into a pathological pattern of mutual psychological dependence – the
British position as the arbitrating authority encouraged appeals to that
authority on the part of the League and the Congress, and the viceroy
could imagine he was dealing with two quarrelsome siblings.
There was also the anomaly of the position of the Muslim League
boycotting the Central (Constituent) Assembly while remaining in
government. On February 5, 1947, a letter to the viceroy drafted by Nehru
and signed by the non-League members of the Interim Government
claimed that by rejecting participation in the Constituent Assembly,
the League had rejected the Cabinet Mission Plan and therefore should
not continue in the Interim Government. On February 21, Nehru met
Wavell and agreed not to press the issue of the League’s resignation from
the government; but he also brought up the question of partitioning the
provinces of Bengal and Punjab, rather than surrendering them entire to
an eventual Pakistan.
On February 23, Nehru wrote to Krishna Menon in London outlining
the situation: as long as the League remained outside the Constituent
Assembly, the Assembly had more freedom to ‘do what it likes for the
parts of India it represents’. The anticipated problem that the League
would press for giving only limited powers to an eventual central gov-
ernment would thus not arise. But Punjab and Bengal were of course, by
the tenets of democracy, not properly represented as a consequence of the
League boycott; western Bengal and south-east Punjab were, because
of their non-League representatives still being in the Assembly. Since
these two areas wanted to remain in the Union, ‘[i]nevitably this means
a division of Punjab and Bengal, bringing the richer parts of both these
provinces, including the city of Calcutta of course, into the Union. The
truncated Pakistan that remains will hardly be a gift worth having.’^31 This
was, in fact, conventional wisdom among non-partisans: Pakistan was
an economic anomaly with no possibility of a successful independent
existence.
Meanwhile, the British prepared to leave, destroying incriminating
or embarrassing documents – Nehru’s protests to Wavell were met with
the disingenuous claim that these were routine and unimportant docu-
ments; Nehru retorted that as the head of the government, it was surely
he who should be the judge of what was or was not useful. And despite
Nehru’s protests, it was the British Indian Army that did much of the
work of restoring British, French and Dutch imperialism in South-East
THE END OF THE RAJ 133