Partition Horrors Remembrance Day

The day remembers the sufferings of many Indians during the partition. Numerous families were displaced and many lost their lives in the partition. It aims to remind Indians the need to remove social divisions, disharmony and to further strengthen the spirit of oneness, social harmony and human empowerment.

The partition had left 10 to 20 million people displaced and left 200,000 to 2 million dead.

Background

The Partition was the division of British India into two independent Dominions: India and Pakistan. The two states have since gone through further reorganization: the Dominion of India is today the Republic of India (since 1950); while the Dominion of Pakistan was composed of what is known today as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (since 1956) and the People's Republic of Bangladesh (since 1971). The partition involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and Punjab, based on district-wide non-Muslim or Muslim majorities. The partition also saw the division of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, and the central treasury. The partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, i.e. Crown rule in India. The two self-governing independent Dominions of India and Pakistan legally came into existence at midnight on 15 August 1947.

The partition of India occurred on the basis of religious separatism, demanded by the All-India Muslim League who propagated the idea that Indian Muslims and Indian Hindus were two different nations—a theory that was propounded by the Hindu Mahasabha as well. The Indian National Congress, along with the Communist Party of India, All India Azad Muslim Conference, Khudai Khidmatgar, All India Anglo-Indian Association, All India Conference of Indian Christians (AICIC), and Chief Khalsa Diwan, adamantly opposition to India's partition as it upheld the concept of composite nationalism—that the Indian nation is made up of a "diversity of religions, creeds, castes, sub-castes, communities and cultures". Mahatma Gandhi, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Frank Anthony, Purushottam Das Tandon, Maulana Azad, Tara Singh and Allah Bux Soomro actively worked to oppose the partition of India. The leader of All India Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, demanded "either a divided India or a destroyed India" and called for Direct Action Day, which resulted in communal violence that sowed the seeds for the partition of India. Though the demand of the All India Muslim League was eventually accepted by the British, the state of India officially rejected the two-nation theory and chose to be a secular state, enshrining the concepts of religious pluralism and composite nationalism in its constitution.

The partition displaced between 10 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. There was large-scale violence, with estimates of the loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million. Pakistan was created through the partition of India on the basis of religious segregation; the very concept of dividing the country of India has criticized for its implication "that people with different backgrounds" cannot live together. After it occurred, critics of the partition of India point to the displacement of fifteen million people, the murder of more than one million people, and the rape of 75,000 women to demonstrate the view that it was a mistake. The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that affects their relationship to this day.