Genesis and Growth of Communalism and Partition of India

Separate electorates were introduced in 1909 as a limited constitutional device. By 1947, the logic those electorates set in motion had split the subcontinent into two countries. This topic traces how a colonial administrative choice hardened, over four decades, into the idea that Hindus and Muslims were two separate political nations who could not share one government.

In two minutes

Communalism in Indian politics grew from separate electorates in 1909, through the Lucknow Pact's uneasy compromise and the Communal Award's extension of the same logic, into the Muslim League's two-nation theory and the Lahore Resolution of 1940 — a trajectory that ended in the Partition of India in 1947.

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