Partition of India

• 1. Introduction

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  The Partition of India in August 1947 set into motion one of the largest forced migrations in recorded history. Between 12 and 20 million people fled across newly drawn borders in a matter of months. Estimates of the dead range, as of 2009, from two hundred thousand to two million. A London barrister named Cyril Radcliffe drew the line that split the subcontinent, handing down his decision in days for a boundary that would govern the lives of hundreds of millions. How did a single administrative division produce such catastrophe? The answers reach back to a census taken in 1871, a song that became a battle cry, and a long series of decisions, each one narrowing the space for any outcome other than division.

• 2. Seeds of Division

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  The 1871 Census of British India was the first to estimate the populations of Muslim-majority regions, and its numbers would shape politics for the next seven decades. British anxieties about those numbers grew sharper in light of Muslim resistance during the 1857 Rebellion and the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Thirty years of intermittent tension followed, as Hindu political and social groups mobilized in ways that alarmed Muslim leaders across North India. The Arya Samaj supported cow protection campaigns and organized events to welcome Muslims back to the Hindu fold, while the Hindi-Urdu controversy and anti-cow-killing riots of 1893 further deepened communal anxieties in the United Provinces.

  Viceroy Lord Curzon split the Bengal Presidency in 1905, creating a Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal and Assam and a Hindu-majority province of Bengal. Bengalis felt the move was punishment for their political assertiveness, and the resulting protests coalesced around the slogan Bande Mataram, the title of a song by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. The phrase had first appeared in the novel Anandmath, in which Hindus battled Muslim oppressors, a detail not lost on Muslim leaders watching the agitation unfold. Young men in groups such as Jugantar moved beyond boycotts into bombings, armed robberies, and assassinations of British officials.

  The Muslim elite, alarmed by the scale and character of the Hindu protest, approached the new viceroy Lord Minto in 1906 to request separate electorates, citing both their status as former rulers and their history of cooperating with the British. That meeting produced the All-India Muslim League, founded in Dacca in December 1906 in the mansion of Nawab Khwaja Salimullah at Shahbag. A provision that Muslim leaders had long debated in private had now taken organizational form, and it would grow steadily in the decades ahead.

• 3. War, Pacts, and Competing Visions

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  1.4 million Indian and British soldiers of the British Indian Army took part in World War I, and their participation reshaped how India was seen internationally. News of Indian soldiers fighting alongside troops from Canada and Australia reached distant parts of the world by newspaper and radio. India joined the League of Nations in 1920 under its own name and participated as "Les Indes Anglaises" in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, raising its international profile further.

  At the 1916 Lucknow Session of the Congress, an unexpected partnership formed between the Congress and the Muslim League. The wartime alliance between Germany and the Ottoman Empire had raised doubts among some Indian Muslims about British religious neutrality, since the Ottoman Sultan held guardianship over the Islamic holy sites of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. In the resulting Lucknow Pact, the League joined Congress in demanding greater self-government, while Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims in provincial and imperial legislatures. The pact was largely negotiated by a group of Young Party Muslims from the United Provinces, most prominently the brothers Mohammad and Shaukat Ali, and it gained the support of a young Bombay lawyer named Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

  The Government of India Act 1919, known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, enlarged legislative councils and transferred departments such as education, agriculture, and local self-government to provincial Indian ministers. Voting at the national level was extended to Indians but still reached only 10% of the adult male population. The principle of communal representation was reaffirmed, with seats reserved for Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, and domiciled Europeans in both provincial and imperial councils. The reforms offered the most significant legislative opportunity yet for Indians but remained constrained by limited voter rolls, small provincial budgets, and rural seats widely seen as instruments of British control.

• 4. The Two-Nation Theory

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  Arya Samaj leader Lala Lajpat Rai laid out his own version of the two-nation theory in 1924, calling for "a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India," driven partly by riots against Hindus in Kohat in the North-West Frontier Province. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had earlier proposed an embryonic form in his 1923 pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva, which became the founding text of Hindu nationalist ideology. At the 19th session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad in 1937, Savarkar declared: "India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation. On the contrary, there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Muslims, in India."

  In 1933, Choudhry Rahmat Ali produced a pamphlet entitled Now or Never, coining the term Pakistan, meaning "land of the pure," comprising the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan. A Muslim delegation to the Parliamentary Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms dismissed the idea as "chimerical and impracticable." Muhammad Ali Jinnah embraced the ideology in 1940, terming it the awakening of Muslims for the creation of Pakistan, though he opposed partitioning Punjab and Bengal and advocated for their integration into Pakistan without displacing Sikhs or Hindus. In 1943, Savarkar publicly expressed agreement, stating: "I have no quarrel with Mr Jinnah's two-nation theory. We, Hindus, are a nation by ourselves."

  The theory carried sharply divergent implications depending on interpretation. One reading called for sovereign autonomy for Muslim-majority areas with no population transfers, so Hindus and Muslims would continue to live together. Another held that the two communities constituted "two distinct and frequently antagonistic ways of life" that "cannot coexist in one nation," making a full exchange of populations a desirable outcome. Opposition came from two directions: the idea of a single Indian nation held by the Congress and later enshrined in the Republic of India's secular constitution, and the argument, raised by Baloch, Sindhi, and Pashtun sub-nationalities, that neither Hindus nor Muslims formed coherent nations and that the real political units were the subcontinent's relatively homogeneous provincial communities.

• 5. Countdown to Independence

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  In March 1940, at the Muslim League's annual three-day session in Lahore, Jinnah gave a two-hour speech in English laying out the arguments of the two-nation theory. On the last day, the League passed what came to be known as the Lahore Resolution, demanding that Muslim-majority areas in the north-western and eastern zones of India be grouped into independent, sovereign states. The resolution was a turning point. Though the League had been founded more than three decades earlier, it would gather significant support among South Asian Muslims only during the Second World War.

  In August 1942, Congress launched the Quit India Resolution, which the nervous British immediately answered by jailing Congress leaders and holding them until August 1945. With Congress leaders imprisoned, the Muslim League had three years to spread its message freely, and its ranks surged. Jinnah himself admitted that "the war which nobody welcomed proved to be a blessing in disguise." The 1945 United Kingdom general election brought the Labour Party to power under Clement Attlee, whose exchequer had been exhausted by the war. Many in his Cabinet had long supported Indian independence, and in early 1947 Britain announced its intention to transfer power no later than June 1948.

  The 1946 Indian elections produced decisive results. Congress won 91 percent of the vote in non-Muslim constituencies, forming governments in eight provinces. The Muslim League won the majority of the Muslim vote and all Muslim seats in the Central Assembly. V. K. Krishna Menon, president of the India League in London, nominated Louis Mountbatten as the only suitable viceregal candidate in clandestine meetings with Stafford Cripps and Clement Attlee. Mountbatten was given the task of overseeing independence by June 1948, with instructions to preserve a united India if possible, but with flexible authority to ensure a British withdrawal with minimal setbacks.

• 6. The Calcutta Killings and the Road to Partition

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  Jinnah announced in July 1946 that the 16th of August would be "Direct Action Day," warning Congress: "We will either have a divided India or a destroyed India." Armed Muslim gangs gathered at the Ochterlony Monument in Calcutta that morning to hear the League's Chief Minister of Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who, in the words of historian Yasmin Khan, "if he did not explicitly incite violence certainly gave the crowd the impression that they could act with impunity." That evening Hindus were attacked, and pamphlets distributed earlier showed a direct connection between violence and the demand for Pakistan. The following day Hindus struck back, and three days of fighting killed approximately 4,000 people by official accounts, among both communities.

  Historians noted that the Calcutta killings were the first communal violence to display elements of ethnic cleansing. Homes were entered and destroyed; women and children were attacked. The violence spread to Bihar, to Noakhali in Bengal, to Garhmukteshwar in the United Provinces, and on to Rawalpindi in March 1947, where Hindus and Sikhs were attacked or driven out by Muslims.

  When Lord Mountbatten formally proposed the partition plan on the 3rd of June 1947, Sardar Patel gave his approval and lobbied Nehru and other Congress leaders to accept it. At the All India Congress Committee meeting, Patel told delegates: "The choice is between one division and many divisions. Whether we like it or not, de facto Pakistan already exists in the Punjab and Bengal. Under the circumstances, I would prefer a de jure Pakistan, which may make the League more responsible." On the 18th of July 1947, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act, finalizing arrangements for partition and abandoning British suzerainty over several hundred princely states, leaving their rulers free to accede to either new dominion or remain independent.

• 7. The Radcliffe Line and Its Consequences

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  Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister, chaired the boundary commissions for both Punjab and Bengal. In Punjab, the commission consisted of two Muslim and two non-Muslim judges under his chairmanship. On every major issue the judges divided two and two, "leaving Sir Cyril Radcliffe the invidious task of making the actual decisions." The districts of Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Lahore, and Montgomery were all disputed in the Bari doab; all except Amritsar had Muslim majorities, though Gurdaspur's Muslim majority stood at a slender 51.1%. Amritsar itself was 46.5% Muslim. The Punjab that emerged was split into a Muslim-majority West and a Hindu-Sikh majority East, but many of each community lived on the wrong side of the new line.

  Historians Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh wrote of the violence that followed: "There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the maiming and mutilation of victims. The catalogue of horrors includes the disemboweling of pregnant women, the slamming of babies' heads against brick walls, the cutting off of the victim's limbs and genitalia." On the 3rd of March 1947, at Lahore, Sikh leader Master Tara Singh, alongside about 500 Sikhs, declared "Death to Pakistan" from a dais, and flashed his kirpan outside the Punjab Assembly. Nehru wrote to Gandhi on the 22nd of August that, up to that point, twice as many Muslims had been killed in East Punjab as Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab. Sir Francis Mudie, governor of West Punjab, estimated that 500,000 Muslims died trying to enter his province.

  Pakistan came into being on the 14th of August 1947, with Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor-General in Karachi. The following day, India became independent, with Nehru assuming the office of prime minister. Mountbatten administered the independence oath to Jinnah on the 14th, then flew to New Delhi for the midnight ceremony on the 15th. Gandhi remained in Bengal to work with the new refugees.

• 8. Migration and Its Aftermath

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  The population of undivided India in 1947 was approximately 390 million. After partition there were roughly 330 million in India, 30 million in West Pakistan, and 30 million in East Pakistan. The 1951 Census of Pakistan identified 7,226,600 displaced persons; the 1951 Census of India counted 7,295,870. Total migration across Punjab alone is estimated at 12 million people, with around 6.5 million Muslims moving into West Punjab and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moving into East Punjab. Virtually no Muslim survived in East Punjab except in Malerkotla and Nuh, and virtually no Hindu or Sikh in West Punjab except in Rahim Yar Khan and Bahawalpur.

  In Delhi, where the 1941 census had recorded a Muslim population of 33.2%, that figure collapsed to 5.7% by the 1951 Census. Tens of thousands of Muslims were driven to camps in historical sites including the Purana Qila, Idgah, and Nizamuddin. Prime Minister Nehru estimated 1,000 casualties in the city; Gyanendra Pandey's 2010 account puts Muslim casualties in Delhi at between 20,000 and 25,000. Chittagong Hill Tracts, with a 98.5% Buddhist majority in 1947, were awarded to Pakistan. In Sindh, an estimated 1.2-1.4 million Hindus migrated to India primarily by ship or train.

  On the 13th of January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi began a fast to stop the killing. Over 100 religious leaders gathered at Birla House and accepted his conditions; representatives of the Hindu Mahasabha, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and Jamait-ul-Ulema all attended. By the 18th of January, Gandhi agreed to break his fast, and the fast is credited with ending the immediate cycle of communal violence. Most scholars accept that approximately one million people died in the partition violence overall, with Punjab recording the worst of it. The 1951 Census of India recorded that 2% of the country's population at that point were refugees, a figure that captures only those who had crossed borders, not the millions more displaced within the new nations' boundaries.