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Families torn apart by Partition.
The endless anguish of Partition: India and Pakistan at 75
Seventy-five years ago this week, two of the most powerful countries in Asia were born in a bloodbath. At the stroke of midnight that separated Aug. 14 from Aug. 15, 1947, British India was divided — along an inexpertly drawn line — into a sprawling, Hindu-majority India, and a smaller, Muslim-majority Pakistan.
The event, known as “Partition,” tore apart families, villages, and whole regions, sparking violence that left millions dead and displaced. It also laid the groundwork for sectarian conflicts and enmity between India and Pakistan that have lasted to this day.
To learn more about why Partition happened, and how it continues to shape the troubled relationship between these two countries, we sat down with Akhil Bery, a former analyst at Eurasia Group who is now Director of South Asia Initiatives at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Alex Kliment: Let's start at the beginning, Akhil – what was Partition, and why did it happen?
Akhil Bery: Under the British Empire, Muslims were the largest religious minority in India, accounting for about 25% of the population. And due to their minority status, they were guaranteed a certain amount of representation in various legislative bodies.
As the calls for independence from the British grew louder, there was a fear that Muslims would lose these protections, especially in a Hindu-dominated India, and so there were calls for a separate Muslim state. There's some debate about whether that was an actual goal or whether it was just a negotiating tactic. But that sort of became the rallying cry for Muslims.
Then in 1947, after World War Two, Lord Mountbatten came to India as the new viceroy, and his mandate was to end the British Raj. He charged a prominent lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, with partitioning India along sectarian lines: a Hindu-majority India on one side, and Pakistan, for Muslims, on the other.
And let me guess, this imperial Englishman didn’t draw such a great map?
Well, Radcliffe had been to India – once. But he did all of this from England, using outdated census information.
So it was just a mess, villages were split in half and so on. You had mobs burning villages, attacking people. You had Hindus and Sikhs versus Muslims, and vice versa.
It was a small percentage of the population who engaged in these things, of course – most people were bystanders. But when the dust settled in 1948, some 15 million people had been displaced from their homes, and the conservative estimate is that at least 2 million people died. That history of violence is what gave birth to India and Pakistan.
Why was it so violent?
Until the mid 1940s, British India was a multi-ethnic, multicultural country. I mean, you had Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, for the most part coexisting peacefully.
But the British had long practiced a deliberate policy of divide and rule, selectively playing sectarian groups off each other as a way to undermine any anti-British movements in India.
So as the British departure from Indian territories became more likely, those divisions provided fertile ground for more ideological ideas of nationhood: you had Muslims for a Muslim-majority Pakistan, and Hindus in India who believed that because you were going to have a Muslim-majority Pakistan, then India should also be a Hindu majority country.
And of course, when Partition arrived, you had fanatics on both sides taking advantage of the situation to carry out violence.
You are from India – are there any Partition stories that you grew up hearing or that you remember from your family?
Every family has some sort of story of the Partition or of the terrorism and violence that came after. My grandfather was born in Lahore [today’s Pakistan] and my grandmother was in Amritsar, which is in Punjab, in today’s India. They used to be able to travel freely between those two cities, and there was even visa free travel between the two countries until the late 1960s.
But for my grandmother, as a newlywed young mother, some of her earliest memories of that time were of hosting Partition refugees from Pakistan in Delhi.
How has Partition shaped sectarian attitudes in the two countries?
It’s still unresolved today. If you look at how both India and Pakistan deal with religious minorities, neither of them has a good track record on that. Look at India right now with the growth of the BJP, you've seen an increase of violence against Muslims.
And in Pakistan, an Islamization of the country that goes back to when General Zia [ul-Haq] was in charge in the 1970s, and he kind of promoted the Islamization of Pakistan, which ended up supporting the Taliban, and passing anti-blasphemy laws and so on.
So, I mean, this idea of a hard line, religious, almost fanaticism is prevalent in both India and Pakistan now.
On top of those internal tensions, did Partition leave flashpoints between India and Pakistan directly?
Yes, in Kashmir. The conflict over Kashmir is a legacy of Partition. At the time, you had a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu king who signed an “Instrument of Accession” (which ceded the area to India).
But this is where the history gets dicey because Pakistan believes that as a Muslim majority it naturally belonged to Pakistan, and there is disagreement about whether the king even wanted to sign the document.
India, meanwhile, believes that because the king signed the agreement Jammu and Kashmir should be a part of India.
And this conflict over Kashmir is really what prevents India and Pakistan from finding peace with one another. There have been numerous attempts, but it's just never a great combination of people on both sides and it's been a bloody history throughout. They’ve fought three wars over this. There have been terrorist attacks from Pakistan into India. There've been terrorist attacks from India into Pakistan. These are two nuclear armed neighbors who don't get along because of Kashmir, so that’s one big, unfulfilled legacy of Partition.
Where does the Kashmir issue stand now?
Until India’s decision to abrogate Article 370 (a law that had given Kashmir a measure of autonomy) in 2019, Jammu and Kashmir was India's only Muslim majority state. Now its status has been downgraded to a union territory. And because of that, it has hardened minds. India and Pakistan don't have trade relations. The border is still militarized. There is a ceasefire in effect on the line of control. But there isn't really a path forward right now.
How is Partition remembered today – and is it seen differently in India and Pakistan?
The generation that survived Partition is slowly dying out. It's been 75 years. New generations don’t have those same stories, and yet the wounds of Partition are still there and it's still a political cudgel, so you are seeing more competing hardline views.
In India last year, they designated August 14, which is Pakistan's independence day, as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.”
And you've got Hindu nationalist groups, for example, that espouse this idea of “Akhand Bharat,” or “unified India”, who believe that India should unite the continent, basically. And it's not just Pakistan they want – they want Bangladesh, Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar, and so on.
There's also a view in India that Partition was a mistake because, due to the wastage of resources on security (in the standoff with Pakistan), an undivided India could have spent more on health and education to achieve better development outcomes.
And then, of course, there is the view that India should just be an overtly Hindu state, since Pakistan is a Muslim state. And that view has come into prominence more and more, especially with the decline of India’s Congress Party as a relevant opposition party, and the rise of the BJP, which is a very unabashedly pro-Hindu party.
And how is it seen in Pakistan?
In Pakistan, meanwhile, with the rise of the BJP and the Hindu nationalism across the border in India, it's seen as incredible foresight by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (the founding father of Pakistan) to predict that this would come to pass and that this is why you needed a separate Muslim homeland in the first place. So Partition is a good thing in that view.
What would it take to put to rest the ghost of Partition?
Right now you've got a government in India that doesn't see the benefit of negotiating with Pakistan, and you've got Pakistan in the midst of an economic and political crisis.
And for India, the top geopolitical issue right now is China, and that also hampers things because India does not get along with China, but China has a very, very strong relationship with Pakistan.
So, yes, you have a ceasefire holding along the line of control (in Kashmir), but will it last? All it takes is one more terrorist attack, and things will get dicey again. Remember that in 2019, suicide bombers from Pakistan killed 40 Indian soldiers. Modi escalated by sending planes over into Pakistan for the first time since 1972. And Pakistan right now is dealing with a surge in terrorism in its border regions.
But if there are these kind of confidence building measures, like no firing on the line of control, no terrorist attacks, maybe some steps to normalize trade, then there is a future.
Sounds like there’s not much light at the end of the tunnel at the moment – do you think India and Pakistan will ever bury the hatchet?
I personally think you need more economic engagement and more people-to-people ties. There needs to be a realization that the other side is not the enemy. The Indians and Pakistanis have shown an ability to come to agreements in the past. Diplomacy is very helpful. And I think there is a role that international actors have to play there.
The rise of India's relations with the Middle East, I think, is a net positive because Middle Easterners typically had strong relations with Pakistan. So as the US influence in the region ebbs, I think there’s space for Middle Eastern countries to use the leverage that they have to say like, ‘okay, we get that you're not going to have peace with one another, but at least let's try to normalize some aspects of the relationship.’
Cricket fans, with their faces painted in the Indian and Pakistani national flag colors, ahead of a match between the two countries.
What We’re Watching: Partition 75th anniversary, Kenyan vote count, US-China in Southeast Asia
India & Pakistan turn 75
This year’s Aug. 15 Diamond Jubilee of Partition, when the British Raj split into India and Pakistan, is a complicated affair. India has gained more from independence in 1947 than Pakistan: earlier this summer, the Indian economy crossed the $3.3 trillion mark and officially overtook the UK to become the world’s fifth-largest — a nice touch to celebrate 75 years of independence from its colonial master. But India’s democratic credentials remain under threat by the rise of Hindu nationalism. However, Pakistan’s experiments after Partition — proxy wars, civil war, martial law, and Islamism — brought much suffering to its people. Today, the country is at the verge of another financial crisis and negotiating its 23rd IMF bailout, as well as in talks with its own version of the Taliban. Unfortunately, a growing nuclear arsenal is the only equalizer for the political and economic imbalance between the two countries. But there is still hope yet. After years of making zero progress, India and Pakistan are now involved in a backchannel dialogue, which may bring some normalcy between the old enemies. That, and the cricket, of course: Pakistan has won more games overall against its arch-rival, but never beaten India in a World Cup match.
Kenya's election nailbiter
Six days after Kenya's presidential election, the race between Deputy President William Ruto and opposition leader Raila Odinga is still undeclared. As of Monday afternoon in Nairobi, Ruto is ahead by a slim margin with about half of the vote officially counted, while unofficial media tallies that initially put his rival in the lead now also have Ruto winning. Both sides accuse each other of tampering with the process, which is painstakingly slow to avoid past instances of fraud: in 2007, more than 1,200 people were killed in violent clashes across the country after Odinga claimed the election had been stolen, and in 2017 a string of logistical mistakes forced the Supreme Court to annul the result and order a rerun. The result must be announced no later than Tuesday, a full week after the vote. Also, if neither candidate gets more than 50% of the vote and at least 25% of the ballots cast in a minimum of 24 out of Kenya's 27 counties, the presidential election will for the first time go to a runoff before Sept. 8.
Southeast Asia tiptoes on US-China
Over the weekend, the US and Chinese militaries held separate military drills with Southeast Asian partners less than two weeks after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's mega-controversial trip to Taiwan, to which China responded by its biggest-ever show of force around the self-governing island. Chinese fighter jets participated in joint exercises with the Thai air force, while American and Indonesian troops wrapped up their two-week Garuda Shield live-fire drills, which Australia, Japan, and Singapore joined for the first time. The war games come amid heightened tensions in the region over Taiwan: many Southeast Asian countries are now “keeping their head down” to avoid picking sides between Beijing, who they do by far the most trade with, and Washington, which has given them more military aid for decades. No one wants to rock the boat in the region, where more than 10 years ago China and the Philippines — a former US colony that America is treaty-bound to defend — came to the brink of war over a disputed shoal in the South China Sea. Meanwhile, China kicked off Monday another round of military exercises near Taiwan after a group of US lawmakers visited the island the day before.
Pakistan’s Hina Khar: India’s policies are undemocratic
The last time Ian Bremmer and Hina Khar met at the Munich Security Conference, in 2020, she called India a “rogue state” and a bully in the neighborhood.
Two years later, she argues that the Indian government has proven her right with undemocratic gestures like the Citizenship Amendment Act.
“Basically, you're saying everybody who is Hindu has the right to be an Indian citizen, and anyone who's Muslim has the least right, and anyone in the middle, we'll think about it,” Khar said.
“This is not a liberal India,” she added.
What's more, Khar points out, India is also endangering regional politics as a member of the Quad, whose sole purpose according to Khar is to contain China.
"India today can get away with murder, and the West would look away.”
Watch the GZERO World episode: As democracy erodes: Pakistan’s Hina Khar on “supremely dangerous” global trends
A Pakistani ranger stands near Indian and Pakistani flags during a fair in Chamliyal in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
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India and Pakistan break bread over... water? Representatives from India and Pakistan are meeting this week to discuss water-sharing in the Indus River for the first time since the two countries severed relations following India's suspension of autonomy for Kashmir almost three years ago. It's a big deal — especially for the Pakistanis, whose farmers get 80 percent of the water they need to irrigate their crops from the Indus. Even more importantly, the meeting is also the latest sign of an apparent thaw in Indo-Pakistani ties, starting with last month's ceasefire agreement on Kashmir. A recently released readout of the secret talks that preceded that truce shows unusual impetus by both sides to make progress, and was followed up by rare conciliatory messages between Delhi and Islamabad. Given the long history of animosity between the two nuclear-armed nations -- they have gone to war three times since 1948 -- it's hard to be optimistic, but let's see if these water talks can move things along further.
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A moronic situation in the heart of Europe. A prominent writer is currently facing a prison term for calling the president of his country a schoolyard insult. Is it in Russia? China? North Korea? No, in fact this is happening in an EU member state. Poland to be exact, where popular screenwriter Jakub Żulczyk has been charged with "an act of public insult" for calling president Andrzej Duda a "moron." Żulczyk let fly the insult on Facebook last November after Duda, a right-winger who was close to US President Donald Trump, said that he wouldn't congratulate Joe Biden on victory in the 2020 US election until the electoral college had officially named him the winner. Pretty tame stuff on both sides, but Poland's famously strict defamation laws (which among other things now include penalties for suggesting Polish complicity in the Holocaust) could land Żulczyk in jail for up to three years.What We're Watching: Ethiopia dam dispute, India-Pakistan ceasefire, upheaval in Armenia
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US airstrike on Iran-backed militias: On Thursday, President Biden ordered an airstrike against "multiple facilities located at a border control point used by a number of Iranian-backed militant groups," according to the US military. The US side has called this a "proportionate military response" to three rocket attacks launched from Syria on US forces in Iraq. The first of those three attacks killed an American civilian contractor and wounded five others. If Iran is testing the new US president, this strike is meant to signal that the US will hit back if tested, but still hopes both sides can de-escalate. We'll be watching to see how many more punches Iran's proxies in Syria want to throw before Washington and Tehran move to restart nuclear talks.
India-Pakistan ceasefire:Longtime foes India and Pakistan have agreed to a ceasefire in the predominantly Muslim area of Kashmir for the first time in almost two decades. (A 2003 ceasefire along the Line of Control was consistently violated.) In theory, this means that armed forces from both South Asian nations have agreed to stop exchanging fire across the border by midnight Friday, in a bid to end a low-grade conflict that's killed hundreds of locals and military personnel over the past few decades. Relations between the two sides have long been hostile but soured further in 2019 when New Delhi blamed Islamabad for a terror attack that killed 30 Indian military personnel, resulting in a series of tit-for-tat attacks and cross-border skirmishes. The row between the two nuclear powers went from bad to worse that same year, when India revoked Kashmir's special status in an attempt to integrate the region into India, irking Islamabad and sparking an uptick in violence. However, the two sides have committed to halting hostilities and sorting out the status of disputed Kashmir before — it would be a massive feat if they can pull it off this time around.
Coup in Armenia? Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has accused the army of attempting to stage a coup after the military establishment called on him to step down over the PM's alleged foreign policy blunders in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Azerbaijan. The PM — who has been under pressure to resign for months over his ill-fated decision to surrender some territory to the Azeris in order to stop the conflict and ensure a longterm truce — responded by firing the head of the armed forces. Meanwhile, thousands of Pashinyan's supporters heeded his call to turn up on the streets of the capital, Yerevan, where they were met by a similar number of anti-government demonstrators. With the two main opposition parties supporting the army's demand for the PM to call it quits, Pashinyan is fast running out of options to stay in power. Meanwhile, of the two main outside players involved in Nagorno-Karabakh, so far Turkey has condemned the coup attempt, while Russia has kept mum. Indeed, Pashinyan's political survival could in part depend on Russia, which has forces and military bases in Armenia. What will Vladimir Putin do?