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Soon after Vasco da Gama discovered a sea route to India in 1498, European traders began to make their presence felt in Asia. The East India Company was founded by British merchants in 1600, and over the next two and a half centuries the company gradually extended its control through military and political means. By the time the company was disbanded in 1858, Punjab and Sindh had become part of British India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire.
The North-West Frontier Province and Balochistan were highly valued as buffer states against Russia, and by the beginning of the 20th century the whole of what is now Pakistan was part of British India.
Many historians attribute the creation of Pakistan to the policies of the British in India. The spread of Western education, in particular, had the effect of alienating Moslems, who were more inclined to insist on their own religious schools than Hindus. At the same time, the British were willing to exploit the religious differences in order to weaken the threat posed by the Indians' demand for self-government.
By the end of World War II, independence for India was inevitable, but the British had come to think that an independent Moslem state was also inevitable. In 1946, 5,000 people died during religious conflicts in the city of Calcutta. The pressure for a new Moslem state was spearheaded by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a man whose name is inseparable from the birth of Pakistan.
When Muhammad Ali Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress as a young man, the congress represented both Hindu and Moslem aspirations for self-determination. At first Jinnah was an ardent supporter of Hindu-Moslem unity, but he became disillusioned with Mohandas Gandhi's leadership of the Congress, and in 1930- he left for England. By the time he returned in 1934, he had abandoned the idea of Hindu-Moslem unity and was stridently advocating a separate home for India's Moslems.
Jinnah campaigned for an independent Pakistan, which means "the land of the pure" in Urdu. The big problem was how to determine which parts of India would become Pakistan. "I don't care how little you give me," Jinnah said to the British, completely."
When Jinnah's Pakistan emerged into history in 1947, it was unique, consisting of two parts separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. In the northwest, Sindh, Punjab, the North -West Frontier Province, and Balochistan became West Pakistan, and in the northeast, Bengal became East Pakistan. The Bengalis shared the Moslem religion with the West Pakistanis, but had little in common culturally and economically. Even their language was different. The two sections were a thousand miles apart in more ways than one.
Jinnah was the first governor-general of the new country and president of its Assembly, but his success was short-lived. He died on September 11, 1948.