CABINET MISSION PLAN

CABINET MISSION PLAN Great Britain's final attempt to transfer its waning imperial power over India to a single independent constitutional entity was launched in March 1946, by three members of Prime Minister Clement Attlee's Cabinet: Secretary of State for India Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Board of Trade President Sir Stafford Cripps, and First Lord of the Admirality A. V. Alexander. Their Cabinet Mission Plan, had it been accepted in good faith by the leaders of India's National Congress and Muslim League, could have saved millions of lives and averted three disastrous South Asian wars, and more than half a century of constant conflict over Jammu and Kashmir.

The plan was to create a complex confederation of British India's provinces and princely states, all divided into three groups: A, B, and C. Most of independent India's Union would have been integrated into Group A, with its overwhelmingly Hindu majority. To the west of Group A would have been Group B, modern Pakistan, mostly Muslim but also including millions of Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus from the eastern districts of Punjab, not just its Muslim-majority western districts, as well as all of Sind and the North-West Frontier province and Baluchistan. Group C would have included all of Bengal and Assam, with a very narrow Muslim majority, and the much richer real estate of West Bengal's Calcutta, rather than what became impoverished East Pakistan in 1947 and has remained Bangladesh since the 1971 South Asian war.

Those three groups, the modern sovereign states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, would have been the most powerful, virtually autonomous units within the three-tier plan of a South Asian confederation. Elected representatives from each group would join the new federation's constituent assembly as soon as the British left, roughly one member elected for each million inhabitants, as was later the case for India's Parliament. At the bottom of the plan's three-tier pyramid, provincial officials (elected within the former British provinces and the princely states) would collect most taxes and supervise the administration of local services, as do local governments in Britain and the United States. At the pyramid's top would be a Union umbrella with key representatives from all three groups sharing power only over foreign affairs, defense, communication, and to raise finances enough to run those three central departments. The Cabinet Mission worked tirelessly, trying to persuade the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League of the brilliance and impartiality of their plan, the last best hope for keeping South Asia unified. It almost worked.

But neither side really trusted the other, Congress leaders suspecting that Muslim Leaguers agreed only in order to buy time until they felt strong enough to break free and establish their state of Pakistan; the League feared that once the British left, Congress would ignore the plan's communal checks, undermining both powerful Muslim-majority groups to bolster the central powers of a Hindu-dominated union. Soon after the Mission went home, its plan fell apart, and by midsummer of 1946, only ashes remained. A year later, the hasty, incompetent partition of Punjab and Bengal shattered South Asia's unity, and during the months of Britain's withdrawal of its forces, over 10 million Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh refugees fled their ancestral homes, leaving almost a million dead.

Stanley Wolpert

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mansergh, N., and E. W. R. Lumby, eds. The Transfer of Power, 1942–7, vol. VII: The Cabinet Mission, 23 March–29 June 1946. London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1977.

Menon, V. P. The Transfer of Power in India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Moon, Penderel, ed. Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal. London: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Rajput, A. B. The Cabinet Mission. Lahore: Lion Press, 1946.