| Part of the decolonisation of Asia, Indian and Pakistani independence movements | |
 Prevailing religions of the British Indian Empire (1901), the basis for the partition | |
| Date | 14–15 August 1947 |
|---|---|
| Location | South Asia |
| Cause | Two-nation theory: Muslim league's demand for separate Islamic nation, Indian Independence Act 1947 |
| Outcome | Partition of British India into two independent Dominions, India and Pakistan, sectarian violence, religious cleansing, and refugee crises |
| Deaths | 1 million |
| Displaced | 10–20 million |
The Partition of India in 1947 was the change of political borders and the division of other assets that accompanied the dissolution of the British Raj in South Asia and the creation of two independent dominions: India and Pakistan.[1][2] The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India, and the Dominion of Pakistan—which at the time comprised two regions lying on either side of India—is now the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947. The change of political borders notably included the division of two provinces of British India,[a] Bengal and Punjab.[3] The majority Muslim districts in these provinces were awarded to Pakistan and the majority non-Muslim to India. The other assets that were divided included the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Indian Air Force, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury. Self-governing independent Pakistan and India legally came into existence at midnight on 14 and 15 August 1947 respectively.
The partition caused large-scale loss of life and an unprecedented migration between the two dominions.[4] Among refugees that survived, it solidified the belief that safety lay among co-religionists. In the instance of Pakistan, it made palpable a hitherto only imagined refuge for the Muslims of British India.[5] A poll conducted by Gallup Pakistan in 2011 shows that an overwhelming majority (92%) of Pakistanis held the view that separation from India was justified in 1947.[6] The migrations took place hastily and with little warning. It is thought that between 14 million and 18 million people moved, and perhaps more. Excess mortality during the period of the partition is usually estimated to be around one million.[7] The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that affects their relationship to this day.
The term partition of India does not cover the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, nor the separation of Burma (Myanmar) from the British Raj in 1937 or the much earlier separation of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the rule of the EIC in 1796. Other political entities or transformations in the region that were not a part of the partition were: the political integration of princely states into the two new dominions; the annexation of the princely states of Hyderabad and Junagadh by India; the dispute and division of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir between India, Pakistan, and later China; the incorporation of the enclaves of French India into India during the period 1947–1954; and the annexation of Goa and other districts of Portuguese India by India in 1961. Nepal and Bhutan, having signed treaties with the British designating them as independent states, were not a part of British-ruled India.[8] The Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim was established as a princely state after the Anglo-Sikkimese Treaty of 1861, but its sovereignty had been left undefined.[9] In 1947, Sikkim became an independent kingdom under the suzerainty of India. The Maldives became a protectorate of the British crown in 1887 and gained its independence in 1965.
- ^ Fisher, Michael H. (2018), An Environmental History of India: From Earliest Times to the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, doi:10.1017/9781316276044, ISBN 978-1-107-11162-2, LCCN 2018021693, S2CID 134229667,
The partition of South Asia that produced India and West and East Pakistan resulted from years of bitter negotiations and recriminations ... The departing British also decreed that the hundreds of princes, who ruled one-third of the subcontinent and a quarter of its population, became legally independent, their status to be settled later. Geographical location, personal and popular sentiment, and substantial pressure and incentives from the new governments led almost all princes eventually to merge their domains into either Pakistan or India. ... Each new government asserted its exclusive sovereignty within its borders, realigning all territories, animals, plants, minerals, and all other natural and human-made resources as either Pakistani or Indian property, to be used for its national development ... Simultaneously, the central civil and military services and judiciary split roughly along religious 'communal' lines, even as they divided movable government assets according to a negotiated formula: 22.7 percent for Pakistan and 77.3 percent for India.
- ^ Khan, Yasmin (2017) [2007], The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (2 ed.), New Haven and London: Yale University Press, p. 1, ISBN 978-0-300-23032-1,
South Asians learned that the British Indian empire would be partitioned on 3 June 1947. They heard about it on the radio, from relations and friends, by reading newspapers and, later, through government pamphlets. Among a population of almost four hundred million, where the vast majority live in the countryside, ploughing the land as landless peasants or sharecroppers, it is hardly surprising that many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, did not hear the news for many weeks afterwards. For some, the butchery and forced relocation of the summer months of 1947 may have been the first that they knew about the creation of the two new states rising from the fragmentary and terminally weakened British empire in India
- ^ Talbot & Singh 2009, p. 25: "When the British divided and quit India in August 1947, they not only partitioned the subcontinent with the emergence of the two nations of India and Pakistan but also the provinces of Punjab and Bengal. ... Indeed for many the Indian subcontinent's division in August 1947 is seen as a unique event which defies comparative historical and conceptual analysis"
- ^ Chatterji, Joya; Washbrook, David (2013), "Introduction: Concepts and Questions", in Chatterji, Joya; Washbrook, David (eds.), Routledge Handbook of the South Asian Diaspora, London and New York: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-48010-9,
Joya Chatterji describes how the partition of the British Indian empire into the new nation states of India and Pakistan produced new diaspora on a vast, and hitherto unprecedented, scale, but hints that the sheer magnitude of refugee movements in South Asia after 1947 must be understood in the context of pre-existing migratory flows within the partitioned regions (see also Chatterji 2013). She also demonstrates that the new national states of India and Pakistan were quickly drawn into trying to stem this migration. As they put into place laws designed to restrict the return of partition emigrants, this produced new dilemmas for both new nations in their treatment of 'overseas Indians'; and many of them lost their right to return to their places of origin in the subcontinent, and also their claims to full citizenship in host countries.
- ^ Metcalf, Barbara D.; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2012), A Concise History of Modern India, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-107-02649-0,
The loss of life was immense, with estimates ranging from several hundred thousand up to a million. But, even for those who survived, fear generated a widespread perception that one could be safe only among the members of one's own community; and this in turn helped consolidate loyalties towards the state, whether India or Pakistan, in which one might find a secure haven. This was especially important for Pakistan, where the succour it offered to Muslims gave that state for the first time a visible territorial reality. Fear too drove forward a mass migration unparalleled in the history of South Asia. Within a period of some three or four months in late 1947 a number of Hindus and Sikhs estimated at some 5 million moved from West Punjab into India, while 5.5 million Muslims travelled in the opposite direction. The outcome, akin to what today is called 'ethnic cleansing', produced an Indian Punjab 60 per cent Hindu and 35 per cent Sikh, while the Pakistan Punjab became almost wholly Muslim. A similar, though less extensive, migration took place between east and west Bengal, though murderous attacks on fleeing refugees, with the attendant loss of life, were much less extensive in the eastern region. Even those who did not move, if of the wrong community, often found themselves treated as though they were the enemy. In Delhi itself, the city's Muslims, cowering in an old fort, were for several months after partition regarded with intense suspicion and hostility. Overall, partition uprooted some 12.5 million of undivided India's people.
- ^ "Majority Pakistanis think separation from India was justified: Gallup poll". Express Tribune. 12 September 2011. Retrieved 28 December 2011.
- ^ Dyson, Tim (2018), A Population History of India: From the First Modern People to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, p. 189, ISBN 978-0-19-882905-8,
The sudden refugee flows related to Partition may at the time have been unsurpassed in modern world history. It is likely that at least 14–18 million people moved. Previous assessments of the mortality associated with Partition have varied between 200,000 and 1 million. The first figure, attributed to Mountbatten (the last Viceroy) smacks of a number that—conveniently from an official perspective—minimises the loss of life. However, the figure of 1 million may also be too low. The data, however, do not allow for a firmer judgement.
- ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. "Nepal" Archived 18 March 2006 at the Wayback Machine, Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. "Bhutan"
- ^ "Sikkim". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Archived from the original on 12 December 2007. Retrieved 23 February 2017.
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