During the 1930s, the nationalist movement in India was
severely shaken by factional disagreements between Hindus
and Muslims. The outbreak of World War II subdued
these sectarian clashes, but they erupted again after the
war ended in 1945. Battles between Hindus and Muslims
broke out in several cities, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah,
leader of the Muslim League, demanded the creation of
a separate state for each. Meanwhile, the Labour Party,
which had long been critical of the British colonial legacy
on both moral and economic grounds, had come to power
in Britain, and the new prime minister, Clement Attlee,
announced that power would be transferred to “responsible
Indian hands” by June 1948.
But the imminence of independence did not dampen
communal strife. As riots escalated, the British reluctantly
accepted the inevitability of partition and declared
that on August 15, 1947, two independent nations—
Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan—would be established.
Pakistan would be divided between the main area
of Muslim habitation in the Indus River valley in the
west and a separate territory in east Bengal 2,000 miles to
the east. Although Mahatma Gandhi warned that partition
would provoke “an orgy of blood,” 2 he was increasingly
regarded as a figure of the past, and his views were
ignored.
The British instructed the rulers in the princely states
to choose which state they would join by August 15, but
problems arose in predominantly Hindu Hyderabad,
where the nawab was a Muslim, and mountainous Kashmir,
where a Hindu prince ruled over a Muslim population.
After independence was declared, the flight of millions
of Hindus and Muslims across the borders led to
violence and the death of more than a million people.
One of the casualties was Gandhi, who was assassinated
on January 30, 1948, as he was going to morning prayer.
The assassin, a Hindu militant, was apparently motivated
by Gandhi’s opposition to a Hindu India.
World History
