Retaliation against these atrocities was swift and furious. On 23 August a train full of Sikh refugees was attacked by Muslims at Ferozepur, leaving 25 dead and 100 wounded. In Quetta, riots kicked off between Muslim League supporters and Pathans. After three boys were paraded through the streets, bearing injuries sustained from riots in West Punjab, both sides turned on the local Hindus.22 One week after partition, Delhi was a temporary home to 130,000 Muslim refugees on their way to Pakistan, a quarter of whom had arrived in the preceding fortnight. Five thousand were crowded into a squalid refugee camp in front of the Jama Masjid; sixteen other camps were set up to host the rest.23 Inside these enclaves, according to Lord Ismay, ‘conditions defied description’: there was no water, no food, no sanitation and no security.24
Mountbatten has been widely held responsible for the scale of the partition disaster, and for the failure to deal with it once it started. For his management of the situation, according to his fiercest critic, Andrew Roberts, ‘Mountbatten deserved to be court-martialled on his return to London.’25 This is a serious accusation, and worth examining in some detail. The criticism has been aimed from three angles. First, Mountbatten is accused of ignoring the specific problem of the Sikhs, who were particularly disgruntled by their lot under his plan, and capable of organizing their disgruntlement into military action. Second, he is accused of failing to use British troops to stop the trouble once it started. Third, he is accused of having rushed through the whole transfer of power so fast that preparations made for the effects of partition were either inadequate or absent.
On the matter of the Sikhs, Mountbatten had long been alerted. During his very first week in India, he had asked V.P. Menon for an assessment of the Sikh situation.26 He had had extensive contact with the moderate Sikh Minister of Defence, Baldev Singh; he had also spoken to the more militant Akali Dal leaders, Tara Singh and Kartar Singh. He had heard their demand for an independent Khalistan.
Khalistan was impossible, as Kartar Singh himself admitted.27 The Sikhs had a great deal of land and people scattered throughout the Punjab, but they were a majority in no part of it – and neither Hindus nor, more emphatically, Muslims would have consented to live in a Sikh state. Inevitably, once the partition of the Punjab had been decided upon, the Sikhs would have to be split. The only alternative would have been to leave the Punjab intact and give it in its entirety to India or Pakistan. Pakistan was the stronger contender, for the Punjab had over 16 million Muslims against fewer than 8 million Hindus and 4 million Sikhs, and a strong Muslim League presence in its government.28 But without any firm word on their security or freedom of conscience the Sikhs were reluctant to enter into an Islamic nation.29 Several Punjabi Sikh groups threatened civil war if they were forced into Pakistan.
Mountbatten had been warned that the Sikhs would object to their deal before partition. Liaquat repeatedly asked him to imprison Sikh leaders and to ban the kirpan.30 Mountbatten did not, and this has often been used to hold him responsible for Sikh involvement in the massacres.31 But he had only refrained from acting, on the advice of senior neutral experts. On 5 August, Mountbatten had a secret meeting with Patel, Jinnah and Liaquat, which directly implicated the Sikh leaders in a number of plots – including that to assassinate Jinnah in Karachi on 14 August. Jinnah and Liaquat again demanded the arrest of Tara Singh and his associates, but Patel warned that this would make the situation worse. Mountbatten did not take Patel’s word for it, but wrote to Evan Jenkins, Governor of the Punjab, and his two successors, Sir Chandulal Trivedi and Sir Francis Mudie, to ask them for their opinion. All three were firm and unanimous in their accord with Patel.32
Had Mountbatten imprisoned the likes of Tara Singh and Kartar Singh for crimes they had not yet committed, and had he banned the kirpan, he would have faced a tremendous backlash from the Sikhs before the transfer of power. This was exactly opposite to Britain’s interests, and therefore he could not do it. Even if he had imprisoned the leaders, it is unlikely that the Sikhs would have been pacified. From the character of the fighting during August and September 1947, it was obvious that they had created an organized militia. Had Tara Singh and Kartar Singh been removed, more heads would have sprung up to replace them. As Nehru wrote afterwards, ‘It is just childish nonsense or deliberate malice for anyone to contend that [the] arrest of Tara Singh or a few others could have made any difference to a vast explosive situation.’ Nehru also noted another point, too often ignored, that ‘The charges are based on premises that the Sikhs were originators of and guilty party in all that happened,’ premises which he described as ‘completely wrong’.33 Mountbatten did exactly as he was advised by his governors and staff: he duly reported the Sikh problem to London – which did not volunteer any extra reinforcements – and set up the Punjab Boundary Force with it in mind.34 Without hindsight, it is hard to see that he could have done more.
Mountbatten has also been charged with not deploying more British soldiers to maintain order, and to guarantee safe conduct for refugees between the two dominions.35 To a great extent, this would have been the responsibility of the Ministry of War, the Ministry of Air, and the Admiralty, rather than Mountbatten, but it is true that he did not bother those ministries for reinforcements.36 Had British troops been used, he argued, ‘They would doubtless have incurred the odium of both sides.’37 As it was, the Punjab Boundary Force was widely seen as being an arm of British imperialism.
After 15 August, Mountbatten was the servant of the Union of India; and his Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had made unequivocal his opinion: ‘I would rather have every village in India go up in flames than keep a single British soldier in India a moment longer than necessary.’38 Mountbatten’s staff agreed with Nehru. When the Governor General showed an inclination to send a British brigade to police Delhi, Auchinleck argued that British troops could only be used to protect British lives.39 British services were overstretched, and commanders had been pointing out for at least a year that the release of soldiers from India was a high priority: India was no longer relevant to British defence.40 Field Marshal Montgomery had visited Delhi in June, and met Nehru, to whom he expressed his desire to withdraw all British troops as fast as possible. ‘He asked me if there was any chance of our changing our minds later and asking some British troops to be left in India,’ noted Nehru. ‘If this happened it would upset his programme. I told him that there was not the least chance of this happening and we wanted British troops in India to be taken away completely.’41 The situation was unambiguous: the British government, the British services and the Indian government all insisted that British troops should be removed from India at the earliest possible opportunity. It is fanciful to imagine that Mountbatten could have acted in direct contradiction of the wishes of all three of these bodies.
Finally, there is the question of whether Mountbatten’s extraordinary rush to transfer power caused the disaster. Undoubtedly, Mountbatten went much faster than anyone asked him to. But the arguments against Mountbatten’s speed all rely on a mistaken assumption: that, if the Viceroy had stuck to Attlee’s timetable, he would have had the time and resources to subdue the Punjab. He had neither. Attlee had made it clear that Britain was going to leave India regardless of its situation in June 1948. Once this had been stated, even a dramatic show of force against rioters could only have postponed the violence until then. There is no reason to think that the slow-boiling of communal tempers under martial law for an extra nine months would have reconciled everybody to live happily ever after. There is every reason to think that the result would have been just as bad, if not worse.42 Chakravarty Rajagopalachari, who would the following year take over from Mountbatten as Governor General of India, was one of many who expressed this view. ‘If the Viceroy had not transferred power when he did’, he wrote, ‘there could well have been no power to transfer.’43
For Britain to impose martial law would have put the governments in Delhi and in London in a dubious situation. In the first place, there was no appetite
in Britain for further British casualties in foreign wars. Only seven British officers were killed in India between partition and the end of January 1948; had the British Army taken full responsibility, it is logical to suppose that there would have been many more.44 In the second place, had Mountbatten cracked down hard on the Punjab before 15 August, he would have caused untold trouble both inside India and with Britain’s international allies, especially the United States. Assertions of British dominance were neither desirable nor practical. They risked antagonizing the Indian people and politicians further, and spreading serious discontent from the Punjab to other parts of India – an effect that was already visible from sympathy riots in the North-West Frontier Province. Neither Britain nor India needed in the middle of 1947 to risk any more Brigadier General Dyers carrying out any more Amritsar massacres.
But most important of all was the issue of resources. The British government was in the middle of its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. There was very little popular understanding of what was going on in the Punjab, and even less interest. The British had recently emerged from six years of war. Hundreds of thousands had been killed, and millions expended. Their normal industries had been battered, their towns destroyed, their families broken up and stuck back together. Still they languished under the strictures of rationing, which were getting tighter, not looser. To these ordinary people, the Empire was a superfluous accoutrement. Edie Rutherford, a forty-three-year-old housewife from Sheffield, had a typically indifferent reaction to the mass of press coverage about the effective end of her nation’s Empire and the independence of 400 million of her fellow subjects. ‘I swear most folk couldn’t care less’, she wrote in her diary on 16 August 1947, ‘and I resent the inference that we have had them enslaved up to now. Most folk are simply glad to be shot of them, to put it vulgarly yet truthfully.’45 Churchill’s warnings about indignant Britons awakening sharply to defend their Empire came to nothing. Even he himself had relented. ‘I do not think we shall lose very much by leaving India at the present time, and that feeling is undoubtedly widespread here,’ he had mused in an unsent letter to Jinnah.46
Mountbatten’s early withdrawal might not have allowed sufficient time for the Indian and Pakistani governments or armies to get their acts together, but it did a service to Britain – whose interests, after all, he had been employed to serve. It has been argued that the British government should have felt a responsibility for the millions of Punjabis who were, after all, British subjects until August 1947. In moral terms, probably it should have. But in practical terms it felt a lot more responsibility for the millions of British subjects who lived in Britain itself, to whom it would still be accountable after 15 August. Faced with a choice between abandoning a nation a very long way away, and antagonizing the nation on its doorstep, the government chose the former. The decision may not have been a happy one, but no government in that position could have behaved differently.
On all three counts for which Roberts would have had Mountbatten court-martialled – the mishandling of the Sikhs, the lack of British Army support, and the speed of the transfer of power – there is a strong case in his defence. As Viceroy, Mountbatten was charged with serving the interests of Britain. He did this rigorously. Naturally, his focus on British interests meant that both India and Pakistan were ill-served by his viceroyalty – but that was inevitable. Moreover, for all his later boasts that Attlee had granted him ‘plenipotentiary powers’, Mountbatten’s hands were tied by what London would give him.47 He could not magic soldiers out of thin air.
From Mountbatten’s point of view, the greatest mistake was staying on as Governor General of independent India. At the stroke of midnight on the morning of 15 August 1947, he had been transformed from a servant of British interests to a servant of Indian interests. The best interests of Britain had been served by a swift exit, a slapdash partition, the creation of Pakistan, and the repatriation of British armed forces. The best interests of India might well have been served by exactly the opposite. After 15 August, Mountbatten was in the unenviable position of having to deal with a combusting and hamstrung India that had been left that way by his own successful management of his previous job. He had been deeply reluctant to accept the governor-generalship, but had had little choice under pressure from his king, government and opposition. From his point of view, though, his reputation would have endured far better had he been on his plane heading for London alongside Sir Cyril Radcliffe.
Ten days after the transfer of power, the scale and awfulness of what was underway had still not been realized in Delhi. ‘We are only just alive’, wrote Edwina to her friend Kay Norton, ‘but the last gruelling five months have been well worth while after all the incredible happenings and demonstrations of the last 10 days.’ She expressed the hope that the refugee situation would soon be resolved.48 In the days after writing those words, both she and Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Punjab, and the grim truth began to sink in.
In 1946, Nehru had made three predictions to journalist Jacques Marcuse. ‘One, India will never be a Dominion. Two, there will never be a Pakistan. Three, when the British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India.’ Marcuse was back in Delhi just after partition to interview him again, but could not bring himself to remind Nehru of their previous conversation. In the end, Nehru brought it up himself. ‘You remember, Marcuse, what I told you? No Dominion, No Pakistan, No …’
Both men were silent for a moment, until Nehru added wistfully, ‘Wasn’t I wrong?’49
On 24 August, he set out at six o’clock in the morning in an aeroplane for the Punjabi town of Jullundur, and spent hours travelling by car and jeep across the dusty plains. He emerged to walk through deserted ruins which had been lively, noisy and welcoming villages. Now there was no sound, no life; just corpses, cinders, and dried-up splashes of bloodstain in the dust. He saw a caravan of 100,000 refugees, moving despondently away to a new land unknown. He talked to as many as he could. ‘I cannot imagine another day when he could have felt more strongly that all his hopes, his dreams, his faith in human nature were crashing down in pieces,’ remembered his secretary, H.V.R. Iengar. Finally, he made it to bed at two o’clock the next morning, before getting up at half-past five to fly to Lahore. The passengers on the plane slumped back in their seats, exhausted and miserable; except for Nehru, who was engrossed in reading a slim volume. Iengar asked him what it was. He explained that it was a Sanskrit play: Mrcchakatika, or The Little Clay Cart.50 It is the witty and scandalous story of a hero, Charudatta, ‘the tree of plenty to the poor’, ‘a treasure of manly virtues, intelligent, liberal, and upright’, who has given up his hereditary riches to the people. Charudatta falls in love with a spirited, bold and compassionate woman, Vasantasena. But Vasantasena is claimed by another man – the frivolous, hasty and foolish brother-in-law of the King. ‘There is no changing nature,’ a character remarks; ‘nothing can keep an ox out of a field of corn, nor stop a man who covets another’s wife.’ In the end, Charudatta not only wins the love of Vasantasena, but through ‘noble daring wrested an empire from its ancient lords’.51 Much in this ancient tale must have resonated.
Two days after Nehru had set out, Edwina flew to Jullundur with her close friend and India’s first female cabinet minister, Amrit Kaur. She had gone after consulting Maniben Patel, who had told her that it would be helpful to have a reliable eyewitness report on the situation, in addition to the raising of morale her trip might effect.52 The local authorities were in such disarray that no welcome party had turned up to meet Edwina and Amrit, apart from a lost baby buffalo that had wandered on to the tarmac. Eventually, they managed to commandeer a jeep, and toured seven refugee camps and hospitals in Jullundur and Amritsar that first day, distributing medical supplies and food when they could, and making notes of what was needed after they ran out. As Edwina came to the end of her tour, she was told of an attack on a lorryload of refugees who had come in from Sialkot. Without hesitation, she returned to the Victo
ria Memorial Hospital to visit the survivors. Afterwards, she went to see the Sikh leader, Tara Singh, in person. According to Alan Campbell-Johnson, he was ‘at last beginning to tremble at the wrath he has readily invoked’.53 The next morning she was off to Lahore in Pakistan, visiting a Muslim refugee camp and a school before breakfast. She continued through Rawalpindi, Sialkot and Gujranwalla before returning to Delhi.
The trip established Edwina’s position at the prow of the government’s relief efforts, making her one among many visible women in senior positions in the Indian administration. Independent India had been constituted along remarkably progressive lines. From the outset, Indian women would earn equal pay for equal work – a right not conferred upon British women until the 1970s. ‘A lot of people will dispute the advisability of such a thing in this country, and it remains to be seen what will happen here,’ Lady Mountbatten told a meeting of the East India Association in London the following year; ‘but I am convinced that India was perfectly right to decide that there should not be any discrimination between men and women, that every field of service should be open to those women who were qualified to serve. Men and women must be equal before the law and if that is so they must then receive equal pay for equal work.’54
But behind this image of feminist progress lay a long, dark shadow of female despair. At Calcutta in 1946, and subsequently, the vengeance of the rioters had been wreaked deliberately on women. As the great migrations and great slaughters following partition got underway, so too did a sustained and brutal campaign of sexual persecution. The use of rape as a weapon of war was conscious and emphatic. On every side, proud tales were told of the degradation of enemy women. Thousands of women were abducted, forcibly married to their assailants, and bundled away to the other side of the border. Many never saw their families again. Thousands more were simply used and then thrown back into their villages. There were accounts of women who had been held down while their breasts and arms were cut, tattooed or branded with their rapists’ names and the dates of their attacks.55
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