Between August 14th and 15th, Pakistan and India celebrate the 75th anniversary of their independence: Pakistan on the 14th and India on the 15th. Both commemorate the same event that took place at midnight on August 14th, 1947: the partition of India decided by the British Empire, which divided the former colony of British India into two separate and independent states, India and Pakistan.
The birth of the two states was marked by enormous tensions that caused the mass migration of 12-15 million people and provoked horrific violence that would have claimed a million lives. The massive mass migration of this period is now considered one of the largest of the 20th century.
Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities have lived together in the Indian subcontinent for hundreds of years, with tensions surfacing, albeit contained, during British rule. India (including present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh) officially became a colony of the British Empire in 1858 after being indirectly controlled for almost two centuries by the British East India Company, which exercised both political and economic power.
The British colonizers began to differentiate the Indian population on the basis of religion, which many scholars believe contributed to the subsequent polarization. The growing opposition between Hindus and Muslims experienced a decisive acceleration from the early years of the 20th century, when the two religious groups also began to identify themselves in political independence movements, often divided on the form that an independent India should take.
The Congress Party, which assembled a Hindu majority and the Muslim League, began to take a political rebate in the 1920s, and by the early 1940s the two communities were already struggling to live peacefully with increasing levels of violence: the years of World War II the mixed neighborhoods almost disappeared, with the creation of separate and contrasting entities.
A departure of Muslim refugees from New Delhi. (AP photo)
At the end of World War II, the weakened British Empire had to decide quickly what to do with its vast Indian empire, whose population was increasingly restless, politically active and difficult to control. At the end of a twenty-year process of struggle and civil disobedience, the Indian Congress Party led by Mahatma Gandhi called for the creation of a grand federal state that would encompass all of British India, while Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah called for Indian Muslims ( 30 percent of the population) are allowed to set up their own independent state in order not to run the risk of being oppressed by the Hindu majority.
India’s last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, took note of the British government’s 1946 decision to abandon the Indian colony and grant independence, and accepted the two-state solution on religious and sectarian grounds.
He divided the subcontinent into three parts. Much of the southern, central, and northern territory became what we know today as India, while the northwestern and northeastern ends, separated by two thousand kilometers of Indian territory, became Pakistan. One of the two areas that made up what was then Pakistan, the Northeast, gained independence in the 1970s and became Bangladesh. What went down in history as “partition” came into effect at midnight on August 14-15, 1947: Pakistan celebrates the 14th, India the 15th.
Almost immediately, over ten million people who found themselves in the “wrong” part of the partition began one of the largest mass migrations in history: millions of Muslims moved to western and eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh), millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled their homes the opposite way to go.
There were sudden, chaotic migrations, unprepared at all (the British colonial government had brought partition forward by ten months compared to what was expected, in the impossibility of controlling the country). Some of it was forced migration: the religious majority groups expelled the minorities. They were marked by very severe outbursts of violence involving Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other, which some historians have described as “mutual genocide”.
Karachi, the designated capital (until 1958) of Pakistan, was inhabited by 48 percent Hindus in 1941, New Delhi was a third Muslim. Ten years later almost all Hindus had left Pakistan and 200,000 Muslims the Indian capital.
Victims of a massacre by Sikhs in the village of Naru Nangal in Pakistan in 1947 (AP Photo / GMK)
The regions hardest hit by sectarian violence were those on the border, Punjab and Bengal: Here the slaughter was particularly violent, with massacres, burning of entire villages, forced conversions and mass rapes: it is estimated that around 75,000 women were raped, scarred and were mutilated. Writer Nisid Hajari, in the book Midnight’s Furies, writes about horrific violence, with groups on both sides rampaging on dead bodies, women and children.
Migrants, often walking great distances, were ambushed along the road and crowded refugee trains were attacked, arriving with few survivors. The Lahore railway station, just across the Indian Punjab border, has been the scene of some of the best-documented massacres: on the one hand, trains loaded with the bodies of Muslims killed en route to Pakistan, and on the other hand the Hindus, arriving on its tracks arriving preparing to leave the city were attacked by angry mobs of Muslims.
An Indian train derailed in a Muslim attack in 1947 (AP Photo)
The violence was not only sectarian, but at times served to exploit the chaos of partition to secure land and influence. Historian Mytheli Sreenivas writes, “Former soldiers who fought in World War II used the weapons available to eliminate local elites and secure political and economic power.”
A year after the decision of the British Empire, which at the time could not or did not try to contain the violence, the migration was largely over: there were at least one million deaths, but demographic studies of the following years indicate more than three million dead or disappeared as a result of partition. The huge refugee camps in both countries would have housed hundreds of thousands of people until at least 1951.
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For decades, the history of partition was marked by the contrast between the two states: in Pakistan, the date is celebrated almost exclusively as the country’s hour of birth and the violence is told as a one-way street, in India, Muslims are accused of having been the only cause of the separation and thus the tragedy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pro-nationalist and pro-Hindu policies are increasing tensions between the two religious communities in major Indian cities.
In recent years, there have been attempts, particularly in the West, by Indian and Pakistani immigrants to restore memory of the Partition, and the Partition story has also recently found its way into popular culture and entertainment products, such as the Disney mini-series Ms. Miracles.
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