Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  Ismay thought Caroe looked ‘terribly tired and strained’ that day and it was hardly surprising.36 Congress vitriol for Mudie was nothing compared to what would be heaped on poor Caroe. Worthy, experienced, intellectually astute, Caroe suffered from not being his predecessor, the legendary Sir George Cunningham, who had captained the Scottish rugby team, governed the Frontier from Peshawar for nearly ten years and of whom the warlike frontier tribes were reputed to walk in fear. ‘Everyone regarded him with deep affection and respect’, said Norval Mitchell, who had worked closely with him ‘and his presence was thought to be the equivalent of two divisions on the Frontier’. Mitchell was Caroe’s chief secretary in Peshawar, the North West Frontier capital, that April and clearly also rated him as a man ‘with an extraordinary degree of fortitude and distinction’, although he leaves much unsaid.37 However, N. Mukherji, an Indian ICS officer who also worked under Caroe at the time, and who came from a strongly nationalist family, had the fullest praise for him, saying he did an ‘exceptional’ job.38

  The North West Frontier was as politically complicated as it was physically wild. Its population of 3 million was predominantly Muslim, although it had two significant Hindu areas, Charsadda, immediately north of Peshawar, and the Banu district to the southwest. The province bordered the tribal agencies, responsible for a further 3 million people, the Mahsuds, Wazirs, Daurs, Afridis, Shinwaris, Salmanis and Kullaghoris, mostly Pathans, almost totally Muslim and to whom Islam was fundamental to every aspect of their lives. Peshawar itself, only forty miles from the Afghan border, ‘was still a bastion of Kiplingesque behaviour. It was neatly divided into two separate cities. The cantonment’, the British area, was ‘entirely surrounded by barbed wire’ and ‘was as spick-and-span as any English country village. There were bungalows with well-tended lawns, one of the most luxuriously appointed clubs in the whole of India, and every week the Peshawar Vale Hunt met to chase, not foxes, but jackals, complete with mottled English squires in red coats and horse faced ladies’, wrote Edward Behr, then a young officer in the Garwhal Regiment who had just been made Intelligence Officer to the Peshawar garrison.39 He goes on:

  Across the railroad tracks lay Peshawar City, so different from the cantonment it was difficult to believe the two towns were in the same country. Peshawar City then was still an exotic medieval walled city, with eleven massive gates abutting a huge fort. Inside was a maze of shops, markets, tiny workshops, and the narrow streets jammed with Pathans, mostly armed with home made Lee-Enfield rifles.

  The Pathans, ‘the toughest, hardiest people in the world’, mostly lived in the border areas by marginal subsistence farming, adhered to their own strict code, the pashtunwallah, and fought each other for generation after generation over obscure family feuds whose initial cause had long been forgotten. They had never fully accepted British rule, and the Frontier was run on the basis that neither side would interfere in the affairs of the other providing nothing happened to upset the status quo. Occasionally, when it did, the Raj would mount military expeditions, for which they kept specific forces in Frontier garrisons.

  The Frontier had been fairly quiet during the Second World War, Pathan appetite for fighting having been partially sated by the uprising led by the Faqir of Ipi, which had tied up a sizeable number of British troops. Neither had the Pathans paid much attention to the subsequent developments in Indian politics, so that in both 1936 and 1945 they had elected a Congress government; there was strong Congress support in both Charsadda and Banu. This was led by the remarkable Khan brothers. The first, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a dedicated Congress supporter, was known as the ‘Frontier Gandhi’ as he copied Gandhi’s campaign for self-sufficiency. Unlike Gandhi he had raised an irregular force, the Khudai Khitmagars or Red Shirts, who gave him considerable influence. They lived in a camp in Charsadda, where they ‘drilled, spun cloth and held indoctrination courses’, and had played a major role in the nationalist campaigns of the 1930s. Behr got to know them well and thought that ‘although they may have been Gandhian in spirit’ they were ‘not averse to violence to make their presence felt’.40

  The Congress government had resigned in 1939, as did all provincial Congress governments, being replaced by a short period of direct rule. Between 1943 and March 1945 there had been a fairly ineffective and corrupt League administration, but in January 1946 Congress won the election once more, with 30 out of the 50 seats, again helped by the Red Shirts. This victory surprised many; it was ascribed partly to the fact that Congress had strong historic Muslim support from its leadership of the Khilafat Movement, the campaign to restore the Ottoman Caliphate in the 1920s, but it was more likely because the majority of Pathans simply did not appreciate the significance of the political process. Conditions on the North West Frontier were unique, and they were reluctant to come under the sway of any centralist party.

  Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s brother, Dr Khan Sahib, was the Congress premier. He had been a distinguished army doctor and was very well liked and respected throughout the Frontier; he was a close friend of Cunningham and regularly played bridge with him. Mitchell had ‘a deep affection’ for him and thought that he was ‘determined to do what he thought best for the Frontier’ while Caroe described him as ‘the most impressive Indian I have ever met’.41 The problem was that what Dr Khan Sahib and Congress thought best, and what they thought the 1946 election result had given them a mandate for, was that in the event of partition the province should be part of India. Caroe, realising that the League had not impressed the tribes, and knowing that they would never accept being assigned to a Hindu-dominated government, argued strongly that there must be a plebiscite on the specific issue of whether a majority wished to join Pakistan. He had considerable previous experience on the Frontier, and he had also asked Mitchell, who had spent much of his career there, to write a paper summarising the case for each jurisdiction. Mitchell concluded that unless there was a plebiscite there would be civil war and that the electorate was likely to vote overwhelmingly to be part of whatever Pakistan might be.

  Nehru and Patel realised that if they could wrestle the Frontier for Congress, and India, Jinnah’s ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan would look so moth-eaten that it would consist of just Sind and West Punjab, along with the ‘rural slum’ of East Bengal, which might mean it would never happen or at least collapse soon after it came into existence. Again Nehru misunderstood the depth of communal feeling. He did not know the Frontier, and logically assumed that as Dr Khan Sahib had won the election, that there was a popular mandate for Congress. He had, however, visited the province the previous year. Caroe had tried to stop him, pointing out that his visit would simply draw attention to the growing divide, and arguing that he should bide his time until he had a specific message for the tribesmen. Nehru ignored him. His visit was a predictable disaster. A jirga of Afridi leaders refused to meet him. In Waziristan the locals said plainly that they did not like him or Congress. Nehru told them they were ‘pitiful pensioners’, referring to the allowances the Raj paid them to behave, while they retorted that they regarded Hindus as their serfs. At Landi Kotal, at the foot of the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the army had to open fire to extricate Nehru from a hostile crowd and in Malakand his car was fired on. Back in Peshawar with Caroe, with a badly bruised ear and chin, and an even more bruised ego, Nehru accused the Raj and their political agents among the tribes of organising the protests. He never forgave Caroe.

  On 18 April, as the conference neared its end in Delhi, Mountbatten gathered Caroe, Dr Khan Sahib and Nehru together.42 He had previously sought the advice of Colonel de la Fargue, who had been chief secretary before Mitchell and a man who emerges rather badly from this affair. De la Fargue told the viceroy that although ‘Caroe had a great knowledge of the Frontier, he was biased against his Congress government and had lost the confidence of fair minded people’ and that ‘his continuance in office was in fact a menace to British prestige’.43 Mountbatten sensibly treated such direct advice with caution. However, he found hi
s meeting with Dr Khan Sahib and Caroe unsatisfactory. Dr Khan Sahib complained that Caroe interfered with his decisions while Caroe argued that he had to maintain law and order. Dr Khan Sahib said that if things were left to him there would be ‘no rioting, no processions, no murder’ but Caroe retorted that Dr Khan Sahib’s policy was to ‘let everyone who was likely to vote for him have a gun’. Unsurprisingly the viceroy determined to visit the Frontier to assess the situation for himself.44

  On 27 April Mountbatten arrived in Peshawar. Lady Mountbatten, who played an important and sometimes understated part in so much of this story, accompanied him. Mitchell ‘had no words to describe the degree of anxiety and suspense that preceded’ their arrival. ‘It was as if clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon waiting for the simultaneous flash of lightning and crash of thunder.’ Once news of the visit got out, a massive crowd of Pathans started to converge on Peshawar, making it plain that they insisted on seeing the viceroy and impressing on him their determination not to be assigned to India should partition happen. Estimates of their numbers vary, but it was somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000, most of whom were armed. They declared they would march on Government House and occupy it if the viceroy refused to see them, and the previous night the General Commanding had his house raked by gunfire. It was a delicate moment. Mountbatten knew Nehru’s depth of feeling on the issue of the frontier, and the critical importance of not upsetting Congress. Yet he also knew that if he ignored the Pathan demonstration he risked an incident that might rival the slaughter of Amritsar. On his arrival he drove to consult with Dr Khan Sahib who agreed that the Red Shirts would be kept in the background and that Mountbatten should be seen by the crowd. He and Lady Mountbatten duly drove with Caroe to a railway bridge from where the three of them were clearly visible. It was a masterstroke, the sort of gesture at which Mountbatten excelled. The temperature was 38 degrees, the mood one of ‘fanaticism, anger and communal hatred’ and it would have taken little for it to turn into a full-scale riot. But the Mountbattens’ appearance, with the governor, equally unruffled, calmed them. In fact the crowd became ‘in excellent spirits and greeted his appearance with shouts and flag waving’.45 Much was made of the fact that the viceroy was wearing a uniform of dark green, the holy colour of Islam, but Mitchell, who was present for most of the visit, said this was a later misinterpretation as the Islamic green was a totally different shade. Mountbatten could not resist his customary self-congratulation at the success of his appearance. He reported to London that he distinctly heard shouts of ‘Mountbatten Ki jai’, or ‘Long Live Mountbatten’ and that ‘I felt it was most awkward that they could look on me as some sort of saviour’.46

  The important result of the visit was that Mountbatten agreed with Caroe that there had to be a second election in the province. Nehru, predictably, disagreed and disagreed furiously. Mountbatten wrote to Nehru in surprisingly direct terms on 30 April. He said Dr Khan Sahib was being unfair to Caroe and that the tribes were very clear they did not want to be part of a Hindu-dominated country. They now wanted Dr Khan Sahib’s government out and had said they would prefer to be part of Afghanistan rather than India, although it was fortunate for them that the latter contention was never actually put to the test. The logical Nehru must have appreciated the reasoning, but the political, public Nehru was outraged. It was the first and only time Mountbatten would stand up to him on a matter of substance. Among the many milestones of 1947 it was this decision that would shape how Congress now proceeded. In the event of partition, a Congress-dominated assembly in the North West Frontier Province would inevitably, if the decision was left to them, vote that the province should join India. What would Pakistan then be other than Sind, and parts of the Punjab and Bengal? But a plebiscite would almost certainly give Jinnah control of the North West Frontier Province and meant that he would have the makings of a viable political bloc, whatever shape Pakistan finally took.

  The subsequent question was then whether Dr Khan Sahib’s government should remain in office until the plebiscite had taken place or should it be removed and leave Caroe to govern under Section 93 as Jenkins was doing in the Punjab? Outside Peshawar there was continuing violence. The south of the province was ‘as bad as the Punjab, with only the River Indus separating two vast areas of looting, burning, massacre and rape’.47 Shri Mehr Chand Khanna, Dr Khan Sahib’s finance minister, told the Hindustan Times that League agitation had led to 400 Hindu and Sikh deaths, with 150 injured and 300 forcibly converted, with 50 places of worship and 1,600 houses destroyed.48 Even Dera Ghazi Khan, which Christopher Beaumont had found so settled, was in chaos. Caroe had asked Auchinleck for more troops to help contain the violence but the commander-in-chief had replied that he was being alarmist and the army was too busy. He was generally being unhelpful, telling Mountbatten on 14 April when consulted before the governors’ conference that dividing the armed forces would take at least a year and require a large new staff. He said, correctly, that Congress would wreck Plan Balkan, the plan for the transfer of power V.P.Menon was even then furiously drafting, and that the declaration of Pakistan would cause ‘any amount of trouble’.49

  Caroe and Mitchell both strongly advised Mountbatten to leave Dr Khan Sahib’s administration in place, advice that was ultimately accepted. This meant that there was at least some form of representative government on the Frontier, but the Khan brothers were now seething. They would look for new political opportunities when it became apparent that Nehru had accepted the inevitability of a new vote.

  The conference wound up on 16 April having reached two conclusions that were rapidly becoming obvious. First, that a quick decision was vital if the country was not to disintegrate. They estimated that there were now twelve private armies operating, which numbered more than 400,000, from the 7,000 in Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Red Shirts to the 100,000-odd in the Hindu Mahasabha, the nationalist movement that proclaimed that India should be a country for the Hindus. Master Tara Singh and Kartar Singh had already raised 50 lakhs of rupees (a lakh is 100,000) for the Sikh militias in the Punjab. They were circulating a pamphlet which urged Sikhs that ‘in your veins is yet the blood of your beloved Guru Gobind Singhji! Do your duty; we have to fight this tyrannical Pakistan’.50 Secondly they realised that it was probably impossible to preserve India as a united country. That was something Plan Balkan acknowledged.

  Throughout the last two weeks of April, V. P. Menon drafted and redrafted ‘a new version almost daily’51 as Plan Balkan slowly took shape. Yet in reality the initiative had already passed to Congress and their attitude was, as Jenkins had so accurately predicted, hardening all the time. The impressive Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, then Minister for Industry and Supply in the Interim Government, told Mountbatten that he should remember that in India ‘most leaders took a long time to obtain sufficient influence to become leaders and once this happened they were usually embittered old men who had become obstinate and not open to reason’.52 However unkind that may have been, the events of the past weeks had only strengthened Congress’ resolve that partition of some sort was a price worth paying for getting on with self-government. They knew what Jinnah wanted but they were not prepared to let him have it. The experience of Interim Government, from its painful inception the previous year, had shown them that they could not share power with the League and they knew they could not govern India without that strong central power base which had been core to their policy for so long. Patel told Mountbatten decidedly on 1 May that Congress would never consider parity in central government.53 The decision to hold the Frontier plebiscite, which they knew they must lose, had been the final straw.

  The Interim Government was simply not working, with Congress and League ministers concentrating on fighting each other rather than attempting to govern. Ismay was dismayed to find himself at a dinner party with a Congress minister on his right and a League minister on his left. ‘Throughout the meal both of these cultured men, who normally had impeccable manners, spoke to me unceasingly and i
n loud voices about the iniquities of the opposing community.’54 Jinnah remained uncompromising. A unified India was, he argued, an artificial creation; it had never really been one even under the early Hindu and later Muslim emperors. Partition of Bengal remained a ‘red herring’ and the Sikhs, ‘in many ways an admirable people’ but who ‘unfortunately lacked leadership of a high order and while they were successful in small ways of business, seldom produced outstanding men in law, science or politics’ would be much better off under Muslim government.55 The leaders of Congress were ‘so dishonest, so crooked and so obsessed with the idea of smashing the Muslim League that there are no lengths to which they will not go to do so’.56

  One such length was for Congress to report to the Constituent Assembly on 28 April its definitions of the three crucial policy areas that the centre would control actually were. These were so extensive that they would leave the provincial governments virtually powerless and responsible for doing little more than running local services. Defence was now to include not only the armed forces but also all defence industry and special powers, reminiscent of Section 93, by which the central government could take charge of provinces in an emergency. Foreign affairs included all overseas trade, immigration and all overseas financial transactions. Lastly communications was interpreted as including all airways, telephones, shipping, broadcasting ports, much of the railway network and waterways. Beyond that the report recommended a series of financial measures that meant the centre would be self-financing rather than dependent, as the League wanted, on contributions from the provinces. The key taxes were to be retained by the central government, as were all the key financial and commercial instruments to regulate banking and insurance. There wasn’t much left for a provincial government to do.57 If they could not have parity in central government, then the League would be left virtually powerless, effectively running a series of provincial administrations that would be little better than county councils. If they wanted effective power they would have to accept an independent Pakistan, truncated or moth-eaten.