between the Soviets, the willfully unreliable
closet-Marxist Indians, and the still unknown quantity of an
emerging and virulently anti-Western Islamic world stretching from
West Africa to Indonesia.
More portentous still, in the eyes of Western multinational
capitalists, was the appearance of atomic weaponry. First it surfaced
in India; then, it was suspected, in Pakistan. Coupled with the everpresent
and allegedly ever-growing Soviet nuclear arsenal, this
conjured up a daunting vision to outside vested interests. Foreign
powers could not fathom the intentions of these new nuclear powers,
190