Partition
Page 1
Dedicated to all those who lost their lives
in India and Pakistan in 1947
CONTENTS
List of Maps and Illustrations
Notes on the Text
Preface
1. January: The End of the Raj
2. February: A Victory for Congress?
3. March: The Muslims Disagree
4. April: An Intractable Problem
5. May: Plan and Counter Plan
6. June: An Act for the Independence of India
7. July: Cuius Regio
8. August: The Noblest Act of the British Nation?
9. September: A Heap of Ashes
10. October: Divided Nations
11. November: Eius Religio
12. December: A Doubtful Legacy
List of Illustrations
Glossary
Notes
Notes on the Sources
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS
MAPS
All maps © ML Design
Pagelink: India, 1947
Pagelink: Punjab, August 1947
Pagelink: Bengal, 1947
Pagelink: Kashmir, 1947
ILLUSTRATIONS
Pagelink: © Imperial War Museums (HU 87259); Pagelink © Imperial War Museums (HU 87261).
Pagelink: © William Vandivert/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
Pagelink: © Associated Newspapers/REX/Shutterstock; Pagelink © National Army Museum; Pagelink source unknown.
Pagelink: © Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images); Pagelink source unknown.
Pagelink: From the private collection of Major General Syed Ali Hamid; Pagelink source unknown.
Pagelink: Source unknown; Pagelink © Imperial War Museums (TR 842); Pagelink © Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images); Pagelink Wikipedia/Government of India; Pagelink © Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Pagelink source unknown.
Pagelink: © India Times; Pagelink © AP/REX/Shutterstock.
Pagelink: From the private collection of Major General Syed Ali Hamid; Pagelink source unknown.
Pagelink: © Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; Pagelink © AP/REX/Shutterstock.
Pagelink: Source unknown; Pagelink © Henry Bush/Associated Newspapers/REX/Shutterstock; Pagelink source unknown.
Pagelink: Courtesy of Robert Beaumont.
Pagelink: © Francis Tuker; Pagelink © AP/REX/Shutterstock.
Pagelink: © Uncredited/AP/REX/Shutterstock; Pagelink © Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images).
Pagelink: © Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images; Pagelink © Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
Pagelink: © Universal History ArchiveUIG/REX/Shutterstock; Pagelink © Margaret Bourke-White/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
Pagelink: © National Portrait Gallery, London; Pagelink © Max Desfor/AP/REX/Shutterstock.
NOTES ON THE TEXT
Place names. I have written place names as they were in 1947, so Bombay instead of Mumbai, Cawnpore instead of Kanpur, Ferozepore instead of Firozpur. I appreciate that there are some people who might be offended by this, as that in most cases these are the anglicised versions of the original Indian names. However, given that I am quoting contemporary accounts, it would not make sense to change them.
Language and terminology. Similarly I have throughout used the language and terminology common in 1947. Again this will seem anachronistic, even offensive, to some but it is logical given that I am trying to understand how people thought seventy years ago. The term ‘classes’, for example, to denote the various different racial and religious groups from which the British Indian Army was recruited, will grate with some readers, but it was the way in which those who divided that army thought.
Money. The currency across India in 1947 was the rupee, usually written as Rs, which is the convention I have followed in this book. The rupee was pegged to the pound sterling at the rate of Rs 13 to £1, so a rupee was worth a bit less than two shillings in old British money. A rupee was divided into 16 annas, so an anna was worth about one old-style British penny. The rupee coins had the King Emperor’s head on one side and a prowling tiger on the reverse. Pakistan continued to use Indian currency throughout 1947.
In 1947, rupees were often expressed, as they still are today in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, as lakhs, which is 100,000, or as a crore, which is 10,000,000.
Style of address. Indian titles and honorifics are as confusing as British ones. I have tended to avoid them throughout so that Nehru is just Nehru, rather than Pandit Nehru, Pandit being a term of respect for a learned person; Patel plain Patel, rather than Sardar Patel, where Sardar means a chief or leader, and Mountbatten simply Mountbatten, rather than Rear Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma. It is tempting to refer to V. P. Menon by his honorific Rao Bahadur, which means Most Honourable, and which was awarded formally as a title together with a badge, but instead, for the sake of consistency, I have referred to him throughout just as V. P. Menon and Krishna Menon, unsurprisingly, as Krishna Menon to avoid confusion.
Indian Words. There are, obviously, a lot of Indian words and expressions in the text. Anything in italics is explained in the glossary here.
PREFACE
In 2008 I was the military commander of British and Coalition troops in Basrah and the three other provinces designated by the Coalition Authority in Baghdad as constituting the South Eastern Sector of Iraq. It was a time of some confusion. British troops had been withdrawn from Basrah city the previous summer. We were now based at Basrah airport, with insufficient numbers to do much more than protect the airport and unable to exercise much influence on the immediate area and very little on the outlying provinces. When we asked London for instructions we were told that our job was to stay put, ostensibly to help reopen the airport but in effect simply to be a continuing British presence to bolster an American effort that would be seen to be weakened morally, if not practically, should we withdraw. It was a strange strategy that did not convince many, least of all the Iraqis. British soldiers are at their best in such awkward situations but even their patience was tried by being restricted to guarding a perimeter while being subjected to periodic rocket attacks.
We had become a presence that supposedly conveyed international influence but in effect could be said to have damaged the United Kingdom’s standing in the world. We had stayed on too long and with insufficient strength to do anything. We made this point to the then prime minister, Gordon Brown. I grew to respect his personal integrity and concern but his government struck us as having a weak team of strategic advisers. Ultimately, by developing a plan to deploy soldiers directly with the Iraqi Army, we were able to help them reoccupy Basrah and thus drive out the Iranian-backed militias that had been making life for Basrawis so miserable. But it was a difficult operation during which we lost the initiative. We then regained it and the British Army can look with some pride on the fact that Basrah is today the most peaceful part of Iraq, although that must remain a relative judgement given that the country as a whole is fragmenting.
But why had we stayed on so long in Basrah when it had become counter to our interests? Why hadn’t we left when we had originally intended, that is, within eighteen months of the 2003 invasion? It was not as if we were overseeing the reconstruction of the Basrah economy or its infrastructure, which had been so badly damaged by a combination of Saddam’s general disinterest and occasional vindictiveness. Basrah in 2008 suffered from the same power shortages, lack of proper sewerage and mass unemployment as it had in 2003, despite all the effort that had been made to get London to take an interest in its development.
T
he British Army’s experience in Iraq, and later in Afghanistan, also led many of us to think about how previous British armies would have coped and, in particular, how the whole mechanism of Imperialism had worked. We had been reared on the exploits of the British Indian Army, and their legacy was difficult to avoid in Iraq. We compared ourselves to them, generally unfavourably, and asked whether there were lessons to be learned from how they had organised and conducted themselves. Equally interesting was how the British administration had worked in the Empire; how had we managed to run huge economies like India while now we seemed unable to get the power stations working in Basrah?
Yet as we looked deeper we began to see cracks in the model of British India. The British Indian Army had undoubtedly been a most impressive if surprisingly delicate machine, yet the much-vaunted administration of the Raj did not seem to have achieved that much. The Indian peasant in 1932 had the same income and standard of living as when the Mughal Emperor Akbar died in 1605, just after the East India Company was founded in 1599. Was what we went through in Basrah actually just a repeat, albeit on a very small scale, of the same old British pattern of being unable to leave when it would have been in our and India’s best interests to do so? Staying on in Iraq achieved very little for our national interest but, more seriously, had our inability to leave India led to two of the worst losses of life in the twentieth century – the Bengal famine of 1942–44 and Partition in 1947? And the great British Indian Army, designed specifically to keep internal order, and which had accomplished such an extraordinary victory over the Japanese in 1944, had then seemed powerless to act. Why?
What we were trying to do in Iraq was obviously on a totally different scale to India and, as such, the two are incomparable. Yet Basrah seemed to me to be a microcosm of the same issue, namely that Britain has long intervened overseas, as have many nations, usually for reasons of profit and occassonally for prestige, sometimes unwillingly, and then been unable to leave – at great cost to itself and the local people. This year, 2017, is the seventieth anniversary of Indian independence, the birth of Pakistan and the end of the Raj. It is timely to re-examine exactly what happened in 1947.
I have written this book from a soldier’s perspective. It does not purport to be a full history of Indian Independence and the birth of Pakistan. Such a study would be a lifetime’s work, fill many volumes and is correctly best left to professional historians. Rather what I have attempted to do, as someone who has played a small part in British interventions around the world, is to explore the thinking of and pressures on the politicians, administrators and soldiers of seventy years ago, and the effect their subsequent actions had on the people of the Indian subcontinent. Inevitably, given my background, I have a better understanding of the British players in this tragedy than I do of their Indian and Pakistani counterparts. Neither am I an apologist for Empire. That is not my role, but what is both terrible and fascinating to explore is what happened when that extraordinarily thin crust, which represented law and order under the Raj, collapsed into holocaust.
This has been an absorbing book to write, but it is only fair to warn the reader that it is also a violent and shocking story, as it must be when so many people died in such terrible circumstances; from the outset you will be confronted by scenes that may make you shudder. I have told it month by month, following the sequence of events as people experienced them at the time, dipping back where necessary to explain the history behind them.
1. JANUARY
THE END OF THE RAJ
‘I see with worry and dismay the rising tide of ruin which is engulfing this great country of India’
(A. P. HUME – Indian Civil Service)
Field Marshal Lord Archibald Wavell, Viceroy of India and ruler of half a billion souls, had returned to Delhi from London at the end of December 1946 as bitter a man as his even temper and undemonstrative character would allow. Reserved, almost taciturn, Wavell had been appointed viceroy in October 1943, having previously been commander-in-chief in India, a post to which he had been transferred, having been sacked by Churchill as commander-in-chief Middle East in 1941. There was an element of the consolation prize in his being made viceroy, Churchill having previously toyed with making him Governor General of Australia. It was a curious way of selecting the incumbent of the most important post in the Empire. The two men detested each other. Wavell thought Churchill was a blundering amateur strategist and blamed him for the diversion of British forces from North Africa to Greece, which resulted in the German breakthrough in early 1941. After his first year as viceroy Wavell’s opinion had not changed, describing Churchill’s government as ‘negligent, hostile and contemptuous’.1 For his part Churchill thought Wavell was the epitome of the cautious, unimaginative general, unwilling to take risks, and in turn blamed him for the failure to retake Tobruk. Once Wavell became viceroy, Churchill corresponded with him directly just twice between October 1943 and June 1944, once demanding to know why Gandhi had not yet died.2 He described Wavell, inappropriately, as a ‘contemptible self-seeking advertiser’ and ‘talked about the handicap India is to defence’.3
Despite Churchill’s antipathy, Wavell turned out to be as successful a wartime viceroy as the extraordinary circumstances allowed. Almost his first act was to visit Bengal, where the most terrible famine of the twentieth century had been raging since 1942, and to divert army resources from the campaign against the Japanese in Burma to bring what relief was still possible at that late stage; over 1 million people had already starved to death. Although not from the Indian Army himself,4 Wavell had considerable experience of India, having spent thirteen years of his life there – two and a half as a child, five years as a young officer and six years as commander-in-chief of the Indian Army and then viceroy. Consequently he knew the country well and had a deep affection for it in that slightly paternalistic manner so characteristic of the Raj. He was generally well liked and respected within the admittedly narrow circle of the administrative classes in India. On New Year’s Day he dined with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, a British regiment stationed near Delhi. Captain Shahid Hamid, an Indian officer on the staff of Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief, remembers him ‘looking cheerful in spite of the very heavy burden which he is carrying. He is a great man. He is straight and honest. Even Gandhi, whom Wavell regards as an unscrupulous old hypocrite, cannot fool him’.5
Yet the circumstances that January were very different to those wartime years and the problems Wavell faced were in many ways more intractable than ending the Bengal famine or mobilising India to defeat Japan. His job now was to bring to an end ninety years of direct British rule in India, and to hand over power to representatives of an Indian people bitterly divided between the majority Hindus, led by the Congress Party, and the minority Muslims led by the All-India Muslim League who were demanding their own jurisdiction, termed Pakistan, but it was not clear what form that jurisdiction would take. Neither did he have the support he felt he should have in London. Although Churchill had been defeated in the July 1945 general election, Wavell found he was getting on no better with the new Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee. Handling the subtleties of politicians was not one of Wavell’s strengths. Attlee’s Cabinet were not, he felt, demonstrating ‘sufficient directness of purpose’.6 He had gone to London in December 1946 with an Indian delegation comprising of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh representatives but the negotiations had proved fruitless. Their immediate problem was to make the putative Constituent Assembly work, a body that could, should the Muslim League support it, have come up with a plan for the handover of power. Wavell had told the Cabinet that if it did not, then ‘we should not be able to enforce British rule in India beyond 31st March 1948’. He advised abandoning the four southern provinces7 and conducting a gradual evacuation of the British community rather like a military withdrawal. The Cabinet had debated his recommendations on New Year’s Eve. They did see merit in announcing a date by which the Raj would end but thought the rest of Wavell’s pl
an too drastic and too military. Wavell had few supporters in the Cabinet. They thought him defeatist. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, told Attlee on New Year’s Day that he should be recalled and replaced by ‘somebody with courage who would, even if he were the last man left there would come out with dignity and uphold the British Empire’.8 Attlee, who knew India quite well and had served on the 1927 Simon Commission, agreed that Wavell had ‘a defeatist mind’. He had kept him hanging around in London throughout December although he did graciously lend him his aeroplane so the viceroy could be back in Delhi for Christmas. Bevin went on to say that the Cabinet themselves were badly divided. Sir Stafford Cripps, a veteran negotiator of the handover of power, was ‘so pro Congress’ that ‘a balanced judgment is not being brought to bear on the importance of the Muslim world’ while A. V. Alexander, who had recently assumed the Defence portfolio, was ‘too pro Muslim’.9
However calm he may have appeared to young Captain Hamid at that New Year’s Day dinner, and however dignified he was as he knighted Reginald Savory, the Adjutant General of India, before they sat down to eat, Wavell was, as he himself admitted, very tired. It had been ‘rather an unhappy year. It is a great strain on a small man to do a job which is too big for him, if he feels it is too big’.10 The issue was not just the apparent intractability of the opposing Indian parties, or the failure of any British initiative to achieve a solution that was mutually acceptable, but that law and order were beginning to break down across the vast subcontinent. What had started as an anti-British movement, a nationalist campaign that had initially encompassed all religions and ‘classes’, as the Raj referred to the different Indian ethnic and religious groups, orchestrated by Congress against British unwillingness to hand over power, had become a violent conflict between Hindus and Sikhs on the one hand, and Muslims on the other, which now teetered on the brink of becoming civil war.