Crisis Upon Crisis

The world has never been without large movements of people. They move both inside the boundaries of individual countries as well as across international frontiers. Millions of people have gone from one place to another in the last one hundred years. One of the most significant movements occurred around the time the British decided to leave their large Indian colony after dividing it into two parts – a predominantly Hindu India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan. That was in August 1947, after resisting the Indian demand for independence for decades. I wrote about the mass migration that resulted from London’s withdrawal from their long-occupied Indian colony. I did this work in the late 1960s as a graduate student at Harvard University. I worked under the guidance of Alexander Gerschenkron, who was regarded as the world’s foremost economic historian at that time. International migration was of particular interest to him. He was a Russian Jew who had moved several times, first to France and then to the United States.

He knew little about South Asia, and one way he could develop some knowledge of the area was to encourage me to focus on the creation of Pakistan and how the circumstances surrounding that event were to influence its future when I told him that the British decision to leave by portioning their colony in two parts created an enormously large movement of people. He encouraged me to develop some numbers, and I spent hours at the University’s Widener Library pouring over the census data. Comparing the censuses of 1941 and 1951, I came up with the estimate that some 14 million people had moved within a few months, often traveling on foot.

Eight million Muslims left India for Pakistan, while six million Hindus and Sikhs went in the other direction. Remembering the Hindu-Muslim riots that had preceded the departure of the British, neither Muslims nor non-Muslims felt that they would be safe if they stayed in their homes. I wrote about this event in my first book, Pakistan Under Bhutto, published by Macmillan of London, in which I developed the thesis of “Insiders and Outsiders.” Outsiders were the people who left India for Pakistan, while the Insiders were the host populations. About three to four million people went to Karachi, which was chosen to be the new country’s first capital. They spoke Urdu and began to call themselves “Mohajirs.” Karachi’s native populations were mostly Sindhis, who spoke the Sindhi language. This ethnic difference between the insiders and outsiders resulted in a deep conflict between the two groups that still affects life in this country. Another component of this ethnic mix was added – the Pathans, who migrated from Afghanistan to Pakistan when the former country became highly unsettled.

I have done a recollection of this international move of people as the background to understand the current episode of mass global migration – Palestinians who are leaving the Gaza Strip that is under the assault of the Israelis and moving into neighboring Egypt. In a long story about what The Washington Post calls the new diaspora, the newspaper provides a detailed account of how this new large-scale migration is taking shape. “When Israel launched its war against Hamas, Cairo was adamant: It would not accept Palestinian refugees,” wrote the newspaper in its front-page cover story published on June 30. “Yet more than 115,000 have crossed into Egypt since October, the Palestinian Authority embassy here estimates. Most remain in limbo, with no legal status and nowhere else to go. They are members of a new diaspora of Palestinians, a people already haunted by memories of displacement.”