[Jawaharlal Nehru : The first Prime Minister of Independent India]

"..in a few months about 500,000 people, Hindus and Muslims were killed and millions became homeless. Such wanton killing of innocent people had never occurred in the history of India before.."

The year 1947 dawned with the darkest possible prospects on the political horizon. India seemed to be sliding into an undeclared, albeit confused civil war, with the battle lines passing through every town and village. The Central government, split top to bottom, was unable to set an example of cohesion and firmness to the governments in the provinces. After the ‘Great Calcutta Killing’ and the disturbances in Bengal and Bihar, communal violence became the strongest argument in Jinnah’s brief for Pakistan.'If India was not divided’, he warned, 'worse things would happen.’

In the spring of 1947 the choice seemed to the Congress to be between anarchy and partition, they resigned themselves to the latter in order to salvage three-fourths of India from the chaos that threatened the whole country. In March 1947, Lord Mountbatten, who came to India as the new viceroy, presented a plan for the division into 2 independent states- India and Pakistan.

In 1946, there had been riots in Bengal, Bihar, Bombay and other places in which thousands of Hindus and Muslims were killed. The announcement of partition was followed by more riots, particularly in the Punjab. In a few months about 500,000 people, Hindus and Muslims were killed and millions became homeless. Such wanton killing of innocent people had never occurred in the history of India before. Many people of all communities devoted themselves to the cause of restoring sanity. These events caused terrible anguish to Gandhiji who had devoted his life to the cause of Hindu Muslim unity. He toured the riot-ravaged areas and plunged himself entirely into the task of restoring peace and sanity. To Gandhiji, the violence of 1946-47 was a shocking and even a bewildering phenomenon. All his life he had worked for the day when India would set an example of non-violence to the world. The chasm between what he cherished in his heart and what he saw was so great that he could not help feeling a deep sense of failure. ‘We are not yet in the midst of a civil war’, he had commented of the Great Calcutta Killing, ‘but we are nearing it.’ From the end of October 1946, when he had left Delhi for Noakhali, he had made the assuaging of communal fanaticism his primary mission.