India's Partition: The Forgotten Story

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find disturbing

I'm Gurinder Chadha.

I'm a British film director.

And in my films like Bend It Like Beckham, and Bhaji on the Beach,

I've explored and celebrated what it's like to be Asian

growing up in this country.

Now I'm delving into my own family story.

Growing up in an Indian or Pakistani family,

there's one piece of history that we all know about.

It's an event that's had a huge impact on all our lives.

The partition of India.

In 1947, the British divided India in two...

..creating a newly independent India, and a new country, Pakistan.

People of different faiths turned on each other.

17 million people became refugees overnight.

And over a million lost their lives.

It was a seismic event that tore apart millions of lives

including my own family's.

But why did this happen?

Like so much of history, the answer depends on who gets to tell it.

When I was growing up, I was taught at school

that the partition of India happened because

we as Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, couldn't get along.

In fact, we hated each other.

So the British had no choice but to divide the country

and it was our fault.

But my mum says the opposite.

She says that everybody got along before partition.

So there's a major discrepancy here.

In this film, I want to explore what really happened 70 years ago.

Was partition inevitable?

Was it really about religious intolerance?

Or were there other reasons why India was divided, 70 years ago?

You'll have tea, coffee?

Oh, that looks nice.

It's dhokra, but made small.

I'm starting my journey close to home,

by visiting my mum and my aunties in west London.

They were young girls in 1947

and rarely talk about how they survived partition.

As Sikhs they found themselves living in the new state of Pakistan

which was created as a homeland for India's Muslims.

They were forced to flee to India when partition was announced.

What do you remember in 1947, what happened?

So there was your mother, there was you two

and another little sister, baby sister?

My family had lived in Jhelum and Rawalpindi for generations.

When India was divided in two,

they ended up on the wrong side of the border

and were no longer welcome.

That's why, along with millions of others, they were forced to flee.

I always thought that before these troubles and before partition,

everybody used to get on?

What was it like before partition, with Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs?

So how did that feel, living there, when you were all together?

It's clear that the events of 1947 in India has affected my family

until today, and I think it's fair to say that all of us

who have been affected by partition still live under that shadow.

I'd like to find out what happened to the world

that my mum talked about, where everybody lived side by side

as brother and sister.

I'd like to find out where the seeds of partition started.

If everyone got along as my mum says,

why did anyone think Muslims needed a separate homeland?

I want to find out where, and why, the idea of Pakistan

was first dreamed up.

I've arranged to meet Oxford historian Yasmin Khan,

who's studied the roots of partition.

Hello, Yasmin.

-Hello.

-Nice to see you.

So I thought that I was going to get on a plane to hot, sunny India.

But I'm here in suburban Cambridge.

And this is the house where the word Pakistan was coined

and where it was first written down in 1933 by a student in Cambridge.

So it kind of all originates from here.

So this is the very place... This is the birthplace of Pakistan.

So it's not exactly what you associate with Pakistan.

-What's this?

-Chaudhry Rehmat Ali.

He was a Cambridge student.

-Yeah.

-He wasn't exactly a young thing,

he was already in his late 30s,

he'd already done one law degree and was doing another law degree.

And he was living here. He got increasingly interested

in the rights of Muslims.

He wrote this, 'Now or Never - are we to live or perish forever?'

Very sort of rousing polemical tract.

And he was committed to the idea of Muslims living separately to Indians

and the idea that India couldn't be a plural, sort of, mixed place.

And where did the word Pakistan,

did he just come up with that in his head?

Well, some people say he thought of it on the top of a London bus!

But actually the first time it was written down was in this house.

The thing that made it distinctive is because each letter stands

for a different part of Pakistan.

-Ah, OK.

-So P is Punjab.

A is Afghanistan.

But he meant it to mean the North-West Frontier.

K is Kashmir.

S Sind.

And then the 'stan' bit is Baluchistan.

And then Pakistan itself means land of the pure.

-Right.

-So it had this resonance.

So here he is, writing his pamphlets,

coming up with these ideas.

Was there anyone in India listening to him?

Not really. In India,

nobody was really thinking about a separate homeland

for Indian Muslims, at that point.

And so his ideas were pretty marginal.

Leafy suburban Cambridge is the last place where I would have expected

Pakistan to be born.

But what is interesting about what Yasmin says

is that nobody was interested in a separate homeland

for Muslims at this point.

So what happened, what changed?

How in less than 15 years did the whimsical dream

of a Cambridge student become a nation of 31 million people?

To find out, I need to go to India's capital where the idea of partition

first took hold.

It's road rage, road rage!

In the 1930s, Delhi was the beating heart of the largest empire

in the history of the world.

The British had ruled India for almost 200 years.

A few thousand white Christians governing over 400 million Indians

of all creeds and religions.

English. Hindi.

This is old Delhi and here you have Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs,

all working together,

living on top of each other still just like my aunts and my mum were

talking about. You've got Sikh temples and Hindu temples, mosques,

that have been here for centuries.

So here you have a thriving kind of bustling,

very mixed community still.

Back in the '30s, the majority of Indians were Hindus.

But a quarter of the population was Muslim.

And there was also a significant Sikh minority.

But for the most part, the different religions

did live together in peace.

So how did the divide between them begin?

Indian MP and historian Shashi Tharoor has recently written a book

about the British rule of India.

If the communities in India are living side-by-side,

what made things change?

Well, I think principally it was a very deliberate and conscious

British decision to separate.

Because in Indian unity would lie the biggest threat

to the British Empire.

So are you saying the British started instigating a new form

of rule and approach to India?

-What was that called?

-It was called divide and rule.

It was called divide and rule by the British themselves.

Systematic efforts were made

to foment a separate Muslim consciousness,

whether it was in creating Muslim institutions,

including educational institutions,

in specifically favouring people on the basis of community.

To the extent that when Indians were allowed to vote,

the British created separate electorates in which Muslims

could only vote for Muslim candidates to represent them.

Something they would have never countenanced back home in England.

One can't imagine the Jews of Golders Green having a separate list

to vote only for Jewish representatives.

But the British did that in India very deliberately

as part of divide and rule.

And so it went all the way right through the '30s and '40s.

Was anybody calling for a separate state of Pakistan?

Oh, only a few cranks, really.

And in fact the vast majority of Indian Muslims

did not subscribe to this.

It was still very much a minority view.

So, according to Shashi, the British policy of divide and rule

was a deliberate attempt to weaken the Indian people

and stop them from challenging British rule.

They encouraged Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs to view themselves

as different from each other.

And in some parts of India, Muslims were increasingly seen

as inferior by some Hindus.

But nobody was yet calling for Pakistan.

Instead, since the 1920s, most Indians had been fighting

for one thing - an independent India, free from British rule.

The problem was that few could agree on what shape it would take.

Three men drove the fight for independence.

Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru

led India's largest political party, Congress.

This was an alliance of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs

who campaigned for an independent India

where all religions would live side by side.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah led the Muslim League

which was concerned with protecting Muslim minority rights.

To find out more about these three men,

I've come to see writer William Dalrymple, who lives in Delhi.

So, William, it's lovely to see you here in India,

in your natural habitat.

Can you tell me something about the leading characters,

the players of the time?

When historians talk about the great events of history,

they often draw on great historical forces, changes in economies,

changes in climate.

But with partition, a lot of it is simply due to the personalities

of the three principal players

and the way that two of them get on very well,

Nehru and Gandhi, despite being very different men.

And the fact that neither of them like, personally, Jinnah.

And yet they should've got on.

They were all Anglicised lawyers,

all went to London and studied in London, studied at the bar.

All of them returned to India wanting to free India.

And as a personality?

If you had a dinner party today,

Nehru was the one of the three you would have wanted as the guest.

Enormously handsome, enormously charming.

Writes beautifully, is in many ways a wunderkind.

Jinnah, he was a staunch secularist, he was a rationalist,

quite a dry character with a brilliant academic mind.

Gandhi sheds his suits and becomes, wears homespun, becomes the Mahatma.

And brings his ideas of spiritual regeneration into politics.

And Jinnah thought this was hogwash.

He thought that Gandhi was bringing religion, Hinduism, into politics,

by having prayers at prayer meetings and in political rallies.

He eventually, reluctantly, takes the view that Muslims

have to look after themselves. And that's a long and important journey.

And one that leads him to personally falling out with Gandhi and Nehru.

William told me that in the 1930s Nehru and Gandhi began to scorn

Jinnah and relations between the three men deteriorated.

They reached a new low in 1937 after elections for provincial government

were held across India.

Congress sweeps the board, the Muslim League does very badly.

But Jinnah believes that it has been established between him and Congress

that they would be sharing power.

Whatever the results, there would be some Muslim League representation

and he is not given it. Buoyed up with the confidence

of their victory, Congress sweeps him aside as a minor irrelevance.

Jinnah feels he has been double-crossed

and it's at this point that the bitterness

between the principal players becomes, in a way, irreconcilable.

According to William,

Jinnah saw his treatment by Congress as a warning that in future

Muslim religion and culture would be ignored.

And the growing suspicion between these three politicians

would now unwittingly propel them along the path to partition.

But Jinnah wasn't yet calling for a separate Muslim homeland.

All that was about to change.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939,

India was dragged into the conflict.

Britain needed soldiers, so she turned to the colonies

to provide them.

Congress refused to support the imperialist rulers' war

and resigned in protest.

Its leaders were then thrown in jail.

For Congress, this was a fatal mistake.

Locked away, they created a power vacuum.

Jinnah filled it by declaring his support for the British war effort.

Then in March 1940, in Lahore,

Jinnah made a speech that would change history.

So at this point, I really wanted to go to Pakistan to learn more

about Jinnah and his speech in Lahore.

But I've been denied a visa.

This is probably because of the tension between India and Pakistan

right now, and it's a real tragedy for me because my ancestral homeland

is there in Pakistan. And since I can't go to Pakistan,

I've come back to my adopted homeland of Southall.

I've asked Yasmin Khan to meet me again

to explain the significance of what happened in Lahore.

So, Yasmin, tell me about Jinnah's speech in 1940 in Lahore?

So Jinnah, in 1940, gives a speech which really revolutionises

the Muslim League, it really changes everything for him.

What's important about it is that he talks about a Muslim homeland

or Muslim states for the first time. I've got a bit here.

He says Muslims are a nation

according to any definition of a nation.

And they must have their homelands, their territory, and their state.

So he's starting to really articulate something different

and new, which is grabbing the attention of people

who, in the past, hadn't supported the Muslim League.

So that was a turning point.

It's a huge turning point, it's a pivotal moment, really.

Because people suddenly think the Muslim League

isn't just campaigning for Muslim rights in India,

they may also be campaigning for a separate state or states.

So suddenly this idea of a separate country...

-Yeah.

-It's quite radical, right?

It is radical.

Why do you think he chose this particular moment

to make this speech?

It's March 1940, so the Second World War is just a few months old.

It's thrown Congress into disarray,

so Jinnah uses that to seize the moment.

As these calls for separatism started to gain popularity

with ordinary people,

what were the other signs of divisions that you saw happening?

Yeah, there are little things that start to creep in.

People being very wary about their neighbours perhaps,

starting to have economic ideas of nationalism.

So they would just buy from a Hindu or buy from a Muslim shopkeeper

rather than going to the market before and buying from everybody.

There's more and more, kind of, unpleasant, kind of,

characterisation of the other happening

in newspapers and popular pamphlets.

Using inflammatory language and who were trying to, on all sides,

trying to, sort of, rally their supporters.

So what's interesting about what Yasmin says

is that the genie was finally out of the bottle.

Here was a politician standing up

and saying India needed to be divided,

Muslims wanted their own separate homeland called Pakistan.

But partition was still not inevitable at this point.

Most Muslims didn't want a separate homeland, so what changed?

To find out how partition came a step closer,

I need to travel back to India

and head to the foothills of the Himalayas.

In June 1945, the war was over.

During the past five years, most Indian people

had supported the British war effort,

providing thousands of troops and nurses.

In return, the British had promised them self-rule

at the end of the war.

Now they had to deliver.

They announced a conference to be held in the summer retreat

of the Raj.

Simla.

This was where the British rulers of India moved every summer

to avoid the heat of Delhi.

This is my mum's favourite.

It was a little England in the Indian hills.

The aim of the conference

was to decide the political future of India.

With the Congress leaders released from jail,

India's politicians came here to meet with Viceroy Wavell,

the British government's representative in India.

If successful, the conference would pave the way

for a united, independent India.

But could all sides ever see eye to eye?

-NEWSREEL:

-Clouds gather over Simla for the opening

of Lord Wavell's conference with the Indian leaders...

To find out what happened,

I'm meeting local historian Raaja Bhasin,

who's written about the conference.

How did Jinnah react to this conference?

Wavell found Jinnah argumentative.

He simply wouldn't budge from whatever stand he had taken,

on anything.

He remained aloof, distant.

He is the man who is standing away

with his back towards everyone else.

He remained adamant that the Muslim League will represent all Muslims

in the Indian subcontinent,

and no-one else has the right to do so.

Not the other Muslim parties, not the Congress.

So Jinnah took quite an audacious position, some might say,

by not willing to negotiate with anybody, not Wavell, not Congress.

Do you think he was trying to derail the conference?

Yes. Even Wavell went on record to say that it had failed.

That the Simla conference had failed.

But from Jinnah's point of view, it was a great success.

For one, he emerged as the undisputed leader

of the Muslim community,

he came away from the conference having got what he wanted.

Raaja explained that the conference catapulted Jinnah

to political stardom.

It showed India's Muslims that Jinnah was the man to stand up

for their rights against the Hindu majority.

He convinced them that Pakistan was better

than being second-class citizens in a Hindu dominated India.

So after talking to Raaja,

it's clear that here in Simla, in June 1945,

Jinnah knew exactly what he wanted to come out of this conference,

and he was going for it.

He was intransigent and very firm in fighting for what he wanted.

Jinnah was the star now, Jinnah had the power

and it seems partition was getting closer and closer.

-NEWSREEL:

-Labour will now have a majority over all parties

in a house of 640...

Just one month later, in July 1945,

Clement Attlee's new Labour government

meant a new future for India.

Attlee's priority was to get Britain out as quickly as possible.

After six years of war, Britain was bankrupt

and India was a massive drain on British resources.

So the British announced elections for an Indian national government,

to help them run the country in the lead up to independence.

But these elections would divide the Indian people even further

along religious lines.

While Congress campaigned for a united India,

the Muslim League declared that a vote for them

was a vote for Pakistan.

But Hindu hardliners dismissed Pakistan as an absurd concept.

These were the elections that really brought religion into politics.

By taking up the slogan of a vote for Pakistan is a vote for Islam,

Jinnah changed everything.

Once he started that kind of sloganeering,

other communities started questioning themselves.

You had the Sikhs calling for their own separate homeland.

This was not what Congress had been fighting for.

Religious identity was being used by all parties

to turn the Indian people against each other.

I want to know how the British rulers of India

now proposed to deal with the rising tension

between the different communities.

And to find that out, I need to go back to Delhi.

By early 1946, anti-British feeling was on the rise.

Attlee was under pressure to come up with an exit strategy.

So in March, the British formulated a plan for Indian independence

that they felt might be acceptable to both sides.

The Cabinet mission plan proposed the united India

demanded by Congress.

As a concession to the Muslim League, it also proposed

giving them almost complete power over the areas they governed.

They would run everything apart from defence and foreign affairs

which would be controlled centrally.

Although the plan didn't give Jinnah his Pakistan, he accepted it.

I've come back to see William Dalrymple,

to find out why Jinnah said yes.

Everyone expects Jinnah to reject it.

Because he has been very strong on the idea of Pakistan

as an entirely separate country.

But the offer put on the table by the Cabinet mission

is so strong, with such powers given to the regions,

that Jinnah, to everyone's amazement, actually accepts it.

And then, to everyone's equal surprise,

it's Congress that rejects it.

And the person who's militating most strongly against it, is Nehru.

So why did Nehru in particular and Congress reject this plan?

Congress rejected the Cabinet mission plan

for exactly the same reason that Jinnah accepted it.

Because there was very strong powers given to the regions.

And to the different states.

And for Nehru, this meant there would be a Balkanised India,

one strung out, weak, without any central authority.

And at this point, Nehru is looking admiringly at Soviet Russia.

He likes central planning and he wants a country

which can hold together.

And he rejects the Cabinet mission plan and at that point,

for the first time, partition seems inevitable.

Pakistan, an idea which had only been dreamt up 13 years earlier,

was now closer than ever.

India's politicians were in deadlock.

And violence between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims

was breaking out in many places.

To understand why this was happening,

I have to travel to India's old colonial capital...

..Kolkata.

Look at this monument here.

Looks like I could be in the City right now, in London.

But, of course, I'm not.

I'm here in Kolkata, a city I've never visited.

This was the home of the British for over 200 years.

We're here because in 1946, this is where

the independence struggle, for a free India,

which up till now had been incredibly peaceful,

led by Gandhi as a nonviolent movement,

it was here that things suddenly changed and became the opposite.

This is the Maidan, a huge park in the centre of Kolkata.

Following Nehru's rejection of the Cabinet mission,

Jinnah called for a direct action day,

a Muslim general strike across India,

that was to be held on the 16th of August 1946.

In Kolkata, thousands of Muslims gathered here to demand Pakistan.

The city was divided almost equally between Hindus and Muslims

and religious tensions had been growing for months.

When the meeting ended, some Muslims attacked Hindu areas of the city.

Hindus retaliated, and the violence quickly escalated.

Ashok Choudhury and Abid Mollah were children when the riots broke out.

They watched as the violence unfolded.

Abid is Muslim, Ashok is Hindu.

In August 1946...

The main feeling was that of panic.

Everybody was panicking.

Nobody moved alone.

Everybody tried to move with a companion.

Some four or five together.

And with some sort of material for his defence.

Maybe a knife, maybe bricks.

Something for his defence.

The killing continued for three days.

At least 5,000 people were killed.

Historian Suranjan Das is the world's leading authority

on the Kolkata riots.

I want to know why the violence was so extreme.

The fight for Pakistan was actually projected as a holy war.

There were new newspapers coming in from the Muslim side.

There were pamphlets coming in from the Muslim side.

There were large-scale demonstrations

that were organised in support of Pakistan.

How did the Hindu leaders react to the Muslim League's call

-for a day of action?

-The Hindus were not less prepared.

The Hindus had realised that there would be troubles.

Just as the Muslim League were organising themselves,

they had also organised themselves.

Suranjan explained how the violence was allowed to go on unchecked.

The British governor of Kolkata refused to bring up the troops,

until it was too late.

If the British Governor had intervened at the right time,

in the right way, I feel the violence would not have taken

the proportion that it did.

I wonder why the British governor was not that forthcoming

in introducing troops.

It was evident that they would have to leave India.

When and how, it was only a matter of time.

So that acted as a factor in psychology.

So they didn't want to get involved?

They didn't want to get involved.

As a result there was the worst communal hysteria.

It showed that partition was on the way out.

So, as I leave Kolkata, I really believe that these sad events

of August 1946 were a real victory for divide and rule.

Hatred and violence entered the political arena here in India,

in a big way.

A precedent had been set.

And where were the British during all this?

They were still the rulers of this country.

They could have stopped the rioting like that...

SHE CLICKS HER FINGERS But they chose not to.

And was it because they couldn't be bothered?

Was it because they didn't care about Hindus and Muslims

killing each other?

Or was there something else going on behind-the-scenes?

Back in London, Attlee was appalled by the violence in Kolkata.

He summoned the Indian politicians to yet another conference.

This time, in Downing Street,

to knock heads together and find a solution.

Predictably, they couldn't come to an agreement.

Nehru flew straight home,

but Jinnah didn't.

Jinnah stayed behind for two weeks in London,

meeting various dignitaries,

and members of the British establishment.

One of which was Winston Churchill.

And you don't get more establishment than him.

So why did Jinnah stay behind to meet Churchill,

now leader of the opposition?

Thank you.

What was going on here?

Historian Alex von Tunzelmann has written about Jinnah's relationship

with Churchill.

Why was Churchill cosying up to Jinnah?

Well, Churchill had had an interest in the idea of Pakistan

for quite a long time.

He'd always had quite a negative attitude towards India.

He famously had said, "I hate Indians, they are a beastly people,

"with a beastly religion."

Really though, he was talking about Hindus.

Certainly, people of Churchill's generation,

there's a perception that Muslims are much more like us.

Like British people.

They have one God.

They were seen as much more natural allies of the West,

whereas Hindus, a lot of British people

found very hard to understand.

Lots of gods, a confusing religion, a very different feel and culture.

So a lot of people of Churchill's generation discovered

that they felt closer to Muslims than Hindus.

So tell me what happened in 1946, when the leaders came to England?

Churchill invited Jinnah to Chartwell, his country house,

on the 7th of December.

We don't have a record of what happened during that lunch,

but we know that it went very well,

because afterwards there was this extraordinary letter that Churchill

wrote to Jinnah.

I've got a copy of the letter here.

It says, "My dear Mister Jinnah,

"I should greatly like to accept your kind invitation

"to luncheon on December 12th.

"I feel, however, that it would perhaps be wiser

"for us not to be associated publicly at this juncture.

"I greatly valued our talk the other day,

"and I now enclose the address to which any telegrams

"you may wish to send me, can be sent

"without attracting attention in India."

So this is a fascinating letter, which implies the two men

probably had a secret correspondence afterwards.

It's clearly very warm.

Clearly they got on well,

but Churchill realised that it would be bad to be seen publicly with

Jinnah. So there was this idea of having a secret correspondence.

Was it only Churchill that he was seeing?

What was the feeling of the British establishment at that time?

Actually, it wasn't just Churchill.

We know that he also met the King and Queen at that time.

He went to Buckingham Palace and met them.

Jinnah was very impressed when he met the King and Queen,

because he found, in his words, that they were 100% Pakistan.

They fully supported his idea.

Already, I've had the opportunity of meeting some friends,

and I might yet find more friends.

No one knows whether the King and Queen really supported Pakistan,

as Jinnah claimed.

But as Alex explained,

there were some people in the British establishment,

like Churchill, who did support the creation of Pakistan.

Why was that?

I recently made a feature film, Viceroy's House,

which relives what happened in the dramatic weeks

immediately before partition.

It looks at what the British were thinking

as they prepared to leave India.

While I was writing the film,

I came across documents which I believe helped to explain

why some in the British establishment supported partition.

In the archives of the British library,

is a document marked 'Most Secret'.

It was written by the military chiefs of staff for Churchill

when he was still prime minister.

Yasmin Khan has studied it.

So, what do we have here?

This document was produced just before the very end of the war,

in May 1945.

What it shows us is just how nervous and worried the military,

the British military, were about the prospect of Indian independence.

India had always been a linchpin.

It was the pivotal place between the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

And they are very worried about the, sort of,

future security of South Asia if Britain aren't there.

In particular, the idea that Russia will push down

and bring Communist influence from the north.

So, you're talking about the Cold War?

We're talking about the Cold War, definitely.

This is all about the threat of Soviet influence in Asia.

And of the Russian threat to India, in particular.

So, they're really concerned to be able to keep that presence,

or to keep that influence, that military influence.

There's a very interesting sentence here, it says,

"It is of paramount importance that India

"should not secede from the Empire or remain neutral in war."

Which is, you know, really saying,

that they want to be able to dictate Indian foreign policy in the future.

So what are the conclusions?

What they know they want is a strategic reserve in India,

that's centrally placed, with airfields that they can control

and with a reserve which could operate in war,

and be used outside of India in the region.

The problem they have is they know full well

the Congress party and the Indian nationalists

are unlikely to allow that to happen.

So one of the solutions they suggest is that Baluchistan,

which is now part of Pakistan, could be, perhaps,

not included in the Dominion.

And therefore, used as a place to station reserves.

So it's basically saying, if we carve off a little bit of India,

a place that exists at the moment as India, but if we carve it off,

we can make that a military base.

-Yeah.

-So were there, then, people in the British camp,

who saw a particular role for Pakistan based on this document?

There would have been people who would have seen it

as potentially a way of maintaining British influence in the region

in a way that they couldn't with a united India.

This wasn't the official government line.

Attlee always stated that he wanted to leave behind a united India.

But, as Yasmin says, there were some people in the British establishment

who favoured strategic considerations over Indian unity.

So, clearly, there was a much bigger global agenda here,

and I believe that Nehru and Gandhi never realised

how significant India was in this new, post-war map of the world.

On the other hand, I think Jinnah, with his friends in England, did.

And I believe he knew that if he could give them politically,

and strategically, what they wanted, he would get his Pakistan.

With Nehru and Jinnah in deadlock,

the British government finally took decisive action.

On 20th February 1947,

Attlee told parliament that Britain would leave India

no later than June 1948,

with or without any agreement between Nehru and Jinnah.

When Clement Attlee made his announcement here 70 years ago,

the news was received with great relief in India.

The British Raj would finally be over.

But what was that independent India going to look like?

With so many agendas at play, who was going to win out?

Back in Delhi, the endgame of independence was about to begin.

To carry out the final negotiations,

Attlee sent a big hitter to be the new viceroy.

-NEWSREEL:

-At Delhi, Lord Louis Mountbatten arrives

to take up his appointment as India's viceroy

and governor general.

At a crucial moment in India's history, the 47-year-old grandson

of Queen Victoria becomes the 29th, and last, Viceroy.

In March 1947, Mountbatten arrived here in viceroy's house.

This magnificent palace had been built and completed

only a decade earlier, to house the British rulers of India.

And here, in these corridors of power,

Mountbatten oversaw the negotiations for the final end of British rule.

Mountbatten was chosen because, as a decorated war hero,

and relation of the King,

it was hoped the Indian leaders would see him as an honest broker.

Officially, at least, a united India was still on the cards

and Mountbatten was seen as the man who could deliver it.

But was it really still a possibility?

As I was growing up, I had always been told that Mountbatten arrived

in India hoping to give India back, as a unified country.

I find that, honestly, somewhat implausible.

By the time Mountbatten arrived in March '47,

you had seen not only Wavell's failure, the previous viceroy,

but you'd seen the violence having begun.

Particularly with Direct Action Day in August 1946, in Kolkata.

So I think he came as a credible face of, sort of,

well-meaning British attempts to find a solution acceptable to all.

But, very clearly, the British establishment behind him had,

in my view, decided that partition was the only way out.

The first few weeks of negotiating convinced Mountbatten,

I think, there was no way forward.

With all sides at loggerheads, Mountbatten quickly realised

that partition was the only workable solution.

Nehru reluctantly accepted

that if he wanted to keep control over most of India,

then he would have to give Jinnah Pakistan.

All parties now agreed to India being split in two.

With violence spreading across northern India,

Mountbatten now made a dramatic announcement.

Partition would not take place in June 1948 as planned

but ten months earlier, in August 1947,

now just weeks away.

Why do you think he brought the date forward?

I think there was a perception

that matters were spiralling out of control.

The British felt that they didn't want to be holding the reins

while this happened. They didn't want to be blamed.

Therefore, they thought, if they made their exit

sooner rather than later, the Indians could kill themselves,

and it wouldn't be the British's problem.

That seems a cynical way of putting it, but I think, almost certainly,

that seems to have been their thinking.

You think they were rats leaving a sinking ship?

I am afraid so, yeah. The British scuttled.

They actually sank the ship first.

And then they swam away from it.

The agreed plan gave Pakistan the Muslim majority provinces

in the North.

Jinnah had also wanted the wealthy provinces of Bengal and the Punjab.

But as these were religiously mixed,

the British decided to divide them between India and Pakistan,

tearing them in two.

They would keep the precise details of the new borders secret

until after independence, so as not to overshadow the celebrations.

Nobody was happy with the Mountbatten plan.

The Muslims ended up with a Pakistan which they called "moth-eaten."

The Hindus ended up with a divided India.

And the Sikhs lost huge tracts of their religious and holy lands.

Everybody was unhappy, except the British,

who couldn't wait to get out fast enough.

Just two months later on the 15th of August 1947,

the newly created countries of Pakistan and India

were declared independent.

Nehru was sworn in as the first Prime Minister of India.

Jinnah, as the first Governor General of Pakistan.

But as millions celebrated,

parts of India and Pakistan were about to explode in more violence.

The day after independence,

the precise details of the line

dividing the Punjab and Bengal was announced.

Millions of people found themselves on the wrong side of the border.

On the Indian side, gangs of Sikhs and Hindus attacked Muslims.

On the Pakistan side, gangs of Muslims attacked Hindus and Sikhs.

This was largely the work of organised militia,

grabbing land and property.

As children, Tilak Raj Aneja and Kuldeep Kaur witnessed attacks

on the villages where they lived.

Spears...

Wow.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my...

For every Sikh and Hindu woman who was killed,

a Muslim woman was killed too.

The violence was on all sides.

Both Nehru and Jinnah expressed their dismay at the violence.

But neither they, nor the British,

had planned for the scale of the upheaval.

An estimated 17 million people fled their homes.

And at least a million men, women and children lost their lives.

It's just awful, and harrowing, and it's hard,

because I imagine my own family being caught up in all that

tragedy too, and my aunt who starved to death at that time, you know,

would have been, you know, my aunt living today.

But the other thing that I just find very hard to deal with,

is just how explosive it was on all sides.

As many Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs died, you know,

everybody was a victim.

During the Cold War, Pakistan became a loyal ally to the west,

just as Churchill had wanted.

But Pakistan's relations with India

have been beset by distrust and conflict.

There have been three wars between the two countries since 1947.

And today, they both have nuclear weapons aimed at each other.

Yet, there was nothing inevitable about partition.

It was politicians, not ordinary Indians,

who were the driving force behind it.

First the British, with divide and rule,

and then some of India's leaders encouraged religious difference

as a weapon to win power.

But now, 70 years later,

as India and Pakistan celebrate their anniversaries,

I believe it's time to forge a new relationship.

Both nations have committed citizens, who love their countries,

along with thriving communities all over the world.

And this is the community that I'm now a big part of.

British Asians.

It's nice to see you!

It's been so long!

After 200 years of British rule,

all our history and cultures are intertwined.

I grew up here in Southall with Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs,

sharing and appreciating each other's cultures.

We long left the divisions brought about by partition behind us.

And what that tells me is that although religion and culture

are important in defining who we are,

that doesn't mean they need to divide us.

Rather, I believe they should enrich us,

and that's something worth celebrating today,

and for future generations.