South Asia
The British faced a similar problem on a much larger scale in India, whose population included 250,000,000 Hindus, 90,000,000 Muslims, and 60,000,000 distributed among various ethnic and religious minorities. Between the wars Mohandas Gandhi’s passive-resistance campaigns had crystallized Indian nationalism, which was nurtured in part by the relative leniency of British rule. Parliament set in motion the process leading to home rule in 1935, and the Attlee Cabinet rewarded India for its wartime loyalty by instructing Lord Mountbatten on Feb. 20, 1947, to prepare India for independence by June 1948. He did so, too hastily, in only six months, and the partition of the subcontinent into a mainly Hindu India and a mainly Muslim but divided Pakistan (including part of Bengal in the east) at midnight on Aug. 14–15, 1947, was accompanied by panicky flight and riots between Hindus and Muslims that claimed between 200,000 and 600,000 lives. Perhaps a bloodbath was inevitable whatever Mountbatten did or however long he took to do it. Nothing, however, tarnished Britain’s colonial record in India so much as its termination. The Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru then took firm control and governed the Dominion (after 1950 the Republic) of India in parliamentary style and made India one of the first decolonized states to adopt a posture of nonalignment among the great powers. Disputes with Pakistan, especially over the contested province of Jammu and Kashmir, however, ensured continued strife on the subcontinent.
Elsewhere in South Asia the colonial powers expelled the Japanese only to confront indigenous nationalist forces. The British fought a successful counterinsurgency against Communist guerrillas in Malaya, but the French waged a protracted and ultimately unsuccessful war with the Communist Viet Minh in Indochina, while the Dutch failed to subdue nationalists in Indonesia and granted independence in 1949. The United States transferred power peacefully in the Philippines in 1946.
In Japan, the American occupation under General Douglas MacArthur effected a peaceful revolution, restoring civil rights, universal suffrage, and parliamentary government, reforming education, encouraging labour unions, and emancipating women. In the 1947 constitution drafted by MacArthur’s staff Japan renounced war and limited its military to a token force. During the Korean War a majority of the Allies signed a separate peace treaty and the United States entered into a mutual security pact with Japan (Sept. 8, 1951). These policies laid the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous Japan, but the United States took upon itself the burden of defending the western Pacific for the foreseeable future.