Lengthy negotiations ensued again. Mountbatten had to concede the demand for partition of India, but he told Jinnah that if the country could be divided, provinces could be too and if Jinnah would not agree with the idea, he would simply hand over power to the congress and be done with it. Conscious of his fast deteriorating health, and certain that his assistants would not be to able to withstand the combined onslaught of the British and the congress, he agreed to a “moth eaten Pakistan”2 . Now, the small man that he was, having been thwarted in his designs to inaugurate a united independent India, Mountbatten decided to leave a veritable mess. Transfer of power was planned for June 1948. In March 1947 he advised the British government to bring the date forward to August 1947, otherwise, he claimed, the situation would get out of control. Civil war might break out. The loyalties of Indian soldiers would be sorely tried. British soldiers, too few and too tired, would not be able to cope with the situation. The cabinet had no choice but to accept his plan. He chose August 15, 1947, the date he had accepted surrender of the Japanese army two years earlier, as the date of transfer of power into Indian and Pakistani hands. Mountbatten, willful, unmindful, unaware, and not caring much for the consequences, delayed announcement of the boundary commission awards till two days after Independence.3 On Independence Day hundreds of thousands did not know which country their home was in. Officials had no information either. Such intricate business as dividing a country which had been one political entity for centuries would tax the skill of an experienced and seasoned administrator. Mountbatten, devoid of any such attributes, set unrealistic deadlines and proceeded with haphazard, disjointed and disorganized partition of the country, government and assets. He charged a boundary commission, the leader of which was unfamiliar with topography, with demarcating a line of control between 1Ibid. 2 Jinnah, on being shown a map of the future Pakistan, with Hindu majority areas, hived off the Punjab and Bengal, so described the country. 3Please see Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity byAkbar S. Ahmad and The Sole Spokesman byAyesha Jalal. A Medical Doctor Examines Life on Three Continents – A Pakistani View 34 India and Pakistan. The man had at best a rough outline of districts, few maps, and no statistics of the majority–minority areas. And he had only a few weeks. It was truly a scuttle. Mountbatten still harbored ambitions of staying on as the governor general of both countries. Nehru, cognizant of the advantages of keeping on the right side of the British government which still controlled all the levers of authority, readily offered the job to him. Jinnah rejected the feelers, claiming that his people wanted him to be the first Governor General of Pakistan. Mountbatten threatened Jinnah that it would have an adverse effect on Pakistan, but Jinnah would not budge. He sought advice from the British prime minister, who urged him to stay on as Governor General of India alone. Whether Jinnah had spurned the advances of Mountbatten because of vanity and arrogance or, as he told his confidants, because he wanted, right at the beginning, to claim an unquestioned independent status for Pakistan, one will never know for certain. The fact that he was terminally ill may have been the determining factor in his decision. Whatever the reason, it was to have a far reaching and grievous effect on Pakistan’s fortunes. Patel and Nehru (and, I suspect, Gandhi) were confident that Pakistan would collapse soon. There would be no other rational reason for Gandhi to change his stance abruptly and acquiesce to the idea of partition which previously he had vowed would happen only over his dead body. Patel is on record making a public speech that it would be only a matter of days, weeks, or at the most months, before Pakistan would collapse; they would go down on their knees to be taken back into the Indian Union. Only Azad, among the top Congress leaders, remained steadfast in opposing partition. Azad and Nehru were very close. Nehru probably did not take Azad into his confidence. Being acutely conscious of the latter’s sensibilities and lack of guile, he also may have wanted to spare his friend the Machiavellian designs of Patel. Azad had been the president of the Congress from 1940 to 1946. He would have been the automatic choice for the office of the first Prime Minister of India. But that was, under the circumstances, untenable. Muslims had got Pakistan. One of them could not be the PM of India too; such was the overwhelming sentiment. The party machine wanted Patel to succeed to the office. Azad offered to resign, but told Gandhi that he would not, till he was given solemn assurance that Nehru would follow him. To hasten the collapse, Nehru and Patel withheld Pakistan’s share of the joint assets. Mountbatten aided and abetted them. The patently lame excuse they gave was that Pakistan would use the funds to wage more effective aggression in Kashmir. And collapse it would — it did not even have funds to pay salary to government servants — if the Nizam of Hyderabad had not come to the rescue. Reputedly the Bill Gates of his time, he gave Pakistan two hundred million ru- Chapter 3. Negotiations for Transfer of Power and Partition 35 pees (equivalent to about $150 million at today’s value). Once Pakistan became a going concern, Gandhi went on a hunger strike to force India to hand over Pakistan’s share of assets to the country.