World War II accelerated the drive toward Indian independence begun by Mohandas Gandhi (see “The Roots of Militant Nonviolence” in Chapter 29). In 1942 Gandhi called on the British to “quit India” and threatened another civil disobedience campaign. He and the other Indian National Congress Party leaders were soon after arrested and were jailed for much of the war. Thus India’s wartime support for Britain was substantial but not always enthusiastic. Meanwhile, the Congress Party’s prime rival skillfully seized the opportunity to increase its influence.

The Congress Party’s rival was the Muslim League, led by the English-educated lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948). Jinnah feared Hindu domination of an independent Indian state led by the Congress Party. Asserting the right of Muslim areas to separate from the Hindu majority, Jinnah called on the British government in March 1940 to grant the Muslim and Hindu peoples separate national states:

The Hindus and Muslims have two different religions, philosophies, social customs, literatures. They neither inter-marry, nor dine together, and indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. . . . To yoke together two such nations under a single State, one as a numerical minority and the other as majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a State.5

Gandhi regarded Jinnah’s two-nation theory as untrue and as promising the victory of hate over love.

Britain agreed to speedy independence for India after 1945, but conflicts between Hindu and Muslim nationalists led to murderous clashes in 1946. When it became clear that Jinnah and the Muslim League would accept nothing less than an independent state of Pakistan, India’s last colonial viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, mediated a partition that created a predominantly Hindu nation and a predominantly Muslim nation. On August 14, 1947, India and Pakistan gained political independence from Britain as two separate nations (Map 31.2).

Massacres and mass expulsions followed independence. Perhaps a hundred thousand Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered, and an estimated 5 million became refugees. Congress Party leaders were completely powerless to stop the wave of violence. “What is there to celebrate?” exclaimed Gandhi in reference to independence, “I see nothing but rivers of blood.”6 Gandhi labored to ease tensions between Hindus and Muslims, but in the aftermath of riots in January 1948, he was killed by a Hindu gunman who resented what he saw as Gandhi’s appeasement of Muslims.

After the ordeal of independence, relations between India and Pakistan remained tense. Fighting over the disputed area of Kashmir, a strategically important northwestern border state with a Muslim majority annexed by India, lasted until 1949 and broke out again in 1965–1966, 1971, and 1999 as tensions continued.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) and the Indian National Congress Party ruled India for a generation and introduced major social reforms. Hindu women gained legal equality, including the right to vote, to seek divorce, and to marry outside their castes. The constitution abolished the untouchable caste. In practice, less discriminatory attitudes toward women and untouchables evolved slowly — especially in rural villages, where 85 percent of the people lived.

The Congress Party leadership pursued nationalist, state-driven economic development, but population growth of about 2.4 percent per year consumed much of the increased output of economic expansion. The relocation of millions during the partition of India and Pakistan exacerbated poverty. The Congress Party maintained neutrality in the Cold War, distancing itself from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Instead India became one of the most avid advocates of a “third force” of nonaligned nations that aimed for economic and cultural cooperation. This effort culminated in the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 (see “The Politics of Liberation”).

At independence, Pakistan was divided between eastern and western provinces separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory, as well as by language, ethnic background, and social custom. The Bengalis of East Pakistan constituted a majority of Pakistan’s population as a whole, but were neglected by the central government, which remained in the hands of West Pakistan’s elite after Jinnah’s death. In 1971 the Bengalis revolted and won their independence as the new nation of Bangladesh after a violent civil war. Bangladesh, a secular parliamentary democracy, struggled to find political and economic stability amid famines that resulted from monsoon floods, tornadoes, and cyclones in the vast, low-lying, and intensely farmed Ganges Delta.