For more than a hundred years 400 millions of you have lived together and this country has been administered as a single entity. This has resulted in unified communications, defence, postal services and currency; an absence of tariffs and customs barriers; and the basis for an integrated political economy. My greatest hope was that communal differences would not destroy all this.
Furthermore, surrendering to the forces which had sought to sunder India along the fault lines of religion was a concession to primitive ancestral prejudices of the kind the Raj had once hoped it could extinguish. It had, at least among India’s educated élite, and for all its life the Raj had been a secular state which had done all that was humanly possible to govern dispassionately. This noble principle had been accepted by men like Gandhi, Nehru and the Muslim Congressman, Dr Azad, for whom a passionate attachment to the ideal of a nation was not a denial of personal faith. A pious Hindu and a devout Muslim could live together in harmony under a government that was blind to confessional differences; this had been one of the greatest triumphs of the Raj. The upper echelons of Congress, true to their Western education, hoped that they might perpetuate this system along with the unity that the Raj had given India. They failed because in this they did not truly reflect the feelings of the masses and, however hard they tried not to, most of them spoke with what seemed to be the voice of Hindu revivalism.
The decision to bisect India was the result of Mountbatten’s hectic consultations with its political leaders. He and his staff worked with the dedication and demonic energy of men running a race against the clock. Everyone involved, British and Indian, exhausted themselves, and nerves and tempers often became frayed. The momentum had to be maintained, for, as Ismay reported to the Cabinet on 2 April, India was like a ship crammed full of combustible material. Fire had broken out and had to be extinguished quickly so that the vessel could proceed to a port, preferably British. In quenching the flames and steering the ship to safety, Ismay concluded that ‘we must not allow the “best” to be the enemy of the “good”. From now on, an improvised, workable but flawed plan was better than none at all.’13 As early as 29 March, the Viceroy was examining the possibilities of a division, and his exchanges with Jinnah during the following week convinced him that some form of Pakistan was inevitable.14
The first blueprint for partition and the allocation of power was drawn up during April and May. In its first form, which appeared in mid-April, it was known as ‘Plan Balkan’ and, as its name suggested, it involved the fragmentation of India. This scheme evolved further after consultations with the Congress leadership and Jinnah, who continued to oppose any arrangement that might produce a shrunken and impoverished Pakistan. The issue of whether or not the successor states would enter the Commonwealth led to various scuffles up blind alleys, with Indian politicians anxious to avoid any settlement under which Dominion status allowed Britain to retain some executive powers. Nevertheless, and thanks to the manipulative skills of the hard-nosed Patel, Congress accepted the principle of partition on 28 April. He and many others believed that Pakistan would wither and, at some future date, be driven by economic necessity to return to the greater India.
Inextricable from the questions of boundaries and constitutional formulae was that of security. A divided India meant a divided Indian army, whose two parts would be responsible for internal security and, in all likelihood, the policing of those areas in which partition was bound to lead to upheavals. Auchinleck’s emotional attachment to the Indian army was deep, and he was saddened by the prospect of it being wrenched apart. Given that Hindus and Muslims were mixed within nearly every unit, their separation and the allocation of resources was a dauntless, as well as disheartening task for a soldier who was never happier than when sitting cross-legged with his men and sharing their meals in an atmosphere of comradeship. When asked by the Viceroy (whom he called ‘Pretty Dickie’) how long it would take to split the army, Auchinleck replied two, three, possibly five years. In the event he and his staff were given four weeks to prepare a plan.15 Among other things, it would involve the replacement of all but 2,500 of the 13,500 British officers who were widely and rightly seen in many quarters as the cement which was binding the Indian army together.16
It would have been hard for the Indian army to have preserved any cohesion if Plan Balkan was implemented. At its heart lay the idea that Indian provinces and states would ultimately decide their own future, and it was, therefore, an invitation to fragmentation and a violent free-for-all. Just what this might involve was revealed by the Raja of Faridkot, who discussed the possibility of a war between his state and Nabha during a dinner at which the Viceroy was present. Two days after, he informed Lieutenant-General Savory of his intention to annex the Firozpur and Ludhiana districts after independence. The general also heard that other princes were considering retaining British officers to command their armies, which struck him as a return to the days of the Raj’s foundation, when European officers like Dupleix and Boigne had commanded princely forces and thereby made themselves kingmakers.17 The princes may have had fantasies about future power struggles, but real ones were already underway in Rajasthan and the Punjab, where sectarian factions were attempting to secure local dominance.
Plan Balkan was a recipe for anarchy. This point was trenchantly made by Nehru to Mountbatten at a private meeting on the evening on 10 May after the Viceroy had, quite improperly, allowed him a glimpse of the secret plan. This breach of security and partiality was excused by Mountbatten as a ‘sudden hunch’, but it turned out to be a lucky one. Nehru objected to the scheme in forthright but essentially correct terms. ‘The inevitable consequences of the proposals would be to invite the Balkanisation of India; to provoke certain civil conflict and to add to violence and disorder; to cause a further breakdown of the central authority, which alone could prevent the growing chaos, and to demoralise the army, the police and the central services . . .’ Congress would reject out of hand a plan which would weaken it as much as India. In great haste, and greater embarrassment, a new plan was concocted, largely by Bahadur Vapal Pangunni Menon, an experienced civil servant and Reforms Commissioner. On 18 May it was carried to London by Mountbatten for Cabinet approval.
III
There was a strong element of panic in Mountbatten’s dash to fabricate a second plan that would satisfy Congress. He had talked himself and the Cabinet into believing that any delay might lead to them being overtaken, and swamped by events which were beyond their control. Over the past five years the Raj had successively lost its prestige and authority. The ICS, once known as the ‘steel frame’ which held India together, had been reduced to a few struts, and in many areas real power rested with Indian administrations to whom their countrymen looked as sources of patronage and advancement. A morally and physically diminished Raj was left with what it had started with: the army. And this, while still loyal to its commanders, was about to become immobilised as detachments, command structures, arsenals and stores were divided and parcelled out.
Worse still, large areas of north-western India were lurching towards pandemonium, and the Viceroy, his staff, ministers and the provincial governments were unable to arrest this movement. They were constrained by three factors. First, the religious truce established by the Raj had collapsed in ruins during the second half of 1946 and, despite appeals by Jinnah and the Congress leadership, could not be rebuilt. Then there was Attlee’s declaration that the British would depart in June 1948, which had signalled the start of a series of bloody contests for paramountcy in the Punjab. These, in turn, intensified sectarian violence in Bihar, Bengal and Rajasthan. In each area, the authorities’ resources for upholding order had been stretched to breaking point, and had snapped in Bihar. On the morning of 5 May, Auchinleck had warned the Cabinet’s India committee that the situation in the country was now ‘dangerous’, and the same afternoon Ismay reported that communal antipathies were deepening and clashes proliferating.18
A week or so after, Attlee obtained gri
sly confirmation of the brass hats’ prognosis when he received an eyewitness account of massacres near Rawalpindi in a private letter from a personal friend, Lieutenant-Colonel Reginald Schomberg. The colonel described how the police and administration had stood by helplessly during three days of anti-Sikh riots orchestrated by minions of the Muslim League. Sikhs and Hindus were fleeing in terror from northern and western Punjab. The fate of those who failed to escape was revealed by the colonel’s photographs of bodies (most already stripped to skeletons by vultures, kites and pariah dogs) including those of Sikh women who had hurled themselves into a well rather than face rape by Muslim gangs. Schomberg, whose military and civilian career in India stretched back for nearly forty years, concluded that only the British and Indian armies were holding the country together. ‘India is in a melancholy state. There is no evidence of any grasp of the fundamentals of administration; and the auguries for the future are not propitious . . . the general opinion is that the hand-over is too quick.’19
Schomberg’s analysis was correct. On 14 June, Jenkins informed Mountbatten of the slump in morale among embattled British administrators in the Punjab. ‘It seems doubtful if many of the British officials will wish to stay . . . The average British official does not in fact believe that the new Government will be fit to serve under – in his opinion they are likely to be communal and unfair, their administrative standards will be low, and their financial stability will at best be questionable. This goes apparently not only for the British members of the ICS and IP [Indian Police], but the majority of doctors and engineers.’ Indian administrators were also uneasy about their futures. ‘The Muslims are, I understand, already parcelling out the more lucrative Pakistan appointments among themselves. The non-Muslims do not think they would be safe in the Western Punjab, and hope to be accommodated in Hindustan.’20 All this was to be expected and not confined to the Punjab. Over twelve months of high-level prevarication, political wrangles and uncertainty as to where their loyalty would ultimately lie placed an almost unbearable burden on the by now predominantly Indian civil service and police. Many became frightened men; at the end of March, as order dissolved in the Punjab, Muslim and Sikh clerks at army HQ in Lahore took to carrying knives and swords.21 It was no longer easy for an Indian administrator or policeman to take condign measures whenever they were needed, for he could no longer rely on his judgement being upheld by sympathetic superiors. Impartial and firm enforcement of the law was not always politically expedient, and rigorous action was, therefore, best avoided.
After nearly six months of handling intermittent communal disorders, the Bihar police cracked up at the very end of March, in part, it was suspected, as a consequence of Communist subversion. The result was a police mutiny that was suppressed by the Bihar regiment and armoured cars of the 25th Dragoons.22 The spirits of those responsible for keeping the peace must have sagged further after the government decided not to hold enquiries into what had occurred in Bengal and Bihar, for fear of causing further acrimony. Those with a direct or indirect hand in the disturbances must have been encouraged by this pusillanimous dereliction of duty.23
And yet everything was not quite lost; at least where determined men were willing to resort to tough measures. This was proved in Rajasthan during the recrudescence of conflict between Muslim Meos and Hindu Jats in mid-March. Attempts to uncover the source of the troubles produced the usual catalogue of petty incidents: a row over washing a bullock, a buffalo stolen by Muslims, a false rumour that Hindus had been stabbed in the small town of Rewari, a lewd remark by a Muslim boy to a Hindu girl at a bathing fair, and a Hindu–Muslim brawl at a railway station.24 With religious tension acute, the slightest affront led to bands of armed men gathering and attacking and burning neighbouring villages. Police and troops were moved swiftly to the centres of the outbreaks which were often in remote, roadless areas. In the Mathura district Stuart tanks of the Poona Horse, each with a police officer sitting on the turret, criss-crossed disturbed areas.25 All the troops conducted themselves well. ‘The behaviour of the Indian soldier has been almost beyond praise,’ ran the official report of the operations. ‘He has shown to the whole district that the Indian soldier has no communal feeling in the execution of his duty.’26 Among the units deployed was a local one, the Rajputana Rifles, whose steadfastness had been previously questioned.27
Order was restored and a fine of 90,000 rupees imposed, but, and this was a sign of official faint-heartedness, only 450 rupees had been collected by the beginning of August. Here, as elsewhere, there was a strong feeling that all penalties incurred under the British would be waived after independence.28 Wrongdoers had only to wait and the slate would be wiped clean by a new régime whose minister had been covertly sympathetic to their cause; after all, political pressure applied by Congress had enabled INA ringleaders and RIN mutineers to escape punishment. The state governments of Alwar and Bharatpur connived at and assisted in what Liaquat Ali Khan, the secretary general of the Muslim League, described as a systematic attempt to wipe out the Meos of western Rajasthan.29 It was an area which had been plagued by sporadic commotions for over a year, and both sides had been buying and manufacturing firearms, including home-made mortars, shells and sub-machine guns. There was a fresh wave of troubles in early May, accompanied by rumours that the Maharaja of Bharatpur intended to expel all Muslims and distribute their lands among the Hindus, to which end his regular troops joined Hindu mobs.30 On 7 August, Alwar state forces and police armed with Bren guns and mortars combined with between 10,000 and 20,000 Hindus to besiege the Meo village of Silgaon. Two Meos, both former Indian army officers, attempted to negotiate, but they were shot as a prelude to a massacre. A fortnight or so later, and just after independence, a similar assault on a Meo village near Gurgaon was frustrated by a British officer commanding an Indian unit. He fired three and a half magazines from a Bren gun, killing about fifty of a 10,000-strong mob, which scattered.31
Delhi did not even admonish the rulers of Bharatpur and Alwar for misdemeanours which, a generation before, would have brought about their dethronement and exile. When he visited the disturbed region on 1 June, Sir Evan Jenkins found that less than 400 regular Indian troops had been deployed, a hopelessly inadequate force.32 Mountbatten had accompanied Jenkins on his inspection of the stricken districts, seeing for himself the destruction and hearing how resolute officers in command of small units had been able to scatter the mobs with rifle fire. Two Congressmen, Patel, the Home Affairs Minister, and Sardar Baldev Singh, the Defence Minister, had also toured the area and once encountered Hindus setting fire to a village. The Viceroy hoped that such sights would inject them with a sense of urgency and make them amenable to his plan for partition.33
The recrudescence of the violence in Rajasthan during the early summer was in part a response to tales spread by Hindu and Sikh refugees from the Punjab, where there had been chronic disorder since the beginning of March. Communal violence had been expected for several years and police and military intelligence had monitored the stockpiling of weaponry, mostly bladed, and the mushrooming of political armies which were, in every respect, the counterpart of Hitler’s Brown Shirts. Former soldiers (one in three of the Punjab’s adult male population had served in the army) were prominent in these units, and, when the raids and massacres were under way, it was noticed that they had been planned with military precision.34 There was no shortage of recruits or cash: police intelligence discovered that the League, Congress and the Sikh Akali party were secretly funding and encouraging groups responsible for the disturbances.35 Many probably did not need money to kill their neighbours, for passions had been rising ever since November 1946, when Muslim refugees reached the Punjab with eyewitness accounts of how their fellow believers had been treated in Bihar.36 Press photographs of corpses and charred pages from the Koran, together with clandestine wireless stations kept tempers close to boiling point.
But the miseries of the Punjab were not just the consequence of outraged individuals seekin
g revenge. They were, in great part, the result of a calculated use of terror by political parties whose objective, in the case of the League, was to secure complete dominance. At the end of February 1947, the League promoted a violent campaign of mass disobedience which was designed to destabilise a province which it coveted as part of Pakistan. Roughly 60 per cent of Punjabis were Muslims, but the League had never secured a monopoly in local political power, having been forced to share it with the Muslim Unionist party. This group, in tandem with the Sikhs and Hindus, formed the Punjabi government, which was the first target of League agitation. After vainly attempting to ban the private political armies, the coalition resigned on 2 March and no successor could be found. Control over the province passed into the hands of the governor, Sir Evan (‘Jenks’) Jenkins.
Jenkins was an upright, dedicated and thoroughly honourable proconsul who had joined the ICS in 1920, beginning his career in the Punjab. His experience and knowledge of the province were unequalled, and were reflected in his cogent and forthright analyses of its present problems. He refused to place expediency before principle and, in private, was contemptuous of the Muslim League leadership, admired the tenacity of the Sikhs, and found the hypocrisy of Congress leaders distasteful.37 The League was well aware of his views and accused him of favouring its adversaries. If there were any heroes of the last days of the Raj, Jenkins would deserve a place among them: backed by a weary and often disheartened administration and police force, starved of soldiers and indifferently supported by Mountbatten, he did all that was humanly possible to prevent a catastrophe which cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
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