Why were India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh split? India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were split at the end of British rule in 1947, and they were split along religious grounds. Although, it was not a simple process and it has caused numerous problems.
India became a colony of Britain in 1857. Queen Victoria I was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877. However, Britain had been controlling India for centuries before this, albeit not in an official capacity. The first British people to arrive in India arrived there for the purpose of trade. In 1600, British traders managed to get a royal charter to trade in the east, but the Dutch had taken control of most of Indonesia, so the British turned their attention to India, which was mostly ruled by the Mughal Empire. The traders were banded together under the label of the East India Company and they started to trade spices, silk, and other commodities. The Dutch East India Company were also doing the same thing, and the British East India Company started to increase its manpower and fighting power to fight off the Dutch. They started to build fortified trading posts and resupply posts. Then they began to trade more directly with the rulers in India, slowly establishing a foothold. Over the next century and a half, they used division amongst the Indian rulers to slowly increase their power and expand their trading empire. They taxed the areas they controlled and had an army of locally trained soldiers that had more advanced equipment and training than the armies of the Mughal Empire. By the end of the 18th century, the East Indian Company controlled most of India. They had rules to follow, but the British government generally let them get on with it. A lot of people in the government had money invested in the company. Then, in 1857, everything changed. There were a series of rebellions in India that the company could not deal with, so the British government stepped in and sent troops to put down the rebellions. They replaced the Mughal Empire, dissolved the East Indian Company, and India became a British colony. To keep control, they introduced systems of segregation along religious lines and along racial lines because a divided population is much easier to control than a unified one. That lasted until 1947, when India was given independence and partitioned. So, what happened?
Britain didn’t give up its colonies and its empire by choice. No empire ever decides to just stop being an empire. After World War 1, Britain was barely able to afford the colonies and after World War 2 it definitely couldn’t afford to govern them. Also, the USA made decolonization one of the conditions of any money it would lend Britain, which ended up being a lot. Both of these were enough, but there was a rising sense of nationalism in all of the countries that had seen the British Empire trounced out of most of Asia by the Japanese. There was not much respect left for British rule. All of these things added up, and Britain decided to start letting her colonies go.
Once the decision was made to free the colonies, the question was how to do it. There needed to be a government that could take control and ensure a smooth succession. The fear with independence was that the countries would collapse into civil war. In India, the majority of the population were Hindi, and the next largest religious group were Muslims. The fear among Muslim political groups was that when India gained independence, the ruling government would be Hindi and the Muslims wouldn’t get a say. They campaigned for their own state. One idea was to have a very slow transition and give the new Indian government ten years or so to ease into the role before declaring independence, but that never happened. Factions on the Hindi and Muslim sides wanted things worked out, and in 1946 there were riots and protests. 200 years of Britain using differences of religion to separate groups of people came back to bite them. Lord Mountbatten, the cousin of King George VI was sent over to make the transition happen. It looked like there was going to be a religious civil war and Mountbatten convinced all of the leaders that two countries was the only way forward. He had a year to make this happen, but he wanted to get it done as soon as possible. He tasked a British lawyer called Cyril Radcliffe with marking the border. Cyril Radcliffe had never been to India, but he had a map that showed the concentrations of Hindi and Muslims. He used these concentrations to divide up the country and ended up with India where it is and Pakistan divided into west and east, with a gap between them. Mountbatten knew this would cause trouble, so he didn’t release the map until the day after Independence. He wanted the mayhem that he knew would follow to be the fault of the new Indian government and not the fault of the British government.
When the new countries were published, it started the largest migration of people in human history. 15 million Hindus and Muslims moved out of the places they had lived in for generations and to the new countries. It also sparked a religious war. It is estimated that close on 2 million people were murdered during the partition. Then, in 1971, it became too difficult to have a vastly divided East and West Pakistan, so East Pakistan became Bangladesh. With hindsight, so many things should have been done differently and so many lives could have been saved. And this is what I learned today.
Try these next:
Sources
https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/the-british-impact-on-india-1700-1900
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/8/14/how-india-pakistan-and-bangladesh-were-formed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-62467438
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/partition-of-india-and-pakistan-history-legacy