by Harper, Tim
Meanwhile there was a constant round of rallies and parades: for the first time in early March, International Women’s Day was celebrated in Singapore and Penang, followed in quick succession by the anniversary of the 1919 peace conference, the birthday of Karl Marx and May Day, a somewhat muted affair after the earlier arrests and banishments, and there were large anti-war rallies in May and June in Singapore and many peninsular towns. The memory of the war remained deeply divisive. On the first anniversary of VJ Day in Singapore, the Chinese Chambers of Commerce and the Kuomintang paraded in the morning as part of the official event. Then the left paraded in the afternoon.116 It was a massive show of strength: a procession a mile long snaked through the city, led by veterans of the forgotten armies, of the Chinese fighters of Dalforce still demanding back pay. Some 130 other associations followed: the New Democratic Youth League, the MPAJA ex-Comrades, the trade unions, the Malayan Democratic Union and many more. A year after the end of the war, the demands were still the same: for rice, clothes and freedom, and an end to crime and violence. The parade was, as the local press pointed out, an act of thanksgiving for the end of Japanese tyranny, but it was not a sign of rejoicing. As the second colonial conquest of Malaya finally began to put down roots there, it was to be tested by a new and potentially fatal wave of opposition. Despite all the setbacks it had faced, by the end of the year the Malayan Communist Party proclaimed that its organization was larger now than during the Malayan Spring: ‘This time there are more participants and there is unanimity in their actions.’117
7
1947: At Freedom’s Gate
THE LAST DAYS OF THE RAJ
Even during the tense early months of 1947 as India, Pakistan and Burma lurched violently towards freedom, the Second World War continued to cast a long shadow. In India the issue of the INA still rankled with the British, even though all now realized that their tenure in the subcontinent was in its final stages. Wavell’s original 7,600 ‘blacks’ – men guilty of particularly treasonable or brutal acts – had been reduced by 5,500 who had been dismissed from the service with forfeiture of pay and allowances. Despite the bad publicity of the 1945 trials, in early 1946 it was still intended to bring 600 ‘blacks’ to trial. This proved hopelessly optimistic. The military lawyers found the case against many of them difficult to prove. Continuous Congress agitation against the trials sapped Wavell’s and Auchinleck’s determination to proceed with them. The number proposed for trial dropped steadily, first to 300, then to fewer than 100. Finally, twenty were brought to trial in the Delhi Red Fort on charges of gross brutality. Of these, twelve were sentenced to long prison terms. In January 1947 Sarat Bose began one final push to get all the men released. He even demanded that they be given pay and allowances for the period that they were serving under the Japanese, a suggestion that particularly infuriated the British.1 Bose tried to pressure Nehru through the Indian defence minister of the interim government, Sardar Baldev Singh. The viceroy and the commander-in-chief were both determined to resist this, even though it became a huge issue in the central legislative assembly.
The Congress leadership prevaricated. They had always been aware of the deep public hostility to the trials, even in those cases purportedly relating to ‘brutality’. This was the reason Nehru and Patel had stood so firmly behind the INA prisoners in 1945. But these two men were now virtually the rulers of India. They did not want an open breach with the viceroy and commander-in-chief because it might have fostered public disturbance in a period of rising tension. Any issue could easily ‘turn communal’. Some conservative Muslim clerics had long since denounced the INA as enemies of Islam because of their support for the ‘godless Japanese’. A breach with the remaining British officers of the Indian Army would also be dangerous, given the pervasive fear that the security situation in the country might easily deteriorate disastrously.
Archibald Wavell had come to the end of his tenure as viceroy and almost to the end of his tether. He had been continuously involved with India and its armies since he had been commander-in-chief during the ill-fated defence of Burma in 1941. On New Year’s Eve 1946 he had confided to his journal: ‘It is a great strain on a small man to do a job which is too big for him, if he feels it is too big. Health and vitality suffer.’2 He wrote to Pethick-Lawrence in early March, regretting that he was leaving India ‘with the work unfinished, but if HMG feel that a younger man and a fresher mind can do it better, that is for them to decide’. The Indians would probably pull through, he thought, but ‘it is force of character that is so often lacking. Perhaps they will develop it when we leave.’3 Privately, he wrote: ‘I’m glad that I have finished with politics.’4 Most British soldiers and civil servants in India felt he had been shabbily treated, but then political hatred of the Labour government was very widespread among the remnants of the Raj’s service class.
Wavell’s martial paternalism and decency gave way to Mount-batten’s breezy realism on 24 March. Almost straightaway a compromise was struck on the INA issue. Nehru agreed that the government would reject the demand in the legislative assembly for the release and remuneration of all the remaining ‘black’ prisoners, while Auchinleck agreed to allow judges of the federal court to review the evidence with a view to commuting or reducing the sentences.5 The compromise meant that Mountbatten did not need to use his viceregal veto to overrule the Congress-dominated government, a proceeding that Nehru had feared would cause demonstrations across the country. In return, Nehru backed Auchinleck in the assembly, a ‘courageous and statesmanlike’ gesture according to Mountbatten, who made little secret of his admiration and liking for the Congress leader. But the compromise went only so far. Even as independence approached in August, there was contention over eleven INA men still in jail. The Congress wanted them out before the magic date, 15 August. Auchinleck argued that this would offend the British officers who were to continue to serve in the Indian Army at least until the following spring. The solution seemed to be an amnesty, but the British would agree to this only on condition that the detainees would not be mobbed by jubilant crowds on their release.6
As the hot weather of 1947 set in – the last year, as it was to prove, of two centuries of British rule – a change came over the mood of the people and the politicians. Everyone seemed to adopt a more intransigent position. There was between the Congress and the Muslim League an impasse so unbreakable that by late April Mount-batten had decided that a partition of India and its Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east was the only solution. Faced with troubles around the world, the Attlee government and Mountbatten decided to pull out of India as quickly as possible. Employing a mixed metaphor of woeful banality, Attlee told Mount-batten: ‘I am very conscious that I put you in to bat on a very sticky wicket to pull the game out of the fire.’7 With almost indecent haste, Attlee’s government pushed legislation through the British Parliament to create two new dominions within the Commonwealth on 15 August 1947. Freedom would be granted separately to Pakistan and Hindustan-India. By 17 July secretariats for the two countries were up and running. While Hindu–Muslim conflicts increased in number all across the vast country, a myriad of apparently trivial but highly symbolic issues absorbed the time of the political leaders. The British, for instance, wanted to signal that it was dominion status within the British Commonwealth that was being conceded. They asked that a small Union Flag should be incorporated into the flags of the two countries. The Indians refused outright. Jinnah professed himself pained to have to reject the request, but reported that it would be ‘repugnant to the religious feeling of the Muslims’ to have a cross of St George juxtaposed to the Prophet’s crescent moon, which was to be the emblem on the Pakistan flag.8 Similar squabbling broke out over whether the British monarch would use his signature ‘George Rex Imperator’, his old title as king-emperor, or simply ‘George Rex’.
The Indian armed forces, to the despair of Auchinleck and his brother officers, had to be divided. The interim government’s
Armed Forces Nationalisation Committee had already been wrangling for months over the phasing out of British officers. Now, just before it produced its report in May, the committee had to address the frighteningly complicated issue of dividing the army between two sovereign states. The Indian members anticipated a ‘loss of efficiency’ when the British officers left, but simply wanted to ‘get on with the job’. Naively, several members predicted that there would be no major war for ten years, only internal security operations. In fact, India and Pakistan were to be at each other’s throats the moment the Union Flags came down, posing immense difficulties for the residual British element in both successor armies.9 India got most of British India’s financial assets and the new Indian army commandeered most of the military stores: Pakistan would have to beg on the international arms market. The division gave India twice as many army units, warships and aircraft as Pakistan.10 All the same, the importance of Muslims in the old army meant that Pakistan emerged as a formidable military power. In other respects Pakistan was not so fortunate. Its territorial boundaries were a geographical absurdity with East Pakistan separated from West by 2,000 miles. This was a recipe for trouble, particularly as the commission appointed to determine the borders was working at a frantic pace and the status and options of the princely states were as yet unclear. Conflict simmered on in Bengal, where hatred had reached a peak in the massacres of the previous autumn. In the Punjab, Hindu–Muslim and Muslim–Sikh tensions escalated, even among those who had fought together as comrades through the war. Gandhi regretfully concluded that the division was ultimately not the fault of the British. Indians simply could not agree among themselves. Burmese politicians, ever watching over their shoulders, took the hint. If complete freedom, rather than ‘mere’ dominion status, was to be achieved, then the Burmese must stay unified.
Yet there was something else afoot in that sweltering Asian summer. Fears for the future were mixed with pride in the coming of independence. The Indian nation was about to be reborn as a free, modern people. Sri Krishna, a journalist, reported from the ‘perpetual Turkish bath’ that Delhi had become:
Watching the crowded dance floors in New Delhi’s clubs or hotels one wonders whether the Swadeshi [independent] Government would bring down the inflated values in the social market. Gandhi cap and Jawahar waist [coat] have become fashionable pieces of manly wear. Our women look really chic in sarees, even the Continental or American brand. No one minds the sleeveless and ever shortening blouses. Indian men and women, having achieved the freedom to dance with anybody but their wedded partners, are not likely to abandon it even for Purna Swaraj [full independence].11
Evidently the new India would be neither the paradise of socialist equality anticipated by Pandit Nehru nor the republic of village virtues dreamed of by Mahatma Gandhi. The future of Pakistan was, however, even more clouded. Mahomed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League had managed to block Congress and British attempts to forge independent India in their own interests. Yet Jinnah was unable to secure anything more than a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan. The alternative, the Muslim League’s submergence into a federal structure dominated by the Congress, might have been acceptable if he could have been sure of controlling his Muslim lieutenants in the Punjab and Bengal. But he could not. As a result, thousands of Muslim civil servants began to make their way on intermittent railway services to the distant western seaport of Karachi, Pakistan’s capital designate. Mount-batten, who had opposed partition until the last, derisively predicted the new government would be living in a ‘tent’.12 Nehru secretly hoped that it would collapse in a few months, lacking administrative structure.
The British officers who contemplated the once unthinkable demise of the Raj were beset by mounting worries. Nehru’s emotional attachment to the princely state of Kashmir seemed the most likely cause of conflict between the two new dominions. The state had a Muslim majority but was ruled by a Hindu prince; at the time, no one knew whether it was going to join India or Pakistan. Mountbatten had difficulty in stopping the prime minister designate from personally visiting Kashmir, something that might well have sparked off bloodshed there.13 Meanwhile, the British commander of what was to become the Indian air force was stunned to learn that Nehru was contemplating sending planes to Southeast Asia to help the Indonesian nationalists against the Dutch.14 Nehru did in fact later send Indian planes to break the Dutch embargo of its former colony. The aim was to deliver food and medicines to the nationalist forces, though some said that arms had found their way there too. In the interim All-India Radio acted as the official news station of the Indonesian Republic.15 Nehru was also keeping a weather eye on events in Burma, where the Indian minority was vulnerable to political change. The departing British disapproved of this ‘meddling’ in international affairs, although it was frankly unavoidable. As India became an independent nation its rulers found it difficult to distance themselves from the geopolitical interests of their British predecessor, however much they might have wished to strike a neutral pose in international affairs.
The deepest foreboding affected the officers and men of Britain’s old Indian Army. They had fought together from Assam through to Rangoon, in North Africa and in Italy. They had watched comrades survive the horrors of the Second World War only to see them perish in the abortive occupation of Indonesia. Hindu and Muslim fighters from the Burma campaign watched with horror as their home villages were consumed by communal rioting. Darbar Notes, an army magazine, reported the efforts of Indian subalterns in the Punjab districts to form Hindu–Muslim peace committees.16 At first officers noted with pleasure that only 5 per cent of the people arrested for communal crimes had military training.17 But other men of arms – irregular troops raised during the war, princely states’ armies and bandits of various sorts – actually led the ruthless communal killing that spilled out across the country. Senior British officers later acknowledged that former soldiers had probably played a more significant role in the violence than initially thought. At his prayer meetings, the frail and now deeply disillusioned Gandhi said that he feared that there was every likelihood that the partitioned armies ‘would be used for making war on each other’.18 Mountbatten too was uneasy with the whole situation. He reported to the Partition Council that the Maharaja of Patiala, who had been a key figure in the war effort, had written to him asking him to receive a deputation of Sikh officers, many of whom had served under Mountbatten in South East Asia Command.19 Mountbatten was worried that receiving the men would compromise his supposedly impartial position and that they would use the occasion to raise the issue of the Punjab boundary, which threatened to strand their families on the wrong side of the India–Pakistan border. The Sikhs were also worried that their grants of land for wartime service would not be safe if their districts ended up in Pakistan. As the cities of the Punjab descended into a hell of communal murder, everyone feared that parts of the regular army would get involved in the fighting. In the event, the old Indian Army remained aloof from the mayhem that broke out between March and October 1947, but some former personnel took part in the violence. Officers begged their men to remain impartial as hatred grew. Every officer was sent a pamphlet, ‘The army is the anchor of the country’. The forces newspaper, Fauj Akhbar, reported on the fine job that Indians were doing overseas. Indian troops from a variety of regiments were guarding the Japanese royal palace, for instance.20 But the experience of war stoked the tension in many indirect but malign ways. The Radcliffe Commission, which was responsible for drawing up the boundaries between the two new dominions, divided the homeland of India’s Sikh community in two. This led to what was effectively a murderous armed migration by the large Sikh community living in the Montgomery district of west Punjab to eastern parts of the province that were on the point of becoming India. The adjutant-general of the Indian army, Sir Reginald Savory, reported that this migration and concomitant Sikh violence was ‘well planned, well directed and well carried out’. The Sikh connection with the army had served them excellently, he b
elieved.21
Partition put the departing British into absurdly difficult situations. In theory at least, Sir Frank Messervy, who had led an Indian division at Imphal and was now commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s forces, could be pitted against his old commander, Sir Claude Auchinleck, who remained head of the rest of the Indian army. With a heavy heart, Messervy set to work policing the borders of the emerging dominion of Pakistan.22 He foresaw that old comrades from the Burma front would be trying to kill each other within a few months, as conflicts erupted over the line of the India–Pakistan border. He doubted whether martial law would be of any use in case of a serious breakdown of order. There were simply too few officers, especially British officers, to administer it. Yet Machiavellian diplomacy did not cease simply because the vivisection of the subcontinent was underway. As independence neared, defence strategists in London grasped that it might be possible to secure an agreement with Pakistan even if India were to withdraw from imperial defence arrangements. The Americans too were beginning to see a future for Pakistan as ‘an Islamic buffer’ against Soviet communism in the Hindu Kush. It was Western realpolitik as much as the Muslims’ fear of Hindu domination that determined that Pakistan would survive its traumatic birth.