by John Keay
What did change was the Viceroy. In March 1947, just as Malcolm Darling was completing his long ride, Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived as Wavell’s replacement. Unlike Wavell, the new Viceroy enjoyed Whitehall’s utmost confidence plus the luxury of having drafted his own brief. With numerous other advantages – a royal connection, an open mind, an attractive wife and an infectious sense of urgency – Mountbatten would plunge straight into the constitutional impasse between Congress and the League. The princes would therefore have to wait.
In May 1947, a year after it had been tabled, the Cabinet Mission Plan was finally ditched along with the all-party Constituent Assembly. The demands of Congress and the League remained irreconcilable, but an uneasy lull in the massacres in the Punjab offered some hope. June brought the critical turnaround, when Mountbatten endorsed Partition and quickly followed this by announcing an earlier deadline for its enaction. Only in July, as the days ticked away and Congress agonised over the loss of Pakistan, did it dawn on Mountbatten that it was the princely states that ‘held the key to a negotiated settlement …’
V.P. Menon, Mountbatten’s ‘political reforms commissioner’ and the unofficial intermediary between Congress and the Viceroy, has been credited with coming up with the terms of the deal. These had something for everyone. Mountbatten would dragoon the states into signing Instruments of Accession to the new India (and in a few cases to Pakistan); Congress, in return, would accept Partition and the loss of Pakistan; and the princes would be mollified by having to hand over their powers only in respect of defence, foreign affairs and communications – in effect no more than they had surrendered under the system of paramountcy. Moreover, by way of further reassuring them with a residual British connection, India and Pakistan would join the British Commonwealth, so giving Mountbatten something to crow about and saving British blushes with a face-saving formula that was of some strategic value in an increasingly bipolar world.
Given the urgency of the situation, it was a persuasive package. But as with Partition itself, the self-imposed haste so concentrated ministerial minds that the wider issues of implementation received little attention. The princes would not all sign on the dotted line, Congress would honour the terms of their Instruments of Accession only for a matter of weeks, the Muslim League would do its utmost to render India as ‘moth-eaten’ as Pakistan by encouraging princely defections, and Mountbatten would wash his hands of the whole business as quickly as he could. In short, the power-brokers seemed oblivious to the anxious faces under the countless village pipal trees in the back of beyond. Chauffeur-driven negotiators sped down the Delhi boulevards without sparing a thought for the dark moustachioed drivers in undarned cotton rags atop their creaking bullock carts.
2
Counting the Cost
It has often been asked why no one seems to have foreseen the hell that Partition was about to unleash. The Calcutta killings of 1946 and those elsewhere in Bengal and Bihar gave ample warning, as did the atrocities perpetrated in western Punjab in early 1947. A few officials, both Indian and British, did anticipate trouble and called for reinforcements. But in Delhi the excitement over independence claimed the moment to the exclusion of all else. Victory in the freedom struggle was not to be gainsaid. It was assumed that the entire nation shared in the rejoicings and that, in the prevailing spirit of goodwill, Partition could be effected without bloodshed. The haste with which it had been adopted might actually help. Instead of laborious consultations and the tensions that must result from them, most of the people affected were to be presented with a fait accompli. Territory would be allocated to India or Pakistan on the basis of the majority community; minorities, Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, were to be reassured with soothing words and the glorious prospect of freedom.
Aside from an arrogance born of bureaucratic habit and indifference to the plight of the lower castes, this attitude overlooked the considerable novelty of communities being equated with territories and nations with sovereign states. It also ignored the fact that a British India riddled with princely states had never been the uniform entity that partitioning implied. And it took no account of South Asia’s prior acquaintance with political division and the concept of sovereignty as something layered rather than absolute. Nehru insisted that a sense of all-Indian nationhood could be traced back into the mists of antiquity; but for most of its interminable past the Indian subcontinent had not been governed as one. Fragmentation was in fact the norm, and a strong, centralised polity as championed by Congress very much the exception. Despite claims to the contrary, history was on the side of Partition.
In yet another paradox, it has been argued that it was not Jinnah but Nehru himself who was ultimately responsible for Partition and so, indirectly, for the imminent holocaust. The demand for Pakistan, say the protagonists of this view, need not have meant separation.1 Jinnah wanted guarantees for his ‘Muslim nation’ in the form of a ‘Pakistan’ composed of all the existing Muslim-majority provinces of British India – so including the whole of Bengal (with Calcutta) and the whole of the Punjab (possibly with Delhi). The result in terms of population would have been something much nearer parity between this so-called ‘Greater Pakistan’ and a rump India composed solely of the non-Muslim-majority provinces. Such an arrangement should have sufficed to preclude mass migration and the killings that would accompany it, because Muslim opinion within the unpartitioned subcontinent would be well represented in the Constituent Assembly and could be decisive in the formation of a central government. Nothing if not consistent, in 1946 Jinnah had demanded a similar parity in respect of the interim government; indeed the Cabinet Mission’s ‘grouping’ of provinces could be read as foreshadowing this ‘Greater Pakistan’.
Jinnah’s somewhat excessive demands were informed by past experience. In the 1930s, Congress ministries in provinces with a vociferous Muslim minority, notably UP, had been accused of ignoring the sensibilities of Muslim constituents and shunning the claims to office of the Muslim League. Arguably, this could now be prevented; the League had emerged from recent elections much stronger, and the possibility of its retaliating in its own Muslim-majority provinces could be expected to act as a deterrent to Congress exclusivity.
Moreover, a Pakistan within India might be more manageable than one outside it. The anomalies and inconveniences of Pakistan’s two halves being themselves partitioned by a thousand kilometres of potentially hostile territory would be largely negated; a Pakistan within India might be less vulnerable to internal ethnic and linguistic contradictions than if left to its own devices; and the League would be well-placed to forge alliances with other non-Congress parties, like those representing the lower-caste and no-caste communities or lesser minorities like the mixed-race Anglo-Indians. Such an alliance might even contest power with Congress in the central government. Thus Jinnah, provided his ‘Greater Pakistan’ was forthcoming, had much to gain by not insisting on Partition. Some loose form of federation, or just a treaty that preserved a façade of unity, might suffice. It would be a small price to pay in terms of diminished sovereignty, and the arrangement was anyway to be subject to revision after ten years.
But if this was indeed what Jinnah wanted, he never actually said so. Adamant about what he would reject, he could be remarkably reticent about what he would accept. Nor was it what he was offered. For to Nehru, an India hobbled by a subordinate Pakistan had begun to look a worse option than an India relieved of a sovereign Pakistan. Only a strong central government could tackle India’s massive social problems, oversee the incorporation of the princely states, root out feudal and colonial attitudes, plan the framework of a modern economy, and set the world a proud example. A weak federal centre as posited by Jinnah would paralyse the state-building process and play into the hands of other possible separatists, for instance in the north-east and the south of the country. New Delhi would therefore be better writing off Pakistan completely and bidding good riddance to the unbending adversary who claimed to be its ‘sole spokesman’.
> This did not, though, mean giving Jinnah the Greater Pakistan he wanted. The quid pro quo of conceding sovereignty was that the new Pakistan must be pared down to its Islamic heartland. With non-Muslims (Sikhs and Hindus) outnumbering Muslims in both the eastern half of the Punjab and the western half of Bengal, there was some logic to these two great provinces being themselves partitioned. In effect, instead of a Greater Pakistan albeit within India, Jinnah must be obliged to settle for a lesser Pakistan albeit outside India. ‘Maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten’ was his own description of the new construct; he would never accept it, he had declared. But in 1947, with his supposed bluff over separation called, that was precisely what he did have to accept. And hence, as the countdown to Independence proceeded, it was Nehru who readily endorsed Mountbatten’s Partition plan and Jinnah who, when asked to do so, merely hung his head. The gesture seemed to signify despair as much as assent.
*
August, though mid-monsoon, is not an unpleasant month in Delhi. Cloudbursts douse the heat and clearing skies excite the vegetation. Trees erupt into flower, puddles shrink into sward. Were the subcontinent’s New Year timed for the growth cycle instead of the daylight cycle, it would surely fall in August. In 1947, as mid-month approached, there was much optimism and some understandable self-congratulation. Mountbatten had chosen the date for the handover of power: 15 August. He thought it propitious as being the second anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, an event in which his own part as commander of Allied forces in South-East Asia would of course be noted. India’s astrologers also deemed it propitious, and Pakistan’s leadership contented itself with insisting on just a twenty-four-hour precedence. By opting for 14 August, Pakistan would be winning independence ahead of India, and so from the hands of the British government in London rather than from the Congress government in Delhi.
Incredibly, as it now seemed, both nations had wrested their freedom through largely non-violent pressure; and although the final round of negotiations had been conducted at breakneck speed, relations with London had never been better. In fact, the restraint shown by both sides had set a valuable precedent for future decolonisations elsewhere. The majority of erstwhile India remained intact. And even Pakistan, the two-part exception, looked to have secured the resources – military, diplomatic and economic – to defy the odds stacked against it. Bisection, though regrettable, had to be better than dissection; and if that was the price of liberation, then so be it. The delights of Independence would quickly allay the pangs of Partition.
Yet when addressing New Delhi’s Constituent Assembly on the eve of Independence, Nehru invited the people to reflect as much as to celebrate. The tone of his famous oration was more messianic than triumphant, its twin themes of redemption and destiny sounding positively Churchillian.
Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially … [The] future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges … The day has come – the day appointed by destiny – and India stands forth again … We have much to do before we redeem the pledges … no resting for any one of us until we redeem our pledge in full.2
The rhetoric lost nothing by repetition; a moment so ‘solemn’ positively invited a rambling retrospective. The ‘pledge’ was to ‘the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity’, while that quaint idea of a ‘tryst’, a prearranged meeting at an appointed hour, was intended to evoke a sense of common progression. History had ordained it, struggle had confirmed it. For Nehru, a formidable intellect and an ardent socialist whose moods could be attributed to his excessive workload, 15 August 1947 marked the nation’s longed-for epiphany. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ he intoned. Out with the Old; in with the New.
Jinnah, a minaret of a man compared to Nehru, erect and impeccable with corbel-like cheekbones and a coiffed cupola of silver hair, was both more cautious and more cautionary. Addressing Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August, he seemed scarcely able to believe that his call for a sovereign Muslim nation was being realised. Only what he called ‘an unprecedented cyclonic revolution’ could have brought about the birth of Pakistan; it was the consummation of a scheme so ‘titanic’, so ‘unknown’, that it had ‘no parallel in the history of the world’. Yet for Pakistan to function, grievances like those voiced by Malcolm Darling’s anxious informants must be quickly addressed. Bribery and corruption would be put down ‘with an iron hand’, he warned, jobbery and nepotism would never be tolerated, and ‘black-marketing’ in foodstuffs was the greatest crime of all.
No less important was the suppression of what Jinnah now called ‘the angularities of the majority and minority communities’. In an outspoken assertion of cross-communal equality – one that would come to haunt the new nation – the man already hailed as Quaid-i-Azam (‘Supreme Leader’) announced to the Pakistan Assembly that:
You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another … [If] we keep that in front of us as our ideal … you will find that in the course of time Hindus … cease to be Hindus, and Muslims … cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.3
Nehru, the champion of secularism, could not have put it better. For Jinnah too, freedom meant casting off not just the bonds of foreign rule but those of communal rivalry. The ‘Muslim nation’ must be all-inclusive. To a state predicated and won on the uncompromising basis of a shared religion he now offered as its guiding principles ‘justice and complete impartiality’. The success of the Pakistan movement was down to ‘an evolution of the greatest possible character’, plus those vaguely ‘cyclonic’ forces. In keeping with this unspecified agency, Pakistan might ‘become one of the greatest nations of the world’, provided it demonstrated neither ‘prejudice or ill will’, neither ‘partiality or favouritism’. Islam received not a single mention in the speech. Its unacknowledged presence was like that of a no-longer-welcome guest. Evidently the advent of nationhood heralded a new departure in national definition.
Mountbatten, too, milked the moment for all it was worth. Where so many of his countrymen had floundered over the last three decades, he had triumphed in a matter of weeks. The nettle of Congress–League distrust had been grasped, the Gordian knot of irreconcilable claims and counter-claims summarily severed. Not a single British life had been lost in the act of disengagement; and though about to be anything but peaceful, the bisection of the subcontinent was deemed to be unmarred by actual war. In British eyes, Mountbatten made the loss of empire almost palatable. The manner of its surrender was portrayed as a credit to all concerned, and the abiding friendship of the successor states was construed as a benediction on the whole two-hundred-year Raj. Individually, each of the successor states had opted to join the British Commonwealth; each was pledged to liberal values and democratic government; neither felt inclined to humiliate the ex-imperialists; and both retained the services of some senior British personnel. It was a more amicable parting of the ways than had seemed possible during the previous decades of acrimonious struggle.
Like the monsoonal cloudbursts, the plaudits rained down on the beaming Mountbatten from all sides. New Delhi invited him to stay on as Governor-General. Prime Minister Attlee noted that ‘broadly speaking the thing went off well’, and ‘we left behind so much good will’. Churchill, defender of the empire and inveterate opponent of Indian independence, was greatly reassured by India’s and Pakistan�
�s willingness to join the Commonwealth. And to the already impressive royal connections of his last ever Viceroy, King George VI added an earldom. While modestly deflecting the praise, Mountbatten yet lapped it up. His showmanship had paid off; a career that might so easily have been tarnished by failure or tarred by the shame of retreat had in fact been burnished. Yet, looking back many years later, he would be less sanguine about his achievement and a lot less delicate. ‘I fucked it up,’ he told John Osman, a BBC journalist, in 1965.4
Wrong-footing critics with outrageous volte-faces was all part of the famous Mountbatten charm, yet this disclaimer was not insincere. At the time his main regret had been his failure to secure an invitation to become Governor-General of Pakistan as well as India; for, much to his fury, Jinnah insisted that he himself would be Governor-General of Pakistan. Jinnah was deeply suspicious of the cosy relationship between Nehru and the Mountbattens – especially that between Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten – and he didn’t trust the ex-Viceroy to act as an impartial arbitrator in the division of the spoils between the two dominions, principal among these being the army. Nor, unlike Nehru, could Jinnah afford to relinquish even the trappings of his authority to a post-imperial pawnbroker. From the Chittagong Hills to the North-West Frontier fissiparous tendencies already menaced the bipolar Pakistan. The new India could be expected to exploit them.