With his initial plans for an independent India in tatters, a desperate Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, turned to his senior-most Indian civil servant, Vappala Pangunni Menon— or ‘VP’—giving him a single night to devise an alternative, coherent and workable plan for independence. Menon met his stringent deadline, presenting the Menon Plan, which would play midwife to India’s birth as a free nation.When I Got to Viceregal Lodge, Lady Mountbatten was there, in
the study, holding her husbandâ€
is a historian and foreign policy analyst.
A graduate in history and Chinese foreign policy from the University of Delhi,
she is the author of The United States and China: Competing Discourses of
Regionalism in East Asia and a forthcoming monograph on the history and
significance of the Kashgar Consulate in bilateral relations between India and
China. She writes extensively on foreign policy for several acclaimed
international journals while remaining actively involved with her parent
discipline—modern Indian history.
