haywains drawn by enormous white oxen, others rubber-tyred flatbeds hauled by wispy-haired water-buffalo whose languid pace allowed for a snatched bite at the herbaceous bounty provided by the municipal groundsmen.
New Delhi, the garden city laid out as the capital of British India only twenty years earlier, dozed in the afternoon heat, unroused by the visiting Cabinet Ministers, untrodden by policemen or postmen – both were on strike – and unbothered by the post-war turmoil beyond India’s distant frontiers. It was just eight months since the British Labour Party had taken office in London, and seven since Japan’s surrender had brought an end to the Second World War. Half the world was still in uniform. A blitzed and rationed Britain faced the biggest reconstruction crisis in its history. Yet in London Prime Minister Clement Attlee had reconciled himself to dispensing with three of his most senior colleagues for what would turn out to be a hundred-day absence. Their mission was that important.
Of the three Cabinet Ministers, Lord Pethick-Lawrence was there as of right: as Secretary of State for India he headed a branch of the London government whose personnel and budget exceeded those of both the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. Another of the delegates, Albert Victor Alexander, later Earl Alexander, had responsibility for safeguarding the British Empire’s maritime links as First Lord of the Admiralty; and the third, Sir Stafford Cripps, had led an earlier mission to India, was the prime mover in the present one, and was currently President of the Board of Trade. All were men of high principle. Pethick-Lawrence had once received a custodial sentence for encouraging suffragette defiance; Cripps, a vegetarian and a teetotaller, had once been expelled from the Labour Party as too left-wing; and Alexander, a blacksmith’s son, had been known to double as a lay preacher. All sympathised with India’s national aspirations and shared its leadership’s socialist values. Their integrity, their seniority and their extended leave from Cabinet duties bespoke their government’s intent. Britain’s Labour Party had already committed itself to ‘freedom and self-determination’ for the peoples of India; now it must deliver. As per its instructions, the delegation’s task was ‘to work out in cooperation [with India’s political leaders] the means by which Indians can themselves decide the form of their new institutions with the minimum of disturbance and the maximum of speed’. Thus would be consummated what the mission’s statement called ‘the transfer of responsibility’ and what the delegates themselves called ‘the transfer of power’.1
The Cabinet delegates, all of them aged around sixty, reeking of tobacco and unaccustomed to the ease of light linen suiting, were immediately dubbed ‘the Magi’ by Lord Wavell, the current Viceroy. The Indian press preferred to call them ‘the Three Wise Men’. They might have come from the West and arrived by plane, but the treasure they bore was indeed priceless. India was at last being proffered the means of securing full and unconditional independence. After decades of sacrifice and disappointment, of repression and obfuscation, protest and imprisonment, azadi (‘freedom’, ‘independence’) was within the grasp of the subcontinent’s four hundred millions.
In the history books this first post-war initiative in the endgame of British rule is known simply as ‘the 1946 Cabinet Mission’, an impersonal phrasing that has deterred scrutiny and obscured its importance. Within a year the new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, would steamroller through a very different handover of power that would relegate the Cabinet Mission and all its doings to the India Office’s bulging archive of begrudged concessions and aborted proposals. Yet, for all this, the Mission deserves recognition as one of the twentieth century’s milestones. It marked the beginning of the end for the British Empire in India; it was the first such overture to offer independence on a plate – to India or anywhere else. And it was the last to provide any real hope of staving off a division of the South Asian subcontinent.
Only in retrospect was it a failure. Both of the main contenders for power in India – the Indian National Congress guided by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Muslim League headed by Mohamed Ali Jinnah – would in fact accept a Mission proposal that emphatically rejected any division of the country; the demand for a sovereign state of Pakistan was so hopelessly impractical, declared the proposal, as ‘not to be an acceptable solution’. Even Jinnah, the man who epitomised the demand for a separate Muslim homeland called Pakistan, would not demur over what he called merely these ‘injudicious words’. Fitfully and faintly, a hint of consensus arced across India’s dark horizon of sectarian rivalry. The rainbow would soon fade, but throughout 1946 the country lay within a whisker of attaining full independence as a single sovereign state. Partition, in other words, was no more a foregone conclusion in the run-up to Independence than was the genocidal mayhem of its aftermath.
Rolling up their shirtsleeves of sea-island cotton, the Cabinet Ministers got down to work in the hermetically air-conditioned offices of a wing of the viceregal palace (‘one of the biggest residential buildings in the world’, it is now Rashtrapati Bhawan, the official home of the Republic of India’s President).2 For two weeks they listened – to the views of the Viceroy and his Executive Council, to the Governors of British India’s fourteen constituent provinces, the representatives of its several hundred quasi-sovereign princely states and the spokesmen of its main political parties and communal groupings; in all they would interview ‘472 people on 181 separate occasions’.3 Then for four weeks they drafted – first an outline of the likely constitutional options (a large two-tier federal India versus two or more smaller one-tier Indias) – followed, when the Muslim League rejected both, by a statement of their own that proposed a large three-tier federal India. This too was unacceptable; but hoping that common ground would emerge through direct Congress–League contact, the Cabinet Mission invited the interested parties to send representatives to a conference.
By now it was early May. The thermometer on the terrace outside the viceregal palace hovered in the upper thirties centigrade. Tarmac bubbled like porridge, and it was the turn of the railways to be paralysed by strike action. A suggestion that the delegates repair to Simla, 350 kilometres to the north and 2,000 metres higher, promised some welcome relief plus a tantalising glimpse of the Himalayan snowline. It was approved in a rare show of unanimity; elevation was just what the discussions needed. With the railways at a standstill, the Mission flew to Simla’s nearest airstrip at Ambala before addressing the hairpin bends of the near-perpendicular ascent to the town by car.
But ‘the Queen of Hill Stations’, as so often, disappointed. The change of scene brought no change of heart. Simla’s pine-scented zephyrs neither cooled heads nor cleared the air. The conference lasted over a week and served only to highlight League–Congress differences. Consultation degenerated into altercation. By 13 May the delegates were trailing back empty-handed to the inferno that was Delhi. Pethick-Lawrence was getting tetchy, Cripps, the Mission’s intellectual heavyweight, was wilting with diarrhoea which might have been dysentery, and Alexander had discovered an urgent need to visit a British naval base in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).
Nevertheless, three days later, the Mission came up with its own solution. All its ‘proposals’ having been shot down by either Congress, the League or both, the Mission had decided to stop inviting comment and instead to table a ‘recommendation’. This favoured another three-tier, one-state constitution. Of the three tiers, the first would be comprised of British India’s fourteen directly administered provinces. Their recently elected legislatures would then take their provinces into three predetermined regional ‘groupings’ roughly corresponding to the north-west, the north-east and the remainder of the country, this being the second tier. And the groups would then arrogate to the central government – the topmost tier – certain all-India responsibilities like foreign affairs, defence, communications and some revenue-raising powers. The groups might award to the centre other responsibilities. They might also determine their own constitutions. Although a cumbersome device, the importance of the groups lay in the fact that two of them, those in the north-west and north-east, corresponded to the Muslim-majority regions earmarked by the Muslim League for its putative ‘Pakistan’. The League could thus reassure itself that the substance of a Muslim homeland had not been entirely precluded, while the Congress could reassure itself that the principle of an undivided India remained intact.
Overall the structure was essentially a graduated federal pyramid, with the fourteen provinces tapering to the three groups and then the one centre. Residual