The Cold War and Strategic Partners: 1947–1971

Abstract

The reason Pakistan refuses to close terrorists’ sanctuaries in its territory is so they can use them against India. Pakistan’s obsession with India began when the subcontinent got independence in 1947. The partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan came with an unprecedented brutal violence, deaths, and destruction after the All India Muslim League (AIML, founded in 1906) declared on the Direct Action Day (DAD) on August 16, 1946, to divide India or destroy India. Like America (United States), the Indian subcontinent was a British colony. The birth of Pakistan came at a time of Cold War rivalry, communist menace, and when the British wanted British India to join World War II. In 1930 the Indian National Congress (INC, founded in 1885) launched a noncooperation campaign to boycott all aspects of British rule in India, the AIML’s M. A. Jinnah found himself in total disagreement with this movement and resigned from the Congress, and in 1940, at an AIML’s session in Lahore, he demanded for the partition of India and the creation of a Muslim state of Pakistan. The AIML’s pro-British Jinnah wanted India to join the war and was opposing the Khilafat movement (1919–1924) to restore Ottoman caliph (abolished by Kamal Ataturk in Turkey in 1924), to support the British on both issues, while the INC’s nationalist and the socialist Jawaharlal Nehru and the peace activist Mahatma Gandhi were against the war and were favoring the Khilafat movement, for solidarity with Muslims. The British did not trust the INC and its anticolonial agendas and thought that the INC would be hostile to the British interest after the independence.