Tell about Partition of India ?

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the man behind the creation of Pakistan as a separate country, was a secularist.

The new borders, which split the key provinces of the Punjab and Bengal in two, were officially approved on August 17.

Bangladesh was called East Pakistan, located over 1700 kilometres away from West or present-day Pakistan.

They had been drawn up by a Boundary Commission, led by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, who later admitted that he had relied on out-of-date maps and census materials

As of August, 1947, the subcontinent was divided into parts lying in 4 different countries, some of which are still under dispute after 70 years, most notably the state of Kashmir.

During the iconic pre-independence speech by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of free India, in Delhi, the viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was watching the Bob Hope movie ‘My Favourite Brunette’ with his wife.

Partition triggered riots, mass casualties, and a colossal wave of migration.

Millions of people moved to what they hoped would be safer territory, with Muslims heading towards Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs in the direction of India.

, Kingsway Camp, Delhi’s largest refugee camp at the time, was home to about 300,000 people, when at its maximum.

As Hindu, Muslim and Sikh vigilantes hurt all sides killing and maiming at all sides, British soldiers were confined to their barracks. They had been ordered by Mountbatten to save only British lives.

As many as 14-16m people may have been eventually displaced, travelling on foot, in bullock carts and by train.

There were trains of only corpses going to and fro the new countries – bodies of people who were killed or died on the way to their new homes.

Estimates of the death toll post-Partition range from 200,000 to two million. Many were killed by members of other communities and sometimes their own families, as well as by the contagious diseases which swept through refugee camps.

On August 14, just hours before Nehru’s speech, a great riot had broken out in the streets of Lahore. The main Sikh temple or ‘gurudwara’ was in flames, while around 100,000 people were trapped in the burning city without water or medical help.

Another unforeseen consequence of Partition was that Pakistan’s population ended up more religiously homogeneous than originally anticipated.

Gandhi was absent from all proceedings during this time; he was in Calcutta, the city was torn by riots. Bengal had been divided into two parts – one that would be part of free India and had Calcutta, while the other that had become East Pakistan.

Over 25 films have been made set in the partition of India and Pakistan, while many others allude to the migration, displacement, communal tension and revolts of the time.

1857 saw the first war for independence when the nation revolted as one against the British Empire.

The Muslim League’s leaders had assumed that Pakistan would contain a sizeable non-Muslim population, whose presence would safeguard the position of Muslims remaining in India

Muslims remained the largest minority group in independent India, making up around 10% of the population in 1951. Gandhi himself was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist extremist who blamed him for being too supportive of Muslims at the time of Partition.

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.

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.

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.