In August 1947, the British left India after more than 300 years. British India was partitioned into two independent nation-states, India and Pakistan. India was to remain secular with a Hindu majority.
Pakistan was to have a Muslim majority. This is the story of how two countries were carved up in haste by British colonists and how this led to one of the largest human migrations in history. An estimated 15 million people were uprooted as Muslims began trekking to East and West Pakistan.
While Hindus and Sikhs went the other way. Between 1 and 2 million people lost their lives due to large scale religious violence, starvation and disease. More than 75,000 women were raped or abducted.
But how did this religious hatred spark so much violence? To understand this, we have to look at Britain's rule of India. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims did exist before the British Raj was established. But many Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs also co-existed peacefully. When the British came to rule, they used a now infamous strategy of divide and rule.
They enforced specific measures like the Scientific Census in 1871 and the formation of a separate electorate for Muslims which led to the evolution of rigid religious identities. These identities became more important than language ethnicity and were used to put people against one another so that the British could consolidate their own power. Mistrust between Hindus, Muslim Sikhs and Christians began to grow. How did this lead to the country being partitioned? Indians had long wanted independence from repressive British rules.
During World War I, Britain introduced the Defense Act of of India which gave them indiscriminate power to lock people up without trial and restrict freedom of speech and movement. In 1919, British soldiers massacred unarmed Sikh men, women and children who had gathered to celebrate the Sikh New Year in Jallianwala Bagh. Some say the massacre marked the beginning of resistance against colonial governance. But to understand how and why the country was partitioned, we also need to understand the political players at the time.
This is Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi. They were leaders of the Congress, a Hindu-dominated secular political party which spearheaded the independence movement. They wanted a united, secular India.
This is Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He was the leader of the Muslim League. He also wanted independence and initially backed Hindu-Muslim unity. But by the 40s this changed and he wanted an independence date for Muslims.
In 1939, Britain dragged India into World War II. Most Indians were not happy about it. Nehru and Gandhi refused to fight. They initiated the 1942 Quit India movement. movement, a movement to have the British leave India entirely that resulted in nationwide protests against British rule.
In 1943, famine hit Bengal. Up to 3 million people lost their lives and many Indians believed that the famine was caused by colonial exploitation. At the end of World War II, Britain was cash strapped. They realized they couldn't afford to run India much longer.
They decided they would withdraw from the subcontinent but didn't put a date on it. With talk of a transfer of power, tensions ran high in the country. Muslims were concerned that they would be vulnerable in a Hindu-majority country. Hindus, on the other hand, didn't want the country to be broken up.
The Muslim League called for a strike in Kolkata to demand a homeland in August 1946. The protests went bad and sparked the Great Kolkata Killings. Between 4,000 and 10,000 people were killed in the riots. It also sparked riots and killings in other parts of the country. The British were afraid that this kind of violence would lead to a civil war.
They decided that they wanted to speed up their exit from India and wash their hands of any potential conflict. The British PM announced that India would gain its independence no later than July 1948. But all that changed when a new Viceroy to India and Minor Royal, Lord Louis Mountbatten, was appointed in March 1947. His job was to resolve the issue of partition by negotiating between Nehru and Jinnah and try to get Britain out of the country as soon as possible. In June 1947, he made a shock announcement. The country would be partitioned.
India would be independent by August 1947, almost a whole year earlier than intended. But who would divide the Indian empire? This is Cyril Radcliffe. He was the British lawyer tasked with breaking up India by taking into consideration religious differences and railways and canals. He had never travelled anywhere east of Paris before he was flown to India and given 36 days to carve up the map of South Asia.
Radcliffe drew the line which cut the states of Bengal and Punjab into two. He didn't award the Punti state of Kashmir to either country. He later admitted that he relied on outdated maps and census reports because it was too hot to undertake fieldwork in June. Radcliffe finished two weeks before independence, but the Viceroy decided to keep the borders of the new country a secret till after independence. On 14 August 1947, Pakistan declared its independence.
A day later, so did India. At the time, neither country knew where the borders were. The British army, which had suppressed Indians, had crashed revolts exited India after more than 300 years with hardly a shot fired and only seven casualties. But they left two countries in complete turmoil.
Partition unleashed a wave of bloodshed. One of the central flashpoints was Punjab. People who suddenly found themselves in the themselves in the wrong country had to flee from their ancestral homes on foot on bullock carts or by train.
More than 7 million people traveled from India to Pakistan. Another 7 million people traveled from Pakistan to India. Mobs hid in the bushes along the way waiting to slaughter people.
Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs killed one another. Many of the refugees succumbed to hunger or thirst or were murdered along the way. Train carriages dubbed blood trains which carried refugees often arrived at their destination with corpses. Women were raped and abducted. Many of the victims were mutilated and had their breasts cut off.
Pregnant women attacked by mobs had their bellies cut out of them. Even children weren't spared. Some women were killed by their own fathers and brothers so they wouldn't be captured.
Other women committed suicide by throwing themselves into wells to avoid abduction and preserve their honour. Homes and businesses were looted and burnt down. Some have likened the horrors of partition to the Holocaust. Refugee camps were set up in India and Pakistan to try to house the millions of refugees. But many more people lost their lives because of the poor conditions and disease in the camps.
The massive and sudden migration changed the demographic of South Asia forever. Almost all Hindus fled cities like Karachi, which were populated with just under 50% of Hindus, before partition. More than 300,000 Muslims were forced to flee Delhi alone, the capital of independent India.
Partition separated thousands of families. More than 70 years later, many families are still divided. Pakistan and India remain bitter rivals. They have fought three wars over Kashmir and one over East Pakistan, which eventually became Bangladesh. Today, there are still disputes over water and borders.
More than seven decades later, more than 1.6 billion people still live in the shadow of partition.