Chapter 9: History: Independence and Partition of India
On the evening of 3 June 1947, families across India gathered around their radio sets. All India Radio was carrying an announcement from Delhi, and word had spread that it mattered. Four men spoke that evening, one after another. Lord Mountbatten, the Viceroy, explained the plan the British Government had approved earlier that day. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke for the Congress. Muhammad Ali Jinnah spoke for the Muslim League. Baldev Singh spoke for the Sikhs of the Punjab. What listeners heard was not a description of a new country. It was a set of clauses. British India would be divided into two Dominions. Certain legislative assemblies would vote on whether their provinces should be split. A district in Assam would hold a referendum. A frontier province would hold a plebiscite. A Boundary Commission would afterwards draw the lines on the map. Nothing about those clauses was inevitable. Fifteen months earlier, three British cabinet ministers had come to India with a plan that kept the country whole. That plan had been argued over, partly accepted, and finally set aside. So the broadcast of 3 June was the end of a long argument about documents — about what a plan said, who signed it, and what its words left unsettled. This chapter follows those documents, clause by clause.
Diagram
Fig. 9.0-1 Caption: Millions of Indians first learnt of the plan for partition from a radio broadcast. Brief: Source an archival photograph of a valve radio receiver of the 1940s, of the kind found in Indian homes, tea shops and municipal halls; label the tuning dial and the loudspeaker grille; do not add any modern object to the frame.
9.1 Why A Cabinet Mission Was Sent
In March 1946 three senior British ministers landed in Delhi. They had come to negotiate the transfer of power — the handing over of the authority to govern India from British hands to Indian ones. That such a mission was sent at all tells us how much had changed in a few years.
Britain After The War
The Second World War ended in 1945 with Britain among the victors. Victory, however, had drained its treasury, its industry and its manpower.
Britain had borrowed enormous sums to fight the war and now owed money to India itself. Its forces were stretched across Europe, West Asia and South East Asia. Holding down a discontented India by force would have cost more than Britain could then afford.
In July 1945 British voters elected a Labour government led by Clement Attlee. Several members of that government had argued for years that India should govern itself. During the war the United States had also pressed Britain to move towards Indian self-government.
The Deadlock In India
Inside India, government and opposition had been locked against each other since 1939. The Congress ministries in the provinces had resigned that year, and the Quit India leaders had spent much of the war in jail.
The Viceroy — the British monarch’s representative, who headed the government of India — tried to break the deadlock at Simla in 1945. Those talks collapsed over a single question: who had the right to nominate the Muslim members of his Executive Council.
Elections to the central and provincial legislatures were held over 1945 and 1946. The Congress won most of the general seats; the Muslim League won most of the seats reserved for Muslims. Neither body could now be ignored, and the two disagreed fundamentally about India’s future shape.
Meanwhile the instruments of British rule were themselves becoming unreliable. In February 1946 ratings of the Royal Indian Navy at Bombay — sailors below officer rank — refused duty and took over ships and shore establishments. Officials in London read such incidents as a warning that force could not be counted on indefinitely.
The Mission Arrives
On 19 February 1946 Attlee told the House of Commons that a Cabinet Mission would be sent to India. Its stated purpose was to work out, with Indian leaders, the machinery for transferring power.
The Mission had two connected tasks. It was to settle how a constitution-making body could be brought into being, and to help form an interim government while that body worked.
Three members of the British Cabinet made up the Mission, as shown in Fig. 9.1-1: (a) Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India — the minister answerable to the British Parliament for Indian affairs (b) Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade (c) A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty
Diagram
Fig. 9.1-1 Caption: The three British cabinet ministers who negotiated in India through the summer of 1946. Brief: Source an archival photograph of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander in India in 1946; label each figure with his name and office; keep the image uncropped and add no other figures.
The photograph fixes the seniority of the delegation. Two of the three sat in the British Cabinet with departments of their own, which tells us London treated the visit as a decision-making trip rather than a fact-finding one.
What a photograph cannot show is what these men were authorised to concede. Their instructions, the limits set by the Cabinet in London, and the compromises they were prepared to accept appear only in the proposals they later published — which is where the rest of this chapter looks.
The Mission held weeks of discussions in Delhi and Simla with the Congress, the Muslim League and other parties. When agreement between the Indian parties proved impossible, the Mission published a plan of its own.
9.2 The Cabinet Mission Plan
The Congress and the Muslim League could not agree on a shape for a free India. So on 16 May 1946 the Mission published proposals of its own, known since as the Cabinet Mission Plan.
The Plan tried to hold two demands together. India was to remain one country, and the provinces where Muslims were in a majority were to be given a way of acting together.
9.2.1 The Federal Design
At the centre of the Plan lay a federal union — a state in which power is divided between a central government and the units, each acting directly on the people within its own field.
The proposed Union was to include both the British Provinces and the Princely States. Its powers were deliberately narrow.
- The Union would deal with three subjects only: foreign affairs, defence and communications.
- It would have the power to raise the finances needed for those three subjects.
- It would have its own executive and legislature, made up of representatives of the Provinces and the States.
- Any question raising a major communal issue in the Union legislature would need a majority of the representatives of each of the two major communities present and voting.
- All subjects other than the Union subjects, and all remaining powers, would rest with the Provinces.
- The Princely States would keep every subject and power they had not handed to the Union.
Clause (e) is the heart of the design. It gave the Provinces provincial autonomy — full authority over every subject not expressly given to the Union.
This inverted the usual British Indian arrangement, in which the Centre held the wide powers and the Provinces the narrow ones. A Union with three subjects would have been one of the weakest central governments anywhere.
Why A Separate State Was Refused
The Mission set out its reasons for rejecting the demand for a separate sovereign state of Pakistan: (a) A separate state would not solve the problem of minorities, since large numbers of Muslims would remain outside it and large numbers of non-Muslims inside it. (b) There was no case for including within it the non-Muslim districts of Bengal, Assam and the Punjab. (c) The armed forces, the railways and the postal and telegraph systems had been built for India as a single unit, and dividing them would create serious difficulties. (d) The Princely States would find it hard to decide which of the two to join. (e) The two Muslim-majority regions lay in the north-west and the north-east, separated by hundreds of miles of territory that would belong to the other state.
The Mission’s answer to the demand was therefore not a separate state but a grouped one.
9.2.2 The Grouping Of The Provinces
The Plan allowed the Provinces to form groups. Each group could decide for itself which provincial subjects its members would administer in common.
Three groups were named. Table 9.1 sets them out.
The Chief Commissioners’ provinces were fitted in around this scheme: Delhi, Ajmer-Merwara and Coorg were to join Group A, and Baluchistan Group B.
Read across the table and the logic becomes visible. Groups B and C together would place the Muslim-majority provinces under a single arrangement, without a separate state and without a partition of the country.
What the table cannot tell you is how people in these provinces felt about being grouped. It records majorities counted in a census, not opinions. Assam, with a Hindu majority and a Congress ministry, had been placed in a group that Bengal would dominate — a fact the grid shows only if you already know to look for it.
A province was not locked into its group for ever. It could opt out after the first general election held under the new Constitution, by a majority vote of its own legislative assembly.
That silence proved costly. Both parties accepted the Plan, and each announced that its own reading of grouping was the correct one.
9.2.3 The Constituent Assembly And The Interim Government
The Plan also had to answer a practical question: who would actually write the Constitution of a free India?
Its answer was a Constituent Assembly — a body elected for the single purpose of framing a constitution, and dissolved once that work is done. Its composition was fixed by the Plan.
- The Assembly would have 389 members in all.
- 296 of them would come from the British Provinces.
- 93 would come from the Princely States.
- Seats in each Province were allotted roughly in proportion to its population, and divided between the General, Muslim and Sikh communities.
- The provincial members would be elected by the members of the Provincial Legislative Assemblies, not directly by the people.
Election by adult franchise was ruled out for a practical reason. Preparing electoral rolls for the whole population would have taken years, and the Mission wanted constitution-making begun at once. The route from a provincial election to the Assembly is set out in FC 9.1.
Flowchart
FC 9.1 — How The Constituent Assembly Was To Be Formed Caption: The route from a provincial legislature to a constitution-making body, as the Plan of 16 May 1946 laid it down. Nodes: Provincial Legislative Assemblies are already in place after the elections of 1945–46 → seats in the Constituent Assembly are allotted to each Province in proportion to its population → those seats are divided between the General, Muslim and Sikh communities → the members of each Provincial Assembly elect their own community’s representatives → 296 provincial members are chosen → the Princely States send 93 representatives, settled by agreement with their rulers → the 389-member Assembly meets and frames the Constitution → if the States do not send members, the Assembly proceeds with the provincial members alone.
Two further clauses completed the scheme. An Interim Government — a temporary ministry to run the country until a new Constitution came into force — was to be formed at the Centre with fourteen members drawn from the major parties. A treaty was then to be negotiated between the Constituent Assembly and the United Kingdom to settle matters arising out of the transfer of power.
The Plan did not survive its own ambiguity. Each party held to its own reading of grouping, and the League withdrew the acceptance it had given.
An Interim Government was formed in September 1946, but the parties inside it worked as rival camps rather than as one ministry. Communal violence spread through several provinces in the second half of that year.
The Constituent Assembly met for the first time in New Delhi on 9 December 1946, without the Muslim League. On 20 February 1947 Attlee told the British Parliament that power would be transferred to Indian hands by June 1948, and that a new Viceroy would be sent to complete the task.
9.3 The Mountbatten Plan
Lord Wavell was recalled, and Lord Mountbatten took office as Viceroy in March 1947. He arrived with a deadline already fixed: power was to be transferred by June 1948.
Mountbatten spent his first weeks in talks with the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League. He concluded that the Cabinet Mission Plan could not be made to work, because the two parties would not agree on what it meant.
He therefore prepared a different scheme, and London approved it. The Plan was announced on 3 June 1947.
9.3.1 The Clauses Of The Plan
The Plan of 3 June did not simply declare a partition. It laid down a set of procedures by which particular provinces and districts would decide their own future.
- Partition: British India would be divided into two Dominions — self-governing countries within the British Commonwealth — namely India and Pakistan.
- Relations between the two: the two Dominions would themselves decide what relations they would have with the Commonwealth, and with each other.
- Bengal and the Punjab: the Legislative Assembly of each province would meet in two parts, one of members from the Hindu-majority districts and one of members from the Muslim-majority districts. If either part voted for partition, the province would be divided.
- Sind: its Legislative Assembly would take its own decision at a special meeting.
- The North West Frontier Province: a referendum — a direct vote of the electorate on a single question — would be held to decide whether the province joined India or Pakistan.
- The district of Sylhet: this Muslim-majority district of Assam would decide by referendum whether to join East Bengal or remain in Assam.
- A Boundary Commission: if partition was decided upon, a Boundary Commission would be set up to settle the exact boundaries of the two Dominions.
- The Princely States: paramountcy — the overlordship the British Crown exercised over the States — would come to an end, along with the treaties made under it. The States would be free to join either Dominion or to remain independent.
- The Constituent Assembly: the existing Assembly would continue its work, but the Constitution it framed would not apply to Pakistan. A separate Constituent Assembly would be set up for the areas that chose partition.
- Transfer of power: power would be transferred not in June 1948 but much earlier, and the British Parliament would pass an Act to effect it before 15 August 1947.
Clauses (c) to (f) are the ones that decide the map. They are shown in Map 9.1.
Map
Map 9.1 Caption: The provinces and the district that were asked in 1947 to decide their own future. Brief: A map of British India as it stood in 1947, using the provincial boundaries of that year and no modern boundaries of any country; shade Bengal and the Punjab in one tone (assemblies to vote in two parts), Sind in a second tone (assembly to vote at a special meeting), and the North West Frontier Province and the Sylhet district of Assam in a third tone (referendum); show all princely states in a single neutral tone labelled ‘Princely States’, without naming them individually; print a line on the map stating that these are the boundaries of 1947 and not those of today; do not draw the boundary between India and Pakistan, which had not been settled when the Plan was announced.
Two things stand out on the map. Only a handful of units were given a vote at all, and every one of them lay along the line where a division would have to run.
The map also marks a limit of the Plan itself. It can show which units voted, but not where the boundary would fall, because on 3 June nobody knew. The Boundary Commission had still to do its work, and until it reported, people living near the eventual line did not know which country their village would be in.
The procedures are best followed as a chain of decisions, set out in FC 9.2.
Flowchart
FC 9.2 — How Each Area Was To Decide Under The Plan Of 3 June 1947 Caption: The separate routes by which Bengal and the Punjab, Sind, the Frontier Province and Sylhet were to settle their future. Nodes: The Plan of 3 June is announced → Bengal and the Punjab: each Legislative Assembly meets in two parts → if both parts vote against partition, the province stays whole and joins one Dominion → if either part votes for partition, the province is divided and a Boundary Commission draws the line → Sind: the Legislative Assembly decides at a special meeting which Dominion to join → the North West Frontier Province: a referendum of voters decides between India and Pakistan → Sylhet: a referendum decides whether the district joins East Bengal or remains in Assam → the results are put together → the British Parliament passes an Act giving legal effect to them before 15 August 1947.
9.3.2 The Acceptance Of The Plan
Mountbatten put the Plan to the principal leaders before it was announced. The Congress accepted it, the Muslim League accepted it, and Baldev Singh accepted it on behalf of the Sikhs of the Punjab.
None of the three accepted it gladly. The Congress had opposed partition for decades. The League was not satisfied with the size of the state being offered, since Bengal and the Punjab were themselves to be divided. The Sikhs of the Punjab faced a boundary that would cut through the districts in which they lived.
Why The Congress Accepted
The Congress leadership gave several reasons for accepting a division it had long resisted.
- Communal violence had spread widely through 1946 and 1947, and many leaders concluded that division was the only way to stop it.
- Months of the Interim Government had convinced them that the Congress and the League could not run one administration together.
- The alternative on offer was a Union with a very weak Centre. Sardar Patel argued that refusing the demand now would produce not one Pakistan but many, as province after province claimed the same freedom.
- Further delay, they feared, risked civil war while the British were still formally in charge.
- Partition would let the new Constitution be written without separate electorates and the other communal arrangements built into British Indian government.
Not everyone agreed. Gandhi opposed the division of the country to the last, holding that Hindus and Muslims were one people and that no argument of convenience could justify partition. The All India Congress Committee accepted the Plan nonetheless, and Maulana Azad later wrote that the Congress had believed no alternative was left to it.
What The Votes Decided
The procedures were carried out within weeks. The Punjab and Bengal assemblies voted in favour of partitioning their provinces. The Sind assembly chose Pakistan. The referendum in the North West Frontier Province went in favour of Pakistan, and Sylhet voted to join East Bengal.
The last clause then took effect. The transfer was pulled forward from June 1948 to 15 August 1947, leaving about ten weeks in which to divide an administration, an army, a treasury and a railway system.
Acceptance settled the political question but not the legal one. A plan announced by a Viceroy could not by itself end an empire. That needed an Act of the British Parliament.
9.4 The Indian Independence Act Of 1947
A Viceroy’s plan is a statement of intention. Ending British authority over a fifth of the world’s people needed a law.
The British Prime Minister introduced the Indian Independence Bill in the House of Commons in July 1947. It passed quickly, and received the Royal Assent — the monarch’s formal approval, which turns a Bill into an Act — on 18 July 1947.
Fewer than four weeks separated that assent from the date the Act itself named.
9.4.1 The Two Dominions And Their Boundaries
The Act opened with the clause that mattered most, printed here as Source 9.1.
Notice how little the sentence contains. It gives a date, a number, a status and two names — and nothing else.
That is how a statute works. It states what shall be the case in law, leaving the arrangements to other clauses and to the officials who must carry them out.
The territories of the two Dominions were then set out.
- Pakistan would comprise Sind, British Baluchistan, the North West Frontier Province, West Punjab and East Bengal, together with Sylhet if it so voted.
- India would comprise all the remaining territories of British India.
- Bengal and the Punjab would cease to exist as single provinces, being divided as their assemblies had voted.
- The exact boundaries between the two Dominions would be settled by a Boundary Commission.
The Act therefore named the provinces but not the districts. Until the Commission reported, the precise line remained unknown, even though the date on which it would become an international border was already fixed in law.
9.4.2 Government Until A Constitution Was Framed
Neither Dominion had a constitution of its own on 15 August 1947. The Act had to say how each would be governed in the meantime, and it did so in a series of connected clauses.
- Each Dominion would have a Governor-General — the representative of the Crown at the head of its government — appointed by the British King on the advice of that Dominion’s own cabinet.
- The Constituent Assembly of each Dominion would act as its Central Legislature, with full power to make laws for it, and would function as a sovereign law-making body.
- The legislative authority of the British Parliament over the two Dominions would end from 15 August 1947.
- The words ‘Emperor of India’ would be dropped from the British monarch’s titles.
- Until each new Constitution was framed, the Dominions and their provinces would be governed in accordance with the Government of India Act, 1935. The Governor-General was empowered to adapt and modify that Act, up to 31 March 1948, to make it workable in the new conditions.
- The King gave up the right to withhold assent from laws; that power now lay with the Governor-General of each Dominion.
- The office of the Secretary of State for India was abolished, and the terms of service of officers already appointed by him were protected.
- The Governor-General was given the powers needed to bring the Act into operation.
Clause (b) is the one that changed the nature of the state. Before 15 August the legislature in Delhi worked under an Act of the British Parliament; after it, the same Assembly could make any law it chose, including a law replacing the Act of 1935 altogether.
9.4.3 The Princely States, Treaties And Assets
About two-fifths of the land area of India lay outside British India, in states ruled by their own princes under the overlordship of the Crown. The Act had to say what became of that relationship.
- From 15 August 1947 the suzerainty of the Crown over the Indian States would lapse, and with it every treaty and agreement made under it.
- The powers the British authorities had exercised over the States would come to an end, and the States would be free to join either Dominion or to remain outside both.
- From the same date the British Government would cease to have any responsibility for the government of India.
- Agreements with the tribes of the North West Frontier Province were to be negotiated by whichever Dominion they fell to.
- The Indian armed forces were to be divided between the two Dominions, and the assets and liabilities of the old government shared between them.
Clause (a) sounds technical and was in fact the most dangerous provision in the Act. Lapse meant that hundreds of states were, in strict law, answerable to nobody from 15 August. Whether India would emerge as one country or as a scatter of separate authorities depended on what their rulers now chose to do.
Clause (e) sounds administrative and was equally hard. An army recruited, trained and paid as one force had to be split between two governments in a matter of weeks, at the very moment when both would need it most.
What The Act Did On The Day
On 15 August 1947 the two Dominions came into existence. Lord Mountbatten, at Nehru’s request, continued as Governor-General of India, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became Governor-General of Pakistan.
Mountbatten held the office until June 1948, when C. Rajagopalachari succeeded him as the first and the last Indian Governor-General. The Constitution framed by the Constituent Assembly came into force on 26 January 1950, India became a Republic, and Dr Rajendra Prasad became its first President.
The three documents of this chapter can now be set beside one another, as in Table 9.2.
Read across the last row and the chapter’s argument appears. A plan is only as strong as the agreement behind it; an Act needs no agreement, because it is law. That difference is why independence, when it finally came, came through a statute.
9.5 Summary
- The Second World War left Britain victorious but exhausted, and in July 1945 British voters elected a Labour government under Clement Attlee. Holding India by force had become both expensive and politically difficult.
- Inside India the deadlock was complete. Talks at Simla in 1945 failed over who could nominate Muslim members; the elections of 1945–46 left the Congress and the Muslim League each dominant in a different set of seats; and the revolt of the naval ratings at Bombay in February 1946 warned London that force could not be relied on.
- On 19 February 1946 Attlee announced that a Cabinet Mission would go to India to negotiate the transfer of power. Its three members were Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander.
- The Cabinet Mission Plan, published on 16 May 1946, proposed a federal union of the British Provinces and the Princely States.
- The Union would deal with foreign affairs, defence and communications only, and could raise the finances needed for them.
- It would have an executive and a legislature of representatives of the Provinces and States, with major communal questions needing a majority of each of the two major communities.
- All other subjects and all remaining powers would rest with the Provinces; the States kept everything they had not ceded.
- The Mission rejected the demand for a separate sovereign state, arguing that it would leave large minorities on both sides, that the non-Muslim districts of Bengal, Assam and the Punjab had no place in it, that the armed forces and communications had been built for India as one unit, that the Princely States would struggle to choose, and that the two Muslim-majority regions were separated by hundreds of miles.
- The Plan grouped the Provinces instead. Group A held Madras, Bombay, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bihar and Orissa; Group B held the Punjab, the North West Frontier Province and Sind; Group C held Bengal and Assam. A province could opt out of its group after the first general election under the new Constitution.
- A Constituent Assembly of 389 members was to frame the Constitution — 296 elected by the Provincial Legislative Assemblies and 93 from the Princely States — and an Interim Government of fourteen members was to be formed at the Centre.
- The Plan failed on a silence in its own text: it did not say whether grouping was compulsory. The Congress and the League read the clause in opposite ways, the League withdrew its acceptance, and the Constituent Assembly met in New Delhi on 9 December 1946 without it.
- On 20 February 1947 Attlee declared that power would pass to Indian hands by June 1948, and Lord Mountbatten took office as Viceroy in March 1947. He concluded that the Cabinet Mission Plan could not be worked and prepared a new scheme.
- The Mountbatten Plan, announced on 3 June 1947, divided British India into two Dominions and fixed how each contested area would decide.
- The assemblies of Bengal and the Punjab would each meet in two parts, and either part could vote for partitioning the province.
- Sind’s assembly would decide at a special meeting; the North West Frontier Province and the Sylhet district of Assam would each hold a referendum.
- A Boundary Commission would draw the lines; paramountcy over the Princely States would end; the existing Constituent Assembly would continue, with a separate one for Pakistan; and power would be transferred before 15 August 1947.
- The Congress, the Muslim League and Baldev Singh for the Sikhs all accepted the Plan. The Congress gave as its reasons the spreading communal violence, the impossibility of working with the League in one government, the danger of many Pakistans if a weak Centre were accepted, the risk of civil war in further delay, and the chance to write a Constitution without separate electorates. Gandhi opposed the division to the last.
- The votes followed within weeks. Bengal and the Punjab chose partition, Sind chose Pakistan, the Frontier Province voted for Pakistan and Sylhet voted to join East Bengal.
- The Indian Independence Act, 1947 received the Royal Assent on 18 July 1947 and gave the settlement legal force. It set up two independent Dominions from 15 August 1947, named the territories of each, and left the exact boundaries to a Boundary Commission.
- The Act also provided for a Governor-General in each Dominion appointed on its own cabinet’s advice; for each Constituent Assembly to act as a sovereign Central Legislature; for the end of the British Parliament’s authority over the Dominions and of the title ‘Emperor of India’; for government under the Act of 1935 until new Constitutions were framed; and for the abolition of the office of the Secretary of State for India.
- On the Princely States the Act provided that the Crown’s suzerainty and all treaties made under it would lapse, leaving each State free to join either Dominion or neither. It also required the armed forces, assets and liabilities to be divided between the two Dominions.
- The two Dominions came into existence on 15 August 1947. Mountbatten continued as Governor-General of India until June 1948, when C. Rajagopalachari became the first and last Indian Governor-General, and the Constitution came into force on 26 January 1950.
- The chapter’s central lesson lies in the difference between the three documents. A plan binds only those who agree with it, and both plans were accepted by parties who read them differently; an Act binds because it is law, which is why independence finally came through a statute.
9.6 Key Terms
- Constituent Assembly: a body elected for the single purpose of framing a constitution, which is dissolved once that work is done.
- Dominion: a self-governing country within the British Commonwealth, recognising the British monarch as its head of state.
- Federal union: a state in which power is divided between a central government and its units, each acting directly on the people within its own field.
- Governor-General: the representative of the Crown who stood at the head of a Dominion’s government.
- Interim Government: a temporary ministry formed to run the country until a new constitution comes into force.
- Paramountcy: the overlordship the British Crown exercised over the princely states, under treaties made with their rulers.
- Provincial autonomy: the authority of a province over every subject not expressly given to the central government.
- Referendum: a direct vote of the electorate on a single question put to it.
- Royal Assent: the monarch’s formal approval, which turns a Bill passed by Parliament into an Act.
- Transfer of power: the handing over of the authority to govern India from British hands to Indian ones.
9.7 Points to Ponder
- Both parties accepted the grouping clause of 16 May 1946, and each announced a different meaning for it. If two sides sign the same words while reading them in opposite ways, has an agreement been reached at all?
- The Cabinet Mission proposed a Union with only three subjects and left everything else to the Provinces. What kind of country would such a central government have produced, and what would it have found hardest to do?
- The Constituent Assembly was elected by the Provincial Legislative Assemblies and not by the people, in order to save time. Does a constitution need a directly elected body behind it to bind those who must live under it?
- The Indian Independence Act fixed the date of the transfer before the Boundary Commission had drawn a single line. What does that order of events tell you about what the framers of the Act treated as urgent?
- Lapse of paramountcy left hundreds of princely states, in strict law, answerable to nobody from 15 August 1947. Why might a lapse have seemed the only legally honest course, and what did it leave unsettled?
- A plan binds only those who agree with it; an Act binds because it is law. Of the three documents in this chapter, which did most to bring independence about — and what evidence would you use to argue for your choice?
9.8 Objective Questions
Under the Cabinet Mission Plan, the Union Government was to deal with which subjects?
- Foreign affairs, defence and communications
- Defence, police and land revenue
- Foreign affairs, education and trade
- Communications, education and defence [1 mark]
The Constituent Assembly proposed by the Cabinet Mission Plan was to have
- 93 members
- 296 members
- 389 members
- 14 members [1 mark]
Which province was placed in Group C under the Cabinet Mission Plan?
- Sind
- Bihar
- Assam
- The Punjab [1 mark]
Fill in the blank: Under the Mountbatten Plan, the future of the ______ district of Assam was to be settled by a referendum. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: The Indian Independence Act, 1947 provided that the Governor-General of each Dominion would be appointed by the British King on the advice of that Dominion’s own cabinet. [1 mark]
Match the events in Column I with the dates in Column II. [1 mark]
| Column I | Column II |
|---|---|
| a. The Cabinet Mission Plan is published | i. 3 June 1947 |
| b. The Mountbatten Plan is announced | ii. 15 August 1947 |
| c. The Indian Independence Act receives the Royal Assent | iii. 16 May 1946 |
| d. The two Dominions come into existence | iv. 18 July 1947 |
- Select the option that shows the correct relationship between Statements (I) and (II).
- The Cabinet Mission rejected the demand for a separate sovereign state.
- The Mission held that such a state would leave large numbers of Muslims outside it and large numbers of non-Muslims within it. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (II) is the reason for (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
- Select the option that shows the correct relationship between Statements (I) and (II).
- The Mountbatten Plan provided for the setting up of a Boundary Commission.
- The exact line dividing the two Dominions had not been settled when the Plan was announced. a. (II) contradicts (I) b. (II) is the reason for (I) c. (I) is true but (II) is false d. (I) and (II) are independent of each other [1 mark]
9.9 Check Your Concepts
Name the three members of the Cabinet Mission and state the office each held. [2 marks]
State any two territories which, under the Indian Independence Act, 1947, were to form Pakistan. [2 marks]
Explain briefly the grouping of the Provinces proposed by the Cabinet Mission Plan. [3 marks]
Differentiate between the way in which Bengal and the Punjab were to decide their future under the Mountbatten Plan and the way in which the North West Frontier Province was to decide its own. [3 marks]
What arguments did the Cabinet Mission give for rejecting the demand for a separate sovereign state? [4 marks]
Give any four reasons for the acceptance of the Mountbatten Plan by the Congress. [4 marks]
Describe the composition of the Constituent Assembly proposed by the Cabinet Mission Plan, and explain how its members were to be chosen. [5 marks]
Describe the main provisions of the Indian Independence Act, 1947. Explain why an Act of Parliament was still needed once the Mountbatten Plan had been accepted by the Indian leaders. [6 marks]
9.10 Show Your Skills
- In the last week of June 1947, an officer in a district of the Punjab is told that the members of his Provincial Legislative Assembly will shortly meet in two separate parts. One part will consist of the members from the Hindu-majority districts and the other of the members from the Muslim-majority districts. Each part will vote on a single question, and either of them may decide the matter.
- Which document laid down this procedure, on what date was it announced, and which other province was to follow the same procedure?
- What question were the two parts voting on, and what would follow if either part voted in favour of it?
- Even after the vote was taken, the officer could not tell the people of his district which country they would be in. Explain why. [6 marks]
- A newspaper of May 1946 carries the headline: ‘PROVINCES FREE TO FORM GROUPS — THREE GROUPS NAMED’.
- Name the plan referred to, and state which Provinces were placed in Group B.
- What were the groups allowed to do, and on what condition could a Province leave its group?
- This clause was accepted by both the major parties, yet it did not settle the question it appeared to answer. Explain what the clause left unclear. [6 marks]
- In July 1947 the ruler of a princely state asks his advisers what the new law passed in London means for the treaties his family had signed with the British Crown.
- Name the Act, and state what it provided about the Crown’s suzerainty over the States and about those treaties.
- From 15 August 1947, what choices did the Act leave open to such a State?
- State one thing about the future of the princely states that the Act itself did not settle. [6 marks]