Partition of India

The Partition of India was the splitting of British India into two new countries in 1947. The two new countries were India and Pakistan. India had a Hindu majority. Pakistan had a Muslim majority. The split happened on August 14 and 15, 1947, on the same days the two countries became independent from Britain. It led to one of the largest and fastest movements of people in human history.

For nearly 200 years, Britain had ruled India as a colony. By the 1940s, Indians wanted independence. But the country's leaders did not all agree on what should come next. The Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted one united country. The Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, wanted a separate country for Muslims. They feared that Muslims would be treated unfairly in a Hindu-majority nation.

In the summer of 1947, the British agreed to divide the land. A British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was given the job of drawing the new border. He had never been to India before. He was given only about five weeks to finish. The line he drew, called the Radcliffe Line, cut through the regions of Punjab and Bengal. It split villages, farms, and even families.

When the border was announced, panic spread. Hindus and Sikhs on the Pakistan side rushed toward India. Muslims on the India side rushed toward Pakistan. About 15 million people left their homes in just a few months. That is more than the population of New York City and Los Angeles combined. Trains crossing the new border were attacked. Whole villages were burned. Historians estimate that between 1 and 2 million people died in the violence.

Gandhi was heartbroken. He had spent his life preaching nonviolence and unity. While others celebrated independence, he fasted and walked through riot-torn neighborhoods, begging people to stop killing each other. A few months later, in January 1948, he was shot and killed by a Hindu man who was angry that Gandhi had defended Muslims.

The split was not finished in 1947. Pakistan was created in two pieces, called West Pakistan and East Pakistan, with India in the middle. The two halves were separated by more than 1,000 miles. In 1971, after a brutal war, East Pakistan broke away and became the country of Bangladesh.

Today, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are home to nearly 1.8 billion people. India and Pakistan still argue over the region of Kashmir, where the border was never fully settled. Many families have stories of grandparents who walked away from one home in 1947 and never saw it again.