Mountbatten named last Viceroy of India
On this day · 20 February 1947
On a single day in 1947, Britain set a deadline for leaving India and handed the job of dismantling the Raj to a royal admiral.
On 20 February 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee rose in the House of Commons and announced that Britain intended to transfer power in India “into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June, 1948.” After nearly two centuries of company and crown rule, London had finally put a clock on the end of the British Raj.
In the same statement, Attlee revealed that Viscount Wavell would be replaced as Viceroy by Rear-Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, the wartime commander in South-East Asia and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Mountbatten was charged with “transferring to Indian hands the responsibility for the government of British India.”
He would be the last man to hold the title of Viceroy.
Mountbatten reached Delhi the following month and, facing rising communal violence, dramatically advanced the timetable. Power passed not in 1948 but at midnight on 15 August 1947, when the partitioned dominions of India and Pakistan were born and the office of Viceroy was abolished forever.
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