This unravelling was accelerated by domestic and colonial unrest. The Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946—spanning 78 ships and involving 20,000 sailors—was not just a military insurrection but a class-conscious uprising that resonated with workers and students alike.

It exposed the decaying authority of the Raj and signaled a potential revolutionary convergence between the military and the masses. For Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s government, this was the final blow—a clear sign that Britain no longer had the capacity to dominate India by force.

Faced with the specter of a full-scale, radicalized freedom movement, the British hastily sought to divide and exit. They forged an alliance with the native bourgeois nationalist parties, who were more interested in inheriting state power than dismantling the imperial economic structure.

Partition, then, was not an act of liberation — it was a strategic surgical division, engineered from above, using religion as a scalpel. As Eric Hobsbawm noted, it was a form of “prophylactic decolonization,” designed to pre-empt revolutionary transformation by substituting symbolic independence for substantive emancipation.

Rethinking Partition in colonial and post-colonial Pakistan: a Gramscian perspective—I

When Nehru and Jinnah pledged allegiance to King George VI as Prime Minister of India and Governor-General of Pakistan, respectively, they did so as heads of dominions—not republics. Their governments, born of........

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