Independence and partition (1947)

By 1945 British rule was untenable. Britain was bankrupted by WWII and the new Labour government recognized that India could not be held against the will of its people. The question was no longer whether to grant independence but how.

The fundamental difficulty was Hindu–Muslim relations. The Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah demanded a separate Muslim state called Pakistan, arguing Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations. The Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru insisted on a single united India. Gandhi opposed partition but could not prevent it.

Partition. British official Cyril Radcliffe drew partition borders dividing British India into India (Hindu majority) and Pakistan (Muslim majority). Pakistan was created in two parts (West Pakistan and East Pakistan, the latter becoming Bangladesh in 1971), separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory.

Partition produced one of the largest mass migrations in history. About 12–15 million people moved across the new borders; Hindus and Sikhs fled to India, Muslims to Pakistan. Estimates of deaths range from 200,000 to 2 million. Trains arrived at stations full of corpses. Women on both sides were subjected to mass rape and abduction.

Kashmir. The princely state of Kashmir, with a Muslim majority but a Hindu Maharaja, was a particularly contentious case. The Maharaja chose India; Pakistan disputed it. India and Pakistan fought wars over Kashmir in 1947–48, 1965, and 1999. Both became nuclear powers in 1998.