ABSTRACT
Britain’s Indian empire was the most spectacular feature of the age of colonization in Asia and Africa, and it was the British withdrawal from India that set off the great wave of ‘decolonization’ (9, 27). Until the 1930s, proposals for India’s advance to independence were based on hopes of preserving the unity brought to the whole ‘sub-continent’ by British rule. But a quarter of undivided India’s population, then about 450 million, were Muslims (who had formed the ruling group almost everywhere before the British came). They now insisted on the creation of a separate state, to be called Pakistan; and, to avert a Hindu-Muslim war all over India, a partition was agreed. Even so, before and after the two nations became independent in 1947 there was much bloodshed in Punjab and Bengal, the two provinces where half of the inhabitants were Muslims; these provinces had to be divided. About 8 million Muslims fled from India to Pakistan and about 8 million Hindus and Sikhs fled from Pakistan to India; half a million people were killed; but 10 million Hindus remained in Pakistan, and 40 million Muslims in India. (There are now 105 million Muslims in India, about 11% of the population.)
Pakistan emerged in 1947 with two ‘wings’, 1,000 miles apart and each with half of the population. Its Bengalis were soon complaining, with reason, that its western-based government unduly favoured the western wing, which comprised Sind, Baluchistan, the (Pathan-peopled) North-West Frontier Province and the western part of Punjab (51).
