Propaganda by itself cannot swing public opinion or alignments; self-interest always does. Churchill had trumped Roosevelt’s intervention for self-government in India by playing ‘the Pakistan card’, i.e., by highlighting the value of the Muslim connection to the West. Soon after Indian independence and partition, the Iron Curtain descended over Eastern Europe and the Cold War began. At the same time, a new Muslim state, abutting Iran and Afghanistan and thus consisting of areas of the greatest strategic importance to the West to resist the perceived Soviet threat to the oilfields of the Middle East, and willing to cooperate with US strategy, had come into being. This turn of events changed the American vision about the subcontinent. Even so the ‘good boy’ India in American eyes did not become the ‘bad boy’; nor did India entirely disappear as an adversarial factor in Anglo–US relations, till Pakistan, largely through the good offices of the British, became a firm US ally in the Cold War.
Notes and References
1. US FR 1942, Vol. I, p. 623. Cordell Hull’s talk with Halifax, 1 August 1942.
2. Ibid., p. 663. Merrell to Hull, 21 May 1942.
3. Ibid., p. 664. Merrell to Hull, 25 May 1942.
4. Ibid., p. 667. Hull’s conversation with Halifax, 3 June 1942.
5. Ibid., p. 670. Hull’s talk with Bajpai, 15 June 1942.
6. Ibid., pp. 667–68. Nehru’s message to Roosevelt (via Johnson), 4 June 1942.
7. Ibid., p. 674. Hull/Johnson’s message to Nehru, 18 June 1942.
8. Ibid., pp. 674–76. Gandhiji’s message to Chiang Kai-shek, 21 June 1942.
9. Ibid., p. 677. Gandhiji’s message to Roosevelt, 1 July 1942. Copy in Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, New York.
10. Chiang Kai-shek’s reply to Gandhiji, 8 July 1942, through S.H. Shen, Chinese consul general in Delhi.
11. US FR 1942, Vol. II, p. 695. Chiang Kai-shek to Roosevelt, 25 July 1942.
12. Ibid., p. 698. Chiang Kai-shek’s oral message to Roosevelt via Foreign Minister Soong, 25 July 1942.
13. Ibid., pp. 699–700. Wells’ note to Roosevelt, 29 July 1942 and Roosevelt’s telegram to Churchill, the same day.
14. Ibid., p. 713. Roosevelt’s reply to Gandhiji, 1 August 1942.
15. Ibid., p. 700. Winant to Hull, 29 July 1942.
16. Ibid., p. 703. Attlee’s message to Roosevelt, 7 August 1942.
17. Ibid., see note on p. 705.
18. Ibid., p. 705. Roosevelt’s reply to Chiang Kai-shek, 8 August 1942.
19. Ibid., p. 715. Roosevelt’s message to Chiang Kai-shek, 12 August 1942.
20. TOP, Vol. II, S. No. 532. Churchill to Roosevelt, 13 August 1942.
21. Ibid., S. No. 112. Churchill to Harry Hopkins, 31 May 1942.
22. Ibid., S. No. 695. Hallet’s telegram to viceroy.
23. Ibid.
24. US FR 1942, Vol. I, p. 721. Hull’s memo to Roosevelt, 15 August 1942.
25. Ibid., pp. 712–14. Currie to Roosevelt, 11 August 1942.
26. TOP, Vol. II, p. 477. Churchill to Roosevelt, 9 August 1942.
27. US FR 1942, Vol. I, pp. 726–27. Hull’s conversation with Halifax, 24 August 1942.
28. Ibid., p. 733. Hull’s conversation with Halifax, 17 September 1942.
29. Ibid., pp. 740–71. As related by Bajpai’s to Adolf A. Berle, US State Department, 13 October 1942.
30. British Embassy’s appreciation on ‘American Attitude towards India’, Paras 33 to 42, pp. 21–24 (OIC, British Library, London).
31. US FR 1942, Vol. I, p. 735, Bajpai’s conversation with Berle, US State Department, 2 October 1942.
32. South Asia, University of Canberra, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, 2000, pp. 63–68.
33. Survey of American opinion on India, dated 8 May 1943, by Sir Frederick Puckle (OIC, British Library, London).
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. R. Moore, South Asia, University of Canberra, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, 2000, pp. 66 and 76.
38. US FR 1942, Vol. I, p. 746. Roosevelt’s instructions to William Phillips contained in telegram to Ambassador Winant, 20 November 1942.
39. US FR 1943, Vol. IV, pp. 196–97. Phillips to Roosevelt, 19 February 1943.
40. Ibid., p. 199. Hull’s conversation with Halifax, 20 February 1943.
41. Ibid., pp. 180–83. Phillips to Roosevelt, 22 January 1943.
42. Ibid., p. 193. Sir Reginald Maxwell’s talk with American correspondents, 15 February 1943.
43. Ibid., p. 212. Wallace Murray, US State Department’s memo to Sumner Wells, 6 April 1943.
44. Ibid., pp. 213–14. Phillips to Roosevelt, 7 April 1943.
45. Ibid., pp. 217–22. Phillips’ reports to Roosevelt, 19 April 1943 and 14 May 1943.
46. Ibid., pp. 223–24, Merrell to Hull, 27 May 1943.
47. Ibid., p. 301. Merrell to Hull, 25 September 1943.
48. Ibid., p. 230. Merrell to Hull, 8 October 1943.
49. Ibid., p. 231. Merrell to Hull, 18 October 1943.
50. Ibid., pp. 304, 306 and 307. Hull to Merrell, 9 and 13 October 1943.
* This message could not be delivered to Gandhiji because he had been arrested before it reached India. When he was released in 1944, the American Commissariat advised that the message had lost all relevance and may merely rub the British the wrong way. Roosevelt insisted that it be delivered all the same.
* According to estimates, almost three million people died in Bengal due to starvation.
7
Wavell Plays the Great Game
IN THE BRITISH ADMINISTRATIVE SYSTEM, THE MAN ON THE SPOT traditionally enjoyed considerable authority. This was more so for a person appointed the viceroy of India and who occupied the most important post in the British Empire, outside the British Isles at that time. We have seen in an earlier chapter how the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, in 1942 blocked certain proposals made by a British minister, and one as eminent as Sir Stafford Cripps, by appealing directly to the prime minister. Due weight was attached to the viceroy’s views also because he had at his beck and call a team of tried officials with vast experience of India. This team was made up of secretaries of the various departments of the government, the governors of British provinces and the residents in the princely states – largely drawn from the prestigious Indian Civil Service – and his efficient Directorate of Intelligence. Moreover, the commander-in-chief in India, who controlled the British Indian Army, sat as a member in the Viceroy’s Executive Council. The prestige and authority that the British Parliament and Government sought to bestow on the viceroy were evident from the magnificent building in which he was housed – the largest dwelling for a couple in the entire world at that time – and from the other trappings of pomp and pageantry to fit the status of one standing in for the King Emperor.
It is necessary to provide such a background because a viceroy with definite views had the means to influence high-level policy back home and, indeed, create realities on the ground in India that could not then be ignored. A viceroy running away with the bit between his teeth absolved the ministers of direct responsibility for actions that might involve them in controversy in Parliament and the press and sometimes from taking hard decisions. If Linlithgow took the initiative in 1940–41 to build up Jinnah as the sole spokesman of the Muslims of India and forge an alliance with his Muslim League Party, his successor, Lord Archibald Wavell, in February 1946, produced the blueprint detailing the areas of British India that should go to Pakistan. This blueprint was implemented at the time of the British withdrawal from India in 1947, even though it was kept secret to avoid any impression of a British initiative or hand in the division of India.
Secret archives cannot be depended upon to reveal the entire picture. Many decisions that are taken by governments are never committed to paper or, if so committed, are not revealed, even after the prohibitionary period for keeping them under wraps has lapsed. For instance, Lord Mountbatten’s reports to London, sent after 15 August 1947, while he was the governor-general of India, have not been unsealed even
after almost sixty years, thereby depriving us from information surrounding British policy on Kashmir.
While going through the actual files – with the first drafts and the corrections made in them, all retained – I came across top-secret dispatches that were supplemented by private or demi-official letters that contained the real views of the writer; these do not figure in the transfer of power documents series that have been published. Ministers and officials were careful not to commit to paper, even in top-secret documents, views that dealt with sensitive matters at variance with the government’s public posture or those that could be judged as ‘unprincipled’. Moreover, the influence exerted on decisions by powerful individuals may never be recorded. Therefore, the true course of policy can, at times, only be fathomed by taking into account the action taken by the concerned officials and from circumstantial evidence. The partition of India was a particularly sensitive issue. The Britishers of the post-war generation – particularly the Labour Party leaders – sought to live down their country’s reputation for ‘divide and rule’ and HMG had also to reckon with American public opinion that was against the division of India, because they felt this might help the communists.
Field Marshal Wavell was not a member of the aristocracy, from whose ranks most of the viceroys were drawn. He belonged to a class of society – the upper middle class – which, according to a British historian ‘was the mainstay of the British Raj and largely responsible for its character’.1 Wavell was the first soldier to hold the office of the viceroy after the British Crown took over the governance of India from the East India Company in 1858. Before his appointment to the viceroyalty in September 1943, he was commander-in-chief in India and had supervised the defence of the British Empire in South-east Asia against Japan. Earlier, he had been the commander of the British forces in the crucial front of the Middle East, where his victories over the Italians in Abyssinia and Cyrenica, in North Africa, at the start of the war had made him quite a popular hero in Britain. On coming to power Churchill had removed him from the Middle East command and sent him to the relatively calm waters – before the Japanese attack – of India and Asia. And after the British defeat at Japanese hands in South-east Asia, kicked him upstairs, in an honourable way, to the viceroyalty. Churchill considered Wavell overcautious and defeatist, ‘eminently suited to run a provincial golf club’,2 he once said. Churchill expected him to take no political initiatives in India during the course of the war. Wavell, on the other hand, remained in awe of his chief, ‘the bigger man than either Roosevelt or Stalin’, he noted in his diary,3 but he used to complain that ‘Churchill was always expecting rabbits to come out of empty hats’.4 The irony is that one whom Churchill considered so mediocre has come to be acknowledged by several historians as the most important viceroy of India since Lord Curzon. His forte was his lack of illusions; and his achievement, the division of India.
Before Wavell left London to take up his post in India, Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa and Churchill’s trusted counsellor, sought him out. And, according to Wavell, confided in him what was in Churchill’s mind about India that he did not wish to express to him directly when he had offered him the viceroyalty at a tête-à-tête dinner in the basement of 10, Downing Street. As Smuts put it: ‘The PM is not thinking beyond the end of the war – about India or anything else – and is alarmed lest by raising the Indian issue I should split the Conservative Party in Parliament and cause him trouble.’5 Therefore, for the first year in office Wavell did not make any political move, even though he had come to firmly believe that to let things slide in India was not in Britain’s best interests.
Wavell profoundly disagreed with his predecessor’s view, expressed to him just before Linlithgow left Delhi, that Britain ‘would have to continue responsibility for India for at least thirty years’ and that ‘the country was in pretty good trim…[with] Gandhi and the Congress leaders out of the way in prison and the Muslims immensely strengthened during the last three or four years’.6 Wavell’s assessment was that the British position was deteriorating fast and that a plan was needed for an organized and orderly retreat that would, nevertheless, protect Britain’s most important asset in India, which he saw as the military base that it provided to control the Middle East and the vast Indian Ocean region and from where fighting manpower was recruited. One would do well to bear in mind what an Indian scholar has stated in a recent study:
The growing role of strategic airpower and the vital importance of Middle Eastern oil had transformed British policy in Asia. For over a century, British policy in the Gulf had largely been shaped by the strategic interests of her Indian Empire. This was no longer the case…. By 1947, the tables had been turned – Britain’s strategic interests in the Gulf and Middle East had become a major factor in her South Asia policy.7
Only on one point was Wavell in complete agreement with Linlithgow (and Churchill): that the British position in India depended on the goodwill of the Muslims and could be salvaged by the cooperation of Jinnah’s Muslim League Party.
Wavell was convinced that the leaders of the Congress Party would not cooperate with Britain on defence matters as rulers of an independent India. His distrust of this party, which he considered the fountain of all mischief, he expressed in a letter to the King as follows:
I can never entirely rid my mind of the recollections that in 1942 at almost the most critical period of the war in India, when I was endeavouring as Commander-in-Chief to secure India with very inadequate resources against Japanese invasion, the supporters of the Congress [Party] made a deliberate effort to paralyse my communications to the eastern front by widespread sabotage and rioting.8
In the same letter, he cautioned: ‘The loyalty of the police and the Indian Army in face of a really serious challenge to British rule is problematic.’9
Wavell had been shocked that, on the fall of Singapore in 1942, so many Indian officers, who had sworn allegiance to the King Emperor, as well as thousands of soldiers of his Army, had so easily switched sides to join the Japanese, much to the acclaim of the nationalists of the Congress Party in India. Subhash Chandra Bose had arrived in Singapore, in early 1943, dispatched by the Germans from Europe by submarine, as recounted in Chapter 5. Bose’s charismatic personality, energy and organizing ability made themselves immediately felt amongst the 60,000 Indian prisoners of war in Japanese hands and amongst the Indian residents in the region who pledged him support and money. His call ‘Dilli Chalo’ (on to Delhi), after the cry of the Meerut mutineers of 1857, enthused the prisoners, and despite strict British censorship, began to find echo in India. Whereas the British Military Intelligence put the figure of the officers and men of the British Indian Army who joined Bose to form the Indian National Army (INA) at 20,000, Bose’s officers later claimed their strength was nearly 50,000. At the beginning, British Military Intelligence underestimated and belittled Bose’s movement, but later admitted that the soldiers who had changed sides had been deeply affected by Bose’s ‘inspiring and courageous leadership’. They fought the British Indian Army bravely and regarded themselves as ‘liberators of their motherland’. Moreover, ‘there was substantial popular support from the public in India for the INA’.10
Even more shocking to Wavell had been the defection of some soldiers belonging to the forward units of the Indian Army to Bose’s Indian National Army (INA) and to the Japanese in the fighting in Burma. Churchill blamed the sudden expansion of the Indian Army and the intake of Hindu recruits for this state of affairs. There was no point, he pointed out, in having an army ‘that might shoot us in the back’.11 The fact was that with the modernization of warfare and with the introduction of tanks, aeroplanes and other mechanized instruments of war, higher standards of education had become necessary among the rank and file, and educated Indians of all communities were more nationalistic. What part racialism might have played in switching loyalties, now that for the first time British and Indian officers in such large numbers wer
e thrown together, is discussed later.
Wavell’s apprehensions on taking over as viceroy could not be ascribed to pessimism or defeatism, and were confirmed when mutinies took place in several branches of the armed forces within a couple of years. Indian naval ratings first mutinied in strength in the port of Bombay in early 1946, an insurrection that soon spread to other ports such as Karachi and engulfed other services as well.
The naval mutiny is said to have been provoked by the behaviour of the commanding officer of HMIS Talwar (a shore signals school in Bombay) who commonly called his men ‘black buggers’ or ‘coolie bastards’ and by the refusal of the commanding officer, Bombay, to replace him. The mutiny quickly spread to other ships in the port; over 7000 sailors joined in, and some of the warships involved threatened to fire at British barracks and at the bastions of the European community on the Bombay seafront, such as the Yacht Club and the Taj Mahal Hotel. In Karachi port a two-hour duel took place between the shore batteries and a Royal Indian Navy sloop, HMIS Hindustan, before its crew surrendered. The unrest was not confined to the Indian Navy. The personnel of the Royal Indian Air Force at Madras, Karachi, Poona, Allahabad and Delhi, the Royal Indian Army Signals Corps at Jabalpur and other towns and 1600 Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers at Madras also revolted. In all these units, better educated Indians were to be found.
The Shadow of the Great Game Page 18