Meanwhile, important developments had taken place in India. Indian National Congress was pressing for India’s independence. The country was in growing turmoil. Mahatma Gandhi had led marches across the country, there were growing demands for the British to quit India and the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah were arguing for an independent Muslim state, threatening the division of India. Negotiations were taking place and high-powered delegations were coming from England for talks with Indians. There was tension and nervousness. Eventually, the British had to leave, but only after the division of India.

Then came the explosion: the massacres of Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India and the subsequent mass migration of some ten million people, the largest migration in human experience. I was pulled away from my seat and asked to sit in the Parliament Street Police Station to help maintain law and order. Refugees were flooding Delhi. Partition was under way. They had to be housed while large numbers of Muslim refugees were herded in open spaces and had to be protected, pending their departure to Pakistan. The Police and the Army were all involved in this.

One sad event of that time is indelibly impressed in my memory. One evening, I saw from my room on the ground floor of what is now the Prime Minister’s Secretariat a Rolls-Royce speeding from what was Viceroy’s House and wondered where the Governor-General, Lord Mountbatten , was rushing, without apparently even an escort. Mahatma Gandhi had just been assassinated. It was January 1948.

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