-Aman Baldia
The partition of India in 1947 remains one of the bloodiest and the most violent chapter of Indian history where communalism and the British policy of ‘divide and rule’ led India being broken down into a Hindu majority India and a Muslim majority Pakistan (Bangladesh was a part of the same). The same has led to more than 70 years of the two neighbours fighting multiple wars over the state of Kashmir and the freedom of East Pakistan. This ‘massacre’ as it should be rightly called had led to deaths of 2 million lives, rape of hundred thousand of women and millions of citizens being left homeless and dying in the refugee camps. The roots of the same can be found from the time when the agenda of making India an independent state came into existence. Under the British rule, Muslims made the largest minority group with around 25% population in a Hindu majority country. Under imperial rule, Muslims had grown accustomed to having their minority status protected by a system of reserved legislative seats and separate electorates adopted by the then British establishment. The British system of political control depended on identifying various interest groups willing to collaborate, a governing style often described as “divide and rule”. The possibility of losing this assurance as freedom moved nearer stressed an ever increasing number of Muslims, first in parts of northern India, and afterwards, after World War II, in the persuasive Muslim-lion’s share areas of Bengal and Punjab. In 1945-6, the All-India Muslim League driven by Muhammad Ali Jinnah won a lion’s share of Muslim votes in commonplace decisions. This fortified the gathering’s case to represent a considerable extent of, however never all, the subcontinent’s Muslims. At that point came World War II – and all of a sudden, the political stakes in India were impressively higher. Without India’s consultation, British took India to war, leading to widespread criticism across the country. This allowed the Indian National Congress to start the Quit India movement in the year 1942.
With the culmination of the World War II, Attlee’s Labor government in London perceived that Britain’s crushed economy couldn’t adapt to the cost of the over-expanded realm. A Cabinet Mission was dispatched to India in mid-1946. With independence imminent, there was an all-time increase in the communal riots with the Jinnah led All-India Muslim League initially asking in its resolution ‘Pakistan’ different states dedicated to Muslims. However, after failing to reach to a middle ground in the same regards with the British contingent who came to India to discuss the terms of independence which was claimed to be as per India’s wishes, the Muslim league stated that a separate state of Pakistan is non-negotiable. In August 1946, the Great Calcutta Killing left somewhere in the range of 4,000 individuals dead and a further 100,000 destitute. By March 1947, another emissary, Lord Louis Mountbatten, landed in Delhi with a command to locate an expedient method for conveying the British Raj to an end. On June 3, he reported that autonomy would be presented in August that year, giving government officials a final offer that gave them the minimal option, however, to consent to the making of two separate states. Pakistan – its eastern and western wings isolated by around 1,700 kilometres of Indian region – praised freedom on August 14 that year; India did as such the next day. The new fringes, which split the key areas of the Punjab and Bengal in two, were formally endorsed on August 17. They had been drawn up by a Boundary Commission, drove by British legal counsellor Cyril Radcliffe, who later conceded that he had depended on obsolete maps and evaluation materials. There were disputes regarding the Radcliffe Line’s award of the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the Gurdaspur district. Disputes also evolved around the districts of Malda, Khulna, and Murshidabad in Bengal and the sub-division of Karimganj of Assam.
In addition to Gurdaspur’s Muslim majority tehsils, Radcliffe also gave the Muslim majority tehsils of Ajnala (Amritsar District), Zira, Ferozpur (in Ferozpur District), Nakodar and Jullander (in Jullander District) to India instead of Pakistan. Partition activated mobs, mass setbacks, and a gigantic rush of relocation. A huge number of individuals moved to what they trusted would be a more secure area, with Muslims heading towards Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs toward India. Upwards of 14-16m individuals may have been inevitably dislodged, going by walking, in Bullock trucks, and via prepare.
Estimates of the loss of life post-Partition go from 200,000 to two million. Many were killed by individuals from different groups and additionally by the infectious sicknesses which cleared through displaced person camps. Ladies were frequently focused as images of group respect, with up to 100,000 assaulted or kidnapped. What can clarify this strongly rough response? A significant number of the general population concerned were profoundly connected not simply to religious character, but rather to an area, and Britain was hesitant to utilize its troops to keep up peace. The circumstance was particularly hazardous in Punjab, where weapons and deactivated fighters were bottomless. Another unforeseen consequence of Partition was that Pakistan’s population ended up more religiously homogeneous than originally anticipated. The Muslim League’s leaders had assumed that Pakistan would contain a sizeable non-Muslim population, whose presence would safeguard the position of Muslims remaining in India – but in West Pakistan, non-Muslim minorities comprised only 1.6% of the population by 1951, compared with 22% in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). And even though Pakistan was ostensibly created as a “homeland” for India’s Muslim minority, not all Muslims even supported its formation, never mind migrated there: Muslims remained the largest minority group in independent India, making up around 10% of the population in 1951. Indeed, even after the 1951 Census numerous Muslim families from India kept relocating to Pakistan all through the 1950s and the mid-1960s. As per history specialist Omar Khalidi, the Indian Muslim movement to West Pakistan between December 1947 and December 1971 was from U.P., Delhi, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The following phase of relocation, which kept going in the vicinity of 1973 and the 1990s, was the point at which the movement of Indian Muslims to Pakistan was decreased to its most reduced levels since 1947. The essential goal for these transients was Karachi and other urban focuses on Sindh. Because of religious mistreatment in Pakistan, Hindus keep on fleeing to India. The majority of them tend to settle in the territory of Rajasthan in India. As indicated by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan information, just around 1,000 Hindu families fled to India in 2013. In May 2014, an individual from the decision Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani, uncovered in the National Assembly of Pakistan that around 5,000 Hindus are relocating from Pakistan to India consistently. Since India isn’t a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention it declines to perceive Pakistani Hindu vagrants as evacuees. Gandhi himself was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist extremist who blamed him for being too supportive of Muslims at the time of Partition. Both states subsequently faced huge problems accommodating and rehabilitating post-Partition refugees, whose numbers swelled when the two states went to war over the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947-8.
At the time of partition, the lesser known fact remains that the Muslim ruler of the 80% Hindu majority state of Junagadh, Nawab Mahabat Khan had agreed to make Junagadh a part of Pakistan. However, India disagreed the same as there were other states between Junagadh and Pakistan and claimed that its Hindu population wants to be a part of India. The Pakistani perspective was that since Junagadh had a ruler and representing body who chose Pakistan, it ought to be permitted to do as such. Additionally, in light of the fact that Junagadh had a coastline, it could have kept up sea joins with Pakistan even as an enclave inside India. Neither of the states could resolve this issue genially and it just added fuel to an officially charged condition. Sardar Patel, India’s Home Minister, felt that if Junagadh was allowed to go to Pakistan, it would make mutual turmoil crosswise over Gujarat. The legislature of India gave Pakistan time to void the increase and hold a plebiscite in Junagadh to pre-empt any savagery in Gujarat.
Later bouts of communal tension generated further movement, with a trickle of people still migrating as late as the 1960s. Today, the two countries’ relationship is far from healthy. Kashmir remains a flashpoint; both countries are nuclear-armed. Indian Muslims are frequently suspected of harbouring loyalties towards Pakistan; non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan are increasingly vulnerable thanks to the so-called Islamisation of life there since the 1980s. Seven decades on, well over a billion people still live in the shadow of Partition. Families separated never met again, houses burnt that was never rebuilt, a line was drawn that would never get erased. The idea of partition did not turn out in the way any of the parties involved thought.