I mean, after all, there's plenty of violence in India's past and in its heroic epics, but Gandhi managed to harken back to a past that used nonviolence to bring change. Gandhi and his compatriot Jawaharlal Nehru believed that a single India could continue to be ruled by Indian elites and somehow transcend the tension between the country's Hindu majority and its sizable Muslim minority. In this, they were less practical than their contemporary, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, who felt, to quote historian Ainsley Embry, that the unified India of which the Congress spoke was an artificial one, created and maintained by British bayonets. Jinnah proved correct, and in 1947, when the British left, their Indian colony was partitioned into the modern state of India and West and East Pakistan, the latter of which became Bangladesh in 1971. While it's easy to congratulate both the British and the Indian governments on an orderly and nonviolent transfer of power, the reality of partition was neither orderly nor nonviolent. About 12 million people were displaced as Hindus in Pakistan moved to India and Muslims in India moved to Pakistan. As people left their homes, sometimes unwillingly, there was violence, and all told, as many as half a million people were killed, more than died in the bloody Indonesian battle for independence.