Vande Mataram
70 years ago, Partition came
into effect, dividing British India into two new, independent countries: India
and Pakistan.
At midnight on August 14 1947,
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, gave a famous
speech which hailed the country's decades-long, non-violent campaign against
British rule:
At the stroke of the midnight
hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment
comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the
new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds
utterance
How did Indian and Pakistani independence come about?
The Indian independence
movement began in 1857. The early proponents led militant uprisings against
British rule, but the leaders of the Indian National Congress, which was
founded in 1885, pushed for more rights for Indians in terms of the vast civil
service and land ownership.
From the 1920s onwards, Mahatma
Gandhi was established as the leader of the Indian independence movement. His
belief in civil rights and non-violent struggle inspired a generation. Many
inspirational activists came to the fore, such as B. R. Ambedkar, who
championed greater rights for the lower castes, that had been treated
despicably under British colonial rule.
In 1942, Congress launched the
"Quit India" movement. Britain, leading the fight against Nazism in
the Second World War alongside 2.5 million Indian troops, promised to grant
India independence after the war. Following the Battle of Britain, Gandhi said he
would not push for India's self-rule out of the ashes of a destroyed Britain.
However, by the end of the war
and with its empire weakened, Britain was unable to resist the overwhelming
demand for independence. Both Congress and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad
Ali Jinnah, dominated elections. Further, Clement Attlee, by now Britain's
prime minister, was a supporter of independence.
In a climate of growing
communal tensions and pressure from Jinnah, who argued that Muslims should have
their own state, the Mountbatten Plan was hastily conceived. It divided British
India along broad religious lines. The problem being that there were millions
of Muslims living in what would become Hindu-majority India and huge numbers of
Hindus and Sikhs living in what would be Muslim-majority Pakistan
Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who led
the Boundary Commission, proposed the Radcliffe Line, which was a
"notional division" of the vast country based on simple district
majorities. He submitted his plan for both the west and east borders on August
9 1947 - just five days before it came into force.
The two countries celebrate on
different days because Lord Mountbatten, the viceroy of British India, had to
attend the Pakistan celebration on August 14th and then travel to Delhi for
India's first independence day on August 15.
