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The story of history of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan began on 14 August 1947 when the country came into being in the form of Dominion of Pakistan within the British Commonwealth as the result of Pakistan Movement and the partition of India. While the history of the Pakistani Nation according to the Pakistan government's official chronology ...
- 1843
- 1848
- 1843
- 1848-1849
- Overview
- The early republic
Like India, Pakistan achieved independence from British rule as a dominion within the Commonwealth on August 14-15, 1947, the former day celebrated annually as the country’s Independence Day. However, the leaders of the Muslim League rejected Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy of India, to be Pakistan’s first governor-general, or head of state—in contrast to the Congress, which made him India’s chief executive. Wary of Britain’s machinations and desirous of rewarding Jinnah—their “Great Leader” (Quaid-e Azam), a title he was given before independence—Pakistanis made him their governor-general; his lieutenant in the party, Liaquat Ali Khan, was named prime minister. Pakistan’s first government, however, had a difficult task before it. Unlike Muhammad Iqbal’s earlier vision for Pakistan, the country had been formed from the two regions where Muslims were the majority—the northwestern portion he had espoused and the territories and the eastern region of Bengal province (which itself had also been divided between India and Pakistan). Pakistan’s two wings, therefore, were separated by some 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of sovereign Indian territory with no simple routes of communication between them. Further complicating the work of the new Pakistani government was the realization that the wealth and resources of British India had been granted to India. Pakistan had little but raw enthusiasm to sustain it, especially during those months immediately following partition. In fact, Pakistan’s survival seemed to hang in the balance. Of all the well-organized provinces of British India, only the comparatively less developed areas of Sind, Balochistan, and the North-West Frontier Province came to Pakistan intact. The otherwise more developed provinces of Punjab and Bengal were divided, and, in the case of Bengal, Pakistan received little more than the densely populated rural hinterland.
Adding to the dilemma of the new and untested Pakistan government was the crisis in Kashmir, which provoked a war between the two neighbouring states in the period immediately following their independence. Both Pakistan and India intended to make Kashmir a component of their respective unions, and the former princely state quickly became disputed territory—with India and Pakistan controlling portions of it—and a flash point for future conflicts. Economically, the situation in Pakistan was desperate; materials from the Indian factories were cut off from Pakistan, disrupting the new country’s meagre industry, commerce, and agriculture. Moreover, the character of the partition and its aftermath had caused the flight of millions of refugees on both sides of the divide, accompanied by terrible massacres. The exodus of such a vast number of desperate people in each direction required an urgent response, which neither country was prepared to manage, least of all Pakistan.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah died in September 1948, only 13 months after Pakistan’s independence. Nevertheless, it was Jinnah’s dynamic personality that sustained the country during those difficult months. Assuming responsibility as the nation’s chief and virtually only decision maker, Jinnah held more than the ceremonial position of his British counterpar...
The 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent into the independent nations of Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan was accompanied by one of the largest mass migrations in human history and violence on a scale that had seldom been seen before. As the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal were effectively split in half approximately ...
Civil war between East and West Pakistan in 1971 resulted in independence for Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) in 1972. Many Afghan refugees migrated to Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s and remained there during the Taliban and post-Taliban periods.
Pakistan - Partition, Independence, Conflict: This section presents the history of Pakistan from the partition of British India (1947) to the present. For a discussion of the earlier history of the region, see India. The call for establishing an independent Islamic state on the Indian subcontinent can be traced to a 1930 speech by Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a poet-philosopher and, at the time ...
Aug 8, 2017 · December 16, 1971. After a brutal and bloody war, East Pakistan gains independence from West Pakistan. It becomes the nation of Bangladesh, founded by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Seventy years have ...
From 1947 to 1956, Pakistan was a Dominion in the Commonwealth of Nations.The republic declared in 1958 was stalled by a coup d''etat by Ayub Khan (1958–69), who was president during a period of internal instability and a second war with India in 1965. His successor, Yahya Khan (1969–71) had to deal with the cyclone which caused ...
