What Each Leader Actually Believed

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Position on Partition

Opposed absolutely and publicly from 1940 to the end. He called it a vivisection and a sin, said it would happen over his dead body, and in 1947 proposed to Mountbatten that the interim government be dissolved and Jinnah invited to form a government of his own choosing, with the Congress in opposition, rather than divide the country. That proposal was rejected as fantastic by his own colleagues.

He then, on 14 June 1947, asked the All India Congress Committee to accept the partition resolution, having concluded that he had lost the argument and that the alternative in front of him was civil war.

• The method. A disarmed people with no weapons and no money defeated an empire without an anti colonial war, and Part 7 showed how rare that is.
• The organisation. He built the machine that made a peaceful transfer possible.
• The diagnosis of separate electorates in 1932, which Part 4 examined. He was right that permanent communal representation makes a nation impossible, and history has borne him out.
• Noakhali and Calcutta. At seventy seven and seventy eight he did the physically bravest work of his life, and it saved a city.

What he got right What he got wrong

• Khilafat. He spent the entire capital of Hindu and Muslim unity on a foreign religious cause and secured no constitutional settlement in return.
• Malabar. He applied his moral standard to one community and not to the other, and lost Hindu confidence permanently.
• 1932. Whatever the merits of his objection, he used his own life as a lever against the weakest party at the table.
• Succession. Choosing Nehru over Patel in 1946, against twelve of fifteen provincial committees, had consequences he never accounted for.
• He assumed personal moral force could substitute for institutional guarantees, and by 1946 it could not.

1876 to 1948. The core idea: that a permanent minority in a head counting democracy has no protection except a state of its own, or a share of power written into law that the majority cannot revise.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

The man nobody expects

Jinnah's first career is the opposite of his second, and this is the single most important fact about him.

He was a Bombay barrister, a Congressman from 1906, a follower of Gokhale, a man who wore Savile Row suits, spoke little Urdu, ate and drank what he liked and had almost no interest in religious observance. He was the principal architect of the Lucknow Pact of 1916, the greatest moment of Hindu and Muslim political unity in the colonial period, and Gokhale called him the best ambassador of Hindu and Muslim unity.

He opposed the Khilafat movement in 1920 and resigned from the Congress at Nagpur over it, warning that mixing religion into mass politics would end in disaster. In 1920, Jinnah was the man arguing against religion in politics and Gandhi was the man putting it there.

• The rejection of his Fourteen Points in 1929. The constitutional route had failed.
• The 1937 elections and the United Provinces coalition refusal, which is Part 4.
• The Congress ministries of 1937 to 1939 and the grievance they generated, real or manufactured.
• Personal loss and illness. His wife Ruttie died in 1929. He was tubercular by the 1940s and knew he had little time, a fact he kept secret and which explains a great deal about the pace he set after 1946.

What changed him Position on Partition

He demanded it from the Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940 and obtained it. Whether he wanted it as a country or as a bargaining position is the great unresolved question, and Part 4 laid out both readings. What is documented is that in June 1946 heaccepted the Cabinet Mission Plan, which was not Pakistan, on the ground that grouping gave its substance. A man who has accepted a united India in June cannot easily be said to have wanted nothing else.

• The arithmetic. In a system of counting heads, a permanent 25 percent loses permanently, and no Congress leader ever produced a convincing answer to that.
• He predicted that Congress would govern with majority assumptions, and Part 4 showed that in office it did.
• Tactically he was one of the most effective politicians of the century, taking a party from 4. 4 percent to a country in nine years.

What he got right What he got wrong

• Direct Action Day. Whatever he intended by it, he called it, and Calcutta followed. He never took responsibility for that.
• He got a Pakistan he himself had called moth eaten, without the whole of Punjab or Bengal, and he had explicitly rejected exactly that outcome in earlier negotiations.
• He had no answer for the Muslims left behind in India, who were about a third of the whole. Part 10 is about the people he did not plan for.
• He built a country on a religious claim and then, on 11 August 1947, told its assembly that religion had nothing to do with the business of the state. The contradiction was never resolved and it defined Pakistan's next seventy years.

1889 to 1964. The core idea: that India's real divisions were economic rather than religious, and that a modern, industrial, scientific and secular state would dissolve communal identities within a generation.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Position on Partition

Opposed it in principle throughout, believing the two nation theory was a colonial artefact. Accepted it in March or April 1947, after Patel, on the reasoning that a central government too weak to plan or to govern would produce a permanently paralysed India. He supported the partition of Punjab and Bengal so that India would not inherit the problem in its worst form.

• He held the line on a secular constitution when it would have been popular to do otherwise, in a country that had just been divided on religion and was full of refugees with real grievances. Part 10 will show what that decision was worth.
• He recognised that the greatest danger after 1947 was Indian majoritarianism, and he said so repeatedly and unpopularly.
• He gave India democratic institutions, universal adult franchise from the first election and a habit of constitutionalism that its neighbours did not acquire.

What he got right What he got wrong

• The United Provinces coalition of 1937. Part 4 examined it. A serious unforced error at the worst possible moment.
• The press conference of 10 July 1946. Part 8 examined it. Another.
• Taking the Kashmir question to the United Nations in January 1948, which internationalised a dispute India could have handled bilaterally, and accepting a ceasefire with a third of the state in Pakistani hands.
• He genuinely could not understand religious politics. He thought it was false consciousness that economics would cure, and that blindness cost him repeatedly.
• China, and the military unpreparedness of 1962. That belongs to a later story than this book, but it belongs on the ledger.

1875 to 1950. The core idea: that a state which cannot enforce its writ is not a state, and that a smaller country that works is better than a larger one that cannot.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

Position on Partition

Thefirstof the senior Congress leaders to accept it, in the winter of 1946 to 1947, well before Nehru. His reasoning was practical rather than theoretical, and it came from watching Liaquat Ali Khan paralyse the interim government from the Finance ministry, as Part 8 described. He concluded that a united India in which the League held a permanent veto at the centre would not be a country but a deadlock.

He insisted in return on the partition of Punjab and Bengal, so that India would not be left with two provinces containing hostile majorities.

• The integration of 565 princely states into India between 1947 and 1949, achieved almost entirely by negotiation with the threat of force in reserve, and completed in about two years. It is the single greatest administrative achievement in modern Indian history, and without it there is no India to argue about.
• Hyderabad, Junagadh and the mechanics of holding the country together.
• His judgement about the interim government was correct, and it was formed from evidence rather than from theory.

• He was slower and less consistent than Nehru in condemning Hindu communal violence in 1947, and his correspondence of that period contains language about Indian Muslims proving their loyalty that Nehru would not have used.
• His organisational instincts made the Congress a machine, which served it in 1947 and damaged it later.

What he got right What he got wrong

1891 to 1956. The core idea: that political freedom without social equality is worthless, and that the caste system, not the British, was the primary oppression in Indian life.

Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar

Position on Partition, which is the surprise

Ambedkar wrote the most rigorous book anybody produced on the subject,Pakistan or the Partition of India, first published in 1940 after the Lahore Resolution and revised through 1945. It is not a polemic. It is a legal and demographic analysis, and it reaches a conclusion most Indians do not expect.

He concluded thatif Muslims genuinely wanted a separate state they should be allowed to have it, and he gave a specific strategic reason that had nothing to do with sympathy for the League.

His argument ran like this. In an undivided India the army would contain a very large proportion of Muslims from the north west, drawn from exactly the provinces whose political leadership rejected the Indian nation. A state whose army does not accept the state's legitimacy is not safe. Better a smaller India with a reliable army than a larger India with an army that might not obey it. He also argued that a Muslim minority of a third, permanently organised as a bloc, would make stable government impossible.

And he attached a condition that almost nobody quotes: he argued that partition without a complete transfer of populationswould be worse than useless, and he cited the Greek and Turkish exchange after 1923 as the precedent. He wanted it planned, agreed, financed and orderly.

• Everything he said in 1932 about reserved seats in joint electorates producing dependent representatives, which Part 4 covered.
• The Constitution of India, which he piloted through the drafting committee, and which is why Part 10 can be written at all.
• He insisted that Indian democracy would be a top dressing on an undemocratic society unless caste was attacked, and that warning has aged extremely well.

What he got right What he got wrong, or where he is contested

• His writing about Islam in Pakistan or the Partition of Indiais severe and generalising, and would be called communal if a Hindu nationalist had written it. His defenders say he applied identical severity to Hinduism, which is true, in Annihilation of Casteand elsewhere. Readers should read both and judge.
• He supported a partition whose consequences for the Dalits of what became Pakistan he did not fully anticipate, and Part 10 will show what happened to them.

1888 to 1958. The core idea: that Islam did not require a separate country, that Indian Muslims were Indians whose faith had shaped India, and that Partition would abandon the majority of Indian Muslims who could not move.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

The most important thing about him

Azad was a serious Islamic scholar, not a secular Muslim in the modern sense. He was educated at al Azhar, wrote a Quranic commentary, and argued against Pakistanfrom within Islam. That is why the Muslim League hated him more than it hated any Hindu leader, and why it called him a Congress showpiece. His answer was that a scholar's argument stands on its evidence, not on who finds it convenient.

He was Congress president from 1940 to 1946, the longest continuous presidency in the party's history, which meant he led the Congress through Cripps, Quit India and prison.

Position on Partition

Opposed it to the last day, and was the last senior Congress figure still fighting it after Patel and Nehru had accepted. He argued that Partition would not solve the communal problem but would relocate it, leaving a large Muslim minority in India in a far weaker position than before, and that the two nation theory would be disproved within a generation by the eastern wing.

India Wins Freedom and the thirty sealed pages

His memoir, published in 1958, is one of the essential documents of this period, and it is also an act of controlled score settling. Thirty pages were withheld and placed under seal in the National Library at Calcutta and the National Archives at Delhi. They were opened and published in 1988, thirty years after his death.

Azad's stated reason for sealing them was that he did not wish to embarrass Nehru and Patel while they lived. The released material is more explicit in its criticism, particularly of Patel and of Nehru's role in 1946 and 1947, and confirms rather than overturns the account in the original edition.

Read Azad with the same care you would read anybody. It is a first hand account by a man who was in the room, and it is also the memoir of a man explaining why the disaster was other people's fault. Both things are true.

• He predicted that Partition would leave Indian Muslims worse off and more vulnerable than before, and that the eastern wing would not hold. Both came true, and Part 10 has the evidence.
• His judgement on the 1937 United Provinces coalition and on the 1946 press conference was contemporaneous, from inside the leadership, and correct.

What he got right What he got wrong

• He stepped aside as Congress president in 1946, allowing Nehru to take the office at the decisive moment, and later called it one of the greatest mistakes of his life.
• He was a poor party politician who never built a base among the Muslims he claimed to represent, which is precisely why the League could dismiss him.

1883 to 1966. The core idea: Hindutva, defined in 1923 as belonging to those for whom India is both fatherland and holy land, and the conviction that Hindus must organise as a political nation or be ruled by those who do.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar

Position on Partition

Opposed it absolutely and to the end. This must be stated clearly because it is often muddled. Savarkar wanted an undivided India, Akhand Bharat, in which Hindus were recognised as the nation and others lived as citizens without special claims. He never supported the creation of Pakistan.

Andin his presidential address at Ahmedabad in December 1937 he stated that India could not be assumed to be a homogeneous nation and that there were two nations in the main, the Hindus and the Muslims. Both facts are true and the tension between them is the whole argument about him.

• A genuine revolutionary: Abhinav Bharat, the 1909 book on 1857, the Marseilles escape attempt, two life sentences, about a decade in the Cellular Jail.
• At least six petitions to the British between 1911 and 1920, whose language Part 6 quoted, followed by release in 1924 on political restrictions that he observed for thirteen years.
• The two nations formulation of 1937, three years before Jinnah made the equivalent claim League policy.
• Hindu Mahasabha coalitions with the Muslim League in Bengal, Sindh and the Frontier during his presidency, defended by him at Kanpur in 1942.
• The recruitment campaign of 1941 to 1943, praised by Bose on 25 June 1944 for supplying trained men to the INA.
• Named as an accused in the Gandhi murder trial in 1948 andacquitted for want of evidence. The Kapur Commission of 1969 later expressed a harsher view of his associates' contacts with him, but an acquittal is an acquittal and this book will not treat him as convicted of something he was not convicted of.

• He identified early that a disarmed population cannot bargain, and the militarisation argument was coherent whether or not one likes it.
• He was correct that the Congress had no answer to organised communal politics beyond hoping it would dissolve.

The record, set out plainly What he got right What he got wrong

• Conceding the premise. Once you say there are two nations, you have handed the other side its entire case, and Jinnah used exactly such statements in negotiation. You cannot demand an undivided India while asserting that it contains two nations.
• The petitions and the thirteen years of observed restrictions, which no tactical explanation comfortably covers.
• Office alongside the Muslim League in 1942 while the Congress was in prison, which cost the Mahasabha any claim to the mantle of the freedom struggle.

1906 to 1973. Head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from 1940 to 1973. The core idea: that the nation is built by transforming individuals through daily discipline rather than by politics, and that the Hindu nation is the nation.

Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar

Position on Partition

Opposed it. The RSS position was Akhand Bharat and it did not accept the legitimacy of the division.

• We or Our Nationhood Defined, published under his name in 1939, whose contents Part 4 quoted, including the passage praising Germany's treatment of the Jews. The authorship is disputed, and the RSS later withdrew the book from circulation and distanced itself from it. I have given both facts in the same breath because both are true.
• His instruction that the RSS would not take part in the Quit India movement, examined in Part 6.
• RSS volunteers did substantial relief work for refugees in Punjab and Delhi in 1947, which is documented and is acknowledged by critics of the organisation.
• The RSS was banned in February 1948 after Gandhi's assassination and the ban was lifted in July 1949 after no organisational link to the murder was established.

The record The honest summary

His significance in this book is not personal. It is that by 1939 the hardest form of the two nation position existed on both sides at once, and each could point to the other's text.

1901 to 1953. Vice Chancellor of Calcutta University at thirty three, Hindu Mahasabha leader, minister in the Fazlul Huq coalition, first Industry Minister of independent India, founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh.

Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee

Position on Partition, which is the interesting one

He opposed the partition of India. But once it became certain, he became the leading advocate of partitioning Bengal, so that the Hindu majority western districts including Calcutta would remain in India rather than the whole province going to Pakistan.

This matters enormously and is usually left out. In April 1947 Suhrawardy and Sarat Chandra Bose proposed aunited sovereign Bengal, independent of both India and Pakistan. Mookerjee led the campaign against it, arguing that an independent Bengal would in practice be a Muslim majority state in which Hindus would be a helpless minority, and that Hindu majority districts must be separated and kept in India.

He won. West Bengal exists because of that campaign.

• He was almost certainly correct about what would have happened to Bengali Hindus in a united Bengal, and Part 10's figures on East Pakistan support him.
• He resigned from the Bengal ministry in November 1942 in protest at the repression in Midnapore, which was a creditable act at real cost.
• He resigned from Nehru's cabinet in April 1950 over the Nehru Liaquat Pact, arguing that it gave India nothing enforceable in exchange for guarantees to Pakistan's minorities that Pakistan would not keep. Part 10 examines whether he was right.

What he got right What he got wrong, or where he is contested

• He had been in coalition with the Muslim League in 1941 and 1942, which sits awkwardly with the later politics.
• His campaign against Article 370 and his death in detention in Kashmir in 1953 remain contested, and his family's demand for an inquiry was never met.

1897 to 1945. Covered fully in Part 5. Summarised here so the scorecard is complete.

Subhas Chandra Bose

Position on Partition

He died in August 1945, before Partition became a live proposition, so he never had to decide. What is on the record is unambiguous hostility to communal politics of every kind. He built the Indian National Army deliberately across religion, with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh officers eating together and community ignored in the chain of command, and his political vision for India was explicitly secular and socialist.

His Forward Bloc criticised the Hindu Mahasabha. He praised Savarkar's recruitment drive on 25 June 1944 for the specific and practical reason that it supplied trained soldiers to the INA. He called Gandhi the Father of the Nation on 6 July 1944 while at war with the empire Gandhi was opposing by other means.

The honest summary

A severe critic of Gandhi's strategy who revered the man, and an opponent of communalism who was willing to work with anyone who served the military objective. Anybody who claims him for a communal politics has to explain the composition of his own army.

1878 to 1972. Gandhi's closest political associate in the south, later the last Governor General of India. The man punished for being right early.

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari

The formula that got him hounded

In 1944 Rajaji proposed a settlement, known as the C. R. Formula. The Muslim League would endorse the demand for independence and cooperate in a provisional government. After the war, a commission would demarcate the contiguous districts in the north west and east where Muslims were an absolute majority, and a plebiscite of all the adult inhabitants of those districts, not only Muslims, would decide separation. Defence, commerce and communications would be settled by agreement.

Gandhi endorsed it and used it as the basis of his talks with Jinnah in September 1944. The talks failed, because Jinnah wanted the whole of the provinces, a plebiscite of Muslims only, and no conditions.

Rajaji was denounced across the Congress as a defeatist and a traitor to the cause of unity, and he left the party for a period.

Why he matters

Look at what the formula proposed and then look at what happened in 1947. Contiguous Muslim majority districts, a boundary commission, and separation. It is very close to what India actually got, three years later, except that in 1944 it would have come with negotiation, a plebiscite and time to plan.

Rajaji's position was that the demand for Pakistan could not be defeated by refusing to discuss it, and that a negotiated separation on India's terms was better than a forced one on somebody else's. He was called a traitor for saying it in 1944 and the Congress adopted the substance of it in 1947.

The Sikh leadership. This is the shortest profile in this part and it should be the longest, and the reason for that is itself the point.

Master Tara Singh and Baldev Singh

The position the Sikhs were in

The Sikhs were about 13 to 14 percent of Punjab's population. They were a majority in no district. Their holy places, their most productive canal colony lands and a large part of their community lay on both sides of any line that could be drawn through Punjab.

They therefore had the worst hand of anyone at the table. They could not have a state because they had no majority anywhere. They could not stay in a Muslim majority Pakistan without becoming a minority in a state defined by another religion. And any partition of Punjab would cut their community in half whatever the boundary.

• Master Tara Singh, leader of the Shiromani Akali Dal, opposed Pakistan absolutely. On 3 March 1947, outside the Punjab Assembly in Lahore, he drew his kirpan on the steps in a public act of defiance against the Pakistan demand. The Rawalpindi massacres followed within days. Whether his gesture was a cause, a trigger or a coincidence is argued about to this day, and I do not think it can be settled.
• Baldev Singhrepresented the Sikhs in the negotiations and at the 2 June 1947 meeting where the partition plan was accepted. He accepted it, on the basis that a divided Punjab kept the largest possible number of Sikhs and Sikh shrines in India. He had almost nothing to bargain with.
• A proposal for a separate Sikh state, sometimes called Azad Punjab or Khalistan in various formulations, was raised by Akali leaders in the 1940s and was never seriously entertained by the British, the Congress or the League. There was no territory in which it was demographically possible.

What their leaders did What actually happened to them

Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, and Panja Sahib went to Pakistan. So did Lahore, the capital of Ranjit Singh's kingdom. Virtually the entire Sikh population of west Punjab, some two to two and a half million people, was uprooted. Proportionately, the Sikhs suffered more displacement than any other community in India, and the violence in east and west Punjab in which Sikh jathas were both victims and perpetrators was the worst in the subcontinent.

1890 to 1988. The Frontier Gandhi. The core idea: that nonviolence was not a Hindu doctrine but a universal one, and that he could prove it among the Pashtuns.

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan

What he built

The Khudai Khidmatgars, the Servants of God, a nonviolent movement of about a hundred thousand volunteers in the North West Frontier Province, in a Pashtun society with a deep tradition of the feud and the gun. They wore red shirts, took a vow of nonviolence, and were shot down without retaliating, most notoriously at Qissa Khwani Bazaar in Peshawar in April 1930.

It is one of the most remarkable political achievements of the twentieth century and it is almost entirely forgotten. An overwhelmingly Muslim province, allied to the Congress, voted Congress in 1937 and again in 1946, and did it on a platform of nonviolence.

What happened to him

When the Congress Working Committee accepted the partition plan on 3 June 1947 without consulting the Frontier leadership, he said the sentence for which he is remembered.

The Frontier was then given a referendum with only two options, India or Pakistan. Independence, or a Pashtunistan, was not on the ballot, although the Khudai Khidmatgars had formally demanded it in the Bannu Resolution of June 1947. Believing that contesting a communal referendum would set Pashtun against Pashtun, he boycotted it. The Muslim League won it on a low turnout.

He spent much of the rest of his life in Pakistani prisons, some fifteen years in total, having already spent years in British ones. He was awarded the Bharat Ratna by India in 1987. He died in 1988 in Peshawar under house arrest, and was buried, by his own wish, in Jalalabad in Afghanistan. Both sides in the Afghan war observed a ceasefire so that his funeral could pass.

The verdict

Nothing in this book is a clearer case of a man being right and losing anyway. He proved that nonviolence was not culturally Hindu, he delivered a Muslim majority province to the Congress twice in free elections, and the Congress accepted a plan that handed his province away without asking him.

Four Voices Usually Left Out

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy, 1879 to 1973

The leader of the Self Respect Movement in the Tamil country, and a radical opponent of caste and of Brahmin dominance. His position on Partition is the one nobody expects: hesupported Jinnah's demand, and congratulated him. His reason had nothing to do with Islam. He held that the real threat to south India was north Indian Brahminical domination through a strong Delhi, and that anything that broke up a centralising Hindu majority state was good for Dravidians. He also raised a demand for a separate Dravida Nadu.

He is a reminder that opposition to a unitary Indian nation came from more directions than one, and that Muslim separatism was not the only separatism on the table in the 1940s.

Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, 1905 to 1982

The Lion of Kashmir, leader of the National Conference. He renamed his party from the Muslim Conference to the National Conference in 1939 precisely to make it non communal, and his politics were about land reform and the removal of the Dogra maharaja rather than about religion. He opposed Jinnah's two nation theory, and Jinnah in turn had little time for him.

In 1947 he supported accession to India rather than to Pakistan, on secular and land reform grounds, and his support was what made the accession politically real. He was Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948, and was dismissed and imprisoned by the Indian government in 1953, spending much of the next twenty years in detention. His story is where the argument about Article 370 begins, and it belongs to Part 12.

A. K. Fazlul Huq, 1873 to 1962

The Bengali peasant leader who won Bengal in 1937 on land reform, moved the Lahore Resolution in March 1940, formed a coalition with the Hindu Mahasabha in December 1941, was expelled from the Muslim League, and later served as chief minister of East Pakistan and was dismissed. His career is the single best refutation of the idea that the politics of this period ran on fixed religious loyalties.

Sir Sikandar Hyat Khan, 1892 to 1942

Premier of Punjab and leader of the Unionist Party, the cross community alliance of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landholders that kept Punjab out of communal politics through the 1930s. He signed a pact with Jinnah in 1937 that gave the League a formal presence in Punjab, and then spent the rest of his life trying to limit what he had conceded, insisting in the Punjab Assembly in 1941 that he did not support a Pakistan in which Muslims would rule and others would be subjects.

He died in December 1942 at fifty. The Unionist Party did not survive him, and its collapse in 1946 and 1947 is what opened Punjab to the League and to the killing. It is worth asking what Punjab would have looked like had he lived another five years, and nobody can answer it.

The single most useful page in this book. Everything above, compressed.

Who Opposed, Who Accepted, and When

Word List and Sources

• B. R. Ambedkar,Pakistan or the Partition of India, 1940 and 1945 editions, full text hosted by Columbia University.
• Maulana Abul Kalam Azad,India Wins Freedom, 1958, and India Wins Freedom: The Complete Version, 1988, containing the thirty pages opened after thirty years under seal.
• V. D. Savarkar, presidential addresses to the Hindu Mahasabha, Ahmedabad 1937 and Kanpur 1942, and Essentials of Hindutva, 1923.
• Judgment in the Gandhi murder trial, 1949, and the report of the Kapur Commission, 1969.
• M. S. Golwalkar,We or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939, and the published scholarship on its disputed authorship.
• The C. R. Formula, 1944, and the record of the Gandhi and Jinnah talks of September 1944.
• Records of the Congress Working Committee, 3 June 1947, and contemporary accounts of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan's response.
• The Bannu Resolution, June 1947, and the record of the North West Frontier Province referendum.
• Punjab Legislative Assembly proceedings, including Sikandar Hyat Khan's statement of 1941 on the kind of Pakistan he would not support.
• Accounts of the united sovereign Bengal proposal of April and May 1947 by Suhrawardy and Sarat Chandra Bose, and of the campaign against it.
• Selected works and collected writings of Nehru, Patel and Gandhi for the positions and dates given.