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A Moment of Truth?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
An incidental aside in one of my books has become the focal point of a small controversy. Experiment with Freedom, India and Pakistan 1947 was a brief work which attempted to give a more precise and particular account of the events which led up to the transfer of power. Most attention has been paid to my interpretation of the celebrated episode at Simla in May 1947 when Nehru reacted violently to Mountbatten's plans for transferring power. I suggested that the crisis was not an external confrontation between British and Indian views over whether India should remain united, or be divided, or split into fractions, but was essentially an internal crisis in the mind of Jawaharlal Nehru. To try to explain why Nehru was so upset by a plan which he had, in all essentials, previously (however reluctantly) accepted, I made a comparison with his later reaction to Chinese activities on the Indian border. Nobody adopted the slogan Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai (‘Indians and Chinese are Brothers’) more ardently than Nehru and so the revelation that they were enemies came as a profound personal shock. Speaking on the morrow of the Chinese invasion, Nehru said that he now realized that they had been ‘out of touch with reality’, in an ‘artificial atmosphere of our own creation’. The Times printed this observation under the sardonic heading ‘The Dreamers’ (26 October 1962). I suggested that at Simla Nehru exhibited ‘much the same apparent amnesia’.
1 London, Oxford University Press, 1967.Google Scholar
2 Thus, Philips, C. H., The Partition of India 1947, Leeds University Press, 1967. ‘A first secret plan was therefore drawn up, which provided for the division of Bengal and the Punjab and allowed for a transfer of power to the provinces and states, or to such confederations as they might decide to form’ (p. 32).Google Scholar
3 The Memoirs of General The Lord Ismay, London, 1960, p. 421.Google Scholar
4 Report on the Last Viceroyalty, p. 32.Google Scholar
5 Hodson, , p. 293.Google Scholar
6 Report on the Last Viceroyalty, p. 77 (present author's italics).Google Scholar
7 Experiment with Freedom, p. 105.Google Scholar
8 Ibid., p. 71.
9 Experiment with Freedom, pp. 117–18.Google Scholar
10 Campbell-Johnson, , Mission with Mountbatten, p. 92.Google Scholar
11 Chakrabarti, Atulananda, The Lonesome Pilgrim, Calcutta, 1969, p. 132 (present author's italics). It may be significant that Mr Chakrabarti, a close personal acquaintance of Nehru, uses a similar metaphor to the present writer.Google Scholar
12 James, R. R., Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939, London, 1970.Google Scholar
