Mountbatten Plan

Background

Mountbatten arrived as Viceroy in March 1947 with a mandate to transfer power by June 1948 and initially explored plans to keep India united. Negotiations with the Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, made clear that the League would not accept a unitary Indian federation and that Congress leaders, worried about a weak central government under the earlier Cabinet Mission proposals, had come to accept partition as preferable to prolonged deadlock and continuing communal violence, including the riots that had followed the League's Direct Action Day in Calcutta in August 1946. An earlier draft prepared by Mountbatten's staff, sometimes called the "Plan Balkan," would have allowed individual provinces and even princely states to choose their own future rather than dividing the country into two blocs; Nehru rejected this draft as likely to fragment India into numerous weak successor states, and it was replaced, at short notice, by a revised plan drawn up largely by V.P. Menon, a senior Indian official in the Viceroy's constitutional department, providing for a clean division into two dominions instead.

Provisions of the plan

The plan provided that Bengal and Punjab, both religiously mixed provinces, would be partitioned unless their legislative assemblies voted to remain united, which neither did; the North-West Frontier Province and the Sylhet district of Assam would decide their accession through a referendum; and Sind and Baluchistan would join Pakistan, with the princely states left to accede to either dominion (or, nominally, to remain independent) taking into account geography and population. In the North-West Frontier Province referendum, held in July 1947, the pro-Congress Khudai Khidmatgar movement led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan called for a boycott rather than campaign for union with India, and the province voted heavily to join Pakistan; Sylhet's referendum similarly favoured accession to Pakistan. The plan also advanced the date of transfer of power from June 1948 to mid-August 1947, a compression that left little time to prepare administrative division or the boundary award. Both the Congress Working Committee and the All-India Muslim League Council formally accepted the plan in the second week of June 1947, clearing the way for its implementation.

Implementation and partition

The Indian Independence Act, giving legal effect to the plan, received royal assent on 18 July 1947. A Boundary Commission chaired by the British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe, who had no prior familiarity with India, was tasked with drawing the partition lines through Punjab and Bengal; his award, the Radcliffe Line, was completed by mid-August but not published until 17 August, two days after independence. The plan's compressed timetable, combined with the abrupt drawing of the boundary, is widely linked by historians to the scale of the displacement and communal violence that accompanied partition, in which millions crossed the new borders and large numbers of people died, though precise figures remain disputed and are treated separately from this plan itself. India and Pakistan became independent dominions on 15 August and 14 August 1947 respectively.