between them at the Simla Conference of June
1945; a British Cabinet mission to India in March
1946 came no nearer to success. But this time it
was not just a question of a conference of squab-
bling politicians in India. To show the strength
of Muslim feelings and to protest at the tactics of
Congress, Jinnah called for a Direct Action Day
on 16 August. Fanatics stoked up communal vio-
lence and in Calcutta alone there were 20,000
casualties of the riots.
So ended the last prospects of a ‘united India’;
it was the end too of the Wavell plan as far as the
Labour government was concerned. It was willing
neither to take the blame for leaving India in a
state of chaos nor to pour the resources into India
that were necessary if time for a solution was to
be won. If Britain could no longer guarantee life
and order from outbreaks of massive communal
violence, something drastic had become neces-
sary. In February 1947 Wavell was recalled. He
was replaced by a ‘royal’, a soldier of even greater
fame, Viscount Mountbatten, until then the
charismatic and successful supreme commander in
south-east Asia; in an attempt to make the Indians
accept responsibility for the consequences of their
disputes, a definite date, June 1948, was fixed for
the transfer of power.
The Mountbattens arrived in Delhi on 22 March
1947 with all the pomp due to a viceroy and con-
sort. No viceroy’s wife had ever made so deep an
impression on Indians as Edwina Mountbatten,
who threw herself into support for welfare and
health programmes at a time of turbulence and
misery for so many. Mountbatten began a weary
process of talks with Pandit Nehru and the other
leaders of Congress and with Mohammed Jinnah,
representing the Muslim League. Gandhi was lit-
tle involved. He used his remaining strength – he
was now an old and frail man in his mid-seventies
- to try to halt the mounting religious conflicts
between Hindu and Muslims. The last two years
of his life, devoted to humanity, were the most
genuinely saintly.
Mountbatten got on well with the urbane and
warm Nehru; Jinnah he found negative and for-
bidding. The Muslim leader fought for the under-
dog, the numerically weaker and dispersed 100
million Muslims outnumbered by Hindus three to
one; and his intransigence would finally convince
the British and the Congress leaders to abandon
their cherished hopes for a united India and com-
pel them to accept an independent Pakistan. Even
then they would seek to weaken and confine a
‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan to such frontiers as would
make its viability and continued independence
highly questionable after the transfer of power.
Jinnah reflected Muslim suspicions of the good
intentions of the Hindu majority, influenced by
bitter memories of discrimination culturally, polit-
ically and economically; a unified, secular, cen-
tralised India, he feared, would simply perpetuate
1
INDIA 395
7 June 1947. Lord
Mountbatten, viceroy of
India, discloses Britains
partition plan insisted on by
Jinnah to the right of the
photo and reluctantly
accepted by Nehru on the
left. © Associated Press, AP
