How Partition Actually Happened

11946: The Election That Changed Everything

The Simla Conference, June and July 1945

The Congress leaders came out of jail in June 1945 to find the political ground completely changed. Wavell called a conference at Simla to form a new Executive Council with equal Hindu and Muslim representation.

It failed on one point. Jinnah insisted thatonlythe Muslim League could nominate the Muslim members. The Congress, which had Muslim members including its own former president Maulana Azad, could not accept that it was a Hindu body. Wavell abandoned the conference rather than proceed over Jinnah's objection, which was itself an enormous concession, and confirmed the veto that Part 6 described.

The elections of 1945 and 1946

Elections were held for the central and provincial legislatures over the winter. The results were unambiguous, and they were the mirror image of 1937.

This is the plan almost nobody has heard of, and it is the one that came closest to keeping India whole.

2The Cabinet Mission: The Last Plan for a United India

The mission

In March 1946 the British Cabinet sent three senior ministers to India: Lord Pethick Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander. Their task was to find a constitutional settlement and arrange a transfer of power.

After a further failed conference at Simla in May, the Mission published its own plan on 16 May 1946.

What it proposed

A three tier structure, and it is worth understanding because it is the only serious attempt anyone made to answer the problem this whole book has described.

1.A Union of Indiacovering British India and the princely states, with a central government

2.Three groups of provinces, each free to write its own group constitution and decide which

3.The provinces, holding all remaining powers, which was almost everything that touched

4.An escape clause:a province could vote to leave its group, and after ten years any province

And the Mission said something very important in its own statement: it had examined the demand for a separate sovereign Pakistan andrejected it, on the ground that a Pakistan of the whole of Punjab and Bengal would contain enormous non Muslim populations, while a Pakistan of only the Muslim majority districts would be too small and truncated to be worth having. That analysis, made in May 1946, is exactly what happened in August 1947.

Both sides accepted it

• 6 June 1946:the Muslim League Council accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan, while recording that it did so because the grouping arrangement gave the substance of Pakistan.
• 24 to 25 June 1946:the Congress accepted the long term plan, with reservations, while declining to join the interim government on the terms then offered.

For a few weeks in the summer of 1946, both major parties had accepted the same constitutional scheme for a single undivided India. That is the closest anyone ever came.

The crack in it

The plan contained one deliberate ambiguity, and everything turned on it.

Wasgrouping compulsory? The League and the Mission said yes: a province had to sit in its section first, and could only opt out after the group constitution was framed. The Congress said no: a province, meaning above all Assam in Group C and the Frontier in Group B, could decline to enter its section at the start.

This was not a technicality. If grouping was compulsory, Assam, which was Hindu majority, would be dragged into a Muslim majority group by Bengal's votes, and the Frontier, which had just elected a Congress government, would be locked in with Punjab. If grouping was optional, Group B and Group C fell apart and there was no Pakistan in substance at all.

The Mission had left the words vague on purpose, in order to get both signatures. That is a very common negotiating technique and it usually works. This time it detonated.

310 July 1946: Did Nehru Destroy It?

What happened first: how Nehru became president

In April 1946 the Congress had to choose a president, and everyone knew the president would lead the interim government and probably become Prime Minister.

Twelve of the fifteen Pradesh Congress Committees nominated Sardar Patel. None nominated Nehru. Gandhi made it known that he wanted Nehru, on the grounds that Nehru was better suited to deal with the British and with the world, and he asked Patel to withdraw. Patel withdrew without a word of complaint.

Whatever you conclude from the rest of this chapter, hold on to that fact, because it is the origin of one of the biggest arguments in modern Indian politics and it will return in Part 12.

The press conference

On 10 July 1946, in Bombay, the new Congress president gave a press conference. He said that the Congress had agreed only to enter the Constituent Assembly, and that once there it would be completely unfettered by agreementsand free to change the plan as it thought best. Asked specifically about grouping, he indicated the Congress view that it was not compulsory and suggested the groups might not survive contact with the provinces' own wishes.

Every word of that was arguably the Congress's honest legal position. It was also, politically, a gift to a man looking for a reason to walk away.

What Jinnah did

On 29 July 1946 the Muslim League Council met at Bombay, withdrew its acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, withdrew from the Constituent Assembly, and called on Muslims to observe 16 August 1946 as Direct Action Day. Jinnah said in that session that the League was bidding goodbye to constitutional methods.

Testing the claim

What supports it.The sequence is undeniable and the timing is exact: acceptance, press conference, withdrawal, Direct Action Day, nineteen days apart. And the most serious witness against Nehru is not a League partisan. It is Maulana Azad, a Congress Muslim and former Congress president, who wrote in India Wins Freedomthat Nehru's statement was a grave blunder which gave Jinnah the opportunity he had been waiting for, and who described his own decision to step aside in Nehru's favour as one of the greatest mistakes of his life.

What weakens it.Three things.

• Jinnah was already looking for the exit.He had accepted the plan on the explicit basis that grouping gave the substance of Pakistan. If grouping was optional, the plan gave him nothing, and he would have discovered that with or without a press conference. The ambiguity was in the document, not in Nehru's mouth.
• The Congress objection was real.Forcing Assam and the Frontier into groups against the expressed will of their elected governments was not a small matter of pride. It meant handing two provinces to an arrangement their voters had just rejected.
• The plan may not have been workable anyway.A central government with three subjects, no independent revenue base beyond what those subjects required, and a right of secession built in after ten years, is a very weak thing. Many historians think it would have unravelled into partition within a decade, only more slowly and possibly more violently.

From here the story stops being about constitutional documents. In the twelve months from August 1946 the argument moved into the streets, and once it did, no plan on paper could survive it.

4The Killing Begins

Direct Action Day and the Great Calcutta Killing, 16 to 19 August 1946

Bengal was governed by a Muslim League ministry under H. S. Suhrawardy. The provincial government declared 16 August a public holiday, which put crowds on the streets, closed shops and emptied offices.

What followed was four days of slaughter in Calcutta. Estimates of the dead range from 4, 000 to 10, 000, with around 15, 000 wounded and roughly 100, 000 left homeless. It began with attacks on Hindus and became a two way massacre within a day, with Hindu and Sikh groups organising and retaliating on a comparable scale.

The police did not act effectively for a long and unexplained period, and the conduct of the provincial government during those days remains one of the most serious charges in the whole history of the League.

Noakhali, October and November 1946

The violence travelled east into the rural districts of Noakhali and Tipperah in Bengal, where Hindus were a small minority. What happened there included mass killing, forced conversion, abduction of women and the burning of villages. Estimates of Hindu deaths are commonly given at around 5, 000, with tens of thousands driven from their homes.

Gandhi, then seventy seven, went to Noakhali in November 1946 and stayed for four months. He walked barefoot from village to village, through about forty seven villages, staying in Muslim homes, holding prayer meetings, and trying to persuade people to allow their neighbours to return. He sent his companions to live alone in separate villages as hostages for the peace. Whatever anyone thinks of his politics, this was an old man walking unarmed into a district where people were being killed for their religion, and staying there for months.

Bihar, October and November 1946

Then it came back the other way, and worse. In Bihar, which had a Congress government, Hindu mobs attacked Muslim villages in retaliation for Noakhali. Estimates of Muslim deaths run from about 7, 000 to 10, 000, with Hindu deaths in the low hundreds. It was the single largest death toll of the whole 1946 sequence.

Gandhi left Noakhali for Bihar in March 1947 and told Bihar's Hindus, in public, that what they had done was worse than Noakhali because they had claimed to be avenging it. Nehru went to Bihar and said publicly that he would order aircraft to bomb the mobs if the killing did not stop. It is worth recording, against the charge examined in Part 11, that the Congress leadership condemned the violence committed by Hindus in a state its own party governed, in the harshest terms, in public.

Garhmukteshwar, November 1946, and Rawalpindi, March 1947

At Garhmukteshwar in the United Provinces, a fair turned into a massacre of Muslims, with estimates in the low thousands.

In March 1947, after the Unionist coalition government of Punjab fell and the League launched a mass agitation, violence broke out across the Rawalpindi division. Between 7, 000 and 8, 000Sikhs and Hindus were killed in a few days, villages such as Thoa Khalsa were destroyed, and mass abductions took place. At Thoa Khalsa a large number of Sikh women drowned themselves in a well rather than be taken. The Rawalpindi killings triggered the first mass flight of Hindus and Sikhs out of west Punjab, five months before any border was drawn.

While the country burned, an experiment was tried: put both parties in one cabinet and see if they could work together. The answer arrived quickly.

5A Government That Could Not Govern

The interim government

On 2 September 1946 an interim government took office with Nehru as Vice President of the Viceroy's Executive Council, which made him effectively Prime Minister. The Muslim League stayed out. Then, in October 1946, Jinnah changed course and the League joined, sending five members including Liaquat Ali Khan, who took Finance.

The League did not join to make the government work. Jinnah said openly that the League was entering in order to fight for Pakistan from inside, and it declined to attend the Constituent Assembly which met for the first time in December 1946.

The Finance portfolio, and how one ministry paralysed a country

Giving Finance to Liaquat Ali Khan turned out to be a decisive mistake by the Congress, which had underestimated what the department could do. Every proposal from every other ministry required financial sanction. Every appointment required money. Liaquat used that power methodically.

In February 1947 he presented what became known as the poor man's budget, with a sharp tax on business profits and a commission to investigate tax evasion. Presented as socialism, it fell heaviest on the largely Hindu commercial classes who funded the Congress, and it was designed to make Congress ministers choose between their principles and their backers. Sardar Patel is reported to have said that a Congress peon could not be appointed without Liaquat's approval.

The lesson that Congress leaders drew from those months was the one that mattered most. Patel in particular concluded that a united India in which the League held a permanent share of power at the centre would not be a country at all. It would be a permanent deadlock. That conclusion, formed in the winter of 1946 to 1947, is why Patel became the first senior Congress leader to accept Partition.

The British set a date

On 20 February 1947Attlee announced in the Commons that Britain would transfer power by June 1948, and that Lord Mountbatten would replace Wavell as Viceroy.

Announcing a deadline was intended to force the Indian parties to settle. Its actual effect was the opposite. It told every armed group in Punjab and Bengal exactly how long they had to change the facts on the ground before the lines were drawn. The violence of 1947 was, in part, a race against a published date.

Mountbatten arrived on 22 March 1947 and within weeks moved the date forward by ten months, to 15 August 1947. His reasons were that the situation was deteriorating too fast to wait. The consequence was that everything which follows in this part, including the drawing of an international border, had to be done in about ten weeks.

The order surprises almost everybody, so here it is with dates.

6Who Agreed to Partition, and When

7Gandhi: Over My Dead Body?

What he actually said, and when

His opposition was consistent and public for seven years. He wrote and said repeatedly that the vivisection of India was a sin, that he would not be party to it, and that if it came it would be over his dead body. He offered, in 1947, that Mountbatten should dissolve the interim government and invite Jinnah to form a government of his own choosing, with the Congress in opposition, rather than divide the country. The Congress leadership rejected the idea as unworkable. Mountbatten treated it as impossible.

Why he did not fast against it

He was asked this directly at the time, more than once, and his answers are on the record. They come down to three things.

• A fast is aimed at people who love you.Gandhi's own doctrine was that a fast is legitimate only against those who acknowledge a bond with the faster, and only when they are being asked to do something they know in their hearts is right. He held that fasting to force the Congress and the country to reject a settlement that the Congress and the country had accepted would be coercion of his own people, not persuasion.
• He had lost the argument, and he knew it.He said in these months that he had become a back number, that nobody listened to him any more, and that he was a voice in the wilderness. That was not self pity, it was an accurate description. The Working Committee decided without him and informed him afterwards.
• He judged that the alternative was worse.By June 1947 he was watching a civil war beginning. His speech at the AICC accepted the resolution as the least bad course available at that moment, while continuing to call the division itself wrong.

What he did instead

This is the part that gets left out of the accusation entirely.

He did not attend the independence celebrations on 15 August 1947. There was no flag ceremony for him, no seat on a dais, no speech. While Delhi celebrated, he was in Calcutta, in a poor Muslim locality, fasting and walking, trying to stop the killing in the city that had started it all in August 1946.

And it worked. Calcutta, which everyone expected to be the worst place in India in August 1947, stayed largely quiet. Mountbatten wrote to him that in Punjab it had taken fifty five thousand soldiers to hold the situation and there had been rioting on a great scale, while in Bengal the force had been one man, and there had been no rioting. The phrase that stuck was that Gandhi had been aone man boundary force.

He fasted again in Calcutta in early September when violence flared, and again in Delhi in January 1948, which is Chapter 10.

The line that decided where about fifteen million people would have to live was drawn by a lawyer who had never been east of Europe.

8Radcliffe: A Border in Five Weeks

The appointment

Sir Cyril Radcliffe was a distinguished English barrister with no experience of India. He had never visited the country. He was appointed chairman of both the Punjab and the Bengal Boundary Commissions and arrived in India on 8 July 1947. He was given about five weeks.

His lack of knowledge was presented as the qualification. Because he knew nothing and had no connections, he could not be accused of favouring anyone.

Each commission had four other members, two nominated by the Congress and two by the Muslim League, all judges. They deadlocked on every significant question, exactly as anyone could have predicted. So the decisions were made by Radcliffe alone, working from out of date maps and census returns, in the heat of a Delhi summer, without ever visiting most of the areas he was dividing.

• It cut through Punjab and Bengal, two provinces with deeply mixed populations, dividing districts, canal systems, railway lines, road networks and in some places individual villages and fields.
• It left the headworks of the canals that irrigated west Punjab on the Indian side, creating a water dispute that has lasted to this day.
• In Bengal it separated the jute growing districts from the jute mills of Calcutta, and the Chittagong Hill Tracts, whose population was overwhelmingly non Muslim and tribal, were awarded to Pakistan.
• The award of the Gurdaspur district to India, on grounds Radcliffe explained in terms of river boundaries and communications, gave India its only road access to Kashmir and remains one of the most disputed decisions in South Asian history.

What the line did The two days that killed people

The awards were substantially ready by 12 August 1947. They were not published until 17 August 1947, two days after both countries had already become independent.

Mountbatten decided on the delay, and his reasoning, as he later explained it, was that if the line were announced before the transfer of power the British would have to enforce it and would be blamed for the consequences. Whatever the motive, the consequence was this: on 14 and 15 August 1947, millions of people in Punjab and Bengal did not know which country they were in.

Families celebrated independence in towns that turned out, two days later, to be in the other country. Officials did not know whose orders to obey. Police and army units did not know whose side of a border they were policing. And armed groups, who could make a very good guess at where the line would fall, used those days.

Radcliffe left India on the day the award was published. He refused his fee of forty thousand rupees, and he destroyed his working papers.

9The Numbers

This chapter is short, because there is not much to say beyond the figures, and the figures are almost impossible to hold in the mind.

Two things about these numbers deserve emphasis.

First, the violence was not spontaneous everywhere.In Punjab in particular it was organised, by armed bands on all three sides, often led by demobilised soldiers with military training from the war that had just ended, using weapons that had come home with them. The men who had been trained to fight fascism in 1943 were killing their neighbours in 1947.

Second, the state failed completely.The Punjab Boundary Force, set up to police the division, numbered about 55, 000 men for a region of some fourteen million people, was itself communally mixed and began to disintegrate, and was disbanded on 1 September 1947, barely two weeks after independence.

This is the last accusation of Part 8, and it is the one that got Gandhi killed. It is also, as usually told, wrong in an important way.

10The Fifty Five Crore Fast

What the money was

Under the financial settlement of Partition, the cash balances of undivided India were to be divided. Pakistan's share was fixed at Rs 75 crore. An initial Rs 20 crorewas paid. The remaining Rs 55 crorewas withheld by the Government of India after fighting began in Kashmir in October 1947, on the argument that money should not be handed over to a state using force against India.

Two facts about that decision matter and are usually omitted. The payment was acontractual obligationunder the partition agreement, not a gift. And Mountbatten, then Governor General, took the view that withholding it was dishonourable and would damage India's standing.

What the fast was actually about

This is where the accusation goes wrong. Gandhi began his last fast in Delhi on 13 January 1948. Delhi at that moment was a city where Muslims were being killed, driven out of their homes and their shops, and where mosques had been occupied and in some cases converted.

His stated conditions for ending the fast were about Delhi, and about communal peace. They included the safety and free movement of Muslims in the capital, the restoration of mosques that had been taken over, the return of Muslim families to homes from which they had been evicted, and normal social and economic dealings between the communities. A peace committee representing Hindu, Muslim and Sikh organisations, and the government, gave those undertakings on 18 January and the fast ended.

The release of the Rs 55 crore was announced by the Government of India during the fast, on 15 January. It was, on the record, a factor and Gandhi welcomed it. It was not the stated object of the fast, and the fast did not end when the money was paid. It ended three days later when the Delhi undertakings were given.

Where We Have Reached

Seventeen months. That is the whole distance from a plan for a united India that both parties had accepted to a border published two days after the countries it divided came into existence.

If you want the shortest honest account of how Partition happened, it is this. A plan existed and was accepted by both sides. Its central ambiguity could not survive contact with reality, and a press conference exposed that a year early. A day of direct action turned into four days of massacre, and the massacres then fed each other around the country for twelve months until separation looked like the only way to stop the dying. A joint government was made unworkable from inside. The senior Congress leadership concluded that a weak centre shared with the League was worse than a smaller country, and it demanded the partition of Punjab five months before it accepted the partition of India. A deadline was announced, then advanced by ten months. A border was drawn in five weeks and published two days late. And between one hundred thousand and two million people died.

Nobody in that sequence set out to kill a million people. Almost everybody in it made a decision that, added to the others, produced exactly that.

In Part 9 we stop the clock and go through the leaders one by one: what each of them actually believed, what each said about Partition with dates and quotations, what each got right and what each got badly wrong. Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar, Jinnah, Azad, Savarkar, Bose, Master Tara Singh, Ghaffar Khan, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee and others.

• Statement of the Cabinet Delegation and the Viceroy, 16 May 1946, full text.
• Resolutions of the All India Muslim League Council, 6 June 1946 and 29 July 1946.
• Congress Working Committee resolutions of June 1946, 8 March 1947 and 2 June 1947.
• Report of Nehru's press conference at Bombay, 10 July 1946, in the contemporary press and in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru.
• Maulana Abul Kalam Azad,India Wins Freedom, for the account of the Cabinet Mission, the press conference and the Congress presidency of 1946.
• Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance research file on the Calcutta riots of 1946, and the official inquiry material on the Calcutta, Noakhali and Bihar violence.
• Records and studies of the Rawalpindi massacres of March 1947, including the Punjab research literature.
• Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, volume 88, including the speech at the All India Congress Committee meeting of 14 June 1947, and the Noakhali and Calcutta material.
• Mountbatten's correspondence with Gandhi, August and September 1947, including the one man boundary force letter.
• Report of the Punjab Boundary Commission and the Bengal Boundary Commission, and the Radcliffe Award, published 17 August 1947.
• Indian Independence Act 1947.
• Standard demographic studies of Partition casualties and migration, including the analyses producing the ranges of 200, 000 to 2 million dead and 12 to 20 million displaced.
• Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act, 1949, and the inter dominion agreements on recovery of abducted women.
• Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhiand contemporary press reports for the fast of 13 to 18 January 1948 and its stated conditions.