A partitioned view of the Partition

The 60th anniversary of India's independence has spawned the publication of several books on this subject. But only a few of them have dealt with India's partition, which came along with its freedom from British rule in 1947. Yasmin Khan's entire focus in the book under review has been on the partition of India in 1947, which uprooted over 12 million people from their homes and made them refugees in what they thought was their own country. In addition, over a million people were killed in just a few months, making it one of the worst human calamities of the twentieth century.

The central thesis of the book rests on the author's copious research, which has perhaps for the first time put together incontrovertible evidence of how the famed British administrative machinery proved to be a colossal failure in either anticipating the problems in executing the partition plan or in ensuring a smooth transfer of power to the people in the sub-continent. And how great leaders and statesmen like Mountbatten, Nehru and Jinnah indulged in obfuscation and admitted to their own frailties in accepting what was not a workable solution!

In fact, Yasmin Khan has argued with conviction that the partition of India was not a "contained historical event", in that the scale of disruption and the dangers of the crisis were severely underestimated by the British authorities. The outcome of dividing India was not a foregone conclusion. Nor was there anything pre-planned or inevitable about the way the partition plan was executed. Pakistan could have failed to come into existence or new states could have been created along entirely different lines or some of the princely states could have succeeded in their bids for autonomy, Khan has argued.

But the author's regret is that even though India and Pakistan pioneered decolonisation in Asia, few aspects of this exercise were pre-conceived or well mapped out. Worse, the partition of India was shoddily implemented, British troops were withdrawn while there was no alternative law enforcement machinery in place and the methodology used by the Cyril Radcliffe committee to draw the boundaries of the two countries in a record time of less than seven weeks was a cruel joke played on the 400 million people who lived in undivided India. And all this happened when the British authorities had full knowledge of the plan for at least a couple of years.

King George's declaration to the British members of Parliament in 1945, soon after the Labour Party recorded a landslide victory and formed its government, was the first clear indication of a transfer of power to the people of India. As part of this process, the winter months of 1945-46 saw elections to the central assembly and provincial assemblies. Some 41 million people were eligible to cast their votes, accounting for only 10 per cent of the country's population (how young was India in 1946!).

The ostensible purpose of these elections was to help form provincial governments and create a central body that would start framing a constitutional form of a free India. But as the campaigning showed and the divide between the Congress and the Muslim League widened, these elections almost became a referendum for the creation of a separate country for the Muslims. With the Muslim League cornering all the 30 reserved seats in the central assembly and a majority of the reserved seats in the provinces, the creation of Pakistan seemed inevitable. The three-member Cabinet Mission did make a valiant attempt to propose a federal structure that would have skirted the Pakistan issue, but there were few takers. Even industrialists (G D Birla being one of them) were opposed to the federal structure as proposed by Sir Stafford Cripps.

Yet, the June 3, 1947, radio address by Mountbatten was an exercise in obfuscation. While he announced that power would be handed to the Indian people before June 1948, the real date of independence was advanced by ten months. Neither did the Pakistan word figure even once in Mountbatten's speech (nor did Nehru mention it in his address), although this issue too had been resolved by then. Finally, when asked if the transfer of power would lead to any mass transfer of population, Mountbatten said: "Personally I don't see it ...There are many physical and practical difficulties involved. Some measure of transfer will come about in a natural way ... perhaps Governments will transfer populations ..." What actually happened is of course history.

It is a lucidly written book. Unlike most books that draw heavily on historical records and documents, the author has done away with footnotes and listed the references in a separate section. This is a big relief. The book's only major flaw is that Bengal and what went on there during the days of the partition drama have been largely ignored. But then the author is conscious of this and has acknowledged that Bengal's partition deserves a volume of its own.

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THE GREAT PARTITION
THE MAKING OF INDIA AND PAKISTAN

Yasmin Khan
Penguin/Viking
251 pages; Rs 495