Independence of Pakistan
On 14 August 1947 (27th of Ramadan in 1366 of the Islamic Calendar)
Pakistan gained independence. India gained independence
the following day. Two of the provinces of British India, Punjab
and Bengal, were divided along religious lines by the Radcliffe
Commission. Lord Mountbatten is alleged to have influenced
the Radcliffe Commission to draw the lines in India's favour. Punjab's
mostly Muslim western part went to Pakistan and its mostly Sikh eastern part went to India, but there were significant
Muslim minorities in Punjab's eastern section and light Hindus
and Sikhs minorities living in Punjab's western areas.
There was no conception that population transfers would be
necessary because of the partitioning. Religious minorities
were expected to stay put in the states they found themselves
residing in. However, an exception was made for Punjab which
did not apply to other provinces. Intense communal rioting in
the Punjab forced the governments of India and Pakistan to
agree to a forced population exchange of Muslim and Hindu/Sikh
minorities living in Punjab. After this population exchange only a f
ew thousand low-caste Hindus remained in Pakistani Punjab and only a tiny Muslim population remained in the town of
Malerkotla in India's part of Punjab.Political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed says that although Muslims started the violence in Punjab, by the end of 1947 more Muslims had been killed by Hindus and Sikhs in East Punjab than the number of Hindus and Sikhs who had been killed by Muslims in West Punjab. Nehru wrote to Gandhi on 22 August that up to then, twice as many Muslims had been killed in East Punjab than Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab.
More than ten million people migrated across the
new borders and between 200,000–2,000,000 people
died in the spate of communal violence in the Punjab
in what some scholars have described as a 'retributive
genocide' between the religions.The Pakistani government
claimed that 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped
by Hindu and Sikh men and similarly the Indian government
claimed that Muslims abducted and raped 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women. The two governments agreed to repatriate abducted women and thousands of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim women were repatriated to their families in the 1950s.
The dispute over Kashmir escalated into the first war between
India and Pakistan. With the assistance of the United Nations
(UN) the war was ended but it became the Kashmir dispute,
unresolved as of 2018.
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