The Partition of India

AUG 15 1947 · 12:00

A refugee train crosses the new Indo-Pakistani frontier in the Punjab, autumn 1947. Some fifteen million people were displaced by Partition. Place: Karachi (Pakistan, 14 August) and New Delhi (India, 15 August) Figures: Louis Mountbatten, last Viceroy · Jawaharlal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India · Muhammad Ali Jinnah, first Governor-General of Pakistan · Cyril Radcliffe, the British barrister who drew the line in five weeks having never visited India · Mohandas Gandhi, absent from the Delhi celebrations The Radcliffe Line The Indian Independence Act receives royal assent on 18 July 1947 and sets the transfer of power for the night of 14–15 August. Cyril Radcliffe arrives in India on 8 July with no prior knowledge of the subcontinent, is given five weeks and a small staff to partition Punjab and Bengal, and submits his award on 12 August. Mountbatten withholds the line's publication until 17 August (two days after independence), so that the new sovereigns inherit the violence rather than the empire. Radcliffe burns his papers before leaving and never returns. He later refuses payment for the work. The line cuts through Lahore, Amritsar, Calcutta, and across the canal systems of Punjab. Roughly 14 million people are displaced in the months that follow, the largest sudden migration in recorded history. Communal massacres on trains, in villages, in city quarters, kill between one and two million. The Kashmir question (a Hindu maharaja, a Muslim majority, a contested instrument of accession dated 26 October 1947) erupts into the first India-Pakistan war within ten weeks of independence and remains unresolved in the present. The Largest Single Addition Since Versailles Two sovereign states, with a combined 1947 population of roughly 390 million, enter the international system in 36 hours. It is the largest single addition to the Westphalian state roster since the post-Versailles settlement and the largest by population in the system's history. Both states join the UN within a year (India on 30 October 1945 as a founding member, Pakistan on 30 September 1947). Both inherit the colonial state apparatus (civil service, army, railway, treasury) and divide it under Mountbatten's arbitration. The Indian decolonization template (negotiated transfer to a successor government within the inherited administrative frontier) is the one most of Africa and Asia will follow over the next thirty years. The opposing template, partition along communal lines drawn by the departing power, will recur in Palestine within a year (see UN Resolution 181, 29 November 1947), in Ireland a generation earlier, and in Korea and Vietnam within the decade. The Westphalian state system absorbs both versions and treats the resulting frontiers as inviolable thereafter; Kashmir is the durable counter-example. Video: Mountbatten's transfer of power and the partition of British India into the new dominions of India and Pakistan, August 1947. Some fifteen million people would be displaced.