Saja

SAJA presents a conversation with journalist Nisid Hajari, author of "Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition," the most important book about the Partition of India and Pakistan. Hajari, a longtime SAJA member and former editor of Newsweek, joins us from Singapore, in the anniversary month of the creation of Pakistan and the independence of India from Britain. The book's Amazon description: A  few bloody months in South Asia during the summer of 1947 explain the world that troubles us today. Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody — it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s protégé and the political leader of India, believed Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand.  But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in street-gang fighti