Jim, you are displaying a partizanship which I thought that we were over after Good Friday. Whatever happened, someone was going to have to live is a country whose values were very different from theirs, someone was going to have their rights denied. And there would have been a bloodbath had partition not taken place as Keith has said, and you really must give Keith the respect to think about what he writes, rather than just a knee jerk railing against it. Could it have been handled better? Probably. Would it have been better to hand over all of Ireland to the Republicans? Definitely not. Same with India, although Gandhi was much against it, the partition was almost certainly the least bad option in 1947. At least everyone had somewhere to go.