Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  Nehru did not exactly help in this debate. Smith had been to see him on 13 July to brief him as to how the new government might choose to exercise its control of the military. Nehru did not appear to grasp that it would soon be his responsibility, Smith reported. They then covered the possibility of disturbances in the Punjab post 15 August. Smith explained how the Joint Command structure would work, with Rees reporting to Auchinleck. Rees would need the authority to designate an area suffering violence as a ‘Disturbed Area’ and be authorised to apply military measures within it. Nehru responded vaguely. He was more annoyed with Auchinleck’s attempt to retain control of military finances, insisting that the financial adviser must work to him while Nehru demanded he work to the Finance Department. Auchinleck, Nehru complained, seemed to think he was ‘free to carry out administration in accordance with his own ideas’. He was also beginning to think that the commander-in-chief was biased towards Pakistan. Auchinleck was certainly concerned that the new Pakistan Army’s thirty-five infantry battalions would be well under strength. Then there was a major row about splitting the air force. There were eight fighter squadrons and two transport squadrons. The initial recommendation was to split them 80 per cent to India and 20 per cent to Pakistan but Jinnah was now claiming he needed 70 per cent because of the requirement to control the Frontier. Auchinleck supported him. Nehru infuriated Jinnah by saying that he did not want aircraft used on the tribes he described as ‘our people’.49 As the Punjab staggered towards its awful fate, Nehru seemed unable to realise that the army he had so long despised was now all that could save his own countrymen from disaster.

  In Bengal the violence throughout July was spasmodic. Huseyn Suhrawardy, who would become Premier of East Bengal, was at loggerheads with Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, Premier-designate of West Bengal, Indian Bengal. Suhrawardy had continued to act as premier for the whole province, despite the Assembly vote for partition, but was now preoccupied with the division of assets. He came to Delhi on 30 July, intent on engaging viceregal support in the number of typewriters each state would have. He was particularly exercised about Calcutta Ice Plant. It had eight diesel engines but would run just as well on electricity so East Bengal was claiming all eight engines. Mountbatten by now concluded he ‘was rather a gas-bag, bogged down with trivialities and not thinking about the bigger issues’.50

  8. AUGUST

  THE NOBLEST ACT OF THE BRITISH NATION?

  ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’

  (JAWAHARLAL NEHRU)

  ‘Our people have gone mad’

  (LIAQUAT ALI)

  The monsoon should have arrived by the end of July, that deluge of rain ‘when nature is washed green and breathes again’ and when ‘for a few days, cool air and the smell of damp earth are blessings beyond price’, but it didn’t. The terrible, humid, cloying, all-enveloping heat just continued as if it would never end.1

  There was nowhere to escape it. One of those it affected most was Cyril Radcliffe, a man who had never been east of Gibraltar, and who was now ensconced in a bungalow on the viceroy’s estate. He had two weeks to finalise drawing the partition lines on the maps of Bengal and the Punjab. Christopher Beaumont had been appointed as his secretary and minder. He had applied for a position in Palestine and thought that he had left India for good when he was asked to take the job on. He arranged to meet Radcliffe in the Air Terminal beside London’s Victoria Station. He was worried as to how he would recognise him. The BOAC lady suggested that he should wear a badge with his name on it but Beaumont, an old-fashioned man, was appalled at the vulgarity of the idea as he was by her subsequent suggestion that he should make an announcement ‘over a thing called a Tannoy’. In the end he simply approached the most intelligent-looking man in the room.2 At first he found Radcliffe ‘a rather arrogant man, very self important, almost pompous, unemotional. I never heard him laugh very much’.3 ‘Meeting him’, thought Mountbatten’s press secretary, Alan Campbell-Johnson, ‘was a cold experience’.

  However, they agreed that he had both a formidable mind and that he was totally incorruptible. Beaumont later ‘formed an affection for him’ although he never knew whether this was reciprocated. When they arrived in Delhi they spent two nights staying with the Mountbattens in Viceroy’s House. ‘There were just four of us at meals. Mountbatten and Radcliffe did not get on well. They could not have been more different.’ Mountbatten ‘had few literary tastes’. Radcliffe, a Fellow of All Souls, ‘was of outstanding intelligence and very quietly civilised. Lady Mountbatten, to her credit, adroitly kept the conversations on an even keel.’ They then moved into their house on the Viceregal estate. There was no air conditioning. The first task Beaumont was given was to scour the bazaars for wine, preferably white; he managed to find some cases of Alsatian which seemed to cheer Radcliffe up as he started work.4 Radcliffe and Beaumont had an assistant secretary, Rao Sahib V. D. Ayer, a Hindu in the ICS.

  Beaumont found the two panels of judges assigned to sit on the respective Boundary Commissions were ‘not much help as they always divided along communal lines’. There had been open sessions in court but again the arguments presented went almost entirely based on whether the person advancing them was Hindu or Muslim. There was little objectivity. ‘Drawing the line was always going to be impossible to make acceptable and partition of the Punjab was always going to be acrimonious’, Beaumont continued, ‘it was a tremendously difficult job as the villages were all mixed up, especially the areas around Lyallpur, Ferozepore and Ludhiana’. The problem was made so much worse because ‘there was not enough time. It was rushed through. Much more thought should have gone into it, more advice taken’ but there was no time. Beaumont had always been ‘hugely impressed’ by Nehru, for whom he had worked in the Foreign Ministry. ‘He was very able, very easy to work with’, but he was also emotional and ‘he got the Punjab wrong – he didn’t really understand the Punjab. He didn’t believe the slaughter would occur and he persuaded Mountbatten it wouldn’t happen – so Mountbatten disregarded men like Jenkins’ who really knew what was going on’.5

  A rumour seemed to spread that Radcliffe was treated like a hermit while he was working on the partition lines but that was not true. Beaumont recalled that he travelled to Simla, Lahore and to Calcutta, where he stayed with Sir Fred Burrows in Government House. He hoped he might see the ghost of Warren Hastings, which allegedly stalked the corridors looking for a file which might have helped him at his trial. In Delhi Radcliffe had frequent visitors – Walter Monckton, Auchinleck and the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Patrick Spens. However, Beaumont was never separated from him, part of his remit being to prevent unwarranted interference in his decision making.

  Jenkins briefed Mountbatten and the political leadership in Delhi again on the situation in the Punjab on 4 August. Casualties in July, he estimated, had been 4,632 killed and 2,573 seriously injured, with three times as many in the rural areas as in the towns. His figures were, he admitted, almost certainly inaccurate as his administration was breaking down and the true figures were probably far higher. By the last week of July, 20,256 houses in Lahore had been destroyed. He justified the measures he was taking to keep the peace, given that he was exercising direct rule under Section 93 after the collapse of the provincial government in March, against the strong criticism coming from the League. Very soon such scruples would be irrelevant.6 On 5 August, what was left of the Punjab Police Criminal Investigation Department reported that a major instigator of the Punjab disturbances was Pritam Singh, an ex-Indian National Army man who had been one of those trained by the Japanese at their Penang spy school and landed in India by submarine. Master Tara Singh was also, the CID believed, heavily implicated in the violence. He was ‘completely one track on the subject of taking revenge on the Muslims’ and there was a Sikh plot to kill Jinnah in Karachi on 15 August. ‘The Sikh leaders’, the report concluded, ‘had lost control of their people’.7

  On 6 August, Jenkins i
nvited his staff to a farewell drinks party at Government House in Lahore. Santdas Kirpalani went along, intending to catch a flight to Delhi the next morning as he and the other remaining Hindu ICS officers took their leave. It was clear to them all that Lahore would go to Pakistan and anyway Kirpalani wanted to be near the centre of power in the new India. He left at 6.00 a.m. on 7 August to ensure he reached the aerodrome, six miles outside Lahore, on time, and duly arrived at 6.50 a.m. only to see his aeroplane already taking off. He later discovered someone had sold his seat for cash. Then he remembered that his colleague N. M. Buch had said at Jenkins’s party that he was driving to Delhi that day. Kirpalani had been surprised. Driving had become dangerous but Buch said he had a special reason to do so. Kirpalani just caught him at Faletti’s Hotel on The Mall as he was setting off and climbed in with him. A mile outside Lahore, Buch slowed down and asked Kirpalani if he was armed. He confirmed he was. Buch asked him to load his .38 while he loaded his own .45. Kirpalani asked what was happening. Buch explained that his Muslim bearer, an old friend of many years’ service, had to get out to find his family in Jullundur and bring them back to Pakistan. If he went the normal way, by train, he was sure he would be butchered by Sikh gangs. Kirpalani turned round to see a pile of old blankets and rugs on the back seat under which the old man was hidden. Buch was a Gujarati, a ‘Hindu of Hindus’ and here he was risking his life for his old servant. Leaving Lahore a Muslim gang tried to stop them. Buch accelerated and they escaped, being showered with stones as they sped past. But thirty miles east they came across the first Sikh roadblock. There were a lot of them, they were armed and in an ‘angry and bellicose mood’. They had no option but to stop. Then someone in the crowd recognised Kirpalani. ‘Clear the road’, he shouted, ‘let them go. The Hindu officer we know’. They were lucky. A British engineer had tried to take his Muslim bearer out on a train a few days later and they would both be cut to pieces.

  Forty miles on, past Amritsar, they ran into an Indian Army roadblock. The soldiers explained they had been called out because of rioting in Hoshiarpur, twenty miles from Jullundur. Fateh Khan, a Muslim judge, was sitting down to breakfast with his family when a Sikh gang had thrown a bomb into their house, killing them all. The soldiers advised them to get to Delhi as soon as possible and that the Grand Trunk Road, past Ludhiana, was dangerous. Muslim gangs from Panipat were out of control. Two miles beyond the roadblock they dropped the old bearer off. ‘I shall never forget the mute tears of gratitude on the face of that forlorn bearded old man as he turned to walk “home”,’ Kirpalani added.8

  That same day, 7 August, Major General Pete Rees, the commander of the Punjab Boundary Force, flew over the area between Amritsar and Lahore in a light Auster reconnaissance aircraft. He had in his hand a report that had just come in that ‘a band of one hundred and fifty Sikhs armed with firearms and swords had raided a Mohammedan village during the night and butchered eleven men, two women, one boy and three baby girls. Eight more were badly wounded and all the hay and bullock carts had been burned, the clothing and silver ornaments looted’. His task, he wrote, was not an ‘enviable one and I can’t please everyone. I am bombarded with demands to take over control, to show ruthlessness and to string up the malefactors from the lamp posts’. He was confident of his sepoys who were in ‘good fettle’ but it ‘was a trying time for all. The temperature even in the shade averaged 100 degrees (38 degrees Celsius) and the ‘night minimum’ was 80–90 degrees (27–32 degrees Celsius). ‘This is especially trying to Mohammmedans keeping the annual month’s fast of Ramazan which this year is 19 July to 16 August’ but, he guessed, ‘our task is only a month or two after 15 August’. The Indian Army had, he thought, ‘been a shining example of moderation, unity and solidarity’ at a time when the mutual bitterness and hatred in the Punjab was growing so rapidly. His troops would not be reassigned to their respective new national armies until after their task was complete and they were to work directly to Auchinleck as supreme commander under the authority of the Partition Council as agreed in June.9 But his force was totally inadequate for its task even given the limited role envisaged for it in that first week of August. His 20,000-odd men were to police an area of 37,500 square miles in the central Punjab, the twelve districts that had been identified as disputed by Radcliffe. It was an area about the size of Ireland, and with a population of 14.5 million, divided, like the rest of the province, in the proportion of 55 per cent Muslim, 25 per cent Hindu and 20 per cent Sikh.10 He deployed his brigades, each under strength at about 4,000 men, with one covering Amritsar and Gurdaspur; a second in Jullundur and Hoshiarpur, a third in Lyallpur and Sialkot, the fourth in Ferozepore and the fifth, alongside his own headquarters, in Lahore. He had very little mobility and just one under-strength cavalry regiment.

  There was, thought Penderel Moon, ‘remarkable faith in the projected Boundary Force’. He did not share it. He thought the Sikhs were bound to attack the Muslims as soon as they had the opportunity. Either they would wait until the PBF was withdrawn or, if it was ineffective, they would simply ignore it. A Sikh major on his way to join it, and with whom he shared a railway compartment, agreed. He thought that a large proportion of the troops would be ‘infected by the communal virus’ and that anyway it lacked the mobility it needed to cover its vast area of responsibility. Moon and he thought that a force of 50,000, which was the figure he had heard the PBF was intended to be, would be pushed to do the job even if they were all mobile and totally reliable. They agreed that it would take at least the four divisions Jenkins had been persistently recommending. ‘By the time I got back to Bahawalpur’, Moon concluded, ‘I had written off the Boundary Force completely’. Moon was equally pessimistic about the level of violence to come. He had been corresponding with Major Short, an ex-Sikh officer brought out from England, specifically at Baldev Singh’s request, to help the Sikhs with their negotiations. Short had asked Moon whether he would lobby for Radcliffe’s line to be drawn sufficiently far west to allow the colony lands around Lahore to be included in India. Moon realised that this would mean that Lahore itself would be denied to Pakistan, something that would cause a terrible Muslim reaction. Just because the Sikhs, as a community, had done so much to develop the colony lands did not justify departing from the principle that ‘contiguous Muslim-majority areas’ should go to Pakistan. It was, he felt, inevitable that Radcliffe’s line would run somewhere between Lahore and Amritsar.11

  Sir Evan Jenkins had not given up. The last dispatch from this most clear-thinking and well-informed governor was on 13 August. He pointed out once more that the PBF was responsible for 17,932 villages. It was imperative Rees’s force was reinforced by at least another two divisions, effectively doubling it. ‘The lesson’, he continued, ‘is that once the inter-locked communities begin to fight over the countryside, the only remaining remedy is to employ a very large number of troops’. The police were now almost totally ineffective. A new Hindu police superintendent had arrived in Amritsar. His first act was to disarm all his Muslim officers. This not only created a sense of panic but led to a third of the police deserting. Amritsar itself now needed a lot more troops to replace them, two full-strength brigades instead of the single under-strength one Rees could spare. The Sikhs, Jenkins emphasised, were not only determined to have their revenge for the Rawalpindi massacres but to ‘assert themselves on the boundary question’. They were behaving with ‘extreme brutality. Parties of unescorted Muslim refugees were being routinely butchered. A harmless party of Pathan labourers moving west along the Grand Trunk Road near Amritsar had been set upon and thirty Pathans killed’. The Muslims would then avenge those attacks; already Muslim gangs had held up two trains in Rawalpindi and massacred the Sikh refugees trying to get to Amritsar. The army needed to take over railway security, a task that repeated exercises and studies had recommended as essential in the event of widespread internal disorder.12

  Major General Hawthorn, the Deputy Chief of the Indian General Staff, so a very senior officer wh
ose opinion should have carried weight, visited the Punjab on 11 August and recommended that air patrols were also essential. He estimated the killing at a daily average of one hundred people. Auchinleck did not receive his report well. He pencilled in the margin: ‘There are very few aircraft for the job required of them. It is quite impossible to provide air “standing patrols” ’.13 Yet there were aircraft, a lot of them, with pilots who, after Nehru’s and Patel’s spat over how the squadrons would be divided, were available to fly them. The operational machinery was also there to deploy them, precisely why the Joint Defence staff had been established. There were then those 30,000 British troops, who could supposedly only be used to protect European lives, now sweltering bored in their barracks, alongside their 35,000 Gurkha colleagues. But there was no willingness by Auchinleck, obsessed with the reorganisation of the army or, as he saw it, its demise, to use them nor any pressure on him to do so. Nehru did not understand the military, Jinnah’s attention was now on Karachi and Dacca, and Mountbatten was wary of crossing a military who he always worried would not listen to him. He was, V. P. Menon thought, ‘overwhelmed with the idea that the army and the services might not take his advice’.14 Rees’s inadequate PBF was left to face the coming holocaust unaided.