The R.I.N. (Royal Indian Navy) mutiny began on 18 February 1946, with the ratings on HMS Talwar going on a hunger strike and refusing to cooperate with authorities. They were protesting against flagrant racial discrimination, unpalatable food and abuses and demanded equal pay for white and Indian sailors. It appeared that the nationalist sentiment that had been growing since 1942 had affected the naval ratings as well.

The RIN mutiny passed through three stages.

       Stage I: The ratings formed organisations and protested. B.C. Dutt was arrested for scrawling ‘Quit India’ on HMS Talwar. A Naval Central Strike Committee was elected, headed by M.S. Khan. Soon the strike spread to castle and fort barracks and 22 ships in Bombay harbour.

       Stage 2: The upsurge spread to cities resulting in flare-ups in Bombay and Calcutta.

       Stage 3: People in different parts of the country expressed solidarity with the movement. Karachi, Madras, Delhi, Calcutta, Cochin, Jamnagar, Andamans, Aden and Bahrain joined in, affecting 78 ships and 20 shore establishments in all.

Political response

The CSP and CPI supported the movement. The Congress leaders advised restraint on the part of the strikers and Patel urged them to surrender. The Muslim League also was in favour of ‘restoration of discipline’ in the army and appealed for calling off the strike.

The Government crushed the mutiny, but having realised that the movement was an expression of popular militancy against the British rule, started thinking of granting substantial political concessions to India.

Under popular pressure the British were forced to free the sailors arrested on charges of mutiny.

Time-limit for British withdrawal

The situation was saved by Attlee’s announcement in Parliament on 20th February 1947 that the British would withdraw from India by 30th June 1948 and that lord Mountbatten would replace Wavell as Viceroy. This was no answer to the constitutional crisis that was at hand but it showed that the British decision about leaving India remained unchanged. The Congress responded with a gesture of cooperation to the League. Nehru appealed to Liaqat Ali Khan:

The British are fading out of the picture and the burden of this decision must rest on all of us here. It seems desirable that we should face this question squarely and not speak to each other from a distance.

But Jinnah’s reaction to Attlee’s statement was entirely different. He was confident that now he only needed to stick firmly to his position in order to achieve his goal of Pakistan. After all, the declaration made it clear that power would be transferred to more than one authority if the Constituent Assembly did not become a fully representative body, i.e. if the Muslim majority provinces did not join it.

The Governor of Punjab had warned in this regard that “the statement will be regarded as the prelude to the final showdown”, with every one out to “seize as such power as they can, if necessary by force”. He was soon proved right. The League began a civil disobedience campaign in Punjab which brought about the collapse of the coalition ministry headed by Khizr Hayat Khan of the Unionist Party.

Thus the situation which Mountbatten found on his arrival in India was a fairly intractable one. The League was on the war path, as Punjab showed, and Jinnah was obdurate that he would accept nothing less than a sovereign Pakistan. The Cabinet Mission Plan had clearly become defunct and there was no point in persisting with it. The only way the British could maintain unity was by throwing all their weight behind it. The role of mediators between the Congress and League had to be discarded. Those who opposed unity had to be put down firmly and those who wanted unity had to be openly supported. Despite Attlee’s claim years later - “we would have preferred a united India. We couldn’t get it, though we tried hard”, the truth was that the British chose to play safe and take both sides along without exercising any check or restraint even when the situation demanded this type of assertion of authority.

The 3^rd June plan and its outcome

This was done by making concessions to both the Congress and the League. India would be divided but in a manner that maximum unity was retained. The League’s demand would be accommodated by creating Pakistan, but it would be made as small as possible in order to accommodate the Congress stand on unity. Since Congress was making the bigger concession i.e. it was giving up its ideal of a united India, all its other stands were to be upheld by the British. For example, Mountbatten supported the Congress stand that princely states must not be given the option of independence. Mountbatten realised that it was vital to retain the goodwill of the congress if he hoped to persuade India to remain in the Commonwealth. Dominion status offered a chance of keeping India in the Commonwealth, even if for a while, and hence the 3rd June Plan declared that power would be handed over by 15th August 1947 on the basis of dominion status to India and Pakistan.

The Congress was willing to accept dominion status because it was the only way of assuming complete power immediately and taking the communally explosive situation in hand. British officials were half-hearted about preventing the communal situation from deteriorating further. Sardal Patel summed up the situation in his statement to the Viceroy: “You won’t govern yourself, and you won’t let us govern”. The British had abdicated responsibility and the advancing of the date for withdrawal to 15th August 1947 made this more apparent.

Indian independence act

The Act, introduced on 4 July, was enacted on 18 July. It formalized the Mountbatten plan.

1.    The Act provided for the partition of India to take effect from 5 August 1947.

2.    Pending the adoption of the new Constitution, every dominion and every province was to be governed by the provisions of the Government of India Act, 1935.

3.    Up to 31 March 1948 the dominions could modify the 1935 Act through the Governor-General and thereafter through their Constituent Assemblies.

4.    British Paramountcy was terminated.

5.    The King’s right to veto was given up.

The Indian Independence Act marked the end of colonial rule in India and the beginning of free India.

The speed with which the country was partitioned was disastrous from the Indian point of view, although it suited the British and enabled them to forsake responsibility for the worsening communal situation. Both transfer of power and division of the country, equally complicated processes, were hurried through in seventy two days from 3rd June to 15th August 1947. Some senior British officials like the Commander in Chief and the Punjab Governor were of the opinion that a minimum period of a few years was necessary to effect a peaceful division. Jinnah complicated matters further by refusing to let Mountbeatten be a common Governor General of India and Pakistan. There was no institutional structure to which problems arising from division could be referred and even the joint defence machinery broke down in December 1947 as a fall out of the hostilities in Kashmir.

Massacres that accompanied partition

The speed with which division was allocated and the delay in announcing the awards of the Boundary Commission aggravated the tragedy to partition. These were Mountabatten’s decisions. Mountbatten delayed the announcement of the Boundary Commission Award (even though it was ready by 12th August 1947) to disown responsibility for further complications. This created confusion for ordinary citizens as well as the officials. People living in the villages between Lahore and Amritsar stayed on in their homes in the belief that they were on the right side of the border. Migrations necessarily became a frenzied affair, often culminating in massacres.

The officials were busy arranging their own transfers rather than using their authority to maintain law and order. Had officials in every grade in the civil services, and all the personnel of the armed services, been in position in their respective new countries before Independence Day, it seems there would have been a better chance of preventing widespread disorder.

Another consideration on accepting partition was that it firmly ruled out the spectre of the ‘balkanisation’ of the country. The Congress had the support of the Viceroy and behind him His Majesty’s Government, in refusing the option of independence to the princely states. Through persuasion or force, they were made to join either the Union of India or Pakistan.

Gandhi and partition

It is common knowledge that Gandhi was so distressed when partition became an imminent reality that he no longer wished to live for 125 years, as he had stated earlier. One popular interpretation is that Gandhi’s advice was ignored by his disciples, Nehru and Patel. Though he felt this betrayal acutely, he did not wish to condemn them publicly because they had been his faithful followers.

Gandhi’s own statements, however, suggest that the main reason for his helplessness lay in the communalisation of the masses. When different segments of people wanted partition, what could he or the Congress do but to accept it? At his daily prayer meeting on 4th June 1947 Gandhi said.

“The demand has been granted because you asked for it. The Congress never asked for it ... But the congress can feel the pulse of the people. It realised that the Khalsa as also the Hindus desired it”.

Socialists and Gandhians appealed to Gandhi to launch a struggle for unity bypassing the Congress leaders. Gandhi pointed out that the problem was not that he was unwilling to go ahead without the Congress leaders. After all, few had agreed with his assessment in 1942 that the time was right for a struggle of the Quit India type, and yet he had defied their counsels and he had been proved right. The crucial lacuna in 1947 was that there were no “forces of good” upon which he could “build up a programme”. He confessed - “Today I see no sign of such a healthy feeling. And, therefore, I shall have to wait until the time comes”.

The time never came, for political developments were moving at too fast a pace. Partition was announced on 3rd June and implemented on 15th August 1947. Gandhi’s advice to Congressmen, conveyed in his speech to the AICC meeting on 14th June 1947, was to accept Partition as an unavoidable necessity for the present, but not accept it in their hearts and fight to reverse it later, when passions would subside.

Congress and the Communal problem

It is often argued that partition could have been avoided if the Congress had been willing to conciliate Jinnah, not only before he came up with the demand for a separate state in 1940, but also in 1942 at the time of the Cripps Mission or even in 1946 when the Cabinet Mission Plan was put forward. Maulana Azad in his autobiography- India Wins Freedom has supported this position. This view ignores the fact that Jinnah laid down the impossible condition that he was willing to negotiate with the Congress only if it declared itself a Hindu body and accepted the Muslim League as the sole representative of the Muslims. Had the Congress accepted this demand, it would have had to give up its secular character. This would not only have meant betrayal of the nationalist Muslims who had resolutely stood behind the Congress at great personal cost, but betrayal of the Indian people and their future. The logical culmination of accepting Jinnah’s demand would have been the creation of a Hindu fascist state, from a Hindu body to Hindu state being a logical next step. In Rajendra Prasad’s words, the Congress “would be denying its own past, falsifying its history, and betraying its future”.

Pitfalls of conciliation

In fact, though the Congress refused to negotiate with Jinnah on his terms, it made unilateral concessions to Muslim demands despite Jinnah’s intransigence. The Congress accepted the autonomy of Muslim majority provinces during the negotiations with the Cripps Mission on 1942. In his talks with Jinnah in 1944 Gandhi recognised that Muslim majority provinces would have the right of self-determination. When the Cabinet Mission Plan proposed that Muslim majority provinces (groups B and C) would set up a separate Constituent Assembly if they wished, the Congress did not oppose this. Congress opposed compulsory grouping (because it would force N.W.F.P. and Assam into groups they may not wish to join). But by the end of 1946 Nehru declared that his party would accept the interpretation of the Federal Court on whether grouping was compulsory or optional. Accordingly, when the British Cabinet clarified in its 6th December 1946 statement that grouping would be compulsory, the Congress quietly accepted the new interpretation. As we have pointed out, earlier Nehru appealed to Liaqat Ali Khan for cooperation when His Majesty’s Government announced a time limit for their withdrawal on 20th February 1947. So when the Congress finally accepted the 3rd June Plan and Partition - this was only the final act of surrender to the League’s demand. It was the culmination of a process of reconcilement to the harsh realities of a situation created by the League’s intransigent championing of the demand of a sovereign Muslim majority state.

Thus, the policy of concessions, intended to reassure Muslims that their interests would be protected, ended up as surrender to extreme communal demands. For example, The Congress conceded the right of secession in the hope that “the Muslims would not exercise it but rather use it to shed their fears.” This was wishful thinking as by the 1940s Muslims communalism was no longer based on an assiduous fanning of minority fears, but on an assertive “Muslims nation” determined on a separate sovereign state. Consequently, every time the Congress made a concession Jinnah pegged his demand a notch higher, seeing that Congress was yielding. Far from cutting the ground from under the communalist’s feet, every round of concessions strengthened their foothold as more and more Muslims joined their ranks, impressed by their success. Along with Muslim communalism, Hindu communalism also registered rapid growth as the Hindu communalists projected themselves as the only champions of Hindu interests, which, they charged, the Congress was betraying in the hope of winning over Muslims.

The basic failure

This lack of the logic of communalism in the 1940s was only symptomatic of the general failure of the Congress in contending with communalism. Though the Congress was committed to secularism and though Gandhi staked his life for Hindu Muslim unity, the Congress was not able to formulate a long term strategy to fight communalism in its different forms at the level of both politics and ideology. The Congress leaders naively believed that reassurance, generous concessions and willingness to reach a compromise would solve the communal problem. As Prof. Bipan Chandra has said:

“The fact is that communalism is basically an ideology which could not have been, and cannot be, appeared; it had to be confronted and opposed ... The failure to do so was the real weakness of the Congress and the national movement.