Indian Partition

How many died at the time? All numbers are guesses, heavily influenced by the tribe or nationality of the writer. One answer comes from Chris Goodwin, a sensible Englishman who has never been near the place. It is at How Many People Died During The Partition Of India? He has given good answers to many other questions on Quora. He settles for some 65 million mass murders, give or take several million. His gross estimate is 30 to 100 million. The Wiki settles for a mere million. You pays your money and takes your choice

One scapegoat that gets used is Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Being an Englishman, all of the perpetrators can blame him. One genuine contributor to mass murder is the London School of Economics; it incited various Indians on the make.

How Many People Died During The Partition Of India ex Quora
QUOTE
When I (born 1940) was a young lad in school I had a teacher who had been a Ghurka officer. He told us about his experiences. Typically - a village of population, say 1500 people - found totally deserted - the well, known to be a hundred feet deep, but full of bodies, which had to be left there, as there was no time to lift them out and bury them properly - but perhaps a hundred bodies found dead: these buried in a mass grave, and the result reported to HQ in Delhi - “Village (name) date, 100 bodies counted and buried - no survivors found” which would the elicit a reply from a desk wallah in Delhi, thusly : “Your message of (date) on village (name) correction ( ! ) number of bodies counted 27, please amend your records.” A bureaucrat in the capital, hundreds of miles away, by the stroke of a magical pen, could correct the report of an officer who had watched his men do the grisly work of burying the bodies of fleeing men, women and children of the “wrong” faith, after they had been hacked to death by their neighbours from the next village along the road. He suggested that the “official” death toll admitted to by the various powers that then were was one and a half to two orders of magnitude too small - that is, thirty to a hundred times too modest.

So, for “about one million” - the figure touted here - read thirty to one hundred million - if you want a single figure, say sixty five million. Said teacher NOT a happy bunny, drank heavily, lived live to the full, came off motorcycle, killed - RIP

Those that ended up as “displaced people” were the lucky ones. Incredibly kind, generous people when my son went through on his motorbike, just a few years before he died.
UNQUOTE
Chris Goodwin, an Englishman living in Denmark wrote several answers to questions. He reads as sensible. His answer makes sense with 10 million margin of error. Others answering have axes to grind. The motivation is clear; it was Racism.

 

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When I (born 1940) was a young lad in school I had a teacher who had been a Ghurka officer. He told us about his experiences. Typically - a village of population, say 1500 people - found totally deserted - the well, known to be a hundred feet deep, but full of bodies, which had to be left there, as there was no time to lift them out and bury them properly - but perhaps a hundred bodies found dead: these buried in a masss grave, and the result reported to HQ in Delhi - “Village (name) date, 100 bodies counted and buried - no survivors found” which would the elicit a reply from a desk wallah in Delhi, thusly : “Your message of (date) on village (name) correction ( ! ) number of bodies counted 27, please amend your records.” A bureaucrat in the capital, hundreds of miles away, by the stroke of a magical pen, could correct the report of an officer who had watched his men do the grisly work of burying the bodies of fleeing men, women and children of the “wrong” faith, after they had been hacked to death by their neighbours from the next village along the road. He suggested that the “official” death toll admitted to by the various powers that then were was one and a half to two orders of magnitude too small - that is, thirty to a hundred times too modest.

So, for “about one million” - the figure touted here - read thirty to one hundred million - if you want a single figure, say sixty five million. Said teacher NOT a happy bunny, drank heavily, lived live to the full, came off motorcycle, killed - RIP

Those that ended up as “displaced people” were the lucky ones. Incredibly kind, generous people when my son went through on his motorbike, just a few years before he died.