Midnight's Furies Quotes

“Ultimately, it is not possible to assign blame entirely to one side or the other. What exploded so suddenly in Calcutta in August 1946 were the pent-up fears of communities convinced that they faced imminent subjugation by the other.”
― Nisid Hajari, Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition

“Many of the politicians in Delhi and Karachi, too, had once fought together against the British; they had social and family ties going back decades. They did not intend to militarize the border between them with pillboxes and rolls of barbed wire. They laughed at the suggestion that Punjabi farmers might one day need visas to cross from one end of the province to the other. Pakistan would be a secular, not an Islamic, state, its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, promised: Hindus and Sikhs would be free to practice their faiths and would be treated equally under the law. India would be better off without two disgruntled corners of the subcontinent, its people were told, less”
― Nisid Hajari, Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition

“Scholars still debate whether Jinnah’s equally adamant insistence on a full Pakistan was a bluff. An influential school of thought holds that the Quaid always intended to settle for a united India, after he had extracted as much power and autonomy as he could for himself and the five “Muslim” provinces. The League leader was perfectly rational, Liaquat told Mountbatten: he understood, or could at least be persuaded to understand, how fragile and unworkable a shrunken Pakistan would be.79”
― Nisid Hajari, Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition

“Flying over the unsettled countryside together, they came across mobs that had grown to fifteen thousand people or more. Bucher tossed teargas canisters out of the plane, to little effect. “Time and again, Jawaharlal said, ‘Try to land,’ ” Bucher recalled years later. “Sometimes we did and, regardless of danger, [he] would jump out of the aircraft and rush towards any mobs in the vicinity.”44”
― Nisid Hajari, Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition

“Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny,” he famously declared, “and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”30”
― Nisid Hajari, Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition