I have been watching the Marvel show Ms. Marvel, which is about an American-Pakistani superheroine, and so far the show has had a sideplot about the India-Pakistan partition of 1947. As a German I know almost nothing about said partition.
The latest episode shows a scene of thousands of people fleeing per train to Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, supposedly from India. The trains are very overcrowded.
I then read the Wikipedia article about the partition and it says in the beginning:
The partition displaced between 10 and 20 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming calamity in the newly-constituted dominions.[2][3][4][5] It is often described as one of the largest refugee crises in history. There was large-scale violence, with estimates of the loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million.[1][a] The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that affects their relationship to this day.
But I don't quite understand. Why were there people fleeing? Did the partition include a clause that expelled all Muslim people from India? That cannot be it, because there are still a lot of Muslim people in India. So, if people weren't expelled, then why were they fleeing? Or was there now strong suppression of their rights and religion, which caused them to flee?
And how did this cause the deaths of several hundred thousand to two million people?
What happened during the times of Partition was communal violence that struck the hearts of people. A guy named Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of the nation state of Pakistan was very speculative of the Congress of India, considering how India has a Hindu majority and Muslims its largest minority. So a couple of years before it was properly proposed by him at a meeting called the Lahore Resolution, the idea was considered prepoustorous and was still considered so, by many, before the idea was put forward in Lahore Resolution, after its proposal and even today, because it divided people who were living together, shared similar culture, they were one but got seperated by the politicians. Jinnah would go on to vehemently ask for a independent region of Muslims and would settle for nothing less which fruitioned into Pakistan. He called for a Direct Action Day for the cause of Pakistan which turned violent in Calcutta and it spread like wild fire to various other places including Noakhali, Rakhigarhi, Bihar, Patna etc. Communal Hindus and Muslims killed millions of each other, it was nothing short of a civil war. This violence was primarily caused by a feeling of revenge and lex talionis, the people didn't believe that a partition would come until eventually it did and then HAD to move to their side for feeling safe. India was made largely Hindu but secular state while Pakistan a Muslim state, felt threatened by the violence, Muslims near the borders in India would move into Pakistan and Hindus in Pakistan would move to India. Many Muslims down south, atleast in the rural areas, were unaffected by it because they were safe and no violence happened in the south. They were fleeing for safety, there were no clauses Partition that would ask the people to move, the people just did to feel safe.
You could check out a well made video by Vox Borders on partition, it must be titled something like How the British divided India or something on those lines, just hit up Vox Borders India and its the first video