India will celebrate the 75th Independence Day on Sunday, a day after neighbouring Pakistan celebrates the occasion. The independence day of Pakistan also marks the event that marked its separation from India as British rulers left the country. So how the partition of India took place after people from both Pakistan and India fought the common enemy, the colonial rule?
According to Professor of History, Royal Holloway University of London, Sarah Ansari, partition of India was the “last-minute” mechanism by which the British were able to seal an agreement over how independence would take place. Leading the nationalist movement, the Indian National Congress always demanded a united India that was run on the principles of equality and secularity. However, Ansari writes that organisations representing minority interests had qualms about this idea and viewed it with suspicion.
The minority groups of the country believed that a united India with a central government would establish the political dominance of the majority population which consisted of Hindus. The largest minority group in the country was Muslims, who were protected by a system of reserved legislative seats and separate electorates devised by the British, in accordance with their divide and rule policy.
The prospect of independence also instilled a sense of fear among the minority Muslim population, who were concerned about losing the protection given to them by the British. After All-India Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, won a majority of Muslim votes in provincial elections in 1945-6, it strengthened the party’s claim to voice the concern of most of the subcontinent’s Muslims.
As World War II ensued, the British were more concerned with protecting their homeland than maintaining their rule over the colonies. Leveraging the opportunity for their benefit, the Muslim League’s “Pakistan” resolution called for the creation of “separate states” in March 1940 to accommodate Indian Muslims, whom it argued were a separate nation, writes Ansari in her 2017 article.
After the Second World War ended, British government decided to free India from its rule. In March 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the new viceroy of the country arrived in Delhi and promised to speed up the process of independence which was to come in August that year.
The new borders of the country were drawn up by a Boundary Commission, led by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe. The commission split the key provinces of Punjab and Bengal in two, and Radcliffe had later confessed that he had relied on outdated maps and census materials.
Pakistan was created with an eastern and a western territory separated by 1,700 kilometres of Indian territory, and celebrated independence on August 14, 1947.
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