Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  His interest in politics started in London, where he listened to Naoroji, just elected as the first Indian to sit in Parliament. On his return to India he initially opposed the idea of the Muslim League and of separate electorates but that did not stop him taking advantage of them to get elected to the Imperial Legislative Council in 1909. A supporter first of Gokhale, he, like Gandhi, turned to Tilak during the First World War, became a supporter of the Home Rule League, and eventually a firm supporter of the Muslim League. Initially he worked closely with Gandhi, although he saw Gandhi as more of a social reformer than a nationalist leader and questioned his support for the British war effort in the First World War. It was Jinnah who led the political opposition to the Rowlatt Acts while Gandhi’s oratory fired the masses to protest. Up until 1925 it was perfectly possible that it would have been Jinnah who emerged as the political leader of the nationalist movement but he disagreed with Gandhi strongly on two points. First, he thought civil disobedience was flawed and that the way to ensure home rule quickly was through reasoned negotiation with the British. Secondly, he thought Gandhi was using India’s Muslims cynically. He objected to the Khilafat Movement, through which Gandhi had harnessed Muslim anger at the way the British were treating the Ottoman emperor who was still the Caliph. This had, he correctly felt, been rendered pointless by Atatürk turning Turkey into a secular nation and who had no intention of restoring the Caliphate. Jinnah came to see the Khilafat Movement as a Congress ploy to marginalise the League. Strongly principled, and not one to compromise, Jinnah left Congress after a stormy session in Nagpur in 1920 when he was howled down for opposing satyagraha. His train was stoned at stations all the way home to Bombay. Gandhi emerges at his most vitriolic and scheming in opposing Jinnah. Later, once the Khilafat issue had, as Jinnah predicted, died out, Congress again opposed Jinnah’s 1927 proposals, the Delhi Proposals, designed to find common ground between Congress and the League. It was another of those tragic missed opportunities that would ultimately lead to 1947.

  In 1918, Jinnah married again, this time to Rattanbai Petit, always known as Ruttie, daughter of one of India’s two great Parsi houses and twenty-four years his junior. Her family strongly opposed the marriage, but it produced a daughter and the family lived together in comfort on Malabar Hill in Bombay. His obsession with politics and Ruttie’s bohemian nature meant that the marriage struggled. They separated in 1929 and soon after Ruttie died.

  Much has been made of Jinnah’s apparent aloofness to Ruttie but, despite her parents’ disapproval – Jinnah never spoke to his father-in-law until the day she died – theirs was a genuine love match and Ruttie’s death affected him deeply. Her death, coming soon after Congress’ rejection of his Delhi Proposals, and later the depressing, empty years following the Simon Commission, marked a particularly low point in his life. He returned to London. From then on it was his sister, Fatima, who looked after him, particularly as he developed the early stages of the lung disease that would eventually kill him.

  In London, living in Hampstead, Jinnah got to know Sir Muhammad Iqbal. He eventually became a keen disciple of Iqbal and participated in the first of the London Round Table conferences, but devoted the first half of the 1930s to his law practice. Shahid Hamid first met him in 1932 when he was an officer cadet at the British Royal Military College at Sandhurst. He had gone to London for the weekend with his brother-in-law and was sitting having a cup of tea in the Park Lane Hotel. Jinnah walked past their table and ‘noticing a questioning look in our faces, he stopped’ and joined the two young cadets in an easy and interested conversation. Hamid, a product of Aligarh University, and who would go on to be a general in Pakistan, became an instant admirer.21

  Others who knew him well also give the lie to the stereotype of the humourless, dour Jinnah of legend. Sarojini Naidu, one of Gandhi’s greatest admirers and later an important Congress politician, held an even greater admiration for Jinnah.

  Never was there a nature whose outer qualities provided so complete an antithesis of its inner worth. Tall and stately, but thin to the point of emaciation, languid and luxurious of habit, Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s attenuated form is the deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance. Somewhat formal and fastidious, and a little aloof and imperious of manner, the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve but masks, for those who know him, a naïve and eager humanity, an intuition as quick and tender as a woman’s, a humour gay and winning as a child’s. Pre-eminently rational and practical, discreet and dispassionate in his estimate and acceptance of life, the obvious sanity and serenity of his worldly wisdom effectually disguise a shy and splendid idealism which is the very essence of the man.22

  In 1934 he was persuaded by Muslim leaders in India to return as the Government of India Bill began to increase the possibilities of independence. Re-established on Malabar Hill in Bombay, Jinnah would devote the remaining fourteen years of his life to realising his vision of Pakistan, although it would not quite work out the way he originally envisaged.

  Before the 1937 elections, Jinnah approached Congress to try once more to work out some sort of power-sharing agreement. In the event the League did not perform well and Gandhi and Nehru, flush with their own success, and still refusing to accept the notion of a separate Muslim entity within India, reneged. They could not see the need for the League, judging that they had sufficient control both in the provinces and in the central federal legislature. In fact they actively went about appealing to Muslims, causing Jinnah to mount a counter campaign portraying Congress as an anti-Muslim party that he accused of violent Hindu nationalism. It was, on reflection, ‘one of the gravest miscalculations by the Congress leadership in its long history’,23 and perhaps the last time when some sort of power-sharing could have been worked out and an arrangement which would, given their share of the vote, have been to Congress’ advantage.

  It was a rejection that had a profound affect on Jinnah. Once again Congress had refused to work alongside him. He was now determined to pursue the idea of Pakistan, whatever it might look like, and to establish the League as the sole voice of India’s Muslims. He realised that part of Congress’ success was their superior organisation and he set about creating a League structure that looked almost identical to that which Gandhi had initiated in the 1920s. Iqbal rightly pointed out that part of the reason the League had done so badly in the elections was because the ‘Muslim masses have so far, with good reason, taken no interest in it’.24 The League must appeal to the poor just as Congress had done. A two anna25 annual membership fee was introduced, half what Congress were currently charging, and a district structure was put in place.

  Jinnah’s task was always going to be more complicated because, insist as he might that the League spoke for all India’s Muslims, it was very clear that it did not and the two Muslim majority provinces, the Punjab and Bengal, had manifestly not elected League administrations. In 1937 in Bengal the League had won only 39 seats but independent Muslims had won 42. In the Punjab there were 71 Muslim Unionist members while the League had just 1. Clearly he had his work cut out. Nehru, now more waspish, noted that ‘his creed was enormously successful . . . always to avoid taking any positive action which might split his followers; to refuse to hold meetings or to answer questions; never to make a progressive statement because it might lead to internal Muslim dissensions.’26

  Jinnah was helped by the outbreak of war and a Raj that realised that Congress would prove an unreliable partner. After Linlithgow’s rash declaration of war in 1939, the Raj increasingly turned to Jinnah as being a more sympathetic ally, and treated him as a community leader on a par with Gandhi. Linlithgow and Jinnah established a working understanding. On 18 October 1939, Linlithgow assured Muslims that: ‘It was unthinkable that we should proceed to plan afresh, or to modify in any respect any important part of India’s constitution without again taking counsel with those who have in the recent past been so closely associated on a like task with His Majesty’s Government.’27 Jinnah, L
inlithgow later added, had given him ‘valuable help by standing against Congress claims and I was duly grateful’.28

  In March 1940, taking advantage of these more favourable winds, the League produced a statement of their position. The Lahore Resolution, drafted by the respected jurist and member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, demanded a united homeland for Muslims and the creation of an independent Muslim state. The press declared it as a triumph for Jinnah although it was predictably repudiated by Congress. But whatever the media may have thought, the Lahore Resolution was not an accurate portrayal of Jinnah’s position. Only a few months before, Jinnah had said that any future constitution must recognise that there were ‘in India two nations who must share the governance of their common motherland’.29 Why would the League, so determined to be the sole spokesman of India’s nearly 100 million Muslims, opt for a homeland that would exclude a large proportion of them? Even if at this stage they thought it was realistic that the Punjab and Bengal may be included in this new state undivided, with strong Muslim guarantees of the rights of what would be minority Hindu and Sikh communities, they would still be excluding tens of millions of Muslims in Bombay, where they made up about 18 per cent of the population, and the huge Muslim communities across the United Provinces, Bihar and Oudh.

  Jinnah’s true position was surely best served by having the same ‘strong centre’, the power base in Delhi that enabled the Raj to function and which Nehru and Patel had quickly realised was key to governing any future independent nation. The only way that Jinnah could truly speak for all India’s Muslims would be if he could have a secured role in that. The issue was how to persuade Congress, particularly after their brutal repudiation of his approaches in 1937. Was the Lahore Resolution therefore more of a bargaining counter, a statement that would serve to unify Muslims, make the League impossible to ignore and force Congress and the Raj to come to terms? Jinnah’s behaviour in the latter half of March and April 1947 would suggest that perhaps it was. When Wavell debriefed the British Cabinet in Downing Street on 28 March, he said that ‘although he [Jinnah] would continue to press for Pakistan in the widest sense, he no doubt recognized that there was no chance of securing this’ but that he could reach a stage ‘where it was impossible for him to go back on his public statements’. However, Wavell thought that ‘there was still some hope that when faced with the practical difficulties of partition that both sides might achieve agreement on a federal scheme’.30

  Jinnah was also very likely to have been influenced by the British government’s 1939 White Paper on Palestine. What was happening in Palestine was watched closely from India, with many of the grumpier Raj types complaining that, for a tiny country with a fraction of India’s population, it seemed to get much more attention. ‘Palestine was “chicken-feed” when compared to India’, thought Geoffrey Lamarque, an ICS officer, though it seemed though to ‘be of enormous interest to the people of England’. Having the Palestine affair put before India was a ‘shock’. Britain had ‘her priorities in the wrong order’.31 Although the White Paper was never in fact formally approved, it acted as a policy framework within which Westminster subsequently addressed the issue of a Jewish homeland – in other words, the issue of a religious minority living among a much larger Arab population. It actually said that it was not British policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state as that would have been ‘against the will of the Arab population of the country’. It also rejected the Jewish call to partition Palestine. Crucially, however, it went on to say that the British government’s objective was to establish, within ten years, an independent Palestine in which Arabs and Jews shared government ‘in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safe guarded’.32 To Jinnah, struggling to establish exactly what it was the League wanted, it must have offered a very workable solution.

  The League’s subsequent success in the 1946 elections, winning 86 per cent of the vote in the Central Assembly and 79 per cent in the Provincial Assemblies, and the dispatch of the Cabinet Mission that May, seemed to vindicate Jinnah’s approach. He interpreted the Cabinet Mission Plan, with its emphasis on a strong centre responsible for defence, foreign affairs and communications running a federation of provinces whose governments would represent their respective communities, as basically helpful. He had accepted the plan on 6 June 1946. His subsequent refusal to participate in the Constituent Assembly, which should have been able to turn this plan into a new constitution, was because he thought that Congress and to some extent Wavell had double-crossed him. Instead of the provinces being compulsorily grouped, which, Jinnah thought, was what the Cabinet Mission had intended and would mean that the League could speak for Sind, the North West Frontier Province, Bengal, and, he hoped, the Punjab and Assam; instead Congress were insisting on a looser, voluntary system which would have considerably weakened Jinnah’s claim to command a key role in the central government. Although the League did subsequently join the Interim Government in October 1946, they came ‘to fight rather than to co-operate’33 and Jinnah’s line was increasingly to push for a separate Pakistan, in other words for partition, in the hopes that the reality of this might bring Congress to compromise. In February 1947 he had said very publicly that the Muslim League would not yield an inch of ground in their demand for a separate Islamic State of Pakistan and he started to raise the issue of dividing the army, the very idea of which would shock both the British and Congress. He was making the issue of a Muslim entity, Pakistan in its widest sense, something that could not be ignored, but he was expecting the British and Congress to come up with the solution more along the lines of the Palestine model. It was, as Wavell had noted, a dangerous tactic. Whereas Gandhi saw it as a sacred duty to keep India united, some in Congress, the pragmatists like Patel, were for letting the League have their ‘rural slum’ on the grounds that it would soon prove untenable.

  Felicity Wavell’s wedding to Peter Longmore had been duly celebrated on 20 February. The number of guests was 1400. There were glorious wedding presents, ‘heaps of gold and silver’ from the many maharajahs and nawabs who came, and ‘the reception was held in the Moghul Gardens’, the gardens of Viceroy’s House, ‘which were already blooming in a riot of colour’.34 Given that they were tended by 418 gardeners, this was perhaps as expected. It was the same day as Attlee announced Britain’s departure and Mountbatten’s appointment. Wavell made his farewell broadcast on 22 March. Its tone seemed to sum up all his paternalistic affection for the India he had known. He said:

  I came close to knowledge of the common Indian people. I learnt enough of the language to speak with the villagers where I camped and shot with my shikharis in the hills of Kashmir. My first independent command on active service was a detachment of thirty three Indian soldiers, a VCO [a Viceroy’s Commissioned Officer – see glossary], eight Sikhs, eight Punjabi Mussulmans, eight Dogras and eight Pathans – all magnificent men.35

  He spent his penultimate evening having dinner with his old friend Auchinleck; they played mess games with the military staff after dinner. But that world, the world of sahibs and memsahibs, of polo matches and clubs, of durbars and maharajahs, of the Raj in all its genteel fragility, was ending.

  Mountbatten was sworn in as viceroy on 24 March. The Raj mustered all its impressive ceremonial for the last time. Mountbatten, a serving rear admiral, the substantive naval rank to which he had reverted at the end of the war, was ‘in full regalia and Lady Mountbatten was dressed in ivory brocade and wore medals’, noted Shahid Hamid who was present.36 They moved slowly to their red and gold gilt thrones in the Durbar Hall to fanfares of trumpets and escorted by the Viceroy’s Bodyguard, the Indian Household Cavalry, now reduced to one squadron half Sikh, half ‘Punjabi Mussulman’, dressed in long black jack boots, scarlet tunics and puggarees. They had been converted to a parachute squadron in the war, getting ‘ready to jump on Rangoon if the atom bomb had not forestalled them’, wrote Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Massey, their c
ommanding officer, who had been busy training them up for this important moment.37 As the Chief Justice of India, Sir Patrick Spens, administered the oath, another fanfare sounded and Mountbatten was duly installed as the twentieth and last governor general and viceroy. It was, he reflected, slightly ironic. He had proposed to Edwina twenty-five years earlier in that very palace, sitting out a dance while he was accompanying the Prince of Wales on his tour. Lady Reading, the vicereine of the day, disapproved of the engagement, saying she thought Mountbatten lacked prospects.38

  It was then time for Mountbatten to address ‘all the political leaders, ruling princes, civil and military officers’ and all the many ranks of the Raj arrayed before him in Edwin Lutyens’s great hall. ‘I believe’, he said, ‘that every political leader in India feels as I do the urgency of the task before us’.39

  Mountbatten’s appointment had been generally well received. He was seen as young, being only forty-six, energetic and had a ‘good war’ in which he had been singled out by Churchill for his forward-leaning views and his interest in technical development. He was given responsibility in 1941 for the Combined Operations Staff, a planning team consisting of naval, army and air force officers who would lead in preparing for the invasion of Europe in 1944. Their first operation, the raid on Dieppe in August 1942, saw significant casualties and attracted considerable criticism so that Mountbatten’s position came under threat. However, in August 1943, Churchill promoted him again, over the heads of many more senior officers, to be Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in South East Asia, an appointment that culminated in the defeat of Japan and the complexities of dealing with the emerging nationalist movements in Burma, Malaya and Indonesia. Mountbatten was not only a cousin of King George VI, which gave him considerable standing among many in India, particularly the princes, but he was also, somewhat unusually for someone of his background, sympathetic to the Labour government and enjoyed good relations with Attlee and several of the Cabinet, including Cripps. He was therefore in many ways an ideal choice – a progressive, capable member of the royal family but one who could be relied on to take a liberal view in India and, most importantly, not to embarrass the government.