Did Mountbatten’s speed cause the Partition violence?

The short answer

• The seventy-three-day timetable. Mountbatten’s defenders saw a state in danger of dissolving. The Punjab crisis suggested that delay might bring civil war and an army no longer reliable enough to contain it; Wavell’s breakdown papers had themselves forecast collapse. Critics ask what advancing the date did to the preparations needed for transfer. The Punjab Boundary Force had 50,000 men for a province of 34 million, and the speed outran a security plan, because there was none. The decision turned an attempt at a managed transfer into a race. Britain’s convenience determined the date, while Punjabis paid the bill after Britain left.
• Radcliffe’s five weeks. Two commissions had to draw lines through Punjab and Bengal, but their lawyers were deadlocked. Radcliffe had 1941 census tables, no time for surveys, and had never seen the rivers he was dividing. Any line would cut connections: canal systems from headworks, factories from hinterlands, and shrines from pilgrims. His award was an honest man’s best guess at a task no line could accomplish without such losses. He destroyed his papers, took no fee and never returned to either country. The problem lay in the commission as well as the choice of its chairman: a border that decades of politics had not worked out in detail was demanded in weeks.
• The princely stampede. The end of the Raj also ended paramountcy: legally, 565 princely states became sovereign on 15 August. Patel and Menon offered their rulers an Instrument of Accession covering defence, foreign affairs and communications, with the rest left for later negotiation. Geography gave the appeal force, and all but three acceded before the deadline. This administrative achievement helps explain why the map’s tan patchwork dissolves into the two dominions rather than a hundred Balkans. Junagadh, Hyderabad and Kashmir held out; their conflicts belong to the next chapter.
• Why the Punjab, worst of all. Bengal’s partition killed thousands; Punjab’s killed hundreds of thousands. Punjab presented a three-way division among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, whose homeland and holiest places straddled any possible line. Its prosperous canal colonies were worth fighting for, and two million demobilized soldiers were available to fight. Spring massacres, including those at Rawalpindi in March 1947, had already militarized every village. The struggle concerned where the facts on the ground would place the line. It was a war of position as well as a migration.

What it changed

Two states built from one civil service. A single government’s assets had to be divided between two states. The division reached from army regiments split by religion to library sets divided by alternate volumes. Pakistan’s share of the sterling balances was withheld and later released under Gandhi’s last fast. India inherited the center and its institutions; Pakistan began with 17% of the revenue base, one working port and a capital in a city it had to borrow. That unequal starting point forms the substrate of every Indo-Pakistani crisis since.

The refugees remake both nations. The people who crossed the border changed the cities that received them. Within a year Delhi and Karachi had become refugee cities; Karachi’s population doubled, while Punjabi migration changed Delhi’s language and politics. Memories carried out of the camps entered the politics of both states. Bangladesh’s memory politics after 1971 also descend from these columns. The consequences of fifteen million uprootings continued to accumulate.

A line that never closed. A boundary on a map left questions about the connections it severed. Within months India and Pakistan disputed canal headworks, a water dispute that lasted until the 1960 Indus Treaty. Within weeks they were fighting over Kashmir, where geography, demography and the two national theories collided in a princely accession. The next chapter opens with that war already burning.