The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  The following unsigned document reflects views that had been gaining ascendancy as India’s independence approached. The crux is contained in the following summary:

  The Indus Valley, western Punjab and Baluchistan [the northwest] are vital to any strategic plans for the defence of [the] all-important Muslim belt…the oil supplies of the Middle East. If one looks upon this area as a strategic wall (against Soviet expansionism) the five most important bricks in the wall are: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Only through the open ocean port of Karachi could the opponents of the Soviet Union take immediate and effective countermeasures. The sea approaches to all other countries will entail navigation in enclosed waters directly menaced by Russian air fleets…not only of the sea lanes of approach, but also the ports of disembarkation.

  If the British Commonwealth and the United States of America are to be in a position to defend their vital interests in the Middle East, then the best and most stable area from which to conduct this defence is from Pakistan territory.

  Pakistan [is] the keystone of the strategic arch of the wide and vulnerable waters of the Indian Ocean.27

  Who can say that this assessment was not prescient? For, after partition, Pakistan, together with Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Britain first joined the Baghdad Pact and later CENTO (which the USA also joined) to form the brick wall against Soviet ambitions. Later, Pakistan entered into a bilateral military pact with Britain’s closest ally, the USA, and provided an air base in Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province to the CIA to enable U2 planes to keep a hawk’s eye on military preparations in the Soviet Union. (The existence of this secret base came to light only in 1961 after the US pilot, Gary Powers, who took off from there, was shot down over the Soviet Union.)

  In a later and very important ‘chukker’ of the continuing Great Game, Pakistan, in the 1980s, provided the base from which the US could eject the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, precipitating the break-up of the Soviet Union. If with the establishment of American forces in strength in the Persian Gulf and the prospects of the same happening in the former Muslim territories of the USSR, Western dependence on Pakistan to check Russia has diminished, a half a century’s run is all one can reasonably hope for, from the best of strategies.

  Krishna Menon, writing in June 1947 to Lord Mountbatten, had wondered whether Britain was following a hidden agenda, whose lid had been slightly raised by Bevin in Margate. Two weeks before Menon wrote to the viceroy, two US diplomats, Ely E. Palmer (envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to Afghanistan) and R.S. Leach of the State Department, passed through Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province of British India. They were invited to dine with Sir Olaf Caroe, the British governor of the province. On 26 May 1947 Palmer and Leach reported to the State Department in Washington the substance of their conversation with Sir Olaf. Their report said that the governor asked them to come a little before dinner ‘so that they could have a quiet chat’. During this chat, according to the diplomats, ‘the Governor first spoke about the “correct” British policy looking towards a united India’ but then had ‘spoken more frankly’ and had emphasized ‘the great political importance of the North West Frontier Province and Afghanistan’, which he described as ‘the uncertain vestibule’ in future relations between the Soviet Union and India. He also spoke ‘of the danger of Soviet penetration of Gilgit, Chitral and Swat’ (all situated on Kashmir’s northern border) and then significantly added: ‘He would not be unfavorable to the establishment of a separate Pakistan.’28

  Sir Olaf, before his appointment as governor of the NWFP, had been foreign secretary in Delhi from 1939 to 1946 and hence the principal adviser to two viceroys, Linlithgow and Wavell, on British India’s policy to forestall Soviet expansionism in Afghanistan, Sinkiang and the region of the Persian Gulf. Sir Olaf was really trying to use the Americans’ presence in Peshawar to ‘educate’ the State Department on the usefulness, from a Western point of view, of the creation of Pakistan and Kashmir’s adherence to it, as seen by a person with experience in that region. And, in the process, he had let the cat out of the bag.

  After his retirement, the British Foreign Office sent Sir Olaf on a lecture tour of America. This tour was, in his own words, an ‘attempt to catch and save a way of thought known to many who saw these things from the East, but now in danger of being lost, in the hope that new workers in the vineyards may find in it something worth regard’.29 In America he lectured on the theme (later collated and published in his book Wells of Power) that the Karachi port and the coastline of Baluchistan standing at the mouth of the Persian Gulf were ‘vital to its [British] reckoning’. The British base in India – now in Pakistan – had maintained stability in the Middle East since 1801, when Tsar Paul’s ambitions first blew the whistle. Russian pressure – ‘silent, concentrated, perpetual’ – had predated communism, ‘the Indian anchor’ had been lost, but Pakistan – ‘a new India’ – had emerged, a Muslim state that could help to establish a defence community of Muslim states and ‘show the way for reconciliation between the Western and Islamic models’. Caroe then posed the question: ‘Will Islam stand up to communism?’ The former foreign secretary of the British Government of India was later to boast that the US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles’ phrase ‘the northern tier’ and his own ‘the northern screen’ were ‘the same idea really’.

  It was midway during the Second World War that the British authorities realized that they would have to quit India, their military base for over fifty years, sooner than later. Their thoughts then turned to closing the gap that would result in a Commonwealth defence against a Soviet move to the south, towards the ‘the wells of power’ and the Indian Ocean. To find a solution, they looked for available opportunities and openings in India in the hallowed British tradition described by Churchill as follows:

  We [British] do not think that logic and clear-cut principles are necessarily the sole key to what ought to be done in swiftly changing and indefinable situations…. We assign a larger importance to opportunism and improvisation, seeking rather to live and conquer in accordance with the unfolding events than to aspire to dominate them by fundamental decisions.30

  So now our attention must turn to the ground realities in India as they obtained at the beginning of the war, which set in motion the events that led to Indian independence and partition.

  Notes and References

  1. Mountbatten Papers (MB1/E 104, Hartley Library, Southampton).

  2. Ibid.

  3. Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows (Counterpoint Press, New York, 1999, p. 152).

  4. Henry Rawlinson, England and Russia (John Murray, London, 1875, pp. 279–80).

  5. Quoted by Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, Vol. 2 (India Research Press, Delhi, 1999, p. 856).

  6. View of Sir John Lawrence as paraphrased by Meyer and Brysac, op. cit., p. 155.

  7. Gerald Morgan, Anglo–Russian Rivalry in Central Asia 1810–1895 (Taylor and Francis, London, 1981, p. 120).

  8. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, translated by Boris Brasol (Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1949, pp. 1051–52).

  9. Sir Olaf Caroe, Wells of Power (Macmillan, London, 1951, p. 185).

  10. K.M. Panikkar, The Future of South-East Asia (Asia Publishing House, London, 1943, pp. 69 sqq.) cited in Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO) Document F 15955/8800/85, 1 December 1947, p. 14.

  11. Top-secret document, PHP (45) 15 (0) final, 19 May 1945, L/WS/1/983– 988 (Oriental and Indian Collection, British Library, London).

  12. Top secret, minutes of chiefs of staff (COS) (46) 19(0), 18 April 1946 (OIC, British Library, London).

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Enclosure to Lord Wavell’s letter to Lord Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, Simla, 13 July 1946 (OIC, British Library, London).

  18. Ibid.

  19. Extrac
t from COS (46) 173rd meeting, 29 November 1946, Tp (46), Para 4 (OIC, British Library, London).

  20. Ibid.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Top-secret annexure to minutes of COS (47) 62nd meeting, L/WS/1/1030, pp. 5–12 (OIC, British Library, London).

  23. Ibid.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Top-secret COS memorandum, 7 July 1947, Tp (47) 90, final (OIC, British Library, London).

  26. Ibid.

  27. Unsigned memorandum dated 19 May 1948, entitled ‘The Strategic and Political Importance of Pakistan in the Event of War with the USSR’ (Mountbatten Papers, Hartley Library, Southampton).

  28. Memorandum in File 845-00/2-2647 (National Archives, Washington, 2 June 1947).

  29. Sir Olaf Caroe, article in The Round Table, 1949, and Wells of Power, op. cit.

  30. Winston Churchill, Memories of the Second World War, Vol. 6, War Comes to America (Cassell & Co., London, 1950).

  * The prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossadeq, in the 1950s.

  * Parts of pre-1947 northwest India that were incorporated into West Pakistan.

  2

  The Anglo–Muslim League Alliance

  IN 1949 I WAS CONVALESCING AFTER AN OPERATION IN THE HOME outside London of my father’s friend Sir Paul Patrick. He had been a former assistant undersecretary at the India Office before it was abolished after India gained independence. One day Sir Paul told me that soon after Adolf Hitler had overrun France in the summer of 1940 and an invasion of the British Isles was imminent, Gandhiji, during a meeting with Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, at Simla, stunned him by saying that the British should have the courage to let Germany occupy Britain: ‘Let them take possession of your beautiful Island, if Hitler chooses to occupy your homes, vacate them, if he does not give you free passage out, allow yourself, man, woman and child to be slaughtered.’ Sir Paul then asked me whether Gandhi was turning senile by that time. Faced with such an impracticable – even unethical – attitude of the leader of the Indian National Congress Party, no wonder, Sir Paul said that Lord Linlithgow could not afford to lose the cooperation and support of Jinnah and the Muslim League to ensure the successful mobilization of Indian resources for the Second World War. I must have told Sir Paul some time that we youth in India believed that the British had gone out of their way to support the Muslim League or something to that effect. And he was proffering an explanation for British policy to the son of his friend.

  Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, in his book India Wins Freedom refers to this incident and adds to what Sir Paul told me, as follows: ‘It was normally his (the Viceroy’s) practice to ring the bell for the ADC to come and take Gandhiji to his car. On this occasion he was so surprised that he neither rang the bell nor said good-bye. The result was that Gandhiji walked away from a silent and bewildered Viceroy and had to find his way out to his car all by himself. Gandhiji reported this incident to me with his characteristic humour.’1

  This incident took place on 29 June 1940. However, misunderstandings between the British and the Congress Party, the main political party fighting for India’s freedom, had started to build up right from the beginning of the Second World War. At the time Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, even though the Central Government in Delhi was in the viceroy’s hands, the Congress Party ministries were running the governments in eight out of eleven British provinces* of India and were the foremost partners of Britain in governing the country. They exercised authority over three-fourths of the population of British India and the territories they governed included the British-built port cities of Madras and Bombay, the old Mughal capital of Agra, the ancient cities of Banaras (now called Varanasi) and Patliputra (now called Patna), Lucknow, Ahmedabad and Nagpur and the Pathan stronghold of Peshawar on the Indian side of the Khyber Pass from where the British had played the Great Game to restrain Russian penetration into Central Asia.

  The nationalists had taken over power in the aforementioned provinces after their triumph in the provincial elections of 1937 held under the new constitution for an All-India Federation introduced in 1935. This federal scheme provided for self-government at the provincial level and a bicameral legislature at the Centre in which both the eleven British provinces and the 350 princely states* would be represented. The scheme was launched with the consent of Jinnah and the Muslim League. In the Federal Legislature the princes’ nominees – none elected, all appointed – were to occupy 110 out of 260 seats in the Upper Chamber and 125 out of 375 seats in the Lower House. Since the elected representatives from British India would belong to various, mutually antagonistic, political parties, the princes’ ‘battalions’, if they remained united, could hold the key to the formation and running of the Central Government. According to Sir Paul’s remarks to me, His Majesty’s Government’s idea was to install a conservative Indian Government at the Centre that would be able to accommodate essential British interests, besides building up the unity of the country and ensuring its steady progress towards dominion status. It was a recipe for gradualism and for the retention of British influence.

  The Federal Legislature and thus the unitary scheme, however, remained stillborn because the Indian princes did not accede to it. Churchill had denounced the scheme in the British Parliament as a ‘gigantic quilt of jumbled crochet work…built by pygmies’. He described the notion that India one day would become a dominion as ‘criminally mischievous’. He then used intermediaries to travel to India to persuade the princes to stay out of the Federal Legislature, an endeavour that the officers of the Indian Political Service, who dealt with the princes, quietly supported. Had the princes joined the All-India Federation, whatever its shortcomings, a momentum for a unitary India would have been launched and the British would have continued to look towards the princes rather than towards Jinnah. And probably the partition of India would not have taken place.

  Even so, the introduction of self-government in the British provinces had changed the psychological atmosphere in the country. And this was seen as an important step in Gandhiji’s peaceful ‘reconquest of India’. The provincial elections had been a setback for Jinnah’s Muslim League, which could not get even one-fourth of the seats reserved for Muslims.

  The irony of the situation was that within two months of the outbreak of the Second World War, the Congress Party had given up all its gains by resigning from the governments in the provinces. The reasons given by the Congress Party for this grave step were that India had been dragged into the war without any consultation with its elected representatives and that their demand for a declaration about India’s freedom after the war and for associating them in some manner or the other with the Central Government in the meantime had been rejected. If the aim of the exercise was to pressurize the British to grant more power to the nationalists forthwith, the result was rather different from that anticipated. Their resignations reduced the British dependence on the Congress Party to mobilize Indian resources for the war and made it less necessary for them to accommodate the party’s demands. In other words, the resignations reduced the nationalists’ bargaining power with the British authorities. Further, the Congress Party’s abdication created a political vacuum in the country that gave an opportunity to the Muslim League, defeated in the elections, to stage a comeback through the back door, by making promises to Britain to cooperate in the war effort. Moreover, it created doubts about the nationalists’ commitment to the fight against Hitler and prejudiced opinion against them.

  ‘Had it [the Congress Party] not resigned from its position of vantage in the Provinces the course of Indian history might have been very different.’2 So says Vapal Panguni Menon, the distinguished civil servant and adviser on constitutional reforms to three viceroys – Linlithgow, Wavell and Mountbatten – in his book The Transfer of Power in India. He further says:

  By resigning the Congress Party showed a lamentable political wisdom. There was little chance of its being put out of office: the British Government would surely have hesitated to incur the odium
of dismissing Ministries, which had the overwhelming support of the people. Nor could it have resisted a unanimous demand for a change at the centre, a demand which would have been all the more irresistible after the entry of Japan into the war. In any case it is clear that but for the resignation of the Congress Ministries, Jinnah and the Muslim League would have never attained the position they did.3

  One of the serious long-term repercussions of the Congress’ decision to quit was losing control over the strategic North West Frontier Province. Had this Muslim-majority province remained under Congress Party rule between 1940 and 1946, the plan for the partition of India could not have been put forward. Without the inclusion of the NWFP within its borders, Pakistan would have remained an enclave within India and would have lost its most important asset to the West, that of its strategic value. The inhabitants of this province, mainly Pathans, were under the spell of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a Congress Party stalwart popularly known as the Frontier Gandhi. The breaking of his spell enabled Jinnah, with British help, to gain a foothold in the province, as we shall soon see.

  Jinnah, ensconced in his villa in the tree-clad Malabar Hill in Bombay overlooking the Arabian Sea, was so delighted at the Congress Governments’ resignations from the provincial governments that the words ‘Himalayan blunder’ escaped his lips. And he declared 22 December 1939 as ‘Deliverance Day’ – deliverance from Congress rule – and immediately went on the offensive to win by diplomacy and bluster what he could never have obtained at that time by popular vote, even of the Muslims of India.