West Punjab in the context of "Rawalpindi Division"

In spring 1947, an uprising against the Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu and Kashmir broke out in the Poonch jagir, an area bordering the Rawalpindi district of West Punjab and the Hazara district of the North-West Frontier Province in the future Pakistan. It was driven by grievances such as high taxes, the Maharaja's neglect of World War veterans, and above all, Muslim nationalism with a desire to join Pakistan. The leader of the rebellion, Sardar Ibrahim Khan, escaped to Lahore by the end of August 1947 and persuaded the Pakistani authorities to back the rebellion. In addition to the backing, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan authorised an invasion of the state, by the ex-Indian National Army personnel in the south and a force led by Major Khurshid Anwar in the north. These invasions eventually led to the First Kashmir War fought between India and Pakistan, and the formation of Azad Kashmir provisional government. The Poonch jagir has since been divided across Azad Kashmir, administered by Pakistan and the state of Jammu and Kashmir, administered by India.

The Punjab Province, officially the Province of the Punjab, was a province of British India, with its capital in Lahore and summer capitals in Murree and Simla. At its greatest extent, it stretched from the Khyber Pass to Delhi; and from the Babusar Pass and the borders of Tibet to the borders of Sind. Established in 1849 following Punjab's annexation, the province was partitioned in 1947 into West and East Punjab; and incorporated into Pakistan and India, respectively.

Most of the Punjab region was annexed by the East India Company on 29 March 1849 following the company's victory against the Sikh Empire's army at the battle of Gujrat in northern Punjab, a month prior. The Punjab was the last major region of the Indian subcontinent to fall to British imperialism.

East Punjab was a province of the Dominion of India from 1947 until 1950. It consist of parts of the Punjab Province of British India that remained in India following the partition of the state between the new dominions of Pakistan and India by the Radcliffe Commission in 1947. The mostly Muslim western parts of the old Punjab became Pakistan's West Punjab, later, renamed as Punjab Province, while the mostly Hindu and Sikh eastern parts remained with India.

Sind, sometimes spelled Scinde, was a province of Pakistan from 1947 till its amalgamation into West Pakistan in 1955; and prior, a province of British India from being granted provincial status in 1936 till Pakistan's independence in 1947. Karachi was the capital of the province till 1948, succeeded by Hyderabad.

Under the British, it encompassed the current territorial limits excluding the princely state of Khairpur. In 1948, Karachi was separated from the province to form the Federal Capital Territory and serve as the federal capital of Pakistan; this resulted in the provincial capital being shifted to Hyderabad. The province was dissolved alongside Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, West Punjab, and a number of Pakistani princely states to form a unified province of West Pakistan in 1955, upon implementation of the One Unit Scheme.

West Pakistan was the western province of Pakistan between 1955 and 1970, covering the territory of present-day Pakistan. Its land borders were with Afghanistan, India and Iran, with a maritime border with Oman in the Gulf of Oman in the Arabian Sea.

Following its independence from British rule, the new Dominion of Pakistan was physically separated into two exclaves, with the western and eastern wings geographically separated from each other by India. The western wing of Pakistan comprised three governor's provinces (the North-West Frontier, West Punjab and Sind), one chief commissioner's province (Baluchistan) along with the Baluchistan States Union, several independent princely states (notably Bahawalpur, Chitral, Dir, Hunza, Khairpur and Swat), the Karachi Federal Capital Territory, and the autonomous tribal areas adjoining the North-West Frontier Province. The eastern wing of the new country—known as East Pakistan—comprised the single province of East Bengal (which included the former Assamese district of Sylhet and the Chittagong Hill Tracts).

The One Unit Scheme (Urdu: ون یونٹ; Bengali: এক ইউনিট ব্যবস্থা) was the reorganisation of the provinces of Pakistan by the central Pakistani government. It was led by Prime Minister Muhammad Ali Bogra on 22 November 1954 and enacted on 30 September 1955. The government claimed that the programme would overcome the difficulty of administering the two non-contiguous, unequal polities of West and East Pakistan separated from each other by more than a thousand miles. To diminish the differences between the two regions, the 'One Unit' programme merged the four provinces of West Pakistan (West Punjab, Sind, the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan) into a single province to parallel the province of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

The One Unit program met with great resistance and grievances were raised by the four provinces after its establishment. As per scholar Julien Levesque, the One Unit project had mainly been pushed by the Punjabi elite of West Pakistan since 1953 with the aim of preventing politicians from East Pakistan from gaining power at the centre. The National Awami Party successfully sponsored a bill in the National Assembly calling for its dissolution and providing for regional autonomy. This led to the military takeover of the national government. The One Unit programme remained in effect until 1970. Finally, President General Yahya Khan imposed Legal Framework Order No. 1970 to end the One Unit program and reinstate the provisional status of the Four Provinces as of August 1947.

Sikhism is a minority religion in Pakistan with a population of around 16,000 Sikhs, accounting for 0.01% of the national population. Although Sikhs form a small community in Pakistan today, Sikhism has an extensive heritage and history in the country. Sikhism originated from what is now Punjab, Pakistan in the 15th century. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Sikh community had become a major political power in Punjab, with Sikh leader maharaja Ranjit Singh founding the Sikh Empire which had its capital in Lahore, today the second-largest city in Pakistan. Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, is located in Pakistani Punjab; moreover, Kartarpur Sahib, the place where Guru Nanak died and was subsequently buried, is also located in the same province.

According to the 1941 census, the Sikh population comprised roughly 1.67 million persons or 6.1 percent of the total population in the region that would ultimately become Pakistan, notably concentrated in West Punjab, within the contemporary province of Punjab, Pakistan, where the Sikh population stood at roughly 1.52 million persons or 8.8 percent of the total population. By 1947, it is estimated that the Sikh population had increased to over 2 million persons in the region which became Pakistan with significant populations existing in the largest cities in the Punjab such as Lahore, Rawalpindi and Faisalabad (then Lyallpur). With communal violence and religious cleansing accompanying the Partition of British India at the time, the vast majority departed the region en masse, primarily migrating eastward to the region of Punjab that would fall on the eastern side of the Radcliffe Line and Delhi, with corresponding mass migration of Muslims into Pakistan from India.