What India’s 1947 Partition Was and Was Not

Scheduled for February 12, the general election in Bangladesh, which until 1971 was the eastern wing of Pakistan, reminds us of the importance of understanding what the Indian subcontinent’s 1947 Partition was and what it was not. 

In many places, spreading falsehoods about the past is one weapon for gaining supremacy. This is certainly true for India. A big lie swallowed by too many innocent Indians is about the character and meaning of the Partition that accompanied independence in 1947. We are told that the subcontinent was divided on religious lines, “Pakistan for Muslims, India for Hindus”.

Once this erroneous reading is okayed, it becomes easy to silence India’s Muslims when they ask for elementary rights. They can be told, “We gave you Pakistan in 1947. If unhappy here, you can go there.” 

No, sir, that’s not what happened in 1947. No doubt India was divided that year: Muslim-majority areas separated from the rest and became Pakistan, Hindu-majority areas remained as India. But it wasn’t as if one country was created for Muslims and another for Hindus. While India’s leaders and people indeed consented to the separation of Muslim-majority areas, they did not agree that Muslims in Hindu-majority areas, or Hindus in Muslim-majority provinces, should leave their homes and look for shelter across a newly-created border. 

WHAT THE ACT LAID OUT 

The specifics of the Partition agreed upon by all principal parties in 1947 were spelled out in the Independence of India Act passed by the British Parliament on July 18 that year. Readily available online, this Act listed the areas that were to go to Pakistan, namely West Punjab, East Bengal, Sindh, the Frontier Province (today’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and Balochistan. 

The Act did not state or imply anywhere that undivided India’s Hindus and Muslims were being assigned to separate countries. The aim was to honor the wish of regions, not of religious communities. In fact the words “Hindu”, “Muslim” or “Sikh” are nowhere to be found in the Act. 

While accepting, in 1947, the separation of Muslim-majority areas, India’s leaders made it plain that they were rejecting the so-called Two-Nation Theory, which held that non-Muslims and Muslims could not live as equals in the same country. Their pledge of equal rights for India’s Muslims and other minorities was chiseled into the Constitution that was swiftly drawn up after independence-cum-partition. 

An identical pledge was made in Karachi on August 11, 1947, by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who from 1940 had led the campaign for the separation of Muslim-majority areas. Pakistan’s switch to an Islamic republic was a later development. Here is what Jinnah said in August 1947 to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly, of which he had become president: 

JINNAH’S WORDS OF AUG 1947 

“I cannot emphasize it too much... You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the business of the State...  We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens, and equal citizens, of one State... 

“Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.” 

Everyone knows that the opening months of independence saw horrific riots in several parts of both new states, above all in Pakistan’s West Punjab and in India’s East Punjab. In a historic two-way migration, West Punjab was emptied of its Sikhs and Hindus, and East Punjab of its Muslims, who crossed over into West Punjab (except for the Muslims of Malerkotla district, who possessed a unique history). In almost every other province of India, most Muslims stayed on where they were. Many Hindus similarly stayed on in their homes in Pakistan’s provinces of East Bengal and Sindh. 

We should recall that neither Partition nor the 1947 killings conferred a permanent inferior status on India’s Muslims. For a long time, in fact, India’s Muslims were honorably represented in the running of free India, including from high office. During the four decades that followed independence, i.e. between 1947 and 1987, two Muslims (Dr. Zakir Husain from UP and Assam’s Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed) served as president; two (Dr. Zakir Husain and Mohammad Hidayatullah) as vice-president; two as chief justice (Hidayatullah and Mirza Hameedullah Beg); and one (Air Marshal Idris Hasan Latif) as the chief of India’s air force.

PUSHED DOWNWARDS 

The glaring exclusion in recent years of Muslims from every place of influence, and the pushing of the entire Muslim community into an inferior status, has been achieved by an organized, sustained, and well-financed drive for Hindu supremacy, joined to a parallel drive to spread hatred against Muslims and other religious minorities. This anti-Muslim pressure is not what, left to itself, the Hindu community desires. It is also the opposite of what India’s Constitution continues to demand. 

*

Few BJP leaders in India are as uninhibited in public as Himanta Biswa Sarma, Assam’s 57-year-old chief minister. However, his state’s BJP unit felt compelled to delete a video that showed Sarma firing into a framed photograph of two individuals, the Congress Party’s Assam chief, Gaurav Gogoi, and an unnamed Muslim man. The wall on which the photo was hung for being shot at proclaimed the words “No mercy!” The video was captioned, “Point-blank shot”. These details were reported on February 8 by the online portal, ndtv.com. 

A Congress Party MP in the upper house of India’s parliament, K. C. Venugopal, described Sarma’s video as “nothing but a call to genocide -- a dream this fascist regime has harbored since decades.” “There must be consequences,” added Venugopal. He asked for “action by the judiciary”. 

Another political party, the Trinamool Congress, which governs West Bengal state, also called for action, saying that the deleted video had reduced Indian politics to “performative bloodlust, normalized hatred, and televised dehumanization of Muslims”. 

“This is the same man,” the Trinamool Congress pointed out, “who earlier urged people to harass minorities by underpaying rickshaw fares, training citizens in petty cruelty as political praxis. But now, the cruelty has gone macro. BJP isn’t hinting anymore. They are baying for blood, and daring institutions to stop them,” the party added.

“PAY THEM LESS” 

At the end of January, Chief Minister Sarma had indeed urged Assamese Hindus to make life difficult for “Miyas”, including by underpaying them. “Whoever can cause them trouble should do so. In a rickshaw, if the fare is five rupees, give them four.... If they have to run around a bit, so be it.”

Sarma has tried to explain that by “Miyas” he means Bangladeshi Muslims illegally living in Assam. The phrase, however, has been used for years for India’s own Bengali-speaking Muslims. Sarma’s audience would have taken his remark as being directed at Muslims in general. 

The deletion of Sarma’s “shooting” video is a step to protect him from possible but unlikely judicial proceedings. In the India of 2026, no one expects Prime Minister Modi or the BJP’s new national president, Nitin Nabin, or indeed any person or institution with authority, to admonish Sarma for openly urging hostility against fellow humans who probably are fellow Indians as well. 

DE FACTO ANNEXATION 

While Trump is designing his “Board of Peace,” first launched in the name of administering Gaza and later expanded for a wider role, Israeli authorities are tightening their control of Palestinian land. BBC reports that “Arab countries, Israeli anti-occupation groups and the UK have condemned new steps approved by Israel’s security cabinet for the occupied West Bank, saying they amount to de facto annexation.” 

It was the far-right Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who announced the latest advance. Smotrich bluntly said, “We will continue to kill the idea of ​​a Palestinian state.” 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas -- who heads the Palestinian Authority (PA), governing parts of the West Bank -- called the measures “dangerous” and an “open Israeli attempt to legalize settlement expansion, land confiscation, and the demolition of Palestinian properties, even in areas under Palestinian sovereignty”. 

In a significant statement, the UK said it “strongly condemned” the move and called on Israel to reverse the decision, adding that “any unilateral attempt to alter the geographic or demographic make-up of Palestine is wholly unacceptable and would be inconsistent with international law”. 

The foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar described the announcement as “accelerating attempts at [Palestine’s] illegal annexation and the displacement of the Palestinian people”. 

Predictably, the Indian government has remained silent. Palestinians may lose their lands, be made serfs in their own country, or be pushed out to distant locations, but the Modi regime can’t be bothered. It’s alliance with Israel remains firm. Meanwhile Australia has seen a large-scale protest, with thousands taking part, in the city of Sydney, against the visiting Israeli president, Isaac Herzog. 

ANYONE IN CHARGE? 

No international body seems to want to attempt, or is allowed to attempt, the safeguarding of our world. The UN is toothless; Europe’s alliance with the US has come apart; the so-called Global South is not even a paper organization. The ball is thus in the court of the world’s peoples. It will be interesting to see if they can -- in other words if we can -- agree on a few basic principles for relations inside and between countries.