British policy before and after

Dialogue July-September, 2012, Volume 14 No.1

Partition and the Princely States

S.R. Mehrotra

British policy before and after 1857

Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (1848-56) believed that India – as a British dependency – should be ‘one and indivisible’.1 He wanted the princely states to disappear. So in seven years he annexed seven princely states on one pretext or the other. This became one of the chief causes of the rebellion of 1857-8.2 As A.O. Hume wrote: ‘The whole grand apparatus of a highly civilized government shrivelled up in a single month over a vast country … like some pompous emblazoned scroll cast into a furnace.’3 Dalhousie’s successor, Lord Canning (1856-62), who had to face the storm, learnt a different lesson. According to him, some of the princes, like Sindhia and Holkar, who had refused to join the rebels, had proved themselves ‘breakwaters to the storm which would otherwise have swept over us in one great wave’.4 After the revolt Dalhousie’s policy was given up, and the British decided to preserve and pamper the princes.

In the later 19th century there were no fewer than 562 states in India and they formed a good one-third of the whole country. They differed from each other enormously in size and importance. The sovereignty over the states was divided between the British government and the ruler of the state in proportions which differed greatly according to the history and importance of the several states, and which were regulated partly by treaties or less formal engagements, partly by sanads or charters, and partly by usage. As paramount power, the British government exercised exclusive control over the foreign relations of the states; assumed a general but limited responsibility for the internal peace and security of the state; and required subordinate co-operation in the task of resisting foreign aggression and maintaining internal order. The Indian state did not have any international existence. It could not make war. It could not enter into any treaty or arrangement with any of its neighbours. Indian princes could not even directly communicate with each other.

The territories of British India and of the Indian states were inextricably interlaced. The territories of the Indian states were intersected by British railway lines, postal lines and telegraph lines. For each state there was a British political officer, representing the civil authority exercised by the paramount power, and in each of the more important states there was a resident political officer with a staff of subordinates. Detachments of British troops occupied cantonments in all the more important military positions. The states maintained a number of selected troops in such a condition of efficiency as would make them fit to take the field side by side with British troops. The officers and men of these troops were largely natives of the state, and they were under the command of the ruler of the state, but they were inspected and advised by British officers. All these were limitations on the powers of the state.

The princely states were scattered haphazard over the map of India. Though the geographical layout of the states was a patchwork, taken together they constituted a great cruciform barrier, broken by gaps of varying width, but more or less effectively separating the different parts of British India from one another. This fact had obvious strategic and political importance, which was underlined by Professor Coupland in the early 1940s. ‘An India deprived of the States’, he wrote in 1943 in his famous report on the constitutional problem in India, ‘would have lost all coherence. For they form a great cruciform barrier separating all four quarters of the country. If no more than the Central Indian States and Hyderabad and Mysore were excluded from the Union, the United Provinces would be almost completely cut off from Bombay, and Bombay completely from Sind. … India could live if its Moslem limbs in the North-West and North-East were amputated, but could it live without its heart?’5 It is interesting to recall that as one travelled by train from Delhi to Bombay in 1947 – a distance of about 600 miles – one crossed only 70 miles of British Indian territory, the rest was all the territory of the Indian princes.

Most of the rulers of the states were Hindus, but their religion was not necessarily that of the majority of their subjects. Whereas Muslims numbered one-fourth of the total Indian population, they numbered only about one-sixth of the population of the states.

Though the points of contact between British India and princely India were many, the latter were slow in assimilating the new principles and ideas, methods and practices current in the former. But the growing influence of modern conditions of life was busy breaking down the isolation of the states from one another and from the rest of India. New forces of constitutional development and national movement were beginning to pose problems which could not be solved by keeping India divided into two watertight compartments. It was an artificial division, artificially maintained. But even with the best will in the world, the marriage of Indian India with British India would not have been an easy task. And the British surely were not eager to act as the priest and bring about a happy union. In fact, they had a vested interest in perpetuating the division.

States as bastions of conservatism and imperialism

In order to counter the Indian nationalist movement, the British played two trump cards: one was that of the Muslims; the other that of the states. In the long run, the first proved to be a success; but the second proved to be a failure. The relative failure of the British in using the states – which they regarded as bastions of conservatism and imperialism – against the Indian struggle for freedom and unity was due to many factors: (i) the lack of unity among the Indian states; (ii) the failure of the princes to get the support of their subjects; (iii) the dissatisfaction of the princes with the government of India’s Political Department which dealt with them; and (iv) the patriotism of some of the Indian princes. But the British did not fail to try.

From Lytton (1876-80) in the 1870s to Hardinge (1910-16) in the second decade of the 20th century repeated attempts were made by the British to organize the Indian states as a conservative bloc against the Indian nationalist movement, but they were not very successful. With the emergence of Gandhiji on the Indian stage and the introduction of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms in the early 1920s, the British became more anxious than ever before to use the princes as a counterweight to Indian nationalism. Under the smokescreen of bringing together Indian India and British India and of working towards an ultimate federation of India, the British organized a Chamber of Princes on 8 February 1921 which did little more than promoting joint action on the part of the Indians states and bringing them closer to the Political Department of the government of India. But it had another and a far more important consequence. So far the Indian question had been triangular (involving the British, the Indian nationalists, and the Muslim communalists). From now onwards another element was introduced into the conflict, that of the Indian states, and it became quadrangular. It is this quadrangular situation which we encounter at the Round Table Conferences in the early 1930s, and in the making of the Government of India Act of 1935.

The sham federation of 1935

When in the 1930s the British, under pressure from the Indian Liberals, agreed to the idea of an Indian federation, they saw to it that if at all the federation came into existence, it would be controlled by them and not by the Congress. The federal provisions of the Government of India Act of 1935 gave the Muslims one-third of the seats in the central legislature, though they were only a quarter of the British Indian population. The princely states were even more generously treated. They had 40 per cent representation in the upper house and 33.3 per cent in the lower house, though the population of the states was less than a quarter of the total population of India. The representatives of British India were to be elected, but the representatives of the states were to be nominated by their rulers. There was also a provision that all powers connected with the exercise of functions of the crown in its relations with the states were not to be transferred to the federation, i.e. that paramountcy would not be transferred to the federation.

That was not all. The states were free to join or not to join the federation. And it was well known that the bigger states like Hyderabad and Kashmir would never join it. The federation could come into existence only when a sufficient number of states had joined it to ensure that half the states’ quota of seats had been filled in the upper house and half the population of the states had been included. This was a condition almost impossible to be fulfilled. The states were thus given a veto over the question of federation. The friends of the princes in Britain, Winston Churchill and others, had got a promise from the British government that the princes would not b coerced, and unless the princes were coerced they would not join the federation. The story of the appeasement of the states did not end there. The federation could enjoy in the several states only those powers and functions which they agreed to confer upon it by their instruments of accession.6

Could this ‘gigantic quilt of jumbled crotchet work’,7 as Winston Churchill described the federation envisaged by the Government of India Act, 1935, really function? I personally believe that the federation proposed by the Act of 1935 was not only not meant to work, it was in fact unworkable.

Some persons have blamed Willingdon (1931-6) and Linlithgow (1936-43) for not pressing ahead with the scheme of federation speedily enough during their viceroyalties. They have regretted that the Second World War intervened and the federal proposals had to be shelved. They have gone further and asserted that if the federation had materialized by 1939 the partition of India would have been avoided. As a student of modern Indian history who is fairly conversant with the facts, I am not inclined to attach much weight to such ‘ifs’ and ‘might-have-beens’. The Act of 1935 was not intended to give India either freedom or unity.

First, freedom. The draftsman of the 1935 Act was being absolutely honest and correct when he described it as an Act ‘to make further provision for the government of India’8 by the British. In order to prove this point I shall produce only two witnesses. In the early stages of the consultations which led to the framing of the Act, Sir Samuel Hoare, the then secretary of state for India, drew up, on 12 December 1930, a memorandum for the consideration of the Conservative Party Business committee, in which he presented all-India federation as an opportunity of avoiding democracy and responsibility in the central government of India, of extricating ‘British India from the morass into which the doctrinaire liberalism of Montagu [secretary of state for India, 1917-22, and the chief architect of reforms of 1919] had plunged it’. Hoare pointed out that the British would be yielding ‘a semblance of responsible government and yet retain in our hands the realities and verities of British control. The viceroy would have large overriding powers. The army would be reserved to British control. Some eighty per cent of the Indian revenues would be kept out of the hands of an Indian finance minister. The federal executive would not be responsible or removable in the British sense.’9 In December 1939 Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, wrote to Lord Zetland, the secretary of state for India: ‘But there is also our own position in India to be taken into account. After all, we framed the Constitution as it stands in the Act of 1935, because we thought that way the best way – given the political position in both countries – of maintaining British influence in India. It is no part of our policy, I take it, to expedite in India constitutional changes for their own sake, or gratuitously to hurry the handing over of controls to Indian hands at any pace faster than we regard as best calculated on a long view, to hold India to the Empire.’10

Second, unity. Could ‘the paper federation’11 of 1935 preserve the unity of India? Could it have prevented the partition of the country? I have argued at length elsewhere12 that the creation of an Indian federation, such as postulated by the Government of India Act, 1935, before 1939 would not have prevented the partition of India. The demand for Pakistan had already emerged.13 Only the Muslim League did not officially adopt it as its goal until March 1940. If there was any prospect of the federation materializing earlier, the Muslim League would have adopted the slogan of Pakistan also earlier. But this is not the point which I wish to discuss here.

Believing as I do in the unity of my country and rejoicing in the fact that the Indian states have been integrated with the rest of India to form the present Indian Union, I do not regret that the federal provisions of the Act of 1935 were never put into effect. I am glad that the princes were not wise enough in their time and were ultimately swept away. It would have been a disaster if they had seen their way to join in the making of an Indian federation in the late 1930s. A federation which included some states and excluded other states, which enjoyed different powers and functions in different states, was unlikely to promote Indian unity. If the integrity, sovereignty and autonomy of the Indian states had been recognized and institutionalized by some federation in the 1930s, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the process in 1947.

After their sweeping victory in the elections of 1937 many Congressmen became eager to try even the wretched federation proposed by the Government of India Act of 1935, because they thought they could dominate it. They tried both the stick and the carrot with the princes. The stick was an intensification of the agitation by the All-India States’ People’s Conference and the local Praja Mandals against the princes for constitutional privileges. Even Gandhiji now came out openly against the princes and fasted at Rajkot in 1938. The carrot was the bait thrown out to the princes by the Congress that they would be welcome in the proposed federation if only they would take care to send representative men to the federal legislature. As soon as this was known, the Muslim League, which had so far paid lip-service to the idea of federation, became openly inimical to it; and the British, who had hoped that they would be able to control the federation with the help of the Muslims, the princes, and others, became lukewarm about it. So the federation failed to materialize, not because the Congress opposed it, but because the Muslim League, the British and the princes lost interest in it.

Once the Muslim League adopted the demand for Pakistan in March 1940 and the Muslims all over the country began increasingly to rally to its support, Congress leaders prepared themselves for the unpalatable eventuality of partition. Their strategy was very simple. The Muslim League should have nothing but its pound of flesh. It should get nothing more than what Jinnah later described as ‘a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan’,14 i.e. a smaller Pakistan (without Assam, west Bengal and east Punjab). The struggle for Indian freedom must continue unabated, and if unfortunately the Muslim League succeeded in getting the country partitioned, the unity of the rest of India should be preserved.

The British were still playing the crescent card; but the more they played the Muslim card now, the more difficult it became for them to play the state card effectively. The Indian problem now became more and more a Hindu-Muslim or a Congress-Muslim League problem. The British accepted the principle of Pakistan publicly for the first time in the famous Cripps proposals of March 1942 which said that any province which did not wish to accede to the future union of India could stay out of it and enjoy the same status.15 And what applied to the British Indian provinces also applied – and with greater effect – to the Indian states. Through its resolution of 2 April 1942 the Working Committee of the Congress rejected the long-term proposals of Cripps. The resolution said:

The complete ignoring of ninety millions of people in the Indian States, and their treatment as commodities at the disposal of their rulers, is a negation both of democracy and self-determination. While the representation of an Indian State in the constitution-making body is fixed on a population basis, the people of the State have no voice in choosing those representatives, nor are they to be consulted at any stage while decisions vitally affecting them are being taken. Such States may in many ways become barriers to the growth of Indian freedom, enclaves where foreign authority still prevails, and where the possibility of maintaining foreign armed forces has been stated to be a likely contingency and a perpetual menace to the freedom of the people of the States as well as the rest of India.

The acceptance beforehand of the novel principle of non-accession for a Province is also a severe blow to the conception of Indian unity and an apple of discord likely to generate growing trouble in the Provinces, and which may well lead to further difficulties in the way of the Indian States merging themselves into an Indian Union. Congress has been wedded to Indian freedom and unity and any break of that unity especially in the modern world when people’s minds inevitably think in terms of ever larger federations would be injurious to all concerned and exceedingly painful to contemplate. Nevertheless, the Committee cannot think in terms of compelling the people of any territorial unit to remain in an Indian Union against their declared and established will. While recognizing this principle the Committee feel that every effort should be made to create a common and co-operative national life. Acceptance of this principle inevitably involves that no changes should be made which would result in fresh problems being created and compulsion being exercised on other substantial groups within that area.

The proposal now made on the part of the British War Cabinet encourages and will lead to attempts at separation at the very inception of the Union and thus create great friction just when the utmost co-operation and goodwill are most needed. This proposal has been presumably made to meet the communal demand, but will have other consequences also and lead politically reactionary and obscurantist groups among the different communities to create trouble and divert public attention from the vital issues before the country.16

A careful reading of this resolution would reveal that while the Congress Working Committee rejected the long-term proposals of the Cripps Mission because it feared that they might lead to the disintegration of India, it had implicitly conceded (in the italicized portion of the statement) the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan, provided, first that a common centre was maintained, and, second, that the non-Muslim majority areas in Assam, Bengal and Punjab were not to be compelled to join Pakistan. If Jinnah wanted the smaller Pakistan which he ultimately got in association India, he could have got it any time after 1942.

Towards Partition

By 1946 the British were anxious to withdraw from India as early as possible. There were many reasons for this. One of them was that they feared that there was going to be ‘a revolution’ in the subcontinent.17

If the British had tried to fulfil their obligations to everybody in India, they would have still been here. There is no convenient time for dying or withdrawing. They decided to divide and quit. They fulfilled their obligations to the Muslim League to a large extent, but they had to ditch the princes.

The British had a curious love-hate relationship with the princes. I cannot examine it here. But one point I would like to make. The British gravely overestimated the power and authority of the Indian princes. Many of them hoped – even until 1947 – that the bigger states might have an autonomous existence and some of the smaller ones could do the same by forming unions. The British had clear obligations of honour to the princes. They had nostalgic notions of the ‘gorgeous east’ and a belief in the stability of autocratic rule. But basically the belief of the British in the stability of the princes sprang from their long-indulged preoccupation with the tactics of a triangular or quadrangular situation in India.

On the eve of the transfer of power the British government spelled out its policy towards the Indian States in the Cabinet Mission memorandum of 12 May 1946 (actually published on 22 May 1946).18 It was reiterated by Lord Mountbatten on 3 June 1947.19 Briefly stated, the British policy towards the Indian States was as follows: when the British withdraw from India, paramountcy would lapse and the rulers of the Indian states would become technically and legally independent: they could enter into any relationship with the successor government or governments; or they could remain independent; and they were free to decide all this at their convenience.

Lord Mountbatten made two qualifications to this general statement of policy. He advised the rulers to take their history, geography and the composition of the population into account while deciding their future. And he also advised them to make up their minds before the date of the transfer of power (which was later announced to be 15 August 1947).20

The Congress denounced this statement of British policy. It argued that paramountcy came into existence as a fact and not by agreement and that on the British withdrawal from India the successor authority must inherit the fact along with the rest of the context. It also insisted that no state should be allowed to declare independence, and that the princes must make up their minds to accede to India or ‘Pakistan’, taking into account their geographical situation, before 15 August 1947.21

If Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted partition in a peaceful and friendly way, they should have supported the Congress on all these points. I would go further and say that had Jinnah made up his mind before 15 August 1947 that the only state – outside the territory of the would-be Dominion of Pakistan – which he wanted, or could get, was Kashmir, he could have easily got it. There could have been some straightforward horse-trading. He could have asked the Indian leaders to keep out of Kashmir by promising to himself keep out of Hyderabad.

Kashmir was hardly a bone of contention between the Congress and the League leaders before 1947. Indian leaders had enough problems of their hands. Of the 562 princely states, all but a dozen were contiguous to Indian territory. In June 1947 Mountbatten had gone to Kashmir with the promise of Sardar Patel in his pocket that if Kashmir acceded to Pakistan before 15 August 1947 India would have no objection.22

I am not trying to argue that Kashmir was no problem. It was a problem – and a problem full of complications. Kashmir was contiguous to both India and Pakistan. Its strategic importance was great. The Maharaja was a Hindu. He was in a good bargaining position. He had evil counsellors of all races. One part of the state had a Hindu Majority, the other had a Muslim majority, and the third had a Buddhist majority. And there was Sheikh Abdullah to make confusion worse confounded. But, despite all these complications, I am inclined to think that if Jinnah would have satisfied himself with Kashmir alone, he could have easily bargained with the Congress leaders. He could have supported the Congress stand about paramountcy and about the desirability of all states acceding to one dominion or the other before 15 August 1947, taking into account their geographical position and the composition of their population.

Why did Jinnah not do this? Why did he come out with the astounding statement that the rulers had absolute freedom of decision: they could join either dominion; and they could make up their minds leisurely.23 Some say that Jinnah was a barrister and he was being very legalistic. But this explanation is not satisfactory. Jinnah was not only a barrister, he was also a politician. Had he such a regard for legal forms he would have quietly accepted Kashmir’s accession to India or at least not countenanced the invasion of Kashmir by Pakistani tribals. The second explanation often given is that Jinnah was annoyed because he got only ‘a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan’. This is a plausible explanation, but not a sufficient one. The real reason, in my opinion, was very different. Jinnah was playing for high stakes. He knew that Pakistan had no problem of princely states. Almost all the princely states were in India or contiguous to Indian territory. And a good many of these states had Muslim rulers. He had an eye on Hyderabad, Bhopal, Rampur and Junagarh. There was not one scheme of Pakistan drawn up ever since the early 1930s which did not include Indian states with Muslim rulers within the orbit of Pakistan.24

Jinnah had very little to lose and he had much to gain. Kashmir, after all, was predominantly Muslim. He would easily get it. Why forego the chance of acquiring other states? So he ran after the birds in the bush, leaving the bird in hand.

Now, I would not say that Jinnah was just being greedy. No, there was a lot of sentiment attached to states like Hyderabad. But I would insist that Jinnah’s move was based on a very clear and cool calculation. Anybody who knew anything about the Indian problem in those days realized that India could easily survive the surgical operation of Pakistan, but it could not survive without the Indian states. I have already quoted what Coupland had said on this point in 1943. He repeated it with a slight variation in 1945 in his well-known book India: A Restatement: ‘India could live if its Moslem limbs in the north-west and north-east were amputated, but could it live without its midriff?25 Sir Hamidullah Khan, the Nawab of Bhopal, who also happened to be the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes in the 1940s, was Jinnah’s adviser on this subject. He was an ardent Pakistani. He realized ‘the undesirability of associating too many Hindu States with large Hindu population or even such Moslem states as have large Hindu population, too closely with Pakistan’, because ‘if that were done it would disturb the Moslem preponderance in population’ of Pakistan, so, in a note drawn up for Jinnah’s guidance in early June 1947, he suggested that the latter should offer to associate Indian states with Pakistan in ‘some form of alliance or treaty relations rather than entry through [the Pakistan] Constituent Assembly’. This, he added, was ‘likely to upset completely the apple-cart of Hindustan’.26

The easiest was to destroy India was to encourage Indian states to become independent or to accede to or ally themselves with Pakistan. Jinnah knew this full well. So did Conrad Corfield, the anti-Indian head of the Political department of the government of India in 1947. And so Jinnah began to tempt Jodhpur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, Hyderabad, and even far-off Travancore to become independent or to accede to or ally with Pakistan.

No sooner did Congress leaders learn of Jinnah’s moves than they concentrated all their efforts on defeating him in his own game. Jinnah found more than a match in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. It was no treachery or duplicity. It was a simple game of power politics in which the Sardar defeated the Quaid-e-Azam by his firm and tactful handling of the problem of the Indian states. Before 15 August 1947 he persuaded almost all the rulers to accede to the Dominion of India. The notable exceptions were Hyderabad, Kashmir and Junagarh. How they, too, later on acceded to India is a story too well-known to be repeated here. What India lost by way of Pakistan, she more than made up by the accession of the states.

Endnotes

1. The phrase was used by the Anglo-Indian weekly Friend of India, 16 March, 14 September 1854, then edited by Meredith Townsend. Dalhousie, in a famous minute, dated 30 August 1848, wrote: ‘I cannot conceive it possible for anyone to dispute the policy of taking advantage of every just opportunity which presents itself of consolidating the territories which already belong to us, by taking possession of States that may lapse in the midst of them; for thus getting rid of those petty intervening principalities, which may be made a means of annoyance, but which can never, I venture to think, be a source of strength, for adding to the resources of the public treasury, and for extending the uniform application of our system of government to those whose best interest, we sincerely believe, will be promoted thereby.’ Quoted in T.R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of the Revolt. India, 1857-1870 (Princeton, 1965) pp. 31-2.
2. Metcalf says: ‘Foremost among the causes of the revolt was Lord Dalhousie’s policy of annexing the princely states of India. The fate which befell so many states during his tenure of office excited widespread apprehension, not least among the remaining princes, and contributed largely to that spirit of unrest from which the revolt gathered strength.’ Ibid., p.219.
3. Hume to Lord Northbrook, 1 August 1872, Northbrook Papers, India Office Library, London.
4. Dispatch no. 43A of 30 April 1860, cited in Metcalf, op. cit., p.224
5. R. Coupland, The Future of India (O.U.P., London, 1943), pp.151-2.
6. V.P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (Bombay, 1961), pp;.34-5; U, Phadnis, Towards the Integration of Indian States 1919-1947 (Bombay, 1968) pp.98-101.
7. Quoted in H.V.Hodson, The Great Divide (London, 1969), p.48.
8. M.Gwyer and A.Appadorai (eds.), Speeches and Documents on the Indian Constitution 1921-47 (Bombay, 1957), vol. i, p. 323.
9. Quoted in R.J. Moore, The Crisis of Indian Unity 1917-1940 (Delhi, 1974), pp. 155-6.
10. Linlithgow to Zetland, 28 December 1939, quoted in Zetland, ‘Essayez’ (London, 1956), p.277.
11. The phrase is R.J Moore’s. See his ‘The making of India’s Paper Federation, 1927-35’ and ‘British Policy and the Indian Problem, 1935-40’, in C.H.Philips and M.D.Wainwright (eds.), The Partition of India (London, 1970), pp.59-94.
12. See my Towards India’s Freedom and Partition (Delhi, 2005), 226-334, passim.
13. The idea of Pakistan or a separate homeland for the Indian Muslims had been floating in the imagination of many Muslim intellectuals for quite a long time. It was born of the feeling entertained and sedulously propagated by certain Muslim intellectuals that their community formed a distinct cultural and political entity, different from the other Indian communities, especially the Hindus. It was encouraged and fortified by the sentiment of pan-Islamism, the provision of an exclusive education system, the grant of separate electorates, and the fear that in a united India the Muslims would inevitably by placed under the domination of the Hindus, who outnumbered them by three to one. But the demand for Pakistan received its real strength and substance from the fact that there were certain regions in India, particularly in the north-west and the north-east, where the Muslims formed a majority of the population and which they thought they must dominate. But for this accident of geography, the idea of Pakistan – even if it were born – would never have materialized. If the Muslim population of India had been evenly distributed throughout the subcontinent, it would have been a minority everywhere which could have neither willed nor been in a position to dominate – as a community – any region. Kingsley Davies rightly observes that ‘had the Muslims been distributed evenly throughout India the idea of Pakistan might have never occurred ’. The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton, 1951), p.196.
14. Quoted in Hodson, op. cit., p.113.
15. Writing on 10 March 1942 to Linlithgow, the viceroy, L.S.Amery, the secretary of state for India, said about the proposals Cripps was carrying with him to India that ‘the nest contains the Pakistan cuckoo’s egg’. N. Mansergh and E.W.R. Lumby (eds.), The Transfer of Power 1942-7, vol.i (London, 1970), no. 296, p. 396.
16. Gwyer and Appadorai (eds.), op.cit., vol.ii, p.525.
17. According to Sir Francis Wylie, then governor of the United Provinces, Sir Stafford Cripps, a member of the Cabinet Mission, told him in early 1946: ’There is going to be a revolution here [in India] and we must get out quick.’ Francis Wylie, ‘Federal Negotiations in India 1935-1939, and After’, a paper presented in 1966 at the Seminar on the Partition of India, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
18. Gwyer and Appadorai (eds.), op. cit., vol. ii, pp.767-9.
19. Allan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (London 1951), Appendix, p. 367.
20. Ibid., p.141; Gwyer and Appodorai (eds.), op.cit., vol. ii, pp.773-5.
21. See, for example, Nehru’s statement in Leader, 16 June 1947.
22. Campbell-Johnson, op. cit., p.120.
23. See Leader, 18June 1947.
24. See R.J. Moore, Escape from Empire (Oxford, 1983), pp. 51-2.
25. R. Coupland, India : A Restatement (London, 1945), p278.
26. See Waheed Ahmad (ed.), The Nation’s voice. Vol. VI : Achieving the Goal (Karachi, 2002), p. 549.

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