Cabinet Mission plan

Composition and proposal

The Cabinet Mission, comprising Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander, arrived in India in March 1946 with a mandate from the British government to negotiate the mechanics of transferring power. After talks with the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League and other parties failed to produce direct agreement, the Mission issued its own proposal on 16 May 1946. It envisaged a united India organised as a loose three-tier federation: a Union government with jurisdiction limited to foreign affairs, defence and communications; provinces grouped into three sections (Section A comprising the Hindu-majority provinces, Sections B and C comprising Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest and northeast respectively); and a Constituent Assembly, indirectly elected by the provincial legislatures, to draft a constitution. Provinces retained the right to opt out of their assigned group after the constitution's initial framing.

Congress and League responses

Both the Congress and the Muslim League initially accepted the plan, though on differing interpretations, particularly over whether grouping was compulsory and over the scope of the proposed interim central government formed to govern in the interval before a constitution took effect. The Mission had also floated, as a fallback, an alternative scheme for a much smaller sovereign Pakistan confined to the Muslim-majority districts of Punjab and Bengal, which it judged unworkable and set aside in favor of the grouping plan for a single union; the League's acceptance of the 16 May scheme was understood by Jinnah as, at minimum, a step that kept the possibility of eventual separation open. Elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in July 1946, in which the Congress won the great majority of general seats and the League swept the seats reserved for Muslims. An interim government was formed in September 1946 under Jawaharlal Nehru as vice-president of the Viceroy's Executive Council, serving under Viceroy Lord Wavell, which the League joined the following month.

Breakdown

Disagreement over the interpretation of the grouping clauses, together with deepening Congress-League mistrust, caused the plan to unravel. A particular flashpoint was a press conference given by Nehru on 10 July 1946, in which he suggested that the Constituent Assembly would be free to modify the grouping scheme once in session, a statement Jinnah took as confirmation that Congress would not honor the plan's compulsory grouping in good faith. The Muslim League, concluding that the scheme would not deliver an effective guarantee for Muslim-majority areas, withdrew its earlier acceptance in late July 1946 and called for Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946 to press its demand for a separate state of Pakistan, a call followed by severe communal violence in Calcutta and elsewhere. The collapse of the Cabinet Mission plan, and of the united-India framework it represented, is generally treated by historians as the point after which partition became the practically dominant outcome pursued in the final negotiations leading to independence in 1947; Wavell's failure to hold the interim arrangement together contributed to his replacement as Viceroy by Lord Mountbatten in early 1947.