Partition and Independence in South Asia

The Indian National Congress, led by figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, had campaigned for a unified independent India, while the All-India Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah adopted the Lahore Resolution of March 1940, which called for separate Muslim-majority states in the northwest and northeast of the subcontinent — the basis of what came to be known as the two-nation theory. Lord Louis Mountbatten, appointed Viceroy of India in early 1947 with instructions to oversee a transfer of power, concluded within weeks that a unified transition was unworkable and dramatically accelerated the timetable, announcing on 3 June 1947 that partition and independence would occur by 15 August of that same year, less than ten weeks later — a compression of time that later historians, including Yasmin Khan in The Great Partition (2007), have identified as a major contributor to the scale of the violence that followed.