In one respect, the BBC deserved congratulations for its lavish coverage of the 70th anniversary of the partition of India. But in another it yet again gave us a chilling example of much of what has gone so horribly wrong with today’s BBC.

Several radio programmes, led by the excellent Partition Voices, featured very moving personal accounts of what it had been like to live through the terrifying events that followed the splitting of India and Pakistan. Ageing Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims recalled how happily they had all lived together until the fateful day when millions on both sides of the new frontier had to flee for their lives, amid scenes of indescribable horror.

But then, in an hour-long Newsnight special, presented by Kirsty Wark before a large audience of South Asians living in Britain, we saw the other side of the story the BBC wanted to tell. The message was that this unspeakable tragedy was all the fault of the British, for the cruel way they had “drawn lines on the map”. A sociologist described it as “a particularly good example of the horrors of empire”: the “colossal arrogance that you can redraw a map, showing callous disregard for black and brown lives”, comparing what the British did in 1947 to the crimes of the slave trade.