by Yasmin Khan
The decision to Partition
As a desperate response to the disaster unfolding, Congressmen in the highest echelons started to use the vocabulary of ‘Partition’. Some Sikhs called loudly and provocatively for the division of the Punjab. Nehru himself started to imagine Partition as a possible way out. As Jinnah continually vetoed the vision of one strong united India, it emerged that the price of a strong central government was the division of the country. ‘The truth’, Nehru admitted in an interview in 1960, ‘is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years … The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.’13 If these quarrels continued unabated in one bitterly divided Constituent Assembly, the whole economic future of the country could be undermined. Freedom was being painfully postponed. ‘It is better to pass onto freedom even through chaotic transition than to be under the foreign yoke. Even a parrot would prefer to live half-starved but free rather than to remain in a golden cage, getting all the time raisins and dry fruits,’ mused the quixotic industrialist Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia.14 On paper, the division of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab looked like a solution, of sorts. The Congress Working Committee – the party's innermost circle – accepted the division of the Punjab as a possible solution on 8 March 1947. ‘These tragic events have demonstrated that there can be no settlement of the problem by violence and coercion, and that no arrangement based on coercion can last,’ the leaders regretfully acknowledged. ‘Therefore it is necessary to find a way out which involves the least amount of compulsion … This would necessitate a division of the two provinces so that the predominantly Muslim part may be separated from the predominantly non-Muslim part.’15 The heinous crimes of the preceding year forced the politicians to rush forward the decision to partition. Few were thinking about the line as a real or permanent fixture and the precise meanings of a partition were still inconsistent and unclear. It seemed to offer a way of attaining freedom and a compromise.
For other politicians who dreamed of infusing national iconography and policies with a more ostentatiously explicit ‘Hindu’ flavour, and remained less convinced by Nehru's insistence on pluralism, Partition might also relieve them of accommodating Muslim opinion altogether. They rejected Partition in the loudest voices, yet, in private, could also see its benefits. In July 1947, within weeks of Partition's acceptance, the Education Minister of United Provinces, a former schoolteacher named Dr Sampurnanand met with the sectarian Hindu Mahasabha and was told that, ‘for the first time since the age of Prithwiraj [a twelfth century Rajput ruler], we had received the opportunity to develop the country according to what could broadly be called Hindu ideals. Whatever our choice of words, the culture of this part of India could not be otherwise than predominantly Hindu.’16 Partition, for politicians of different ideological hues, was a painful blow to their original conceptions of freedom, but also had some practical utility. Partition would clear the decks for nation-building by the Congress, in whatever form that might take, and in the final analysis a Balkanised or fragmentary Indian state with extensive regional autonomy was of little value to the Congress Party.
The words on most of the Indian public's lips, though, remained swaraj and Pakistan. The word ‘Partition’ came a very poor third. What people most wanted was freedom and sovereignty over their own communities. The colonial leadership and its heirs were at a remove from the intensity of these patriotic and non-territorial demands. The idea of partitioning ancient homelands was barely contemplated or understood. As the power of the state to deliver law and order visibly collapsed, other regional aspirations came bubbling to the surface and all sorts of groups made violent bids for their own portion of land, their own community's sovereignty. There was still no inevitable or pre-ordained final shape to the subcontinental settlement and with the euphoria of an imperial ending surged the hope for self-rule and the will to power among princes, caste leaders, spiritual pirs and clusters of ethnic minorities. In short, the plan itself had far too little popular legitimacy and few had asked for it or even fully debated its consequences.
A few weeks later Mountbatten flew in with his own posse of hand-picked private staff to take up his post as the last Viceroy of India. The new viceroyalty, which started on 24 March 1947, two days after the Mountbattens landed in India, was strikingly different to any earlier regime in New Delhi. Mountbatten had visited India several times and had been the Supreme Allied Commander for South East Asia during the war. Mountbatten and his colleagues, though, had not loyally worked their way up through the pecking order of the British Raj, from district to imperial capital, and his enthusiastic band of advisers and press secretaries had little insight into the machinations of local Indian politics, or the implications of severe rioting. His predecessor, Wavell, who had spent his childhood in India and also served as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army, appears to have been more hamstrung by sensitivity to the problematic political scene that was unfolding in India and aware of the interconnected difficulties that any kind of settlement could fuel, rather than ease. This left him struggling to take concrete steps whereas Mountbatten was less plagued by worries about regional, and bloody, repercussions. When a group of British provincial governors, exhausted and deeply anxious about the likelihood of violence in their provinces, arrived in Delhi for a meeting shortly after Mountbatten's arrival they were greeted by a buoyant and optimistic new regime.17
Once halving the contested provinces of Punjab and Bengal was accepted by the careworn Nehru and other Congress leaders as a viable option, as a pathway out of the interminable political morass, it was only a matter of time before the creation of two separate states took on momentum in the thinking of the Viceroy and his advisers. Mountbatten denied having arrived in India with any prepared plan, although he was rapidly reconciled to the idea of Partition once he was exposed to the political intransigence of the different parties. Within a month, and before he had even toured outside Delhi, he was starting to think that Pakistan was inevitable and that he had arrived on the scene too late to alter the course of events fundamentally. As K.M. Panikkar, the historian and diplomat who was advising the princely state of Bikaner, put it, ‘Hindustan is the elephant … and Pakistan the two ears. The elephant can live without the ears.’18 Mountbatten liked to describe the Viceroy's vast house as a small town, in which he presided as mayor. From this highly insulated perspective he was perfectly suited to his remit, which was to chart the making of nation states and the settlement of a constitutional solution. He achieved a much-coveted agreement between the League and the Congress by refusing to dwell on the implications of his actions, instead emphasising the practical aspects and stressing the expediency of finding a constitutional settlement.
On 18 May, less than two months after being sworn in as Viceroy, Mountbatten departed for London clutching the papers which sketched the Partition plan, ready to persuade the Cabinet that it was a workable scheme and hopeful of finishing the job on his return to the subcontinent. Only the fine-tuning remained: Punjabi and Bengali legislators would have the opportunity to vote on a potential split of the provinces, and a plebiscite for or against joining Pakistan would be necessary in the NWFP, where a Congress ministry, territorially far detached from the rest of India but strongly in favour of a united India, posed a particularly delicate problem. The paper plan, however, based on territorial and statistical maps, was entirely dislocated from the regional nuances of political life in India, and a top-down conceptualisation of state-centred politics would be imposed directly from London on the subcontinent. Furthermore, the plan was tragically unconcerned with human safety and popular protection. It did not even begin to examine the fear and apprehension of Indians, or to build in suitable safeguards to assuage these fears of domination.
The elite bartering and the final decision to partition was in the hands of a small cabal of British and Indian politicians and was staged theatrically in the classical buildings of Lutyens's New Delhi. By the spring months of 1947 negotiations had left provincial p
oliticians and their followers far behind. The final settlement outran popular will in these localities, and the diverse political struggles taking place nationwide were scarcely factored into the simplistic plan to cut the Raj in two. It is this dislocation between New Delhi and its vast hinterland which has made Partition seem such an unwanted, alien imposition. In some ways, the final settlement was a true compromise, splitting land, resources and people between two entities, yet it satisfied no one. The League was handed a scarcely viable, ‘moth-eaten’ state to run, the Punjab and Bengal (ironically perhaps the two Indian provinces with the most distinctive regional cultures and interwoven populations) would be wrenched apart, and even Jinnah, who had at least achieved his Pakistan, admitted to a journalist in a letter, ‘It is very difficult for me to understand what led His Majesty's Government to come to the conclusion of partitioning Punjab and Bengal. In my opinion it is a mistake and I quite agree with you. But now we have accepted the plan as a whole and I feel confident that we shall make a good job of it.’19 His optimism, despite all the flaws in the plan, seemed justified. In the eyes of the politicians a conclusive settlement had finally been reached; freedom would arrive and almost one year earlier than anybody had ever expected. Perhaps this was the path to a peaceful settlement?
Stepping into the unknown
On 3 June, the plan was broadcast to a nervous and expectant population. In the lush green hills of Assam, in the north-eastern corner of India, the local Congress politicians heard of the plan to divide up the country in the British Governor's own living room, where there was, at least, a working radio. The paper copies of the 3 June plan did not arrive, as the post had been hampered by strikes and heavy sheets of monsoon rain. The Governor himself, Andrew Clow, was emotional at the momentousness of the occasion and the announcement that power was now going to be transferred. ‘Leaving India is a big wrench,’ he wrote to Mountbatten, ‘particularly as I shall, in my own country, be rather a stranger in a strange land.’ For many of empire's repatriated administrators, returning to the British ‘homeland’ would not be straightforward and Clow had been in India since 1914. For all his experience of the Raj, though, Clow's reading of the 3 June plan was that it was not permanent. ‘I am very sorry that … the unity of India has at least for some time to come been broken,’ he wrote. Like very many others his impression was of an expedient settlement rather than a permanent border. Imagining the transition from empire to free nations was complex and uncertain even for those in the imperial inner circle.
The Muslim League had won its Pakistan. But there was no firm line between winners and losers. Endemic confusion and disorientation followed the announcement, which sliced horizontally through all communities. One does not have to look far to find signs of the utter confusion which greeted the 3 June plan. The plan, which was such a relief to the British government, was foisted on a population entirely uninformed about its details and implications. Local understandings of ‘freedom’ and ‘Pakistan’, inspired by millenarianism, fear and heightened anticipation of revolutionary change, suddenly had to be squared with the creation of full-blown modern nation states. The country was to be divided – that much was clear – but would populations be expected to move? Where would the boundaries lie? What would be incorporated in Pakistan and what would not? None of these questions were satisfactorily answered by either the British or Indian political leadership. In the Indian army, on Mountbatten's own admission, ‘Many of the troops had not, ten days after the announcement, yet realised the full implications of the plan.’20 On the question of the princely states, a day after the announcement of the plan a government source suggested the British would ‘begin to think’ about entering into new relationships with over five hundred Indian states, home to 24 per cent of undivided India's population.21
Some Pakistan supporters ecstatically celebrated the victory that they had longed for and, for those in the vanguard of promoting a modern territorial state for Muslims, the news was an irreproachable triumph. ‘When a few years ago, some of us, students at Cambridge, began to dream of an independent Muslim State in India and called it “Pakistan”,’ wrote I.H. Qureshi, a well-known historian at Delhi University in an emotional letter to Jinnah, ‘even in our wildest dreams we were not so hopeful as to think that our cherished goal was so near at hand.’22 For those who had consciously fought for a Pakistani territorial nation state it was a day of jubilation: sweets were distributed, songs sung, flags paraded. Leaguers celebrated the achievement of bringing a new country into being as a homeland for Indian Muslims; one thousand Muslim women gathered at Jinnah's house in Bombay to give him a standing ovation; and after saying their prayers in Agra's central mosque, Muslims celebrated the creation of Pakistan and collected donations for the new state.23
Jinnah made an appeal for funds in mid-June with which to build up the nascent Pakistan. He was inundated with donations and letters which came, in the main, from Delhi, Lahore and the North Indian urban areas where the League had always gained most vocal backing. The receipts for donations offer a fleeting insight into the enthusiastic support for Pakistan, especially from landlords, small businessmen and officials. The Railway Board Employees' Association in Delhi collected 250 rupees, and the Muslim employees of the Press Information Bureau in Delhi proffered a cheque for 80. ‘Decent Leather Works’ in Kanpur gave 25 rupees and twenty-three divisional sepoys from Madras offered 337 rupees from their wages. Women gave as well as men, and supposedly ‘neutral’ civil servants and officials dug into their pockets. The wealthy tenants of Razia Begum, who lived in her haveli, or traditional whitewashed house around an open courtyard in Delhi, gave the princely sum of 500 rupees in their landlady's name. ‘I venture to send a very petty amount I have saved out of my monthly pocket money received from my parents and pray you, respected Sir, to very kindly accept this humble offer,’ implored Athar Shafi Alavi, a young student living in the old quarter of the railway junction town of Bareilly in the United Provinces, who wrote directly to the League leader. Pakistan was still managing, as an ideal, to capture the imagination of a segment of South Asian Muslim society.
The Partition plan, however, was a ‘bitter pill’ for Jinnah. For his supporters who now found themselves marooned, sometimes hundreds of miles from the real Pakistan, it was even tougher medicine.24 In the midst of the celebrations nagging doubts emerged about the nature of the prize. As Begum Ikramullah put it, ‘even though we may have wished for it and I, in a small way had worked for it, it was a bit frightening now that it was actually going to take place’.25 What would happen to the leadership of the Muslims left in India? Should they migrate to the new country? In the provinces where Muslims were in a minority, the shock was for those who had constructed Pakistan as a fictive, imaginary counter-nationalism to the Congress, or had dreamed of a more capacious Pakistan, who were left with the cold realisation that Pakistan was not going to include their home areas. This affected leadership and masses alike. Z.H. Lari, a lawyer, had campaigned energetically for the League. When the final form of Pakistan was announced, however, he was bitterly disappointed with the result, and gave an emotional speech in which he said that if the plan was accepted it would be ‘a major catastrophe’ as ‘the Pakistan which is being offered to us will be from every point of view so weak that we will find ourselves in serious difficulties’.26
The crushing fact, from the League's viewpoint, was that Pakistan's limits would be marked by two half-provinces, not the whole of Punjab and Bengal, and more expansive dreams of Pakistan's future had to be promptly reined in. Professor I.H. Qureshi, who had lavished praise on Jinnah's successful establishment of Pakistan just six days earlier, now wrote to him again. He had had time to examine the terms and conditions of Partition, the reality of the settlement had sunk in and he urged his leader to create a committee, ‘to study and prepare the Muslim case for increased territories in Eastern Punjab and Western Bengal’.27 He pressed the urgency of the situation on Jinnah. ‘You have perhaps read a news item
in today's paper saying that the Hindus and Sikhs will advance considerations other than population for demanding certain areas. I think that we should also prepare a case on the basis of history, strategic considerations, irrigation and a feasible customs barrier.’ Minds turned to squeezing the settlement for the best possible deal. In Jinnah's own words the plan was ‘titanic, unknown, unparalleled’.28
Among those who had vocally supported the Pakistan demand without giving much detailed thought to its potential territorial implications at all, and who had pinned their hopes and dreams on religious revival or revitalised power, there was more unhappiness. In the United Provinces, elation about achieving Pakistan ‘got moderated by the realization among the more sober elements … of its logical implications for Muslims outside Pakistan’.29 Some members of the League continued to hope that the boundaries of the new Pakistani state would include the Mughal heartlands of North India, in the face of all the demographic evidence to the contrary, and even after the declaration that the Punjab and Bengal were to be divided, a circular was issued by some members of the provincial League trying to popularise the idea of ‘Pakistan pockets’ in the province.30 A hastily convened provincial League committee in Bombay demanded the establishment of a ‘homeland or homelands for the Muslims in Bombay province’.31 Firoz Khan Noon, a Punjabi League leader and later Prime Minister of Pakistan, responded to the 3 June plan by suggesting that the Sikhs should be incorporated as members of the new Pakistani Constituent Assembly, or that the Punjab's boundaries should be redrawn on a linguistic basis, while in Amritsar a former newspaper editor started a campaign for a united Punjab.32