Could India-Pakistan partition be avoided?
In the book “Freedom at midnight”, authors Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre have written about an event where Louis Mountbatten told them if he had known this before, there wouldn’t be a Partition.
So what made Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India to say this?
In 1970, authors Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre published their book, ‘O Jerusalem!’, which talks about the creation and conflicts of Israel state. When they decided their next literary adventure will be about the India-Pakistan partition they connected with Louis Mountbatten.
Mountbatten was excited about this idea, who have also read Larry and Dominique’s previous work ‘Is Paris Burning?’ four times, which is also one of his favourite books. He felt his effort to decolonize without a single drop of British bloodshed is underappreciated by his countrymen.
This support from Mountbatten helped the authors, which otherwise they could have never done by themselves. Like meeting former administrators, military men of the colonial empire and having access to some classified documents.
During one such research, Larry and Dominique found an unexpected finding from an Indian doctor, who has treated the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1947. They took the X-Ray report to Mountbatten.
When Mountbatten saw the report, he exclaimed,
“I can’t believe it!… Good God!… If I’d only known all this at the time, the course of history would have been different. I would have delayed the granting of independence for several months. There would have been no partition. Pakistan would note have existed. India would have remained united. Three wars would have been avoided…”
Jinnah was affected with an advanced stage of Tuberculosis, who only had a few months to survive. He was the inflexible Muslim leader who quashed all efforts to preserve India’s unity. One year after the India-Pakistan partition on September 11, 1948, Jinnah died in Karachi, Pakistan.
Could Louis Mountbatten have prevented partition if he had known Jinnah’s illness beforehand?
To read more about India-Pakistan partition stories, read Freedom at Midnight authored by Larry Collin and Dominique Lapierre.
