Indian Independence and Partition
India and Pakistan became independent at midnight on 14 and 15 August 1947, and perhaps a million people died in the following months. The British decision to leave was made quickly. The war had exhausted the Treasury, the naval mutiny of 1946 raised the question of whether Indian forces would enforce British rule, and Attlee announced a deadline of June 1948; Mountbatten, arriving as the last viceroy, moved it forward by ten months. Partition followed from the failure to agree a constitutional formula. The Muslim League under Jinnah demanded a separate state, Congress under Nehru would not accept a federation weak enough to accommodate one, and the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946 collapsed. Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India, was given five weeks to draw the boundaries through Punjab and Bengal, using out-of-date maps and census returns. The lines were published two days after independence. What followed was the largest migration in human history: some 15 million people crossing in both directions, trains arriving with everyone aboard dead, villages destroyed, and mass abduction and rape of women on both sides. Gandhi spent the day of independence fasting in Calcutta rather than at the celebrations, and was murdered five months later. The princely states were absorbed by negotiation and, in Hyderabad's case, by invasion. Kashmir's ruler acceded to India in October during a Pakistani-backed incursion, and the two states have fought over it ever since. The line Radcliffe drew has never been redrawn. He burned his working papers, declined his fee, and told a friend that he would not be welcome in either country for the rest of his life.
- Year: 1947 CE
- Category: Independence
