The Attlee Government’s Decisions of 1947–8

Attlee’s great contribution to decolonization was the transfer of power in India and the latter’s acceptance in the Commonwealth as a republic. His experience went back twenty years to his membership of the Simon Commission which visited India in 1928 and 1929. And during the war, in January 1942, on the eve of the fall of Singapore, when a group of Indian elder statesmen called for a ‘bold stroke [of] far-sighted statesmanship’ in the form of a national government for India with a constitutional position equal to the Dominions, Attlee, who had a history degree, called for a positive response. As he said to Churchill: ‘Lord Durham saved Canada for the British Empire. We need a man to do in India what Durham did in Canada.’1 Attlee believed India to be a candidate for routeing along the century-old track which led to the terminus of independence via Dominion status. However, India’s experience was quite different from that of the settler colonies which became Dominions.