Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  Auchinleck’s power was, in the words of V. P. Menon who saw it at first hand, ‘immense’.62 He was not only the arbiter of the Indian Army, which by 1947 still numbered over half a million men despite its post-war reductions, but also of the 50,000 British troops still in India. He was commander-in-chief of the Royal Indian Navy and Air Force and a key member on the Viceroy’s Executive Council, and effectively Member for Defence, although Baldev Singh had been appointed defence minister, at Nehru’s insistence, in the Interim Government in September 1946. This double-hatting, as both commander-in-chief and with responsibility for formulating defence policy, dated back to Curzon’s bitter row with Kitchener forty years before, which had ultimately led to the vindication of Kitchener and Curzon’s resignation as viceroy. But beyond that Auchinleck’s power rested on the fact that, with an increasingly ineffective police, and the Raj had never managed to establish a police force with equivalent morale and expertise to its army, his military forces, both Indian and British, were the only effective instrument of power in the government’s hands. It had been the army that had stopped the Great Calcutta Killings the previous August and it had been the army that had just managed to quell the unrest in the Punjab. The army also still had an extensive administrative and logistic element, with its own food supplies, farms, workshops and factories, a leftover from the war, which gave it self-sufficiency.

  It should, perhaps, have been obvious that, in the uncertain times ahead, the army would need to play a central role and that Auchinleck would have to work closely with Mountbatten to ensure that it did. Later he was very polite about Mountbatten. Talking to David Dimbleby in 1974, he said that Mountbatten was ‘very good indeed as Viceroy. A very difficult job and one had to support him’.63 But V. P. Menon thought that Mountbatten was ‘overwhelmed with the idea that the army and the services might not do as he said’64 and Shahid Hamid, admittedly a possibly biased observer given his dislike of Mountbatten whom he thought too pro-Congress, wrote that after Mountbatten and Auchinleck met on 31 March, Auchinleck returned in a frightful temper. Mountbatten had wanted troops to be used more in support of the civil authorities. Auchinleck had tried to persuade him that that course was ‘fraught with danger as they could become partisan. With communal feelings running high they should be used sparingly’.65 He told Hamid that Mountbatten did not understand India or the Indian Army. Mountbatten for his part wrote that Auchinleck was in ‘a frame of mind which made him more difficult to deal with than I can remember at any time since October 1943’.66 It was not an auspicious beginning. In the months ahead Auchinleck would become increasingly focused on the army itself and its beloved regiments rather than on the job it was there to do. The consequences would be serious.

  4. APRIL

  AN INTRACTABLE PROBLEM

  ‘It was Congress who insisted on partition. It was Jinnah who was against it’

  (AYESHA JALAL)

  By early April the ‘boiling heat’ of the Delhi summer had started. Gone were those few cool months of the Indian winter when the flowers are in bloom, the daytime temperature is bearable and when ‘a glimpse of paradise is vouchsafed to man and beast, to sustain them during the purgatory of the months ahead’, noted John Christie. No matter how long one lived in India, the summers never got any easier to bear. Spring is hardly noticed and then the hot weather starts, when ‘all living things move more slowly and seek the shade. A hot wind rides in from the desert like an invading army, its impact a physical assault. For weeks and months the sky is hidden behind a lurid pall of dust, and night brings little or no relief from the obsessive heat’.1

  Normally the beginning of the hot weather would signal a move to Simla, the ‘hill station’ 7,000 feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas where the Raj escaped during the summer so that the business of government could continue in relative comfort. Simla boasted a complete set of houses and offices, Viceregal Lodge being a rather weird cross between a Scottish shooting lodge and a Victorian seaside hotel completed for Lord Dufferin in 1888. Not all viceroys or their vicereines liked it. ‘The outside is hideous,’ complained Lady Minto. ‘It is quite bare without one creeper, and reminds me of a nouveau riche house on the 1000 islands.’ She didn’t like the interior much either. ‘The furniture is very bad and the electric light fittings criminal. The Finance Minister had a fit of economy when the house was being built and reduced the hall by half, which quite spoils the proportions.’2 Around this strange house, clustered on the hillside, were the residences of the commander-in-chief and the senior officials, more in keeping with a Kent resort than the mountains of Asia. Here the Raj’s social season had taken place for the last sixty years: balls, dinners, picnics among the stunning scenery. A special narrow gauge railway ran up the mountain from Kalka in the plains through 107 tunnels and over 864 bridges to bring the enormous bureaucracy with all its documents, staff, sahibs and families for the annual pilgrimage.

  This year there was to be no migration. The government would stay in Delhi and the critical debate on the future of India would take place in the relentless, sapping heat of a Delhi summer. By May the average temperature would be 40 degrees Celsius, dropping slightly in July when the air would gather the humidity of the coming monsoon. It was, many thought, the hottest spring for seventy-five years. Few buildings had air conditioning. Mountbatten’s study did, which he kept at 21 degrees. When Gandhi visited, Lady Mountbatten would come in and turn it off, fearing that the frail old man would catch pneumonia given that the outside temperature was 43 degrees.

  For hundreds of millions of Indians what was about to happen was remote and largely irrelevant. Even in the better-off villages, those lucky enough to be on fertile land, they lived in a morass of dust, or mud in the rainy season, and ordure, mostly in flat-roofed mud houses. The unreliability of the rainfall, and the almost total lack of agricultural development under the Raj, meant that, as the population gradually expanded, so land became more scarce; holdings of half an acre were considered rich and many villagers were in hock to their landlord or the moneylender. They would probably never have seen a British official and a visit by the District Officer to their village, should it happen, would be a major event.3 Their priorities were growing enough food to survive, their concerns were their neighbours and their landlords, their politics almost entirely centred around their community and the implications of being governed by the British or by Congress opaque. Despite the extensive reorganisation of both Congress and the League, and their mass recruitment campaigns, they remained largely urban parties.

  In southern India, which would be more or less untouched by the coming miseries, Delhi seemed even more remote. Geoffrey Lamarque, who was so annoyed at how much attention the Labour government was paying to Palestine, had been stationed in Madras. He felt that when the government in Delhi legislated, ‘It would only have in mind the Indus and Ganges Valleys’. The Madras government and the central government were ‘in a state of perpetual conflict, always having violent verbal arguments’ as what Delhi ordained was ‘not appropriate to south India because the conditions were so different’. The south had a way of life that, he felt, worked remarkably smoothly. There was very little communal tension in Madras with its overwhelming Hindu majority and a Brahmin led government. The British had been there for 300 years in 1947, far longer than in places like the parvenu Punjab, and Anglo-Indian relations were easy although there was still the usual Raj refusal to socialise regularly with the locals. English was spoken widely and well and often as a first language. The ICS tended to pay lip service to what they were told to do. When they were instructed to impose a sales tax, for which Delhi demanded income tax figures, Lamarque simply sat down with the telephone book, rang up a few traders, asked what their turnover was, and sent in figures that were decidedly advantageous. One young officer, sent to demand tax from a recalcitrant village, set out with his platoon but never found it; no one in the government had ever been there before. This was not the all-efficient British bureaucracy that
legend associates with the Raj but it was a form of governance that fostered an easier coexistence. Madras would escape the horror to come because it was a Hindu province and the transfer of power would go remarkably smoothly.4

  Even more removed from what was going on in Delhi were the many peoples who lived on India’s fringes. Before he moved to join the viceroy’s staff, John Christie had been the deputy commissioner, which meant he was also inspector of police, judge, district engineer, inspector of schools, public health officer and district agricultural officer in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the strip about forty miles wide and one hundred and fifty miles long that ran parallel to the Bay of Bengal, twenty miles inland from the port of Chittagong. The country was low bamboo-covered hills interspersed with numerous rivers, which provided the only means of transport apart from elephants. Christie had two: Daisy, who was over fifty years old, and a young tusker called Lal Bahadur, who proved his worth in taming the wild elephants who roamed in herds. It was a tribal area, with three chiefs, rampant disease and one small Baptist mission hospital. The cropping pattern was to clear an area of jungle, cultivate it and then move on in a couple of years once the soil was exhausted. For Christie and his young family it was an idyllic period, but the affairs of Delhi and of wider government hardly impinged on a way of life that had not changed in a millennium.5 Soon the future of Chittagong would come into all too sharp a focus.

  Christopher Beaumont, who would also play a major part in the events of 1947, had earlier been posted as agent in another tribal area, over a thousand miles west of Chittagong, on the border of the Punjab and Baluchistan. Dera Ghazi Khan, where the temperature reached 46 degrees in the summer, was a land of Muslim tribes who lived in scattered villages across a landscape that was barren beyond the Indus valley. There was the usual tribal rivalry but ‘no political movement, no political activity’ and the ‘local population had been completely disinterested in the war’.6 Soon that would also change very much for the worse.

  For many others serving on India’s borders the political turmoil of Delhi and the violence in the Punjab and Bengal sounded more as a distant rumble than as something that would soon change their lives for ever. J. P. Cross was posted with his battalion of Gurkhas at Razmak in Waziristan ‘in the isolation of the North West Frontier, still using heliograph and semaphore’ to communicate ‘and in its pre-war, esoteric ritual, much of what went on India reached us as rumour or not at all. Mail from home took six weeks and any newspapers sent out were as slow if not slower. One top priority signal, “Operation Immediate”, took six weeks to reach us from Delhi. Certainly none of us had wirelesses, yet I do not remember that the lack of news worried us’. The local cinema was still showing the Allied crossing of the Rhine as headlines on its newsreel (two years after it happened), although Cross admitted that even they were a bit surprised not to hear about the plan to create ‘a new state called Israel until six months after the event’. But in the spring of 1947 he noted ‘hordes of Pathans’, the tribesmen who lived on the Frontier, ‘moved eastwards on camels and foot. Several weeks later they returned in one long convoy, shooting bullets in the air, laden with booty, having raided Kashmir’. He realised then that ‘big trouble was brewing’.7

  The few remaining ICS officers were still concerned about what would happen to them and their families and what financial provision the government would make for them. There had been the usual deafening silence from both Whitehall and Delhi when anyone mentioned money. The problem was that, when the issue was first discussed in 1946, the British government had insisted that the full financial liability for their compensation be born by the new Indian government. Patel, at his best in handling such matters, had strongly objected; first he thought that it was unfair for India to pay British pensions and, secondly, he did not want to allow the Indian members of the ICS the opportunity to retire. Wavell, true to his word, had been pursuing this issue vigorously and had advised Mountbatten to get it resolved before he arrived. Mountbatten duly took his advice and the Cabinet agreed generous terms for both British and Indian officers, which Britain would pay for. It was a good package, which increased Mountbatten’s popularity and ‘it was a great encouragement’, noted Ismay, ‘that the men who had borne the heat and burden of the day in India, and were about to lose their means of livelihood, were at least assured of monetary compensation on a not ungenerous scale’.8 Congress, however, continued to resist the package being offered to Indian officers, arguing, with some justification, that just because the British were leaving it did not mean that the administration of India should necessarily stop with them.

  Many also felt that what was going on in Delhi was not commanding sufficient attention in London. There is no doubting Attlee’s personal commitment to India. He knew the country well. He had served alongside the Indian Army at Kut in 1916, been a member of the Simon Commission in 1928, an experience he found deeply frustrating, and played a major role on the Select Committee in Parliament that had developed the 1935 Act. He had in fact led the opposition to much of what had originally been proposed, arguing that it left too much power in the hands of the viceroy, allowed the princes too great a role and was ‘premised on a mistrust of Indians’.9 His position was that India should be a fully self-governing Dominion within a set timescale and that its constitution should enshrine the ‘strong centre’. During the war, when Churchill reacted to any talk of furthering Indian independence with a growling fury, Attlee had taken the opposite view. He believed the war effort would have been better served by full Indian cooperation and he was strongly critical of Linlithgow whom he thought a ‘crude imperialist’.10 It was Attlee who persuaded Churchill to send Cripps out in early 1942, although when Cripps’s mission failed, as, some would agree, Churchill had always intended it would, he did subsequently endorse imprisoning the Congress leadership until the end of the war.

  By April 1947 though, Attlee’s approach suffered from two disadvantages. First, India was but one of the several significant overseas issues he had to deal with. In January 1947 he had announced, to Conservative Party criticism, the withdrawal of large numbers of British troops from the Middle East although not from Palestine where 80,000 remained. On 14 February, Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, had announced that the issue of Palestine would be referred to the United Nations. The Cabinet were consumed with trying to stem Jewish emigration from Europe and were preparing for another summer of bloody violence between settlers and the native Arabs. Those like Geoffrey Lamarque were right to complain that Palestine seemed to be taking too much of the government’s time but it was the question that dominated the international headlines.

  Secondly, there is little in Attlee’s correspondence to suggest that he really understood what Jinnah was seeking or that he had come to terms with what Pakistan should be. His advice on India in those months was one-sided. Pethick-Lawrence was ineffective as Secretary of State, waffling at great length about the more esoteric points of future bilateral arrangements. Indian politicians nicknamed him ‘Pathetic-Lawrence’. He would soon be replaced but his successor, Lord Listowel, entered the debate too late to affect its outcome. The most influential voice on India in the Cabinet was Cripps, the veteran of two missions, strongly influenced by Nehru and Krishna Menon, and who saw things from the perspective of Congress. Attlee, Cripps and Nehru were from that generation of socialist politicians who saw problems in social and economic terms and underestimated the depth of Indian communal tension. After the Great Calcutta Killings Attlee had written to Wavell that he hoped that ‘there is just a chance that these events may serve to bring some sense of reality into the minds of the contending politicians’; it was an almost naive view.11 He was, as Nehru aptly described him, ‘a well intentioned liberal’ but one who failed on the specifics.12

  Attlee trusted Mountbatten implicitly. He liked him personally, thought that he had ‘a gift for getting on with all kinds of people’ and the idea that he was related to the royal family appealed. He ‘felt sure that the fir
st Empress of India [Queen Victoria] would be glad to see a descendant complete the last part of a century’s work’.13 It would be Mountbatten he would rely on to advise him on what Jinnah wanted. That should have become apparent in the early days of April when Jinnah started a series of meetings at Viceroy’s House.

  Before his first meeting with Jinnah, Mountbatten sent back his first ‘Personal Report’ to Attlee; interestingly these reports were copied to Cripps, as well as to the king, the India Office, and the Secretary of State for Defence. Mountbatten wrote:

  The scene here is one of unrelieved gloom. The country is in a most unsettled state. There are communal riots and troubles in the Punjab, the North West Frontier Province, Bihar, Calcutta, Bombay, UP and even here in Delhi. In the Punjab all parties are seriously preparing for civil war, and of these by far the most businesslike are the Sikhs. I am convinced that a fairly quick decision would appear to be the only way to convert the Indian minds from their present emotionalism to stark realism and to counter the disastrous spread of strife.14

  The Hindustan Times had reported the previous day that there had been twenty-eight incidents in Calcutta alone. The police had fired fifty-six rounds. Five people had been killed and forty-two injured.15

  That ‘fairly quick decision’ would depend on Jinnah. He came to Viceroy’s House on 5 April for the first of what would be a series of five initial talks. They did not start well. First Jinnah had joked that the welcome photograph, in which he stood in between Mountbatten and Lady Mountbatten, was a ‘rose between two thorns’. Actually he didn’t mean that, and had assumed that Lady Mountbatten would be in the middle, but it was symptomatic of what would be an awkward relationship that he still trotted out his prepared lines. Mountbatten had wanted to spend the first session getting to know the Quaid, much as he had Gandhi and Nehru, but he found Jinnah in a ‘most frigid, haughty and disdainful frame of mind’ and wanting immediately to lay down exactly what was acceptable to the League. ‘For half an hour he made monosyllabic replies to my attempts at conversation’, Mountbatten recorded, and his chief message was that ‘on the Muslim side there was only one man to deal with, namely himself’, the familiar Jinnah refrain which he now protested too frequently. Sadly there is, as yet, no public record of what Jinnah thought of Mountbatten.16