Meanwhile Mountbatten had taken Krishna Menon’s advice and invited Nehru to stay with him at Viceregal Lodge in Simla, a welcome escape from the now terrible heat of Delhi. They arrived on the same day as Ismay arrived in London, and Krishna Menon came too. Opening the house had required 333 staff to be moved up from Delhi. While he was there Nehru was invited to attend several of Mountbatten’s key staff meetings. It seems as if that week Congress, furious at the prospect of losing the Frontier, had decided to try one final onslaught on the Raj. Maybe, now they were so close to a solution, they could just persuade the British to leave immediately, handing over power to the Interim Government, in other words Congress, and leaving them to sort out Pakistan. Nehru put this forward to the viceroy’s staff on 8 May. He said power should be ‘demitted’ to the Interim Government by the end of June 1947, in other words a year earlier than planned. The Interim Government would answer to the Constituent Assembly. The issue of Pakistan would be shelved and it would be left to the provinces to form groups, as originally envisaged in the Cabinet Mission Plan. Miéville, duly shocked, said the League would never accept this. Even Mountbatten’s customary sangfroid momentarily lapsed.48 Gandhi joined in the attack. Writing in his spidery handwriting to the viceroy while on a train to Patna he reiterated his personal opposition to partition in any form.49 Patel led the international attack. On 9 May he told Associated Press that the British policy of ‘remaining neutral, but holding power is a way of propagating civil war’. Power should be passed immediately to the Central [Interim] Government ‘as it now stands’.50
It was, on the face of it, a fairly extraordinary last-minute attempt to undo the months of negotiation but the issue of the Frontier plebiscite went deep. Congress knew that without fresh elections, or a referendum, there was a chance that Dr Khan Sahib’s ministry could swing the assembly behind Hindustan – behind India. Without the Frontier, Jinnah’s Pakistan would be unsustainable. He could have it, as they had already decided, but it would not be long before they could re-assimilate the Sind and western Punjab back into a united India. And Nehru had not yet finished.
By 10 May, after five days of frantic exchanges, the Cabinet were ready to accept the plan. Draft announcements were prepared for both Whitehall and Delhi and a parliamentary timetable was worked out. The Cabinet’s amendments had been included, and it had been decided, taking the advice of the governors, that the form the Frontier plebiscite should take would be a referendum rather than fresh elections to the Assembly. It was a compromise that still would not satisfy Congress, while in Punjab and Bengal it would be up to the assemblies to decide, both Jenkins and Burrows advising that holding referenda would be impractical. By the evening of 10 May Mountbatten had the final draft. He decided, on a hunch, to give a copy to Nehru that evening, unofficially and on a friendly basis, prior to it being formally briefed to India’s political leaders. Mountbatten would later explain to Attlee that his experience in South East Asia Command (SEAC) ‘had taught me that if I have a “hunch” it is best to follow it’.51 Attlee may have read that reflection with a wry smile. Certainly the staff told Mountbatten it was a bad idea.
Mountbatten honestly described what happened next as a ‘bombshell’.52 He remembered Nehru, who had been through the plan with Krishna Menon, as being ‘white with rage’.53 Nehru himself admitted that he reacted to the proposals
very strongly. Indeed they produced a devastating effect upon me. The relatively simple proposals that we had previously discussed now appeared in the garb that HMG had provided for them, in an entirely new context which gave them an ominous meaning. The whole approach was completely different from what ours had been and the picture of India that emerged frightened me. HMG seems to function in an ivory tower of their own isolated from the realities of India.54
Genuine as Nehru’s reaction undoubtedly was, and he could certainly flair up, it does seem a bit strange that he should profess to have been so shocked by a plan the substance of which he had certainly seen and which, even if he hadn’t taken it all in, had already been on the front page of the newspapers. V. P. Menon talked to Patel, rather than Nehru, and it may have been that Patel was not passing enough information over. It may also have been in part contrived, commensurate with the scheme to see if Congress, still fuming over the Frontier, couldn’t force a quick British exit. It was certainly partly because Nehru objected strongly to British civil servants sitting thousands of miles away fiddling with his country’s future. It was arrogant of them to try. ‘It is not possible for the British to devise an acceptable solution for India’, he told Mountbatten’s staff the next day.55 But most of all it was because, as he said, the plan as presented did not stress the centrality of a unified India. It was written in such a way that it delivered
not so much a union of India, from which states could later vote to secede but a ‘large number of successor states’. People would think India was Balkanised. The proposals would only encourage chaos and disorder. The transfer of power would be obstructed by violence, by a mass of complications and by the weakness of the central government and its organs.
The provinces had too much freedom to choose; the idea that any, specifically Bengal, might choose independence was unacceptable. Pakistan must be seen to be secessionist, not a country on equal terms.56
Most proconsuls would have been cast down by such a strong and emotional rebuttal of the plan they had based their entire policy on, on which the prime minister and Cabinet were agreed and which even then was being prepared for referral to Parliament and briefing to the public, but that was not Mountbatten’s style. Those who can find little good to say about his viceroyalty might reflect on his performance over the next fortnight. Telling his staff, correctly, that it was just as well he had consulted Nehru, he set V. P. Menon, who now becomes routinely referred to in official correspondence by the honorific ‘Rao Bahadur’, to redrafting, something on which he regularly consulted Vallabhbhai Patel. Meanwhile poor Ismay, alone and unbriefed in London, wondered what on earth was happening. ‘Ministers here feel very much in the dark and I am unable to enlighten their darkness as I have been left out of touch with important developments that have taken place since I left’, he complained with uncharacteristic frankness on 14 May.57 Attlee too was becoming agitated. He liked Nehru, saw him as a fellow socialist, and was stung by his very direct criticism of his government. Mountbatten had sent Nehru’s letter, in which he had rationalised and set out in full his reservations about the plan, back to London. ‘I can’t understand what Nehru means when he says that things that emerge from London are so peculiar’, Attlee wrote and told Mountbatten that he should return to London to explain himself or the Cabinet would dispatch a further Cabinet Mission.58
Between 11 and 17 May, Rao Bahadur V. P. Menon, that extraordinarily able man who had worked his way up from manual labourer to the highest ranks of the Indian government, crafted the future of South Asia. Nehru’s outburst had at least made the British realise what had been evident to many since the February announcement, that it was Congress who held the initiative; they were merely the ringmaster. Menon conferred with Patel and Nehru. The fundamentals of the plan remained but it would now be presented very differently. Gone was the idea that provinces like Bengal might choose independence; Suhrawardy had a last attempt to press his case on 16 May, telling Mountbatten that he and Sarat Chandra Bose thought the new country should be called ‘The Socialist Republic of Bengal’. He was disappointed when it was pointed out that this might not be very well received, not least by Patel; he then compromised on the ‘Free State of Bengal’, which might have sounded slightly better but by that stage any idea of West Bengal and Calcutta not being an integral part of the new India had vanished.59
The plan that Mountbatten would now take back to London presented the current Congress dominated Constituent Assembly as the successor state to the Raj, the new India, with the new, Pakistani, Constituent Assembly as a ‘group of dissentient elements’, those Congress were so sure wou
ld soon see sense and return to the fold. Provinces and the Princely states now had just two choices. They must join one or other of these two bodies, effectively becoming part of Hindustan, which Congress insisted on being called India, or Pakistan. Nehru and Patel discussed the plan fully with Mountbatten on 17 May with Rao Bahadur V. P. Menon present. Nehru, who wrote and spoke English with such clarity and emotion, confirmed what Congress had already decided some time ago, that they would ‘accept proposals which involve a partition of India with great regret and in considerable agony of spirit’ as ‘we earnestly desire a peaceful settlement of our problems and the least compulsion of any group or area’.60
Later the same day Mountbatten met Jinnah and Liaquat. After rehearsing the same familiar arguments – their opposition to partitioning the Punjab and Bengal, their ability to accommodate for the Sikhs in an undivided Punjab, that the British could not leave so soon and that it would take at least four years to divide the army – Jinnah was left with very little choice. The Pakistan he had so long demanded was now being offered to him. It may, as he continued to describe it, be ‘moth-eaten’, it may exclude a huge number of India’s Muslims, it may consist of two unconnected halves one thousand miles apart and it was certainly not the sharing of power in a federal India he had craved, but once Congress had denied that to him he was left with no alternative but to accept. In both meetings the date for the transfer of power comes up again; Mountbatten says it must now be by 1 October 1947 at the latest. There is no record of any disagreement.61
On 18 May Mountbatten returned to London. Nehru sent Krishna Menon back at the same time. The Cabinet were briefed, again, on 19 May with Mountbatten present. They agreed the plan, this time resisting the temptation to fiddle with it. They then agreed a parliamentary timetable and Attlee dispatched Mountbatten to find Churchill, as leader of the Conservative Party and therefore the Opposition, to see if he would support it. Mountbatten found Churchill, predictably, in bed. Grudgingly, and Mountbatten was of course his protégé, the man who had for so long resisted Indian independence, fought the 1935 Act, opposed Congress, reviled Gandhi and who saw the British Empire victorious in the recent war rather than being in decline, agreed.62
In India an intelligence report from Lahore provided a detailed breakdown of Sikh plans for their offensive against the Muslims in the Punjab, revealing that it was being funded by big business and the Maharajah of Patiala. The staff in Delhi commented it was ‘ungraded’, and therefore unreliable. On 22 May Jinnah told Reuters that the two parts of Pakistan must be joined by a land corridor across Northern India; Krishna Menon told Mountbatten that Congress just wanted to be rid of Jinnah. In London it was announced that the Indian political leaders were invited to a conference in Viceroy’s House on 2 June.
6. JUNE
AN ACT FOR THE INDEPENDENCE OF INDIA
‘It has been impossible to agree on any plan that would preserve the unity of India’
(MOUNTBATTEN)
Liaquat Ali Khan, himself an important Punjabi landowner, returned from a fact-finding visit to Gurgaon late on 31 May. He had been appalled at what he had seen. The violence was not, he told Mountbatten, ‘a spontaneous flare-up of communal feelings but a planned, pre-meditated and well organised attack with the object of completely suppressing the Muslim community of Meos numbering about one million’.1 What made matters worse was that the state troops of Alwar and Bharatpur, two neighbouring Hindu Princely states, had crossed the border into the Punjab and were helping the Hindu lynch mobs. ‘What is actually taking place is a large scale invasion of the Muslim villages by thousands of armed and disciplined men’,2 Liaquat continued. The army had, as Auchinleck had agreed, deployed a brigade but it was composed almost entirely of Hindu troops. The regiments were behaving in a ‘shameless and atrocious manner’; one battalion had made four Muslims lie on their backs and then driven heavy army lorries over them.3 Unsurprisingly the army reacted strongly to such accusations. Auchinleck pointed out that of the brigade troops, one battalion were Gurkhas, who were considered non-partisan, and although two others were entirely Hindu battalions from Madras and Kumaon, both the 3/15th Punjabis and the 6th Rajputana Rifles had Muslim companies. Liaquat replied, accurately, that both those Muslim companies had, for some reason, been left behind when the brigade deployed. Both Mountbatten and Auchinleck subsequently apologised4 but not without Auchinleck complaining again to Ismay that he could not reorganise the army and at the same time maintain law and order.5
By 1 June about sixty Meo villages had been burned and over one hundred people killed, although the Meos continued to react with equal violence and ‘did considerable execution’ as Jenkins reported when he visited. The army was, slowly, beginning to get a grip on the situation and to stem the flow of armed men across the River Jumna, which formed the boundary with the United Provinces. An army patrol of a naik (corporal) and six men in the vicinity of the Meo village of Kardipur were suspicious that the nearby Hindu villages seemed to be being evacuated, correctly seeing it as a warning of impending trouble. They entered Kardipur, which was soon surrounded by a Hindu mob of 4,000 who got rather a shock to find this small force opposing them. The naik warned the mob that if they entered the village he would open fire but they ignored him, attacking with shotguns and home-made bombs. The naik, as good as his word, held his fire until the mob were within a hundred yards of the Kardipur village outskirts and then opened up. The fight went on for over an hour until military reinforcements arrived and the Hindu Jats melted away, carrying numerous dead with them.6
Jenkins was already preoccupied with the continuing violence in Amritsar and Lahore, where the arson was out of control, and, with daytime temperatures now reaching 47 degrees, the police were ‘finding it rough’.7 Nehru, whose mother was from Lahore and who had spent part of his childhood there, complained later in the month after visiting a refugee camp at Hardwar, that over one hundred Hindu properties in Lahore were being burnt every day. ‘At this rate’, he wrote, ‘the city of Lahore will be just a heap of ashes’.8 He reckoned there were already 32,000 refugees in the camp with 200 new arrivals daily.
Sandtas Kirpalani, an ICS officer, had recently been posted to Lahore into what he regarded as his dream job: financial commissioner in charge of the Punjab Canal Colonies. Although a Hindu from Karachi, he knew the Punjab well and had previously been responsible for Lyallpur. The Canal Colonies were those tracts of fertile land created by the government irrigation schemes on the upper reaches of the Punjab rivers. Because the land was reclaimed it belonged to the government which could therefore allocate it; much of it was consequently settled by ex-soldiers.9 One such was Sant Singh, a veteran of the beaches at Gallipoli; he had considered himself very fortunate but his luck was about to change.
Kirpalani’s family were not with him so he moved temporarily into the palatial residence, near the government officers’ residential estate, of his friend and successful Lahore lawyer, J. G. Sethi. He appointed a Muslim as his bearer, noting that the rest of the household staff were Muslims apart from Sethi’s own bearer who was an old Hindu, Rattan, someone he had known for twenty years. Almost immediately Rattan took him to one side to say that it was ‘highly unwise’ to have a Muslim bearer and begged him to intervene with Sethi to get all the Muslim staff sacked. Kirpalani, who had been abroad for some time, and who had been used to Lahore when it was a cosmopolitan mix of creeds and races, was shocked and disturbed. Then the Muslim ruler of Kharipur, a state in Sind, offered Sethi 600,000 rupees for his house. Why they wondered, did Kharipur need a house in Lahore? Sethi put it down to ‘the old boy carrying a torch for a dancing girl in Amritsar’. Kirpalani was not satisfied with that rather simple explanation and urged Sethi to sell but his friend laughed off his concerns. Later that week Kirpalani refused to release government fuel demanded by the Muslim League. His deputy, a keen League supporter, then ‘flew into a towering rage, accused me of anti-Muslim bias and warned me that it was but a matter of a few short weeks before
the League assumed the reins of power in the province and that I would get short shrift’. He soon realised that Lahore was now a city of ‘stabbing, looting and arson’ where ‘an unspoken terror gripped the populace’. The Sikh’s curved sword, the kirpan, had become a symbol of death. Muslim squads on bicycles would ride up behind them, yank the kirpan out of its sheath, stab the victim, and then vanish before any help could arrive.10
Mountbatten and Ismay arrived back in Delhi on 31 May. Ismay vowed never to undertake a long flight with him ever again. ‘The idea of a reasonable degree of comfort never entered his head. Speed was all that mattered’, he complained, as they landed at midnight.11 But there was a need to hurry. The Indian political leadership had been called to a meeting in Viceroy’s House on Monday 2 June to give their final endorsement to the modified plan the viceroy had brought back with him and which was now given to them. Ismay woke up that morning feeling distinctly nervous. He sent Mountbatten a short note. ‘This is like D-Day 1944’, he wrote, ‘and not less exciting: and I just wanted to send you this line of good cheer and good luck’.12 Both Congress and the League were coming forward with amendments and reservations that could still wreck things and no one was sure how Gandhi would react. The meeting could end with agreement and a definite plan for the transfer of power, for the independence of India and the creation of Pakistan, or it could dissolve into argument and failure, much as had happened three weeks before at Simla.
Partition Page 18