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Confetti. At New Delhi that afternoon, in the long Mogul Gardens of the Viceroy's House, Lord Wavell showed no embarrassment. It was his daughter Felicity's wedding day. He shook hands with hundreds of Indian and British guests, laughed and threw confetti as Captain Peter Longmore and his bride were paced by Scottish pipers to the garden gate. Then Good Soldier Wavell called to his office the man whose party propagandists had carried on an anti-Wavell offensive for six months: Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the All-India Congress Party. Wavell showed his own dismissal slip to Nehru.
When India's Congress leaders heard that Attlee had set a date for the end of the Raj, they walked on clouds. Nehru called the Attlee withdrawal statement a "wise and courageous" decision. The Moslem League paper Dawn applauded feebly. Moslem Leader Mohamed Ali Jinnah made a dark and sour reference to recent killings in Bihar, said: "We will not move in our demands for Pakistan." Jai Prakash Narain's Socialists were invincibly skeptical of Britain's sincerity; the Communists just didn't believe a word of it.
But Britain was determined to get out, and leave responsibility for unity and nationhood to the quarreling Indian parties. Britain was fed up. In 1855, when Viscount Canning of Kilbrahan (later the first Viceroy) left London for India, he said: "I cannot forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise, at first no bigger than a man's hand, but which, growing larger & larger, may at last threaten to burst and overwhelm us with ruin." The next year came the Indian Mutiny. From the roots of that tragedy, the Indian independence movement grew. The cloud that rose under cold Lord Canning would come to an end under warm and smiling Lord Mountbatten.
Said London's News Chronicle: "Just 70 years ago Queen Victoria was acclaimed in Delhi as Empress of India. Now it seems the most versatile of her great-grandsons is going back to India to wind up the Raj. The spirit of irony seldom leaves Anglo-Indian relations alone."