Based on the original scenario by Mark C. Carnes
As the Second World War ends, Britain invites the leaders of India's political factions to a conference at Simla to decide the future of the subcontinent. Each faction arrives with its own idea of what India should become and how to get there.
You will play one of these leaders. At Simla you will need to build coalitions with factions you distrust, persuade the British to leave on your terms, pitch your case differently to different audiences, and decide when to compromise and when to hold firm.
It is late June 1945.
Germany surrendered last month. The war in Europe is over, and Japan's surrender looks close. The Soviet Union now controls Eastern Europe. Britain won the war, but it is broke and worn out.
On June 14, Governor-General Lord Wavell announced in a radio broadcast that he would convene a conference at Simla, the summer capital of British India. He has invited the leaders of India's major political groups to agree on a framework for the subcontinent's future government. If they cannot, he has a smaller offer in reserve: an Executive Council of Indian leaders to govern under the Viceroy while the constitution waits.
The next day, the imprisoned Congress leaders were released. Nehru, Patel, Azad, and nearly every other senior Congress leader had spent three years in British prisons, arrested in 1942 after Congress passed the "Quit India" resolution demanding immediate British withdrawal. They have come out angry.
The Gandhi-Jinnah talks of 1944 failed. Gandhi, freed in 1944 because of poor health, met with Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, while the rest of the Congress leadership was still in prison. Gandhi insisted India was one nation. Jinnah said it was two (one Hindu, one Muslim) and demanded the creation of Pakistan. The talks broke down.
Britain can no longer afford the Raj. The war has bankrupted it. More than two million Indians served in the war, and they are coming home to a country that wants independence. Britain signed the Atlantic Charter, which promises colonial peoples the right to self-determination. Whether Britain will keep that promise in India, and on what terms, is what brings everyone to Simla.
The leaders are arriving now. If they reach agreement, one or more new nations will be born. If they don't, the communal violence between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs that has been building for decades could get much worse.
The conference moves through three rough phases that blend into one another:
The British Governors General run the conference. They control the army and the bureaucracy and can arrest leaders or impose martial law.
Victory is defined by the objectives on your confidential role sheet. You can end up on the winning side and still lose if you gave up too much of what your character stands for.
What will India become?
Partition gets the headlines: one nation, two, or many? But every faction also has answers to a string of other questions. Who holds power: a strong central government, the provinces, or the villages? Will the state be secular, or will religious law shape legislation? Will India industrialize or keep its village economy? Will it have an army? Will women vote? Will Untouchables get guaranteed representation? Will the princes keep their thrones?
These questions cut across the partition debate, and factions that agree on unity can disagree on nearly everything else. Congress and Gandhi's adherents both want one India, but Congress wants a modern industrial state run from Delhi while the Gandhians want power spread across what Gandhi called India's "seven lakh" (700,000) villages. The Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha each define the nation by religion; the League wants to leave, and the Mahasabha wants Hindus in charge. Ambedkar wants constitutional guarantees for the oppressed, while the Communists want to overthrow the system that oppresses them.
Each faction's position combines answers on:
A position on borders alone won't carry the conference. You need a program people can believe in and that could actually govern, and you need to sell it to delegates who share some of your answers but not others.
The summaries below describe what is publicly known about each faction. Your confidential role sheet may give you additional objectives.
The British preside over the conference. Officially, their job is to bring about Indian independence and broker a deal that all the major parties can accept. In practice they are pulled in several directions. Prime Minister Churchill wants India kept within the Commonwealth, but Britain votes in a general election on July 5, and the result will not be counted until late July, after the troops' overseas ballots come home. Wavell and Cripps do not know whether they will answer to Churchill or to Labour's Clement Attlee. The Atlantic Charter commits Britain to self-determination for colonial peoples. And Britain can no longer pay for the Raj.
The British run India's civil service and army. They can order arrests, ban organizations, deploy troops, and direct any government agency. They can act publicly through announcements or privately by writing to the Scenario Director, who plays both the colonial bureaucracy and the Prime Minister in London. The Scenario Director can overrule or replace the British representatives.
Strategic situation: The British hold formal power, but their authority is slipping. They want a settlement that heads off chaos without looking like they dictated it, and London is watching.
The Indian National Congress has led the independence movement since 1885. It claims to speak for all Indians (Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Untouchable) and demands a united, independent India with a strong central government. Its delegation includes Maulana Azad, a prominent Muslim, as proof that Congress is more than a Hindu party.
Congress plans to take over the British administrative machinery largely intact: a powerful center with provincial governments beneath it. Its base is the Hindi-speaking heartland (United Provinces, Bihar, Central Provinces), overwhelmingly Hindu with sizable Muslim minorities. Congress leaders argue that with Japan defeated and China divided, a united India could become one of the strongest nations in the world.
Congress is not fully united. Jawaharlal Nehru wants a secular, modernizing, socialist-leaning state. Others in Congress put Hindu culture first. All of them want the British out.
Strategic situation: Congress has the largest following, but it has to keep socialists and Hindu traditionalists in the same party. It also has to convince Muslims and Untouchables that it speaks for them and not only for caste Hindus.
The Muslim League, founded in 1906, argues that India's 100 million Muslims will be permanently outvoted by the Hindu majority. If the British leave and Congress takes power, Hindus will control every democratic institution. As evidence, the League points to the Congress provincial governments formed after the 1937 elections, which promoted Hindu symbols, sang Vande Mataram, and backed Hindu cultural policies.
In 1940, at Lahore, Jinnah declared: "Islam and Hinduism are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but in fact are different and distinct social orders... To yoke together two such nations under a single state must lead to growing discontent and final destruction." The League demands Pakistan, a separate Muslim state made up of the Muslim-majority provinces of the northwest and Bengal. Partition would be messy. In Bengal, Calcutta, India's largest city and commercial capital, is mostly Hindu, while the countryside around it is mostly Muslim. Partitioning India would likely mean partitioning Bengal too.
League members may disagree about whether Pakistan should be secular or governed by Islamic law (shariat), and that split may come out at Simla.
Strategic situation: The League has to convince the British and wavering Muslims that partition is inevitable, while keeping Congress from winning over moderate Muslims. Its best argument is fear. Its weak spot is that many Muslims, including some in Congress, reject the two-nation theory.
Gandhi is the best-known figure in India. He rejects Western modernity, industrialization, and parliamentary democracy, and wants a united India built on self-governing villages, nonviolence, and traditional religious values. He wears handspun khadi, reads the Bhagavad Gita daily, and campaigns for the Untouchables, whom he calls harijans.
Gandhi holds no official Congress position and has said he will not attend the Simla sessions himself. His followers will attend and present his views. He still has enormous influence, especially inside Congress, and he may appear at the conference or make public statements at any point.
The Gandhi faction has two groups that share core values but set different priorities:
Ahimsa Pathiks (Proponents of Nonviolence) treat nonviolence as the non-negotiable foundation of any future India. How independence is won matters to them as much as winning it. They want constitutional guarantees that India will give up standing armies and offensive war.
Gram Swaraj Sangh (Proponents of Traditional India) care most about preserving village life: its handicrafts, self-sufficiency, and communal harmony, and the spiritual traditions they see rooted in it. They firmly oppose industrialization. They are committed to nonviolence too, but their main worry is that independent India will copy Western-style development.
Both groups want the British out immediately, India kept whole, power held by local communities instead of a strong center, and no separate electorates, which they see as dividing the nation. Nonviolence drives their position on the military; village self-rule drives their position on federal structure. Their different priorities may lead them to different strategies as the conference goes on.
Strategic situation: The Gandhians have moral authority but little political organization. They need to turn Gandhi's popularity into policy, often against Congress leaders who share their goal of unity but not their vision of a decentralized, village-based India. Their strongest weapon is Gandhi's hunger strike, and it can be used only once (see Scenario Rules).
Sikhs are less than 2% of India's population but carry real economic and military weight in the Punjab. Sikh farmers made the Punjab India's breadbasket, and Sikhs serve in Britain's Indian armed forces in numbers far beyond their share of the population.
The Punjab is the most dangerous flashpoint in any partition. It has a Muslim majority, a large Hindu minority, and most of India's Sikhs. Its five rivers irrigate some of India's richest farmland, much of it developed by Sikh farmers. All three communities claim Lahore, its cultural capital. If India is partitioned, the Punjab will have to be divided too, and any line will leave millions on the wrong side.
The Akali Dal fears the Sikhs will be swallowed by either a Hindu-dominated India or a Muslim Pakistan. It may propose an independent Sikh state (Khalistan) in the Punjab, demand representation well beyond the Sikh share of the population, or ally with whichever larger faction offers Sikhs the most autonomy. A divided Punjab threatens the community's survival: Amritsar, the Sikh holy city, and the best Sikh farmland could end up on either side of a border.
Strategic situation: The Sikhs can't win alone, but their military reputation and economic weight in the Punjab give them leverage out of proportion to their numbers. They have to pick an ally and get as much as they can in return.
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, an Untouchable who earned a PhD from Columbia University, leads the fight for political power for India's 70 million Untouchables (Dalits). He argues that constitutional promises of equality mean nothing without the political power to enforce them. He demands two things in every future legislature. Reserved seats guarantee that a set number of legislators will be Untouchables. Separate electorates mean that only Untouchable voters choose them. Reserved seats alone would let the Hindu majority pick which Untouchables hold those seats; Ambedkar wants Untouchables to choose their own.
That puts the SCF in direct conflict with Gandhi, who in 1932 nearly fasted to death to block separate electorates for Untouchables. Gandhi sees separate electorates as British "divide and rule" that would permanently split Indian society. Ambedkar sees Gandhi's opposition as a way to keep Untouchables under caste Hindu control.
At 16% of the population, Untouchables are a large bloc. Whether they side with one faction or go their own way could decide the outcome at Simla.
Strategic situation: Every major faction wants the SCF's support, and the SCF wants guaranteed power in return. Every potential ally has a catch. Congress offers unity but opposes separate electorates. The League offers an alliance of minorities but may not deliver. The British offer protection, but they are leaving.
The Hindu Mahasabha is a Hindu nationalist organization whose guiding force is V. D. Savarkar, a former political prisoner convicted of terrorism against the British. It wants a strong, modern, industrialized Hindu nation (Hindustan) built around Hindu civilization and culture. It champions cow protection, Hindi as the national language, and teaching the classical Hindu texts.
Unlike Gandhi, the Mahasabha rejects nonviolence and is willing to use militant tactics in defense of Hindu interests. Unlike Nehru and the Congress secularists, it insists that India is fundamentally Hindu. The RSS, its paramilitary wing, can put large numbers of militant followers in the streets on short notice, which gives the Mahasabha more influence than its seats at Simla would suggest.
Strategic situation: The Mahasabha competes with Congress for Hindu loyalty, arguing that Congress secularism sells out Hindus. It needs to pull Hindu delegates away from Congress without looking so extreme that moderates run toward a deal with the League.
The Communists see the independence struggle as cover for class exploitation. In their view, the British, Indian capitalists, feudal landlords, and religious leaders all work to keep India's workers and peasants down. The CPI wants revolution: abolish the feudal landlords, put workers in control of industry, and replace religious divisions with class consciousness.
During the war the CPI backed Britain, on Stalin's orders, once Britain and the Soviet Union were allied against Hitler. Congress and the nationalists have not forgiven it. The party could follow Marx and Lenin's revolutionary strategy, Stalin's directives, or Mao Zedong's model of peasant revolution, and its members may not agree on which.
Strategic situation: The Communists carry the stigma of wartime collaboration with the British. Their natural allies are workers, peasants, and anyone fed up with both Congress and the League, but revolutionary rhetoric scares off moderates. They have to decide whether to work inside the conference or use it as a platform to call for revolution outside it.
The princely states cover about a third of India's territory. Two of the most important princes are at Simla. The Nizam of Hyderabad is a Muslim ruler of a mostly Hindu state of 16 million people. Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir is the reverse: a Hindu ruler of a mostly Muslim state. Both claim their treaties with Britain guarantee their independence no matter what happens to the rest of India.
Strategic situation: The princes want independence, or at least autonomy, and will deal with whoever protects it. They can play Congress and the League against each other. If India unites under a strong central government, their independence is over.
Undivided India has roughly 700,000 villages, most of them home to a few hundred people. Village leaders (zamindars, council heads, and local notables) speak for the India most Indians actually live in, where few people have ever seen a British official, a Congress pamphlet, or a Muslim League broadside. Most Indians are rural and illiterate, and most are Hindu. They care about land, water, taxes, and who holds power locally, not the constitutional questions debated at Simla.
Village leaders have no formal place at elite conferences like Simla. But any democratic settlement depends on their support, and in a national referendum or election the village vote will decide the result. Village leaders may present to the conference during the debate over the British draft, on behalf of the rural majority whose future is being decided by others. Before their presentations, each village leader may once open a session with a one-minute word from the village: how the people at home are taking what they have heard from Simla so far.
Strategic situation: Every faction claims to speak for the villages, and few listen to them. The village leaders' leverage is that no democratic outcome works without rural support. Their problem is getting elite leaders to care about land and taxes when the agenda is about constitutions.
Not every role is filled every semester. Your role sheet assumes you will meet some of these people; if one is absent, work with the others.
| Faction | Delegate | Known for |
|---|---|---|
| British | Lord Wavell | Governor General; a soldier who proposed this conference |
| British | Sir Stafford Cripps | Governor General; Labour politician who led the failed 1942 mission |
| Congress | Maulana Abul Kalam Azad | Congress president; Islamic scholar |
| Congress | Jawaharlal Nehru | Gandhi's chosen heir; socialist and modernizer |
| Congress | Vallabhbhai Patel | Runs the Congress organization; leader of the 1928 Bardoli peasant campaign |
| Congress | Rajendra Prasad | Bihar leader; devout Gandhian and cultural conservative |
| Congress | Sarojini Naidu | Poet, first Indian woman to preside over Congress, champion of women's rights |
| Congress | Minoo Masani | Bombay democratic socialist and former mayor |
| Muslim League | Muhammad Ali Jinnah | League president; the "sole spokesman" for Muslims |
| Muslim League | Liaqat Ali Khan | League general secretary; Jinnah's deputy |
| Muslim League | Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy | League leader in Bengal; former provincial minister |
| Muslim League | Mumtaz Shahnawaz | Poet and League organizer among Punjab's women |
| (with the League) | Syed Mawdudi | Founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami; religious critic of the League |
| Gandhians | Narayan Desai | Twenty years old, raised in Gandhi's ashram (Ahimsa Pathiks) |
| Gandhians | Ravishankar Vyas | Gujarat organizer of nonviolent campaigns (Ahimsa Pathiks) |
| Gandhians | J. C. Kumarappa | Economist of village industries (Gram Swaraj Sangh) |
| Gandhians | Vinoba Bhave | Gandhi's first individual satyagrahi, 1940 (Gram Swaraj Sangh) |
| Akali Dal | Master Tara Singh | Leader of the Akali Dal and the gurdwara committee |
| Akali Dal | Giani Kartar Singh | Akali strategist; Punjab legislator from Lyallpur |
| SCF | B. R. Ambedkar | SCF founder; Labour Member of the Executive Council |
| SCF | Jogendranath Mandal | Bengal SCF leader; former Bengal minister |
| SCF | B. Shyam Sunder | Depressed Classes leader from Hyderabad |
| Hindu Mahasabha | Shyama Prasad Mukherjee | Mahasabha president; Bengal politician |
| Hindu Mahasabha | V. D. Savarkar | Former president; author of Hindutva |
| Hindu Mahasabha | Bhai Parmanand | Former president; Punjab Arya Samaj leader |
| CPI | P. C. Joshi | CPI General Secretary |
| CPI | B. T. Ranadive | Trade-union leader and Joshi's critic |
| CPI | Hijam Irabot Singh | Peasant leader from Manipur |
| Princely States | Maharaja Hari Singh | Ruler of Jammu and Kashmir |
| Princely States | Osman Ali Khan | The Nizam, ruler of Hyderabad |
| Village Leaders | Rajiv Darpan | Village council head in the United Provinces (fictional) |
| Village Leaders | Ranjendra Chaterjee | Union board president and schoolmaster in Bengal (fictional) |
| Village Leaders | Chenniyar Venkati | Landlord's clerk in Warangal, Hyderabad (fictional) |
Simla is a negotiation among factions with incompatible goals and unequal power. Having the right position won't be enough. You need to define the problem, frame your argument, know your audience, and build a coalition.
Framing: How you define the problem decides who agrees with you. Calling India "one nation" or "two nations" includes some people and shuts out others. Each faction frames the problem so that its own solution looks natural.
Audience: You make one argument to the Governors General, another to your followers, and a third to a potential ally. Good advocates adjust their appeal to values, interests, or fears depending on who they need to persuade.
Coalition-building: No faction at Simla can win alone. Even Congress needs allies to get the kind of independence it wants. Building a coalition means finding common ground with people who disagree with you on important things and deciding what you will give up. Coalitions held together only by a shared enemy tend to fall apart.
Leverage: Power at Simla is unequal. The British control the army. Congress has the largest following. The League can threaten partition, Gandhi can threaten a hunger strike, and the Communists can call for revolution. Know what leverage each faction has and when it makes sense to use it.
BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement): Before any negotiation, ask yourself what happens if the talks fail. Your BATNA is your best walkaway option. A faction with a strong BATNA can hold firm; a faction whose alternatives are worse than a bad deal has to bend. Judge every proposal against your BATNA, not your ideal outcome, and try to figure out the BATNAs of the people across the table.
The conference moves through three phases. They overlap and aren't tied to particular class days. Before it opens, you will study the historical background and meet with your faction.
Every faction except the British and the Village Leaders presents its position to the full conference. This is the one point in the game where every group is guaranteed time at the podium. Factions present in thematic groups:
The Governors General present their draft plan for India's future government to the full conference; this is their formal presentation. It sets the terms for everything that follows. Factions respond, negotiate, form alliances, and push for revisions. The Village Leaders present during this stretch. Deals get made in private and fought over in public, and revised proposals circulate. Factions may also call for nonviolent protest or direct action if they decide negotiation has failed them.
During the debate, the Scenario Director will put test cases to the conference: situations the framework will have to handle once it takes effect, such as a province that refuses the group it has been assigned to, a riot in a district where one community is a minority, or a prince who declares independence. The Governors General must say how their framework answers each case, and any delegate may propose an amendment in response. Expect the cases to aim at whatever is vaguest in the draft.
When they are ready, the Governors General issue a final recommendation. The conference ends in a vote, a referendum, a British decree, or collapse.
Each delegate gives a formal presentation to the full conference: most during the opening presentations, the Governors General when they announce their draft proposal, and the Village Leaders later, during the debate over the draft. Before presenting, you submit a written Argument & Evidence outline for your remarks. Your presentation should:
Here you are persuading decision-makers and rivals in a formal setting, where evidence, logic, and delivery count. Build your speech with Framing Your Argument.
Your victory objectives are listed at the end of your confidential role sheet, and objectives can differ even within a faction. A delegate who strays too far from their core identity and constituency loses, even if the overall outcome looks good for their side. The Scenario Director decides whether a delegate has strayed too far and announces that judgment after the scenario ends.
You begin the conference in a faction, and you caucus with it. You are not bound by it. Any delegate may negotiate with other factions or with the Governors General on their own, make a separate agreement, take a different position from their faction in public, or stop caucusing with it altogether. A faction cannot speak for a member who disagrees.
Independence has limits. Your victory objectives do not change if you break with your faction, and a delegate who strays too far from their core identity and constituency still loses. Some actions also need more than one person. How well a protest or direct action works depends on how many of a faction's leaders back it, and a few actions require the agreement of a whole group or a majority of its delegates.
All delegates have the right to speak from the podium, and the Scenario Director may step in to protect that right. If the Governors General keep ignoring requests to speak, the Scenario Director may report them to the Prime Minister in London, who can recall them. London may also recall a Governor General when the Scenario Director reports large-scale communal violence, or when London refuses to approve a decree. The two Governors General act together; if they cannot agree, the Scenario Director hears both and decides. The Governors General, in turn, can use the Scenario Director as a police force to keep order.
Any faction may call on its followers to act at any time. The call must be made publicly, from the podium.
How well an action works depends on: - How many of the faction's leaders back it - How many followers the faction has - Whether other factions join or oppose it - Whether other groups, especially the Gandhians, work to calm things down
Nobody knows in advance how a protest or direct action will turn out. The Scenario Director weighs these factors and announces the result.
A threat is free; an action is not. You may hint at what your followers might do in private, but nothing happens until it is called from the podium.
Each role sheet ends its Strategy Advice with Your move: one special action your character can take, such as a strike, a resignation, or a refusal to sign. Unless your sheet says otherwise, you announce it from the podium, it takes effect when announced, and the Scenario Director decides what follows. You may announce your move on your own; support from others in your faction makes it stronger, and their open opposition weakens it. Each move can be used once, and if your sheet offers two options, choose one. The Governors General's powers (arrests, bans, troops) work the same way, by public announcement or by a note to the Scenario Director.
Gandhi is not at Simla in person. When all the Gandhian delegates (both groups) agree, they can together become Gandhi. Whoever speaks as Gandhi wears the white cotton cap, so everyone knows it is Gandhi talking and not one of the delegates. As Gandhi, they:
They remain Gandhi for as long as all of them agree with what "Gandhi" says, and there is no limit on how often they can do it. If any one of them disagrees, Gandhi falls silent.
Once per game, the Gandhian delegates may announce from the podium that Gandhi has begun a fast unto death, and name the demand that will end it. Both Gandhian groups must agree on the demand; if they cannot, there is no fast. While the fast lasts, no framework may be signed. The Scenario Director reports on Gandhi's health, and the longer the fast runs, the higher the risk of unrest. The fast ends when the demand is met or the Gandhians call it off. A fast still running when the Governors General present the final framework must end first: if the Gandhians do not call it off, the conference ends in Collapse.
The RSS is a separate organization whose members overlap with the Mahasabha's. The Mahasabha can call RSS volunteers into the streets only through a public call for protest or direct action, backed by a majority of its delegates.
Once per game, each prince may bankroll another faction's campaign, if that faction accepts. The prince announces it from the podium or tells the Scenario Director in a note, naming the faction and what the money is for. The Scenario Director counts the money in any referendum and in how the public responds to that faction's protests. Taking a prince's money has a price: rivals will call the faction the princes' tool.
The Governors General write the draft and final framework in thirteen numbered sections. Your role sheet's Victory Objectives refer to them by number:
A framework that every party reads differently is not a settlement. The final framework must give a plain answer to each of these questions:
Two terms used in many victory objectives: one India (or one nation) means a single state in which no province or group has a right to leave later; groups of provinces inside that state still count.
The Scenario Director scores every delegate's victory objectives against the text as written. If a clause can reasonably be read two ways, it counts as not met for every delegate whose objective depends on it. Before you sign, make sure the framework says what you think it says. If your sheet's victory levels don't mention your personal objective, it counts toward your grade alongside your result. Any outcome your sheet does not list is placed by the Scenario Director somewhere between partial victory and defeat.
When the Governors General are ready, they present a final framework (using the Proposal Template) and invite every delegate to sign or decline it as a whole.
The Scenario Director then scores each delegate against the Victory Objectives on their role sheet.
In a referendum or vote, use these rough figures for the religious makeup of British India:
| Group | Approximate Share |
|---|---|
| Muslims | 22% |
| Caste Hindus | 58% |
| Untouchables | 16% |
| Sikhs | 2% |
| Christians, Jews | 1% |
| Other | 1% |
These figures exclude the princely states. Don't assume all Hindus or all Muslims will vote the same way. The Communist Party calls religion the "opiate of the masses," and both Congress and the Muslim League have secularists among their leaders.
Many Untouchables consider themselves Hindu. Whether they vote with caste Hindus or as their own bloc could swing the result.
Delegates will get pulled into technical questions of constitution-making. The ones who do well will also have an answer to a bigger question: What does it mean to be a nation? An answer that fits your victory objectives and persuades others will carry more weight than any technical detail.
The scenario follows the political situation in India in June 1945, with a few deliberate departures from the historical record.
The real Simla conference did not include the princely states (they were called to separate meetings), the Hindu Mahasabha (a cultural organization, not a political party), the Communist Party (monitored and excluded by Churchill), or village leaders (no mechanism existed for them to take part). The scenario seats all of them anyway, because each shaped what happened: the princes controlled a third of India's territory, the Mahasabha could mobilize militants through the RSS, the CPI had a real following among workers and peasants, and village leaders represented the majority of Indians, whose support any democratic settlement needed.
Sir Stafford Cripps was not at Simla in 1945; he returned to India with the Cabinet Mission in 1946. The scenario makes him Wavell's partner so that the two British players disagree. Minoo Masani attends with the Congress delegation, though he never sat on the Working Committee. Syed Mawdudi, whose Jamaat-e-Islami opposed the Muslim League in 1945, attends alongside the League delegation and begins the conference caucusing with it, as its critic from the religious right; he is not a League member and is not bound by its decisions. The village leaders are fictional composites.
The real conference lasted about three weeks (June 25 to July 14, 1945). The scenario runs longer, which leaves time to work through the issues and opens up more possible endings. The Governors General will respond to whatever happens and may or may not bring the conference to a close.