As the clock struck midnight, Pakistan emerged as a sovereign nation, one day ahead of India's own independence. Muhammad Ali Jinnah became the new nation's first Governor-General. The partition that created it triggered one of the largest and bloodiest mass migrations in human history, as Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs crossed new borders amid communal violence.
The British had ruled the subcontinent for nearly two centuries, and their departure was rushed: the Radcliffe Line dividing India and Pakistan was drawn by a British lawyer who had never before set foot in India, working with maps and census data in barely five weeks. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, gaunt and dying of tuberculosis he had concealed from the British and even his own party, addressed the new Constituent Assembly in Karachi, declaring that Pakistan would protect all faiths equally.
The joy of independence arrived alongside catastrophe. An estimated 10 to 20 million people crossed the new borders in each direction, Muslims fleeing to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs fleeing to India, in trains and columns choked with refugees. Estimates of the dead in the accompanying violence range from 200,000 to two million. Jinnah himself would not survive to see Pakistan's first anniversary, dying in September 1948, his vision of a pluralistic Pakistan already contested by the nation he had midwifed into being.