In the event the crowds were so thick they had to give up all hope of performing the ceremony. The flag was raised and the salute fired with the bodyguard, Mountbatten, Nehru and the Polish wife of a British officer, who was lost in the crowd, marooned in their carriage amid a vast throng of cheering people. ‘This was done amid scenes of the most frantic rejoicing and as the flag broke on a brilliant rainbow appeared in the sky which was taken by the whole crowd as a good omen’, Mountbatten wrote. ‘There were lots of shouts of “Jai Hind” and “Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jai” ’, he continued to Listowel, ‘but there were also lots of shouts of “Mountbatten Ki Jai” and more than one of “Pandit Mountbatten Ki Jai” ’, a tendency to self-congratulation, which was unnecessary given the significance of his achievement and something that would later so damage his reputation.32
Inder Malhotra had walked the ten miles into Delhi from the village where his father was stationmaster to be there. There were no trains. A Muslim village nearby had been attacked and most of the people killed. Some had fled into Delhi where they now joined the crowds of other refugees. Eleven had pleaded with his parents for protection. His father had hidden them and managed to signal a Pakistan special train that wasn’t meant to stop until Lahore to pick them up. Despite this Inder was determined to celebrate. He found a spot near the Assembly on the evening of 14 August. A family next to them kept asking what the excitement was. A young girl said, ‘Today is Mr. Nehru’s coronation’. Inder, a convinced socialist who had tried to get himself jailed as a Young Congress member, screamed at her. He remembered the strange mixture of fear and anger on the one hand and enormous goodwill on the other. He felt that Nehru saying, in his ‘gentle tones’, that India was an entity where everyone was equal and a democratic, secular country, was his ‘noblest legacy’ and very brave considering the growing strength of strong Hindu nationalism.
Elsewhere in India there were very different emotions. In Lucknow, where the Union Jack had flown continuously from the Residency to commemorate the many British who had been slaughtered there in 1857, a noisy crowd arrived wanting to tear it down and replace it with the new Indian flag. Pandit Pant, despite his long years of incarceration by the British, intervened, refusing to allow them to desecrate a memorial to British dead. Instead the Union flag was lowered for the last time, the flagstaff cut down and the access steps up to it cemented up. ‘We shall not’, Tuker wrote, ‘forget Pandit Pant’. In Calcutta the celebrations mostly went off peacefully. Rajagopalachari, Nehru’s nomination as Governor of West Bengal, was not a particularly popular choice among Bengalis. As he arrived for his handover from Sir Frederick Burrows he was met by a mob chanting ‘Go back, Rajagopalachari’ but the ceremony went ahead as planned until near the end when a mob invaded Government House and stole all the silver. That apart, the mood in the city was ‘of great jubilation and fraternization amongst all classes’. Would that it could last.33
The mood among those British who were left was mixed. Sir Alfred Watson, writing in the Daily Telegraph, spoke for the more unashamedly imperialist. ‘The Indians have contended’, he wrote, ‘that left to itself India would have provided itself with all the apparatus of a modern state. The only answer to that can be that no Asian country, with the exception of Japan, has done so. The chapter closes upon a great chapter of British and Indian history, upon the most fruitful experiment the world has seen in the government of an alien people.’ And, he added, untruthfully, ‘Remarkable has been the material advance. There are those who hold that Britain’s greatest gifts to India have been the system of British law, impartially administered and open to all, and the English language.’34
The Times paid a slightly barbed tribute to the British who had run India for both the Company and the Crown, saying that their presence “was marked not by any glittering display of intellectual gifts but by a certain refreshing diffusion of a wholesome air. In his image as nowadays presented by Indians, the British official in India was like the British climate, more than trying at times but very healthy to live with”.35
In the Indian Army 2,590 British soldiers had said they would stay on. The figure had fluctuated wildly over the previous months but that was the ‘official’ number on 15 August. The Indian press continued to attack them, with headlines like ‘Subtle move to retain Britishers in Indian Army’. In fact most would serve in Pakistan, where Jinnah offered a genuine welcome and where they would serve under a British commander-in-chief, General Sir Frank Messervy, and a team of British governors like Bourne in East Bengal and Cunningham on the North West Frontier. J. P. Cross and the officers of 1st Battalion 1st King George V’s Own Gurkha Rifles dined together on 14 August. At the end of dinner the mess president stood and said quietly, ‘Mr. Vice (the traditional army invitation to the vice president to propose a toast), the King Emperor’; ‘Mr. Vice, at the other end of the table, stood up, gripped his glass, lifted it for the loyal toast and said, “Gentlemen, for the last time the King Emperor.” We all rose and lifting our glasses in our right hands, intoned the solemn refrain to the litany of lament; “For the last time the King Emperor.” ’ It was a ritual that would be repeated many times across the subcontinent. The next morning, Independence Day, they held a church service with the other five battalions in Razmak. Four of these were destined for Pakistan; only the Gurkhas and a battalion of the Rajputana Rifles would move to India. As the minister prayed for peace between the two new dominions, the Pathans started sniping them from a nearby hill. The Rajputana Rifles, dressed in their dhotis, responded by firing mortar bombs in reply.36
The 19th Lancers, stationed in Peshawar, held their final parade on 15 August and hauled down the Union Jack for the last time. The Muslim squadrons were staying put but they now had to get their Sikh and Jat squadrons safely into India. ‘The local population had shown little antipathy to Hindus but towards the Sikhs their hatred was murderous’, originating, so the regiment thought, in the days of Sikh rule a century before. The commanding officer had therefore decided to keep the Sikh squadron out of the public eye until he could get them away. He kept them in barracks, making them responsible for the security of the camp and its perimeter. One morning, as a truckload of Punjabi Muslim infantry went past the gate, a young Sikh on guard duty loosed off a shot which hit their lorry. Nobody ever discovered what had made him do it and it was probably an accident, what the army calls an ‘ND’, or ‘negligent discharge’, but the effect was catastrophic. The Punjabis thought they were being attacked by the Sikhs, rushed to their own lines, aroused the rest of their company and mounted a full-scale assault on 19th Lancers’ lines. A hysterical officer rang Edward Behr, still Intelligence Officer of the brigade. He rushed to find Brigadier Morris, his brigade commander, who was having breakfast on his lawn having just finished an early morning game of tennis. Together they drove straight into the 19th Lancers’ barracks, Morris still wearing his tennis whites but with his red-rimmed general staff officer’s hat rammed on his head so he was recognised. He told Behr to drive straight onto the parade ground in between the two opposing groups. This was a brave thing to do. Both sides were lying in fire positions taking potshots at each other and the Punjabis had brought up a machine gun, which was firing bursts into the Sikh barrack blocks. Behr stopped the jeep in the middle of the parade ground. The firing slackened. Morris told Behr to go over to the Punjabis and make them stand up while he addressed the Sikhs. ‘Now then, what’s all this nonsense!’ Behr heard him shout. ‘Get up! All of you!’ The Sikhs sheepishly obeyed.
Luckily the only casualty of the morning was the Sikh who had fired the first shot. ‘A young man, he lay on a stretcher waiting for an ambulance, and a fellow lancer was trying to keep the flies away from his appalling wound. From chest to crutch his stomach was like a model used in medical school for anatomy lessons.’ He died soon afterwards.37 The 19th Lancers’ solution was ultimately for the two Muslim squadrons to escort their Indian comrades to the border but they had to endure several more anxious weeks until that
was possible. They didn’t tell anyone, least of all the police, and conducted the operation in such secrecy that the Sikhs and Jats were well beyond the Indus river before anyone realised they had gone. It was the sort of incident that would soon be repeated many times.38
The week before, the senior Indian officers had invited their Pakistani counterparts to a party at the Delhi Gymkhana Club. K. M. Cariappa, the senior Indian, made a speech in which he said ‘au-revoir’ rather than ‘good-bye’ deliberately. ‘I associate the honest and sincere wishes of every one of us here that we shall meet each other frequently as the best of friends in the same spirit of good comradeship that we have had the good fortune to enjoy all these years.’ Brigadier Aga Mohammed Raza, the senior Pakistani present, replied in the same spirit. They then all sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and Cariappa presented Raza with a silver trophy of two Indian soldiers, one Hindu, the other Muslim, with their rifles pointing at a common enemy. The mood, although jolly on the surface, was, some felt, forced and ‘the atmosphere charged with uncertainty’. Nehru attended but looked very ‘off colour’, as he usually did at military gatherings.39
For most, despite forgivable feelings of nostalgia, Independence passed quietly. Rumours circulated that the members of the Peshawar Club had shot all the Peshawar Vale hounds they had kept to hunt jackal rather than leave them for their Pakistani successors. It was precisely that, just a rumour, and the hounds and the club were both successfully handed over. The Peshawar Club is still there to this day with its library full of useful books from the Raj years such as Big Game, Boers and Boches: A Sportsman’s Notebook by Lieutenant Colonel Prescott-Westcar and copies of Thacker’s Directory to the British India and Native States. Much of what had given the Raj its distinctive flavour would remain, perhaps even more so in Pakistan than in India.
By 15 August the majority of the ruling princes had agreed to accede, even Bhopal, although he kept Patel waiting until the last minute, asking for a ten-day extension; eventually he signed the papers providing Mountbatten kept them in his safe until he agreed to their release. Just three held out. The first, Junagadh, had, some thought, possibly been too busy marrying off one of his dogs and simply omitted to file his papers; they would be very wrong. Although his was a relatively small state, the issue of its accession would soon cause a serious problem as would that of the other two major states, Hyderabad and Kashmir. The Nizam of Hyderabad had held a dinner on 14 August to celebrate Independence but it had been a miserable affair and not just because of his legendary meanness. Still dressed in his customary torn and faded trousers, the Nizam proposed a final toast to the King Emperor. John Peyton, an English guest, thought how sad it was to see two hundred years of history ‘ending in one brief, pathetic gesture’.40 Kashmir remained silent.
On 16 August, after the euphoria had abated, the Boundary Commission findings were briefed to the political leadership. Radcliffe submitted three separate reports and maps. The first dealt with the Punjab, the second Bengal and the third Sylhet and Assam. He said the Punjab had been very difficult, especially the area between the rivers Beas and Sutlej (see map here) on the one hand and the River Ravi on the other. He had cut the key irrigation canals off from their headwaters, for example, the Dipalpur Canal was cut off from its Ferozepore headworks and the same applied to the Upper Bari Doab Canal. These decisions were, he argued, unavoidable but he thought it ‘only right to express the hope that, where the drawing of a boundary line cannot avoid disrupting such unitary services as canal irrigation, railways and electric power transmission, a solution may be found by agreement between the two states for some joint control of what has hitherto been a valuable common service’. That was very much the original spirit of partition.41
In Bengal he had looked at splitting Calcutta but decided it was impossible. He had, however, awarded the Chittagong Hill Tracts to East Pakistan. This was a logical decision as Chittagong was completely cut off from India by East Pakistan but it caused an eruption from Nehru and Patel. Congress had given assurances to the local leadership that the area would come to India. The population was, Nehru swore, ‘97% Buddhist and Hindu’. Patel accused Radcliffe of looking after the interests of the chiefs and not their tribesmen. ‘There was not the least doubt that the people themselves would prefer to form part of India’ and ‘Radcliffe had no business to touch them’. Liaquat, who represented Pakistan at the briefing, would not consider any changes. The commission’s awards, taken as a whole, had, he said, been so unfavourable to Pakistan that he could not consider even minor modifications. It was wholly unreasonable that Darjeeling, the Bengal hill station and tea-growing region, and Jalpaiguri, the town below it on the plains, had not come to Pakistan. There was then a general disagreement about the Punjab but the Radcliffe awards remained unaltered. The two new states now knew where their boundaries ran, except in Kashmir, but what would the effect be on the ground as the awards were made public?42
Radcliffe left India on 18 August. Beaumont went with him. Radcliffe seemed bitter that he had been forced to rush such a critical job and that he would carry the blame for displacing so many millions. ‘Nobody in India will love me for my award’, he wrote to his stepson. ‘There will be about eighty million people with a grievance who will be looking for me. I do not want them to find me. I’ve worked and travelled and sweated – I have sweated the whole time’. He never returned to India.43
Later, Christopher Beaumont went to see him in his Chambers in London and challenged him directly as to whether Mountbatten had asked him to change the allocation of Ferozepore and Zira from Pakistan to India. Beaumont pointed out that during those long, hot six weeks it had been the only occasion they had been separated. ‘I was’, Beaumont later wrote, ‘a most unwelcome visitor. Radcliffe said he was very busy and shuffled me off. There was no discussion about the boundary.’44
The holocaust in the Punjab that followed Independence would see over 1 million killed and at least 10 million lose their homes. It was one of the worst disasters caused by man since the Second World War. It resulted, together with the conflict in Kashmir, in the two new dominions, far from cooperating as Mountbatten and Radcliffe hoped, or reuniting as Nehru and Gandhi had dreamt, ending up fighting two major wars and as antagonistic nuclear powers. It was, among stiff competition, one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.
Once the new border was known, the north–south line between Amritsar and Lahore that divided the Punjab in two, Sikhs and Hindus from across Pakistan, but mostly from the new state of West Punjab, left the homes many had occupied for centuries and tried to reach India. This was despite Jinnah’s consistent message that they were welcome to stay and would have their rights protected. There were approximately 5 million of them, cut off from India by a stroke of Radcliffe’s pencil. Muslim gangs, the goondas, attacked them as they fled, raping, murdering and looting, and forcibly converting those they spared. Where communities were slow to leave, their villages were attacked and they were forced out by those hungry for their land and property. In the East Punjab the pattern was reversed. Over 6 million Muslims fled west, driven out by Sikh jathas, often amid scenes of sickening, medieval violence and gratuitous cruelty. It was, as Liaquat Ali said, as if ‘our people have gone mad’.
The endemic violence that had been continuing for a year, since the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946, and which had periodically flared into spasms such as in Rawalpindi in March, now became widespread, frenzied and on a scale India had never previously witnessed. It ‘amounted to determined and almost universal conflict throughout the twelve [border] districts,’ Rees wrote. ‘Large gangs, often 600 strong and more’ operated ‘and once open fighting started in a locality the number would soon swell to a few thousand’.45 What made the killing even more abhorrent was the systematic raping, mutilation and then murder of captured women, something that both Sikhs and Muslims practised to bestial excess.
Independence Day itself was particularly bad. In Lahore a Muslim mob set fire to a Sik
h gurdwara, burning its twenty-two guards and worshippers alive. A large picket of Muslim military police nearby did not intervene. In Amritsar that afternoon Sikhs paraded naked Muslim women, who were then publicly raped before being set fire to in the street. Some older Sikhs did intervene to rescue a few who survived, and gave them sanctuary in the Golden Temple. Up until the middle of August the worst of the violence was in the cities, or at least it was there it was most visible. Arson was so widespread that the fire brigade became irrelevant; on 15 August there were thirty major fires in Amritsar alone and twenty-one in Ferozepore. Jullundur was particularly badly affected. It was a predominantly Muslim city with a population of 120,000 living in its narrow lanes of whom only a few thousand were Sikhs. On 17 August thousands more Sikhs poured in from outlying villages and started a street-by-street massacre. Robert Bristow commanded the 11th Brigade who were stationed nearby. Entering the city he found the Sikh gangs at work. ‘Armed with kirpans,’ which Sikhs were, by law, permitted to carry, they were ‘using long poles with burning rags at the top. They were setting alight to Muslim houses, of which the occupants had to choose between dying in the flames or being cut down in the street’. He found his Sikh soldiers firing high on purpose and not attempting to interfere. ‘They were not unfriendly but conveyed by their demeanour that the Raj had ended and the conflict should be left to them to settle in their own way.’46
Abdul Haq was a seven-year-old boy when the attacks came. His mother and two sisters had already left for Pakistan but he and his father had stayed to look after the family’s smallholding just outside Jullundur. Now, with Jullundur in flames, they tried to escape but as they fled his father collapsed and died in the road, leaving Abdul alone. He found his cousin who got him onto a train for Pakistan. It was absolutely packed with people escaping the fighting so Abdul sat on the roof. He remembered it crossing a river that was more blood than water. He was lucky. The train was ambushed by a jatha and everyone inside was hacked to death. Those on the roof managed to escape. Eventually he got across the border and was reunited with his mother but the shock had been too much for her and she died two days after he arrived. He and his sisters, aged twelve and two, were left alone. The poor but secure life they had enjoyed in a mixed Sikh/Muslim world had collapsed completely within a week.47
Partition Page 26