What was partition in india

But from midnight today, India will be partitioned too. While, therefore, tomorrow will be a day of rejoicing, it will be a day of sorrow as well. It will throw a heavy burden of responsibility upon us. Let us pray to God that He may give us strength to bear it. He reiterated that the pain of partition can never be forgotten.

In , when India became free from the clutches of years of British rule, it was a time both for rejoicing and sorrow. We had got our independence but had to pay a very heavy price for it. The country had been partitioned into two - India and Pakistan.

The horrors of Partition in witnessed the biggest blood-stained human exodus the world had ever seen. At the stroke of midnight on August 15, , India became a free nation but the country was not to remain the same anymore.

What should have been a moment of crowning triumph after years of anti-colonial struggle was indelibly marred by unimaginable violence and bloodshed. Up to two million people lost their lives in the most horrific of manners.

The darkened landscape bore silent witness to trains laden with the dead, decapitated bodies, limbs strewn along the sides of roads, and wanton rape and pillaging. There was nothing that could have prepared the approximately 14 million refugees for this nightmare. The Partition of the Indian subcontinent into the independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan was accompanied by one of the largest mass migrations in human history and violence on a scale that had seldom been seen before.

As the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal were effectively split in half approximately seven million Hindus and Sikhs and seven million Muslims found themselves in the wrong country. Believing they would return "home," many families left their valuables behind before they packed up their essential belongings and began the trek to India or West or East Pakistan now Bangladesh. Many never made it. In August , the Great Calcutta Killing left some 4, people dead and a further , homeless.

By March , a new viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, arrived in Delhi with a mandate to find a speedy way of bringing the British Raj to an end. On June 3, he announced that independence would be brought forward to August that year, presenting politicians with an ultimatum that gave them little alternative but to agree to the creation of two separate states. Pakistan — its eastern and western wings separated by around 1, kilometres of Indian territory — celebrated independence on August 14 that year; India did so the following day.

The new borders, which split the key provinces of the Punjab and Bengal in two, were officially approved on August They had been drawn up by a Boundary Commission, led by British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe , who later admitted that he had relied on out-of-date maps and census materials. Partition triggered riots, mass casualties, and a colossal wave of migration. Millions of people moved to what they hoped would be safer territory, with Muslims heading towards Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs in the direction of India.

As many as m people may have been eventually displaced, travelling on foot, in bullock carts and by train. Estimates of the death toll post-Partition range from , to two million. Many were killed by members of other communities and sometimes their own families, as well as by the contagious diseases which swept through refugee camps. Women were often targeted as symbols of community honour, with up to , raped or abducted.

What can explain this intensely violent reaction? Many of the people concerned were very deeply attached not just to religious identity, but to territory, and Britain was reluctant to use its troops to maintain law and order.