Independence with Partition

By early 1947 the deadlock, the communal killings and the unworkable Congress-League coalition had made partition once unthinkable but now seem inevitable. Britain fixed a date to leave and sent Mountbatten as its last viceroy. On 3 June 1947 it announced the plan to divide India. The Indian Independence Act turned it into law. At midnight on 15 August 1947 India became free, but it was partitioned and the moment was overshadowed by a vast human tragedy. Sardar Patel then welded over 500 princely states into the Union. This is a very high-yield topic.

Partition's deepest root was communalism, the belief that people of the same religion share the same secular, political and economic interests. Communalism (more accurately "sectarianism") is an ideology, not a natural condition. It was not an age-old Indian reality. It was a modern phenomenon that grew alongside nationalism from the late nineteenth century, born of modern politics based on mass mobilisation. Its social roots lay in the rising middle classes, who propagated imaginary communal interests to further their own. The Left called it "a bourgeois question." Religious consciousness was transformed into communal consciousness. It was backed by the colonial administration, which used it to widen its social base. It was also helped by the fact that socio-economic distinctions often coincided with religious ones.

Communalism evolved through three stages:

• Communal nationalism: the notion that, because people belong to one religious community, their secular interests are the same, even in matters that have nothing to do with religion.
• Liberal communalism: the notion that, because two communities have different religious interests, they have different interests in secular matters too (economic, political, cultural). This was communal while still upholding liberal, democratic values and the idea that diverse communities could be welded into one nation. It prevailed till about 1937.
• Extreme communalism: the notion that the two communities' interests are not merely different but incompatible, so they cannot coexist. Based on fear, hatred and violence, this dominated after 1937.

Several forces fed communalism:

• Socio-economic reasons: Hindus and Muslims were equal victims of colonial exploitation. But Muslims lagged in modern education, trade and industry. Reactionary landlords kept their hold over the Muslim masses. The educated Muslim few, finding scant opportunity, looked to government jobs. Underdevelopment and acute unemployment sharpened competition for scarce jobs, making people prey to demands for communal reservation.
• British divide and rule: after the 1857 and Wahabi revolts the British first repressed Muslims. After the 1870s, fearing rising nationalism, they rallied Muslims behind the government through concessions. They used men like Syed Ahmed Khan to counter the Congress.
• Communal history-writing: imperialist and later chauvinist historians painted the ancient period as a "Hindu" age and the medieval as a "Muslim" age. They distorted the conflicts of ruling classes into Hindu-Muslim conflicts and refused to acknowledge India's composite culture.
• Side-effects of reform and militant nationalism: revivalist reform movements (Wahabi, Shuddhi, Sangathan; and in retaliation Tabligh, Tanzeem) insulated communities from one another. The Hindu tinge of militant nationalism (Tilak's Ganapati and Shivaji festivals, Aurobindo's imagery, the Swadeshi rituals) encouraged looking at politics through a religious lens. So did the communal element in the Lucknow Pact (1916) and the Khilafat agitation.
• Communal reaction by the majority: the Punjab Hindu Sabha (1909), the All India Hindu Mahasabha (1915) and the RSS (1925). For long, though, Hindu communalism was a weaker force than the modern secular intelligentsia.

The two-nation idea developed step by step:

• 1887: Dufferin and Colvin propped up Syed Ahmed Khan and Raja Shiv Prasad as an anti-Congress front.
• 1906: the Simla Deputation (led by the Agha Khan) demanded separate electorates. The All-India Muslim League was founded to keep Muslims loyal and away from the Congress.
• 1909: separate electorates were granted under the Morley-Minto Reforms.
• 1916: the Lucknow Pact: the Congress accepted separate electorates, giving the League political legitimacy as a separate entity.
• 1920s: communal riots; Shuddhi and Sangathan vs Tabligh and Tanzeem.
• 1928–29: the Nehru Report was opposed by Muslim hardliners. Jinnah's Fourteen Points demanded separate electorates and reservation.
• 1932: the Communal Award accepted all the demands of the Fourteen Points.
• After 1937: humbled in the provincial elections, the League turned to extreme communalism. It projected Muslims as a separate nation, an idea named by Rahmat Ali and developed by the poet Iqbal.
• 24 March 1940: the Pakistan (Lahore) Resolution called for grouping the Muslim-majority areas into "independent states."
• 1937–39: Jinnah blocked conciliation by demanding the Congress recognise the League as the sole representative of Indian Muslims. The wartime British veto strengthened the League, which finally won Pakistan in 1947.

By late 1946 every road to unity had closed. The Cabinet Mission of 1946, the last scheme for a united India, had collapsed over the grouping clause, and the League's Direct Action had set off the Great Calcutta Killings; the Nehru-led interim coalition never worked. Meanwhile the INA trials at the Red Fort had triggered a wave of national sympathy that shook British confidence in the loyalty of the Indian armed forces and hastened the decision to leave.

Attlee's statement of 20 February 1947 declared Britain's intention to leave the subcontinent. It fixed a deadline of 30 June 1948 for the transfer of power, even if the parties had not agreed. It also announced that Mountbatten would replace Wavell as viceroy. The fixed date was meant to shock the parties into agreement and convince Indians of British sincerity. In truth, British authority had already irreversibly declined.

Mountbatten proved firmer and quicker than his predecessors. He was informally given wide powers to decide on the spot. He found the Cabinet Mission Plan "a dead horse" and Jinnah immovable on a sovereign state, so he chose partition. His first scheme was the Balkan Plan (also called Plan Balkan or the Dickie Bird Plan), the brain-child of Mountbatten himself. It proposed transferring power separately to individual provinces, each free to join a constituent assembly or stand alone, which risked balkanising India into many small units. Nehru rejected it vehemently when Mountbatten showed it to him at Simla in May 1947, and it was scrapped. The key innovation then came from V.P. Menon: transfer power immediately on the basis of dominion status (with a right of secession), rather than wait for a new constitution. Exams test this distinction: the Balkan Plan was Mountbatten's, the accepted plan was Menon's. This freedom-with-partition formula was announced as the Mountbatten Plan on 3 June 1947:

• the Punjab and Bengal legislative assemblies would meet in two groups (Hindus and Muslims); if either group voted for partition, the province would be partitioned;
• in case of partition, two dominions and two constituent assemblies would be created;
• Sindh would take its own decision (its assembly would vote on which dominion to join);
• referendums in the NWFP and the Sylhet district of Assam would decide their fate; and
• with British paramountcy lapsing, each princely state would join one of the two dominions.

Two provinces tried to avoid being divided. Punjab came forward with a plan for a united and independent existence: its Unionist leaders, joined by some Congress members, proposed keeping the whole province together as a single, independent unit instead of splitting it between the two dominions. In Bengal, Sarat Bose and H.S. Suhrawardy floated the separate United Bengal scheme for a sovereign, undivided Bengal. Both proposals failed, and both provinces were partitioned. Exams ask which province proposed a united and independent existence: the answer is Punjab, with the Bengal scheme as the distractor.

The Congress, whose president at the time of partition was Acharya J.B. Kripalani, had already conceded that a unified India was impossible. Its remaining conditions were met: no independence for princely states, no separate independence for Bengal, no accession of Hyderabad to Pakistan, freedom on 15 August 1947, and a boundary commission (under Radcliffe). The Congress accepted dominion status because it ensured a peaceful and quick transfer of power. It also let Congress assume authority to contain the explosive situation. For Britain, it kept India in the Commonwealth. The League had obtained Pakistan, though a smaller one than Jinnah had demanded.

On 5 July 1947 the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act (royal assent 18 July), implemented on 15 August 1947. It provided for:

• the creation of two independent dominions, India and Pakistan, from 15 August 1947;
• a governor-general for each dominion;
• the constituent assembly of each dominion to act as its sovereign legislature, free to frame any constitution;
• the end of British paramountcy over the princely states;
• the abolition of the office of the Secretary of State for India; and
• in the transitional period, governance under the Government of India Act, 1935.

The constituent assembly that the Act made sovereign was not a new body. It had been set up in 1946 under the Cabinet Mission scheme. Its members were elected indirectly by the legislative assemblies of the provinces, through proportional representation with the single transferable vote. Representatives of the princely states were nominated by their rulers. The members were not nominated by the British Parliament or by the Governor-General, a distinction question setters test. After partition, members from the areas that went to Pakistan withdrew, and the remaining assembly framed the constitution of free India.

The plan was carried out at breakneck speed. The assemblies of Bengal and Punjab voted for partition. The Sylhet and NWFP referendums went to Pakistan. Two boundary commissions under Radcliffe demarcated the new frontiers. Pakistan became independent on 14 August and India on 15 August 1947. Jinnah became Pakistan's first Governor-General. India asked Mountbatten to continue as its Governor-General.

Problems of the early withdrawal. The breakneck speed caused anomalies and failed to prevent the Punjab massacre. There were no transitional structures to manage partition. Jinnah's insistence on being Pakistan's own Governor-General removed a common link between the two new states. The Radcliffe boundary award was ready by 12 August but was deliberately published after 15 August, so the British could escape responsibility for the disturbances. Partition was accompanied by a catastrophic communal bloodbath and the uprooting of millions.

Was Partition inevitable? The Congress accepted it as the lesser evil. The long-term failure to draw the Muslim masses into the national movement, the communal violence and the unworkable coalition left no alternative. As Nehru said, "We were tired men... The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it." The leaders felt that only an immediate transfer of power could forestall "Direct Action" and a wider civil war.

Free India had to build its institutions while absorbing refugees and integrating over 500 princely states, a task Sardar Patel completed almost bloodlessly within a year. One early development that exams pick up is the reorganisation of the trade union movement along party lines. Each major political current built its own central federation of workers:

• AITUC (1920): the All India Trade Union Congress, the oldest federation, which after independence remained under Communist leadership.
• INTUC (1947): the Indian National Trade Union Congress, founded in May 1947 with Congress backing as a non-Communist alternative.
• Hind Mazdoor Sabha (1948): founded in December 1948 at Howrah by socialist leaders, principally Ashok Mehta, T.S. Ramanujan and G.G. Mehta, after the socialists left the Congress fold.
• UTUC (1949): the United Trades Union Congress, formed by smaller leftist groups.

Remember the founder set for the Hind Mazdoor Sabha. Question setters pair it with distractor trios such as Kerala Communist leaders (E.M.S. Namboodiripad and others) or unrelated figures like Jayaprakash Narayan and M.N. Roy. The correct trio is Ashok Mehta, T.S. Ramanujan and G.G. Mehta.