The partition of India
Independence arrives with a line drawn in five weeks, and a million people die.
- When
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
Britain leaves India in August 1947, dividing it into India and Pakistan along boundaries drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, who had never been to India and had five weeks. Between ten and twenty million people move, and between several hundred thousand and two million are killed in communal violence. Kashmir is left disputed and remains so. It is the largest forced migration in human history and it created two nuclear-armed rivals.