Mountbatten arrived in India in February 1947 and was given until June 1948 not 1947 to complete his mission. Impatient to get back to Britain and advance his own naval career, he decided to bring forward the date by 10 months, to August 1947 . How crucial were those 10 months?I would argue, they could have meant the difference between a simply violent partition and a horrifically genocidal partition.The context for a bloody partition was set with the decision to sever Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west in half giving Jinnah what he called a "moth-eaten Pakistan." That killed any hopes of a federated India, which was Jinnah's preference, if it allowed for power sharing and autonomy to Muslim majority provinces.To decide the fate of 400 million Indians and draw lines of division on poorly made maps, Mountbatten brought in Cyril Radcliffe, a barrister who had never set foot in India before then and would never return afterwards. Despite his protestations, Mountbatten gave him just five weeks to complete the job.All of India, and particularly those in Bengal and Punjab, waited with bated breath to find out how they would be divided. Which village would go where? Which family would be left on which side of the new borders?Working feverishly, Radcliffe completed the partition maps days before the actual partition. Mountbatten, however, decided to keep them secret. On Mountbatten's orders, the partition maps were kept under lock and key in the viceregal palace in Delhi. They were not to be shared with Indian leaders and administrators until two days after partition.Yet, Mountbatten, the man who would fret incessantly about what to wear at official ceremonies, made little effort to devise arrangements for how resources would be divided, or shared.Nowhere does the unfinished business of partition bleed more profusely than in the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir.Would a little more attention and a few more weeks of effort in 1947 have spared the world a nuclear-tipped time bomb that keeps ticking on both sides?We can never know the answer to this question.Nor can, or should, I believe, India and Pakistan blame the British and Mountbatten for all their problems. Seventy-two years on, they have only themselves to blame for missing opportunity after opportunity to fix the troubled relationship they inherited.By botching the administration of partition in 1947 and leaving critical elements unfinished including, most disastrously, the still unfinished resolution to Jammu and Kashmir . Mountbatten's partition plan left the fate of Kashmir undecided.Mountbatten, thus, bestowed a legacy of acrimony on India and Pakistan.The Kashmir issue is continuously oscillating from high to low burners and vice versa to engineer the theatrics of war and peace. These are contrived to confuse and distract the oppressed, deprived and exploited masses from the real issues of their existence. They use this chauvinistic nationalism to quell and distort the class struggle and perpetuate their odious rule. For generations this rule of capitalist coercion has brought misery to the region, which has the highest concentration of poverty in the world.The present-day Kashmir is an ugly legacy of this failing barbaric system. Kashmir presents a dark, bleak and gloomy picture. Ironically, the Indian-held Kashmir enjoys a special position in the Indian constitution. This special status was designed to soothe the feelings of discontent of the Kashmiris. But within this system, even the most special status is the most miserable one. The sinking valley is in misery of guns and roses . Roseso may bloom in Kashmir but may emit fragrance of fresh blood of Kashmiris 'blood whereas the deafening silence of United Nations is an evidence of murderous conspiracy to snatched away the rights of survival from a mockingbird, deprived of the fact that India is in the pit of rage and obsession will harvest the worst direful consequences