Midnight's Furies

April 20, 2015
Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru—these towering figures of South Asian independence are widely familiar today for the outsize impact they had on the shape of the modern world. But Hajari, Asia editor for Bloomberg View, turns away from them to deliver the story of the grassroots: faceless actors operating in secret as they overwhelm ideologies and official pronouncements, fomenting chaos to an extent no leader could have predicted. In a region as complex and densely populated as South Asia, events on the ground—often leaderless and seemingly random—can make short work of any policy or plan. Hajari highlights the insufficiency of governments to curb the passions of their populations, devoting a large portion of the book to the contested territory of Kashmir, just one of a multitude of flashpoints at the time of the 1947 partition, albeit the one that arguably inspired the most passion in the dueling leaders. “Given the paucity of unbiased accounts,” he notes, “the question —while endlessly debated over the last six decades—is impossible to answer.” The failure to come to any resolution on that issue has haunted the Indian subcontinent ever since, and Hajari laments that the cycle of recriminations has hardened into a permanent obstacle to peace.