Foreign Office files for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan

Alternate Titles

• Archives Direct, sources from the National Archives, Kew

Description

"These three collections consist of the British Government's files on the countries of South Asia from shortly before Indian partition and independence up to 1980. This was a turbulent era in the region's history. The partition of 1947 and the splitting apart of Pakistan in 1971 were accompanied by loss of life and enormous population movements, as refugees fled violence or ethnic conflict. India fought Pakistan twice in Kashmir, in 1947-8 and 1965, and China in the Himalayas in 1962. Stable and democratic government proved elusive outside India, the region experiencing a succession of coups: in Pakistan in 1958 and 1977, in Afghanistan in 1973, 1978 and 1979, and in Bangladesh in 1975; democracy underwent a flowering and then a withering in Nepal, where King Mahendra established a partyless autocracy in 1959. Even in India, which had successfully established a democratic, secular state at independence, the government of India Gandhi became increasingly authoritarian and intolerant of dissent in the 1970s, imprisoning hundreds of opponents.... The files in this collection cover these events from the standpoint of British officialdom. In addition to high politics, the papers in the files cover such issues as economic and industrial development, trade, migration, visits to South Asia by British politicians and by South Asian politicians to Britain and elsewhere, education, administrative reorganisation, conflict over language, aid, political parties, agriculture and irrigation, and television and the press. Together they form a resource of fundamental value to scholars and students of modern South Asia."

Subjects