Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Partition of India and Pakistan

Starting point is 00:00:00 In 1947, India and Pakistan became independent countries after almost 200 years of British colonial rule. However, it wasn't just a case of a former colony becoming independent. It was a single colony which was partitioned into two separate countries. That partition had wide-ranging implications, many of which are still being felt today. Learn more about the partition of India and Pakistan, the reasons for it, and its legacy on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

Starting point is 00:00:53 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. Modern India and Pakistan are actually rather recent creations. Historically speaking, there never was such a division. To understand the partition of India and Pakistan, we have to go way back in time. India was used to describe the greater region of South Asia, which is today occupied by multiple countries. One of the great early ancient civilizations was the Indus Valley culture.

Starting point is 00:01:27 This was considered to be an early progenitor of Indian civilization, but it is in today what is now Pakistan. When Alexander the Great invaded India in the 4th century BC, most of the land he conquered was actually in modern-day Pakistan as well. He really didn't get much further than the Indus River. Hinduism arose in India and became a religion with multiple kingdoms and empires that rose and fell over time. Sometimes there would be large empires that ruled most of the subcontinent and other times it broke into smaller kingdoms. The origins of partition can be traced back to the rise of Islam in the 7th century.

Starting point is 00:02:00 Arab traders brought their religion with them by sea and the Islamic Caliphate conquered lands in Central Asia and Persia by land. Hindus in many areas converted to Islam and Islam spread throughout the world. the subcontinent. However, it wasn't even growth. Most areas in greater India remained Hindu, but some areas became staunchly Muslim, particularly in the west around the Indus River and in the east in the region known as Bengal. This remained the case even after centuries of rule by the Muslim Mughal Empire. However, and this needs to be stressed, Hindus and Muslims could be found almost everywhere across India, regardless of whether their community had a majority of one religion or the other. Also, for the most part, these people were ethnically the same.

Starting point is 00:02:42 Muslims and Hindus in a city would probably have spoken the same language and had the same ancestors. When the British arrived in the 18th century, this was roughly the situation that they inherited. British rule grew and deepened throughout the 19th century, and there was one thing that united both Hindus and Muslims, a desire to remove the British. In 1885, the Indian National Congress was established, also known as the Congress Party, which was a broad-based Indian movement to try to achieve independence. The group largely advocated Hindu-Muslim unity and included people that were later involved in partition. Most importantly, Mohamed Ali Jinnah. The initial fracture in this United Front occurred in 1905 when the British decided to partition Bengal into two halves, with a Muslim majority in the east and a Hindu majority

Starting point is 00:03:29 in the West. The partition of Bengal, even though it only lasted for a few years, animated both Hindu and Muslim interest groups. One of the groups which sprang out of the partition of Bengal was the All-India Muslim League, usually just known as the Muslim League. The All-India Muslim League was originally founded as an organization to advance the interest of Indian Muslims in British India. The organization initially did not work at odds with the Congress Party. As the independence movement began to pick up steam in the 1930s, there was also an uptick in what was known as the two nations theory. This held that Hindus and Muslims, despite living near each other, were functionally two separate nations, and that India, as it was at the time, wasn't an actual

Starting point is 00:04:10 nation. This was a minority view, but some Muslims and some Hindu nationalists, such as Vinayak Damodar Savakar, Savakar, exposed it. However, there were both Hindus and Muslims who were against the two-nation theory as well, and this included one of the Muslim leaders at the time, Khan Abdul Ghaar Khan, who was called the Frontier Gandhi. Prior to and during the Second World War, independence started to appear achievable, and what was once a dream was now becoming more of a reality. In 1935, for example, the British devolved more power to local provinces. In 1939, at the start of World War II, the British Viceroy of India declared war on Germany without consulting any Indian leaders. The Hindu members of the Congress Party resigned in protest,

Starting point is 00:04:53 but the Muslim League supported the British. As such, the British rulers began to view the Muslim League on a par with the Congress Party. As independents became more real, the idea of turning the British colony of India into two separate countries, one Hindu and one Muslim, gained in popularity, especially amongst the Indian Muslim elites. In particular, in 1940, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, came out in favor of a separate country dubbed Pakistan. That year, the Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution. The Lahore Resolution explicitly called for the creation of a Muslim majority nation separate from India. The resolution said, quote, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated regions which should be constituted

Starting point is 00:05:36 with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the northwest and eastern zones of British India should be grouped constituent independent states in which the constituent units should be autonomous and sovereign." End quote. The name Pakistan was first used in 1933 by Chowardy Ramat Ali, one of the founders of the Pakistan movement. The name originally had a double meaning. In both Urdu and Persian, it means land of the Pax. Pax means pure and Stan means land. However, Romet Ali also intended for Pakistan to be an acronym. He said, quote, it is composed of the letters taken from the names of all of our homelands,

Starting point is 00:06:18 Indian and Asian, Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sind, and Balukistan. End quote. The tipping point for independence occurred in 1945, immediately after the conclusion of the war in Europe. Winston Churchill and the Conservative Party lost the election in the UK, and the Labor Party took control. The new labor government, under Prime Minister Clement Attlee, supported Indian independence and put it on the fast track. The question now wasn't if India would become independent, or even necessarily when, but rather on what terms. Congress wanted a United India, but the Muslim League wanted the creation of Pakistan. Muslims constituted approximately 25% of the population of India prior to India. independence. Muslims had been given special rights and protections under the British and feared that

Starting point is 00:07:06 they would lose their status after independence. Moreover, the Muslim League used the time during the war to bolster support for the creation of Pakistan, which made the idea popular and palatable. In 1946, the specter of civil war rose between Hindus and Muslims. Violence broke out in cities around India in spates of anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu violence. In August of 1946, for example, the Great Calcutta killing killed some 4,000 people and left 100,000 people homeless. And this was far from the only example of sectarian violence. In February 1947, the British appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten to be the last British viceroy of India and gave him a directive to develop a plan for independence by June

Starting point is 00:07:48 1948. On June 3rd, 1947, Mountbatten announced a plan for the partition of India into two countries, India and Pakistan. Pakistan would be a country with two geographically separated areas, East Pakistan and West Pakistan. The entire process was to be completed not within a year, but within two months, with the date for the handover and independence to be on August 15th. The Congress Party accepted this reluctantly, and Gandhi didn't agree with it at all. Creating a border between the two countries proved challenging.

Starting point is 00:08:23 Some of the provinces like Balukistan and the Far West were over 90% Muslim. However, other provinces like Punjab and Bengal were divided. This resulted in the partition of these provinces along predominantly religious lines. The line dividing Punjab and Bengal was called the Radcliffe line, which was drawn by a British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe. However, he later admitted that the line was created with outdated maps and census data, and it was the cause of a lot of problems. The official handover ceremony was conducted in Karachi, just before midnight on August 14th, and in Delhi just before midnight on August 15th. The official handover wasn't the end of partition. Everyone had assumed that once the lines were drawn,

Starting point is 00:09:03 people who were in minority religious groups would just continue to live where they were. However, that didn't happen. The next few months after Independence saw the greatest single migration of human beings over such a short span of time. Millions of people moved from one country to the other depending upon their religion. Riots broke out throughout India and Pakistan, with religious minorities being attacked in both countries. The impact of partition in terms of human lives is still debated,

Starting point is 00:09:30 but the estimates are that between 200,000 and 2 million people may have died during this period. Refugee camps that were set up often suffered from outbreaks of disease that killed those looking for sanctuary. The British, for the most part, did absolutely nothing to prevent or stop any of the violence. As once the handover took place and both countries became independent, the British felt that they had no ability to take military action anymore. The massive migration in people also upset many of the original assumptions made by those who advocated partition. They assumed the presence of a Hindu minority in Pakistan would protect the Muslim minority in India and vice versa. While most of the migration occurred in 1947 and 1948, there were still people moving between the countries as the result of partition as late as 1960.

Starting point is 00:10:17 The humanitarian crisis that developed was not the end of the story either. One of the unresolved land issues had to do with the princely states which existed in India. Each state was able to pick which country to join or whether to become independent. The largest princely state was Jammu and Kashmir, which had a Hindu ruler and a majority Muslim population. The ruler of Jammu and Kazmir initially wanted to become independent, as joining India would anger his Muslim subjects, and joining Pakistan would anger his Hindu and Sikh subjects. Both India and Pakistan wanted Jammu and Kashmir, and the region became caused. up in the same sectarian violence that had engulfed the two countries.

Starting point is 00:10:55 Pakistan began sending in military units from tribal provinces to protect the Muslims in the region. The Maharaja then requested aid from India, who refused to send help until he agreed to join India, which he did on October 26th. The agreement to join India was conditional on a referendum which would take place once the region had been pacified. The end result was a war between the two newly independent countries and former countrymen, which lasted from October 1947 and, and the end result. until early January 1949,

Starting point is 00:11:23 until a ceasefire was agreed to. The issue of Jamil and Kashmir has never really been resolved. Indian Pakistan fought another war in 1965 over the same region. Today, the region that was the princely state of Jamo and Kashmir is divided between Pakistan, India, and China, and everything is still disputed. Pakistan itself became separated in 1971 when East Pakistan broke away to form the nation of Bangladesh.

Starting point is 00:11:48 This resulted in a very brief third Indo-Pakistani war, But the story of Bangladesh is the story for another episode. The trauma of the partition of India and Pakistan can still be felt today. For almost 80 years, a cold tension has existed between the two countries. There are occasional small border flare-ups that occur from time to time, but for the most part, both countries have learned to accept the status quo, even if it's one that both sides are not totally pleased with. The partition of India and Pakistan was one of the most significant events to have occurred in the 20th century,

Starting point is 00:12:18 outside of perhaps the world wars. It was the event that shaped two of the world's largest countries, and its repercussions can still be felt today. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Peter Bennett and Cameron Kiefer. I wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who supports the show on Patreon. Your support helps me put out a new show every day. And if you're interested in Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise, Patreon is currently the only place where it's available. And if you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and get notified a future episode,

Starting point is 00:12:52 and projects, please join my Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Partition of India and Pakistan

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