HIS-103

Lecture- 7

Partition of India 1947 and

Its Aftermath
 Introduction
• The Partition of India of 1947 was the division of India at the end of the
British rule into two independent states called India and Pakistan.
• Pakistan later on was divided and is today the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan and the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
• The partition of India also involved the division of two provinces of
Bengal and Punjab, which was based on the majorities of Muslims and
non-Muslims in the districts.
• The dissolution of the British Raj, or Crown rule in India was the result of
the partition and was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947.
• The two self-governing countries of India and Pakistan legally came into
existence at midnight on 14-15 August 1947.
• The two-nation theory, which was a theory that stated that the Muslims and
Hindus are two distinct nations based on their different religions over any
other common factors between the two, was a founding principle of the
partition of India in 1947.

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 Background of Partition of 1947
• The seeds of Partition were sown long ago.
• As early as 1940s, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim
antagonism would remain “a bulwark of British rule in India”.
• The British-supervised elections in 1937 and 1946, which the Congress
won easily, only hardened Muslim identity.
• In the 1946 elections, the Congress Party leaders refused to share power
with Jinnah, confident that they did not need Muslim support in order to
win a majority vote in elections.
• These attitudes stoked Muslim fears that the secular nationalism of Gandhi
and Nehru was a cover for Hindu dominance.
• The Congress party claimed that it represented 400 million people.
• Jinnah in particular saw the Congress as a party representing upper caste
Hindus and demanded a separate homeland for the Muslims

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 Background of Partition of 1947

• 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 Lahore Resolution called for the
creation of “separate states” – plural, not singular – to accommodate Indian
Muslims, whom it argued were a separate “nation”.
• At first, Nehru and a few other Congress Party leaders dismissed the idea
of Pakistan as a joke.

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 Background of Partition of 1947
•Jinnah ordered mass strikes across India, which
transformed into Hindu-Muslim riots.
•In August, 1946, four thousand residents of Calcutta
died within 3 days.
•It was frenzied violence which spun out of control.
•Retaliatory killings around the country followed
especially in Punjab and Bengal.

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 Background of Partition of 1947
• Gandhi failed with his non-violence approach even with the
Congress Party.
• Many of the Congress leaders spoke openly of civil war.
• By 1946, Jinnah had managed to present himself as the best
defender of Muslim interests in a Hindu-dominated India.
• Also in the aftermath of WW II, the British belatedly realized
that they had to leave the subcontinent, which had begun to get
out of their control through the 1940s.
• Britain deep in wartime debt, simply could not afford to hold
on to India and its other colonies.

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 World War II and Atlee’s Win of England’s
General Election
• British empire was one of the lead participants in World War
II.
• They included most of their colonial ruled territories in this
war which led to loss of many lives and also created a large
number of financial crisis.
• All these made British empire incompetent of holding back
such a gigantic territory in their control.
• Eventually they started transferring power of control over the
local leaders.
• Sir Winston Churchill’s defeat and Clement Attlee’s win
signalled a change in colonial policy and the promise of an
early achievement of ‘full self-government’ for India, thus
working as catalyst for the partition of India and Pakistan.
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 Cabinet Mission

• A Cabinet Mission was dispatched to India in early 1946, and

Attlee described its mission in ambitious terms:
• My colleagues are going to India with the intention of using
their utmost endeavours to help her to attain her freedom as
speedily and fully as possible. What form of government is to
replace the present regime is for India to decide; but our desire
is to help her to set up forthwith the machinery for making that
decision.
• An Act of parliament proposed June 1948 as the deadline for
the transfer of power.

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 Lord Louis Mountbatten
• It was under these circumstances that a new viceroy Lord
Mountbatten arrived in Feb 1947 with a clear mandate to
transfer power to the Indians in 15 months.
• He had to figure out how to transfer power and to whom
• He did not have the time to understand the prevailing Indian
politics.
• He started working his way with the key politicians and
suggested the Partition.
• Starting with Nehru other congress leaders like Patel accepted
the idea of Pakistan.
• Finally, even Gandhi has to relent despite his resistance to the
idea of Pakistan.

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 • On June 3, Mountbatten announced that independence
would be brought forward to August that year
• No reasons to advance the date was provided
• British saw partition along religious lines as the quickest
way to exit
• They were eager to divide and quit and the Indian politicians
were too eager to enjoy power
• Had the congress leaders not agreed to Partition, there
would have a civil war (with violence in Punjab and Bengal
escalating) and there would have been more ethnic strife
• British were content to be just silent spectators.

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 India-Pakistan 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.
• The new borders, which split the key provinces of the
Punjab and Bengal in two, were officially approved on
August 17.
• They had been drawn up by a Boundary Commission, led
by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe

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 Radcliffe Line
• The Radcliffe Line is the boundary separation line between
the Indian and Pakistani portions of the Punjab and Bengal
provinces of British India.
• It was named after, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, its architect, who
was the joint chairman of the two boundary commissions
for the two provinces.
• Sir Cyril Radcliffe got the responsibility to equitably
divide 175,000 square miles (450,000 km2) of territory
with 88 million people.

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 Radcliffe Line

• He lacked basic knowledge of India and was given only

five weeks to redraw all the borders of South Asia.
• He drew the line randomly, without visiting or properly
observing the lands of India which resulted in a problem of
eternity between the people of the borders and the two
states.
• He later admitted that he had relied on out-of-date maps
and census materials.
• The two nations are still fighting over their lands because
of Radcliffe’s unequal drawing.

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

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 Consequences of Partition

• Women were often targeted as symbols of community

honour, with up to 100,000 raped or abducted.
• Britain was reluctant to use its troops to maintain law and
order.

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 Aftermath of Partition

• Both states subsequently faced huge problems

accommodating and rehabilitating post-Partition refugees,
whose numbers swelled when the two states went to
war over the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir in
1947-8.
• Later bouts of communal tension generated further
movement, with a trickle of people still migrating as late as
the 1960s.

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 Conclusion

• With the partition of 1947, the 190 years of British rule over the Indian
sub-continent came to an end.
• This partition gave birth to two individual sovereign and independent
states India and Pakistan.
• The two nation theory was basically on dividing the gigantic territory
based on religion but not by culture and language.
• Some key people like the then leaders, academicians and people from
government’s executive branch worked behind it.
• World War II and England’s general election also played vital role
behind this partition.
• The Partition of the Indian subcontinent was accompanied by one of
the largest mass migrations in human history and violence on a scale
that had seldom been seen before

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 Conclusion

• Today, the two countries’ relationship is far from healthy. 

• Kashmir remains a flashpoint; both countries are nuclear-armed.
• Indian Muslims are frequently suspected of harbouring loyalties
towards Pakistan
• Non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan are increasingly vulnerable to the
so-called Islamization of life there since the 1980s.
• Seven decades on, well over a billion people still live in the shadow of
Partition.

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