Pakistan Born: Partition Tears the Subcontinent

Pakistan came into existence at midnight on August 14, 1947, carved from the Muslim-majority regions of British India in a partition that unleashed one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in recorded history. Between 10 and 20 million people crossed the new borders in both directions, and somewhere between 200,000 and two million were killed in communal violence that the departing British authorities had failed to anticipate or prevent. The demand for a separate Muslim state had crystallized in 1940, when the All-India Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution calling for independent Muslim homelands. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the League's leader, argued that Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct nations that could not coexist within a single democratic state where Hindus would always be the majority. The Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, resisted partition until the final months, when escalating communal violence made a unified India appear increasingly untenable. The British government, exhausted by World War II and eager to shed imperial commitments, dispatched Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy with instructions to arrange the transfer of power. Mountbatten accelerated the timetable dramatically, moving independence from June 1948 to August 1947. The boundary lines were drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never visited India, working with outdated maps and census data in roughly five weeks. The borders were not published until two days after independence, leaving millions uncertain which country they were in. Pakistan was born as two geographically separated halves, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, divided by a thousand miles of Indian territory. This arrangement proved unworkable. East Pakistan seceded in 1971 after a brutal civil war, becoming Bangladesh. West Pakistan continued as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state whose relationship with India has been defined by four wars, a disputed border in Kashmir, and the unhealed wounds of partition.