The British government's intentions were simple - they wanted to preserve their Empire in India and in Sudan. They had suffered bad defeats in the initial fighting in India in 1857 and later in Sudan during the Mahdi rebellion. And they also had alliances with fickle Indian kingdoms who sent tens of thousands of soldiers to fight in wars across the globe. The risk of soldiers and of civilians having access to the same arms and getting together to fight a rebellion against the British was too great especially once Indian nationalism began to express itself in the movement for independence. In the end, in 1947, the British left not because they wanted to or because the Americans pressured them to - the fact is that more than a million Indians had fought in WW-2. The prospect of a rebellion by several hundred thousand soldiers was too much for a country that had narrowly won a war that threatened its very existence, and which it won with the support of the Americans and the Soviets.