Modern India · Topic 20 of 20
Final negotiations, mass upsurge, partition, independence and the start of constitution-making (1944-1947)
The Basics
By 1944 the Congress top leadership was still in jail after Quit India, the war continued, and the Muslim League under Mohammad Ali Jinnah stood firmly on its Lahore Resolution demand for Pakistan. Into this deadlock stepped individual leaders trying private formulas for a settlement, since official talks had broken down after the Cripps Mission failure.
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By mid-1945 the war in Europe had ended, and the British released Congress leaders from jail, expecting a tired, demoralised people. Instead they found crowds impatient for action, their energy sharpened by years of repression since the Quit India Movement of 1942. Into this charged atmosphere came the issue of the captured Indian National Army soldiers.
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By early 1946, the agitation over the INA trials had already produced two violent clashes in Calcutta. These occurred on 21 November 1945 and 11 February 1946. Students, Congress, Muslim League and Communist sympathisers defied the police together in both clashes.
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By May 1945 the war in Europe had ended, though the fight against Japan continued. Britain's Conservative government, led by Winston Churchill, wanted to show it was serious about solving the Indian constitutional question before the next general election. Congress leaders were released from jail in June 1945, and the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, was allowed to open talks with Indian leaders.
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Shimla talks had failed in 1945. The new Labour government in Britain wanted a quick settlement. It lifted the ban on the Congress. It announced central and provincial elections for winter 1945-46.
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By early 1946 the British government, led by Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee, had decided to grant India independence. The question was no longer whether to leave, but how. The Congress and the Muslim League held opposite visions for free India. This divide deepened after the communally polarised elections of 1945-46. On 15 March 1946 Attlee declared that a minority could not veto the progress of the majority. This signalled that Britain now wanted a united India, not a divided one.
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By mid-1946, the Cabinet Mission's Constituent Assembly scheme was the only agreed route to a new constitution. The Muslim League had already withdrawn its acceptance of the Plan in July 1946. Direct Action Day had also turned violent.
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Jawaharlal Nehru moved the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly on 13 December 1946.
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By mid-1946, the Cabinet Mission Plan had broken down over the grouping clause. The British still needed someone to run the government of India. Viceroy Archibald Wavell had earlier preferred to wait for Congress-League agreement, as he had done at the Shimla Conference. He wanted to do the same again. But the British government, especially the Secretary of State, insisted that Congress cooperation was essential. Britain was now preparing to withdraw and needed post-imperial goodwill, not just continued control.
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By mid-1946, talks between the Indian National Congress (Congress) and the Muslim League had collapsed. The Cabinet Mission Plan, meant to keep India united under a loose federal structure, had failed to win the agreement of both parties. Jawaharlal Nehru's statement on 10 July 1946 suggested the Constituent Assembly was fully sovereign. It could reject the Mission's grouping scheme. The League saw this as proof that Congress would never honour a compromise.
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Nehru's ideological journey began well before independence. His encounter with the peasant movement in eastern United Provinces in 1920-21 first drew him towards economic questions. During his jail term in 1922-23, he read widely on the Russian Revolution.
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By early 1947 the Interim Government was barely functioning. Congress and the Muslim League wrangled inside it. Liaquat Ali Khan, as Finance Member, obstructed other ministries. Riots continued in Punjab, Bengal, Bihar and Noakhali. Viceroy Lord Wavell warned London that British authority in India was declining irreversibly. His government dismissed him for this pessimism, but could not deny his assessment.
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Once Congress and the Muslim League accepted partition of Punjab and Bengal, someone had to draw the exact line separating India from Pakistan. The British government appointed a Boundary Commission under Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer with very limited knowledge of India.
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By mid-1947 the Mountbatten Plan had been accepted by the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. The Radcliffe Commission was already at work drawing the border between India and Pakistan. The British Parliament now had to give this plan legal shape before power could be handed over.
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On 15 August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru gave his midnight 'tryst with destiny' speech in the Constituent Assembly in Delhi. Mahatma Gandhi was not in the capital. He was in Calcutta, marking the day with a 24-hour fast, because freedom had come with a divided nation and communal violence.
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On 3 June 1947, Mountbatten announced that British India would be partitioned and freed by 15 August 1947. The over 560 princely states, covering about 700,000 square miles, were told they were free to join India, join Pakistan, or in theory remain independent, since British paramountcy over them would lapse with British rule itself. This threatened to break India into hundreds of pieces just as it was being born, a danger some called worse than Pakistan itself.
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Princely states covered about two-fifths of India, ruled autocratically under British paramountcy.
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By the 1920s, the Indian National Congress was leading the national movement under Mahatma Gandhi. The colonial government ruled through both force and law. It allowed some civil liberties in normal times but used repression during mass movements. Gandhi and the Congress worked out an overall strategy largely through practice. Historians later named this strategy Struggle-Truce-Struggle, or S-T-S.
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By the early twentieth century, the national movement was no longer only a demand for self-rule. It had begun asking what kind of India should emerge once the British left, and the answer took shape gradually through debate, not decree.
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Indian capitalists grew with independent capital, not as junior partners of foreign capital.
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Indian nationalists opposed British wars and expeditions abroad from 1878 onwards, like the Second Afghan War and the annexation of Burma.
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Women's entry into nationalist politics began with the Swadeshi movement against the partition of Bengal in 1905. Urban middle-class and high-caste women, who till then stayed largely confined to their homes, joined processions and picketed shops selling foreign goods. This was a new and remarkable sight, since these were women who had never before appeared in public political life.
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