Free The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan

tried for treason by the colonial state in the ill-chosen and highly symbolic venue of Delhi's Red Fort – Shah Jahan's sandstone fortress from which pre-colonial, Mughal power had emanated. The INA case also became a flashpoint for a more generalised anti-British and anti-imperial feeling, which was quickly outrunning the tempo set by the Congress's political leadership.
    Congressmen could not hope to monopolise the protests but rather rode a wave of popular feeling, at times riding in front of it, at other times being wiped aside by more radical leadership. ‘There has seldom been a matter that has attracted so much Indian public interest and, it is safe to say, sympathy,’ wrote a vexed British intelligence officer and it was reported that politicians were compelled to talk about the INA in appreciative terms during the central assembly election campaign in order to grab – and keep – the interest of their listeners. 20 INA men were garlanded with flowers wherever they went, invited to speak at public meetings and lent the support of powerful backers, from barristers to businessmen. The Viceroy, who found it personally trying to overlook ‘this hero worship of traitors’, nevertheless frankly admitted in private that the INA trials were ‘embarrassing’ and although the trio were found guilty in 1946, the sentences were ultimately quashed. 21 This climb-down by the imperial state marked another notch on the nationalist yardstick, as the ability of the state to enforce law and order appeared distinctly weakened once again. The last refuge and ultimate pillar of the colonial state, its army, was less reliable than at any time since the 1857 uprising and this undoubtedly influenced the British government's decision to hand back the Indian empire to Indians as soon as they possibly could. This victory, and the celebration and drilling of a well-armed military force, enhanced the sense that a revolutionary social upheaval was impending and helped to champion a cult of militarisation among young men.
    Voting for freedom
    The removal of Churchill from Downing Street, and the Labour Party landslide of the summer of 1945, made British intentions to leave India more concrete and gave the negotiations a fresh injection of realism. ‘In accordance with the promises already made to my Indian peoples,’ King George declared to the assembled members of Parliament on the benches of Westminster in 1945, ‘my Government will do their utmost to promote, in conjunction with the leaders of Indian opinion, the early realisation of full self-government in India.’ 22
    Before anything else could be done, though, there was a more urgent imperative – to work out who the leaders of Indian opinion really were and the political persuasions of, in the words of the British monarch, his ‘Indian peoples’. The history of imperial assessments of popular will is a troubled one: how best to find out, at the end of empire, who to hand over power to? Colonial regimes have been notoriously weak, or wilfully manipulative, when identifying and empowering representative leaders. For those engineering the transfer of power, in keeping with the British ideal of democratic decolonisation, the answer was an Indian general election. Some forty one million Indians were eligible to go to the polls in the winter months of 1945–6 or 10 per cent of the general population. The vast size of the country and the logistical difficulties of organising the counts meant that elections were staggered from December 1945 to March 1946. 23
    The purpose of the election was twofold: to form provincial governments in the Indian provinces, and so to draw Indian politicians into the business of running the everyday functions of government from which Congress had been excluded during the Second World War, and to create a central body that would start designing the future constitutional form of a free India. The announcement of the election caused shockwaves that pulsed