Freedom, Partition and the Republic

The Government of India Act 1935 gave the provinces elected ministries; the Congress swept the 1937 elections and ruled eight provinces — twenty-eight months in which it tasted power and, in the Muslim League's reading, showed Muslims a taste of majoritarian rule. When the Viceroy declared war in 1939 without consulting Indians, the Congress ministries resigned; at Lahore (1940) Jinnah's League passed the Pakistan resolution, claiming the Muslim-majority areas as a separate nation.

The war years brought failed offers (the Cripps Mission, 1942, promised dominion after victory) and the last great Gandhian upheaval: Quit India (August 1942) — 'Do or Die' — when the Congress leadership was jailed overnight and a leaderless people paralysed the Raj in districts from Bihar to Midnapore; the movement was crushed in months, but it told every Briton that holding India was over.

Britain's post-war Labour government sent the Cabinet Mission (1946) with a three-tier federal plan; it briefly united Congress and League, then collapsed on the grouping scheme and the Constituent Assembly boycott. Jinnah's Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) ignited the Great Calcutta Killing, and communal fire ran from Noakhali to Bihar — civil war without battle lines. Prime Minister Attlee sent Mountbatten with a deadline to quit.

Mountbatten's plan of 3 June 1947 accepted partition: the Indian Independence Act created two dominions. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never seen India, drew the boundary through Punjab and Bengal in five weeks; on 15 August 1947, as Nehru spoke of India's 'tryst with destiny', fourteen to fifteen million people crossed the new lines and — by estimates ranging from two hundred thousand to a million or more — died in the violence: freedom and catastrophe in the same hour.

The new state faced the greatest stabilisation in its history: Sardar Patel and V.P. Menon integrated 560-odd princely states by the Instrument of Accession — all acceded except Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir, whose stories ended in a police action, a plebiscite and a disputed accession respectively. Gandhi, fasting for communal peace and for payment of Pakistan's share, was assassinated in Delhi by Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948.

The Constituent Assembly, chaired in its drafting by B.R. Ambedkar, gave India its Constitution on 26 November 1949; on 26 January 1950 India became a sovereign democratic republic — universal adult franchise in a poor, largely illiterate society, the boldest act of political faith in the twentieth century. The chronicle of Indian history here becomes the chronicle of its democracy — a new book, still being written.