divide and rule
- Also called:
- divide and conquer
divide and rule, from the Latin divide et impera, a strategy of governing colonial societies by systematically separating social and cultural groups, partly because those groups may otherwise unite and overpower the colonizing power. The term is often used in the context of colonial government in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly to the British raj and the effect of that governance on religious divisions in India. The direct consequences of the British divide and rule policy culminated in the partition of India after the country achieved independence in 1947.
History
The Roman Empire employed divide et impera as a military strategy by fragmenting existing power structures and eliminating or absorbing the portions thus created. This tactic is particularly associated with Julius Caesar and his conquest of Gaul (58–50 bce), during which he exploited divisions caused by tribalism.
In The Art of War (1521) Niccolò Machiavelli recommended the stratagem in warfare (translation by Ellis Farneworth; 1762):
A General ought to endeavour to divide the enemy’s strength, either by making him suspicious of his Counselors and Confidants, or obliging him to employ his forces in different places and detachments at the same time, which consequently must very much weaken his main army.
In colonial India
Having taken over the governing of India from the East India Company after the 1857 Rebellion, the British crown undertook a mass census of the colony. Nineteenth-century British administrators based social categorization on the existence of discrete and mutually exclusive classes and religions and believed that recognition of these differences was key to successful administration. This would allow the British to identify collaborators and avoid unrest by solidifying their understanding of the religious and cultural forces in Indian society.
There is disagreement among scholars as to the extent of division caused by internecine conflict between religious groups in India before the arrival of the British. However, studies of pre-British India have found that categories of religion and caste were experienced by Indians as fundamentally fluid and varied tremendously based on locale. For example, some Muslim citizens of Delhi may have had more in common with Hindus also living in Delhi—including certain localized religious practices—than with Muslim citizens of Bengal. Thus, not only was the premise of the British census misguided, its result was sometimes to create entire new communities of caste and religion and consistently to harden boundaries that had previously been porous.
The British deepened caste and religious divisions, at times unintentionally and at times in the name of convenience and pragmatism. Certain groups were favored for certain colonial positions, particularly the Sikhs in the military and Brahmin Hindus in administration. Units of the army were deliberately made mono-religious to deter the kind of cooperation that had led to the 1857 Rebellion. The partition of Bengal in 1905—ostensibly for administrative efficiency—created two geographical divisions that separated the Hindu-majority western half of the province from the Muslim-majority eastern half. The partition was annulled in 1911, but despite the reunification it caused a permanent breach of sentiment between the populations of the erstwhile east and west Bengal.
Some Indian individuals and groups saw advantages in encouraging the strict categorization of society. This is particularly true of certain Hindu Brahmin priests and Muslim Sharia judges, who used their perceived authority to perpetuate a conservative view of their religions and groups within those religions. Many historians believe that the modern, rigid form of the Hindu caste system was largely created by this process.
This creation through regulation is perhaps best illustrated in the British-created system of personal law, dating from the 19th century. While all of India fell under a single penal law, a discrete system of personal law was written for each religious community to govern practices such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Again, there is disagreement among scholars about how much of personal law corresponded to existing practices before the British codification and how much of it was partially or entirely invented to police the practices of religious groups.
Regardless of the motives behind divide and rule, the divisive effects of the strategy literally tore India apart. When the British began to introduce electoral politics in India, they did so through the medium of religious identity. This encouraged political parties to explicitly appeal to religion to increase their electoral power, culminating in the partition of India, which created Pakistan as a separate country for Muslims.
19th century and onward
Several imperialist powers other than the British have employed divide and rule to maintain political control over subjugated people. Some examples include the Ottoman Empire (c. 1300–1922), which fostered religious divisions between Christian Armenians and Muslim Kurds in the late 19th century, and Belgian encouragement of tensions between different ethnic populations in Ruanda-Urundi (now the countries of Rwanda and Burundi). These policies had far-reaching consequences, laying the groundwork for the Armenian Genocide during World War I, with hundreds of thousands of Armenians in Anatolia killed and displaced, and the genocide carried out in Rwanda in 1994, which had a death toll of more than 800,000 civilians, primarily from the minority Tutsi population.
The strategy of divide and rule continues to be applied today by several countries in matters of internal and external policy.