III
The culminative effect of these mutinies was to generate a mood of despondency at the top. The weekly intelligence summary issued on 25 March bleakly admitted that the Indian army was wobbling and ‘only day to day estimates of its steadiness’ could now be made. All naval and air force units were no longer trustworthy.42 It mattered little that ‘fighting’ units had been unaffected by the bouts of indiscipline, which had been largely confined to technicians and behind-the-lines staff. Transport, signals and other support units would have a vital part to play, if, as expected, there was large-scale civilian unrest. Moreover, the high command intended aircraft to play the same role in anti-insurgency operations as they had done in 1942. Mainstream politicians were also discomposed by incidents which indicated that their hold over the masses was by no means as assured as it had been, and might weaken further in the absence of an agreement with the British.
Settling India’s political future was the task of the three-man Cabinet mission which arrived in Delhi on 19 March. As its leader, Cripps, later explained to the Commons, its overriding objective had been to create the machinery for making a new state which Indians would operate.43 At the same time he had, or so he imagined, laid the foundations of an interim, all-party government which would superintend the transfer of power. It had been very hard work, an epic of physical and mental endurance which had told heavily on Cripps’s two elderly colleagues, Pethick-Lawrence and A. V. Alexander. The former was a benign and gentle influence on the proceedings, while the latter, a Co-op MP and First Lord of the Admiralty, was a taciturn presence, although capable of making penetrating observations when needed. Of Jinnah, Alexander remarked: ‘He is the only man I know who walks around with a built-in air cooler.’44 Alexander’s sharpness impressed Auchinleck’s military secretary, Shahid Hamid: ‘He is full of common sense as well as being shrewd and straightforward. He comes from peasant stock.’45 The First Lord was also, like so many working-class Labour members, a bit of an imperialist at heart, which in part explains why he was soon exasperated by Gandhi and Congress.
Attlee had insisted that the Cabinet mission did all that it could to preserve India intact, so that it could become a self-supporting nation which would play a key role in Britain’s future plans for security in Asia.46 This ruled out the Pakistan of Jinnah’s vision, but did not preclude the existence within India of a knot of semi-autonomous Muslim provinces, which the Quaid had hitherto contemptuously spurned as a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan. At the outset of the negotiations, Jinnah demanded a sovereign Pakistan made economically viable by the inclusion of regions with substantial Hindu minorities, including Calcutta. Congress, as ever, emphasised the need for an Indian state with a strong central government. One escape from this impasse was a plan presented on 16 May, when the commission had retired from the debilitating summer heat of Delhi to the cool of Simla. There would be an All-India Union which would be responsible for defence, foreign policy and internal communications and three clusters of provincial governments. The first (Group A) would embrace Madras, Bombay, Orissa, and the United and Central Provinces – in other words, Congress’s Hindu heartland. The second (Group B) comprised Muslim and predominantly Muslim areas: Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, the Sind and the Punjab. The third (Group C) contained Bengal and Assam, where the balance of religions was slightly weighted in favour of the Muslims. These provinces had no right of secession and were free to construct their own constitutions. Together with the princely states, the provinces would elect representatives to an assembly that would hammer out a national constitution. In the meantime, a stop-gap ministry would be nominated with six Congress ministers, six Leaguers and one each from the Sikh, Parsi and Christian communities.
The mission’s proposals had been evolved against a background of bickering, horse-trading and mutual suspicion. Neither Nehru nor Gandhi could ever fully comprehend the depth of Muslim misgivings about a Hindu Raj, which meant that they could never understand the nature of Jinnah’s passion for Pakistan, or why it struck a chord with so many Muslims. At one stage, Gandhi nearly derailed the proceedings by insisting that a Muslim Congressman joined the interim government just to illustrate Congress’s non-sectarian basis. He was overruled by the Congress Working Committee. In some Congress quarters it was hoped that by procrastinating, the party might splinter the League, whose strength ultimately depended on its ability to secure concessions.47 After stonewalling, Jinnah finally accepted the mission’s plan, as did Congress after some touch-and-go moments. Cripps and his team left India on 29 June, satisfied that they had achieved a breakthrough. On 18 July he reported to the Commons in a mood of guarded optimism; later the same day MPs debated bread-rationing, a reminder that the British people had other, more immediate problems than India.
Having climbed, as it were, a significant ladder in the Indian political game, the British government unexpectedly found itself sliding down a snake. It was hatched during a meeting of the All-Indian Congress Committee on 7 July, in which formal approval was given to the arrangements agreed with the Cabinet mission. Playing to a left-wing gallery, Nehru, just elected Congress president, promised that once his party had won control at the centre it would act as it pleased. Congress refused to be constrained by previous agreements which, in Nehru’s opinion, were unworkable. At the press conference on 10 July, he predicted that the provincial groups would fall apart, with the North-West Frontier (where Congress was strong) and Assam disengaging. Only the Muslim League was in favour of the principle of binding together provinces, he continued, and it was unwelcome to large numbers in the Sind, the Punjab and the North-West Frontier.48 If his analysis was right, and he was certain it was, then the foundations for Pakistan were blown away by the cold wind of political reality. Years afterwards, Nehru regretted his recklessness, which had thrown into jeopardy the admittedly brittle accord between Congress and the League. Moderate Congressmen vainly attempted to limit the damage caused by Nehru’s tactlessness. He had, unwittingly perhaps, opened the way for communal strife on an unprecedented scale.
And yet what Nehru had said merely confirmed what the League had always suspected: Congress was perfidious and, whatever it said to the contrary, would use its ascendancy over central government to frustrate the creation of Pakistan. The League’s reaction was predictably pugnacious: on 27 July it repudiated the agreement with the Cabinet mission and, two days after, Jinnah called upon all Muslims to take charge of their destiny. ‘Today we have forged a pistol,’ he declared, ‘and are in a position to use it.’ The first shot would be fired on 16 August, which the Quaid designated ‘Direct Action Day’.
IV
No one in India could have had any doubt what the words ‘Direct Action’ would mean when translated on to the streets; if they did then they had only to recollect the Congress protest movements of the past twenty-five years. Even the League’s adherents in London carried sandwich boards proclaiming ‘Pakistan or Perish’ or ‘Muster call to Arms’ as they marched from Blackfriars to Downing Street. These slogans were being taken at face value in India where, even before Jinnah’s appeal, Hindu–Muslim conflict was spreading and becoming more intense. Violence was embedded in Indian political life and, with the Raj clearly coming to the end of its days, it was inevitable that those who regarded themselves as its heirs would fall to blows. Efforts by rival party machines to assert supremacy in areas where there was a balance between Hindus and Muslims were a major source of turmoil. In the Hindu state of Alwar (Rajasthan) there was a spate of commotions during the first half of 1946, when Muslim activists attempted to arouse their fellow believers, the Meos. Crowds armed with lathis and guns gathered, a district magistrate’s camp was attacked and schools were disrupted as agents tried to inject sectarian fervour into their pupils.49
During May tension between Hindus and Muslims increased in the Punjab, where both sides were laying in arms and private political armies were drilling. In Jalandhar, knives and lathis were being hoarded and stones
piled on roofs, together with bags filled with sand and red pepper.50 Trouble was coming; of this everyone was certain, and the evidence could be read in the newspapers or heard on the wireless. Communal riots broke out in Bombay in April and Ahmadabad on 3 July, when 39 were killed and 260 wounded in four days of disturbances. A Hindu procession passing a mosque was the signal for a sectarian battle in Dacca on 2 July, in which mosques were burned and temples desecrated. Fear and rancour combined to create an atmosphere in which rumours of real and fictional outrages sparked off sudden explosions. The alleged rape of a Muslim girl by a Sikh in Abbottabad provoked the firing of a Sikh gurdwara (temple) and the retaliatory murder of several Muslims.51 Indian troops stationed at Jhansi became involved in heated rows after listening to wireless bulletins, and there were reports of communal friction among units serving in Burma.52
It had been hoped that the army might somehow remain immune from the sectarian contagion. At the end of March, Southern Command had undertaken a discreet enquiry into the temper of Indian officers of all religions. After hearing their views, it was concluded that soldiers’ reactions to large-scale communal disorder would depend on their officers. Their loyalty was to the army, although some expressed a reluctance to command forces ordered to suppress communal riots.53 Auchinleck took little comfort from this. He was convinced that Muslim and Hindu soldiers would refrain from firing into mobs of their co-religionists, and said as much when questioned on the matter by the chiefs of staff in London on 13 August. He rejected, however, a Joint Intelligence Staff assessment that India was plainly heading towards a civil war which the Indian army could no longer prevent.54
Wavell and his provincial governors were also facing up to the unthinkable: that the Raj no longer possessed the will and wherewithal to keep the peace. This was Wavell’s conclusion after he had listened to the views of his provincial governors on 8 August. Sir Evan Jenkins, the recently appointed Governor of the Punjab, believed that its Indian ministry lacked the nerve to disband the province’s growing private militia and that serious communal troubles would soon occur in the cities. Sir Frederick Burrows, the Governor of Bengal and a former president of the National Union of Railwaymen, did not expect serious mischief during Jinnah’s day of action, which was just as well for the local police could no longer be depended upon. Wavell was gloomily realistic: Congress now controlled three-fourths of India and was unassailable. If there was a trial of strength with the Raj, then the knowledge that the British departure was now predetermined would sway police loyalty towards those who would inherit power and patronage.55 Having weathered the tempests of February and March, the Indian government faced a fresh storm of even greater ferocity.
It broke on 16 August in Calcutta. Trouble had been expected, at least by Eastern Command’s intelligence assessors, and four British, one Jat and one Gurkha battalion backed by the tanks of the 25th Dragoons were standing by in readiness for upheavals.56 But, when the day of action began, they were still in their barracks on the city’s outskirts. Huseyn Suhrawardy, Bengal’s Prime Minister and a future premier of Pakistan, had ordered a public holiday for the 16th which guaranteed a large Muslim turn-out. During the morning there were scuffles whenever Hindu shopkeepers refused to close their businesses. At four in the afternoon, thousands of Muslims converged on the Ochterlony monument (a Muslim police intelligence officer estimated the crowd at 500,000, a Hindu colleague at 30,000) to hear a series of provocative speeches. Suhrawady proclaimed the beginning of the struggle for Muslim emancipation. There was nothing to fear, he assured his audience: ‘I have made the necessary arrangements with the police not to interfere.’57 These words must have made many hearts leap for joy – there were many goondas (gangsters) in the crowd who were to take a leading part in the slaughter, looting and arson which followed.
The rally was a signal for the killing to commence. Muslim gangs roamed the streets during the afternoon, evening and night murdering Hindus. The victims were beaten, stabbed and their corpses sometimes mutilated, usually in alleyways. Many were Biharis who worked as milkmen, rickshaw wallahs, carters and doormen. Following techniques developed over the past decade, the murder gangs would dissolve the moment they saw squads of policemen or soldiers, fleeing into sidestreets and alleys. Not that the assassins had much to fear from the police; during his tour of the city, Burrows was horrifed to find policemen standing by as a mob bludgeoned to death three individuals. One shot from a British sergeant sent the crowd scattering. Strangely, Burrows denied that the police had been ‘fixed’ by Suhrawardy and his League cronies, and blamed their indifference on fear of being criticised in the press and by politicians if they opened fire.58
By the early hours of 17 August the police had lost control over much of the northern part of the city, where many buildings were on fire. By now Hindus were taking promiscuous revenge and casualties were mounting. Troops were deployed to patrol the streets, backed by tanks which had ‘a considerable moral effect’ on the crowds. It took six days to restore order, during which the army fired 2,000 rounds at the elusive bands of assassins, killing 115. The total casualties for the communal massacres were estimated to be at least 4,000 dead and 10,000 wounded. Among the survivors were a small party of Hindus and Muslims, including women and children, who attached themselves to a British businessman. He guided his flock through streets littered with overturned cars and burnt rickshaws until they found a place of safety.59 Their faith in him and his courage were a metaphor for a Raj which was fast passing away. In its place was a government forced to make moral compromises: there were no recriminations when Wavell interviewed Suhrawardy, the man who bore a considerable responsibility for the killings. The politician was merely told to do his duty in the future. But to whom did a party boss like Suhrawardy owe his duty – certainly not to his King Emperor and the people of India.
The Calcutta massacres opened a new phase in the communal struggle. Refugees from the city fled to their native Bihar with horror stories which inflamed passions and triggered random, retaliatory murders of Muslims there. But the pattern of slaughter could be stopped by resolute men and tough measures. On 26 November, Hugh Martin was travelling by train through Bihar with a detachment of the 1st Madras regiment when he heard of an attack on the Muslim village of Nagarnausa. Taking a jeep and a lorry, he led a well-armed party of sixteen soldiers to confront a mob of 5,000 Hindus about to descend on the village. The outnumbered soldiers opened fire without orders and the crowd fled after twenty had been killed. It returned again at night and was dispersed again by shooting. In all, 1,600 lives had been saved and there was no further trouble in the district. Nonetheless, Martin had to face a clamour from militant Hindus who alleged that he was a second Dyer.60
Bombay’s response to the events in Calcutta was a steep rise in communal violence. During September, 471 were killed and over 1,300 wounded in a series of small incidents in which bands of assassins sallied out of alleyways, stabbed their victims and melted away. The city’s Muslims were also disturbed by tales that the Sikhs were now Congress’s ‘shock troops’.61 At Agra ten died after Muslims ambushed Sikh and Hindu religious processions.62 In what would turn out to be a sinister development in the tit-for-tat killings, a train bound from Cuttack to Madras was found to have the word ‘Mussalmans’ chalked on one of its carriages. This identification had been made, it was believed, to enable Hindu acid-throwers to find their targets.63 Preparations for a trial of strength were well advanced in the North-West Frontier Province, where uniformed Muslim League National Guardsmen were parading openly and ex-INA men and released RIN mutineers were being secretly drilled as Jambazes (holy warriors).64
The worst trouble was in eastern Bengal, where there were sectarian killings in the city of Dacca and the Noakhali district. Here occurred a rural pogrom in which Muslim gangs burned Hindu villages, murdered men, kidnapped women and raped them. The death toll stood at 300 on 10 September in what was a carefully planned campaign of terror, contrived both to frighten Hindus genera
lly and to expel them from a province which had been designated as part of a yet-to-be-defined Muslim state. After making allowances for the spontaneous element in the Calcutta massacres, it is possible to detect the same pattern of cause and effect there: the city’s non-Muslim population had to be intimidated or driven out before it could become, as Jinnah wished, a part of Pakistan. Certainly the situation in the summer of 1946 demanded that the League flexed its muscles in a region where its pretensions were strongly challenged by Congress and the Communists, some of whom wanted a separate Bengali republic.
Spiralling Hindu–Muslim violence generated fear and loathing in equal parts. In November 1946, the Muslim Nawab of Bhopal felt certain that his fellow believers faced extermination.65 At this time a black propaganda document was circulating among Hindus, which outlined details of how the Muslims were about to seize control over India. Pakistan would be their base, and their methods included the murder by a ‘secret League Gestapo’ of Congress leaders and Muslims who refused to join the League and the destruction of Hindu and Sikh temples. Systematic sabotage would paralyse urban life and Hindu women would be abducted, raped and converted.66 Lurid images appeared on Hindu leaflets which showed prominent Leaguers washing their hands in blood and breasts being sliced off women. The League’s newspaper, Dawn, printed photographs of Muslim bodies.67 It was impossible for the authorities to suppress such material, and even if they had the means, nothing could have halted the diffusion of rumours or the eyewitness tales of refugees. Nor could the contagion be contained by the personal appeals of India’s leaders who, often at great risk, visited the troubled areas and remonstrated with their inhabitants. Hugh Martin was moved by the dignity and courage shown by Nehru when he visited refugees in Bihar, including a Muslim wrestler whose family had been murdered.68
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