India's Independence Day is a British war anniversary

On 3 June 1947, the Viceroy announced the plan to divide British India. The next day, he held a press conference in Delhi to explain it. His prepared remarks gave the plan in much detail. But they left out one thing: the date when any of it would happen.

A journalist asked. Lord Mountbatten later said that he had no date ready. He chose one while he stood there.

The date I chose came out of the blue. I chose it in reply to a question. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.

The date he gave was 15 August 1947. Years later, somebody asked him why. His answer should be better known than it is. "Why? Because it was the second anniversary of Japan's surrender."

Japan announced its surrender on 15 August 1945, and this ended the war. Japan signed the formal document in Tokyo Bay on 2 September. Mountbatten was Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia. In his own area, the Japanese forces surrendered at Singapore on 12 September.

So the anniversary he chose was not the day the Japanese surrendered to him personally. It was V-J Day, the high point of his war.

That is the origin of India's national day. Somebody asked a British officer a question that he had not prepared for. He chose the proudest date in his own career.

The quote comes with a warning. It is from Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. They got it in interviews with Mountbatten long after the event. So it is a man who remembers his own decision, not a written record from that time. He was not a modest narrator of his own life. But nobody has ever found a different explanation, and the timing fits.

India already had an Independence Day

By August 1947, India already had an independence day. People had observed it for seventeen years.

In December 1929, the Congress held its Lahore session, with Jawaharlal Nehru as president. There it adopted the demand for purna swaraj, complete independence, not dominion status. It then set a date for the country to declare it.

On 26 January 1930, people across India met and read a pledge aloud. They did this every year after that, through the 1930s and the war years, until real independence came.

So when Mountbatten named a date, Indians had already marked 26 January for seventeen years as the day they claimed their freedom. The new date came from a Delhi press room and a British admiral who thought about the Pacific war.

India kept the old date on purpose. The Constituent Assembly adopted the Constitution on 26 November 1949. Then it waited two months and put the Constitution into force on 26 January 1950. In this way, the date that the country chose for itself survived as Republic Day.

India could not control the day it got. It could control the day it became a republic, and it used that choice to remember.

The deadline moved ten months earlier

The date also came much earlier than anyone had planned.

On 20 February 1947, the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, spoke to the Commons. He said that it was the government's "definite intention to take the necessary steps to effect the transference of power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June, 1948". That was the timetable. Mountbatten arrived in March 1947 to work to it.

When he named August 1947, he removed about ten months. His reasons were these. Authority was collapsing faster than the calendar allowed. Communal violence was increasing. A long goodbye would be a bloodier one.

Against this is the criticism that historians have made since then. They say the short time itself was the disaster. The boundary commissions, the division of the army and the civil service, and the movement of millions of people all had to fit into ten weeks. The hurry made the killing that followed worse.

Both things can be true. But one thing is certain: the date controlled the work, not the work the date.

The astrologers and the midnight compromise

Then the date met an objection that nobody in London had expected.

Indian astrologers looked at 15 August 1947 and did not like it. People usually tell this part of the story as charming folklore. I expected to prove it false. But the documents support it better than that.

Mountbatten's own report of 8 August 1947 states the problem clearly. The astrologers said that the 13th and the 15th were inauspicious, but the 14th was fine. One astrologer in Calcutta wrote to beg him to change his mind. His words are hard to improve on.

For the love of God... do not give India her independence on 15 August.

The solution was a clever compromise. In the Hindu system, a day goes from sunrise to sunrise. So the hours after midnight on the night of 14 August still belong to the 14th. If you hold the ceremony at midnight, you satisfy the astrologers and the Act at the same time.

That is exactly what happened. It is why India's founding moment is at a strange hour. The official record is precise about it: "The Fifth Session of the Constituent Assembly of India commenced in the Constitution Hall, New Delhi, at Eleven P. M., Mr. President (The Honourable Dr. Rajendra Prasad) in the Chair." Members sang the first verse of Vande Mataram and the President spoke. Then Nehru stood up to give the speech that everyone remembers.

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

When the clock struck twelve, the members took a pledge. Rajendra Prasad read it out one sentence at a time, first in Hindustani and then in English, and the Assembly repeated it. Then a message went to the Viceroy that India had taken power, and the national flag was presented.

They set the hour so that a date chosen by the British would not offend Indian astrologers. Everybody got what they needed. Nobody had to say aloud that the date was wrong.

Why Pakistan celebrates one day earlier

The Indian Independence Act 1947 got royal assent on 18 July. It had passed the Commons on the 15th and the Lords on the 16th. Its first section is very clear about the date, and about the countries it applies to.

As from the fifteenth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, two independent Dominions shall be set up in India, to be known respectively as India and Pakistan.

One date for both countries. But Pakistan's Independence Day is 14 August. The reason is almost disappointingly practical. Mountbatten wanted to be present at both handovers, and one man cannot be in Karachi and Delhi at the same midnight. So he went to Karachi first and swore Jinnah in there on the 14th. Then he flew back to Delhi for the Indian ceremony.

People later gave a second reason. The night of 14 August 1947 was 27 Ramadan 1366, a very important night in Islam. That is true. But it is also the kind of meaning that a country finds in a date after it already has the date.

The strongest detail is that Pakistan itself was not sure at first. Its early commemorative stamps, from 1948, show the date 15 August 1947. The country's own stamps did not agree with its own anniversary. Only later did 14 August become fixed.

Nobody knew where the border was

The man who had to draw the line between the two countries was Cyril Radcliffe. He was a British lawyer who had never been to India. He landed on 8 July 1947. He had about five weeks to divide Punjab and Bengal. He worked from maps and census returns, in a country whose geography he did not know.

He finished almost on time. The awards were ready on 9 and 12 August. But then nobody published them.

At five o'clock on the evening of 16 August, Indian and Pakistani representatives got copies. They had two hours to read them. The Radcliffe Line became public on 17 August 1947. That was two days after both countries had celebrated their independence.

On 15 August 1947, in the districts of Punjab and Bengal where the border mattered most, people celebrated independence. But nobody had told them which country they now lived in. Villages held ceremonies and did not know if they raised the right flag. The answer came two days later. For millions of people, it was an order to leave.

What the date really is

So here is the day India marks every year. A British admiral named it to answer an unscripted question, and it remembers the end of a war in the Pacific. Indians had chosen a day for themselves and observed it for seventeen years. That day moved to January and quietly became Republic Day.

The hour moved to midnight to satisfy astrologers who thought the whole date was cursed. Pakistan took the day before because one man could not attend two ceremonies. And the border did not exist in public until the 17th.

None of this makes 15 August any less India's. A date means only what a country puts into it. For seventy nine years, the country has put things into this one, and they have long since covered its origin. But it is good to know one fact. When somebody chose the country's most repeated date, it was an afterthought in another person's story.