What Prompted Attlee to Set a Timeframe for Independence

Humour strikes in unexpected ways. An imaginary situation may propel one to laughter. On the other hand, summing up a fact in a manner that makes you look at it in an altogether new direction may also tickle you to laugh. 

One such thing I saw today is Clement Attlee's reasons for declaring June 1948 as the date by which complete independence would be granted to India. As you know, Attlee was the Prime Minister of Great Britain who replaced Churchill after World War II and granted independence to India.

In an interview to a journalist, Attlee said: "I’d come to the conclusion from my own experience of Indians that there was a great deal of happiness for them in asking for everything, and putting down everything that was wrong in India to British rule, and then sitting pretty. I thought that most of them were not really keen on responsibility. They would talk and talk and talk, and as long as they could put the responsibility on us they would continue to quarrel among themselves. Therefore I concluded the thing to do was to bring them right up against it and make them see they’d got to face the situation themselves. I decided that the only thing to do was to set a time-limit and say: ‘Whatever happens, our rule is ending on that date.’ It was of course, a somewhat dangerous venture. But one had also to remember that inevitably the machine of administration in India was running down".

(From the book 'Bose - The Untold Story of an Inconvenient Nationalist' by Chandrachur Ghose)