India and Pakistan: Independence and the Trauma of Partition

Britain granted independence on 15 August 1947 through the Indian Independence Act, a transfer of power overseen by Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy. Two rival political forces shaped the settlement: the Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had formulated the "Two-Nation Theory" holding that Hindus and Muslims constituted two distinct nations and had set out the demand for a separate Muslim state in the 1940 Lahore Resolution. The Mountbatten Plan of June 1947 partitioned British India into two dominions, India and Pakistan — the latter split into two geographically separated wings, West and East Pakistan, the second of which is today Bangladesh — with the actual border drawn hastily, in a matter of weeks, by the Radcliffe Commission. Independence was declared a day earlier in Pakistan, 14 August, than in India, 15 August 1947. The transition also required dissolving more than 500 semi-autonomous princely states, an integration effort led by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel; one holdout, Kashmir, immediately became a flashpoint of territorial dispute between the two new states.