Next week marks the 60th anniversary of the partition of India. Two new books on the subject—Yasmin Khan's The Great Partition and Alex von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer—are reviewed in recent issues of the Economist and The New Yorker, respectively. And though neither review mentions today's Iraq, (except, at most, in passing), the parallels are ominous and inescapable.

Anyone who believes that U.S. troops can simply and suddenly leave Iraq without risk of unleashing great horror—or who regards religious or ethnic partition as a solution instead of a desperate ploy—should look back at the summer of 1947, when the British Empire packed up and India fulfilled its "tryst with destiny" (as Jawaharlal Nehru described its awakening to independence), only to plunge into a monstrous spree of ethnic cleansing (12 million people uprooted, as many as 1 million murdered) that continues to take its toll today.

As India's independence and Britain's withdrawal seemed inevitable in the wake of World War II, the country's long-suppressed internal fissures began to rumble like a reawakened volcano. Gandhi's followers in the Congress Party campaigned as a secular movement. But Muslims saw it as a cover for Hindu domination, and Gandhi's rival, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, though a secular Muslim, played the religion card to the hilt to attract fundamentalists' favor.

On Aug. 15, when the British pulled out, millions of Hindus on Muslim land and Muslims on Hindu land—and lots of Sikhs on either—were brutalized, raped, or killed. Many packed their belongings and moved, but, unprotected, they were slaughtered along the way. The Indian Army, which had been created by Britain, also divided along religious lines, and, as the New Yorker review notes, "many of the communalized soldiers would join their coreligionists in killing sprees, giving the violence of partition its genocidal cast."

www.slate.com/id/2172001/


A much less violent "population exchange" took place between Greece and Turkey after WW1.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popu...and_Turkey