Faiz Ahmed Faiz, in his poem Dawn of Freedom, writes:
“This stained light, this night-bitten dawn,
This is not the dawn we yearned for,
This is not the dawn for which we set out so eagerly.”
As India celebrates 79 years of independence, a day before, on 14 August, we remember Partition and the horrors that accompanied freedom. Punjab bore one of the greatest costs when the province was divided into East and West Punjab. The loss of homes, mass sexual violence, the unimaginable scale of displacement and the killings remain among the darkest memories of Partition.
We remember how people who had lived together for generations were divided on the basis of religion; how communities that shared culture, language and social life were uprooted from their homes; and how mass killings and expulsions took place on both sides of the new border.
Kuldip Nayar, in his book The Tale of Two Cities, describes his experience of leaving Sialkot for India. Initially, they did not want to leave. And when he did, like many others, he believed that he and his family would eventually be able to return home once things became normal.
But what Nayar saw on the journey was unimaginable: dead bodies along the roads, the remains of burnt vehicles, pieces of luggage and the devastation left behind by communal violence. People along the way told stories of brutal killings, sexual violence and the destruction of homes.
To this, Amrita Pritam wrote her famous lines:
Aj aakhan Waris Shah nu kiton qabraan vichon bol
Te aj kitaab-e-ishq da koi agla warqa phol
Ik royi si dhee Punjab di tu likh likh maare vain
Aj lakhaan dheeyan rondiyan tenu Waris Shah nu kehn
The gendered violence of Partition was particularly brutal. In the village of Thoa Khalsa in Punjab, around 90 women jumped into a well in March 1947 to avoid abduction, rape and forced conversion. For some, this may have been a personal choice, but as Urvashi Butalia argues, for others the “decision” must be understood as one they felt “compelled” to take because of the circumstances surrounding them.
The bigger question is: How did we reach such a situation? How did hatred reach such a level that people who had lived together for generations became enemies? How did communal politics turn into communal violence on such an enormous scale?
The answer is complex and difficult to locate. The violence did not happen overnight. It was preceded by years in which political competition increasingly became organised around religious identity.
The Muslim League, founded in 1906, initially sought to protect Muslim political interests within the colonial political system. But its politics changed significantly in the decades that followed. The Lahore Resolution of 1940 marked a major turning point, as the League moved towards the demand for separate Muslim-majority political units, which eventually became the demand for Pakistan.
Jinnah himself had once been an important figure in Hindu-Muslim cooperation. During the early part of his political career, he worked to bring together the Muslim League and Congress and played an important role in the Lucknow Pact of 1916. He was subsequently described as the “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.”
The Government of India Act of 1935 expanded provincial electoral politics, and elections were held in 1937. Congress formed ministries in several provinces, while the Muslim League performed poorly, particularly in Muslim-majority provinces such as Punjab and Bengal.
In Punjab, for example, the League won only two of the Muslim seats it contested in 1937. By 1946, however, it had won 75 Muslim seats in the province.
What Happened Between 1937 and 1946?
This period is particularly important because communal identity increasingly became central to political mobilisation. The Muslim League increasingly presented itself as the political representative of Muslims and focused on the question of Muslim political security in a Hindu-majority democracy.
At the same time, Hindu communal organisations such as the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, along with a broader current of majoritarian politics, were also gaining ground. Savarkar's articulation of Hindutva was part of this parallel development of Hindu nationalism.
The competition was therefore not simply between political parties over votes. Increasingly, political organisations were competing to represent religious communities themselves.
And this is where electoral politics became intertwined with communal politics.
Political leaders could use communal identity to mobilise people for political purposes. But communal identity, once repeatedly invoked in political competition, could acquire a life beyond the intentions of those who invoked it.
By 1946, the consequences were becoming visible.
The violence in Calcutta was followed by violence in Noakhali and then Bihar. In Bihar, Muslims became the principal victims of large-scale violence. The violence was fuelled partly by anger over reports of killings, abductions and forced conversions in Noakhali, as well as stories brought back by people from Calcutta. Rumours and exaggerated accounts of violence helped turn events elsewhere into local grievances and demands for revenge. Nehru himself noted that refugees and relatives returning from Calcutta carried stories of what had happened, creating intense resentment across Bihar.
Punjab, meanwhile, was also beginning to experience escalating communal violence.
William Dalrymple in his article for The New Yorker titled the Great Divide mentions Margaret Bourke-White, who had witnessed the opening of the gates of a Nazi concentration camp a year earlier, described the streets of Calcutta as resembling “Buchenwald.”
This created a dangerous cycle: violence in one place became the justification for violence somewhere else.
Communal politics had moved beyond the electoral arena. It was now shaping how ordinary people understood threat, security and their neighbours.
The state, meanwhile, was struggling to contain it.
Perhaps the most important lesson of Partition is that communal politics, once unleashed, can acquire a momentum of its own. Political leaders may believe that communal identity and fear can be mobilised as instruments for short-term political gains. But once these ideas become embedded in society, their consequences can extend far beyond the intentions, or even the control, of those who initially promoted them.
This contradiction becomes particularly striking when we consider Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s speech to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947, just days before independence. In the speech, Jinnah articulated a vision of Pakistan in which religious identity would not determine a citizen’s rights:
“You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan.”
He went on to speak of citizens being equal, regardless of religion, caste or creed. Yet this vision stood in stark contrast to Jinnah’s earlier political rhetoric, particularly his statement in 1940:
“It is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality. Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literary traditions. They neither intermarry nor eat together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.”
It was this conception of Hindus and Muslims as two distinct nations that became central to the Two-Nation Theory and ultimately provided the ideological basis for the creation of Pakistan.
And the reality that unfolded on the ground was far more devastating than the political theories that had helped bring Partition about. By August 1947, communal identities were no longer simply political categories being invoked in speeches and negotiations. They had become deeply entangled with fear, suspicion and violence. Across Punjab and Bengal, communities were uprooted, homes were looted and destroyed, families were separated, and thousands were killed because of the religious identity they were perceived to belong to.
The tragedy of Partition, therefore, lies not only in the decisions made by political leaders, but also in how political rhetoric can transform social relationships. Once a population is taught to see its neighbours primarily through the lens of religious difference, that distinction can become difficult to contain. The very identities mobilised for political purposes can eventually overpower the political calculations that created them.
Even political leaders who understood the danger were struggling to contain it. During the communal violence in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru reportedly went into the streets himself and confronted looters with a stick. Kuldip Nayar later recalled seeing Nehru personally intervene against looters.
Gandhi's response was different but equally revealing. He had opposed Partition and, rather than participating in the celebrations of independence, spent the final months of his life trying to stop communal violence and restore trust between communities. He was in Calcutta around the time of independence, working to prevent further violence.
The political leadership had created, encouraged or responded to forces that were now much larger than political speeches and electoral calculations.
That is why Partition should not only be remembered as a tragedy of the past. It should be remembered as a warning about the dangers of allowing communal politics to become the organising principle of political life.
The lesson of 1947 is not simply that communal hatred can produce violence. It is that political leaders may use communal identity for short-term political advantage while believing that they can later control its consequences.
Partition shows how dangerous that assumption can be.
Once political competition begins to turn religious identity into the basis of political belonging, fear and insecurity can acquire a momentum of their own. Violence can travel from one place to another. Rumours can become political facts. The suffering of one community can become the justification for violence against another.
The people of Punjab and Bengal did not simply lose their homes in 1947. They lost the social world in which those homes had meaning.
That is what we should remember when we remember Partition: not only the tragedy that occurred, but the political process through which a society that had lived together for generations was brought to the point where its people could see one another as enemies.
And perhaps this is where the legacy of Partition becomes most relevant to the present. India, despite its constitutional commitment to secularism, has increasingly moved towards a politics shaped by Hindutva and the idea of a Hindu majoritarian state. Pakistan, meanwhile, despite Jinnah’s later articulation of a more inclusive and potentially secular vision for the new state, has struggled to fulfil the promise that Pakistan would become a secure political home for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. The creation of Bangladesh in 1971 exposed the limitations of a state built primarily around religious identity, while continuing ethnic and political conflicts involving Baloch and Pashtun communities further demonstrate the difficulties of sustaining national unity through a singular religious identity. The treatment and exclusion of Ahmadi Muslims from the definition of Muslim citizenship provides another stark example of how the boundaries of belonging can become increasingly narrow once religious identity becomes embedded in the state. In this sense, the idea that Pakistan would simply become a haven for the Muslims of the subcontinent has not been fulfilled. The trajectories of both India and Pakistan, in very different ways, demonstrate the enduring danger of making religious identity the foundation of political belonging: rather than resolving communal divisions, it can reproduce and deepen them.