Dominion of India

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dominion of India existed for just over two years, from the 15th of August 1947 to the 26th of January 1950. In that brief window, a civilization of hundreds of millions of people had to be reconstituted from the ground up. A new government, a new constitution, a new army, a new border. And behind every one of those tasks, a human cost that demographers are still debating today. Between 14 and 18 million people moved across a freshly drawn line between India and Pakistan. Upwards of one million people were killed in the violence that followed partition. Trains carrying refugees were stopped and their passengers slaughtered regardless of age or gender. And yet, within thirty months, a constitutional assembly had produced a governing document that abolished untouchability, protected fundamental rights, and transformed India into a republic.

  How did a nation born in such catastrophe manage to draft a functioning constitution at all? Who actually held power in those first fragile months? What happened to the more than 500 princely states that the British had simply advised to pick a side? And what role did Mahatma Gandhi play in those final days, before a bullet ended his life in Birla House on the 30th of January 1948? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. The Road to Partition

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  By the early 1920s, the Indian National Congress had become the dominant voice of Indian nationalism, led by Mahatma Gandhi. For decades it pushed for an independent India built on religious pluralism. That vision ran into a challenge in the early 1940s when Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League began demanding a separate homeland for the Muslims of British India.

  The 1945 general elections in Britain brought in a Labour government under Clement Attlee. Stafford Cripps and Lord Pethick-Lawrence joined the cabinet, and many in that government, including Attlee himself, had long supported Indian decolonization. Exhausted by the Second World War, the British exchequer could not sustain imperial rule indefinitely. In early 1947, Britain announced it would transfer power no later than June 1948.

  Earlier in 1946, elections inside India had given Congress victories in eight of the eleven provinces. But negotiations with the Muslim League over the shape of independence collapsed. Jinnah proclaimed the 16th of August 1946 "Direct Action Day," framing it as a peaceful demonstration for a Muslim homeland. The day after, Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Calcutta and spread across India. A Congress-led interim government was installed in September, with Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister of a still-united India, but the political ground beneath that government was already fracturing.

  By March 1947, when Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived as the new viceroy, violence in Punjab and Bengal had not eased. Mountbatten pushed to accelerate independence rather than wait for a managed transition. In June 1947, Nehru for Congress, Jinnah for the Muslim League, and Baldev Singh for the Sikhs agreed to divide the country. Predominantly Hindu and Sikh areas went to India; predominantly Muslim areas went to the new Pakistan, including partitioned sections of Punjab and Bengal. On the 14th of August 1947, the Dominion of Pakistan came into being, with Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor-General in Karachi. The following day, in New Delhi, the Dominion of India became an independent country.

• 3. The Violence of the Border

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  The Radcliffe Commission, which had been tasked with drawing the new boundary between India and Pakistan, announced its award on the 17th of August 1947 - two days after the transfer of power had already occurred. It divided the Sikh-dominated regions of Punjab equally between the two dominions. Sikh groups had been bracing for that outcome and were already prepared to resist it.

  To manage the expected violence, the British Raj had assembled a 50,000-strong Indian Boundary Force. It proved entirely ineffectual. Most of its units had been recruited locally and their members held deeper loyalties to one of Punjab's three religious communities than to any neutral authority. Within days, Sikhs and Hindus in East Punjab were attacking Muslims there, and Muslims in West Punjab were retaliating against Sikhs with equal ferocity. Trains carrying refugees eastward and westward were stopped; passengers were massacred without regard to age or gender. Long columns of people and oxcarts crossing the new border were intercepted and overwhelmed.

  Judge G. D. Khosla, in his work "Stern Reckoning," estimated the death toll at around 500,000. Historian Percival Spear described what followed as an involuntary exchange of population on the order of five and a half million people moving in each direction across the new border. From Sind alone, roughly 400,000 Hindus migrated to India. Around a million Hindus moved from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) to West Bengal. Later demographic research by Bharadwaj, Khwaja, and Mian, using 1951 census data, suggested that approximately 14.5 million people arrived in India or Pakistan during the period 1947-1951, while an estimated 17.9 million departed in the other direction - implying around 3.4 million missing people whose fate remains uncertain.

  The figures from western Punjab tell a concentrated story. By 1951-25% of Pakistani Punjab's population had come from India, and 16% of Indian Punjab's population had come from Pakistan. In East Pakistan, only 2% of the population recorded in 1951 had migrated from India. Historians attributed the disparity to the far greater perception of physical threat in the Punjab. As the demographer Tim Dyson put it, the sudden refugee flows related to partition may at the time have been unsurpassed in modern world history.

• 4. Gandhi's Last Months

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  Mahatma Gandhi arrived in Delhi in October 1947, his mission in Bengal accomplished. He chose to work from the Balmiki Temple in the Gole Market area, which served the scheduled caste community also known as the "untouchables." As refugees flooded the city, the temple was requisitioned for shelter, and Gandhi moved to two rooms in Birla House, a large mansion in central Delhi.

  His goal in Delhi was to protect the Muslim community from a feared pogrom. Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring in from West Punjab vastly outnumbered the Muslims who were departing for Pakistan, and religious passions in the city were running dangerously high. Some groups within the Indian government opposed his intervention. The partition had also produced a financial dispute: assets owed to Pakistan had been withheld by the Indian government as leverage over the escalating Kashmir crisis.

  On the 12th of January 1948, Gandhi - who had turned 78 the previous October - undertook a hunger strike to halt the religious violence. On the 15th of January, the government released the financial assets it owed to Pakistan. On the 18th of January, Gandhi broke his fast after significant political leaders and representatives of communal bodies committed to a joint plan for peace.

  Not everyone accepted that peace. Nathuram Godse was a Hindu nationalist, a member of the Hindu Mahasabha political party, and a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He was among those incensed by Gandhi's accommodation toward Muslims and Pakistan. On the 30th of January 1948, Godse shot Gandhi three times in the chest at Birla House, as Gandhi was walking to his evening prayer meeting. That same evening, Nehru addressed the nation by radio: "Friends and comrades, the light has gone out of our lives, and there is darkness everywhere." British Prime Minister Clement Attlee told the United Kingdom that Gandhi had been "the major factor in every consideration of the Indian problem" for a quarter of a century.

  The assassination discredited Hindu nationalism broadly in Indian politics; it did not recover its political reputation until many decades later. Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel, who also served as Home Minister, was reproached for the failure of security arrangements.

• 5. Integrating Five Hundred States

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  The British had governed India through two parallel systems: the directly administered British India provinces, and a patchwork of more than 500 princely states governed by local rulers under British paramountcy. When that paramountcy ended in August 1947, the British simply revoked their treaty rights and advised each ruler to join either India or Pakistan. No coercion was built into the handover.

  The scale of the task was staggering. The premier 21-gun salute state of Hyderabad covered 200,000 square kilometres and held a population of 17 million. At the opposite extreme, roughly 200 states each had an area of less than 25 square kilometres. By the 15th of August 1947, all but three had acceded. The exceptions were Junagadh, Hyderabad, and Kashmir.

  Sardar Patel and his assistant V. P. Menon handled the integration through a combination of inducements - including special privileges and tax-free pensions for the former rulers - and, on occasion, explicit threats. Baroda State and Kathiawar were merged into the new federal unit of Saurashtra. The states of Rajputana were united to form Rajasthan. The princely states of Travancore and Cochin became Kerala. Mysore, large enough in both area and population, became a federal unit by itself. Hundreds of smaller states were absorbed into larger units and effectively ceased to exist as distinct entities.

  Junagadh was resolved quickly. It was a small coastal state on the Kathiawar peninsula with a Hindu majority but a Muslim nawab who acceded to Pakistan. Indian troops marched in, a plebiscite was held and declared for India, and Pakistan protested but took no further action. Hyderabad was more complicated. Despite an 85% Hindu population, it was ruled by a Muslim Nizam who had declared himself an equal ally of the British rather than a subordinate. The state was landlocked, surrounded entirely by India. When the Nizam allowed the Razakars, an extremist organization, to grow in power, India launched a military operation officially termed a "police action," and incorporated Hyderabad into the union. Kashmir remained unresolved, as the next phase of this story will show.

• 6. War Over Kashmir

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  Kashmir's origins as a political unit go back to 1846, when the British defeated the Sikh Empire in the First Anglo-Sikh War. The Raja of Jammu, Gulab Singh, purchased the region from the British under the Treaty of Amritsar and became its ruler. His descendants ruled under British paramountcy until partition in 1947.

  In August 1947, the reigning Maharaja was Hari Singh, a descendant of Gulab Singh. The state's population was 77% Muslim, it shared a border with Pakistan, and much of its economic activity ran down the Jhelum River toward the Pakistani Punjab. Hari Singh had signed a standstill agreement with Pakistan to keep trade and communications functioning. Historian Burton Stein noted that it was widely anticipated he would accede to Pakistan once British paramountcy ended.

  When Hari Singh hesitated, Pakistan launched a guerrilla offensive intended to pressure him into submission. Instead, the Maharaja appealed to Mountbatten. The governor-general agreed to assist on the condition that Kashmir first accede to India. Indian soldiers entered the state and drove Pakistani-backed irregulars from most of it, though a small section remained under their control. The United Nations was invited to mediate. The UN insisted that the Kashmiri people must be consulted through a plebiscite; India insisted no plebiscite could take place until Pakistani-sponsored forces had withdrawn entirely from the state.

  A ceasefire was agreed in the last days of 1948 under UN auspices, but the plebiscite the UN demanded was never held. Relations between India and Pakistan deteriorated as a result, and eventually produced two more wars over the territory in 1965 and 1999. The line drawn by that 1948 ceasefire remains, in broad terms, the line of control today.

• 7. Writing a Constitution

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  The Constituent Assembly that drafted India's constitution had 299 representatives: 284 men and 15 women. Among the women were Sarojini Naidu, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Hansa Jivraj Mehta, Durgabai Deshmukh, and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, most of them veterans of the nationalist movement. The assembly's plan had been drawn up during the British Raj itself, following negotiations with the 1946 Cabinet Mission to India.

  The Government of India Act 1935, the last constitution of British India, served as the primary model. Long passages were carried over directly. But the framers also drew from elsewhere. Fundamental rights came from the Constitution of the United States. The constitutional directives - the goals the government committed itself to pursuing - came from the Constitution of Ireland. The constitution also recommended an Indian institution: the panchayat, or village committee, as a unit of local governance.

  The central government in the new structure was deliberately strong. It held exclusive authority over defence, foreign affairs, railways, ports, and currency. The President, as constitutional head of government, held reserve powers to take over the administration of a state if necessary. The Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, would be directly elected by the people every five years. The Rajya Sabha, the upper house, would be nominated by elected representatives in the states.

  Two provisions addressed India's most entrenched social hierarchies directly. Article 17 made untouchability illegal. Articles 15(2) and 16(2) derecognized caste distinctions in public life. The constitution was drafted with what the source describes as uncommon speed and absence of irregularities between 1946 and 1949. On the 26th of January 1950, its promulgation transformed India from a dominion into a republic within the Commonwealth, with Rajendra Prasad elected as the country's first President.

• 8. A Nation's Starting Poverty

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  In 1949, a committee appointed by the new Indian government set about trying to measure something that had long been known but never formally quantified: how poor was India, exactly? Its report, published in 1950-1951, computed the average annual income per person at Rs. 260 or roughly . Domestic workers, tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers often earned well below that amount.

  Historian Judith M. Brown described what that income level meant in practice: "almost perpetual hunger, a monotonous and unbalanced diet at the best of times, cramped and squalid housing, perhaps one change of meagre clothes, insufficient bedding to prevent deaths from cold in the northern Indian winter, children's absence from school for lack of clothes or books." The 1951 Census of India recorded literacy at 23.54% for men and just 7.62% for women. In rural areas, female literacy stood at 4.87%.

  Agricultural conditions were similarly stark. In the 1940s, most farmers worked at subsistence level. Only a small fraction had access to tractors or tube wells. Fertilizer use per acre was lower than in any other country. An India-wide survey conducted shortly after independence found that 14-15 million rural households, constituting 22% of the total, owned no land at all. Just under 50% of rural households owned only 1.5% of cultivated land. The top 25% owned 83% of it.

  For women in particular, the legal structure compounded economic deprivation. Patrilineal inheritance gave women no right to property. Divorce and even separation were neither legally nor culturally available to most Hindu women. The new government eventually addressed some of these conditions in the mid-1950s through the Hindu code bills, which outlawed patrilineality, marital desertion, and child marriage - though evasion of those bans continued for years after their passage.