section_path: After World War II/Decolonization and the rise of nationalism in Asia/British in India and the Middle East
section_name: British in India and the Middle East
paragraph_text: British in India and the Middle East
  
  In India, the westward movement of Japanese forces towards Bengal during World War II had led to major concessions on the part of British authorities to Indian nationalist leaders. In 1947, the United Kingdom, devastated by war and embroiled in an economic crisis at home, granted British India its independence as two nations: India and Pakistan. Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka (Ceylon), which is also part of British India, also gained their independence from the United Kingdom the following year, in 1948. In the Middle East, the United Kingdom granted independence to Jordan in 1946 and two years later, in 1948, ended its mandate of Palestine becoming the independent nation of Israel.
  
  Following the end of the war, nationalists in Indonesia demanded complete independence from the Netherlands. A brutal conflict ensued, and finally, in 1949, through United Nations mediation, the Dutch East Indies achieved independence, becoming the new nation of Indonesia. Dutch imperialism moulded this new multi-ethnic state comprising roughly 3,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago with a population at the time of over 100 million.
  
  The end of Dutch rule opened up latent tensions between the roughly 300 distinct ethnic groups of the islands, with the major ethnic fault line being between the Javanese and the non-Javanese.
  
  Dutch New Guinea was under the Dutch administration until 1962 (see also West New Guinea dispute).