now get was what he had once dismissed as a ‘mangy’ and ‘moth-eaten
Pakistan’, and what Nehru had described as ‘a gift not worth having’.
Nehru and Patel, for the Congress, and as members of the Interim
Government, accepted partition on the understanding that there needed
to be no more negotiations with Jinnah once he had been given this last,
major concession. In later years Nehru spoke of everyone’s tiredness in
1947; at the time, he reportedly summed up the situation as ‘cutting off
the head we will get rid of the headache’.^34
Power was, in the end, to be transferred to two entities, temporarily
the Dominions of India and Pakistan. The Princely States, allied to
Britain under the principle of ‘paramountcy’ – they were theoretically
independent and sovereign, but Britain was the ‘paramount power’ to
which all the states conceded crucial powers – were informed that the
paramountcy agreements would lapse with the British departure, and
they would have to join one or other of the new dominions. The actual
boundaries of the crucial provinces of Bengal and the Punjab were drawn
up by a Boundary Commission effectively comprising one man, Sir Cyril
Radcliffe, who was brought to India and advised not to visit the areas
he was about to tear asunder; he was given maps and census figures and
some office space. Radcliffe set out to draw his lines after the matter had
been put to vote in the Assemblies of those provinces, whose Hindu and
Sikh members tilted the vote in favour of a partition of those provinces
rather than a complete incorporation of both provinces into Pakistan. Even
the vehemently anti-partition position of the Hindu Mahasabha altered
when the alternatives were so formulated. The award of the Boundary
Commission was kept secret until August 15, 1947, but in anticipation
of partition many areas tried to cleanse themselves of their minorities,
adding to the already serious carnage. The western areas were the worst
affected – the Punjab was, for instance, a region with ready access to arms
due to its high levels of army recruitment – and organised massacres of
Hindus and Sikhs by Muslims and of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs,
accompanied by apparently gratuitous mutilations of bodies, by rapes,
abductions, and communities killing their own women to protect their
‘honour’, continued well past the date of actual transfer of power.
For ordinary people, diverse responses to fiercely disruptive events
over the past few years – which probably had in common only feelings of
confusion and insecurity – had been interpreted simplistically to mean
that Hindus and Muslims needed to live in separate states. This spurious
THE END OF THE RAJ 137