70 YEARS AFTER
Seven decades ago, at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, India and Pakistan gained independence, but at a terrible price. The breaking up of British India into two independent nations – Hindu majority India and mainly Muslim Pakistan – provoked one of the most terrible catastrophes of a turbulent century.
About a million people – no one knows the number for sure – were slaughtered as Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other embarked on a swathe of violence. Twelve million people became refugees, many traipsing across the new international borders in seeming endless columns. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. A radical Labour government was elected in Britain at the close of the Second World War, determined to grant independence to our biggest colony, India. The dashing Lord Louis Mountbatten – uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh and distant relative of the Queen – was given the role of the last Viceroy of India. His task: To organise an orderly British exit and a seamless transfer of power.
Mountbatten was a naval officer who had served as the Supreme Allied Commander, South East Asia. As befits a military man, he wanted the job done quickly. And India paid the price.
India’s main political leaders – Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah – couldn’t agree on what should follow British imperial rule. Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, argued that British India’s Muslim minority – about a quarter of the total population – were a nation in their own right. Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, reluctantly agreed to the dividing of the country.
That meant dissecting two of India’s biggest provinces, Punjab and Bengal. A task that should have taken months, perhaps years, was completed in five weeks by a British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India before. And never went back.
He had to carve up India based on unreliable census returns and out-ofdate maps. The news of where the new boundary would run was announced on August 17, just two days after independence.
Clashes between different religious communities intensified in the run-up to independence. It wasn’t simply spontaneous mob violence. Local politicians and gang leaders were involved, and, in the aftermath of a world war in which millions of Indians fought, there were a lot of men around with military training and army-issue weapons.
The violence spiralled out of control. Trainloads of refugees were massacred. Tens of thousand of women were abducted and raped, and then either killed or married off. Each mass slaughter prompted demands for revenge and neither the politicians nor the police were able to stop the frenzy.
The steps taken to enforce law and order and deal with large numbers of
refugees proved to be utterly inadequate. It was an inglorious end to imperial rule in India.
In Punjab in particular, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had lived together peaceably for generations.
No one expected a forced mass migration. But by the close of 1947, almost all Hindus and Sikhs in west Punjab had fled east, often encountering long processions of Muslim refugees heading in the opposite direction.
It was one of the biggest population movements of the modern world and a grim start to nationhood.
But within weeks, events took a turn for the worse. Britain had pulled out of the “jewel in the crown” of its empire