Partition unleashed untold misery and loss of lives and property as millions of Hindu and Muslim refugees fled either Pakistan or India. The violence in 1947 was exceptionally brutal and large in scale; but the underlying attitudes had long been in the making. Families were torn apart in a population exchange that uprooted more than 14 million people during the months after independence. By one account, over 8 million refugees poured across borders to regions completely foreign to them, whith other accounts state that about 7 million people migrated to Pakistan from India and vice-versa. By another estimate, Partition resulted in the forced movement of 20 million people (Hindus and Sikhs to India and Muslims to Pakistan). Most estimates of the numbers of people who crossed the boundaries between India and Pakistan in 1947 range between 10 and 12 million.
The migrations and the violence were regionally confined. They were not all-India phenomena. Partition brought, by one estimate, five million refugees from east Punjab to west Punjab after the British decided to leave their Indian empire in the hands of the successor states of India and Pakistan. While 5 million people left India for Pakistan, about the same number of people moved in the other direction. By another estimate, 4 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West to East Punjab and 5 to 6 million Muslims moved from East to West Punjab. In the late 1940s, more than one-quarter of Punjab's population of about 19 million was made up of refugees. Sikhs, caught in the middle of Punjab's new "line," suffered the highest percentage of casualties. Most Sikhs finally settled in India's much-diminished border state of Punjab. Some though the Punjab disturbances were the direct result of Mountbatten's unwisdom in accelerating the date of partition, and that if Punjab had been given time, the terrible massacre of August, September and October could have been avoided.
The death toll of this terrible episode remains very much contested. Hundreds of thousands of people died, as Hindus and Sikhs fled to India, Muslims to Pakistan, and many others were caught up in a chaotic transition. A consensus figure of 500,000 is often used, but the sources closer to the truth give figures that range between 200,000 and 360,000 dead. By other estimates, Partition resulted in as many as 1.5 million deaths. The word genocide did not come to the minds of observers at the time, though there were genocidal aspects to what finally developed.
