Jinnah also tried to persuade Maharajah Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur to join Pakistan. He ruled a large and ancient state that would abut Pakistan but he was a Hindu as were the majority of his subjects. He had only just succeeded and was very young, his father, Umaid Singh, having died unexpectedly of a ruptured appendix only days after the 3 June announcement. Umaid Singh was a hard act to follow, one of those competent and visionary rulers whom the Indian dynasties habitually produced. In 1946 he had opened the Jawai dam in Godwar, a project which ensured Jodhpur a plentiful supply of clean drinking water. Famine had long been a concern in the desert kingdom and Umaid Singh was remembered in local folklore ‘on his flying horses, soaring through the sky, over a Marwar (Jodhpur) he made green’.26
Jinnah had a series of meetings with young Hanwant Singh during which he offered the ‘use of Karachi as a free port, free import of arms, jurisdiction over the Sind railway and a large amount of grain for famine relief’.27 There was considerable alarm in the States Department that Jodhpur might actually be swayed, and that this might start a chain reaction with the other Rajput states that adjoined Pakistan like Udaipur and Jaisalmer. They had good cause. Jodhpur had historically ruled the district of Amarkot in the eastern part of Sind, its territory stretching as far as Hyderabad (a separate Hyderabad to the Nizam’s dominion) on the River Indus. They had lost control of it after Napier’s occupation of Sind in 1843 with the British paying them what they thought was a miserly rent of 10,000 rupees per annum by way of compensation. This had not been increased for eighty years. They had been lobbying for many years to have this historical wrong redressed. In 1916 Sir Pratap Singh had made a formal application only to have it firmly rebuffed, an insult that was keenly felt. Jinnah’s offer now gave Jodhpur an opportunity. Twenty-two per cent of Jodhpur was Muslim and communal relations were very good, held together by a ruling family that had governed in the interest of the whole community since the fifteenth century. Hanwant Singh saw the issue more as how he could best protect Jodhpur and its way of life rather than as a decision between two new nations. ‘The magic potion’ that was Britain ‘had finally worn off’ for Jodhpur. ‘The traders from across the sea were once again mere traders and for the first time in three hundred and forty-eight years Britain’s interests no longer lay in India’, says the history of the House of Marwar, the ruling Jodhpur dynasty. Hanwant Singh must now make the best deal he could with their successors.
A week away from the deadline, the maharajah, still uncommitted, was again summoned to Delhi to be given a lecture by V. P. Menon and taken off to see Mountbatten who was just getting out of his bath. Mountbatten told him that ‘he had been a friend of his father’s for twenty-six years and knew that he would have wanted to be with India’.28 He warned the young maharajah that if he succumbed to Jinnah’s offers then he would be leaving his state vulnerable to terrible future inter-communal violence. Hanwant Singh did not see it that way but did manage to secure significant concessions from Menon should he accede to India, effectively ensuring similar terms as those that Jinnah had offered. He returned from Delhi still undecided. It was probably his mother, a devout Hindu from an old Jaisalmer family, who finally persuaded him. Her brother, close to Patel, applied pressure and ultimately Jodhpur agreed to accede to India. Udaipur and Jaisalmer followed suit. When he returned to Delhi to sign, Hanwant Singh, a keen member of the Magic Circle, took a large pen that, once the top was unscrewed, became a small pistol. He had made it himself in his workshops and was rather proud of it. He was alone with V. P. Menon in the room, duly signed, and then, unscrewing the pen top, told Menon that if he tried to retract on the promises he had made he would ‘shoot him like a dog’. The terrified Menon dived under the table on which the Instrument of Accession sat, shouting to Mountbatten to rescue him. The viceroy dashed into the room and promptly confiscated the pen.29
Jinnah’s attitude to those states that would definitely join Pakistan, like Bahawalpur, was more relaxed. He was in no hurry to have Instruments of Accession signed by 15 August and was content to take his time negotiating. The one that would cause him most trouble was Qalat, where a mighty khan ruled over a state the size of the British Isles and which constituted a large part of Baluchistan. The khan, like the Nizam, believed his state should become an independent country and, also like the Nizam, he employed Walter Monckton to argue his case, although it is unlikely he paid him quite so generously. He was happy to have a treaty with Pakistan and for Karachi to run his defence, foreign affairs and communications but would not actually accede; again Monckton’s tactics were replicated. Why, the khan argued, should he accede if Afghanistan did not? Nothing had been resolved by August and the argument would drag on for many months to come until Jinnah finally felt he had to act.30 The last Pakistan state, Hunza, did not in fact accede until 1973.
On 25 July the major princes were asked, en masse, to Delhi to be addressed by the viceroy in the Chamber of Princes and then to lunch at Viceroy’s House. Some, like Indore and Bhopal, refused, Bhopal saying that they were being ‘invited like the oysters to attend the tea-party with the Walrus and the Carpenter’, but most accepted. It was a splendid occasion with everyone wearing their best uniforms, state robes and jewels, the last time such an event would take place under the Raj. Mountbatten, looking almost as splendid as his audience in his white naval uniform with decorations, and using the moral authority of his links to the British royal family, laid out the terms of accession again. He had, he said, ‘wrung from the future government of India the best terms to which they will agree’, which was undoubtedly true. ‘Immediate accession on the three subjects of defence, external affairs and communications will not prejudice the position of the states’, he continued, urging the princes to accede and to do so quickly.31 Gandhi thought the viceroy spoke to them ‘in very gentle terms. I liked his speech’ but added, with the typical Gandhi touch of sardonic humour, ‘it was not a brief one’. Gandhi was becoming agitated that the emphasis was continually on the princes themselves but, he argued at his prayer meetings, ‘the ruler is nothing. The people are everything. The ruler will be dead one of these days but the people will remain’.32 But for the time being the focus was very much on the rulers. Mountbatten’s approach worked well. Twenty-two more princes acceded after lunch.
‘In the end’, thought Penderel Moon, ‘the princes were bullied’33 but it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise. Bhopal may have been correct to say that, ‘The British seem to have abdicated power and what is worse they have handed it over to the enemies of all their friends’, something he looked on as ‘one of the greatest, if not the greatest tragedies that has ever befallen mankind. The States, the Moslems, and the entire mass of people who relied on British justice and their sense of fair play, suddenly find themselves totally hopeless, unorganized and unsupported’,34 but in reality there was no alternative. Hyderabad would soon discover the cost of not acceding.
In fact many of the princes saw independence as an opportunity. The more charismatic had not relished living under British control, however much they had appreciated some of the benefits and comforts that the Raj afforded. A new India, and a new Pakistan, could offer them opportunities to re-establish the ascendancy of their families, which the British had suppressed for so long. On 9 August some of the greatest rulers, the Maharajah Scindia of Gwalior, the Raja of Faridkot, the Maharajah of Bharatpur, the Maharajah of Panna, the Raja of Bhagat and the Maharajah of Alwar, sent out a circular to the ‘Princes and Leading Men of India’ to join them at a conference in Delhi. It was, they said, time for the Princely Order to take advantage of the golden opportunity that independence offered to provide fresh leadership to the Indian people. It would take time, and there would be more clashes with Congress under Nehru’s descendants, but for those princes who took advantage of the political and commercial opportunities, there was certainly life in the new India.35
One prince who would not, however, find the new India, or the new Pakistan, offered him any
opportunities was the Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir. There were really three parts to his beautiful north-western state of 4 million people. Ladakh, to the east in the lower Himalaya, is a barren, mountainous area with its main town, Leh, at 11,500 feet. Its population, such as it was, was mainly Buddhist. It is still known as ‘Little Tibet’. Jammu, to the south-west, was really an extension of the Punjab. Its eponymous main town, Jammu, at 1,000 feet, was the winter capital, known as the city of temples and an important centre of Hindu pilgrimage. Then there was the fabled Vale of Kashmir itself, the green valley fringed with snow-capped mountains that pushed north into the Himalaya and whose lakeland city, Srinagar, with its colonies of houseboats, was the government’s summer capital. Its ruler was the Hindu prince Maharajah Hari Singh, whose Dogra family, Gandhi would maintain, had ‘bought’ the state from the British for 75 lakhs of rupees under the Treaty of Amritsar in 1846.36 Logical as it may have seemed to the British, and advantageous to the maharajah, it imposed Hindu rule on a state that was 77 per cent Muslim and, in the Vale of Kashmir itself, 92 per cent Muslim.
Kashmir occupied a special place in the Indian psyche, and no more so than with Nehru whose family were long established Kashmiri Brahmins. Patel thought that ‘Kashmir meant more to him than anything else’ in India.37 It was, Nehru wrote, ‘a very poor state with an oppressive land system’ and there was historic tension between the people and the maharajah’s government, which was generally thought corrupt and inefficient. During the 1930s this opposition had structured around the Kashmir National Conference, led by the charismatic Aligarh graduate Sheikh Abdullah. He represented everything Nehru sought: he was a Muslim Congress supporter, who opposed the League, in a key Muslim majority state, reinforcing Congress’ claim to speak for all Indians. He was also a social reformer campaigning for fairer land tenure and for democratic representation. Predictably he was put in prison while, according to Nehru, the maharajah’s premier, Pandit Kak, tried to stir up inter-communal violence. Kak, who ‘hated Nehru with a bitter hatred’,38 was a sycophant who had been in office since 1945. He was now trying to persuade his indecisive ruler to opt for Pakistan, an option he thought would allow him to retain greater power than he would have under a socialist Congress government. ‘The normal and obvious course’, Nehru countered, ‘appears to be for Kashmir to join the Constituent Assembly of India’ but ‘the Maharajah is timid and is in a fix’.39
Nehru and Gandhi both now decided they should go to Kashmir to put pressure on Kak to release Abdullah. Kak, nervous of the effect on the population of an impassioned Nehru, protested to Delhi and Mountbatten consequently asked them not to. Instead he went himself on 18 June, intent on persuading the maharajah to hold a referendum, as was happening in the neighbouring North West Frontier Province. It was an inconclusive visit, and the maharajah feigned illness so he did not have to see him; Nehru said that was his usual trick and normally it was a tummy ache. Gandhi did in fact visit in late July, and was remarkably restrained. Nehru agreed not to go at all but by the end of July there was still no indication of what the maharajah was intending.
There was some concern in London that the princes, those old friends of Britain, were being virtually forced to accede. This was partly as a result of Monckton’s lobbying, partly because of individual princes using their political contacts and also because the older hands in the India Office felt the viceroy was actually exceeding his brief. The prime minister had stated clearly in Parliament that the princes would not be under any pressure to accede and yet here was the viceroy doing exactly that. There was a wonderfully archaic exchange of minutes between India Office officials over Qalat. Mr Rumbold wrote to Mr Croft saying that the viceroy had misunderstood the constitutional position of Qalat and had got the issue ‘quite wrong’. Mr Croft replied that he was in doubt but that His Excellency ‘went astray’ but that he was ‘not too sure what there is to be gained by pointing it out’.40 Eventually Listowel was persuaded to write. He asked Mountbatten to explain why the states had to have decided by 15 August and pointed out that it was contrary to the government’s public line.
One of Mountbatten’s strong points was how he played Whitehall. British governments are traditionally less trusting of the lieutenants they send to represent them abroad than other nations, such as the United States. How much to refer back to London has always been a delicate balance. The immediate focus in Westminster has long been on Parliament and the media, rather than achieving what is in the best interests locally. Usually Mountbatten was clever about this. He had worked out where power lay, with Attlee, Cripps and those who briefed them like Krishna Menon, and he spent long hours preparing his briefings for them – his personal reports are extraordinarily full for a man as busy as he was – but he did not consider Listowel as occupying a place in his pantheon. ‘I am afraid you have completely misunderstood my purpose and what I am trying to achieve’, he replied on 4 August. ‘I am trying my very best to create an integrated India. If I am allowed to play my own hand without interference I have no doubt that I will succeed’, which may have been fairly arrogant but many who have been in a similar position would strongly agree with him.41
There were, besides, many other pressing issues for the Partition Council to decide. What should happen to the Andaman Islands, that unhealthy archipelago in the Bay of Bengal that the Raj had primarily used as a prison. The British chiefs of staff wanted to keep them as a military base and suggested they be appropriated. Mountbatten’s staff, mindful of Patel’s reaction should the British start seizing parts of Indian territory, tactfully advised they be leased or some sort of ‘joint control’ be worked out.42 Then there was the much more complicated issue of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, that strip of tribal territory south-east of the Ganges Delta, on the east side of the Bay of Bengal, where John Christie had spent so many happy days. Patel was warning of extreme trouble if they did not come to India but if they did they would be completely cut off by East Bengal. Their fate would occupy much of Radcliffe’s time.
Effectively, Congress had decided to boycott the Frontier referendum, which was conducted over a prolonged period in mid-July by specially drafted army officers on the correct assumption that Dr Khan Sahib’s ministry would not have run it fairly. The Congress logic was that if the turnout was subsequently low then the vote would have no legitimacy and they could argue to overturn it. Their tactic nearly worked, but not quite; turnout was just over 50 per cent and the vote overwhelmingly for joining Pakistan. The absent Caroe had been vindicated and Jinnah was cheered that Sir George Cunningham had agreed to return as its first Pakistani governor of the North West Frontier Province. Ninety-five Muslim ICS officers also now agreed to serve Pakistan, several of whom would go on to occupy high office, as did one Indian Christian, Cornelius, who would end up as chief justice. Fifty British ICS also said they would stay on with Pakistan rather than India.
In the Punjab, Sikh agitation was growing. Giyani Kartar Singh, President of the Shiromani Akali Dal, the Sikh political party headed by Master Tara Singh, said publicly on 29 July that the Sikhs would not accept any Boundary Commission award that they considered unjust, despite what Baldev Singh was saying in the Partition Council. Giyani said that Baldev Singh had no authority to give any such undertaking. ‘The Sikhs’, overall, thought Jenkins, ‘are very puzzled and unhappy and do not quite know what to do’. Jenkins had told Giyani he should negotiate with Jinnah; there was nothing to stop Sikhs retaining their land and enjoying freedom of worship in Pakistan. Groups of Sikhs had in fact been in negotiation but Giyani said ‘he had seen a good deal of Mr. Jinnah and had no confidence in him’. There was, Jenkins continued, increasing rural violence with heavy Muslim casualties in the Hoshiarpur and Jullundur areas. Partition work seemed to be going very slowly and he could not see how a major muddle could be avoided on 15 August.43
Jenkins’s repeated warnings were beginning to have some effect. On 17 July Auchinleck briefed the Partition Council that the army was assembling a Punjab Bo
undary Force, the PBF, to assist the police in keeping order. It would be an Indian Army force, based on 4th Indian Division and commanded by the energetic and respected Major General Pete Rees, an officer with an excellent operational record, who would have senior Indian and Pakistani advisers attached to his headquarters. No similar plans were made for Bengal as the view was that there would not be serious trouble in Bengal with the possible exception of Calcutta.44 The PBF was to be about 20,000 troops, five infantry brigades, so about one and a half divisions. Jenkins who, like most senior ICS officials had a good working knowledge of the military, had consistently recommended a force four times that size given the area over which they would have to operate, the density and pattern of the population and the fact that his Punjab police were now virtually useless. Warnings of the problems the army’s class structure had caused in Gurgaon were ignored. Of Rees’s seventeen infantry battalions, two were Gurkhas but the remainder all ‘class-based’ Indian units. Nearly all the battalions were locally based and two were actually from the Punjab regiment so made up exclusively of local men.45
Auchinleck’s heart does not seem to have been in the PBF from the very start. Strongly opposed to the Indian Army being used for internal order purposes, and preoccupied with its division and reorganisation, the PBF was an unwelcome distraction. The Army Intelligence Summaries published in July and August dealt at length with matters in Palestine and the wider world but on the Punjab were restricted to commenting that, ‘In spite of the announcement regarding the division of the Indian Armed Forces, the integrity and impartiality of Indian troops has remained unchanged’ and that ‘There has been no report of Hindu-Sikh-Muslim friction in any unit’.46 Minds seem to have been completely shut to the possibility of using British troops, despite the fact that Tuker had deployed them in Bengal almost continually since the previous August and with clear effect. On 29 July Sir Arthur Smith, the chief of the Indian General Staff, so the professional head of the Indian Army, while Auchinleck was commander-in-chief of all Indian armed forces including the Royal Indian Navy and Royal Indian Air Force, published an order, the content of which was ‘NOT to be divulged to Indians’. It said that British troops could not be employed in communal disturbances to protect Indian lives but they could if it was necessary to protect British ones’.47 He was following a direct instruction from the Labour government in London, reinforced by a note Listowel sent to Mountbatten on 18 July.48 As the PBF assembled, the 30,000 mobile and rapidly deployable British troops, and the available Gurkha battalions in India, a total force of over 65,000 with no ‘class’ bias, were simply excluded. The PBF was set up to fail from its inception.
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