Whether it is the continuing ugly massacres in Kashmir or this dreadful war in Iraq, the truth is that far too many of the trouble spots in the world are the consequence of the frontiers created ad hoc by Britain's wicked old imperialism and the legacy of its divide and quit policy.

Christopher Hitchens, the author of Why Orwell Matters, points this out in an elegant essay in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1916, it was one Sir Mark Sykes who divided the Middle East into Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan. Six years later, Sir Percy Cox carved Kuwait out of Iraq. The year before the Irish were told they could either have an independent or a united state but not both. And as we know, it was Sir Cyril Radcliffe's pen that carved a Pakistani state in 1947 out of what had formerly been India. More recently, Lords Carrington and Owen of the British Foreign Office advanced the ethnic division of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and before Nelson Mandela came out of jail, the same Carrington wanted to split South Africa three-ways into a white Afrikaner area, a Zulu reservation, and a free for all among the others.

Marya Mannes captured this historic legacy with wonderful irony in a poem that no one reads any more. She wrote: "Borders are scratched across the hearts of men/By strangers with a calm judicial pen,/And when the borders bleed we watch with dread/The lines of ink across the map turn red." Ruefully, one remembers that most of those lines would not have been there had the map not been coloured red in the first place. The year after she wrote this, the British government informed the people of Cyprus in 1960 that they must either accept a sullen independence or face an outright division of their island between Greece and Turkey.

But for us in India it was Audens poem, 'Partition', that truly brought out our sweet sourness over Mountbatten's disengaging mission: "Unbiased at least he was when/ he arrived on his mission,/ Having never set eyes on this/ land he was called to partition/ Between two peoples fanatically at odds,/ With their different diets and/ incompatible gods./ Time, they had briefed him in/ London, is short. It's too late/ For mutual reconciliation or/ rational debate:/The only solution now lies in separation."

Hitchens questions the popular view that Islam was a big loser from colonialism. In India, he says, "the British were openly partial to the Muslims, and helped to midwife the modern state consecrated to Islam. In Cyprus they favoured the Turks. In the Middle East Muslim Hashemite and Saudi dynasties benefited as much as anyone from the imperial carve-up. Had there been a British partition of Eritrea after 1945, the Muslims would have been the beneficiaries." No, the Muslims were not losers but they do have reasons to feel resentful over the loss of the Islamic empire, which is a different grievance.

There certainly were Muslim losers in Palestine and elsewhere, but the big losers were the many people of the other creeds and those who believed in modernity and transcended tribalism. It is the same in today's India where amidst the fanaticism of the Hindu nationalists and the Muslim terrorists, the losers are the ordinary people who want to get on with their lives. This unhappy British colonial legacy not only holds lessons for imperial America in Iraq — when its time comes to quit it ought not to botch things — but it is a reminder to all of us on the sub-continent that our borders emerged from scornful bureaucratic pens, and deserve to be treated with similar contempt.