LONDON: Precisely at 10.40 G.M.T today [July 18] ... the great new Dominions of India and Pakistan were born and the 400,000,000 people of India came into their inheritance of full political freedom when in the British House of Lords, a Royal Commission of Peers with ceremony and ritual dating back to William the Conqueror`s time, announced the Royal Assent to the Indian Independence Bill, writes Fraser Wighton, Reuter`s political correspondent. `Roi Le Veult` in the Norman French of 1066 A.D., the Clerk of Parliament, Sir Henry Baddeley, uttered the f ateful words `The King wishes it.` In this single pregnant phrase was the birth and the inheritance. The ceremony which transferred Britain`s 200-year-old responsibility for India to the people of that country, took barely 15 minutes.

[Meanwhile, according to news agencies in Lucknow,] Fifteen persons were killed and 20 injured in communal incidents in Aligarh district on July 15 and 16, according to information received at the headquarters of the Provincial Government. Followed an altercation in the weekly village market at Khair, the visitors, while returning to their homes, burnt houses and assaulted people, some fatally. There were minor repercussions in Aligarh city and the village of Atr auli. Dawn Delhi