Quotes About Conflict

Sikh and Muslim Punjabis, Pashtuns and Gurkhas joined the British in the slaughter

Despite a common adherence to Islam, Punjabi Muslims did not join the Afghans in their battles against the Sikhs.

during the Panipat battle of 1761, the Sikhs had remained neutral between the Afghans and the Marathas.

If one regiment mutinies, the next regiment [should be] so alien that it would be ready to fire into it.

More often than not, a report that a cow was about to be slaughtered, or that a religious procession carrying Hindu idols was interfering with mosque prayers, set off stone-throwing or worse.

Probably between half a million and eight hundred thousand in all were killed in Punjab in 1947.

Stir and use the dislikes: Sikh resentment of Muslim rule, Muslim resentment of Sikh domination, Punjabi disdain of the Purbiah. Spread word of the chance to plunder Delhi under British protection.

The year 1834 saw unrestrained fighting between Nalwa's force and Pashtun tribals. The latter's ambushes and sniping were countered by the destruction, under Nalwa's command, of whole villages and the construction of a series of forts.

Blood on India's streets was not what the Raj desired, yet Hindu-Muslim disputes were preferable to India-England ones.

Nalwa rose from his sickbed and led a counter-attack. In gory battles fought along the Khyber Pass, about 6,000 Punjabis and 11,000 Afghans were killed, but Nalwa and a son of Dost were among the dead.

Goods and cash worth crores of rupees lie buried to my knowledge in the palace of my late father-in-law (Qamruddin) besides heaps of gold and silver stored inside the ceiling. Complete disagreement exists among the emperor, his wazirs and nobles. If you invade India this time, the Indian Empire with all its riches of crores will fall into your hands.

Timur again crossed the Indus in an attempt to join up with the emperor. But the Sikhs once more blocked his path

On his way back, however, 'the Sikhs plundered [Abdali's] baggage, and cut off the stragglers of the Afghan party'. Evidently the Afghan king was 'much incensed

Jabbar Khan blundered by persecuting Hindu Kashmiris. Many of them left the Valley

when World War I started, and Turkey aligned itself with the Empire's foe, Germany, India's Muslims felt even more conflicted.

Deception, war, fratricide, and the murder or blinding of closely-related rivals would mark virtually every succession in Mughal times, as it had done during the Sultanate.

Gandhi was a great man but he failed to understand two things: the value of the sword, and the danger from Islam.

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High, 2nd edition,

Many people in the world today are not starving because there is an inherent inability to produce food, they are starving because they are caught in the middle of political fights and blockades that have been used as weapons.

All concepts of politics, of whatever kind, are about conflict??how to contain it, or abolish it.

Human beings may hate a distant enemy in theory, but they generally prefer to kill their neighbors.

But in the real world-in which even academics perish-war often changes everything. The blood-drunk killer is rarely disarmed by the man who lives in books-or by the eternal adolescent clinging to the lie that all men want peace.

War was a sorrier business than storybooks told.

Afghanistan is more than the "graveyard of empires." It's the mother of vicious circles. —MAUREEN DOWD