The division of British India was poorly planned and brutally carried out, as fear and revenge attacks led to a bloody sectarian ‘cleansing’
Yasmin Khan
Sun 6 Aug 2017 00.04 BST
On 3 June 1947, only six weeks before British India was carved up, a group of eight men sat around a table in New Delhi and agreed to partition the south Asian subcontinent.
Photographs taken at that moment reveal the haunted and nervous faces of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian National Congress leader soon to become independent India’s first prime minister, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, head of the Muslim League and Pakistan’s first governor-general and Louis Mountbatten,the last British viceroy.
Yet the public also greeted this agreement with some cautious hope. Nobody who agreed to the plan realised that partition was unleashing one of the worst calamities of the 20th century. Only weeks later, the full scale of the tragedy was apparent. READ MORE
