The independence of India and the partition with Pakistan

On the night of 15 August 1947 Britain hands power to two new states: India with its Hindu majority, and Pakistan, cut out of its western and eastern edges for the Muslims. Thirty years of the independence movement under Gandhi—with its refusal of violence, its marches and its fasts—end in freedom, but also in partition: the border is drawn in haste, and some fifteen million people cross it in both directions, while in the massacres on the way die, by varying estimates, from two hundred thousand to a million. In January 1948 Gandhi is killed by a Hindu nationalist. A year after India, Israel too will gain independence—both countries born of Britain's departure, and both with a partition.