Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  It was this refusal to compromise, while not having the resources nor the real willingness to administer and develop India in the way the country so badly needed, that was the main cause of the tragedy in 1947. A Raj that was already paper-thin became even thinner. The year 1935 presented another opportunity when the Government of India Act offered the logical moment to grant Dominion status but again it was missed. The Second World War masked the cracks in the British administrative machine but, once the army started to demobilise in 1945, they would become all too apparent.

  By 1947 there was little of the Raj still functioning apart from the army. India was disintegrating. Congress realised this, as did the senior ICS officers, those men like Jenkins who, however fashionable it may now be to discredit them, really understood India. Nehru and Patel came to two conclusions. First, that if they wanted to have a country left to govern they needed to get on with it and, secondly, that they would not share central power with Jinnah. It was too late for that. Had Congress reacted more favourably to Jinnah’s approaches in 1937 then things might have turned out differently but their experience in the Interim Government had shown them that they were better without the League. For Congress, it was essential to maintain that strong central government without which they feared they could not keep the country together. They would force Jinnah into a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, which they knew he did not want, and which they were sure would not last because it was, as Nehru said in his historic broadcast on 4 June, the quickest route to a unified India. For Jinnah, whose vision was a federal India with the League sharing power and exercising control over the Muslim majority provinces on the original Palestine model, this was a bitter blow. He never got what he wanted.

  Yet even once partition had happened, India and Pakistan could have worked cooperatively within the loose federal structure, which was what many people had in mind in June. There was nothing inevitable about the slaughter in the Punjab, nothing inevitable about Kashmir or about the subsequent wars. The Joint Defence arrangements could have worked. The relationship could have been as England to Scotland rather than as an armed stand-off. Mountbatten, so heavily criticised for almost everything he did in his four and a half months as viceroy, was absolutely correct to try to become governor general of both new nations, thus providing an overarching structure. Had Jinnah not been dying it is possible he may have succeeded.

  The Punjab made future cooperation almost impossible and Kashmir made it completely impossible. Did the slaughter happen because partition was rushed? Many would argue it did and it became fashionable to denigrate Mountbatten for bringing forward the date from 1948 to August 1947. Yet that decision was not Mountbatten’s. The problem with Mountbatten is that he pretended he had more influence than he did, particularly later in life when his tendency to exaggerate was more pronounced. He was an important interlocutor, and a good one, but no more than that. Once Attlee had made his historic announcement on 20 February, and given the very strong links between Congress and the Labour government, it was Nehru and Patel who dictated events. It was Nehru who, after the one occasion Mountbatten stood up to him, on the question of the plebiscite in the North West Frontier Province, decided to go for partition. It was Nehru and Patel who decided to get on with it quickly; Nehru even tried in May to get the British to hand over in June. It was Nehru and Patel, working with V. P. Menon, who crafted the final agreement that Mountbatten took back to Attlee.

  It was not the rush that caused the slaughter; rather it was an inability by all the key players to foresee it. Nehru should have done, but for him the new India was about socialism not communalism; he did not believe that religion held such sway. Jinnah should have done but he never really understood the Punjab. Mountbatten should have done, but he hardly knew India. Auchinleck should have done but he was too consumed with the heartbreak of dividing his beloved army. The provincial governors should have done, and they did, but were ignored. It was obvious to people who knew the Punjab that the Sikhs would not form a minority in Pakistan. Their enmity against the Muslims was too deep and, after the Rawalpindi massacres, they were determined to carve out their own part of India. They were well organised and had been preparing since March exactly as Jenkins had warned. The Sikhs, with their traditions, organisation and sense of common purpose, would have struck whenever partition had come.

  The only way to prevent the slaughter was to police the Punjab properly and that meant, given the inadequacy of the police, to use the army, that jewel in the crown of India, the one remaining part of the machinery of government that still operated effectively and which had sufficient power to subdue the Sikh jathas and the Hindu and Muslim goondas. There is no excuse for not using British and Gurkha troops and deploying alongside them those non-communal units of Indian troops who would not be affected by local affiliations. It was the way the army in India had operated for generations; why should it make any difference that they were now saving Indian rather than European life? Mountbatten took two pages in his final report to Attlee to explain why British troops were not used, which is in itself revealing. Had they been deployed, he argued, Britain would have ‘incurred the odium of both sides’.30 He then argued that it would have been ‘a task of the utmost military difficulty to have maintained a large number of soldiers in the Punjab’. This is disingenuous. There was hardly anything which attracted such ‘odium’ on Britain than the murder of one million people, and the troops available were grouped in mobile brigades with their own logistics. There was ample time to brief and deploy a force of the size and capability that Jenkins had recommended, with accompanying air power, in July. Armies are good at moving quickly; that is what they are there for, and to protect the citizens who pay for them. They are not there to become, in inelegant but accurate modern British army slang, ‘self-licking lollipops’. In August 1947 over half a million servicemen stood idle.

  Were 1 million people killed? Some argue it was far less. Mountbatten put the figure first at 100,000 then at 200,000, but he was trying to justify a course of action.31 Those on the ground, men like Lieutenant Colonel Mitchison of the PBF and the BBC correspondent Wynford Vaughan-Thomas both thought the figure was nearer 1 million as did Ismay. Others have put it at 500,000, at 600,000 and at 800,000.32 It is impossible to arrive at an objective figure; whatever it was, it represents a shaming loss of life.

  Many British officials felt that shame as they left. Sir Reginald Savory, the adjutant general whom Wavell had knighted at that dinner in January, was called in to see Attlee when he arrived back in London. ‘Was it too quick?’ Attlee asked. Savory didn’t answer but he did say, ‘Is this to be the culmination of British rule in India and the fulfilment of our great mission?’33 Ismay, who had given so much of his life to India, could not, as his ship steamed slowly away from Bombay, ‘bear to watch that shore fading out of view’. He went to his cabin alone with his memories. ‘I thought of two million British graves that dotted the land, and of the devoted service that many generations of countrymen had given it. Would these forefathers of ours think that all their work and sacrifice had been wasted and their trust betrayed by those who came after them?’34 They would undoubtedly have judged the Bengal famine of 1942–4 as harshly as the events of 1947.

  Ismay’s sentiment, testimony to that feeling that so many Raj officials had that they were in some way on a ‘civilising’ mission in India, was part of the problem. The British went to India to make money. They ended up governing the country because it made trade easier but they never resourced the government in a way that allowed any improvement in the lives of Indians, or which developed their health, education and economy. It is often said that the British left India a valuable legacy in a parliamentary democracy, in the railways and infrastructure and in the English language. That does not quite ring true. The Raj did not operate as a democracy and it was Congress who properly instituted it. Many believe that the sheer complexity of India meant that democracy was anyway the only viable form of government. ‘In fact, deep
down, Indians are not very democratic; rather the reverse. They’re very feudal’, thought the journalist Romesh Thapar, who wrote for The Times of India and who lived through the events of 1947. ‘But we have to be democratic to involve all the many different tribes and castes and now our huge middle class. But our system is not a British or a US system, it’s an Indian system’ and, he added, ‘it hasn’t worked very well.’35 Neither can the path of democracy in Pakistan be judged a particular success.

  Neither can the railways be said to have been a gift to the Indian nation. They were laid down after the Mutiny to move troops quickly around the country and, as we have seen, they were funded by loans guaranteed a 5 per cent coupon regardless of whether they made any money. The English language, which Indians and Pakistanis love, and which they have so enriched, does act as a unifying force although only a proportion of the populations of both countries speak it.

  Rather than try to justify past actions, the British involvement in India should be seen for what it was. In the age of empire, when European nations were using their comparative technological advantage to dominate the world, in which they saw nothing wrong or immoral, it was a successful venture that benefited British commerce and enriched her international standing. It did very little for the Indians. It could have ended so much better, as with British involvement in many other parts of the globe, had it ended when it should have done, when the age of empire was demonstrably over and when subject peoples were demanding self-government. It did not and when it was finally forced to close it did so amid terrible bloodshed, which the British and British Indian armies could have significantly limited if not wholly prevented. We had stayed too long – just as we were doing in Basrah.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta, August 1946. Three days of rioting between rival Hindu and Muslim mobs left 5,000 people dead and 10,000 injured in what became known as The Great Calcutta Killing. The savagery appalled even soldiers hardened from fighting the Japanese in Burma.

  2. The Bengal famine of 1942–44 caused the deaths of up to 3 million people, approximately six times the total of all other British Empire losses in the Second World War. One, against stiff competition, of the most disgraceful events of Empire, it showed not only that the Raj’s administration had collapsed but that it had lost its remaining moral authority to govern. Here starvation victims lie dying on Calcutta’s streets, while their emaciated bodies are burned.

  3. The passing of the Rowlatt Acts of 1919 caused serious unrest to break out in the Punjab, already suffering from heavy recruitment during the 1914–18 war, increased taxation and epidemics. On 13 April, martial law was imposed. The same day Brigadier General Dyer, the local British commander, ordered troops to open fire on a protesting crowd in the confined area of the Jallianwala Bagh; 379 were killed and over 1,000 wounded.

  4. Indians were made to crawl along a street in which a European woman had allegedly been molested and public flogging was instituted. Called ‘a monstrous event’ by Churchill, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre caused a major change in Indian attitudes to the Raj.

  5. Mahatma Gandhi as he is usually remembered, wearing homespun, carrying his staff and tramping rural India with his disciples. Although more marginal to the daily working of Congress by 1947, he was still hugely influential. When he visited Mountbatten, Edwina Mountbatten had to turn down the air conditioning in the viceroy’s study so that the old man did not get pneumonia.

  6. Auchinleck, Jinnah and Fatima Jinnah in 1947. The signs of the disease that would soon kill the Quaid are evident.

  7. The popular Hindu view of Jinnah’s ambitions for Pakistan. The cartoonist was more accurate than he realised. Jinnah wanted a federal arrangement, which would have included all India’s Muslims rather than the ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan he ultimately had to accept.

  8. V. P. Menon, who rose from lowly beginnings to become the architect of independence and of much of modern India.

  9. Wavell in his study. A sincere and honourable man who had run out of energy and ideas by 1947, he represented an India that had all but disappeared.

  10. Hamidullah, Nawab of Bhopal and Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes, who felt the British had betrayed the hereditary rulers.

  11. Vallabhbhai Patel, the hard man of Congress, whose attitude to Pakistan was uncompromising.

  12. A rose between two thorns, as Jinnah unfortunately remarked to the Mountbattens as this photograph was taken. He had thought that Edwina Mountbatten would be in the centre.

  13. Sir Evan Jenkins, Governor of the Punjab, and one of the ablest servants of India. Had his warnings been heeded then much of the slaughter in the Punjab could have been avoided.

  14. Jawaharlal Nehru, visiting a refugee camp with Gandhi and with Sir Stafford Cripps. Gandhi remained very influential on the Congress leader throughout 1947, while Nehru maintained direct links with Attlee’s government in London via Cripps.

  15. Auchinleck was popular and respected throughout the British Indian Army and was at his happiest chatting to its soldiers and their families. His devastation at having to break up the great institution he led would lead to serious strategic misjudgement.

  16. State troops. The Maharajah of Rampur’s forces stage a parade for Auchinleck. Armed with old-style muskets in 1947, as the maharajah had preferred to spend his budget on education, they played little part in events. Other state forces became actively partisan.

  17. Subhas Chandra Bose struts past a female squad of INA in his jackboots. Early recruits had to swear an oath of loyalty to him based on that of the Waffen SS. Ineffective militarily, the INA were nevertheless a significant political force.

  18. The critical meeting in the viceroy’s study on 3 June. Nehru and Jinnah are either side of Mountbatten; Ismay sits behind. They used a small round table to increase the sense of intimacy.

  19. Refugees begin to move. Between August and December 1947, approximately 6 million Muslims would leave India for Pakistan and 6 million non-Muslims would move the other way.

  20. Contrasting princes. The Maharajah of Junagadh, a Muslim ruler of a predominantly Hindu state, was excessively fond of his dogs and would spend thousands of rupees on their weddings. By August 1947, he had still not decided whether to join India or Pakistan.

  21. Hanwant Singh, by contrast, the young Maharajah of Jodhpur, a state with advanced famine-relief measures, decided for India but took far-reaching measures to minimise inter-communal violence.

  22. Huseyn Suhrawardy, last premier of British Bengal and later prime minister of Pakistan. He argued strongly for Bengal to become independent in 1947.

  23. Sir Olaf Caroe, Governor of the North West Frontier Province. It was Caroe who courageously stood up for a plebiscite on the Frontier, which would see that province choose Pakistan. He was consequently loathed by Congress, who got him sacked. Nehru thought that, without the Frontier Province, Pakistan would not be a viable country.

  24. Radcliffe sits front and centre. On his left is Mehr Chand Mahajan, who would become prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir the next month and be in office during the coming crisis. Christopher Beaumont is second from the right (as you look at the photograph), in the back row. On his left stands V. D. Ayer, whom Beaumont suspected of leaking the Commission’s secret findings to Congress.

  25. Muslim Meo children horrifically injured during the violence in Gurgaon, near Delhi, which started in April and May 1947 and which should have served as a warning of what was to come elsewhere in the Punjab.

  26. Refugees cram onto a train. Attacks on trains became a favoured tactic of both Muslim and Sikh mobs during August and September. Once a train had been halted, the mobs would systematically butcher everyone on it and loot their possessions. The Punjab Boundary Force did not have enough resources to protect them.

  27. Jinnah announces the birth of Pakistan in Karachi on 14 August, while Mountbatten looks distracted. From their very first meeting, the two men did not get on.

  28.
Next day in Delhi, Mountbatten tries to get through the crowds to raise the new Indian flag while Nehru perches on the cover of the landau. Theirs was a much closer relationship.

  29. September in the Punjab was an even worse month than August. The refugee crisis led to the proliferation of terrible camps where food, water and information were scarcely available, a situation made worse by the torrential rains. But in many ways those who reached them were lucky; approaching 1 million lay butchered across the countryside.

  30. A boy contemplates the future from the misery of a camp. Resettling the vast numbers of refugees, sorting out their property and starting to repair their psychological wounds would place enormous demands on both India and Pakistan for decades.

  31. A dog chews a corpse in railway tracks. For many, human life seemed to have lost any value.

  32. Hari Singh, the ineffectual Maharajah of Jammu and Kashmir, whose indecision would lead to the crisis. He refused to accept that the British were leaving.