The Real Reason Britain Partitioned India and Pakistan

On August 14, 1947, British India was divided into two separate nations, displacing more than 14 million people and killing as many as 2 million. The conventional story is that partition happened because of religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims, but recently declassified documents from the Whitehall archives suggest a different motive. The answer is oil. By 1945, Britain was no longer the supreme power it had been before the Second World War, and the strategic oil reserves of the Middle East were now dangerously exposed to Soviet expansion. A report prepared by the Post Hostilities Planning Staff for Winston Churchill's War Cabinet predicted that by the 1950s, the Soviet Union would be the only major power capable of threatening British interests in India and the Indian Ocean. The fear of Russian southward expansion was not new. For nearly a century, the Great Game had pitted the British Empire against the Russian Empire across Central Asia. After 1945, that rivalry shifted toward the oil corridors of Persia and the Middle East. British strategists, including Sir Olaf Caroe, the former governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, argued in his book Wells of Power that a separate Pakistan would serve as a strategic buffer between the Soviet sphere and the Persian Gulf. The Indian National Congress had resigned from the provincial government during the war, and Gandhi had advised the British to surrender to Hitler. Jinnah and the Muslim League, by contrast, supported the British war effort. When these forces converged with the strategic need for a buffer state, partition became the preferred outcome in Whitehall. The vision laid out by Caroe was inherited almost seamlessly by American policy, visible in Pakistan's accession to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in 1954, the Baghdad Pact of 1955, and the use of Pakistani territory to launch operations against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan after 1979. This video draws on declassified War Cabinet documents from the Whitehall archives, Sir Olaf Caroe's Wells of Power (1951), and the diaries of Field Marshal Lord Wavell to examine how oil and Soviet containment shaped the partition of 1947. References: The Shadow of the Great Game: https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Great-G... Other Men's Flowers: An Anthology of Petry by Lord Wavell: https://www.amazon.com/Other-mens-flo...