We agree on the liberty aspect. They would say yes, we were in favor of gay marriage but dont want to force Ryan Anderson to violate his conscience and that is the Common Ground here at cpac. Host Ryan Andersons book is called truth overruled the future of marriage and religious freedom. [inaudible conversations] good morning. Welcome and good morning. I am on the faculty of Political Science department and Research Fellow at the piece for center. It is my great pleasure and honor to have this conversation with nisid hajari, the 2016 winner of the norwich colby military history award. What we are going to do today is have a conversation. You have read his bio, i am sure. You should look at the pamphlet that was handed out. He is a very famous journalist, helped set up time magazine, lives now in singapore and works for bloomberg bloomberg. And he has written this book called midnights furies. What we wanted to do today is unpack this book. I have intentionally not read the entire bio because i think it would be of more interest to the audience for us to have a conversation and put the book in perspective so this book deals with eventss that happened in countries far away, over 70 some odd years ago but i would contend that nisid hajaris book is so timely and relevant to where we are today. It connects with headline issues that you see in the newspapers every day. The war in afghanistan. The war in iraq. Americas engagement with the world. Americas leadership in transforming or trying to transform countries, what the 21 student century will bring in asia. The role of religion in conflict and if i might say, how important it is politicians when they are running for office or otherwise to be very careful in what they say. I want to take you back if you will a few centuries. I was born a long time ago, not that long ago but i want to take you back a few centuries to india where for hundreds and hundreds of years there existed cosmopolitan multicultural civilization with hindus and muslims and christians, all living together, worshiping at each others shrines, especially true of muslims and hindus who did that. Even today you can go to virtually any village in pakistan or india and you will find hindus worshiping at muslim shrines and muslims worshiping at hindu shrines. There are intermarriages when the partition of india took place, after 150 years, british presence in india and another 200 to 300 years of another empire before that when the partition took place it was a hugely significant event but the point i want to bring out before we get into conversation is nothing as simple as it looks. This was not strictly a religious conflict and i will give you a personal example. And uncle of mine rose to be head of the Indian Air Force. His family, like many muslim families did not leave india because they thought it was home so in the pakistani wars, heres my uncle leading the Indian Air Force against the Pakistani Air force. Muslim to muslim, patriots on both sides, both owing allegiance to their own countries. The big point i want to make is as important as religion seems to appear, that is not always the case. I want to start by asking you, for hundreds and hundreds of years these people have lived together, hindus and muslims. In 1947 millions get injured or killed. Why . Glad you started with an easy one. I will give you a 1word answer, power. What changed in 1947, what was different from the previous 150 years was for the first time, power was the british were leaving, they made clear for several years at that point they were headed out, didnt have the money to maintain their empire in india, didnt have the political will to do it and they werent wanted. Hindus and muslims had lived together, they were fairly limited, you would have small riots break out in a particular city or another that usually lasted a day or two but you didnt have the sort of mass scale violence that you had in 1947. What happened was because the british were leaving, the Muslim Community in india, the political leaders in muslim communities in india saw a future in which they would be a permanent minority cut out of power in india and the parliamentary system, the Congress Party led by Mahatma Gandhi would always win. They would get the majority of votes wherever they ran so muslim parties would be confined to impotence and in this system they feared it was a winner take all system where if you ran the government your friends and family and cronies would get the contract. You would write the textbooks in school, you would write the rules of worship and so on and citizenship and the political leaders, the founder of pakistan, argued the only way muslims could be save after the british left with if they had a state of their own where they were a majority, where they ran the government. And that was at the top level. What happened is political leaders, be careful how you talk about these things, what you say, they would paint these pictures for their followers of the terrible things that were going to happen if they didnt get their own state. Not only would you be forced to convert, but your daughters would be kidnapped and raped, your grandfathers would be killed and so on. This filters down from the top level of Political Leadership in new delhi, once you get to the ground level it becomes the message becomes very simple, kill or be killed. About a year before partition terrible riots broke out in the sea of calcutta and it is still unclear who started them, but something around 10 to 15,000 people were killed in the span of four days and this gave indians of all stripes a vision of what they thought would happen if they didnt defend themselves so they started to arm themselves, started to organize. Remember this was just after world war ii so you have a lot of young men who had been trained in the military. Had thought africa and europe, asia, and a lot of them still had weapons, so unlike previous riots when the violence broke out after the british left, these organized squads, you could almost call them death squads were much more effective, much more deadly than previous attacks. They were not fighting with fists and knives, they were using machine guns and the deaf. Iraq because of that. That is such an interesting series of thoughts you have tried to connect. Let me ask you, a lot of the trouble. I grew up in bombay, my family and i went through the partition but there was scarcely a whimper there. What i wanted to ask you was if you could unpack that part of your book where you talk about the killings. Why were they localized. Why didnt they happen all over . This is something that is important to remember. A lot of people have the idea the british left and all of a sudden violence and riots broke out all over the continent, people were killing each other. It wasnt that at all. My family, my father was a child in bombay at the time, no memory of any violence. It was most of india was unaffected by this. There was one particular province which is now split between india and pakistan. It is on the western side of india and this is where the border was going to go. They decided to draw the border to divide areas where muslims were the majority and hindus were the majority and it was split half and half so when the border was going to be drawn there, the problem was there is a Third Community known as the sikhs who were a small community, 5 Million People, concentrated in the middle of the province, the border was going to split their community in half and historically there was a historical memory of how the sikhs had suffered under muslim rulers centuries ago. Much more recently in the spring of 1947 as art of this series of riots muslim mobs had massacred several thousand sikhs. Within a few months of memory they had this vision of what would happen to them if the british through this border and they found themselves on the wrong side of the line. The sikhs were overrepresented in the army so they were militarized. So their death squads as it were started the violence after the border was drawn and that is why it spread very quickly. It was very concentrated in this area. Muslims on the indian side were pushed out and hindus and sikhs were pushed out of the other side and you had this movement of people, Something Like 14 Million People crossed over the span of a few months, you had miles long convoys of refugees, 250,000 people in a convoy essentially defenseless. There were some soldiers trying to guide them but these death squads would swoop in and able to massacre several hundred thousand people at a time. It was that combination of communities with the new border that provoked them. That is so interesting. I wanted to commend you for still calling it bombay. A lot of us have never grown used to mumbai. I was going to say this and do muslim issue came to prominence along the border areas but it didnt spread to the rest of the country. Does that tell us anything about how deeply embedded in religion this was or that it was a local fact having to do more with territory and advantage and revenge . That is right. It is easy to think of this as a hindu muslim conflict but remember the leaders of india and pakistan were completely secular men. They were not religious at all. Jenna barely knew the koran. He drank alcohol which is forbidden by islam. He was a man of fine tastes. Very dapper. And narrow was a cambridge socialist. He didnt believe in any of this hindu mumbojumbo as he saw it so it wasnt about religion for them. It was about territory, it was about community. It was feared that was driving them. The sikhs were afraid they were going to be, their community was going to be massacred. The other thing that is interesting to remember is the strongest drive to create pakistan was not in the areas the eventually became pakistan because in northwest and northeastern india where muslims are majority they were a majority, they were in power. They didnt have to fear what would happen after the british left. The muslims in central india, southern india. Other places, who really pushed the idea of pakistan. Some of them moved when it was created, many others did not. And many Indian Muslims never wanted pakistan to be created at all and live in india now. A quick personal anecdote. On this issue of how importantly a lot of muslims felt about not creating another country called pakistan, my dad at that time was an up and coming screenwriter and hadnt yet made a big movie and he was having a hard time and got an offer from pakistan to produce a movie and he said great. This is going to be my big opportunity and my mother of course was a Freedom Fighter and so on india and she said not on your life, you are not going to that horrible country to start a movie. He said we dont have any money, we have two children and he went out for his walk to think about this and came back and told me when we were growing up my mother had her suitcases packed and he said what are you doing . And she said you go to pakistan to make money, i am going back to my mother. So that is how intensely a lot of muslim families felt that the question i have for you then now is i want to focus on there for the importance of leaders and the importance of the british. Do you think if the british had stuck it out and said no, we are going to work this out as they had many times over 150, 200 years, or if the leaders themselves had stuck it out, do you think there is a failing on the leaderss side, on the british side, for the partition to happen . There were mistakes made on all sides, failures, there is guilt to be assigned to everyone. You cant prove a counterfactual obviously. Even if partition hadnt happened there is no proof that unified india would have stayed unified. These pressures still would have been there, 5 years later, 10 years later could have broken up along different lines. The other thing to remember is in 47 the british only directly controlled about half the subcontinent. The other half were independent kingdoms ruled by monarchs who legally were independent and could choose to india or pakistan because of the british left them unified they decided to declare independence but all of the leaders made mistakes. They did try to compromise. The british for a year had tried to bring the two sides together and almost a year earlier in spring of 46, they had come up with a compromise, very complicated, rickety compromise where you have a unified india with a very weak Central Government and the muslim areas would have a certain degree of autonomy and individual provinces would have other powers and it was a facesaving way for everybody to agree and they did agree. Everybody agreed to this. Almost immediately after they agreed to it, but Commerce Party leader at a press conference, he was being pressured by people within his own party saying why are you giving up all this autonomy to muslim areas, we have fought for decades to keep the british out and this is our time, he said something stupid like dont worry, we are just saying this now. Once the british leave we will do whatever we want and of course for any muslim hearing this you had to think how can we trust these people, they will sign this document now and once the british leave they will be in power and they will turn on us. So jenna backed out of the agreement. They were back to the other agreement and it became virtually impossible to bring them back together again. They did try, the british kept trying up until summer of 47, they kept trying to get back to that compromise. The americans were putting heavy pressure on both sides to come back to the compromise. They were very worried, it was the beginning of the cold war and they wanted a united india to help in the defense against the soviet union, they didnt want it to be broken up for the army to be broken up. Between the time they struck the compromise and the summer of 47, that is when these riots started to spread across the country, calcutta and other parts so feelings were getting embittered at the ground level and tensions, divisions between communities were growing and they grew between the leaders themselves. You have to remember they had known each other 30 years, neros father had been good friends with jenna. They had argued with each other, they had friends in common. You would think they could have found Common Ground even if personal relations grew very difficult at this time. In a moment i will open it up and let people ask questions but i want us now to close this part of the conversation, to think about history. I had the pleasure of interviewing general gordon sullivan, chair of the board of trustees at Norwich University a few weeks ago and he impressed on me how important it was to get this history major in a huge liberal, i use liberal in a classical sense, education. Resolve an understanding of history, he said, that is there is very little you can do as far as making sound decisions at the top level of any chain of command and so i wanted to take us forward now, we spend trillions of dollars, the Strongest Army in the world, has taken every hill that we wanted to but we have not been able to prevail against an enemy, the telegram that has no gdp, we have 15 trillion, same in iraq and you can carry that through, so my question to you is in america we have the same, that is history, when someone says something you think is irrelevant you say that his history. I think we ought to do away with that saying and i want you to take what happened in 1947 and if you would as you did masterly in your book, i am raising the pressure here so you go out and buy multiple copies of his book, christmas is not that far away, you need to buy six each. So i wanted to say can you now take us forward and connect this to what is happening in afghanistan especially but the importance of history. It is important in two ways. For americans in particular, you mentioned afghanistan. The reason we are still fighting in afghanistan 15 years later almost is only because the delavan have had a safe haven to retreat to across the border in pakistan. They have a certain degree of support from the Pakistani Military covertly, they are tolerated and allowed to regroup and to meet and the leadership is safe there and so on. That allowed them to keep the insurgency alive and they can keep it alive forever as long as they have that safe haven. Why does pakistan do this, why do they take billions of dollars in aid from the us and support the delavan . Why do they support what you would call terrorist groups that fight the indians in cashmere but also conduct attacks like the moon by attacks of 2008 and why are they building up their Nuclear Arsenal so rapidly and creating smaller Battlefield Nuclear Weapons and so on . They do all this because they view india as a mortal threat, they dont believe the Pakistani Military still treat india as an existential threat, a country that doesnt believe in their existence, doesnt want them to survive and would like to see them fail and be reabsorbed within india, so that mentality is nothing new. That came out after a few months in 1947, that mentality was cemented within the Pakistani Strategic establishment among ordinary pakistanis. It is why the Pakistani Military has been able to rule the country for half of its existence because every time they take power they say you need us to defend you against india. We are going to protect the country and they blended this with islam and other excuses but that is the justification for drawing the majority of the budget for the military. You need us to defend you. So for americans, or any outside power it is important to understand the roots of this mentality and where it comes from, we obviously need to understand how it has changed over decades and how it has developed but you cant start to unwind it until you know where it came from and expect at least when it was created there was a certain degree of legitimacy to it. There were indian leaders who didnt want pakistan to be created or to exist and it would have been perfectly happy to see it fail within a year or two and be reabsorbed so it is not entirely crazy. It is not the truth now.