Tell about Partition of India ?

Riots broke out at such times as during Holi festival, when sacred cows were slaughtered, or when Hindu religious music was played in front of mosques at prayer time.

Despite the growing unrest, both the INC and the Muslim League supported sending Indian volunteer troops to fight on Britain's behalf in World War I

In exchange for the service of more than one million Indian soldiers, the people of India expected political concessions up to and including independence.

However, after the war, Britain offered no such concessions.
In April 1919, a unit of the British Army went to Amritsar, in Punjab, to silence pro-independence unrest.

The unit's commander ordered his men to open fire on the unarmed crowd, killing more than 1,000 protesters. When word of the Amritsar Massacre spread around India, hundreds of thousands of formerly apolitical people became supporters of the INC and the Muslim League.

In the 1930s, Mohandas Gandhi became the leading figure in the INC. Although he advocated a unified Hindu and Muslim India, with equal rights for all, other INC members were less inclined to join with Muslims against the British.

As a result, the Muslim League began to make plans for a separate Muslim state.

World War II sparked a crisis in relations between the British, the INC, and the Muslim League.

The British government expected India once again to provide much-needed soldiers and material for the war effort, but the INC opposed sending Indians to fight and die in Britain's war.

After the betrayal following World War I, the INC saw no benefit for India in such a sacrifice.

The Muslim League, however, decided to back Britain's call for volunteers, in an effort to curry British favor in support of a Muslim nation in post-independence northern India.

Before the war had even ended, public opinion in Britain had swung against the distraction and expense of empire: the cost of the war had severely depleted Britain's coffers.

Winston Churchill's party was voted out of office, and the pro-independence Labour Party was voted in during 1945.

Labour called for almost immediate independence for India, as well as more gradual freedom for Britain's other colonial holdings.

The Muslim League's leader, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, began a public campaign in favor of a separate Muslim state, while Jawaharlal Nehru of the INC called for a unified India.

The INC leaders such as Nehru were in favor of a united India since Hindus would have formed the vast majority of the Indian population and would have been in control of any democratic form of government.

As independence neared, the country began to descend toward a sectarian civil war.

Although Gandhi implored the Indian people to unite in peaceful opposition to British rule

the Muslim League sponsored a "Direct Action Day" on August 16, 1946, which resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Calcutta (Kolkata).

This touched off the "Week of the Long Knives," an orgy of sectarian violence that resulted in hundreds of deaths on both sides in various cities across the country

Indian Independence Act of 1947
In February 1947, the British government announced that India would be granted independence by June 1948.

Viceroy for India Lord Louis Mountbatten pleaded with the Hindu and Muslim leaders to agree to form a united country, but they could not.

Only Gandhi supported Mountbatten's position. With the country descending further into chaos, Mountbatten reluctantly agreed to the formation of two separate states.

Mountbatten proposed that the new state of Pakistan would be created from the Muslim-majority provinces of Baluchistan and Sindh, and the two contested provinces of Punjab and Bengal would be halved, creating a Hindu Bengal and Punjab, and Muslim Bengal and Punjab.

The plan gained agreement from the Muslim League and the INC, and it was announced on June 3, 1947