The run-up to the partition and the immediate aftermath were marked by riots and violence resulting from religious persecution of minorities on both sides. An estimated half million people were killed, and mass displacements of religious minorities in turn touched off mass population movements between the new borders and a major refugee crisis in the border provinces.2 An estimated seven million Muslims fled India for Pakistan, while some eight million Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan for India.3
The extent of the violence and the ensuing exodus took both governments by surprise. At independence neither had put in place mechanisms and institutions either to protect minorities or to facilitate their evacuation. Furthermore, the two countries received very little help from the international community, as Western governments did not view the two countries as geopolitically important and the UNHCR did not at the time have any provision for dealing with “partition” refugees. As a result, the massive population movements caused appalling loss of life, rocked both newly established countries, and nearly collapsed state infrastructures.4
Nevertheless, after the initial months of chaos, particularly in the western part of the subcontinent, the authorities in the two countries were able to organize the evacuations of religious minorities as well as to provide some security during the migration process through the creation of two joint institutions, the Military Evacuation Organization (MEO) and the Joint Refugee Council. Yet both countries assumed that the refugees were temporary and would go back to their original homes once the violence had died down. As such, the formidable challenge of resettling refugees took center stage only starting in 1948.
Course of the Dispute
While religious tensions had existed in India since at least the early 1900s, the violence began shortly after the British government decided in 1945 to grant India its independence. On August 16, 1946, the All India Muslim League (AIML), a party created in 1906 to promote Muslim interests, called on Muslims to participate in the “Direct Action Day” to pressure the government to accept the two-nation concept at independence. This however led to riots in Calcutta, in which over four thousand people died. Over the next couple of weeks, the unrest spread into other areas, with communal riots in several other provinces including Bihar and Punjab.5 These events convinced the British government that the partition of India was unavoidable, and London’s plan for partition was announced on June 3, 1947.
The borders between the two countries, known as the Radcliffe Line, were announced on August 17 and were determined on the basis of the religious distribution of the population: provinces with a majority Hindu population became India and those with a majority Muslim population became Pakistan.6 This meant that Pakistan was made up of two nonadjacent enclaves. In the west, Punjab province was separated into East Punjab, located in India, and West Punjab, located in Pakistan, and likewise in the east, Bengal province was divided into West Bengal and East Pakistan, located respectively in India and Pakistan.7
Partition immediately touched off riots and unrest in many cities (Lahore in Pakistan, Amritsar, Delhi, and Calcutta in India). In the western part of the former British India, this translated into the persecution of religious minorities. Many of them fled their homes by foot or by train under very perilous conditions, risking attacks by opponents who killed and tortured on a large scale, and raped and abducted women in the migrating convoys. In sum, within three months of the partition—between August and November 1947—an estimated half million people were killed as 4.5 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan into India and 5.5 million Muslims went the opposite direction.8
In the eastern part of the subcontinent, reactions immediately after independence were calmer. Indeed, while Calcutta experienced some unrest, the two-way population movements were relatively minor and more voluntary, with people moving for socioeconomic reasons rather than fleeing religious persecution. However, in late 1949, riots in East Pakistan led masses of Hindus to migrate from East Pakistan into India. Similarly, communal riots in West Bengal led more than one million Muslim refugees to flee to Pakistan.
The flow of East Pakistani Hindus into West Bengal continued over the next five years as border quarrels between Pakistan and India in the west (in Kashmir) intensified. Uncertainty over proposals to make Urdu the official language of Pakistan (to the detriment of Bengali) and to adopt an Islamic constitution led to increased unease among Hindus living in East Pakistan. This flow was stopped only briefly between 1959 and 1964 when the government of India decided to close all the refugee camps in West Bengal and not provide any assistance to refugees from East Pakistan. It had to reopen them in 1964 when tensions arose in East Pakistan, which eventually led to its secession from Pakistan in 1971, which again resulted in more refugees flocking into India.9
At independence, the governments of India and Pakistan did not expect the level of violence and the mass population exodus that the partition induced. As a result, they were ill prepared to deal with the crisis, especially in the western part of the subcontinent, where the bulk of the population movements happened in the first three months. And given that the pace of the movements was so different between the western part (i.e., between East Punjab in India and West Punjab in Pakistan) and the eastern part (i.e., West Bengal in India and East Pakistan), the arrangements that the two governments established to deal with the crises in the west and in the east differed substantially.
In the west, the pressure on the civil administration was such that the military had to take over the evacuation of the endangered religious minorities and to provide them with humanitarian aid. On August 1, 1947, the Boundary Force, an Indian military force of about twenty-five thousand men of “mixed class composition” under the British command, was created as a neutral entity to ensure civil order and protect the religious minorities. However, while the force supported some of the evacuation efforts, it largely failed to prevent the riots and the atrocities that followed. In the end, the Boundary Force was disbanded just a month after it was created.10
As the crisis intensified, the two countries formed ministries to handle refugee evacuation and rehabilitation. Both recognized the need to secure the paths of the refugees during their journey to the border and to protect them from attacks from opposing groups, so MEO was formed in September 1947 as a joint endeavor to organize the flow of migrants and secure evacuations by rail, road, and foot. For those traveling by foot, the MEO prepared a Joint Evacuation Movement Plan to schedule the movement of large convoys of refugees in order to avoid clashes. In addition, the MEO acted to secure trains and reduce attacks on them, and was able to organize sixty mass evacuations by rail in November 1947. The Joint Refugee Council was also set up by the two governments to provide emergency medical supplies and food at rest stops for the migrating refugees.11
Very little by way of resettlement occurred in either country, as authorities in both expected the refugees to go