Partition of India

The Partition of India was the process by which British dependencies and treaty states in the Indian subcontinent were granted independence in the 1940s. The divisions resulted in the creation of four new independent states—India, Burma (now Myanmar), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Pakistan (including modern-day Bangladesh)—and sowed the seeds for later conflicts between India and Pakistan.

The term partition is generally used only in reference to the independence of India and Pakistan in August 1947, which were created largely along religious lines. Ceylon and Burma were granted complete independence separately, on January 4 and February 4, 1948, respectively. For more information, see History of Sri Lanka and History of Burma.

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Britain's holdings on the Indian subcontinent were granted independence in 1947 and 1948, becoming four new independent states: India, Burma (now Myanmar), Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Pakistan (including East Pakistan, modern-day Bangladesh).

Pakistan and India

Two self-governing dominions within the British Commonwealth legally came into existence at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. The ceremonies for the transfer of power were held a day earlier in Karachi, the capital of the new state of Pakistan, to allow the last British Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, to attend both the ceremony in Karachi and the ceremony in Delhi. Pakistan celebrates its Independence Day on August 14, while India celebrates on August 15.

Background of the partition

Seeds of partition

The seeds of the partition were sown long before independence, in the struggle between various factions of the Indian nationalist movement, and especially of the Indian National Congress, for control of the movement. Muslims felt threatened by Hindu majorities. The Hindus, in their turn, felt that the nationalist leaders were coddling the minority Muslims and slighting the majority Hindus.

The All India Muslim League (AIML) was formed in 1906 as a counterbalance to what it perceived as the Hindu domination of the Indian National Congress. A number of different scenarios were proposed at various times. Among the first to make the demand for a separate state was the writer/philosopher Allama Iqbal, who, in his presidential address to the 1930 convention of the Muslim League said that he felt that a separate nation for Muslims was essential in an otherwise Hindu-dominated subcontinent. The Sindh Assembly passed a resolution making it a demand in 1935. Iqbal, Jauhar and others then worked hard to draft Mohammad Ali Jinnah to lead the movement for this new nation. By 1930, Jinnah had despaired of Indian politics, particularly getting mainstream parties like the Congress (of which he was a member much longer than the League) to be sensitive to minority priorities. (He went on to become known as the Father of the Nation, with Pakistan officially giving him the title Quaid-e-Azam or "Great Leader". See Mohammad Ali Jinnah#A "Secular" Jinnah?). At the 1940 AIML conference in Lahore, Jinnah made clear his commitment to two separate states, a position from which the League never again wavered:

"The Hindus and the Muslims belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs and literature . . . To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state."

However, Hindu organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha, though against the division of the country, were also insisting on the same chasm between Hindus and Muslims. In 1937 at the open session of the Hindu Mahasabha held at Ahmedabad, Veer Savarkar in his presidential address asserted:

"India cannot be assumed today to be Unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main - the Hindus and the Muslims."

Many of the Congress leaders were secularists and resolutely opposed division of India on the lines of religion. The extremely influential Mohandas Gandhi, widely perceived as the leader of the independence movement, was both religious and eirenic, believing that Hindus and Muslims could and should live in amity. He opposed the partition, saying,

"My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God."

For years, Gandhi and his adherents struggled to hold the independence movement together, in the process enraging both Hindu and Muslim extremists. (Gandhi was assassinated soon after the Partition by Nathuram Godse, who believed that Gandhi was appeasing Muslims at the cost of Hindus.) Politicians and community leaders on both sides whipped up mutual suspicion and fear, culminating in dreadful events like the riots during the Muslim League's "Direct Action Day" of August 1946 in Calcutta, in which more than 4000 people, mostly Hindus, were killed and many more injured. As public order broke down all across northern India and Bengal, British, Congress, and Muslim League negotiators finally agreed to the Partition.

Right uptil 1946, the definition of Pakistan as demanded by the League was so vague that it could have been interpreted as a sovereign nation, a nation within a nation, or a member of a confederated India. Many historians believe that this was Jinnah's doing and that he intended to use Pakistan as a means of bargaining to get the possible political deal for Muslims, rather than a nation itself, and it was the intransigence of his interlocutors, both Indian and British, that made Pakistan an inevitability.

State of affairs before the partition

The British colonial administration did not directly rule all of "India". There were several different political arrangements in existence:

Provinces ruled directly
Princely States with varying legal arrangements

Main political players

Political groupings

British Colonial Administration
Indian National Congress
Hindu Mahasabha
All India Muslim League
Unionist Muslim League (mainly in the Punjab)

Personalities

Lord Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy of the Emperor of India
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Indian National Congress
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All India Muslim League
Allama Iqbal, leader of AIML who coined the idea of Pakistan
Mohandas Karamchand ("Mahatma") Gandhi
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
Veer Savarkar

The process of division

The actual division between the two new dominions was done according to what has come to be known as the 3rd June Plan.

Border definition

The border between India and Pakistan was determined by a British Government-commissioned report usually referred to as the Radcliffe Award after the London lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who wrote it. Pakistan came into being with two separate wings, East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, separated geographically by India. India was formed out of the majority Hindu regions of the colony, and Pakistan from the majority Muslim areas.

Legal arrangements

On July 18, 1947, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act that finalized the partition arrangement. The Government of India Act 1935 was adapted to provide a legal framework for the two new dominions.

The Princely States

The 565 Princely States were given a choice of which country to join. Those states that chose a country at odds with their majority religion, such as Junagadh, Hyderabad, and especially Kashmir, became the subject of much dispute.

Expedited, controversial process

The Partition was a highly controversial arrangement, and remains a cause of much tension on the Subcontinent today. British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten not only rushed the process through, but also is alleged to have influenced the Radcliffe awards in India's favor.

Some critics allege that British haste led to the heart-rending cruelties of the Partition. Because independence was declared prior to the actual Partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep public order. No large population movements were contemplated; the plan called for safeguards for minorities on both sides of the new state line. It was an impossible task, at which both states failed. There was a complete breakdown of law and order; millions (no one knows how many) died in riots, massacre, or just from the hardships of their flight to safety. What ensued was the largest population movement in history.

However, some argue that the British were forced to expedite the Partition by events on the ground. Law and order had broken down many times before Partition, with much bloodshed on both sides. A massive civil war was looming by the time Mountbatten became Viceroy. The only way the British could have maintained law and order would have been through martial law, and that could not have prevented communal violence throughout India, or the inevitable clashes that would come with partition. If Mountbatten had delayed partition and independence any longer, the death toll would have been in the millions. By rushing the process through, some say, Mountbatten saved more lives than were lost in the Partition.

Population exchanges

Massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly-formed nations in the months immediately following Partition. Once the lines were established, roughly 13 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. Approximately 7 million Muslims went to Pakistan from India while about 6 million Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from Pakistan.

Massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides of the border—leading to the deaths of as many as five million people—as the newly formed governments were completely unequipped to deal with migrations of such staggering magnitude.

The present-day religious demographics of India and Pakistan

Despite the huge migration during Partition, India still has a large Muslim minority. The current estimates for India:

82% Hindu (890 million)
12% Muslims (130 million)
2.3% Christians (25 million)
2% Sikhs (21 million)
1.7% Others (15 million)

Pakistan has smaller minority population. Its religious distribution is believed to be:

96.3% Muslims (156 million)
3.7% Hindus, Sikhs and Christians (6 million)

Division of assets

The assets of the legal entity that was “India” as of August 15, 1947, namely the British Indian Empire, were divided between the two dominions. The process became involved. Mahatma Gandhi went on hunger strike at one point to pressure the government of the Union of India to transfer funds, an action that is mentioned as one of the “grievances” cited by the group that assassinated him.

Present Day Status of Refugees in both India and Pakistan

Both nations prodigiously managed to assimilate the refugees in to their societies. Sikhs and Hindu Panjabis mostly settled in the Indian part of Punjab. The responsibility of rehabilitating Hindu Sindhis was borne by all the states in Indian Union, but they mostly settled in the western states of Gujarat and Maharashtra. Sindhis contributed greatly towards industrializing India. These people have now lost their refugee identities as such. In late 2004 Sindhis vociferously opposed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India calling upon government of India to delete word Sindh from the Indian National Anthem (written before the partition) on the grounds that it infringed upon the sovereignity of Pakistan. These people have also played an active role in Indian politics with the current Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (a Punjabi Sikh) and leader of opposition L.K. Advani (a Sindhi) both born in what is now known as Pakistan.

The descendents of refugees in Pakistan often refer to themselves as Muhajirs. Muhajirs are mostly Urdu-speaking people who originally emigrated from India to Pakistan during the partition of 1947. While they form what amounts to an ethnic group within Pakistan, the group is actually comprised of people from different ethnic groups and regions in India, such as Uttar Pradesh (then known as "United Provinces of Agra and Awadh", or UP), Madhya Pradesh (then Central Province or "CP"), Gujarat, Bihar, what was then the Princely State of Hyderabad and so on. They are united by the Urdu language.

Aftermath

Violence between Hindus and Muslims, or between India and Pakistan, did not end with the Partition. India has been riven by communal riots, while Pakistan is riven by sectarian strife against its minority Shi'ite population. Further the Muslims who migrated to Pakistan called "Muhajirs" are generally treated as second class citizens within Pakistan. India and Pakistan have also gone to war four times:

They have also engaged in a nuclear arms race which has at times threatened to erupt into nuclear war.

The British-Tibetan border, winding as it did through the Himalayas, had never been definitively surveyed or marked. India, as the inheritor of a long stretch of the British borders, and the People's Republic of China, as the conqueror of Tibet, eventually clashed, leading to the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

All of the four nations resulting from the Partition of the British Raj have had to deal with endemic civil conflicts. These include:

in 1971, Bangladesh Liberation War between Bangladesh and Pakistan (called the Pakistani Civil War by Pakistan) earned independence for the new country of People's Republic of Bangladesh
the Mohajir movement in Pakistan and riots in Karachi
civil conflict in Kashmir
the Sikh separatist movement in the Punjab, resulting in the Golden Temple Raid in 1984
civil conflict in Sri Lanka between Sinhalese and Tamils
civil conflict between the Burmese central government and hill tribes such as the Karen

Some political scientists, like Ernest Gellner, would argue that this is due to an imported Western political theory, nationalism. The same theory that justified Indian rebellion against the British could also justify minority rebellion against the four new governments formed from the Raj -- particularily as they were new and lacked the legitimacy of custom and antiquity.

External links

Partition of India (http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1826/18260810.htm) by A G Noorani.
Pre-Partition Map of India (http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/india/prepartition.jpg)
The Story of Pakistan (http://www.storyofpakistan.com)
The library of the University of California at Berkeley maintains a collection of pointers to online documents South Asian History: Colonial India (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/SSEAL/SouthAsia/india_colonial.html), including numerous documents about independence and partition
Fordham University maintains an archive of relevant public-domain documents (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/india/indiasbook.html#Indian%20Nationalism).