Independence Bill receives royal assent

The eight-column banner headline on the front page of the Indian Express of July 20,1947 — a Sunday, incidentally — said it all: ‘India and Pakistan Dominions Take Birth’. From London, Fraser Wighton, Reuter’s political correspondent, captured with a rare eye for detail the pomp — and brevity — that marked the ceremony of King George’s assent to the Indian Independence Bill. He also recorded for posterity the fact that as the last secretary of state for India left the British Parliament, he passed a group of visitors which included Indians

London, July 18: The Royal Commission’s historic move conveying to Parliament King George’s assent to the Indian Independence Bill, creating the two Dominions of India and Pakistan, came soon after noon. Only a few Peers, members of the Commons and spectators saw the ceremony, which marked the passing of British sovereignty over about a fifth of the human race.

The Commission met in the King’s robing room, the small chamber in which the House of Lords has met since bombs destroyed the Commons Chamber and compelled the Commons to take over the Lords’ meeting room.

For the ceremony, attendants uncovered two gilded thrones on the dais, beneath a richly embroidered panel bearing the Royal arms immediately behind the woolsack on which lay the mace. The five members of the Commission, all dressed in peers’ robes of scarlet and ermine, were Lord Chancellor Viscount Jowitt; the Earl of Cytton, a former acting Viceroy of India whose father proclaimed Queen Victoria, Empress of the Indian Empire; the Earl of Listowel, the present and past Secretary of State for India; Viscount Stansgate, a former Secretary and Lord Llewellin.

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Precisely at 10.40 GMT today 14.10 a.m. IST, the great new Dominions of India and Pakistan were born and the 400,800,000 people of India came into their inheritance of full political freedom, when in the British House of Lords, a Royal Commission of Peers with ceremony and ritual dating back to William the Conqueror’s time, announced the Royal assent to the Indian Independence Bill, writes Fraser Wighton, Reuter’s Political Correspondent.

“Roi Le Veult” — in the Norman French of 1066 AD, the Clerk of Parliament, Sir Henry Baddeley, uttered the fateful words — “The King wishes it “. In this single pregnant phrase was the birth and the inheritance.

The ceremony which transferred Britain’s 90-year-old responsibility for India to the people of that country took barely 15 minutes…

India and Pakistan — to whom power is transferred on August 15 — were now in being, their creation having occupied but a fleeting moment in the life of the age-old Parliament. As the last Secretary of State for India, Lord Listowel, divested himself of his Commission robes and departed from the building, he passed within a stone-throw of a little crowd of visitors to Parliament, among them Indians…