On February 21, 1947, Lord Louis Mountbatten was named as the last viceroy of India. His mission was clear: devise a swift formula to partition India in a manner that would placate both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. In London, King George VI and Prime Minister Clement Attlee had taken the historic decision to dismantle the British empire in India. Mountbatten’s brief: execute the exit “in a blaze of goodwill”.
Armed with charm, speed and a ruthless determination “to manipulate or bludgeon his way to a settlement”, Mountbatten plunged into the monumental challenge of dividing India. By the time he arrived in Delhi, Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel had resigned themselves to partition as a grim reality for expediting the British withdrawal. Mountbatten’s brief included a crucial political sleight of hand: to ensure that the responsibility for partition appeared to rest squarely on Indian shoulders, and secure India’s membership in the Commonwealth—something Pakistan under Muhammad Ali Jinnah was expected to accept readily.
The fiercest opposition to partition came from Mahatma Gandhi, who wanted Mountbatten to exhaust every political alternative before resorting to division. Supporting Gandhi was M.C. Davar, a Nehru associate who advocated for an India-Pakistan confederation. As Mountbatten bulldozed his way forward, Davar made a final, desperate attempt to persuade Jinnah to reject the viceroy’s blueprint and preserve a united India. He might have succeeded—had a crucial letter he sent to Gandhi not gone undelivered.
Did that missed communication cost India its last chance to avert the horrors of partition?
The question takes centre stage in He Almost Prevented Partition: The Life and Times of Dr M.C. Davar, a new biography by columnist and former Army officer Praveen Davar. Through vivid sketches and meticulous detail, the book reconstructs the final months before partition.
Exclusive excerpts from the book:
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But Mountbatten’s arrival was hardly a victory for Gandhi—it spelled the end of his fondest hopes. “Partition became inevitable,” writes Arthur Herman in Gandhi and Churchill, quoting Andrew Roberts, an eminent Churchillian. “No other solution to a possible Hindu-Muslim civil war seemed possible.” But Dr Davar was determined to make the impossible possible. He sent to the new viceroy copies of his letters written to his predecessor. But too soon he lost faith in the intent and fair play of Mountbatten. When asked to explain why Mountbatten insisted on partition even while (according to Davar) Jinnah had accepted the 40:40:20 formula and was inclined towards a United India, Dr Davar has this to answer:
Lord Mountbatten came in place of Wavell with some definite mission. Before he arrived here, King George VI had told the Prime Minister [Attlee] that as you are recalling Wavell you must send his successor with a definite purpose. So what I feel from their statements and writings [is] that he came with this purpose—that he was to divide India somehow or the other. It was not new, but a long-drawn scheme of the Britishers. It was almost 75 years earlier that the British had initiated this scheme that India will be divided into two parts: Hindu India and Muslim India. On this principle Mr Churchill’s mind was always working.
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Soon after his arrival, Mountbatten discovered that the coalition government of Congress and Muslim League which was running the country, after being put together by his predecessor with enormous difficulty, was in fact an “assembly of enemies so bitterly divided that its members barely spoke to one another”. He was convinced within a week of his arrival that it was clearly going to fall apart.
He had also arrived at a time when thousands of Hindus and Muslims were being killed in communal clashes in Bengal, West Punjab and Bombay. “In March 1947 the Muslim League was holding its own, emphatic in its insistence that there had never been one India, that unity was the creation of the British Raj, and that if Hindu rule was forced upon them a civil war more terrible than any in the history of Asia would ensue. To avoid civil war, the League insisted that power be handed over to two separate authorities equally.”
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When he arrived in India, Mountbatten realised that besides Gandhi, the leaders that mattered the most were Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Muhammed Ali Jinnah. So he first got down to meeting all these leaders one by one during the course of a few days. As head of the interim government, Nehru was the first leader to be invited by the viceroy for talks. “The two men readily agreed on two major points: a quick decision was essential to avoid a bloodbath; the division of India would be a tragedy.” In an interview with Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, authors of Freedom at Midnight, almost a quarter of a century later, Mountbatten would reiterate this point: ‘Nehru was horrified by the idea of partition. He was an extraordinary intelligent man… he could have given me any help he could to try and keep India united if Jinnah had any sort of advance at all.” But Jinnah had a closed mind on the issue. He told Mountbatten: “India has never been a true nation.” The Muslims of lndia, he argued, were a nation with a “distinctive culture and civilisation, language and literature, art and architecture, laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions”. Jinnah remained unmoved by any argument put forth by Mountbatten who concluded “Jinnah was a psychopathic case, hell bent upon this Pakistan”.
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Mahatma Gandhi, who was on a tour of the riot affected areas of Bihar, returned to Delhi when a telegram reached him from the viceroy’s house requesting him that Lord Mountbatten wished to see him as early as possible. Gandhi politely rejected the offer of the viceroy’s personal aircraft to fetch him and came by train. When the Mahatma met the viceroy, he told him, “Don’t partition India... don’t divide India even if it [means] shedding rivers of blood.” The evening earlier, in his prayer meeting after arriving in Delhi, the Mahatma had declared that “India will be divided over my dead the body. So long as I am alive I will never agree to the partition of India.” What was his solution to keep India united? Gandhi caught Mountbatten by surprise: “Give the Muslims the baby instead of cutting it in half. Place three hundred million Hindus under Muslim rule… let Jinnah and Muslim League form a government… give Jinnah all India instead of just the part he wants.” However, he told the viceroy, “If Jinnah rejects the offer it should be made to the Congress.” But Mountbatten, who had met Nehru and Patel earlier, knew that the Congress would never agree to this proposal. So he asked Gandhi: “If you could bring me formal assurance that Congress will accept your scheme, that they will try sincerely to make it work, then I am prepared to entertain the idea.” Acharya Kripalani, then Congress president, writes in his biography of Gandhi: “The viceroy’s reaction to the proposal was favourable. He said that it appealed to him. But his advisers did not want it to succeed as it would upset their plan of partitioning India.” This view was shared by Dr Davar, who maintained to the end of his days that “it was the British bureaucracy that divided India”.
According to Rajmohan Gandhi, historian and the Mahatma’s grandson: “No student of this episode can fail to be struck by the exertions in the viceroy’s office against the scheme. The staff, and the viceroy too, seemed to resist a solution emanating from Gandhi, an encroachment on their prerogative by an unrepentant foe of the Raj.
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Mountbatten never discussed Gandhi’s proposal with Jinnah as “V.P. Menon thought at the time that the League leader would not have accepted it, a view supported by some future Pakistani scholars”. However, Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah’s biographer, feels that Gandhi’s plan “might just have worked; surely this was a King Solomon solution”. On 28 April, Dr Rajendra Prasad, in his capacity as the president of the Constituent Assembly, issued a public statement that “no constitution would be forced on any part of the country that was unwilling to accept it… It may mean not only a division of India but a division of some provinces.” This was an authoritative statement of the Congress stand which clinched the issue and left no doubt in anyone’s mind that India was on the verge of a vivisection.
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But neither Mountbatten nor Lord Ismay, his key adviser, or V.P. Menon, who only a fortnight earlier had redrafted the plan at Shimla after Nehru had found in the original plan “fragmentation and conflict and disorder”, could have ever imagined what was awaiting the viceroy a few hours before midnight. Dr Davar narrates this in his interview:
Two days before the announcement of the Mountbatten Plan, Gandhiji had stated at his prayer meeting, “India will be divided over my dead body. So long as I am alive, will never agree to the partition of India.” So we thought when Bapu has spoken these words, partition will not take place. I was running from pillar to post and meeting Congress leaders, Muslim League leaders, princes and others, when I came to know that partition was going to take place. It was simply shocking. Suddenly an idea came to my mind. I immediately rushed to meet Sir Syed Sultan Ahmed after ringing him up. I prevailed upon him to go and meet Jinnah one last time, and convince him to tell Mountbatten that he could not accept his plan… Sir Syed Sultan Ahmed met Jinnah and he convinced him fully. Thereafter, Jinnah met Lord Mountbatten. That was their last meeting. Jinnah categorically refused to accept partition. Three times when he said that “I do not want Pakistan, I do not want to divide India”, Lord Mountbatten, as was reported by Jinnah to Sir Sultan, told Jinnah: “No going back. Pakistan has already been given to you. So please be prepared for it, otherwise the consequences will be very bad.”
What Davar mentioned in his interview in 1975 fully tallies with the account given in at least two popular books on the last days of the Empire, Freedom at Midnight and Alan Campbell Johnson’s Mission with Mountbatten. Campbell writes:
Mountbatten began the day with an early morning staff meeting at which he told us of his dramatic midnight encounter with Jinnah. Jinnah had categorically refused to give any answer to the plan in writing. Ismay joined Mountbatten as a second witness of what he was ready to say. He began by reiterating at great length the remarks he had made round the conference table in the morning and no amount of pressure from Mountbatten would make him agree to a firm acceptance from the Muslim League Council when they met… Nothing Mountbatten could say would move him, he once more took refuge behind the excuse that he was not constitutionally authorised to make a decision without the concurrence of the full Muslim League Council, and pointed out that he could not in any case call the council meeting for several days.
But Mountbatten could not wait even for a day. He had assured Prime Minister Attlee that his plan would work and the latter was waiting to make his historic announcement in the House of Commons in less than a day. Mountbatten told Jinnah that there was simply no question of waiting as Jinnah had got what he had been fighting for, even if it was “moth eaten”. When Jinnah told the viceroy that everything had to be done in a “legally constituted way” and that “l am not the Moslem League”, Mountbatten replied, “You can tell the whole world that, but please don’t try to kid yourself that I don’t know who’s who and what’s what in the Muslim League! ‘He also told him firmly: ‘I don’t intend to let you wreck your own plan. I can’t allow you to throw away the solution you’ve worked so hard to get….
As recorded in Dr Davar’s interview, “Jinnah came back after his meeting with the viceroy and told Sir Sultan Ahmed that the ‘monkey [Mountbatten] does not agree.’ Sir Sultan phoned me and told me all about it. Then I thought I must inform Bapu. I wrote a letter to Bapu… but there was no response. (It came to light years later that Gandhiji’s personal assistant, one Brij Kishan Chandiwala, did not deliver that letter, and had actually torn it as he did not like Davar’s close association with top Muslim leaders of the country. Obviously, the anti-Muslim propaganda of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha had affected people even in Gandhi’s staff….)
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Yasser Latif Hamdani writes in his recent book Jinnah: A Life: “At 11pm Jinnah met Mountbatten again, trying to convince him not to announce the partition plan publicly, saying that the Muslim League’s council may not accept it. Mountbatten warned him that he might lose Pakistan for good, to which Jinnah replied coolly: ‘What must be, must be.’ The so-called triumph of his life, the crowning glory of his political career, if biographers and historians are to be believed, was thus imposed on him through an act of bullying on part of Mountbatten.”
This is exactly what Dr Davar told his interviewer of the NMML (Nehru Memorial Museum and Library) in 1975, relating his personal experience of the events 28 years earlier. But could Davar have prevented Partition if Mahatma Gandhi had received his letter? We have already mentioned that the letter Davar wrote was not delivered to the Mahatma by his personal staff. Actually, for some years Dr Davar was under the impression that his letter, like his earlier letters, had been seen by Gandhiji, but that this time the Mahatma had chosen not to reply, even though the letter was such an important one. Davar thought Gandhiji had not replied because he may not have agreed with what Davar had written. So what were the contents of this letter? According to the archives of the NMML this is what Dr Davar wrote to Mahatma Gandhi:
Jinnah has refused Pakistan and when a man who wanted Pakistan does not want Pakistan, and we don’t want to give Pakistan, who is this man [Mountbatten] to come in our way? Why we should not tell the British government? Why should they thrust Pakistan upon the Muslims who are unwilling to accept it? Bapu, why should you not meet Lord Mountbatten and tell him why is he dissecting India when both parties do not want it, and tell Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel about Mountbatten’s intention? And if still Mountbatten insists upon it, I would request you, Bapu, to go on a Fast unto Death and until the British people agree that there will be no partition, you should not break your fast.
Dr Davar said in his interview to NMML that he was totally heartbroken when he did not receive any reply from Gandhiji, and he never wrote any letter to the Mahatma hereafter.
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But could a letter from Davar to Mahatma Gandhi really have made a difference—the difference between a United India and an India divided? Dr Davar thought so.
He believed that if the Mahatma had come to know that Jinnah had changed his mind, he may have contacted Jinnah immediately to defeat Mountbatten’s game plan. This is what Davar told his interviewer:
If that letter would have fallen in the hands of Gandhiji, he may have called me to ask about the authenticity of what I had written. I would have then asked him to call Sir Syed Sultan Ahmed who would then have explained to Gandhiji what Jinnah had told him after meeting Mountbatten. Then in all likelihood Gandhiji would have contacted Jinnah and the volcano of vivisection might not have exploded.
He Almost Prevented Partition: The Life and Times of Dr M.C. Davar
By Praveen Davar
Published by Speaking Tiger
Pages 248
Price Rs384