Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  The demise of the Joint Defence Council, its Supreme Headquarters and its Supreme Commander impacted, of course, as much on Pakistan as on India. It meant that the fledgling Pakistan Army was confronted with having to police West Punjab, and East Bengal, but without any proper command structure. It had the units that had been transferred, and many of them had been stationed in what was now Pakistan anyway, but it lacked the brigade, divisional and army hierarchy that are so necessary to ensure that soldiers operate under a coherent plan and, at a higher level, to the political direction required. What this effectively did was to make Jinnah and Liaquat very dependent on the existing British senior officers. As the Indian Army moved to reduce them, and to replace them with Indians, Pakistan was content to allow them to continue in command and would do so for a long time to come. General Sir Frank Messervy, a much-respected veteran of Hodson’s Horse, became commander-in-chief, and would be succeeded by another British officer, the Gurkha Douglas Gracey. It wasn’t until 1951 that Singh Chopra’s old staff college friend Mohammed Ayub Khan became the first Pakistani to take over. About five hundred other British officers continued in post. Admiral James Jefford continued as chief of Pakistan’s Naval Staff until 1953 and there would still be a British chief of the Pakistan Air Force until 1957, ten years after Independence. India would claim that the British were too supportive of Pakistan; this is one of the reasons why.

  Towards the end of the month the Indian press were attacking the British freely. Britain was supplying tanks to Pakistan disguised as scrap iron; Britain planned to reconquer India through the back door of Hyderabad and Pakistan; the right-wing British press were calling for all British personnel to be pulled out of India at once but made no mention of doing the same thing in Pakistan; a British military clique were fomenting the violence in the Punjab to justify reimposition of the Raj. More far-fetched but as damaging were allegations that British officers were leading the slaughter.39 Mountbatten had to get Nehru to intervene after a leading politician, Pandit Kunzru, made a public statement saying that the worst killings had been deliberately inspired and encouraged by a British officer.40 Master Tara Singh went even further. He was reported in the Amrita Bazar Patrika on 6 September as saying that there were ‘hundreds of cases’ in which British officers had ordered innocent civilians to be gunned down. The peace efforts of the local Sikh leaders had been powerless against these government organised attacks.41

  There were two more significant results of this failure of the Joint Defence structure. As Pakistan struggled to establish itself as a country, and to build from nothing the basic institutions a country needs, it found itself reliant on the military to deal with its most pressing national issue, the slaughter and migration in the Punjab. The army therefore assumed a central role in the new Pakistani state from its very inception, something that would, as Pakistan’s democracy floundered, lead to them assuming a political role. Jinnah, rather like Nehru, had little time for the military before the creation of Pakistan. ‘Jinnah was not really interested in the army: he had no idea on the subject and said to me, “I have no military experience: I leave that entirely to you and Liaquat” ’, recalled Messervy.42 With the Punjab and the coming tragedy in Kashmir, the military in Pakistan would develop subject only to light political constraints.

  Even more seriously, the demise of the tortuously negotiated joint structures and the sheer scale and horror of the refugee issue would mean that early relations between India and Pakistan at government level would start very badly. Up until the first week of September there was a shared revulsion and shame at what Punjabi Muslims were doing to Sikhs and Hindus and vice versa. The summit meetings between Nehru and Liaquat (Jinnah now staying in Karachi) were if not friendly at least focused on solving a common problem, but as September wore on, and the killing intensified, that cooperation began to break down. By 10 September Liaquat was publicly accusing India of reneging on the agreement he had made with Nehru in Lahore. The Punjab Muslim League were demanding the immediate fortification of the border and compulsory military training for every Pakistani youth; Begum Shah Nawaz demanded the same for Pakistani women. Nehru tried to mediate with Liaquat but in New York Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, now Pakistan’s foreign minister and much respected internationally, put out figures suggesting that ten times as many Muslims were being killed in India as Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan. The Indian government responded that there were more refugees coming from Pakistan than the other way. ‘People do not uproot themselves by the million from their homes except when impelled by intolerable suffering and unspeakable terror’, they replied.43

  On 26 September the Hindustan Standard reported Gandhi as saying at his daily prayer meeting that if ‘Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimize it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it’. Predictably they ran the headline ‘Pakistan’s attitude may lead to war’.44 Other papers followed suit, making the Mahatma’s speech headlines across Asia. There was undoubtedly a strong element of journalistic interpretation of what Gandhi had actually said, and he quickly tried to redress the damage, pointing out that he remained firmly against war and that he was as wedded to non-violence as ever, but his intervention only increased the tension. Churchill did not help matters with an ‘I told you so’ speech on 27 September. He said the

  fearful massacres which were occurring were no surprise to him; that we were of course only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries perpetrated upon one another with the ferocity of cannibals by races gifted with capacities for the highest culture who had for generations dwelt side by side in general peace under the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown.45

  His remarks caused predictable fury among Congress.

  Although he would soon return home, Ismay remained a trusted agent of both Mountbatten and Nehru during those difficult weeks. He now flew from Delhi to Karachi to see Jinnah in an attempt to preserve the small degree of cooperation that still remained. He found Jinnah waiting for him at the top of the stairs of Government House. ‘He looked very dignified, very sad and he spoke as a man without hope’, Ismay thought. They went into his study and the Quaid ‘let himself go. How could anyone believe that the Government of India were doing their utmost to restore law and order and to protect minorities?’ he demanded.

  On the contrary, the events of the past three weeks went to prove that they were determined to strangle Pakistan at birth. The blood-baths taking place in the Punjab and in Delhi were the result of plans which had been prepared in the greatest detail. The whereabouts of all Moslems had been systematically recconnoitered; the gangs of miscreants had been assembled and armed; their duties had been apportioned; and finally, at the appointed time, they had been loosed on their mission of murder. The conditions in the refugee camps were shameful beyond belief. How could any civilized Government permit such a state of affairs?

  Jinnah went on in a similar vein for twenty minutes. Ismay did his best to reassure him of the Indian government’s best intentions. He said he firmly believed in Nehru’s personal commitment and told the Quaid how he had seen him ‘charge into a rioting Hindu mob and slap the faces of the ring-leaders’. More tellingly, he pointed out that ‘the situation which had developed with such suddenness would have shaken any government in the world, however long-established and experienced’. The Indian government was neither and had been overwhelmed. Nor, he could have fairly added, was Pakistan’s. He explained that a ministry had been set up to deal with refugees, and that Mountbatten was now chairing the Emergency Cabinet Committee.

  Ismay spent eleven hours talking to Jinnah, either in his office or in Government House, which the fastidious Jinnah and his sister, Fatima, were trying to make resemble the luxurious home on Malabar Hill in Bombay they had recently abandoned. Jinnah had discovered that the Governor of Sind had taken the library with him; he demanded that it be returned. He then found that the Governor of the Punjab had taken the croquet set; a
n order was dispatched that it should be sent back forthwith. Ismay felt he had achieved something but the coming month would see relations between the two new countries plunged into a new crisis.

  10. OCTOBER

  DIVIDED NATIONS

  ‘Life here continues to be nightmarish; everything seems to have gone away’

  (JAWAHARLAL NEHRU)

  Jinnah, as with many visionary men, found that he could think more clearly about the big things when the details of his personal life were well ordered. Now he and Liaquat had to concentrate on building a state, something they had not been expecting to do. They had not got what they wanted and now had to turn this ‘moth-eaten’ package into a nation. The framework of Pakistan had been laid down in the Indian Independence Act of July, which had in turn endorsed much of the 1935 Government of India Act. Pakistan would be governed by a cabinet under a prime minister; that was Liaquat. They were responsible to the Constituent Assembly. That assembly had two roles. It was to prepare a constitution and, secondly, to act as a parliament until that constitution was agreed. Pakistan was a Dominion, a member of the British Commonwealth, with a governor general appointed by the king but in effect selected by the Pakistan Cabinet; that was Jinnah.

  Their first Cabinet contained a mix of the great names of the League, like Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan who became foreign minister, and professional administrators like Malik Ghulam Muhammad, the finance minister, who had risen through Aligarh University and the ranks of the ICS. It was broadly based in that it contained two Bengalis, Fazlur Rahman and Jogendra Nath Mandal, and a member from the North West Frontier, Abdur Rab Nishtar, who had taken part in much of the negotiation that summer. They answered to an Assembly that was entirely dominated by the League but which would not play much of a role in the coming weeks.

  The administration also retained its strong element of British personnel, thus achieving some continuity. Apart from the heads of the armed services and many subordinate officers, three of the four provincial governors remained British. Sir George Cunningham had agreed to return from St Andrews to the North West Frontier Province, Sir Francis Mudie moved from Karachi to Lahore to become Governor of West Punjab, and Sir Frederick Bourne was still trying to find somewhere to live that befitted his status as Governor of East Bengal. Jinnah had recruited Sir Archibald Rowlands, the last British finance minister in Delhi, to be the government’s financial adviser and Sir Victor Turner, a brilliant statistician who had been born the son of a London butler, to be a Cabinet minister as financial secretary. For a man who in his early career had been so strongly anti the British official class, much as he always admired Britain as a nation, and who had castigated Gandhi so strongly for his support of the British in the First World War, Jinnah now clearly allowed his pragmatism to rule his inner feelings.

  Even his closest advisers were surprised that he agreed to have dinner with a British regiment, the Royal Scots, just before they sailed for home. It was the usual grand regimental dinner, the Royal Scots being the oldest British infantry regiment apart from the Guards, with silver and bands much in evidence. At the end of dinner the commanding officer, according to regimental custom, toasted both the king and then the princess royal, their colonel in chief. Then, breaking with centuries of tradition, which is always a brave thing to do in a British infantry regiment, he stood up and said to Jinnah, ‘Your Excellency, we consider ourselves good fighters; we consider you to be a good fighter also’, and he proposed a toast to the Quaid-i-Azam. Jinnah was so overcome that he replied by proposing a toast to ‘the British who have stayed in Pakistan to help us begin our work’, concluding ‘This I shall never forget’.1

  His own personal staff also contained several British officials. His secretary was Colonel Bill Birnie.2 Birnie was one of those men whose career and interests seemed to label him as a stereotypical British Indian Army officer. He was from the Guides Cavalry, the crack regiment raised to police the Frontier. In 1927, while big-game hunting, he had been surprised by the tiger he was stalking. The tiger, demonstrating both admirable restraint and sound judgement, merely bit him on the arm. It then picked up his rifle in its mouth and carried it off into the forest. In 1933 he had formed part of the team that made an attempt on Everest, surviving eight days below the summit at 25,700 feet. Yet, as with so many men of his type, he was also a brilliant linguist, a sensible diplomat and knew the Frontier as well as any man. He would serve Jinnah very well indeed.

  Yet the essence of Pakistan in those early weeks was Jinnah himself. Much as he had been frustrated in his plans for the sort of Muslim state he wanted, and much as he would complain that he had ended up with a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, from the people’s point of view he was the embodiment of what they had achieved. Everywhere he went he would be met with cries of ‘Quaid-i-Azam Zindabad’, and for a man to whom public speaking had never come easily, he now found himself able to command vast crowds just by appearing. Inevitably, in a Muslim country, he started to attract religious labels. ‘Maulana Mohammed Ali Jinnah Zindabad!’ shouted one excited crowd in a small town where he had stopped. Jinnah waved to the crowd to be silent and wagged his finger at them. ‘Stop calling me Maulana. I am not your religious leader. I am your political leader. Call me Mr. Jinnah or Mohammed Ali Jinnah. No more of that Maulana. Do you understand me?’ The crestfallen crowd melted away, embarrassed and bemused.3

  Establishing Pakistan as a state in which all religions were encouraged and where Islam was dominant but not intolerant was, paradoxically, Jinnah’s key message in those early months. It was the central theme of all his major speeches. This was partly in answer to Congress’ claims that he had created a communal problem where none had existed, partly because, as an Ismaili who personally took a very broad view of his religion, he was committed to a modern interpretation of the Prophet’s teaching but also largely to do what he could to quieten the Muslim mobs in the Punjab. ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State’, he told the Constituent Assembly on 11 August.4 He and Liaquat had chosen a flag that was three-quarters dark green, for Islam, but one quarter white, representing the minorities. ‘It is not’, Liaquat said, ‘the flag of any one political party or community. The State of Pakistan will be a State where there are no special privileges, no special rights for any one particular community. It will be a State where every citizen will have equal privileges’.5

  But what was this new state? It was a nation that was, whatever Jinnah and Liaquat may now be arguing, based on religion. It was a nation born in adversity, with an incoherent set of borders, opposed by its more powerful neighbour by whom it quickly felt threatened. It was a nation that felt that it had to rely on armed force to protect itself, a feeling that would become even more prevalent by the end of the month. It was, in many ways, very similar to Israel, another new state based on religion, which the British would create nine months later and whose development had so influenced Jinnah’s thinking.

  Pakistan consisted of a hotchpotch of constitutional parts: four provinces under their British governors each with their own Legislative Assembly; six Princely states, in varying degrees of acceptance or denial; Baluchistan, which was governed by an agent helped by locally appointed advisers; the North West Tribal Territories, which largely governed themselves according to local custom and who fiercely resented outside interference whether British or Pakistani; and the Chittagong Hill Tracts in East Bengal, which were again largely self-governing. These new territories answered to a new capital, Karachi, which many influential Pakistanis detested. The country had a population of just over eighty million people; over half – forty-six million – of these lived in East Bengal and a further twenty million in West Punjab. About 10 per cent of these were literate. Apart from a sizeable but reducing Hindu minority of about eleven million in East Bengal, and some Hindus in Sind, the vast majority were Muslim.

  Inevitably therefore, because of t
his disparity and the speed of its birth, it would take time for the new country to function as a coherent nation. The existing provincial governments could continue their administration, albeit with very few people and not much money, but it would take a long time to establish a proper central government structure and to execute national policy. Apart from anything else, the preoccupation in Karachi was the Punjab and the refugee crisis. This was to have important implications before the month was out.

  One of the problems associated with Jinnah having prevaricated so long as to what Pakistan was intended to be, and his inability to define it while the tortuous negotiations had dragged on, was that it left people free to interpret it in their own ways. For many, it was the inevitable result of the last few decades, something that had happened in a way they were not expecting but which they now accepted. They hated the idea of partition and bitterly regretted the killing, but tried to look beyond it. Alice Faiz had been working for W. H. Smith in London in the 1930s. She had joined the Communist Party in 1936 and got to know Krishna Menon. In London she moved in a circle with many Indian friends and became a passionate believer in Indian independence, using W. H. Smith’s internal mail system to smuggle communist literature to Menon’s contacts. In 1939 she went out to Amritsar to see her sister who was married to a Muslim teacher. She liked India so much that she stayed and in 1941 married herself. Her husband, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, was a writer and a journalist, later to become one of the most celebrated Urdu poets of his generation. Alice had been in Delhi in early 1947 and moved to Lahore before the worst of the violence started. Later she remembered the ‘trainloads of dead’ and the ‘extraordinary, horrible feeling of massacres and fear’ that still characterised Lahore that October. Her mood that month was very, very sad. Her parents, who had come to the subcontinent to be with their daughters, emigrated to South Africa, unable to live with such violence.