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Rajendra Prasad’s motive in accepting Partition may be understood from the following passage: ‘It is necessary to mention here that it was the Working Committee, and particularly such of its members as were represented on the Central Cabinet, which had agreed to the scheme of partition. … (They) did so because they had become disgusted with the situation then obtaining in the country. They saw that riots had become a thing of everyday occurrence and would continue to be so; and that the Government. . .was incapable of preventing them because the Muslim League Ministers would cause obstruction everywhere….It had thus become impossible to carry on the administration. We thought that, by accepting partition, we could at least govern the portion which remained with us in accordance with our views, preserve law and order in a greater part of the country and organise it in such a way that we might be of the greatest service to it. We had, accordingly, no alternative but to accept partition’. As regards the reasons which finally persuaded Nehru to accept the partition scheme, we have his own testimony as recorded by Leonard Moseley:

‘Pandit Nehru told Michael Brecher, his biographer, (in 1956, the reasons for accepting the Partition of India): ‘Well, I suppose it was the compulsion of events and the feeling that we wouldn’t get out of that deadlock or morass by pursuing the way we had done; it became worse and worse. Further a feeling that even if we got freedom for India with that background, it would be very weak India; that is a federal India with far too much power in the federating units. A larger India would have constant troubles, constant disintegrating pulls. And also the fact that we saw no other way of getting our freedom – in the near future, I mean. And. so we accepted it and said, ‘let us build up a strong India. And if others do not want to be in it, well how can we and why should we force them to be in it?’ However, as R.C. Majumdar comments Pandit Nehru came nearer the truth in a conver sation with Mosley in 1960, when he said: ‘The truth is that we were tired men, and we were getting on in years too. Few of us could stand the prospect of going to prison again – and if we had stood out for a united India as we wished it, prison obviously awaited us. We saw the fires burning in the Pun jab and heard every day of the killings. The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it’.

Excerpted from Page 457-458 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh