India's 1947 Partition displaced 14 million in just 70 days

Partition is the canonical case-study for what happens when a state's territorial geography is decided faster than its political consensus matures. The decision to divide was politically necessary by mid-1947 — neither Congress nor League could govern jointly without one absorbing the other — but Mountbatten's decision to move the date forward by ten months, from June 1948 to August 1947, made the violence vastly worse than it had to be. The lessons cited by political scientists ever since: (1) borders need ethnographic preparation, not just census data; (2) population transfers, when they happen, need protection forces large enough to deter armed groups; (3) national leaders need to walk the borders themselves to see what is happening, as Gandhi did in Bengal; (4) post-partition reconciliation is a generational project, not a treaty. Almost every subsequent partition — Korea (1948), Cyprus (1974), Yugoslavia (1991-99), South Sudan (2011) — was studied with reference to India 1947, sometimes for what to copy, more often for what to avoid. India and Pakistan have fought four wars since independence, and the unresolved Kashmir dispute — a Muslim-majority princely state whose accession to India was contested from day one — remains a direct product of Radcliffe's line and Mountbatten's compressed timetable. An estimated 15-20 million people were uprooted in what stands as the largest forced mass migration in recorded human history. The consequence of rushed borders echoes through every generation that follows.