of the country as a whole. Mountbatten would be the judge of the sincerity
of such measures not as viceroy but in his personal capacity (in effect,
Gandhi granted Mountbatten for this purpose the moral status of a
satyagrahi). Private armies that had been involved in the violence of the
past months should be disbanded, and Jinnah was to do his best to ensure
the parties represented in his Cabinet would do their best to preserve peace
in the country. If Jinnah rejected this offer, the same offer would be made
to the Congress.
This Caucasian Chalk Circle gesture won little support from anyone;
by April the practicalities of a partition were already being seriously
discussed: how to phrase the questions to be asked the voters of Punjab
and Bengal – firstly, whether they wished the provinces to be partitioned;
and secondly, whether they wished the whole or parts of the provinces to
remain independent, to adhere to the Indian Union, or to join Pakistan.
Nehru pointed out there that figures from the 1941 Census were not
very accurate in parts of India, especially in parts of Bengal: ‘Separate
electorates gave a great temptation to “cook” numbers, particularly of
women in purdah.’^33 Other questions that emerged included whether the
North-West Frontier Province really needed a plebiscite given that it had
voted for the Congress and its allies in the 1946 elections, or whether
it could realistically have a fair plebiscite given the movement of refugees
fearing being caught on the wrong side of the new border.
By May, all that was left to argue about was the details of exactly
where boundary lines were to be drawn. The Bengal Hindu Mahasabha
leader, Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, wrote to Nehru expressing concern that
Sarat Bose was talking to Suhrawardy about an independent, sovereign
Bengal, and he opposed this, demanding the partition of Bengal regardless
of whether Pakistan was created or not. Nehru replied that he did not
‘appreciate’ the idea of a sovereign Bengal unconnected with the Union
altogether, but that details of a partition would have to be decided by
a boundary commission. By this point, the best available option in the
absence of the possibility of agreement among Indian political groups
seemed a British-administered partition of India – an option that the
Congress would have vehemently rejected in earlier years; in a final, ironic
twist, the British claim to being referee between two antagonistic
communities had de factobeen conceded to them when they least wanted
it. It can only be a matter of speculation what exactly Jinnah’s hopes were
in terms of his ideal Pakistan; but it seemed clear that what he would136 THE END OF THE RAJ