The Partition of India of 1947 was the division of British India into two independent dominion states, the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan. The Union of India is today the Republic of India; the partition involved the division of two provinces and Punjab, based on district-wise non-Muslim or Muslim majorities. The partition saw the creation of the British Indian Army, the Royal Indian Navy, the Indian Civil Service, the railways, the central treasury; the partition was outlined in the Indian Independence Act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of the British Raj, or Crown rule in India. The two self-governing countries of India and Pakistan came into existence at midnight on 14–15 August 1947; the partition displaced between 10–12 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that plagues their relationship to the present.

The term partition of India does not cover the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971, nor the earlier separations of Burma and Ceylon from the administration of British India. The term does not cover the political integration of princely states into the two new dominions, nor the disputes of annexation or division arising in the princely states of Hyderabad and Jammu and Kashmir, though violence along religious lines did break out in some princely states at the time of the partition, it does not cover the incorporation of the enclaves of French India into India during the period 1947–1954, nor the annexation of Goa and other districts of Portuguese India by India in 1961. Other contemporaneous political entities in the region in 1947, Bhutan and the Maldives were unaffected by the partition. Among princely states, the violence was highly organised with the involvement or complacency of the rulers, it is believed that in the Sikh states the Maharajas were complacent in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims, while other Maharajas such as those of Patiala and Bharatpur were involved in ordering them.

The ruler of Bharatpur is said to have witnessed the ethnic cleansing of his population at places such as Deeg. In 1905, the viceroy, Lord Curzon, in his second term, divided the largest administrative subdivision in British India, the Bengal Presidency, into the Muslim-majority province of East Bengal and Assam and the Hindu-majority province of Bengal. Curzon's act, the Partition of Bengal—which some considered administratively felicitous, contemplated by various colonial administrations since the time of Lord William Bentinck, but never acted upon—was to transform nationalist politics as nothing else before it; the Hindu elite of Bengal, among them many who owned land in East Bengal, leased out to Muslim peasants, protested fervidly. The large Bengali Hindu middle-class, upset at the prospect of Bengalis being outnumbered in the new Bengal province by Biharis and Oriyas, felt that Curzon's act was punishment for their political assertiveness; the pervasive protests against Curzon's decision took the form predominantly of the Swadeshi campaign and involved a boycott of British goods.

Sporadically—but flagrantly—the protesters took to political violence that involved attacks on civilians. The violence, was not effective, as most planned attacks were either pre-empted by the British or failed; the rallying cry for both types of protest was the slogan Bande Mataram, the title of a song by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which invoked a mother goddess, who stood variously for Bengal and the Hindu goddess Kali. The unrest spread from Calcutta to the surrounding regions of Bengal when Calcutta's English-educated students returned home to their villages and towns; the religious stirrings of the slogan and the political outrage over the partition were combined as young men, in groups such as Jugantar, took to bombing public buildings, staging armed robberies, assassinating British officials. Since Calcutta was the imperial capital, both the outrage and the slogan soon became nationally known; the overwhelming, but predominantly Hindu, protest against the partition of Bengal and the fear, in its wake, of reforms favouring the Hindu majority, now led the Muslim elite in India, in 1906, to meet with the new viceroy, Lord Minto, to ask for separate electorates for Muslims.

In conjunction, they demanded proportional legislative representation reflecting both their status as former rulers and their record of cooperating with the British, this led, in December 1906, to the founding of the All-India Muslim League in Dacca. Although Curzon, by now, had resigned his position over a dispute with his military chief Lord Kitchener and returned to England, the League was in favor of his partition plan; the Muslim elite's position, reflected in the League's position, had crystallized over the previous three decades, beginning with the 1871 Census of British India, which had first estimated the populations in regions of Muslim majority. (For his part, Curzon's desire to court the Muslims of East Bengal had arisen from British anxieties since the 1871 census, the first comprehensive census there—and in light of the history of Muslims fighting them in the 1857 Mutin

Clarges Street is a street in the City of Westminster, London. The street runs from Clarges Mews in the north to Piccadilly in the south, it is crossed by Curzon Street. Clarges Street was built in the early 18th century and is named after Sir Thomas Clarges. Notable inhabitants of Clarges Street have included Lady Hamilton, Edmund Kean, Thomas Babington Macaulay, racing driver D'Arcy Baker. Clarges Street is made up of Georgian town houses and modern office buildings; the headquarters of The Kennel Club is at numbers 1-5. Media related to Clarges Street at Wikimedia Commons

In statistics and research, internal consistency is a measure based on the correlations between different items on the same test. It measures whether several items that propose to measure the same general construct produce similar scores. For example, if a respondent expressed agreement with the statements "I like to ride bicycles" and "I've enjoyed riding bicycles in the past", disagreement with the statement "I hate bicycles", this would be indicative of good internal consistency of the test. Internal consistency is measured with Cronbach's alpha, a statistic calculated from the pairwise correlations between items. Internal consistency ranges between one. Coefficient alpha will be negative whenever there is greater within-subject variability than between-subject variability. A accepted rule of thumb for describing internal consistency is as follows: Very high reliabilities are not desirable, as this indicates that the items may be redundant; the goal in designing a reliable instrument is for scores on similar items to be related, but for each to contribute some unique information as well.

Note further that Cronbach's alpha is higher for tests measuring more narrow constructs, lower when more generic, broad constructs are measured. This phenomenon, along with a number of other reasons, argue against using objective cut-off values for internal consistency measures. Alpha is a function of the number of items, so shorter scales will have lower reliability estimates yet still be preferable in many situations because they are lower burden. An alternative way of thinking about internal consistency is that it is the extent to which all of the items of a test measure the same latent variable; the advantage of this perspective over the notion of a high average correlation among the items of a test – the perspective underlying Cronbach's alpha – is that the average item correlation is affected by skewness just as any other average is. Thus, whereas the modal item correlation is zero when the items of a test measure several unrelated latent variables, the average item correlation in such cases will be greater than zero.

Thus, whereas the ideal of measurement is for all items of a test to measure the same latent variable, alpha has been demonstrated many times to attain quite high values when the set of items measures several unrelated latent variables. The hierarchical "coefficient omega" may be a more appropriate index of the extent to which all of the items in a test measure the same latent variable. Several different measures of internal consistency are reviewed by Zinbarg. Cronbach's alpha Consistency Reliability https://web.archive.org/web/20090805095348/http://wilderdom.com/personality/L3-2EssentialsGoodPsychologicalTest.html