History unfolds; it is not directed. Its real events guide the present, and the present, by learning from them, lays the firm foundation of the future. Unfortunately, in our school history textbooks, events and facts have often been severed from reality and presented through fabricated ideals, emotional slogans, abstract theories, vested interests, and partisan biases. Whenever efforts have been made to present history in an authentic, factual, and impartial manner, they have repeatedly faced unnecessary controversy and uproar.
Against this backdrop, advancing the reform process initiated under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, NCERT on August 14, 2025 released two special supplementary educational modules for students of Classes 6–8 and 9–12. These modules are not part of the compulsory curriculum; rather, they are designed to give students an opportunity to understand the horrors of Partition and the resulting human tragedy more deeply through discussions, debates, poster-making, and projects. The objective of this material is to highlight the ideas, factors, and circumstances that gave rise to a divisive mindset. It explicitly identifies three principal elements as responsible for Bharat’s Partition—Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Indian National Congress, and Lord Mountbatten. Jinnah demanded Partition, Congress accepted it, and Mountbatten formalized and implemented it. This initiative by NCERT marks an important step toward understanding history on the firm ground of reality and drawing essential lessons for the future.
Who does not know that Jinnah’s blind ambition, lust for power, and politics of separate identity played a decisive role in fueling the communal sentiment already growing among Bhartiya Muslims? In fact, the seeds of this divisive ideology had been sown much earlier in the thoughts of leaders like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Muhammad Iqbal, and Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. In a speech delivered at Meerut on March 14, 1888, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan said, “The foremost question is—into whose hands will the power of this country fall? Suppose the British leave India—who will then rule? Can Hindus and Muslims sit together on the same throne? Certainly not. … Muslims may be fewer in number, but they are not weak; if needed, our Pathan brethren will descend from the mountains and make rivers of blood flow from the Frontier to Bengal. Who will be victorious after the British leave is in Allah’s hands, but one thing is certain: Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations, and until one subdues the other, there can be no peace in the land.” Muhammad Iqbal, who in 1904 had composed Tarana-e-Hind (“Hindi hain hum, watan hai Hindustan hamara”), by 1910 wrote Tarana-e-Milli (“Cheen-o-Arab hamara, Hindustan hamara, Muslim hain hum, watan hai sara jahan hamara”), explicitly portraying Muslims not merely as a religious community but as a separate nation.
On December 29, 1930, in his presidential address at the Muslim League session in Allahabad, Iqbal declared, “I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state. Whether within the British Empire or outside of it, I am convinced that the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.” Iqbal believed that Muslims, because of their distinct religious and cultural identity, could not coexist within a common framework. Thus, he too laid the ideological groundwork for the Two-Nation Theory based on religion.
In 1933, Chaudhary Rahmat Ali openly called for the creation of “Pakistan,” combining Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. All these ideas were nourished by a strand of political Islam that rejected the possibility of permanent and equal relations with non-Muslims. The argument ran that if Islam had once ruled Bharat for centuries, how could its followers now live as equals in a democratic and secular Bharat dominated by a Hindu majority? In the early years of the twentieth century, the Muslim League and the demand for a separate nation did not enjoy broad support. However, Jinnah’s confidence steadily grew because the British government—and even more, the then Congress leadership—kept conceding one Muslim League demand after another. The Muslim Waqf Act presented by Jinnah in 1911 remained in force until 1954 and was popularly known as the “Jinnah Law.”
In 1916, at the Lucknow Session, the agreement between Congress and the Muslim League formally recognized separate electorates for Muslims, further cementing the foundations of communal politics. Under the Government of India Act of 1935, the provincial elections of 1936–37 gave Jinnah significant success in Assam, Bengal, Bombay, the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh), and Madras Presidency—showing that Muslims outside what later became Pakistan trusted the Muslim League more than the Congress. After the Lahore Resolution of March 1940, the demand for Partition under Muslim League leadership began receiving widespread Muslim support.
On August 16, 1946, Jinnah’s proclamation of “Direct Action Day” virtually sealed the course toward Partition. In Calcutta alone, nearly six thousand people were killed. On October 10, 1946, at Noakhali (Bengal), under the leadership of Ghulam Sarwar Hussaini, an organized massacre of defenseless Hindus took place—thousands of women were brutalized, countless children slaughtered, and innumerable forced conversions occurred. At the time, Bengal was under a Muslim League interim government, and various reports revealed that Chief Minister Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy himself was instructing the Lalbazar Police Headquarters to halt action against the rioters. Just before Direct Action Day, 22 of Calcutta’s 24 police stations were placed under Muslim officers and two under Anglo-Indian officers, while most policemen were given three days’ leave without explanation. This massacre was not a sudden outbreak of frenzy but the result of a calculated conspiracy. In the end, Jinnah and the Muslim League’s threat—“Divide India or destroy India”—brought the then Congress leadership to its knees.
Since the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation Movement of 1919, the Congress had been blindly appeasing the Muslim community, ignoring the historical realities and civilizational differences between Hindus and Muslims. Jinnah, on the other hand, succeeded in convincing a large section of Muslims that in every aspect—religion, culture, literature, customs, history, and worldview—they were permanently distinct from Hindus. On March 22, 1940, speaking with absolute clarity while demanding a separate nation for Muslims, Jinnah declared, “Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literatures.
They neither intermarry nor dine together. Indeed, they belong to two different civilizations whose ideas and conceptions are opposed to each other. They have different views of life. Their sources of inspiration in history are different. Their heroes and their villains are different. Often the hero of one is the villain of the other; likewise, their victories and defeats overlap inversely.” In that period, Jinnah was not the sole voice sowing the poison of division into the social environment. His ideology was endorsed by almost the entire Muslim community of Bharat. This explains why, in the Constituent Assembly elections of 1946, the Muslim League won 73 of the 78 seats reserved for Muslims. Significantly, the League gained far greater support from Muslim-majority regions outside present-day Pakistan than within it: 100 percent in Madras, Bombay Presidency, and Odisha; 95 per cent in Bengal; 93 percent in Central Provinces and Berar; 91 percent in Assam; 86 per cent in undivided Punjab; 85 percent in Bihar; and 82 percent in the United Provinces (Uttarpradesh). It is noteworthy that Jinnah did not contest elections from Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Sindh, or even his birthplace Karachi, but rather from the Byculla seat in Bombay Presidency, and won. Similarly, several other top Muslim League leaders contested and won from regions outside what is now Pakistan.
The irony was that among the Muslims who had supported the demand for a separate homeland, nearly 3.5 crore continued to live in Bharat even after Partition. Many prominent Muslim League leaders—such as Mohammad Ismail, Syed Ahmad Mehdi, Begum Aijaz Rasul, Ahmad Ibrahim Sahib, Pokar Sahib, Tahir Mohammad, and Tajammul Hussain—did not move to their so-called dream country, Pakistan. Later, they joined the Congress and, aligning themselves with the rhetoric of so-called secular politics, enjoyed the fruits of power. Meanwhile, around 1.5 crore Hindus, Sikhs, and Sindhis who came to Bharat from Pakistan were rendered refugees in their own country, wandering from place to place.
The Partition riots claimed the lives of 10 to 12 lakh innocent people. Trains laden with corpses repeatedly arrived from across the border while our leaders stood by as mute spectators. Millions of families were driven like cattle from their ancestral homes, their hard-earned wealth and property seized by rioters, and the atrocities inflicted upon mothers and sisters crossed every limit of brutality and inhumanity. The Congress leadership committed grave errors in understanding the real character of Jinnah, the Muslim League, and political Islam—and they continued repeating these errors even after Independence. In the words of the renowned socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, “The very problems for which Partition was accepted remained exactly as they were even after Partition.” (Guilty Men of India’s Partition, p. 50)
As a result, Bharat still faces internal and external crises even today. After Partition, the newly formed Bhartiya state found itself hemmed in by hostile neighbors on two sides and simultaneously burdened with recurring internal communal strife. The wounds of Partition have repeatedly tormented Bharat over time. Hindus and Sikhs who remained in Pakistan and Bangladesh suffered horrific persecution. Whereas Hindus constituted about 15 percent of Pakistan’s population and 30 per cent of Bangladesh’s at Independence, these numbers have now fallen to just 1.61 percent and 7.95 percent respectively. Furthermore, many developed nations have often used Pakistan as a tool to exert pressure on Bharat. It is widely known that Pakistan has consistently sheltered and promoted terrorism against Bharat. It has become the safest haven for terrorists. To justify Partition in the eyes of its own people—or to divert attention from governmental incompetence—Pakistan has kept anti-Bharat hostility as its ultimate and sole objective, using religion like an opiate to inflame its citizens. Partition also created the entirely new and permanent problem of Kashmir, which to this day burdens Bharat’s politics, diplomacy, military apparatus, defense expenditure, and economy.
The Partition of Bharat was the largest displacement in human history. It was neither the result of a natural disaster nor of a foreign invasion, but rather the outcome of negotiations and impractical compromises among the Congress, the Muslim League, and British authorities—decisions in which the consent or dissent of the affected civil society had no weight. Even today, people from scholars to common citizens ask: Why did the Congress and its top leadership, which repeatedly vowed never to accept Partition under any circumstances, ultimately agree to it? The fact is that neither the Cripps Mission of 1942 nor the Cabinet Mission of 1946 contained any proposal for Partition. British Viceroys Lord Linlithgow and Lord Wavell themselves opposed Partition. Between October 1943 and February 1947, Lord Wavell repeatedly warned that Partition would not provide a lasting solution to the Hindu-Muslim problem; rather, it would lead to widespread violence, chaos, administrative collapse, and enduring hostility.
On February 4, 1946, he wrote in his diary, “Partition would be a most destructive process. It will not solve the communal problem but will make it permanent. It will leave Hindustan and Pakistan facing each other with the same problems, and bitterness will only increase.” What then compelled the Congress to accept the transfer-of-power and Partition plan proposed on 3 June 1947 by the new Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, who had arrived on 22 March 1947? At the press conference on 4 June 1947 at the Constitution Club in New Delhi, when journalists asked questions regarding population transfers, Mountbatten could not provide satisfactory answers—indicating that such a critical decision had been made without adequate deliberation on the human consequences. Even more astonishing, Mahatma Gandhi—who had always proclaimed, “Bharat will be partitioned over my dead body”—personally attended the Congress Working Committee meeting on June 14,1947, even though he was not a member at the time, and persuaded those present to accept Partition. Out of 400 desired members, only 200 attended the meeting, and just 158 participated in the vote. Of these, 129 voted in favor of Partition. H.V. Hodson writes in “The Great Divide: Britain–India–Pakistan” that between 29 March and 6 May 1947, Mountbatten held 133 meetings with Congress and Muslim League leaders. Can it not be said that these very meetings finalized the script of Partition and brought leaders into agreement? Another mystery demands close scrutiny: Why did the Congress, a party known for mass movements, satyagraha, and protest marches, not launch any movement or hunger strike against Partition? Why did it not call upon the people to take to the streets?
At that time, only the Congress and the Muslim League possessed the leverage to pressure the British government; no other party or organization had the standing to influence the decision. Because the Congress had earned the overwhelming trust of the people, the ultimate responsibility for accepting or rejecting Partition rested on its shoulders. It is a universally accepted principle that responsibility falls on the capable. Even when Mountbatten advanced the date of transfer of power from June 1948 to August 1947, the Congress leadership raised no objection—resulting in a disorganized and chaotic Partition. In the 1970s, during conversations with Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, Mountbatten admitted to haste, “I did not divide India. The plan for Partition had already been accepted by Indian leaders. My task was to carry it out as peacefully as possible. … I accept responsibility for the haste … but not for the subsequent violence. That responsibility lay with the Indians.” Worse still, only five weeks were allotted for drawing the boundaries—a gross act of negligence. As a result, even days after 15 August 1947, millions of people did not know whether their village or town lay in Bharat or Pakistan.
The man tasked with demarcating the boundary, Cyril Radcliffe, had never before set foot in Bharat and was unfamiliar with its geography or cultural complexities. Consequently, he divided 111 villages in such a way that half fell in Bharat and half in Pakistan. If the responsibility for this artificial, unnatural, impractical, and imbalanced Partition of an undivided Bharat does not lie with the Congress, the Muslim League, and Lord Mountbatten—then with whom does it lie?
The important question is whether Partition was truly inevitable, and if it was inevitable, why was a rational transfer of population not ensured?Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly known as “Frontier Gandhi,” was deeply hurt by Congress’s unilateral acceptance of Partition. He remarked: “You (Congress leadership) have thrown us to the wolves.” Not only he, but also many other leaders such as Allah Bakhsh Muhammad Umar Soomro, founder of the Sindh Ittehad Party, and Punjab’s Unionist Party leaders Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan and Malik Khizar Hayat Tiwana opposed Partition. Should Congress not have aligned with such people and parties, rather than appeasing the Muslim League and Jinnah, so that with their help the larger Muslim community could have been persuaded? Many historians and contemporary thinkers have opined that Bharat’s Partition and the creation of Pakistan were in no way inevitable. The famous writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri writes in The Continent of Circe (p. 243), “I can say with full confidence that even till the end of 1946, no one in Ibdia believed in the possibility of Partition.” Even Jinnah himself later admitted that he had no expectation of Partition.
According to British journalist Leonard Mosley (The Last Days of the British Raj, p. 239), Jinnah told his ADC Mian Ata Rabbani, “I never thought it would happen. I never expected that I would see Pakistan in my lifetime.” Jinnah’s biographer Stanley Wolpert also writes, “Except for two or three top leaders, most leaders of the Muslim League considered Partition impractical. They used it merely as a tool to pressure Congress into granting greater Muslim representation in any power-sharing arrangement.” These facts clearly show that Congress leaders gravely misjudged Jinnah and the prevailing circumstances. They underestimated him, and when conditions worsened, instead of showing political courage, they accepted Partition. In this context, an interview of Pandit Nehru taken by Leonard Mosley in 1960 is notable. Mosley asked, “Why were you in such a hurry for Partition? If you wished, it could have been avoided.” Nehru replied, “The truth was that we (Congress leadership) were tired. Our leadership was aging, and we no longer had the courage to go to jail. If we opposed Partition, prison awaited us. Punjab was burning, killings occurred daily. Amid all this, we chose the path of Partition. We thought Partition would be temporary — that Pakistan would return to us. But none of us could foresee how long it would last.” It is worth pondering that during centuries of foreign invasions, India maintained its geographical, social, and cultural identity intact. Whenever the opportunity arose, Bhartiya society, rulers, and warriors succeeded in regaining lost territories. But after the Partition of 1947, this historic tradition came to a permanent halt. This is the only instance in human history when, without a war, a few leaders — behind closed doors at a negotiation table — voluntarily cut off millions of their own citizens and vast tracts of land from their own nation. Did separatism, minority religion-based privileges, and the politics of exclusive identity end after Partition? Is it not true that once violent, anarchic groups have a demand accepted, their demands grow even stronger over time? Even today, political parties and leaders who profess so-called secularism repeat the same mistakes made before Partition — indulging in blind and dangerous appeasement of muslims, regardless of the consequences. Let it be remembered, history can neither be falsified nor selectively twisted to suit convenience. It must be accepted, written, and taught in its complete and truthful form, so that future generations may learn from past mistakes. If NCERT is taking meaningful steps in this direction, why object? History bears witness that any nation which does not learn from its past is doomed to repeat it.
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