# Mountbatten's 3 June plan
**माउंटबेटन की 3 जून योजना**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/dominion-plan-1947/
- Chapter: [Crown and the freedom struggle](https://indianepics.online/chapter/raj.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1947 CE
- Where: Viceroy's House (Rashtrapati Bhavan), New Delhi (28.6144, 77.1997)
- Tags: political, colonial

## Summary

On 3 June 1947 Mountbatten announces that British India will be partitioned; the handover is brought forward to August and Parliament passes the act in July.

3 जून 1947 को माउंटबेटन ने ब्रिटिश भारत के विभाजन की घोषणा की; सत्ता-हस्तांतरण अगस्त तक आगे लाया गया और संसद ने जुलाई में अधिनियम पारित किया।

## Account

On 20 February 1947 Attlee told Parliament that Britain would leave India by June 1948, and sent Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy; he was sworn in on 24 March. A first plan, which would have handed power to the provinces separately, was dropped in May after Nehru saw it at Simla and rejected it. V. P. Menon drafted the scheme that replaced it: two dominions, with the Punjab and Bengal divided if their legislators so voted. Mountbatten put it to Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, Baldev Singh and the other leaders at Viceroy's House on 2 June, and on 3 June he, Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh announced it on All India Radio.

At a press conference on 4 June Mountbatten named 15 August as the date of transfer. The Bengal and Punjab assemblies voted for partition on 20 and 23 June; Sylhet voted to join East Bengal and the North-West Frontier Province to join Pakistan in referendums in July; and boundary commissions under Cyril Radcliffe began work. The Indian Independence Act received royal assent on 18 July 1947. British paramountcy over the princely states lapsed, leaving their rulers to accede to one dominion or the other.

The ten weeks between the plan and independence are the most criticised part of the transfer: critics hold that Mountbatten's haste left no time to prepare for the migrations and killings, and his defenders that delay would only have spread the violence.

## Sources

- Menon, The Transfer of Power in India (1957) — https://archive.org/details/dli.csl.6473
- Indian Independence Act 1947 — https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1947/30/contents

## Image

Partition of India Collage. Captain AmericanBurger1775, CC0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3APartition_of_India_Collage.jpg

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