we agree on the liberty aspect. they would say yes, we were in favor of gay marriage but don't want to force ryan anderson to violate his conscience and that is the common ground here at cpac. >> host: ryan anderson's book is called "truth overruled: the future of marriage and religious freedom". [inaudible conversations] >> good morning. welcome and good morning. i am on the faculty of political science department and research fellow at the piece for center. it is my great pleasure and honor to have this conversation with nisid hajari, the 2016 winner of the norwich colby military history award. what we are going to do today is have a conversation. you have read his bio, i am sure. you should look at the pamphlet that was handed out. he is a very famous journalist, helped set up time magazine, lives now in singapore and works for bloomberg bloomberg. and he has written this book called "midnight's furies". what we wanted to do today is unpack this book. i have intentionally not read the entire bio because i think it would be of more interest to the audience for us to have a conversation and put the book in perspective so this book deals with eventss that happened in countries far away, over 70 some odd years ago but i would contend that nisid hajari's book is so timely and relevant to where we are today. it connects with headline issues that you see in the newspapers every day. the war in afghanistan. the war in iraq. america's engagement with the world. america's leadership in transforming or trying to transform countries, what the 21 student century will bring in asia. the role of religion in conflict and if i might say, how important it is politicians when they are running for office or otherwise to be very careful in what they say. i want to take you back if you will a few centuries. i was born a long time ago, not that long ago but i want to take you back a few centuries to india where for hundreds and hundreds of years there existed cosmopolitan multicultural civilization with hindus and muslims and christians, all living together, worshiping at each other's shrines, especially true of muslims and hindus who did that. even today you can go to virtually any village in pakistan or india and you will find hindus worshiping at muslim shrines and muslims worshiping at hindu shrines. there are intermarriages when the partition of india took place, after 150 years, british presence in india and another 200 to 300 years of another empire before that when the partition took place it was a hugely significant event but the point i want to bring out before we get into conversation is nothing as simple as it looks. this was not strictly a religious conflict and i will give you a personal example. and uncle of mine rose to be head of the indian air force. his family, like many muslim families did not leave india because they thought it was home so in the pakistani wars, here's my uncle leading the indian air force against the pakistani air force. muslim to muslim, patriots on both sides, both owing allegiance to their own countries. the big point i want to make is as important as religion seems to appear, that is not always the case. i want to start by asking you, for hundreds and hundreds of years these people have lived together, hindus and muslims. in 1947 millions get injured or killed. why? >> glad you started with an easy one. i will give you a 1-word answer, power. what changed in 1947, what was different from the previous 150 years was for the first time, power was the british were leaving, they made clear for several years at that point they were headed out, didn't have the money to maintain their empire in india, didn't have the political will to do it and they weren't wanted. hindus and muslims had lived together, they were fairly limited, you would have small riots break out in a particular city or another that usually lasted a day or two but you didn't have the sort of mass scale violence that you had in 1947. what happened was because the british were leaving, the muslim community in india, the political leaders in muslim communities in india saw a future in which they would be a permanent minority cut out of power in india and the parliamentary system, the congress party led by mahatma gandhi would always win. they would get the majority of votes wherever they ran so muslim parties would be confined to impotence and in this system they feared it was a winner take all system where if you ran the government your friends and family and cronies would get the contract. you would write the textbooks in school, you would write the rules of worship and so on and citizenship and the political leaders, the founder of pakistan, argued the only way muslims could be save after the british left with if they had a state of their own where they were a majority, where they ran the government. and that was at the top level. what happened is political leaders, be careful how you talk about these things, what you say, they would paint these pictures for their followers of the terrible things that were going to happen if they didn't get their own state. not only would you be forced to convert, but your daughters would be kidnapped and raped, your grandfathers would be killed and so on. this filters down from the top level of political leadership in new delhi, once you get to the ground level it becomes the message becomes very simple, kill or be killed. about a year before partition terrible riots broke out in the sea of calcutta and it is still unclear who started them, but something around 10 to 15,000 people were killed in the span of four days and this gave indians of all stripes a vision of what they thought would happen if they didn't defend themselves so they started to arm themselves, started to organize. remember this was just after world war ii so you have a lot of young men who had been trained in the military. had thought africa and europe, asia, and a lot of them still had weapons, so unlike previous riots when the violence broke out after the british left, these organized squads, you could almost call them death squads were much more effective, much more deadly than previous attacks. they were not fighting with fists and knives, they were using machine guns and the deaf. iraq because of that. >> that is such an interesting series of thoughts you have tried to connect. let me ask you, a lot of the trouble. i grew up in bombay, my family and i went through the partition but there was scarcely a whimper there. what i wanted to ask you was if you could unpack that part of your book where you talk about the killings. why were they localized. why didn't they happen all over? >> this is something that is important to remember. a lot of people have the idea the british left and all of a sudden violence and riots broke out all over the continent, people were killing each other. it wasn't that at all. my family, my father was a child in bombay at the time, no memory of any violence. it was most of india was unaffected by this. there was one particular province which is now split between india and pakistan. it is on the western side of india and this is where the border was going to go. they decided to draw the border to divide areas where muslims were the majority and hindus were the majority and it was split half and half so when the border was going to be drawn there, the problem was there is a third community known as the sikhs who were a small community, 5 million people, concentrated in the middle of the province, the border was going to split their community in half and historically there was a historical memory of how the sikhs had suffered under muslim rulers centuries ago. much more recently in the spring of 1947 as art of this series of riots muslim mobs had massacred several thousand sikhs. within a few months of memory they had this vision of what would happen to them if the british through this border and they found themselves on the wrong side of the line. the sikhs were overrepresented in the army so they were militarized. so their death squads as it were started the violence after the border was drawn and that is why it spread very quickly. it was very concentrated in this area. muslims on the indian side were pushed out and hindus and sikhs were pushed out of the other side and you had this movement of people, something like 14 million people crossed over the span of a few months, you had miles long convoys of refugees, 250,000 people in a convoy essentially defenseless. there were some soldiers trying to guide them but these death squads would swoop in and able to massacre several hundred thousand people at a time. it was that combination of communities with the new border that provoked them. >> that is so interesting. i wanted to commend you for still calling it bombay. a lot of us have never grown used to mumbai. i was going to say this and do/muslim issue came to prominence along the border areas but it didn't spread to the rest of the country. does that tell us anything about how deeply embedded in religion this was or that it was a local fact having to do more with territory and advantage and revenge? >> that is right. it is easy to think of this as a hindu/muslim conflict but remember the leaders of india and pakistan were completely secular men. they were not religious at all. jenna barely knew the koran. he drank alcohol which is forbidden by islam. he was a man of fine tastes. very dapper. and narrow was a cambridge socialist. he didn't believe in any of this hindu mumbo-jumbo as he saw it so it wasn't about religion for them. it was about territory, it was about community. it was feared that was driving them. the sikhs were afraid they were going to be, their community was going to be massacred. the other thing that is interesting to remember is the strongest drive to create pakistan was not in the areas the eventually became pakistan because in northwest and northeastern india where muslims are majority they were a majority, they were in power. they didn't have to fear what would happen after the british left. the muslims in central india, southern india. other places, who really pushed the idea of pakistan. some of them moved when it was created, many others did not. and many indian muslims never wanted pakistan to be created at all and live in india now. >> a quick personal anecdote. on this issue of how importantly a lot of muslims felt about not creating another country called pakistan, my dad at that time was an up and coming screenwriter and hadn't yet made a big movie and he was having a hard time and got an offer from pakistan to produce a movie and he said great. this is going to be my big opportunity and my mother of course was a freedom fighter and so on india and she said not on your life, you are not going to that horrible country to start a movie. he said we don't have any money, we have two children and he went out for his walk to think about this and came back and told me when we were growing up my mother had her suitcases packed and he said what are you doing? and she said you go to pakistan to make money, i am going back to my mother. so that is how intensely a lot of muslim families felt that the question i have for you then now is i want to focus on there for the importance of leaders and the importance of the british. do you think if the british had stuck it out and said no, we are going to work this out as they had many times over 150, 200 years, or if the leaders themselves had stuck it out, do you think there is a failing on the leaders's side, on the british side, for the partition to happen? >> there were mistakes made on all sides, failures, there is guilt to be assigned to everyone. you can't prove a counterfactual obviously. even if partition hadn't happened there is no proof that unified india would have stayed unified. these pressures still would have been there, 5 years later, 10 years later could have broken up along different lines. the other thing to remember is in 47 the british only directly controlled about half the subcontinent. the other half were independent kingdoms ruled by monarchs who legally were independent and could choose to -- india or pakistan because of the british left them unified they decided to declare independence but all of the leaders made mistakes. they did try to compromise. the british for a year had tried to bring the two sides together and almost a year earlier in spring of 46, they had come up with a compromise, very complicated, rickety compromise where you have a unified india with a very weak central government and the muslim areas would have a certain degree of autonomy and individual provinces would have other powers and it was a face-saving way for everybody to agree and they did agree. everybody agreed to this. almost immediately after they agreed to it, but commerce party leader at a press conference, he was being pressured by people within his own party saying why are you giving up all this autonomy to muslim areas, we have fought for decades to keep the british out and this is our time, he said something stupid like don't worry, we are just saying this now. once the british leave we will do whatever we want and of course for any muslim hearing this you had to think how can we trust these people, they will sign this document now and once the british leave they will be in power and they will turn on us. so jenna backed out of the agreement. they were back to the other agreement and it became virtually impossible to bring them back together again. they did try, the british kept trying up until summer of 47, they kept trying to get back to that compromise. the americans were putting heavy pressure on both sides to come back to the compromise. they were very worried, it was the beginning of the cold war and they wanted a united india to help in the defense against the soviet union, they didn't want it to be broken up for the army to be broken up. between the time they struck the compromise and the summer of 47, that is when these riots started to spread across the country, calcutta and other parts so feelings were getting embittered at the ground level and tensions, divisions between communities were growing and they grew between the leaders themselves. you have to remember they had known each other 30 years, nero's father had been good friends with jenna. they had argued with each other, they had friends in common. you would think they could have found common ground even if personal relations grew very difficult at this time. >> in a moment i will open it up and let people ask questions but i want us now to close this part of the conversation, to think about history. i had the pleasure of interviewing general gordon sullivan, chair of the board of trustees at norwich university a few weeks ago and he impressed on me how important it was to get this history major in a huge liberal, i use liberal in a classical sense, education. resolve an understanding of history, he said, that is there is very little you can do as far as making sound decisions at the top level of any chain of command and so i wanted to take us forward now, we spend trillions of dollars, the strongest army in the world, has taken every hill that we wanted to but we have not been able to prevail against an enemy, the telegram that has no gdp, we have $15 trillion, same in iraq and you can carry that through, so my question to you is in america we have the same, that is history, when someone says something you think is irrelevant you say that his history. i think we ought to do away with that saying and i want you to take what happened in 1947 and if you would as you did masterly in your book, i am raising the pressure here so you go out and buy multiple copies of his book, christmas is not that far away, you need to buy six each. so i wanted to say can you now take us forward and connect this to what is happening in afghanistan especially but the importance of history. >> it is important in two ways. for americans in particular, you mentioned afghanistan. the reason we are still fighting in afghanistan 15 years later almost is only because the delavan have had a safe haven to retreat to across the border in pakistan. they have a certain degree of support from the pakistani military covertly, they are tolerated and allowed to regroup and to meet and the leadership is safe there and so on. that allowed them to keep the insurgency alive and they can keep it alive forever as long as they have that safe haven. why does pakistan do this, why do they take billions of dollars in aid from the us and support the delavan? why do they support what you would call terrorist groups that fight the indians in cashmere but also conduct attacks like the moon by attacks of 2008 and why are they building up their nuclear arsenal so rapidly and creating smaller battlefield nuclear weapons and so on? they do all this because they view india as a mortal threat, they don't believe -- the pakistani military still treat india as an existential threat, a country that doesn't believe in their existence, doesn't want them to survive and would like to see them fail and be re-absorbed within india, so that mentality is nothing new. that came out after a few months in 1947, that mentality was cemented within the pakistani strategic establishment among ordinary pakistanis. it is why the pakistani military has been able to rule the country for half of its existence because every time they take power they say you need us to defend you against india. we are going to protect the country and they blended this with islam and other excuses but that is the justification for drawing the majority of the budget for the military. you need us to defend you. so for americans, or any outside power it is important to understand the roots of this mentality and where it comes from, we obviously need to understand how it has changed over decades and how it has developed but you can't start to unwind it until you know where it came from and expect at least when it was created there was a certain degree of legitimacy to it. there were indian leaders who didn't want pakistan to be created or to exist and it would have been perfectly happy to see it fail within a year or two and be reabsorbed so it is not entirely crazy. it is not the truth now. indians have no interest in taking over pakistan. quite the opposite, but it did come out of something real that we have to accept and understand. and it is interesting you bring up the saying about americans. i agree with you. on the other hand americans live a very healthy ability to examine their own history and to be self-critical and not to feel they have to hide things or sugarcoat them or ignore them. they can admit what happened in the civil war, shelves and books about this, they can move forward. we can move forward. indians and pakistanis still have trouble with this. i have given lots of readings in indian. the majority of the population was born after partition, they shouldn't have any personal connection to this yet the phrases they use, is no different than 1947. still a sense of paranoia and suspicion and it is because they are taught a version of history that is different from this. indians get one version, pakistanis get another version and they are mutually incompatible and neither side wants to admit they could have been partly at fault, maybe gandhi wasn't entirely a saint, maybe he did make mistakes, pakistanis say maybe jenna was not such a nice guy, maybe he was a little power-hungry and so on. until they do that and come up with some sort of joint narrative that assigns blame to all sides i don't think they will be able to move forward either. that is dangerous for the rest of us, we have to hope they will. so before i open up for questions i want to give you an opportunity. was there a time when you wrote the book or after that you set back and said you know, this really came out well. besides when you were told about it. >> that only happened when i first -- got my first review and they called it superb. that was the only time i got to that point. >> let's say a personal thought at some point, you thought about this for so long, it was a long process. >> i started working on this book five years ago in spring of 2011. i was working at newsweek for ten years and left my job, my wife and i sold our apartment in new york and put our stuff in my in-laws's basement and took off and lived out of a suitcase for a year as i did research in india and london and had no idea where this was going. imagine you are in a library twee 10 hours a day pouring through painstakingly telegrams the churchill find, personal diaries and letters and vacuum it all up and try to see patterns but you are just trying to get as much as possible and then i sat down and tried to make sense of it all. what was important to me was this book, to write it for general audience, not meant for professors, i hope they find new scholarship. i wanted to make a narrative that would be appealing to everyone and to try to find a narrative, this great mass of material, i cannot say there was a moment i was doing at that i was fully confident i succeeded until it was published, >> we will take a few questions. tell us who you are. the microphone will come to you. >> a question about craft and the choices you made. and open up a little bit. and how did you work through that. what was the best advice, either an editor or friendly reader, >> the best advice i got early on was to make a timeline. and the book takes place in a short period. i did a day by day timeline of those two years. once you do that you start to see these patterns emerging, these leaders especially in the month after partition, there were 1 million things going on, there was uprising in kashmir, moving towards independence and these things were happening in the same day and most accounts treat them all separately. you don't realize he went to one meeting about this and another meeting about that and operating on two hours of sleep and got this letter from his girlfriend and so on and only once you see it laid out that way you can get into their heads a little more and understand the pressures they were under and why they made certain decisions. there are certain decisions jenna made that have never been explained before. he made a decision at the end of this three our meeting where they talked about x before hand and i imagine that would reinforce his thinking. the hardest part was making a narrative because you have many characters, huge forces at play, and it was chaos at the time so it is hard to know what is real, what is not. a lot of people's memories afterwards were not all that trustworthy. if you hear the same story over and over again that my aunt was on a train and everybody was killed but her, i heard this story dozens of times and it is generally not true because they stopped most of the trains but this is something people have told themselves for generations, you see the records at the time, to know they were not that many massacres. and finding a way to make it a chronological narratives, and a vehicle to work larger forces and politics, >> i did most of it in london. >> all those records were british records so they exist in india but in india trying to work from the archives is difficult, you have to fill out request forms with paper and send them in and three days later you get a note saying we can find the file. you can get through a lot more material very quickly and a lot of personal papers there as well. spent three months in india and almost a year in london. >> if you take the time on research versus the time in writing? >> guest: it was half and half. until -- about a year researching, wrote the first half may and december. and read the first draft, and weekend and to polish it up. >> class of 68. when you were researching the book was there a moment for you the changed your mind or understanding of the history? >> my understanding was wrong and it was this way. >> can you share that with us? >> there wasn't a single moment. there were individual moments, days when you go through the library, you come home and you know you found nothing new, everything you read that day has been read by somebody else but there are days that eliminate a particular angle. and and the best material i found was the state department, in culture park in maryland. and the americans with rising power. they had great details. the british ambassador in london, the day the british decided to create pakistan, june 1947, the british prime minister called in the us ambassador to explain the decision, the ambassador writes back to washington and said we are going to do this and create pakistan, hand over power as soon as august to india but they know pakistan is not ready yet, they will hand over power later, a few months or a year, hasn't been worked out yet. you understand why they left so fast, how could they have thought this was a good idea? they hadn't thought it through. they thought somehow the pakistanis will want us to stick around to help set up their government so everything will be okay, we don't have to worry about the details so there are moments like that, why did the british decide to leave so quickly? it seems so crazy and stupid and you realize because they didn't think they were leaving that quickly. >> i am a student at the university. pakistan is providing for the talent and. and the past couple years in afghanistan the current president of afghanistan, trying to bring the taliban and other parties to the negotiation with peace talks but it never worked out and afghanistan doesn't have to provide security inside the country or its borders. what do you think is the solution left with afghanistan. what can they do to the talent and? can they bring this part of power in? >> the nobel peace prize. >> exactly. i oversaw coverage of the war in afghanistan and i wish i had a good answer. i think you are right there has to be a negotiated solution. all the parties are right to work towards that. even though they give the talent and safe haven they don't have control or tell them what to do. i do believe pakistanis want the talent and to come to the peace table. they are not able to do it. on the other hand if they say we are not giving you any safe haven whatsoever and we are kicking out all the leaders or we will arrest you then i think they might change their mind but pakistanis are not ready to do that yet. the only thing, the one positive development i have seen so far and is not a breakthrough yet, china is not involved and china has much more interest in stability in afghanistan than it ever did before partly for economic reasons and develop minerals there and so on but also they are worried about islamic extremism, coming into western china and china is the one power of pakistanis, and to the peace table, they offered talks, it will be a long process but if they sustain that pressure we coordinate with them and it is important to remember their tensions between the us and china and the south china sea and other issues, important to remember to take a picture or two, we need their help on north korea and afghanistan so even as we compete with them in some areas we have to work with them in others. i don't anticipate a breakthrough anytime soon but pakistan and china pressuring them, if they hold their own and keep losing territory the taliban have less incentive to come to the peace table but if they hold their own maybe we will get to a point where you can bring them in a little bit. what power-sharing agreement will look like in the end i don't know because you have to preserve the liberties that have been created in afghanistan, you can't go back to the taliban days. >> do you think the continued american presence helps or do you think if we left countries within themselves? >> i think we are still needed there now. i think the afghan army is not able to hold its own against the talent and without our logistical help so i think our presence there, we can't solve this for them, sending more troops. i don't think there is a surge that can turn things around but i also don't think we should rush to draw down to zero. >> you recognize someone in the back? we can come back to you. who is in the back? go ahead. >> an iconic figure for americans and indians, can you talk briefly how your perceptions may have changed in writing this book? can you talk a little about that? are you surprised by what you learned about gandhi and how that might affect our memories of him? >> it is interesting. you have to write about him carefully especially for an indian audience, but gandhi was more of a politician than people give them credit for. if you have only seen the movie he seems like an ethereal saintly figure that spouts proverbs that sounds great and is for peace and so on and hates violence. he was a very shrewd politician. he used nonviolence against the british because it worked. he knew the indians didn't have the weapons to challenge the british army. this was the advantage they had over them. he had great success in the 20s and 30s but was also fairly vain man and surrounded by admirers and sycophants telling him what a great person he was, how infallible he was and even indian leaders came to him for advice as if he were a guru. he never understood the way muslims saw him. he thought, i am up your person, no prejudice, nothing against muslims, of course they must embrace my message. he couldn't understand that for many muslims they would see gone the dressed as a hindu sage holding prayer meetings, having hindu chants and so on, the parables he used, hindu parables using hindu gods, he never understood that the image he was projecting to a lot of muslims was frightening. they saw another religious leader, not a secular democrat. he also didn't understand the impact of his words. by the time partition came around, he was in his mid to late 70s and i don't want to use the word senile but he was not as sharp as he had been before but no one around him would tell him that. everybody still acted as if everything he said was gospel so he would do things like when these riots were starting to spread there were reports, rumors about riots in far eastern india and bangladesh and rumors that muslim laws, massacreing hindus and raping hindu women. he brought this up at a prayer meeting, he was trying to say don't retaliate, don't use violence, don't fight back. instead for all of you tens of thousands of hindu women at risk of being raped you should kill yourselves. he hadn't thought this through at all. this message was heard out of the provinces, hindu women are being raped. local politicians at a much lower level used this message and rallied and committed a massacre over several weeks of several thousand muslims in the province and it is something again muslim leaders blamed gandhi for saying you are spouting this stuff, it is causing this violence. he wouldn't acknowledge that. his spirit was pure, his intentions were good, and they were but he didn't understand the impact of his words. the compromise that i mentioned, he fought against it the most and dragged out the negotiations. them negotiation might have held, moment in the process where he would have been good as a spiritual figure, a moral figure involved in politics, very hard to make compromises. >> from the class of 1970, i was intrigued for the last month that in the book jenna and others were very egotistical, narcissistic to some degree and seemed not to catch on to things a more practical or humble person might see, reminded me of today. >> there are some eerie parallels. these three men had huge egos, they were great statesmen in their own way and maybe that is part of the reason they rose to the top. you need a certain degree of self-confidence to do this but they were in a system, a british system where combined with the indian feudal caste system, a political rally surrounded by worshipers, he would give speeches in english talking about socialism and these farmers had no idea what he was talking about, they just knew here was this godlike figure who was on stage, they were just there to be in his presence, to listen to this guru. they didn't want to touch his feet or shake his hand and so on, he knew this was dangerous and ten years before, 1937 when he was a young man receiving all this adulation, he wrote an essay for a magazine under a pseudonym that warned against the danger of a leader like him becoming a dictator, letting this go to his head, the party needed to be wary, the country needed to be wary, not allow this to happen so he knew it was a danger but he let it happen. jenna had been fighting for recognition for years and years and all of a sudden, promoting pakistan, hundreds of thousands of people came to his rally and surrounded by guards waving swords and uniforms and loved it, absolutely loved it. the most vain of all three, he counted every ribbon on the uniform, when these death squads were working out what the flags would look like if used on independence day, a pop and circumstance was there, you do have to worry. you can't just let this stuff go. >> fascinating when the normal indian folk didn't want to leave. .. led sort of the feelings. the two ours of sleep deprivation, sofas nateing subject for us how the world leaders are making decisions. so that's a really cool thing that you uncovered for us. >> yeah. >> it was fas nighting -- fascinating to see. never been a politician but really just a leader, a street leader in a way. he had never been an executive. so he tried to run everything himself. he was dealing both with negotiation and sending out invitation to a conference and when the riots broke out they spread and a friend came to his house and said, there's a bridge . a prime minister of a country of 4 million people, gets giant revolver that hasn't been fired in 30 years. we are going to dress as refugees you and i, we are going to try walk across the bridge. that was the mentality that they had. gandhi was fairly religious. i don't know that it would have been a guarantied against that. after the riots broke out, there were a lot of people in india who didn't want muslims to stay, wanted them to all be sent across the border including top politicians and it was gandhi that fought against that and said, no, we are going to be a multiethic society and we are not going to allow this. this was not a popular decision. i had forgotten the first question. >> over centuries -- in most of the places, religion and basically the same food, some people don't eat beef or this or that, same spices and children will go to school together in many cases, and, you know, i think most people generally want to get along. [inaudible] >> they were -- muslims had legitimate fears politically about what would happen but they were solvable i think. there would have been a compromise to solve that fear and not just pretend everything is great and everybody love's each other. there were real tensions. >> i never thought about this issue myself. there's another piece, had they been religious. india is a. >> religious country, what it was really like, i won't draw your dad in the conversation, you know, and everyone knew what they were about. it didn't seem to make any difference where the religious people knew what these people are, right? >> right. nobody knows muslim really believed -- >> right. >> it's interesting. most of the elections, they try and get votes. one of them wrote back to headquarters in dehli. that was the image they were portraying and they never seen him. but they were able to manipulate ordinary voters. >> right. let's go back to the audience. >> you mentioned one of the major flaws f not the major flaw was that they exited too quickly and left a lot of details. any other major flaws in hindsight now that -- >> there were a bunch. i do -- i will say that i am less critical of the british than many writers are. probably because i feel the indians and pakistanies wanted independence. they were the ones that had influence over the death squads. they weren't ordering it themselves but at low-level people were involved and procuring weapons. it's there responsibility to stop this before the violence truly broke out. in the long run, they contributed to dividing these communities, you know, the -- in 1909 they decided that they would create special seats for muslims to run for legislators and only muslim could vote for those particular people, so then you got parties breaking down along religious lines and they did this, of course, to divide the too and weak tennessee opposition and so on. but that was earlier on. in world war ii, fdr and pressured europe to grant ib dependence and they would join the fight against nazis and japanese. churchill, single handily resisted. there was no real moment in pakistan at all. the british would have stayed. nobody we wanted to kick them out in the middle of the war. in addition to leaving too fast, they underestimate it had threat of violence. it wasn't a surprise. people were telling them, sending daily cable saying, this is happening, we need more troops, i need more troops. on paper created a peacekeeping force. he was busy drawing his flags, supposedly 50,000 member army force that went there, ended up being less than 2,000 people with actual rifles, soy they weren't able to suppress the violence quickly. the only way to stop this is massive quickly and they didn't have the troops in place. that was the british's responsibility. they were responsible for law and order and there were mistakes made. it's important for indians and pakistans to take responsibility. it's easy to say it's their fault, they did this to us. they -- the british within the helpful in some ways but they're not entirely to blame. >> you have written a wonderful book. you don't have a limit of how many you sign per person? >> no, the more the better. [laughter] >> the time you spent talking to faculty, classrooms, i want to canning late you and thank you all for coming and best of luck. [applause] >> thanks very much for coming. >> you'll be here -- >> if you have any other questions, i can answer them individually. >> you can all get up now. >> sorry. [inaudible conversations] >> very nice to meet you. >> here is a look at some books that are being published this week n. the assassination complex, along with staff of online magazine do intercept with classified documents related to the u.s. drone program. fox news contributor calls on americans to adopt the ideals of teddy roosevelt. mark green, chronicles of the progressive movement from 1960's through present day. two-year imprisonment in north korean labor camp in not forgotten. in the morning they came from us, middle east editor for newsweek looks at the impact of syrian war. in the country we love in which actress guerrero recalls how she moved forward after foration of her parents at 14 year's old. modern culture has corrupt it had feminist movement in we were feminist once. niel gives account on how allies sabotaged nazi effort. cheryl casone after lengthy absences in the comeback and in ruthless examines the sciencology, watch for the authors in the near future on book tv. >> so i called my -- the social life of dna after the work of an anthropologist, now 30 plus years ago called the social life of things and he suggested to us that it was by following things in motion, right, that we can illuminate human and social contact. so i wanted to understand why genetic ancestry testing was significant not only for individual identity and family history but beyond as well. so the social life of dna for me means two things, it means the way in which forms of genetic analysis travel between social sites and domain, which i will say a little more about, and the multiple uses of one type of genetic analysis is set. so we tend to think of forms of genetic testing and analysis in these domains, right? we typically -- i think researchers, regular -- regulatory bodies, recreational genetics and used for family-court setting or paternity. what i found in the course of talking to people about genetic testing generally testing is that the way that individuals understand genetic testing really blur it is boundaries. they are a social power because they have the ability to work sometimes simultaneously in all of the domains at once. a woman called sarah said, we think breast cancer runs in our family, now that i understand the african ancestry test, the difference between the mother's line and the father's line and all that, i have a better sense of what the genetic counselor at what my doctor's was telling me. i wanted to know everything about genetics. i started reading scientific journals and those sorts of things. so what i want to suggest here just briefly because i want to tell you more about the sort of social travels of this company that i studied over a decade, in fact, that one category of genetic testing often drives authority from its association with other forms and individuals experiences and attitudes about one form of testing inform the broader authority of genetics, for those of us interested in health disparities and medical genetics in particularly, i would like to say for african americans and some communities of color the genetic ancestry testing becomes a threshold moment, first moment that people are thinking about genetics ever, martin, never thought about genetics or people like sarah who have an experience that is informed by interest and spernz which -- experience which is to understand the social life of dna and how people think about it in various domains if we want to understand how it's important and how we can use and in a medical or clinical encounter. >> you're watch k book tv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here is a look at what's on prime time tonight. after that, charles on how banking and monetary systems work. at 8:45 michelle on why we fail to recognize and act on obvious dangerous. american cofounder steve case speculates on the future of the internet. we finish up our prime time program at 11:00 with a look at alibaba, the chinese e-commerce site that now rivals amazon. that all happens on c-span2 book tv, and here first up is sebastein gorka. 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