The last four years of Gandhi's life saw the end of British
rule in India and the emergence of the sovereign states of India
and Pakistan. This thesis examines Gandhi's political progress
during the period. It provides an account of how and why it came
about that the independence of India was accompanied by partition.
As late as 1946, the partition of India seemed an unlikely
prospect: the British preferred a unitary India, Congress was
committed on principle to Indian unity, and the Muslim League
leaders intended to use their demand for "Pakistan" as a means of
securing separate representation for Indian Muslims in an all India
Union. However, while partition seemed unlikely,
independence was known to be imminent: from mid-1945, H.M.G. was
increasingly determined to effect a rapid transfer of power.
The central argument of this study is that Gandhi played an
important role in determining the outcome of Indian independence.
At a profound level, the spirit of Gandhianism had long informed
the Indian political culture within which the independence debate
took place. In the period 1944 to 1948, the impact of Gandhianism
contributed to the rise of sentiments which eventually compromised
Indian unity. Furthermore, changing political conditions during
this turbulent period often brought Gandhi to the front rank of
the Congress leadership. On such occasions, fired by the Gandhian
vision of an idealized future Indian society, his was a voice
raised in consistent opposition to proposals likely to promote an
equal, or nearly equal, distribution of power between Congress and
the League at the Centre. Moreover, Gandhi's enthusiasm in this
respect impelled him to attempt to subvert British intermediary efforts when, from time to time, such efforts appeared likely to
succeed in reconstructing the power structure so as to accommodate
the essence of the demands of the Muslim political separatists.
By early 1947, in the absence of a power-sharing arrangement,
the only alternative was partition: H.M.G. had placed a time
limit on the Raj, and communalist forces were so aroused at the
social level as to require that independence be informed by some
form of Muslim separatism. This thesis contends that the Congress
leaders settled upon partition as the preferred form of separatism
to be implemented in the independence scheme. It analyzes the
nature of Gandhi's eventual acquiescence to the Congress leaders'
decision for partition, and examines the Mahatma's militant
response to the reality of Pakistan.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/2418 |
| Date | January 1988 |
| Creators | Daley, Kevin Luke |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Department of History |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Kevin Luke Daley, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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