Professor Anita Inder Singh is an international affairs analyst, who has published widely on democracy, human rights, diversity and integration in Europe and South Asia, the great powers in Asia, governance, international organisations, and development and security.
Professor Singh is one of the founding Professors of the Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the Jamia Millia Islamia, a Muslim university in New Delhi. Prior to that she was a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and has taught International Relations at Oxford University. [1] She has also been a Fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs in Stockholm, and worked for the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues in Geneva.
Anita Inder Singh has written for the OSCE Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODHIR) and UN/DESA.
Her books include Democracy, Ethnic Diversity and Security in Post-Communist Europe [2] [3] Based on extensive travelling in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the book showed that nationalism only leads to war if attempts are made to change state borders by force and that democracies are better at managing ethnic diversity than authoritarian states.
The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship 1947-56. [4] Based on official American archives in Washington DC, the papers of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas, President Harry S. Truman in Independence, Missouri, and official British archives in London, this book shows how and why the US replaced Britain as the dominant foreign power in South Asia during the Cold War.
Her Oxford DPhil thesis, The Origins of the Partition of India, 1936-1947, was first published by Oxford University Press in 1987. [5]
In an article in The Atlantic in 2003, Christopher Hitchens drew an analogy on the inevitability of partition between Anita Inder Singh’s book on Partition and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet . [6]
An abridged 25,000 word version of her book, The Partition of India, was published in English by the National Book Trust of India in 2006 [7] and has been translated into nine Indian languages, including Kannada, Urdu, Oriya, Assamese, Gujarati, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi and Hindi.
Anita Inder Singh has also published The United States, South Asia and the Global Anti-Terrorist Coalition. [8] This book breaks new ground by exploring the significance of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India in the American-led international coalition against terrorism. Will the anti-terrorist strategies of the US establish that it is the world’s principal spoiler or a superpower upholding international norms and strengthening the capacity of international society to quash terrorism?
Anita Inder Singh’s articles have been published in The World Today and International Affairs (both connected with Chatham House, London), The Guardian , The Times Literary Supplement , the Far Eastern Economic Review and The Wall Street Journal Asia .
She has lived in Sweden, India, Switzerland, Britain, the United States, and Russia.[ citation needed ]
Kashmir is the northernmost geographical region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term "Kashmir" denoted only the Kashmir Valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal Range. Today, the term encompasses a larger area that includes the India-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the Pakistan-administered territories of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and the Chinese-administered territories of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract.
Sikhs are people who adhere to Sikhi or Sikhism, an Indian religion that originated in the late 15th century in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, based on the revelation of Guru Nanak. The term Sikh has its origin in the Sanskrit word śiṣya (शिष्य), meaning 'disciple' or 'student'.
The Khalistan movement is a Sikh separatist movement seeking to create a homeland for Sikhs by establishing a sovereign state, called Khālistān, in the Punjab region. The proposed state would consist of land that currently forms Punjab, India and Punjab, Pakistan with Lahore as its capital, that is past geographical area of Punjab region, where once Khalsa Empire was established.
The Partition of India in 1947 was the change of political borders and the division of other assets that accompanied the dissolution of the British Raj in South Asia and the creation of two independent dominions: India and Pakistan. The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Pakistan—which at the time comprised two regions lying on either side of India—is now the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947. The change of political borders notably included the division of two provinces of British India, Bengal and Punjab. The majority Muslim districts in these provinces were awarded to Pakistan and the majority non-Muslim to India. The other assets that were divided included the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Indian Air Force, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury. Self-governing independent Pakistan and India legally came into existence at midnight on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.
The Punjabis, are an Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group associated with the Punjab region, comprising areas of eastern Pakistan and northwestern India. They generally speak Standard Punjabi or various Punjabi dialects on both sides.
The Pakistan Movement was an ethnoreligious political movement in the first half of the 20th century that aimed for the creation of Pakistan from the Muslim-majority areas of British India. It was connected to the perceived need for self-determination for Muslims under British rule at the time. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a barrister and politician led this movement after the Lahore Resolution was passed by All-India Muslim League on 23 March 1940 and Ashraf Ali Thanwi as a religious scholar supported it. Thanwi's disciples Shabbir Ahmad Usmani and Zafar Ahmad Usmani were key players in religious support for the creation of Pakistan.
Communalism is a term used to denote attempts to construct religious or ethnic identity, incite strife between people identified as different communities, and to stimulate communal violence between those groups. It derives from history, differences in beliefs, and tensions between the communities. Communalism is a significant social issue in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Communal conflicts between religious communities in India, especially Hindus and Muslims have occurred since the period of British colonial rule, occasionally leading to serious inter-communal violence.
Independence Day is celebrated annually on 15 August as a public holiday in India commemorating the nation's independence from the United Kingdom on 15 August 1947, the day when the provisions of the Indian Independence Act, which transferred legislative sovereignty to the Indian Constituent Assembly, came into effect. India retained King George VI as head of state until its transition to a republic, when the Constitution of India came into effect on 26 January 1950 and replaced the dominion prefix, Dominion of India, with the enactment of the sovereign law Constitution of India. India attained independence following the independence movement noted for largely non-violent resistance and civil disobedience.
The two-nation theory is an ideology of religious nationalism that influenced the decolonisation of the British Raj in South Asia. According to this ideology, Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus are two separate nations, with their own customs, religion, and traditions; consequently, both socially and morally, Muslims should have a separate homeland within the decolonised British Indian Empire.
India–Pakistan relations are the bilateral ties between the Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The two countries have a complex and largely hostile relationship that is rooted in a multitude of historical and political events, most notably the partition of British India in August 1947; the India–Pakistan border is one of the most militarised international boundaries in the world. Northern India and most of modern-day Pakistan overlap with each other in terms of their common Indo-Aryan demographic, natively speaking a variety of Indo-Aryan languages.
Sudhan is one of the major tribes from the districts of Poonch, Sudhanoti, Bagh and Kotli in Azad Kashmir, allegedly originating from Pashtun areas.
After the first war for Indian independence, the British Government took over the administration to establish the British Raj. The British Raj was the period of British rule on the Indian subcontinent between 1757 and 1947, for around 200 years of British occupation. The system of governance was instituted in 1858 when the rule of the East India Company was transferred to the Crown in the person of Queen Victoria.
The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia, situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas. Geopolitically, it includes the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The terms "Indian subcontinent" and "South Asia" are often used interchangeably to denote the region, although the geopolitical term of South Asia frequently includes Afghanistan, which may otherwise be classified as Central Asian.
Pakistanis are the citizens and nationals of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. According to the 2017 Pakistani national census, the population of Pakistan stood at over 213 million people, making it the world's fifth-most populous country. The majority of Pakistanis natively speak languages belonging to the Indo-Iranic family.
The East Pakistan Renaissance Society was a political organisation formed to articulate and promote culturally and intellectually the idea for a separate Muslim state for Indian Muslims and specifically for the Muslims of Bengal. The organisation's founders and leaders included Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, the society president, Habibullah Bahar Chowdhury and Mujibur Rahman Khan.
Indian reunification refers to the potential reunification of India with Pakistan and Bangladesh, which were partitioned from British India in 1947.
Kewal Singh Choudhary (1915–1991) was an Indian diplomat, Foreign Secretary and India's ambassador to the USSR, Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan and USA. He was a 1955 recipient of the Indian civilian honour of Padma Shri.
Provincial elections were held in British India in January 1946 to elect members of the legislative councils of British Indian provinces. The consummation of British rule in India were the 1945/1946 elections. As minor political parties were eliminated, the political scene became restricted to the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League who were more antagonised than ever. The Congress, in a repeat of the 1937 elections, won 90 percent of the general non-Muslim seats while the Muslim League won the majority of Muslim seats (87%) in the provinces. Nevertheless, the All India Muslim League verified its claim to be the sole representative of Muslim India. The election laid the path to Pakistan.
Joya Chatterji FBA is Professor of South Asian History and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She specialises in modern South Asian history and was the editor of the journal Modern Asian Studies for ten years.