Lines of hatred and blood: the scars Britain left in S. Asia

BEIJING, April 12 (Xinhua) -- One of the most atrocious absurdities ever in human civilization would be the fact that a person sitting in an office thousands of kilometers away could draw a line and decide the fate of billions of people on the other side of the continent, where they have been dwelling for thousands of years.

That is what happened to the vast land of South Asia, when British colonists unfolded a world map and dropped the ink while drinking tea, drawing the demarcation lines that have plunged the subcontinent into conflicts and disputes.

THE RADCLIFFE LINE: GRIM REAPER'S SCYTHE

In June 1947 when dusk fell on the British empire, in line with the Mountbatten Plan that prescribed the Partition of India, Britain appointed Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer "who had never been east of Paris," to chair two boundary commissions, one for Bengal and one for Punjab.

It's not hard to imagine that Radcliffe's hasty demarcation, based on outdated maps and little specialized knowledge, was doomed to fail. To make matters worse, the Radcliffe line was not announced until both India and Pakistan declared independence, forcing the Muslims and Hindus to rush to their new homes.

The Grim Reaper raised his Scythe when 14.5 million people fled across the new boundary in the first few years after the partition: massacres, rapes and torture claimed two hundred thousand to two million lives and turned the subcontinent into a hell. Particularly, the ambiguity over Kashmir directly resulted in wars and conflicts between India and Pakistan in the following decades.

Did Radcliffe make an unconscious and inevitable mistake? It was more like colonial Britain's old tactic "divide and rule" than a coincidence. After all, the British colonists were apt at employing this strategy to incite tension between Hindus and Muslims during the "Great Mutiny" in 1857 to consolidate its rule.

THE MCMAHON LINE: APPLE OF DISCORD

It has been a remarkable spectacle in human history that China and India, two of the greatest Asian civilizations that had prospered for thousands of years, have maintained peaceful exchanges for almost an equally long period of time. But during the last century, an apple of discord was thrown between the two giants by the British colonists.

In March 1914, Henry McMahon, foreign secretary of British India at the time, imposed a line at the Simla Convention to push the China-India border a hundred kilometers north to the crest of the Himalayas. The delimitation of the "McMahon Line," fulfilled by a British spy named Fredrick Bailey through illegal activities of surveying and mapping, was never recognized by the then Chinese government.

As Aitchson's Treaties, the official publication of the treaties signed by the colonial government, did not include the illegal "McMahon Line" agreement, Olaf Caroe, deputy foreign secretary of British India, obtained the British government's permission to withdraw the original volume and publish a revised one in 1938 which not only included the "McMahon Line" but also carried the original date of 1929. In this way, Caroe was able to revise the official maps of India to mark the "McMahon Line" as the new boundary. The plot was approved by the India Office of the British government in July 1936, and ordered to make the change "unobtrusively" without notifying the press. Working secretly, Britain created a dispute out of nowhere between China and India.

THE DURAND LINE: PANDORA'S BOX

In an attempt to expand colonial ambition and seek advantage in the "Great Game" against Russia, the Durand Agreement, which incorporated parts of southern Afghanistan into British India, was imposed onto Afghanistan by Britain in 1893 after two Anglo-Afghan wars, formally acknowledging the Durand Line as the border of the British sphere of influence. The line, cutting through the Pashtun tribal areas, politically divides ethnic Pashtuns, Baloch and other groups living on both sides of the border. Such an unreasonable maneuver was designed to make trouble, and indeed, an anti-Britain campaign quickly broke out in June 1897, where Britain sent 40,000 troops to suppress the unrest.

Yet it was rather the start than the end of misfortune falling on this land: a pandora's box has been opened for Afghans who were trapped repeatedly by hegemonic exploitation ever since. The British retreated from South Asia, but the seed of conflict they planted has grown, and the Anglo-Afghan dispute was transformed into a scar for Afghan-Pakistan relations, making the border one of the most dangerous on earth.

Undoubtedly, Britain's toxic colonial legacy is the root cause of most territorial conflicts in South Asia today. The British colonists have manipulated border disputes to sow seeds of distrust and hatred among different religions, nations or regions, so as to maintain or expand its sphere of influence. When the colonists are gone, those disputed border lines turn into permanent scars or wounds that continue to bleed. Enditem