Every August, Pakistan and India celebrate the anniversary of their independence with ceremonies, flags and patriotic songs.

Beneath the jubilation lies another memory that is inseparable from the birth of the two nations. The partition of British India in 1947 was one of the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in modern history. The exact toll will never be known, but historians estimate that the Partition uprooted 14-20 million people and claimed 500,000 to 1 million lives. 75,000-100,000 women were abducted, raped or forcibly married. Whole villages were swept within weeks. The Punjab, where diverse faith communities had lived together for centuries, became the epicentre of this human tragedy.

The demographic scars remain visible even today. A landmark study by Kenneth Hill and others, based on the population censuses of 1931, 1941 and 1951, estimated that the Punjab’s 1951 population should have been 2.9 million larger. Instead, partition caused 2.3-3.2 million demographic losses through deaths, displacement and unrecorded migration, with excess mortality and migration reaching 2.7 million above expected level. The study concluded that the Partition transformed the Punjab from one of South Asia’s most religiously diverse regions into one that had become dramatically segregated within a matter of months.

The violence of 1947 is often remembered as a spontaneous eruption of communal hatred, mass hysteria or the collapse of law and order. These explanations are not baseless, but they are incomplete. They overlook a deeper historical and political process that had already transformed much of Europe before it reached South Asia. The violent Partition of India did not occur in isolation. It unfolded during an era when states across the world were increasingly re-organising around the nation-state; a belief that every nation deserved its own state and that every state should belong primarily to one nation. When diverse societies were forced into that political mould, minorities frequently became obstacles rather than fellow citizens.

Political scientist Jerry Z Muller argues that this was one of the defining dynamics of the 20th Century history. In his influential essay, Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism, Muller contends that the transition from multi-ethnic empires to nation-states rarely occurred peacefully where populations were deeply intermixed. Instead, the pursuit of ethnically homogeneous states often produced forced migration, population exchanges and ethnic cleansing. Europe’s experience before and after the two World Wars demonstrates that the tragedy of August 1947 was part of a much broader historical pattern rather than an exceptional event.

Before the 20th Century, Europe was shaped not by nation-states but by multi-ethnic empires. The Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian Empires governed dozens of linguistic, religious and ethnic communities. Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, Jews, Croats, Serbs, Greeks and Armenians often lived side by side, owing allegiance to emperors rather than ethnic majorities. Diversity was not an exception but the political norm.

The 19th Century transformed this order. Inspired by the French Revolution, nationalism asserted that sovereignty belonged to “the people,“ increasingly defined by a common language, ancestry and history. Industrialisation, public education, newspapers and compulsory military service forged shared national identities. The state was no longer expected merely to govern territory; it was expected to embody a nation.

Not everyone embraced this vision. In 1862, British historian Lord Acton warned that equating the state with a single nationality threatened liberty, as minorities would inevitably become outsiders in their own countries. His warning proved prophetic. Following the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman Empires in 1917-18, the Paris Peace Conference redrew Europe’s map in the name of national self-determination. Yet the new states contained about 60 million people, including 25 million ethnic minorities. Instead of resolving the minority question, nation-state building often deepened it, as governments privileged majority languages, identities and histories. Diversity increasingly came to be seen as a political liability.

The search for homogeneous nation-states soon moved beyond administrative discrimination to the physical separation of peoples. The first internationally sanctioned example came after the Greco-Turkish War. Under the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations (January 30, 1923), later incorporated into the Treaty of Lausanne (July 24, 1923), almost 1.5 million Orthodox Greeks were expelled from Turkey and nearly 400,000 Muslims from Greece. Families rooted in their homelands for generations became foreigners overnight because they belonged to the “wrong” religion or ethnicity. Far from being condemned, the exchange was widely accepted as a practical solution to ethnic conflict. Decades later, in December 1944, Winston Churchill defended compulsory population transfers in the House of Commons, invoking the Treaty of Lausanne as proof that “a clean sweep” of mixed populations could prevent future conflict and secure lasting peace.

This logic gathered momentum during the interwar years as governments increasingly defined citizenship in ethnic rather than civic terms. Jews became particular targets of exclusion. According to Muller, people of Jewish descent made up nearly half of all doctors and lawyers in Budapest, Vienna and Warsaw before World War II. As nationalism intensified during the 1930s, restrictions on Jewish education, employment and public life spread across Europe before Nazi Germany turned discrimination into systematic persecution and genocide.

The end of World War II accelerated rather than ended Europe’s demographic upheaval. Between 1944 and 1947, five million Germans fled the advancing Soviet Army and another seven million were expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia; around 12 million people in what Muller calls the largest forced population movement in European history. Hundreds of thousands died through violence, starvation and disease. Meanwhile, 1.5 million Poles were resettled from Soviet-annexed territories, 500,000 Ukrainians transferred in the opposite direction. Centuries-old Jewish communities virtually disappeared. About 220,000 Jewish survivors passed through the American occupation zone of Germany before emigrating, largely to Israel and the United States. By the late 1940s, Europe had become far more ethnically segregated than it had been in 1914. Scholars like Muller argue that Europe’s post-1945 stability partly resulted from decades of war, expulsions and population transfers that reduced ethnic diversity, although many historians credit democracy, economic reconstruction and European integration for reshaping the continent.

None of this suggests that the Partition of India simply replicated the European experience. Yet the broad pattern is striking. In both Europe and the Indian subcontinent, projects of nation-state building collided with societies that had evolved over centuries through coexistence, migration and cultural overlap. Where political borders sought to correspond neatly with singular national identities, mixed populations became vulnerable. Violence, displacement and forced migration were repeatedly justified as unfortunate but necessary steps towards creating stable states.

For South Asia, this history carries an important lesson. Remembering Partition solely as a story of communal hatred risks obscuring the larger political ideas that made such violence, displacement and bloodshed possible. It was not simply a failure of coexistence but the consequence of a political imagination that equated the state with a single nation. Minorities ceased to be equal citizens and became problems to be managed, removed or assimilated.

In an age when exclusive nationalisms are once again gaining ground across the world, that may be the most important lesson August has left us.

The writer is a youth and social development consultant. He can be reached at [email protected].