India’s Independence Day and its link with Japan

The year is 1947 but the date isn’t August 15.

The Indian Independence Bill was introduced in the British House of Commons on July 4, 1947. It was formally passed after receiving the Royal Assent on July 18, 1947, when it became the Indian Independence Act, which was defined as "An Act to make provision for the setting up in India of two independent Dominions, to substitute other provisions for certain provisions of the Government of India Act, 1947".

What was the hold-up then? The answer lies with the last Viceroy of India Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was entrusted with the task of drawing up a plan for the transfer of power as well as the partition.

As mentioned in Freedom at Midnight, a 1975 book by French author Dominique Lapierre and American writer Larry Collins, Mountbatten had announced the date of transfer and partition at a press conference on June 4, 1947. About 300 journalists – all the way from the USSR, China, Europe and the USA to their Indian counterparts – were in attendance. It was only the second time that a Viceroy in British India had addressed a press conference and it also happened to be the last.

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On Feb. 20, 1947, British Prime Minister Clement R. Attlee had told the House of Commons about his government’s intention to transfer power "into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June 1948".

However, the date Aug. 15, 1947, was chosen and announced by Lord Mountbatten. The choice of date is said to be Mountbatten’s own initiative, often referred to as a spontaneous one.

The advanced date did come as a surprise to many but had a deeper significance for the British and Mountbatten himself.

This is where the Japan link comes in.

Aug. 15, 1947, happened to be the second anniversary of Imperial Japan’s surrender to the Allies in World War II. Referred to as the Victory over Japan Day, it officially marked the end of the war, months after the fighting had stopped in Europe. Japan’s surrender was also special for Mountbatten because of his active participation in the war against the Japanese as a British Royal Navy officer in Burma (now Myanmar).

That reason aside, the book also has the last Viceroy recollecting, “I had to force the pace. I knew I had to force parliament to get the bill through before their summer recess to hold the thing together. We were sitting on the edge of a volcano, on a fused bomb, and we didn’t know when the fuse would go off.”

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Churchill disagreed with the name ‘Independence Bill’

Writing to then British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Leader of the Opposition Conservative Party Winston Churchill had objected to the bill drawn up to grant independence to India being called the ‘Independence Bill’.

"…The essence of the Mountbatten proposals and the only reason why I gave support to them is because they establish the phase of Dominion status," wrote Churchill in a letter to Attlee on July 1, 1947, just three days before the Bill was introduced in the House of Commons. "Dominion status is not the same as Independence, although it may be freely used to establish independence. It is not true that a community is independent when its Ministers have in fact taken the Oath of Allegiance to The King.”

Calling it a “measure of grave constitutional importance”, Churchill said that a correct, formal procedure and nomenclature must be observed.

“The correct title would be, it seems to me, The Indian Dominions Bill," Churchill continued, asking Attlee to consider alternatives. "I should, however, be quite willing to support it if it were called, The India Bill, 1947 or The India Self-Government Bill."