This dashing admiral, whose real dream was to direct the Royal Navy, had taken on the New Delhi assignment to see if, pulling off a personal coup, he could resolve ‘the India question’, not to divide any glory with Gandhi or Jinnah or to sign, in Irwin’s footsteps, anything like a ‘Gandhi-Jinnah-Mountbatten Pact’.
Troubled by the possibility of the Congress Working Committee endorsing the scheme, Mountbatten sought ideas from his staff to scuttle it. After a staff meeting on 5 April, his papers tell us, Mountbatten ‘decided to talk to Pandit Nehru that afternoon about Mr Gandhi’s scheme’.21 One of Nehru’s close friends, V.K. Krishna Menon, was also encouraged to work on him. ‘Krishna Menon and Ismay (chief of the Viceroy’s staff), at Mountbatten’s request, had a prolonged talk about Gandhi’s proposals,’22 and the Viceroy had Krishna Menon to lunch on his own as well.
A vital role was also played by V.P. Menon, the Viceroy’s talented reforms secretary, who had cultivated close relations with Patel. Though Patel was supposed at this stage to be excluded from discussions, V.P. Menon met him from day to day. We must assume that the Jinnah idea was discussed at these meetings, for it was V.P. Menon who wrote for Mountbatten and his team a paper entitled ‘Tactics to be adopted with Gandhi as regards his scheme’.
We do not have details of the various talks in the first part of April involving Mountbatten, Nehru, Patel, Ismay, Krishna Menon and V.P. Menon. But the record conveys both anxiety and activity regarding the Gandhi scheme, and there is evidence of Mountbatten’s effort to keep Patel detached from Gandhi.
On 1 April, after Gandhi had first outlined his proposal to Mountbatten, the Viceroy told Patel of his opposition to an inquiry in Bihar.23 The next day, when Gandhi brought up the inquiry, Mountbatten told him that he, Patel and the Bihar governor were all against it. According to Mountbatten’s account, Gandhi ‘flatly disagreed’24 with their reasoning; but the Viceroy’s ability to count on Patel’s support is noteworthy.
Aware, however, of Gandhi’s earlier hold over his Congress colleagues, Mountbatten feared a revival of the old magic. And during a three-hour meeting with Jinnah on 9 April, when Mountbatten tested the waters, he saw that the offer was likely to tempt Jinnah.
As Mountbatten recalled right after the talk, he began the interview by saying that ‘it was a daydream of mine to be able to put the Central Government under the Prime Ministership of Mr Jinnah himself’. Thereafter, Jinnah ‘once more appealed’ against ‘a moth-eaten Pakistan’. Continues Mountbatten’s record:
Some thirty-five minutes later, Mr Jinnah, who had not referred previously to my personal remark about him, suddenly made a reference out of the blue to the fact that I had wanted him to be the Prime Minister. There is no doubt that it had greatly tickled his vanity, and that he had kept turning over the proposition in his mind. Mr Gandhi’s famous scheme may yet go through on the pure vanity of Mr Jinnah!25
DEFEAT
But in two days the Viceroy’s anxieties were over. Gandhi’s Congress colleagues rejected his proposal, which was therefore never put to Jinnah. On the morning of 11 April Gandhi wrote a letter to Mountbatten, admitting defeat:
I had several short talks with Pandit Nehru, and an hour’s talk with him alone, and then with several members of the Working Committee last night about the formula I had sketched before you, and which I had filled in for them with all the implications. I am sorry to say that I failed to carry any of them with me except Badshah Khan…
I felt sorry that I could not convince them of the correctness of my plan from every point of view. Nor could they dislodge me from my position although I had not closed my mind against every argument. Thus I have to ask you to omit me from your consideration. Congressmen who are in the Interim Government are stalwarts, seasoned servants of the nation and, therefore, so far as the Congress point of view is concerned, they will be complete advisers (94: 283-4).
The ‘several members of the Working Committee’ with whom Gandhi talked are not all identified. If Azad was one of them, his rejection of the Gandhi scheme would have been inconsistent with his word to Mountbatten that the scheme offered the best hope of stopping bloodshed.
Nor do we know what passed between Gandhi and Nehru in their ‘several short talks’ or in their hour between themselves, when the ‘heir’ was in effect asked to agree to someone else becoming India’s first Prime Minister. But we can assume that the discussion was not about personalities or positions; it would have been about what was wise and feasible. The Congress leaders on their part had little doubt. A diary entry by C.R. tells us that ‘Gandhiji’s ill-conceived plan of solving the present difficulties’ was ‘objected to by everybody and scotched’.26
Yet the ‘ill-conceived’ plan was perhaps the last chance for peace and unity in India. It could have unsealed the division conceded by the 8 March resolution of the Working Committee. Gandhi understood what its ‘scotching’ meant. The next day (11 April), when two leaders of South Africa’s Indians, Yusuf Dadoo and G.M. Naicker, called on Gandhi, he said to them that India no doubt stood
on the threshold of independence. But this is not the independence I want. To my mind it will be no independence if India is partitioned and the minorities do not enjoy security, protection and equal treatment… If what is happening today is an earnest of things to come after independence, it bodes no good for the future.
‘I therefore feel ill at ease,’ Gandhi added. ‘But I am content to leave the future in God’s good hands’ (94: 286). And he was content to leave for Bihar.
On 12 April a ‘leading paper with a large circulation’ reported that Gandhi was leaving Delhi because he had ‘fallen out’ with the Working Committee. In the evening the man who had been comprehensively rejected called the report ‘sheer nonsense’ and pointed out that Azad, C.R., Patel, Nehru and Kripalani had seen him during the day. ‘We have our differences,’ Gandhi admitted, but he added he would be back ‘the moment [he] heard [Patel’s] summons’ (94: 294).
The sharpest difference in the world would not break his bond with his colleagues, whom he thought of as sons, or cause him to undermine their standing. Equally, however, his fullest loyalty would not hide the fact that in April 1947—as in the summer of the previous year—his ‘sons’ felt closer to the Empire’s guardians than to him.
At least one of Jinnah’s biographers, Stanley Wolpert, would later offer the view that Gandhi’s plan ‘might just have worked’. ‘Surely,’ Wolpert added, ‘this was a King Solomon solution’.27 That Jinnah’s acceptance was not to be wholly ruled out is suggested by his response in 1942 to a similar proposal:
If the British government accepts the solemn declaration of Mr Gandhi and by an arrangement hands over the government of the country to the Muslim League, I am sure that under Muslim rule non-Muslims would be treated fairly, justly, nay generously…28
On 12 April, just before he left for Bihar, Gandhi signed with Jinnah not the ‘solution’ he had envisaged but a joint appeal for peace proposed by Mountbatten:
We deeply deplore the recent acts of lawlessness and violence that have brought the utmost disgrace on the fair name of India… We denounce for all time the use of force to achieve political ends, and we call upon all the communities of India, to whatever persuasion they may belong, not only to refrain from all acts of violence and disorder, but also to avoid both in speech and writing any words which might be construed as an incitement to such acts (94: 290).
Gandhi had wanted Kripalani, the Congress president, to sign this appeal instead of or in addition to himself, but Jinnah said he would sign only with Gandhi. Yielding, Gandhi signed in Hindi, English and Urdu—his way of signalling a right to reach Muslims as well as Hindus. Also, whereas the draft shown to him had referred to ‘peoples of India’, Gandhi altered the phrase to ‘communities of India’. Even in defeat Gandhi was not accepting the two-nation theory.
On 6 May, when on Nehru’s invitation he found himself again in Delhi, Gandhi spent, as he would say to Mountbatten, ‘a ver
y pleasant two hours and three-quarters’ with Jinnah in the Lutyens-designed house the League leader had acquired on Aurangzeb Road (95: 46). Patel and others had tried to prevent the meeting but Gandhi said he would go to Jinnah ‘seventy times seven’ if necessary.
After the meeting Gandhi reported that he and Jinnah had agreed that ‘what we talk should remain between us’ (95: 42). But we know that Gandhi reiterated his opposition to partition. In a statement issued by Jinnah with Gandhi’s concurrence, the League leader said their discussions had covered
the question of division of India into Pakistan and Hindustan and Mr Gandhi does not accept the principle of division. He thinks division is not inevitable, whereas, in my opinion, not only is Pakistan inevitable but this is the only practical solution of India’s political problem (95: 411).
In his prayer-meeting talk the next day, Gandhi said:
I claim to have [Jinnah’s] friendship. After all he also belongs to India. Whatever happens, I have to spend my life with him (95:43).
At the sweepers’ colony on Delhi’s Reading Road (Mandir Marg), where Gandhi and Ghaffar Khan again stayed during the 1947 summer, there was occasional objection over the Qur’an verses in the prayers conducted by Gandhi. If that reading was to go, he replied, the Hindu texts too would be left out. It was a chance to teach tolerance, but the climate was not calm.
He was urged to visit the Punjab. When the call came he would go, Gandhi replied. Meanwhile he would hope to impact the Punjab from wherever he was. He asked the Punjab’s Muslim leaders to protect Hindus and Sikhs in their areas:
7 April: No matter how provocative had been the language of Hindus and Sikhs in the Punjab, that was no excuse for the barbarity and cruelty perpetrated on non-Muslims by Muslims in the areas where they were in a majority (94: 256).
But he did not make public his ‘Jinnah card’ or the Working Committee’s opposition to it. As in the past, he would champion the Working Committee even when it went against him; he knew of no nucleus of leaders who could steer India better than Nehru, Patel and company. He acknowledged Nehru’s role in assembling Asian leaders in New Delhi and conveyed to the gathering his understanding of Asia’s message:
1 April: All the Asian representatives have come together. Is it in order to wage a war against Europe, against America or against non-Asiatics? I say most emphatically ‘No’. This is not India’s mission (94: 212).
2 April: The first of [Asia’s] wise men was Zoroaster. He belonged to the East. He was followed by the Buddha who belonged to the East—India. Who followed the Buddha? Jesus, who came from the East. Before Jesus was Moses who belonged to Palestine though he was born in Egypt. After Jesus came Mohammed… I do not know of a single person in the world to match these men of Asia. And then what happened? Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West.
[T]he message of Asia… is not to be learnt through Western spectacles or by imitating the atom bomb. If you want to give a message to the West, it must be the message of love and the message of truth. I want you to go away with the thought that Asia has to conquer the West through love and truth.
Of course, I believe in ‘one world’. How can I possibly do otherwise, when I became an inheritor of the message of love that these great unconquerable teachers left for us?
In this age of democracy, in this age of awakening of the poorest of the poor, you can redeliver this message with the greatest emphasis. You will complete the conquest of the West not through vengeance because you have been exploited, but with real understanding…This conquest will be loved by the West itself (94: 222-3).
The visitors were aware of the violence occurring in India in the autumn of 1946 and in March 1947, and Gandhi expressed his shame at it. Yet the visitors seemed thrilled about India’s coming freedom. Someone brought lines written by the Arab poet, Mikhail Noema:
The spindle in Gandhi’s hand became sharper than the sword; the simple white sheet wrapping Gandhi’s thin body was an armour-plate which guns from the fleets of the master of the seas could not pierce; and the goat of Gandhi became stronger than the British Lion.29
3 JUNE PARTITION PLAN
On 20 April Jawaharlal publicly conceded Pakistan: ‘The Muslim League can have Pakistan, if they wish to have it, but on the condition that they do not take away other parts of India that do not wish to join Pakistan.’30 Nine days later, Prasad, who chaired the Constituent Assembly, spoke to it of the likelihood of ‘not only a division of India but a division of some provinces’.31
Unwilling as yet to declare it in public, Patel conveyed his acceptance of Pakistan to Mountbatten.32 ‘I for one cannot agree to Pakistan on any account,’ said Gandhi on 7 May, but it was also clear that his dissent would take the form of dissociation, not defiance. ‘When I say that I cannot bear it,’ explained Gandhi, ‘I mean that I do not wish to be a party to it’ (95: 42-3). And though Jinnah called partitioning Bengal and the Punjab a ‘sinister’ idea,33 he could advance no argument against it that did not also undermine his case for Pakistan.
‘Small Pakistan’ thus became, in April and May, the acceptable basis for negotiations involving the Congress, the League and the Raj that produced the independence-cum-partition plan of 3 June 1947. Unveiled simultaneously in New Delhi and London, the plan provided for a commission to demarcate borders for dividing Bengal and the Punjab, and for a referendum between India and Pakistan in the Frontier province (and in Assam’s Muslim-majority district, Sylhet). Their link with the British Crown ending, rulers of princely states were asked to enter into a relationship or ‘particular political arrangements’ with India or Pakistan or both.34
Invited to sessions of the Working Committee held on 31 May and 1 and 2 June to consider the plan (its elements were known to the Congress negotiators), Gandhi told the Committee that he ‘disagreed’ with it ‘but would not stand in the way’ (95: 192). Ghaffar Khan, Jayaprakash Narayan and Rammanohar Lohia also expressed unhappiness, but everyone else was in favour, and the plan was approved.
The Frontier province. However, Gandhi and Ghaffar Khan asked for a modification of the proposal for a referendum in the NWFP. Launched from 20 February, the League’s agitation against Dr Khan Sahib’s Congress ministry had acquired great intensity after the premier ordered the arrest of thousands of Muslims on rioting charges. ‘Islam in danger’ was the League’s battle-cry, people were ‘reminded of Bihar’ (95: 304), and Ghaffar Khan and his older brother were portrayed as pro-Hindu traitors.
The Viceroy and his team were sympathetic to the League’s demand for Dr Khan Sahib’s removal and fresh elections. A Congress ministry running a Muslim-majority province was viewed as a ‘bastard situation’ by Lord Ismay, who headed the Viceroy’s staff.35 Though opposing new elections, Vallabhbhai, who had privately concluded that the NWFP ‘would have to be written off’,36 and Jawaharlal accepted the referendum.
In the summer of 1947 the question of India or Pakistan in the Frontier province would be a choice between Hinduism and Islam and lead only to one result. As between Pakhtun identity and submergence in a Pakistan, however, the Frontier was capable of choosing the former. Ghaffar Khan and Gandhi therefore asked the Working Committee to ‘find out if the proposed plebiscite… could include the alternative of independence alongside the choice of India or Pakistan’.37
The Working Committee declined to do this. Gandhi continued to press Nehru, but Jawaharlal’s hands were tied.38 He wrote to Gandhi:
8 June: The British Government and the Viceroy are definitely committed to the referendum, and some of us are more or less committed. The question of the referendum is therefore a settled one, and it is not clear how we can get out of it.39
The truth was that by proposing the division of the Punjab and Bengal and again by killing the ‘Jinnah card’, the Working Committee had accepted the two-nation theory in all but name and prepared the ground for abandoning the faithful Khan brothers.
The brothers’ response was to boycott the referendum. Apart from the ce
rtainty of losing to ‘Islam’, they were also alert to the violence that a contest was likely to provoke. Backing their choice, Gandhi sought to strengthen the brothers’ hands for a revised objective: Pakhtun autonomy within a federal Pakistan, which would come into being on 14 August. India would be free on 15 August.
AGONY AND RESILIENCE
Dividing the summer between Bihar and Delhi, thinking about the Punjab and in May making a trip to Calcutta, Gandhi was often in agony. He felt that partition would lead to more violence, not less, but his Working Committee and ministerial allies thought the opposite. He felt that details of the division should be settled between the Congress and the League, without the mediation of the Raj; they disagreed. Having ‘scotched’ his Jinnah card, they seemed set also on a large army for India and on large-scale industrialization. The charkha had been forgotten.
He had been rejected on several fronts. ‘I feel as if I was thrown into a fire-pit and my heart is burning,’ he said from his prayer meeting in Delhi on 5 June. ‘God alone knows why I continue to live in spite of this.’ But he had no intention to die of self-immolation ‘to prove that I alone was right’.
‘I have a very big job to do,’ he claimed (95: 214-5). And he felt that he was being led, that his insights were of value. In the pre-dawn hours of 1 June, having woken up earlier than usual, he mused on his isolation. Manu recorded his words:
Today I find myself all alone. [Even the Sardar and Jawaharlal] think that my reading of the situation is wrong and peace is sure to return if partition is agreed upon… They did not like my telling the Viceroy that even if there was to be partition, it should not be through British intervention or under the British rule. They wonder if I have not deteriorated with age…
Mohandas: True Story of a Man, His People Page 80