The Independence of India and Pakistan in 1947

The Indian Independence Act of 18 July 1947 was the legislative instrument by which the British Parliament dissolved its own empire in South Asia. Pakistan came into existence on 14 August 1947, India on 15 August. In the seventy-five years since, the two states have fought four wars, conducted a fifth by proxy, and assembled nuclear arsenals pointed at each other across a ceasefire line drawn through Kashmir. The thesis of this article is straightforward: the act was not a withdrawal but a transfer, and the empire’s most consequential legacies in the twentieth century were not institutions but boundaries, debts, and the unresolved questions of the princely states.

The Decision to Withdraw

The British decision to leave India was taken in a single Cabinet committee meeting on 20 February 1947, after a long retreat. The Labour government of Clement Attlee, returned with a large majority in 1945, had inherited a country that could no longer be governed. The Indian economy was broke, the Indian Army was restive, the Royal Indian Navy had mutinied in February 1946, and the British public had had enough. Attlee’s announcement, on 20 February 1947, that power would be transferred to Indian hands no later than June 1948 was a recognition that the British could not stay and could not afford to leave with a constitutional settlement.

The Indian context was, by 1947, ungovernable in a way that the 1942 Quit India Movement had only intimated. The Muslim League, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had abandoned the united-india position and was demanding Pakistan in a tone that was no longer negotiable. The Indian National Congress, under Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, was willing to accept partition as the price of unity in the rest. The Cabinet Mission of March–June 1946, the last serious attempt to keep India whole, had failed because the League would not accept any constitutional formula that did not guarantee Pakistan. Lord Wavell, the viceroy, had concluded by December 1946 that the British could not hold the country together for another year. The February 1947 announcement was, as the historian Alex von Tunzelmann put it in Indian Summer (2007), the moment when the British government “stopped pretending to keep India and started working out how to leave it.”

The Mountbatten Mission

The appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last viceroy, in March 1947, was the decisive act. Mountbatten, a cousin of the king, a former Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, and a man with more energy than patience, was sent to complete the transfer of power by August 1948. He cut the timetable by almost a year, and on 3 June 1947 announced the partition plan. The plan was a settlement in the form of an announcement: the provinces of British India would be grouped into India or Pakistan on the basis of their Muslim and non-Muslim majorities, the Bengal and Punjab legislatures would decide the fate of those two provinces, and the boundary would be drawn by an independent Boundary Commission under Sir Cyril Radcliffe.

Mountbatten’s role has been the subject of a vigorous historiographical argument. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight (1975) treated him as a decisive and largely benevolent figure. Nisid Hajari’s Midnight’s Descendants (2014) and Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer (2007) have been more critical, arguing that Mountbatten’s imperial manner, his manipulation of the timetable, and his decision to appoint Cyril Radcliffe — a lawyer who had never been to India and who was given five weeks to draw the boundary — was a serious dereliction. Yasmin Khan, in The Great Partition (2007), has been the most measured, treating Mountbatten as a man who arrived too late and acted too fast, but who was working within constraints that the British had themselves created over the previous decade.

The Indian Independence Act

The Indian Independence Act, which received royal assent on 18 July 1947, was a remarkable piece of legislation by the standards of British imperial practice. It did not, as earlier imperial-divestment acts had done, vest sovereignty in a single successor state. It created two new dominions, India and Pakistan, on the basis of the existing constitutional framework of the Government of India Act 1935; it dissolved the British Indian government; it provided for the partition of the British Indian Army, the Indian Civil Service, the Indian railways, and the central finances; and it left the accession of the princely states to the rulers of the states themselves, with a deadline of 15 August 1947.

The princely-states question was the most politically dangerous. There were 565 princely states, covering perhaps 40 percent of the area of British India and almost a quarter of its population. The states had been under British paramountcy, not British administration, and the British took the position that the paramountcy would lapse at the moment of independence — which left the rulers, in the words of the political scientist Ian Copland, “free to choose their own futures, and not enough time to do it.” Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Indian home minister, and V. P. Menon, his secretary, undertook the work of accession, and by 15 August 1947 all but three of the rulers had acceded to one or the other dominion. The three exceptions — Hyderabad, Junagadh, and Jammu and Kashmir — would each, in its different way, come to define the post-independence politics of South Asia. The accession of Kashmir to India on 26 October 1947, in the context of a tribal invasion from Pakistan, was the act that produced the first India-Pakistan war and the Kashmir conflict. The Indian action in Hyderabad in September 1948, the “police action” that annexed the largest Muslim-ruled princely state, was the act that established the principle that India would not tolerate independent princely states within its territory. Junagadh, a small state on the coast of Gujarat with a Muslim ruler and a Hindu majority, went the other way: it acceded to Pakistan, and India took it by force in November 1947.

The Partition and Its Consequences

The Radcliffe Award, announced on 17 August 1947, two days after independence, was the document that drew the boundary. The line, which divided Bengal and Punjab on the basis of contiguous Muslim and non-Muslim majorities, cut through districts and villages with a precision that was possible on the map and was impossible on the ground. The Gurdaspur district, which the boundary placed in India, gave India the only land route to Kashmir. The Khulna district, which the boundary placed in Pakistan, gave Pakistan access to the port of Calcutta’s hinterland. The decisions were not, as the subsequent conspiracy literature has claimed, the result of Mountbatten’s manipulations; the evidence, as Khan and von Tunzelmann have shown, is that Radcliffe made the decisions and did not tell anyone about them until 12 August.

The violence that accompanied the partition has been examined in detail elsewhere; the principal point to make here is that the British Indian Army, which was the only institution that could have contained it, was itself being divided. The army’s partition was carried out at remarkable speed — by 1 September 1947 the units had been distributed between the two new states — and the Muslim and non-Muslim components of the army were kept on the boundary line in an attempt to keep order. The attempt failed. The Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim soldiers of the former British Indian Army were demobilised in the same weeks as the civilian population was in motion, and the discipline that the army had imposed on the Punjab broke down with it.

The Two New States

The two new states that came into existence in August 1947 were, in almost every respect, ill-equipped for sovereignty. India had a population of perhaps 350 million, a workable civil service, a working parliamentary system, and a political leadership that, in the persons of Nehru and Patel, had the capacity to govern. Pakistan had a population of perhaps 75 million, divided into two wings separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, a much smaller civil service, a more difficult political inheritance, and a leadership that was already fracturing. The Indian state’s early consolidation — the integration of the princely states, the land reform, the planned industrialisation — is one of the most successful state-buildings of the post-war period. The Pakistani state’s corresponding years, in the words of Ayesha Jalal in The State of Martial Rule (1990), were “an accident of history that kept happening.”

The most consequential political difference was the early death of Jinnah in September 1948. Jinnah was the only figure who had held the Muslim League together, and his death removed the only political authority that might have made a parliamentary Pakistan work. The first military coup, in October 1958, was the consequence; the subsequent alternation of military and civilian governments has been the dominant pattern of Pakistani political life. The Indian political system, by contrast, has been dominated since independence by a single party, the Indian National Congress, and by the Nehru-Gandhi family, and the political stability that this has produced is one of the explanations for the divergent economic trajectories of the two states.

The Legacy

The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 was the end of the British Empire as a South Asian power and the beginning of the post-imperial international order in Asia. The withdrawal was the model for the subsequent British withdrawal from Africa and the Caribbean; the violence of partition was the model that the British worked, sometimes successfully, to avoid in the later withdrawals. The non-alignment policy of independent India, of which Nehru was the principal architect, was a major element in the Cold War international order: the refusal of the new states to choose between the American and Soviet blocs was a constraint on both, and the Bandung Conference of 1955 was the moment when the new Asian and African states asserted their position in the international system.

The legacy of 1947, in the longer view, is the partition. The Kashmir conflict, the wars, the nuclear standoff, the Hindu-Muslim communal violence of the Indian polity, the secessionist movements in Pakistan’s smaller provinces, the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 — all of these are the consequences of the boundary drawn in the summer of 1947. The British did not create the communal politics that made partition possible, but the British imperial state had been the principal manager of those politics for the previous century, and the decision to withdraw without a constitutional settlement was, in the end, the most consequential decision that the British imperial state ever made.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Indian independence has been transformed in the last forty years. The older tradition, of which the work of the British official historians and the Indian and Pakistani nationalist historians is representative, treated the independence as a triumphant culmination of the Indian national movement and the British withdrawal as a graceful recognition of the inevitable. The revisionist work of the 1980s and 1990s — of which Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman (1985) is the most distinguished example — restored the agency of the Muslim League, of Jinnah, and of the political dynamics of the Muslim-majority provinces. The most recent generation — Khan, von Tunzelmann, Hajari, Copland — has produced a more integrated picture in which the British, the Congress, the Muslim League, and the Sikh and Hindu political parties of the Punjab are all treated as participants in a process whose outcome was not predetermined. The current debate is over the question of contingency: was partition the only realistic outcome of the British withdrawal, or was it the consequence of specific decisions, by specific people, that could have been taken differently? The consensus has moved, in the last twenty years, towards the second answer.

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