article: It's about 700km (430 miles) from Delhi to Islamabad - less than the distance between London and Geneva. A short hop in aviation terms. But you can't fly non-stop from the Indian capital to the Pakistani capital. There are no direct flights at all. It is only one of the legacies of seven decades of mutual suspicion and tension. Take another example: cricket. India and Pakistan played each other a few weeks ago in the final of the Champions' Trophy. Both countries are cricket crazy. However, the game was played not in South Asia, but in London. India and Pakistan don't play cricket in each other's countries any more, although they have met in one-day matches around the world, including in countries in their region like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. But it is almost 10 years since they faced each other on South Asian soil in a Test match. Despite a lot of shared culture and history, they are not simply rivals, but more like enemies. In the 70 years since India and Pakistan gained independence, they have fought three wars. Some would say four, although when their armies last fought in 1999, there was no formal declaration of war. The simmering tension between India and Pakistan is one of the world's most enduring geopolitical fault lines. It has prompted both countries to develop their own nuclear weapons. So the uneasy stand-off is much more than a regional dispute: it is fraught with wider danger. India and Pakistan gained their independence at the same moment. British rule over India, by far its biggest colony, ended on 15 August 1947. After months of political deadlock, Britain agreed to divide the country in two. A separate and mainly Muslim nation, Pakistan, was created to meet concerns that the large Muslim minority would be at a disadvantage in Hindu-majority India. This involved partitioning two of India's biggest provinces, Punjab and Bengal. The details of where the new international boundary would lie were made public only two days after independence. Partition triggered one of the great calamities of the modern era, perhaps the biggest movement of people - outside war and famine - that the world has ever seen. No one knows the precise numbers, but about 12 million people became refugees as they sought desperately to move from one newly independent nation to another. Amid a terrible slaughter in which all main communities were both aggressors and victims, somewhere between half a million and a million people were killed. Tens of thousands of women were abducted, usually by men of a different religion. In Punjab in particular, where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had lived together for generations and spoke the same language, a stark segregation was brought about as Muslims headed west to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs fled east to India. This was not a civil war with battle lines and rival armies - but nor was it simply spontaneous violence. On all sides, local militias and armed gangs planned how to inflict the greatest harm on those they had come to see as
summary: As India and Pakistan celebrate 70 years of independence, Andrew Whitehead looks at the lasting legacy of the Partition of British India, and the turmoil and trauma which marred the birth of the two nations.