Mountbatten on Partition.

In the second Nehru Memorial lecture, delivered in 1968, Lord Mountbatten revealed that he had demanded plenipotentiary powers from Atlee- in other words, he was the first Viceroy not subordinate to the Secretary of State for India. He was truly a 'pro-consul'. His second revelation had to do with why he brought forward the date for the transfer of power. He had previously met the Indian political leaders who seemed in no great hurry. Indeed, Nehru thought India's most salient problem was economic while others mentioned niceties of constitutional law.

Then he talked to British officials. 

I invited the eleven Governors of the provinces of British India to stay with me and had fruitful meetings with them. They told me of the August riots in Calcutta with 5,000 dead and 15,000 injured, followed by massacres in Noakhali and then Bihar, which had now reached the Punjab. They gave me a terrifying picture of the internal situation, as the pendulum of counter-massacres between the communities was swinging ever higher. Their accounts convinced me that the transfer of power would have to take place much earlier than we had planned in London. I then invited the Residents of the Political Department in the principal Indian States to stay with me for discussions. They painted an equally black picture. I had been friends with ten of the principal ruling Princes since we were on the Prince of Wales’ staff together twenty-five years before. Practically all came to see me now to renew their friendship and offer their help. Their views could not have been more disturbing.

In other words, British officials and even bone-headed Princes saw the looming catastrophe. Tens of thousands- perhaps hundreds of thousands would be killed. Yet Indian politicians weren't talking about how peace was to be maintained or an orderly exchange of populations (in the event of partition) could be effected. 

I tried to tempt Jinnah by offering him Bengal and the Punjab unpartitioned

there was no point doing so. On Direct Action Day in Calcutta, the Hindu majority had turned the tables on Premier Suhrawardy and his Muslim goons. In other words, just being in charge of the whole Province didn't mean you could impose your will. The minority would prevail in districts where it was the majority.  

provided he would agree that, though the Provinces with Muslim majorities would have self-government, they must be within an overall federal government at the centre. However, he said he would sooner have a moth-eaten Pakistan that owed no allegiance to a central government

and thus have an Army of its own 

than a larger and more important area which came under it.

For the reason I've mentioned.  

I then ascertained from the Congress and Sikh leaders that, heartbroken though they were at the very thought of partitioning India, if the Muslim League would not accept a transfer of power on any other basis, they would have no option but to accept if they were not to remain indefinitely under British rule. At this stage of developments such an alternative would have been unthinkable and also quite unworkable. There had been no recruitment to the Indian Civil Service or Police since 1939 and the British means of administering India were irreversibly running down. However, I was determined that the British should not be saddled with the responsibility of breaking up the unity of India, which it had taken them so many years to create and build up. So I devised a scheme whereby the elected members of the Constituent Assembly should vote, province by province, whether they wished power to be transferred to a unified or a partitioned India.

Thus Mountbatten was able to throw not just the blame for dividing India on to the Indians, he also absolved the Brits of responsibility for the Partition genocide. To be fair, it was indeed the fault of the Indians that they made no provision for vulnerable minorities. But, being independent does mean you can choose to let innocent people of your own kind die horrible deaths. Still, it must be said, Mountbatten lets the cat out of the bag when he tells us that it was he, nobody else, who gave the leaders of the two new dominions just ten weeks before power was transferred. True, they probably would still have done nothing if given ten months, yet it tells against Mountbatten himself. He was, after all, a sailor not a statesman. Still, what he was doing was giving Atlee- and thus the Labour party- an alibi for the Partition blood-letting. Mountbatten had been a 'pro-consul'. Everything was his fault. The problem with this view is that the British Constitution firmly subordinated the Viceroy to the Secretary of State for India. It wasn't till the office of Viceroy was replaced by that of Governor General that the Crown in Parliament ceased to be paramount.