Tell about Partition of India ?

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“Partition” – the division of British India into the two separate states of India and Pakistan on August 14-15, 1947 – was the “last-minute” mechanism by which the British were able to secure agreement over how independence would take place. At the time, few people understood what Partition would entail or what its results would be, and the migration on the enormous scale that followed took the vast majority of contemporaries by surprise.

The main vehicle for nationalist activity was the Indian National Congress, whose best-known leaders included Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Even before the 1940s, it had long argued for a unitary state with a strong centre even though Congress was ostensibly secular in its objectives.

At around 25% of its population, Muslims were British India’s largest religious minority. Under imperial rule, they had grown accustomed to having their minority status protected by a system of reserved legislative seats and separate electorates.

The British system of political control hinged on identifying interest groups willing to collaborate, a governing style often described as “divide and rule”.

The prospect of losing this protection as independence drew closer worried more and more Muslims, first in parts of northern India, and then, after World War II, in the influential Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab. In 1945-6, the All-India Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, won a majority of Muslim votes in provincial elections.

When Britain took India into the war without consultation in 1939, Congress opposed it; large nationalist protests ensued, culminating in the 1942 Quit India movement, a mass movement against British rule.

For their part in it, Gandhi and Nehru and thousands of Congress workers were imprisoned until 1945.

Meanwhile, the British wartime need for local allies gave the Muslim League an opening to offer its cooperation in exchange for future political safeguards.

In March 1940, the Muslim League’s “Pakistan” resolution called for the creation of “separate states” – plural, not singular – to accommodate Indian Muslims, whom it argued were a separate “nation”.

Historians are still divided on whether this rather vague demand was purely a bargaining counter or a firm objective.

After the war, Attlee’s Labour government in London recognised that Britain’s devastated economy could not cope with the cost of the over-extended empire.

India and Pakistan became two separate countries in August, 1947, with Pakistan celebrating their Independence Day on August 14 and India celebrating theirs on August 15.

A Cabinet Mission was dispatched to India in early 1946, and Attlee described its mission in ambitious terms

An act of parliament proposed June 1948 as the deadline for the transfer of power.

Having been under the rule of the British Empire for almost 200 years, 2017 marks the 70th year of independence and partition for the nations. Here's a fun quiz to brush up on your history.

the Mission failed to secure agreement over its proposed constitutional scheme, which recommended a loose federation; the idea was rejected by both Congress and the Muslim League, which vowed to agitate for “Pakistan” by any means possible.

In 1941, Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan had a 46.7 per cent Hindu population, who fled the city during and immediately after the partition.

Around the same time, Delhi’s entire population included one-third Muslims, most of whom were displaced in 1947.

The borders of Pakistan were drawn up two days after partition, on August 17th of 1947.

All the while, communal violence was escalating. In August 1946, the Great Calcutta Killing left some 4,000 people dead and a further 100,000 homeless.

At least 15 million people were uprooted and displaced in one of the largest human migrations in recorded history.

By March 1947, a new viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, arrived in Delhi with a mandate to find a speedy way of bringing the British Raj to an end. On June 3, he announced that independence would be brought forward to August that year, presenting politicians with an ultimatum that gave them little alternative but to agree to the creation of two separate state

Around one to two million people were killed during the implementation of the partition.

Pakistan – its eastern and western wings separated by around 1,700 kilometres of Indian territory – celebrated independence on August 14 that year; India did so the following day.