LONDON, ENGLAND, August 13, 2007: Memoirs of a British civil servant never published until now show how much the partition of India was decided by just two men. In a quiet village in the northern English county of Yorkshire, Robert Beaumont rifles through his father’s archives. The various and somewhat tatty pieces of paper he unearths are no ordinary collection of paternal memoirs. They are the thoughts and reflections of his father, Christopher Beaumont, who played a central role in the partition of India in 1947, which resulted in arguably the largest mass migration of peoples the world has ever seen. It is estimated that around 14.5 million people moved to Pakistan from India or travelled in the opposite direction from Pakistan to India. After the death in 1989 of Mountbatten’s Private Secretary, Sir George Abell, Beaumont was probably not exaggerating when he claimed to be the only person left who “knew the truth about partition.”
The family documents show that Beaumont had a stark assessment of the role played by Britain in the last days of the Raj. “The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame – though not the sole blame – for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished,” he writes. “The handover of power was done too quickly.” The central theme ever present in Beaumont’s historic paperwork is that Mountbatten not only bent the rules when it came to partition – he also bent the border in India’s favor. The documents repeatedly allege that Mountbatten put pressure on Radcliffe to alter the boundary in India’s favor. On one occasion, he complains that he was “deftly excluded” from a lunch between the pair in which a substantial tract of Muslim-majority territory – which should have gone to Pakistan – was instead ceded to India.
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