At the second meeting, which took place on 7 April, Jinnah laid out his agenda more clearly. The Constituent Assembly was dead and the spirit of trust that had fluttered briefly and hopefully in the middle of 1946 ‘was destroyed’. The only thing to do now was to hand over India province by province and ‘let the provinces themselves choose how they formed into groups’, in other words reiterating the League’s position that a simple majority of Muslims in Bengal, the Punjab, Sind, the North West Frontier Province and possibly Assam would ensure he could balance central power with Congress. He then went on to say two things which perhaps portrayed his real position more clearly. He first castigated Mountbatten over Attlee’s declaration that the British would leave by June 1948, come what may. ‘Is it your intention’, he asked him, ‘to turn this country over to chaos and bloodshed and civil war?’ Secondly, he emphasised that the League would insist on the armed forces being divided, something he made Liaquat Ali Khan follow up in writing that evening.17
At their third meeting, on 8 April, he went on to say that any idea of partitioning the Punjab and Bengal was ‘a bluff on the part of Congress to try and frighten him off Pakistan’. He did not, he insisted, want a ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’, in other words just Sind, the North West Frontier Province, and the western half of the Punjab, with a remote East Bengal and part of Assam in the east.18 When he was debriefing his staff after these meetings, Mountbatten told them ‘he did not believe that Mr. Jinnah had thought of the most elementary mechanics whereby Pakistan was to be run’.19 This was not surprising; Jinnah was not then intending it to be a separate nation outside a federal structure. The appeal for the British to stay longer, the insistence on the division of the army, which he and Liaquat both thought would be unacceptable, and even if it was accepted would take several years, re-emphasised that Jinnah was, as Wavell had pointed out, using the idea of partition as a threat to get what he wanted. But Jinnah did not actually say what he wanted, Mountbatten did not grasp it and the two men had not managed to establish a constructive working relationship. On 11 April, Mountbatten told his staff that Jinnah ‘was a psychopathic case. He was impossible to argue with. Until he had met Mr. Jinnah he had not thought it possible that a man with such a complete lack of sense of responsibility could hold the power which he did’.20 It was, on every count, a profound misjudgement,
Maybe Jinnah realised that he had failed to impress his position on Mountbatten. After his fifth meeting with the viceroy, on 11 April, he went to see Eric Miéville, who found him ‘positively jokey!’. Jinnah related, ‘How much he had enjoyed lunch at Buckingham Palace’ the previous December. He had found ‘The King pro-Pakistan, The Queen even more pro-Pakistan’ and ‘Queen Mary was 100% pro-Pakistan’. Miéville, with true civil service reserve, regretted that their Majesties had expressed an opinion on political matters!21
More significantly, Jinnah sent Liaquat back to see Mountbatten. He knew Liaquat was liked and respected by the Raj officials, although they had been annoyed by his recent budget; this had increased capital taxation, stealing some of Nehru’s socialist thunder and also placing him in a difficult position with industrialists like Birla, on whom Congress depended for funding. Liaquat now made four clear points. First, he emphasised that establishing an independent Pakistan would be very difficult; secondly, he insisted that the British government’s responsibilities would last beyond June 1948; thirdly, he said that the division of the army was non-negotiable and finally, making a strong play for continuing British support, he said that Pakistan would need British officers in both the Civil Service and the Army for some time to come.22
With these initial discussions complete, Mountbatten and his team in Viceroy’s House had a deadline but no plan. They would now draw up the options and map out an approximate timetable. First they would sketch out the possibilities, they would then discuss them with the provincial governors, after which the viceroy would call the political leaders together to get their reaction. Ismay would then take the draft plan back to London to get Cabinet and parliamentary endorsement before it was announced.
The result of the viceroy’s staff meeting on 11 April was one of those classic instructions which senior British officials so nonchalantly issue to their subordinates, a trait the British Army has long and cynically referred to as ‘Big Hand, Small Map’. That afternoon Hastings Ismay sent V. P. Menon a note which read: ‘Could you possibly have a go at a plan for the Transfer of Power – preferably by tomorrow afternoon?’ What would become known as ‘Plan Balkan’ was the result. It was, in effect, a derivation of the Cabinet Mission Plan but envisaged the partition of the Punjab, Bengal and Assam; a separate plebiscite in the North West Frontier Province, and that the provinces would work out their own respective constitutions leaving the central government with the three ‘union’ subjects of defence, foreign affairs and communications.23 Menon, now no stranger to drafting papers on the future of his homeland, set to work and on 15 April Mountbatten duly called in the provincial governors to discuss his product.
The eleven men who answered his call represented a formidable body of intellect and experience. Many Indians saw their attitude as patriarchal, even arrogant. ‘There was a tendency on the part of politicians in India to regard all British members of the Civil Service as bigoted, scheming bureaucrats, and the Indian members as mere stooges of their British colleagues’, thought Ismay, whereas the reality was that both the new administrations would soon be dependent on ‘this handful of highly-trained, loyal and upright men’. But by any measure they were an impressive group. Sir Archie Nye, Governor of Madras, was a distinguished general who had been Field Marshal Alanbrooke’s deputy as Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the war. Commissioned from the ranks due to his impressive record as a sergeant in the First World War, he was as highly rated by Nehru as he was by the British Army. The Scottish industrialist Sir John Colville, Governor of Bombay, was an ex-member of the Westminster Cabinet and had served as both financial secretary to the Treasury and Secretary of State for Scotland. A third, Sir Frederick Burrows of Bengal, although too unwell to attend in person, and represented by his secretary, John Tyson, was an ex-general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, who delighted in telling his rather grander Raj contemporaries that while they were ‘Huntin’ and shootin’’, he had been ‘Shuntin’ and hootin’’. He rated his proudest achievement as having been Regimental Sergeant Major of the Grenadier Guards in the First World War.
The remaining eight were all ICS men. One, Sir Chandulal Trivedi, Governor of Orissa, was an Indian; the remaining seven were all British, men who had spent their careers in India, who spoke the languages and knew the people, and had a genuine love for the country. Portraying such men simply as arch imperialists, bent only on furthering British interest, is simplistic and ignores the complexities and apparent contradictions of the Raj. That relations remained so good between Indians and British during the terrible months ahead, and why relations today are so much better than they might be, is precisely because men like Sir Francis Wylie of the United Provinces, Sir Hugh Dow in Bihar, Sir Frederick Bourne in the Central Provinces and Sir Andrew Clow in Assam were all people who had dedicated their lives to India, while Trivedi was soon to be given one of the most demanding roles in the new nation. And as they gathered in Viceroy’s House on that hot April morning they felt challenged and, understandably, confused. Not only was the world to which they had given their careers about to end but they were not at all sure how.24
Mountbatten opened the conference in the way that meetings of senior British officials have always started, and still do, with a pep talk. He said that the Labour government’s instructions to him were ‘to regard himself less as the last British Viceroy than as the head of the new Indian state’.25 He regretted recent comments by one senior ICS officer who had said, when he heard the announcement of 20 February, ‘That bloody fool Attlee must be mad’, and another who had reportedly said on being told half his town was on fire: ‘We are leavi
ng anyway. What do we care.’ It was important that everyone appreciated the urgency of what they were doing. After an embarrassed shuffling, people became more positive when the generous terms of the ICS retirement package were explained.
The main business of the conference was more sanguine. The first day was spent surveying the state of the country province by province. Madras remained quiet. Bombay was unsettled but manageable, although Colville complained that he now had just twenty-two ICS officers left to manage his province of approximately 30 million people. The United Provinces were also unsettled. Meerut district was on the edge, only kept quiet by constant patrolling by a Special Armed Constabulary maintained by Premier Pandit Pant’s administration and commanded by the most effective brigadier, Mahomed Akbar Khan, a soldier who had risen from the ranks of Probyn’s Horse and who would soon play an even more prominent role. The week before there had been serious rioting in Agra, where the police had gone on strike. The week after the conference Cawnpore would also erupt. The Central Provinces were containable, while spasmodic violence continued in Bihar where the police were now ineffective. Orissa remained relatively quiet although, as General Sir Francis Tuker noted to his evident disgust, ‘large numbers of students turned communist for want of other political diversions’.26
More time was spent discussing the provinces that would be more directly affected by the transfer of power, Bengal and the Punjab but also Assam, Sind and the North West Frontier, and where the governors were subject to particular pressure. Tyson summed up the position in Bengal as seen by Sir Frederick Burrows and the few remaining Raj officials. Effectively there were only two communities in Bengal, 33 million Muslims and 25 million Hindus. Among the Hindus were 9 million of the ‘scheduled’ castes, in other words the lowest castes previously called Untouchables, the people who Jinnah thought would support the League rather than their higher-caste Congress brethren, although Burrows’s advice was that only about a quarter of them might do so. Partition of the province would be easier than in the Punjab as districts tended to be discretely Muslim or Hindu rather than mixed, with the bulk of the Muslims living in the east; of the population of a putative East Bengal, 26 million of a total of 38 million would be Muslim, while in what might become West Bengal 14 million of a population of 22 million were Hindu with only 8 million Muslims.27 The Hindus, who had so vigorously opposed Curzon’s partition in 1905, now strongly preferred partition, with West Bengal becoming part of ‘Hindustan’, to the possibility of becoming a minority in a Muslim-dominated state or, as the premier, Huseyn Suhrawardy, wanted, for a united Bengal to become an independent country where they would again find themselves in the minority.
The problem, as Burrows saw it, was that East Bengal on its own would be unsustainable. In a remarkably prescient analysis, he queried how any country could function when one part would be a thousand miles from its parent state and he could not see how it would survive economically. West Bengal could work, assuming it included Calcutta, whose population was 70 per cent Hindu and where Hindus owned 90 per cent of the investment. It would have all the coalmines, minerals, factories and all but two of the all-important jute mills. Neither would East Bengal be able to feed itself; it had a food deficit of 225,000 tons a year, without which people would starve as had recently been so horrifically proved. It would ‘stagnate to such an extent and become so poor that it would end up as a rural slum’, and ‘he shuddered to think of its condition in seven years’ time’.28 In the meantime he was concerned about the growth of communism, something to which, as an ex-senior member of the British Trade Unions movement, he was particularly sensitive. Could communists be declared illegal? he wondered. Nye said that they dealt with them in Madras by imprisoning them for other crimes. In fact, although they would later become increasingly influential in Bengal and eventually form the government, communism did not play that significant a role in the coming events. Suhrawardy thought them insignificant although ‘he sometimes wished they had gone in for violence as it would have been easier to deal with them’.29
Suhrawardy’s concept of an independent Bengal had found very little support among his Muslim supporters. He said Jinnah never listened to him anyway and unless he got all his points over in the first two minutes, the Quaid’s attention had wandered. Suhrawardy emerges, as he twists and turns his way throughout this story, from being Minister of Supply during the famine to Premier of Bengal after the 1946 elections, as someone who could let his imagination overtake him. He told Sir Terence Shone, soon to be British High Commissioner to India, that he was worried about Indian aggression to a Muslim Bengal. ‘After all Mr. Nehru, on a big black horse, might lead a Hindu army against Muslim Bengal’. When Shone pointed out that Nehru hardly seemed to be cast for such a role, Suhrawardy said that ‘as an alternative Mr. Nehru might try to induce the Nepalese to move against a Muslim Bengal’. He then went on to muse as to where in the world ‘One could go nowadays to settle down in peace? Ireland? Or perhaps the Balearic Islands? He believed hall porters at hotels in New York did very well’.30 In fact, fate had other plans for him. On 26 April he saw Mountbatten, argued his case strongly and said that the army should be split three ways between Hindustan, Pakistan and Bengal. But Congress were never going to entertain such a plan and neither was Whitehall.
Having had the rather depressing discussion on Bengal, which had revealed all the pitfalls of partition but led to no other practical solution, the conference discussed Assam. It was the province north and east of Bengal, a beautiful wild country of forests and tea plantations, home to indigenous tribes and scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the recent war as General Bill Slim’s 14th Army had turned the Japanese invasion of India at Imphal and Kohima. Assam had originally been part of Bengal but was made a separate province in 1911 when Bengal was reunited after the Curzon debacle. Hindus were, narrowly, in the majority, numbering 4.21 million out of a population of just over 10 million and the 1946 election had returned Gopinath Bardoloi leading a Congress administration. There were 3.44 million Muslims and 2.41 million from the ‘tribes’ but most Muslims, about 2 million, lived in the Sylhet district in the most southerly part of Assam and bordered solidly Muslim areas of Bengal. Sir Andrew Clow, who liked plain speech, said the ‘whole of the rest of Assam would be very pleased if Sylhet left as it was a deficit district and a liability’.31 Although no supporter of partition, believing that a separate East Bengal could cut Assam off from India, he favoured a separate solution for Sylhet. This was duly noted.
The conference then turned its attention to the western areas. The violence in the Punjab and the Rape of Rawalpindi dominated. Sir Evan Jenkins, now governing under Section 93 and dismissive of repeated League approaches demanding they be invited to form a new government, described what had happened. He said that in part of the Jhelum district there had been ‘an absolute butchery of non-Muslims. In many villages they were herded into houses and burnt alive. Many Sikhs had their hair and beards cut off and there were cases of forcible circumcision. Many Sikh women who escaped slaughter were abducted’.32 There was little more he could add; all those present realised that partition of the province was almost unavoidable, however hard Jinnah protested. Jenkins did, however, make two key points, neither of which were given the attention they subsequently would prove to have deserved. Accepting that partition was looking more or less inevitable, he emphasised that it could only be imposed by force and that ‘a large number of troops would be required’. He had previously estimated this at four divisions, or roughly 100,000 soldiers. Secondly, he said he ‘thought the Muslims’ demand for Pakistan was potentially much less dangerous than the possible subsequent pressure which might come from non-Muslim parties to ensure that they got it’. Even as he spoke Congress were debating how to do exactly that.
There was a short discussion about Sind. Mountbatten had been fielding complaints from Nehru that Sir Francis Mudie was ‘being too pro Muslim’ and unfair to Congress. This was not altogether surprising, given th
at Sind was an overwhelmingly Muslim province. Originally part of Bombay, it had become separate only in 1936 with its capital at Karachi. Yet in the 1945–6 elections Congress had entertained hopes that, even if they couldn’t win an outright majority in the Karachi Assembly, they could at least prevent the League from forming a ministry by allying with Muslim independents. They had given eighteen Muslim candidates financial backing. The League’s position was anyway weak, with a strong breakaway faction led by G. M. Syed, and with widespread electoral corruption; a vote was said to cost the minimum of 1 rupee. In the event the League had won enough seats, 27 out of 60, so that Mudie could legitimately invite their leader, Ghulam Hussain, to form the administration. However, Congress polled a significant vote and came in as the second party, so that Patel accused Mudie of prejudice in not including them.33 Mudie, fresh from being the Home Member in the Delhi government, had been robust with him as he now was with Mountbatten. He told the viceroy that Congress didn’t like him because he had imprisoned their leaders in the United Provinces when he was posted there in 1942; Nehru’s complaint was symptomatic of a Congress that was finding its cry that it spoke for all Indians regardless of religion to be coming under severe pressure in the Muslim majority areas.34 Nowhere would that be more evident than in the North West Frontier Province, and much of the rest of the conference was taken up with discussing the difficult situation there, one described by its governor, Sir Olaf Caroe, as ‘being liable to drop to bits at any minute’.35
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