Why Do India and Pakistan Hate Each Other?

Mr. Beat explains the scary India/Pakistan rivalry.

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Produced by Matt Beat. Music by Electric Needle Room (Mr. Beat's band). All images and video either by Matt Beat, found in the public domain, or used under fair use guidelines.

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Anil Kaushik

Azm Rehman

Usman

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India and Pakistan. Two major Asian countries. Both own nukes, and the world was scared they might actually use those nukes against each other back in 1999. Some folks are scared that might use them against each other TODAY. Holy crap. But woah...don’t click away now...I don’t mean to get you scared. Let’s go back and take a look at the history of India–Pakistan relations.

We will begin this story with the end of British Raj...aka British rule on the Indian subcontinent. Yep, the British controlled all that. But in 1947, the British Parliament granted all of it independence. But it would be tricky. It created two new dominion states: the Union of India and Dominion of Pakistan. However, there were over 500 sovereign princely states ruled by local monarchs, as well as French, Portuguese, and Omani territories on the subcontinent.

The princely states had the option to join India or Pakistan by signing the Instrument of Accession, or they could remain independent.

So why just these two new states? Why just Pakistan and India? Well it all was rooted in what is known as the two-nation theory.

The two-nation theory argued that the main unifying force for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent was their religion, not their language or ethnicity, and that they should all be together in one country. And therefore, Hindus and Muslims were two distinct nations. The Dominion of Pakistan would mainly be a Muslim state, and the Union of India would mainly be a Hindu state.

At midnight on August 15th, 1947, India and Pakistan legally came into existence. Within a period of less than 4 years, at least 14.5 million people migrated on the subcontinent. Millions of Muslims left everything they had behind to either West Pakistan or East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh, and millions of Hindus headed the opposite direction.

It was one of the biggest and most rapid migrations in human history. And this mass migration wasn’t pretty. Hundreds of thousands did not make it. Although Hindus, Muslims, and this other religious group called the Sikhs had got along for the most part for hundreds of years, now there was an outbreak of sectarian violence, usually with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other.

It’s estimated as many as 2 million people were killed after the Partition of India. It also led to a refugee crisis. Things were particularly violent in Punjab, a region in India that was the heart of the largest Sikh community in the world and bordered West Pakistan, and Bengal, a region in India that bordered East Pakistan.