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yet the British army used poison gas on the Frontier Pathans in the early twentieth century. This was only to be expected because the British Manual of Military Law stated that the rules of war applied only to conflict ‘between civilized nations’.
this weak, poor and divided state was ravaged by hangings and rounds of savage cruelty. Sitting in Calcutta, Lytton relished this vindictive hostility greatly.
It is our present task to shed such a glare upon the last bloodstained page of Indian annals as shall sear the sinister date of it deep into the shamed memory of a smitten and subjugated people.
It can happen only in an insecure and disorganized society that they make a hero out of an ordinary foreigner belonging to some economically advanced country. Either that or in a colony that suffers from a deep-rooted inferiority complex.
this is atonement, a regret that Afghans should have been denied a factual and historically correct peek into what really happened on 12 November 1893.
The only area that was given to the Amir was Kafiristan.
the Amir was happy to keep the area because as far as his wishes went, it would greatly please his subjects. The real reason, as the Amir told Durand, was to send in his army and convert the Hindus living there to Islam.
to part with more than 50 per cent of the Pashtun population, did not seem logical at all.
Could it have been something personal; was it due to a medical condition that turned him temporarily into a compliant marionette for the British?
The question that intrigues is this: how is it that we have a complete picture of the whys and why nots of the northern border part of the negotiations, but there is next to nothing about the far more important Durand Agreement? Why and how was the Amir brought about?
The line travels in a zigzag fashion across the map, which makes you wonder as to how this casual romp of a pen could become the dividing line of people’s destiny?
there is considerable detail about how he agreed to settle the northern boundary during his talks with Durand, but almost next to nothing about the frontier where he gifted away 40,000 square miles of Afghan lands to the British?
Was he disabled naturally or purposely when he signed the document?
The British put an entire people on opium because it was profitable business.
This was a man who was suspicious and constantly wary of plots against him. Yet we have readily accepted the British spin that this Amir had happily signed away 40,000 square miles of his territory, that too in a language that he did not know a word of.
It cuts across one of the main basins of the Indus watershed, it splits a nation in two, and it even divides tribes. It is surprising that Abdur Rahman accepted such a boundary;
Many of the borders that exist today, from the Middle East to India, reflect not any one plan, but a series of opportunistic proposals by competing strategists of colonial powers.
Can a rough line drawn at the spur of the moment by a man who had no known expertise in cartography be treated as a ‘scientific’ border?
Is it possible that Doctor Hamilton, Pyne and Durand conspired in this, and that the biographer of Abdur Rahman, Mir Sultan Mohammad Khan, was their co-conspirator?
It seems that the Amir had finally discovered that Pyne was a British spy. Therefore, fearing for his life, Pyne had to leave Afghanistan in a hurry. Naturally then, there was no question of his return to Kabul.
Its governing principle was one-sided law; and that law always judged in favour of the British. This was typically the colonial manner of dispensing justice.
peoples’ destinies had been decided and their territory divided unilaterally by a stranger who had no idea of their traditions, their heritage, their way of life and their daily struggles.
Working twelve hours a day, the troops began to burn villages and settlements, killing livestock and laying waste to foodstuffs. After four days of such destruction, the officers decided that this ‘had been sufficient punishment for the murder of the two British officers’,
According to Wavell, Churchill left their meeting with these parting words: ‘Keep a bit of India’. ‘Keep a bit of India!’ Isn’t that an amazing comment? As if India was a chocolate bar and Churchill wanted just one little slab of it.
Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin told the US Secretary of State George Marshall that ‘the main issue was who would control the main artery leading into Central Asia.’
Since a large country like India with leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru and Patel might refuse to accommodate Britain’s strategic interests after independence, a bit that was conveniently accommodating had to be carved out of it.
Olaf Caroe, the governor of NWFP. His partiality towards the Muslim League was an open secret. His actions and recommendations were biased and so one-sided that he had to be removed abruptly from his position.
Caroe did not let the humiliation of his abrupt removal deter him. He kept espousing the Pakistani cause
In the case of other Indian states, no such referendum was proposed and where necessary, the decision to join either India or Pakistan was left to provincial assemblies. Had the same principle been applied to NWFP, the Congress-dominated assembly would have opted to remain with India.
The British, both in London and in Delhi, were generally well-inclined, even partial to his demands.
some British politicians, for reasons of their own, supported Pakistan’s point of view. Prominent among them was Noel Baker, a well-known India baiter
The issue is not just the bias of one man, but the arbitrariness of the British.
Among the reasons for this bias was the fact that by 1947, British military chiefs of staff had become enthusiastic proponents of Pakistan.
As Winston Churchill wrote to a friend in September 1897, ‘After today, we begin to burn villages. Every one. And all who resist will be killed without quarter.
He noted matter-of-factly in his autobiography, My Early Life, how the British went about their business: ‘We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation.’
In October 2007, Pakistani aircraft bombed a village bazaar packed with shoppers near the Afghan border killing 250 of them.
In all these years, US governments have acknowledged that they have been double crossed repeatedly by Pakistanis, yet they remain drawn to it like moths to a flame.
The Guardian wrote in 2009, ‘Bodies have been dumped throughout the valley—bloated corpses have been found floating down the rivers while others dangle from electricity poles with notes warning of dire consequences… According to eyewitnesses and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the army and state paramilitaries have carried out reprisal killings on a mass scale.’*
When an army major was killed in Miranshah Bazaar in 2016, the entire bazaar was bombed out by the Pakistani army.
