Tell about Partition of India ?

The one exception was the impatient last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, who decided that drastic surgery was the only solution to escalating communal tensions.

White-Spunner is kinder to Mountbatten than most historians, suggesting that his errors of judgment were largely driven by his close friendship with the Congress leader, Jawaharlal Nehru.

The main culprit for Partition in this narrative was the predominantly Hindu Congress, with its determination to dominate a centralised, majoritarian state.

Although the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, responded with its demand for Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, this was really a bargaining counter

designed to secure Muslim autonomy in a loose Indian federation. While the Raj tried hard to broker a unity deal, its efforts foundered on Congress intransigence amid growing communal violence.

The partition of the India in mid-August 1947 took place as part of a negotiated settlement brokered by the British between the Indian National Congress And All-India Muslim League.The principle on which India and the Punjab were divided was that Muslim-majority areas were separated from the rest of India and given to Pakistan.

White-Spunner rightly points out that the British might have pre-empted all this by granting a united India self-governing Dominion status in the 1920s or 30s, before Congress-Muslim League rivalry had become so bitter and entrenched.

This book is at its most powerful in its month-by-month narrative of how Partition tore apart northern and eastern India, with the new state of Pakistan carved out of communities who had lived together for the past millennium.

Before the announcement of Independence, In Aug 1946 During cabinet mission of India ,Divide British India into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan was proposed by the Muslim League. Congress rejected the proposal outright.On 16 August, terming it as Direct Action Day, to protest this rejection and assert its demand for a separate Muslim homeland.In those days the situation in Bengal

The book draws on oral history archives for its harrowing, though never voyeuristic, accounts of how otherwise humane people turned overnight into brutal killers of their own friends and neighbours.

This strike led to "Direct Action riot".  in Calcutta,  Muslim Mob armed with brickbats and iron bars as weapons and attacking Hindu-owned shops. Hindus in Calcutta soon retaliated with attacks on Muslims, any Muslim found in house, road or shop or even educational institution was pulled out by Hindu mobs in Calcutta and were cut into pieces.

Not only did an estimated million die in such ethnic cleansing, but many of them were hacked to pieces in the most horrendous manner, thousands of men and women with their breasts and genitalia mutilated, pregnant women with their bellies cut open, babies with their brains bashed out.

The total population of the undivided Punjab Province was 33 million.The Punjab was a Muslim majority province while Hindus and Sikhs together made up a very large minority of 44-47 percent. The principle on which India and the Punjab were divided was that Muslim-majority areas were separated from the rest of India and given to Pakistan.

White-Spunner spares us no such details, but his purpose is to remind us of the human cost of the new lines that were being so callously drawn on India’s map.

Muslim refugees sit on the roof of an overcrowded coach railway train near New Delhi in trying to flee India.

Perhaps because of his own military background, he is at his best on how Partition tore apart the century-old camaraderie that had held together the British Indian army.

Thus at the end of 1947 all traces of a Muslim presence in the Indian East Punjab were wiped out, except for some Muslims remaining in the tiny princely state of Malerkotla (total population 88,000). In the Pakistani West Punjab, Hindus and Sikhs became conspicuous by their absence.

All is not doom and gloom, though. There are stories of great heroism – by Indians who sheltered friends and servants from murderous mobs and by British officials who sacrificed their lives trying to separate the protagonists.

The Muslim League said that it would never accept Indian independence if it meant rule by the Hindu-dominated Congress party. The Muslim League wanted a partition, which meant a division of British India into two countries;one Hindu and one Muslim. This Propaganda created hate between People and As consequences.

There are also lighter anecdotes, such as Nehru shocking Indian onlookers by kissing Edwina Mountbatten in public, or V.P.

Menon, who bullied and cajoled India’s princes into joining the new republic, hiding under a desk while a demented princeling brandished a toy pistol.

The main culprit for Partition in this narrative was the predominantly Hindu Congress, with its determination to dominate a centralised, majoritarian state.

the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, responded with its demand for Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, this was really a bargaining counter designed to secure Muslim autonomy in a loose Indian federation.

Muslims Mob started large-scale violence, mainly against Sikhs but also against Hindus, in the Muslim-majority districts of northern Punjab and East Bengal.  Muslims also had been killed in East Punjab than Hindus and Sikhs together in West Punjab.

The most telling part of this book is its description of how the 41,000 British troops still stationed in India were largely confined to barracks by their political masters