Towards independence & partition
The road from the Cripps Mission and Quit India to the Cabinet Mission, Mountbatten Plan and the Indian Independence Act 1947 that partitioned British India.
The wartime impasse, 1942
Britain's entry into the Second World War in September 1939, declared by Viceroy Linlithgow without consulting Indian opinion, triggered the resignation of all Congress provincial ministries in November 1939 (the 'Day of Deliverance' the Muslim League observed on 22 December 1939). The August Offer of 1940 promised dominion status and minority safeguards but was rejected. The decisive escalation came with the Cripps Mission (March 1942), sent by Churchill's War Cabinet under Sir Stafford Cripps. It offered post-war dominion status with the right of provinces to secede—the first official admission of the possibility of Partition. Congress rejected it (Gandhi called it 'a post-dated cheque on a crashing bank'); the League rejected the absence of a clear Pakistan commitment.
Quit India and the radicalisation of 1942-45
The All India Congress Committee passed the Quit India Resolution at Bombay on 8 August 1942, with Gandhi's call to 'Do or Die.' The colonial state arrested the entire leadership at dawn on 9 August under the Defence of India Rules, decapitating the movement before it began. What followed was the most violent phase of the freedom struggle: parallel governments (Tamluk's Jatiya Sarkar in Midnapore, Satara's Prati Sarkar under Nana Patil, Ballia under Chittu Pandey). Repression was severe—over 1,000 killed by official count, mass floggings, RAF strafing of crowds.
The period also saw Subhas Chandra Bose reorganise the Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj) and proclaim the Provisional Government of Free India at Singapore on 21 October 1943. The INA trials at the Red Fort (November 1945) of Prem Sahgal, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Shah Nawaz Khan—deliberately a Hindu, Sikh and Muslim together—provoked nationwide protest, and the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny of February 1946 at Bombay signalled that British control over the instruments of coercion was eroding.
The shift in British calculations
The Labour victory of July 1945 under Attlee, Britain's financial exhaustion, the unreliability of the Indian armed forces, and American pressure made continued rule untenable. The Wavell Plan and Simla Conference (June-July 1945) collapsed over Jinnah's insistence that the League alone nominate all Muslim members of the Executive Council. The provincial and central elections of 1945-46 then hardened communal lines: the Muslim League swept the Muslim seats (winning all 30 reserved seats in the Central Assembly and over 87% of Muslim provincial seats), establishing its claim to speak for Muslim India and setting the stage for the constitutional endgame of 1946-47.
