Transfer of Power & Independence

Transfer of Power and Independence

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15 August 1947 brought India both independence and Partition — a duality that has shaped how the transfer of power is understood ever since. Why did the British finally quit, and why did the Congress accept the division of the country it had spent decades trying to unite? Answering this requires tracing the collapse of British authority through the final years of the Raj, the tortuous negotiations of the Cabinet Mission, the Interim Government and the Mountbatten Plan, and finally, the long historiographical debate over who — or what — was truly responsible for Partition.

Why Did the British Quit, and Why Did the Congress Accept Partition?

Three Explanations

• The imperialist answer. Independence was simply the fulfilment of Britain’s self-appointed mission to guide the Indian people towards self-government, while Partition was the unfortunate consequence of an age-old Hindu-Muslim rift — the two communities’ failure to agree on how, and to whom, power should be transferred.
• The radical view. Independence was finally wrested through the mass actions of 1946–47, in which Communists often participated as leaders — but the bourgeois leadership of the Congress, frightened by this revolutionary upsurge, struck a deal with the imperial power, transferring power to themselves while the nation paid the price of Partition.
• The real answer. The Independence–Partition duality in fact reflects the success-failure dichotomy of the Congress-led anti-imperialist movement.
  • The Congress carried a two-fold task: structuring India’s diverse classes, communities, groups and regions into a nation, and securing independence for this emerging nation from British rule.
  • While the Congress succeeded in building nationalist consciousness strong enough to force the British to quit India, it could not complete the task of welding the nation together — failing, in particular, to integrate the Muslims into it. This contradiction between success and failure in nation-building is what is mirrored in the other contradiction: independence, but with it, Partition.

The Erosion of British Authority by the End of the War

• By the end of the Second World War, the success of nationalist forces in the struggle for hegemony over Indian society was fairly evident. The British had won the war against Hitler but lost the one in India — the space occupied by the national movement now far exceeded that over which the Raj still cast its shadow, with previously unpoliticized areas and apolitical groups falling in line with the country’s agitation over the INA trials.
  • Nationalist success could be plotted on a graph of swelling crowds and deepening nationalist fervour — and a corresponding graph of British demoralization and shifting Indian loyalties told the same story from the other side.
• The pillars of British rule. British authority rested partly on the consent, or at least acquiescence, of many sections of Indian society.
  • Its social base lay among zamindars and upper classes — the “loyalists” who received the main share of British favours and offices, staffed the administration, and supported government policy and reform.
  • The British also secured broader consent by cultivating belief in British justice and fair play, in the district officer as the Mai-Baap of his people, and in the benefits of Pax Britannica. The Raj ran, to a considerable degree, on prestige — embodied above all in the district officer of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), the “heaven-born service,” vaunted as “the steel frame of the Raj.”
  • When the loyalists began jumping ship, when prestige was shaken, and when district officers and secretariat officials abandoned the helm, it became clear the vessel was sinking fast — the result of years of damage from two directions: rot from within and battering from without.
• Weakening of the ICS and the services.
  • Manpower shortage. A shortage of European recruits, combined with a policy of Indianization, ended British domination of the ICS as early as the First World War.
    • By 1939, British and Indian members had reached parity; overall recruitment was cut to preserve this balance and stopped altogether in 1943. Between 1940 and 1946, total ICS strength fell from 1,201 to 939 — British members from 587 to 429, and Indian members from 614 to 510.
    • The new recruits, moreover, were no longer Oxbridge graduates from aristocratic families steeped in belief in Britain’s civilizing destiny, but increasingly grammar-school and polytechnic products for whom serving the Raj was a career rather than a mission. By 1945, war-weariness was acute, home absences were long, inflation had bred economic anxiety, and many officers were nearing — or seeking premature — retirement. What remained was a vastly depleted, war-weary bureaucracy, already battered by the 1942 movement.
  • Contradictions in British strategy. More damaging than manpower shortage was the way the twin British strategy of conciliation and repression began to contradict itself.
    • After the Cripps Offer of 1942, little remained to concede short of full transfer of power itself — yet the national movement’s multi-pronged strategy, combining non-violent mass action with working constitutional reform, proved more than a match for the British.
    • When non-violent movements met repression, the naked force behind government stood exposed; but when the government held back from suppressing “sedition,” or agreed to a truce (as with the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 1931) or conceded provincial autonomy under the Government of India Act, 1935, it appeared too weak to govern, undermining its authority and prestige further.
    • The brutal repression of the 1942 movement, by contrast, offended liberal and loyalist sensibilities alike — as did the government’s refusal to release Gandhi even as he neared death during his 21-day fast of February–March 1943, and its decision to proceed with the INA trials despite appeals from liberals and loyalists to abandon them.
  • Crisis of loyalist faith. British friends were dismayed when the government appeared to placate its enemies — as in 1945–46, when it seemed to be wooing the Congress into a settlement and government. The powerlessness of those in authority — officials standing by as violent Congress rhetoric filled the air — shook loyalist faith in the might of the Raj.
  • The services’ dilemma of action. Where the loyalists’ crisis was one of faith, the services faced a dilemma of action — decisive action required a clear-cut policy, repression or conciliation, not both, and implementing contradictory poles of policy through the same set of officials inevitably created friction.
    • This dilemma first surfaced in the mid-1930s, when officials feared that the very Congressmen they were repressing during the Civil Disobedience Movement might soon become their political masters in provincial ministries — a prospect that materialized in eight provinces.
    • Constitutionalism, in fact, wrecked services morale nearly as effectively as mass movement had earlier: if fear of authority was dispelled by non-violent mass action, confidence was gained through direct exposure to “Congress Raj” — people could not fail to notice the British Chief Secretary in Madras taking to khadi, or Bombay’s Revenue Secretary scurrying across a railway platform from his first-class compartment to Revenue Minister Morarji Desai’s third-class carriage so as not to keep the minister waiting.
    • Most importantly, the likelihood of a Congress return to power increasingly shaped how officials handled subsequent Congress agitations — there was no outright refusal to carry out orders, but this consideration produced half-hearted action against the individual disobedience movement in U.P. in 1940, and even against the 1942 rebels in East U.P. and Bihar; action was generally harsher in 1942, creating entanglements between repression and conciliation once Congressmen were released and provincial ministries again became likely.
    • Official morale sank further when Congress demands for enquiries and retribution went unaddressed on the grounds that some electioneering latitude had to be allowed. The previous Viceroy, Linlithgow, had pledged there would be no enquiries, but the services had little confidence the government could withstand Congress pressure — his successor, Wavell, confessed that the question of enquiries was the most difficult issue posed by the formation of provincial ministries.
  • Portents by the war’s end. By the end of the war, the writing was clear to officials and policymakers attuned to the dynamics of power. Demands for leniency towards INA men from within the army, and the revolt within a section of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN), signalled that the coming storm might prove irrepressible.
    • The structure remained intact, but there were real fears that the services and armed forces might prove unreliable if the Congress launched another 1942-style mass movement after elections that a sympathetic provincial ministry would aid rather than control. The Viceroy summed up the danger: “We could still probably suppress such a revolt,” but “we have nothing to put in its place and should be driven to an almost entirely official rule, for which the necessary numbers of efficient officials do not exist.”

Towards a Negotiated Withdrawal

• Once it was recognized that British rule could not survive on its old basis much longer, a graceful withdrawal — following a settlement on the modalities of transfer of power and the post-imperial relationship between Britain and India — became the overriding aim of British policy.
  • The British government understood a settlement was essential both for future relations and to bury the ghost of renewed mass agitation. Since failure was not an option, the concessions offered had to largely meet Congress demands — and with the Congress demand being that the British simply “Quit India,” the Cabinet Mission travelled to India in March 1946 to negotiate the formation of a national government and set the machinery for transfer of power in motion. Unlike the Cripps Mission of 1942, this was not an empty gesture — the Cabinet Mission came prepared for a long stay.

The Cabinet Mission (1946)

• By early 1946, with the imperialism-nationalism conflict resolved in principle, the spotlight shifted to the competing visions of the post-imperial order held by the British, the Congress and the Muslim League.
  • The Congress sought transfer of power to a single centre, with minority concerns addressed within a spectrum ranging from provincial autonomy to self-determination — but only after the British had left.
  • The British sought a united India, friendly with Britain and an active partner in Commonwealth defence, believing a divided India would lack strategic depth, frustrate joint defence planning, and embarrass British diplomacy — Pakistan was not seen as Britain’s natural future ally.
  • British policy in 1946 clearly reflected this preference, in sharp contrast to earlier declarations — Attlee’s statement of 15 March 1946 that a “minority will not be allowed to place a veto on the progress of the majority” stood far removed from Wavell’s earlier decision to let Jinnah wreck the Simla Conference (June–July 1945) by insisting on nominating all Muslim members.
• The Cabinet Mission was convinced that Pakistan was not viable, and that minority autonomy could be safeguarded within a united India instead.
  • Its plan envisaged three Sections: A (Madras, Bombay, U.P., Bihar, C.P. and Orissa), B (Punjab, NWFP and Sind), and C (Bengal and Assam), each meeting separately to draft its own group constitution, with a common centre controlling defence, foreign affairs and communications.
    • A province could opt out of its group after the first general elections, and could seek reconsideration of the group or union constitution after ten years.
  • The Congress wanted a province to have the option of not joining a group in the first place, rather than waiting for the first elections — a concern shaped by the Congress-ruled provinces of Assam and NWFP, placed in Sections C and B respectively.
  • The League wanted provinces to be able to question the union constitution immediately, rather than waiting ten years.
  • A basic ambiguity ran through the Plan: it declared grouping optional but sections compulsory — a contradiction the Mission chose to quibble around rather than resolve, hoping to somehow reconcile the irreconcilable.
• The Congress and the League each interpreted the Plan in their own favour.
  • Patel maintained the Plan was against Pakistan, that the League’s veto was gone, and that a single Constituent Assembly was envisaged; the League announced its acceptance of the Plan on 6 June, reading the compulsory grouping provision as an implicit basis for Pakistan.
  • Nehru asserted the Congress Working Committee’s own interpretation in his speech to the AICC on 7 July 1946: “We are not bound by a single thing except that we have decided to go into the Constituent Assembly” — implying the Assembly was sovereign and would decide its own procedural rules.
  • Jinnah seized on Nehru’s speech to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the Mission Plan on 29 July 1946.

Formation of the Interim Government

• The government faced a dilemma: proceed with an Interim Government with the Congress alone, or wait for League agreement.
  • Wavell, who had chosen the latter course at Simla a year earlier, wanted to do so again, but His Majesty’s Government — especially the Secretary of State — argued that securing Congress cooperation was vital.
  • The Interim Government was formed on 2 September 1946 with Congress members alone, Nehru as its de facto head — against the League’s insistence that all settlements be acceptable to it. This marked a shift in British posture: where earlier policy had encouraged communal forces and denied the Congress’s representative legitimacy, continuance of rule had demanded one stance, while withdrawal and future post-imperial links now dictated the opposite.
• Jinnah had no intention of letting the British break cleanly with the past.
  • Direct Action was launched — Jinnah had, in his own description, become “answerable to the wider electorate of the streets.” With the battle cry “Lekar rahenge Pakistan, Larke lenge Pakistan,” Muslim communal groups provoked communal frenzy in Calcutta on 16 August 1946; Hindu communal groups retaliated in equal measure, and roughly 5,000 lives were lost.
  • The British authorities, fearing they had lost control of the “Frankenstein monster” they had helped create, felt it was too late to tame it, and were frightened into appeasing the League by Jinnah’s demonstrated ability to unleash civil war.
  • Wavell brought the League into the Interim Government on 26 October 1946, even though it had accepted neither the short- nor long-term provisions of the Cabinet Mission Plan and had not renounced Direct Action. The Secretary of State argued that without the League’s presence, civil war would have been inevitable — Jinnah had, in effect, succeeded in keeping the British in his grip.

Breakdown of the Interim Government

• The Congress demand that the British either bring the League to modify its conduct within the Interim Government, or force its exit, began almost as soon as League members were sworn in.
  • Except for Liaquat Ali Khan, all the League’s nominees were second-raters — a sign that what was at stake was power, not the responsibility of governing. Jinnah, realizing it would be fatal to leave the administration entirely in Congress hands, had sought a foothold from which to continue the fight for Pakistan; for him, the Interim Government was the continuation of civil war by other means.
  • League ministers questioned Congress ministers’ actions and appointments, and refused to attend the informal meetings Nehru had devised to reach decisions without reference to the Viceroy — disruptionist tactics that convinced Congress leaders of the futility of the Interim Government as an exercise in cooperation.
  • They held on, however, until 5 February 1947, when nine members of the Interim Government wrote to the Viceroy demanding the League members’ resignation. The League’s demand for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly — which had first met on 9 December 1946 — proved the final straw; the League had earlier refused to join the Assembly at all, despite British assurances in a 6 December 1946 statement upholding the League’s interpretation of grouping. A direct bid for Pakistan, bypassing the Mission Plan altogether, now appeared to be Jinnah’s preferred card.

The Attlee Statement (20 February 1947)

• This deepening crisis was temporarily defused by Attlee’s statement to Parliament on 20 February 1947, fixing 30 June 1948 as the date for British withdrawal from India and announcing the appointment of a new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten.
  • The hope was that a fixed date would shock the parties into agreement and avert the looming constitutional crisis, while finally convincing Indians of British sincerity — though, in truth, both hopes were read into the terminal-date idea only after it had already been decided upon. The real reason the Attlee Government accepted the need for a final date was its inability to deny the truth of Wavell’s assessment that an irreversible decline in government authority had already taken place — the 20 February statement was, in effect, an acceptance of the dismissed Viceroy’s reading of the Indian situation.
• The prospect of freedom lifted the gloom of continuous internal wrangling, and the statement was enthusiastically received in Congress circles as final proof of British sincerity.
  • Partition was implicitly foreshadowed in the proviso that if the Constituent Assembly proved insufficiently representative — that is, if Muslim-majority provinces stayed out — power would be transferred to more than one central government. Even this was acceptable to the Congress, since it meant the existing Assembly could proceed to frame a constitution for the areas it did represent, offering a way out of the deadlock created by the League’s refusal to join the Assembly and its simultaneous demand for its dissolution. There seemed some real chance that Attlee’s hope — that the date would “force the two political parties in India to come together” — might be fulfilled.
• This hope proved illusory: Jinnah was, if anything, more convinced than ever that he needed only to bide his time.
  • The League launched civil disobedience in Punjab, bringing down the Unionist-Akali-Congress coalition ministry led by Khizr Hayat Khan. Wavell noted in his diary on 13 March 1947: “Khizr’s resignation was prompted largely by the statement of February 20.”

Mountbatten as Viceroy

• This was the situation Mountbatten inherited as the last Viceroy, charged with winding up the Raj by 30 June 1948.
• Mountbatten’s claim to have introduced the time limit into the 20 February settlement is untrue — the idea of a fixed date originated with Wavell, who had proposed 31 March 1948 as the point by which “responsibility without power” would set in. Attlee thought mid-1948 the appropriate target; it was Mountbatten who insisted on a specific calendar date and settled on 30 June 1948.
• Mountbatten’s claim to have held plenipotentiary powers, needing no reference back to London, is similarly misleading.
  • He did enjoy greater independence than his predecessors, and his views carried real weight with the Labour Government — but he referred back to London at every stage of his Plan’s evolution, sent his aide Ismay to London, and finally travelled there himself to secure Attlee and the Cabinet’s agreement to the 3 June Plan.
• Mountbatten operated under a clear directive from His Majesty’s Government rather than writing his own script, as he later claimed.
  • He was instructed to explore options for unity or division until October 1947, after which he was to advise on the form the transfer of power should take. He soon discovered he had little real choice — the broad contours of the eventual outcome were discernible even before his arrival. Within two months, he found that flogging the Cabinet Mission Plan further was pointless — it was a dead horse — as Jinnah remained obdurate that Muslims would settle for nothing short of a sovereign state.
  • Mountbatten found himself unable to shift Jinnah from this position: “He gave the impression that he was not listening. He was impossible to argue with… He was, whatever was said, intent on his Pakistan.”

Why Britain Could Not Keep India United

• The British could have kept India united only by abandoning their role as mere mediators and actively intervening in favour of unity — including putting down communal elements with a firm hand. This they chose not to do.
  • Attlee later wrote: “We would have preferred a United India. We couldn’t get it, though we tried hard.” In practice, the British took the easier path — genuinely preserving unity would have meant identifying with the forces favouring a unified India and confronting those opposing it, rather than wooing both sides into friendly post-imperial collaboration on strategic and defence matters.
• Britain’s preference for a united subcontinent as a strong Commonwealth defence ally was, in effect, modified into a preference for two dominions, both allied to Britain, together serving roughly the same purpose.
  • Mountbatten’s formula was to divide India while retaining maximum unity — partitioning the country, but also partitioning Punjab and Bengal, so the resulting, smaller Pakistan would meet both the Congress’s and the League’s positions to some degree. The League’s demand for Pakistan was conceded in principle, while the Congress position on unity was accommodated by making Pakistan as small as possible.
  • Since the Congress was being asked to concede its central point — a unified India — its other positions were largely honoured: ruling out independence for the princely states, preserving Bengal’s essential unity where possible, and blocking Hyderabad’s accession to Pakistan instead of India — Mountbatten firmly backed the Congress on these issues, having persuaded His Majesty’s Government that Congress goodwill was essential if India was to remain within the Commonwealth.

The Mountbatten Plan (3 June 1947)

• The Mountbatten Plan, announced on 3 June 1947, sought an early transfer of power on the basis of Dominion Status to two successor states, India and Pakistan.
• The Congress accepted Dominion Status, at least temporarily, because it felt it must assume full power immediately to confront the country’s explosive situation, and because Dominion Status offered a breathing period during which British officers and civil servants could stay on temporarily, easing India’s transition into self-governance.
• For Britain, Dominion Status offered a chance — even if temporary — of keeping India within the Commonwealth, a prize not to be lightly given up.
  • Though Jinnah offered to bring Pakistan into the Commonwealth too, far greater importance was attached to India’s membership, given India’s sounder economic strength and defence potential, and Britain’s much larger trade and investment stake there.
• The rationale for the early transfer date, 15 August 1947, lay chiefly in securing Congress agreement to Dominion Status — with the added benefit that Britain could escape responsibility for the rapidly deteriorating communal situation.
  • Some officials were, by this point, more than happy to pack their bags and leave Indians to “stew in their own juice,” as Patel put it to the Viceroy: the situation was one where “you won’t govern yourself, and you won’t let us govern.”
  • Mountbatten later defended advancing the date to 15 August on the grounds that things would have “blown up” under British feet had they not left when they did — a defensible position from Britain’s own vantage point, but not, therefore, an inevitable one. Despite the steady erosion of authority, “responsibility without power” remained, at that point, still a prospect rather than a settled reality; in the short term, the British could still have asserted authority but chose not to, as Kripalani, then Congress President, pointedly reminded Mountbatten. If anything, the deteriorating situation called for someone to actually wield authority, not abandon it.

The Rushed Timetable and Its Consequences

• If abdicating responsibility was callous, the speed with which it was done made it worse.
  • The seventy-two-day timetable — from 3 June to 15 August 1947 — for both the transfer of power and the division of the country proved disastrous. Senior officials in India, such as Punjab Governor Jenkins and Commander-in-Chief Auchinleck, believed peaceful division would require at least a few years.
  • As it happened, the Partition Council had to divide assets — down to typewriters and printing presses — within weeks, with no transitional institutional structures in place to handle the many complications spilling over from division. Mountbatten had hoped to serve as common Governor-General of both India and Pakistan, providing an institutional link between them, but Jinnah insisted on the position for himself instead — so even the joint defence machinery that was set up failed to survive past December 1947, by which time Kashmir had already become the scene of military conflict rather than political settlement.
• The Punjab massacres that accompanied Partition stand as the final indictment of Mountbatten’s approach.
  • Both the early date of 15 August 1947 and the delayed announcement of the Boundary Commission Award — both Mountbatten’s decisions — compounded the tragedy. Senior army official Brigadier Bristow, posted in Punjab in 1947, believed the Punjab tragedy would not have occurred had Partition been deferred by a year or so — a view endorsed by Lockhart, Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army from 15 August to 31 December 1947: “Had officials in every grade in the civil services, and all the personnel of the armed services, been in position in their respective new countries before Independence Day, it seems there would have been a better chance of preventing widespread disorder.”
  • The Boundary Commission Award was ready by 12 August 1947, but Mountbatten chose to make it public only after Independence Day, so responsibility for its consequences would not fall on the British. Independence Day in Punjab and Bengal saw strange scenes — flags of both India and Pakistan flying in villages between Lahore and Amritsar, as people on both sides believed themselves on the “right” side of the coming border, only to find themselves aliens in their own homes the very next morning, exiled by executive decree.

Why and How the Congress Came to Accept Partition

Common Misconceptions

• Why did Nehru and Patel advocate acceptance of the 3 June Plan, and the Congress Working Committee and AICC pass resolutions endorsing it? And, most surprisingly, why did Gandhiji acquiesce?
• Popular explanations often misread this moment.
  • Nehru and Patel’s acceptance of Partition is popularly read as a lust for quick, easy power that led them to “betray” the people.
  • Gandhiji’s counsel is believed to have been ignored, leaving him feeling betrayed by his disciples — even suicidal — while he heroically fought communal frenzy virtually single-handedly, earning Mountbatten’s description of him as “a one man boundary force.”

The Real Explanation: A Long-Term Failure to Integrate the Muslims

• What is often forgotten is that Nehru, Patel and Gandhiji in 1947 were simply accepting what had become inevitable, owing to the Congress’s long-term failure to draw the Muslim masses into the national movement and stem the rising tide of Muslim communalism that had, especially since 1937, been gathering force.
  • This failure was revealed with stark clarity in the 1946 elections, in which the League won 90 per cent of the Muslim seats. Though the political battle against Jinnah was effectively lost by early 1946, defeat was conceded only after it had been fought to the end in the streets of Calcutta and Rawalpindi and the village lanes of Noakhali and Bihar.
• By June 1947, Congress leaders felt that only an immediate transfer of power could halt the spread of Direct Action and communal disturbance.
  • The virtual collapse of the Interim Government made Pakistan appear an unavoidable reality. Patel, at the AICC meeting of 14 June 1947, argued that Pakistan was already functioning in Punjab, Bengal and within the Interim Government itself. Nehru was dismayed at watching the Interim Government reduced to an arena of internal struggle — ministers wrangling, with Liaquat Ali Khan, as Finance Member, hamstringing the functioning of other ministries.
  • Faced with the Interim Government’s inability to stop Governors from abetting the League, and the Bengal provincial ministry’s inaction — even complicity — in communal riots, Nehru began to wonder whether there was any point continuing in a government while people were being butchered. An immediate transfer of power would, at least, mean establishing a government capable of exercising the control it was expected — but powerless — to wield.
• A further consideration favoured accepting immediate transfer of power to two dominions: it ruled out balkanisation, since neither the provinces nor the princely states were given the option of independence — no small achievement, since princely states standing apart would have posed an even graver threat to Indian unity than Pakistan itself.

Step-by-Step Concessions to the League

• The acceptance of Partition in 1947 was, in this light, only the final act in a long process of gradual concession to the League’s uncompromising demand for a sovereign Muslim state.
  • Autonomy for Muslim-majority provinces was accepted in 1942, at the time of the Cripps Mission.
  • Gandhiji went further, accepting the principle of self-determination for Muslim-majority provinces in his 1944 talks with Jinnah.
  • In June 1946, the Congress conceded the possibility of Muslim-majority provinces — those forming Sections B and C of the Cabinet Mission Plan — setting up a separate Constituent Assembly, though it still opposed compulsory grouping and upheld the right of NWFP and Assam not to join their groups. It then accepted, without demur, the British Cabinet’s December 1946 clarification that grouping was, in fact, compulsory.
  • The Congress officially broached Partition in early March 1947, when the Working Committee passed a resolution declaring that Punjab — and, by implication, Bengal — would have to be partitioned if the country itself were divided.
  • The final act of concession came in June 1947, when the Congress accepted Partition under the 3 June Plan.

Unreal Hopes and Wishful Thinking

• This gradual surrender is less surprising in hindsight, since hardly anyone at the time anticipated either the speed of the unfolding tragedy or was prepared to accept it as final. Millions on both sides of the new border, in fact, refused to accept Partition’s finality long after it was announced — a major reason population transfer became such a frenzied, last-minute affair.
  • The Congress conceded the right of secession believing Muslims would never actually exercise it, using it instead simply to shed their fears — failing to recognize that what had emerged by the mid-1940s was no longer the communalism of the 1920s or even the 1930s, when minority anxieties were being deliberately fanned, but an assertive “Muslim nation,” led by an obdurate leader determined to secure a separate state by any means. Each Congress concession, rather than undercutting the communalists, consolidated their position further, as success drew still more Muslims towards them.
  • Another unreal hope was that, once the British left, differences would be patched up and a free India built jointly by Hindus and Muslims — underestimating the degree to which communalism, by this point, had become autonomous. It was no longer propped up merely by the British; it had thrown away that crutch and grown assertively independent, defying even the British themselves.
  • A further fond hope was that Partition would prove temporary — unavoidable given the current psyche of Hindus and Muslims, but reversible once communal passions subsided and sanity returned. Gandhiji often told people that Pakistan could not endure if people refused to accept Partition in their hearts, while Nehru wrote to Cariappa: “But of one thing I am convinced that ultimately there will be a united and strong India. We have often to go through the valley of the shadow before we reach the sun-lit mountain tops.”
  • The most unreal belief of all, given what actually followed, was that Partition would be peaceful. No riots were anticipated and no population transfer planned, since it was assumed that once Pakistan was conceded, there would be nothing left to fight over. Nehru continued to believe in the essential goodness of his people, even amid the wave of riots that had plagued India from August 1946 onwards.

Gandhiji’s Helplessness

• Gandhiji’s unhappiness and helplessness have often been noted — but their root lay neither in Jinnah’s intransigence nor in any alleged lust for power among his disciples, but in the communalisation of his own people.
  • At his prayer meeting on 4 June 1947, he explained that the Congress had accepted Partition because the people themselves wanted it. It was the desire of Hindus and Sikhs for Partition that left him ineffective, blind, impotent — Muslims, meanwhile, already regarded him as an enemy. How could he build a movement against communalism upon a people who had themselves become communalised?
  • Gandhiji himself described his special ability as lying in an instinctive feel for “what is stirring in the hearts of the masses,” and the capacity to “give a shape to what was already there.” By 1947, there were no “forces of good” left for him to seize upon in building a new programme.
  • He nonetheless walked into the AICC meeting of 14 June 1947 and asked Congressmen to accept Partition as an unavoidable necessity under the circumstances, while resolving to fight it in the long run by never accepting it in their hearts. He himself never did — keeping alive, like Nehru, his faith in his people.

The Historiography of Partition

Partition as Contested Terrain

• For many Indians, freedom arrived tinged with the sense of loss caused by Partition; for many Muslims in Pakistan — particularly its state ideologues — Partition itself was freedom. It is little wonder, then, that Partition remains the most fiercely contested discursive territory in South Asian historiography.

Elite-Centric Historiography: The Demand for Pakistan as an Elite Affair

• This historiography began with a focus on the elite — the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League as the chief actors in a drama of epic proportions.
• For some Pakistani historians, Partition was a liberatory experience — the logical culmination of a long historical process beginning in the nineteenth century with Sayyid Ahmed Khan and others, through which South Asian Muslims gradually discovered a national identity later articulated in the complex politics of the 1940s.
  • For Aitzaz Ahsan, Partition was “a Primordial Divide” — “a Divide that is 50 years young and 5,000 years old.” As Akbar Ahmed argues, the concept of Pakistan was “irresistible and widespread among the Muslims”; in 1947, they “forced a separation” and thereby claimed “a separate history of their own,” with Jinnah and the League leadership as its chief architects.
• Other important scholarship has questioned Partition’s inevitability and legitimacy.
  • Sucheta Mahajan (2000) has argued consistently — despite variations in emphasis and nuance — that Congress leaders stood, all along and until the very end, for a secular, united India, and that it was Jinnah and the League — advocating the “two-nation theory” from 1940 onwards — who bore ultimate responsibility for the “sad but avoidable vivisection” of the subcontinent. In her reading, Jinnah’s alienation from the Congress began after 1937, and even though he remained somewhat flexible about the specifics of the Pakistan demand until Britain announced its decision to quit, “it was always on the cards.”
  • This interpretation rests on two assumptions that Asim Roy has described as the “two partition myths” — “the League for Partition” and “the Congress for unity.” A recent body of “revisionist” history has forcefully challenged both these staples of the familiar partition narrative.
• When Pakistan was finally created, it contained some 60 million Muslims, leaving another 35 million behind in non-Muslim India.
• Ayesha Jalal (1985) launched this revisionist critique by posing a central question: “how did a Pakistan come about which fitted the interests of most Muslims so poorly?”
  • In her reading, the Lahore Resolution — which mentioned neither “Partition” nor “Pakistan” — was Jinnah’s tactical move, a “bargaining counter” designed to have the claim of separate Muslim nationhood accepted by both the Congress and the British.
  • The constitutional arrangement Jinnah actually preferred, in Jalal’s view, was a weak federal structure, with strong provincial autonomy and Hindu-Muslim parity at the centre. His calculation was that the Congress, keen on a strong unitary centre, would ultimately concede this demand rather than risk his more aggressive separatist scheme — a full Partition that “in fact he did not really want.”
  • The mistaken assumption, in this reading, was that the Congress or the British would never accept Partition under any circumstances — but the Congress eventually did accept it, and Jinnah was, in effect, beaten at his own game.
• Asim Roy, writing in support of Jalal’s thesis, offered the strongly emotive claim that “it was not the League but the Congress who chose, at the end of the day, to run a knife across Mother India’s body.”
  • This interpretive model, however, has been criticised by many for attaching even greater weight to “High Politics” than the model it seeks to displace — relying heavily on Jinnah’s individual agency and the speculative inner workings of his mind.
• Even accepting that Jinnah may initially have floated the idea of Pakistan as a bargaining counter — a reading Sumit Sarkar himself accepts — it remains doubtful whether Jinnah retained the same bargaining autonomy once mass mobilisation began in 1944 around this increasingly emotive symbol of Muslim nationhood.
• It would, at the same time, be equally mistaken to argue that Jinnah simply followed rather than led Muslim opinion, as Mushirul Hasan has demonstrated.
  • In Hasan’s view, “the two-nation idea” was itself “grounded… in the mistaken belief” of Muslim unanimity. At the political level, the League was, in fact, as “faction-ridden and ideologically fragmented” as the Congress; and at the popular level, even amid intense communal distrust, sizeable sections of the Muslim population were never mentally reconciled to Partition, nor regarded the religious divide as insurmountable.
  • Many who joined the Pakistan campaign, in Hasan’s account, were manipulated by a highly orchestrated campaign imposed from above; ultimately, it was the colonial government that “created a Muslim community in its own image,” allowing its wartime ally, the League, to transform a segmented population into a “nation.” This does not mean, however, that the Pakistan movement lacked genuine popular support, at least in the closing years of the Raj.

Historians of Popular Mobilisation: Was the Demand for Pakistan an Elite Affair?

• Ian Talbot has shown how, in Punjab, the League took the Pakistan campaign “from the drawing room on to the streets” — how “hundreds of thousands of Muslims” celebrated designated “Days,” joined demonstrations, processions and strikes, and finally fought in communal riots in Pakistan’s name, thereby “legitimized the Muslim League’s claims.”
• In Bengal, Shila Sen and Taj Hashmi have argued that the Pakistan movement was “mass-based and democratic,” successfully drawing in the East Bengali Muslim peasantry through the promise of a utopian “promised land.” In the 1940s, Muslim rioters in Bengal attacked Hindu adversaries with the openly political slogan “Pakistan ki jai” (victory to Pakistan) — evidence of considerable communal politicisation among ordinary crowds.
• The Hindus mobilised too — the growing popularity of the RSS in the Hindi belt, as Christophe Jaffrelot argues, was “undoubtedly linked to the circumstances of Partition.”
• Joya Chatterji (1995) has shown how the Bengali bhadralok launched a campaign for Partition and sought to draw in non-bhadralok classes as well — with many of the latter, particularly some dalit groups in the northern and eastern districts, actively responding, eager to carve out a place for themselves in the emerging power structure of post-colonial India.
• Taken together, these works make it hard to describe the Pakistan movement as merely an elite affair by its later years.

Leftist and Nationalist Historiography

• For Bipan Chandra and his colleagues, Partition occurred because of the surging waves of Muslim communalism since 1937, and, above all, because of the Congress’s long-term failure to draw the Muslim masses into the national movement. The Congress leaders themselves owned this failure and accepted Partition “as an unavoidable necessity in the given circumstances.”
• Sumit Sarkar, by contrast, argues that “communalism” had not yet become fully normalised in Indian public life by this point. Indeed, there was, in his reading, greater communal harmony at the barricades — visible in the popular agitations, peasant struggles and industrial actions of the 1940s — than at the negotiating table.
  • The Congress leadership, rather than harnessing these popular energies and risking another round of mass movement, chose instead the tempting alternative of an early transfer of power, accepting Partition as its necessary price. For Sarkar, the communal riots that broke out from August 1946 onwards do not properly form part of this popular politics.

Subaltern Historiography

• Gyanendra Pandey has argued that conventional elitist partition historiography has been seriously constrained by its self-imposed aim of “establishing the ’causes’ of Partition.”
  • For Partha Chatterjee, the question of causes is, in a sense, a non-question — Partition was decided entirely by “all-India players,” and it is, in his view, “historically inaccurate” to suggest the Partition campaign involved any significant mass participation.
  • Pandey instead redirects historical attention away from “causes” and towards “the meaning of Partition for those who lived through it, the trauma it produced and the transformation that it wrought.” For Pandey, the “truth” of Partition lies in the violence it produced.

The Shift Toward Aftermath and Memory

• Pandey is far from alone on this new discursive terrain. The agenda of partition historiography has shifted significantly in recent years — away from its earlier preoccupation with causes, and towards a deeper interest in the traumatic experiences Partition produced.
  • Historians today are markedly less concerned with causation, and far more introspective about the “afterlife” or “aftermath” of Partition across South Asia — examining how Partition shaped post-colonial history and politics, how the memory of Partition continues to define community identities and inter-community relations, and thereby emphasising historical continuity rather than rupture.
  • In doing so, these historians self-consciously deny 1947, and the founding of the two nation-states, the privilege of being treated as “the end of all history.”