The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  The naval mutiny in Bombay was suppressed after over 200 persons, mostly demonstrators in Bombay city who had joined them, were shot and over 1000 injured. The fact that it spread like wildfire showed that the bullying by a few British officers could not be the only cause, and that the disaffection was part of a deeper malaise. Could, under these circumstances, the British rely on the loyalty of the officers of the Indian Army to suppress a renewed mass agitation or an armed struggle by the nationalists? According to the newly released documents, neither the Joint Intelligence Committee in London nor the officials in Delhi thought so by 1946. Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, who had replaced Wavell as commander-in-chief, was to record in a top-secret appreciation: ‘It is no use shutting one’s eye to the fact that any Indian soldier worth his salt is a Nationalist though that does not mean…that he is anti-British.’ And added that: ‘Wholesale defections and disintegration of the Indian Army was [sic] possible.’12

  Wavell’s judgement of the capabilities of Indian leaders also influenced his assessment of their value as Britain’s future partners. Except for Vallabhbhai Patel, whom he considered ‘the most forceful character among them’ and ‘more of a man…though communal’,13 Wavell had little time for the others. Maulana Azad, he noted, was a ‘gentleman but against Gandhi like a rabbit faced with a stoat’; Ghaffar Khan ‘stupid and stubborn’; and Gandhiji ‘shrewd but devious and malevolent’. Nehru was ‘sincere and intelligent and personally courageous but unbalanced’, according to Wavell’s opinion of the future prime minister. The epithets he used for Jinnah were: ‘unhappy’, ‘arbitrary’, ‘self-centred’, ‘lonely’, ‘but straighter and more sincere’, which apparently did not disqualify him in the same sense as they did the Congress Party leaders.14

  Some officers of the Indian Army, while recounting their exploits of chivalry in the Middle East and Burma, told me that they were surprised how racist the British were, though they shrugged this off as ‘one of those things’. So, when writing this book, it became necessary to explore a little further if racism had indeed played a part in creating mutual Anglo–Indian antipathy in the British Indian Army. Fears about the loyalty of this Army, perhaps more than any other factor, shook the foundations of the Raj.

  Major General Udey Chand Dube, now in his nineties, is probably the oldest King’s Commissioned Officer alive in India today. Commissioned from the British Military Academy at Sandhurst in 1928, he is still fit. David Niven, the famous actor, was his roommate at the renowned British War College and John Hunt, who led the team that climbed Mount Everest, and Mohammad Ayub Khan, who became the president of Pakistan, were his contemporaries there. When asked whether he ever faced racial discrimination in the Army, Major General Dube replied as follows.

  After Sandhurst he was attached for a period to the Black Watch, a British regiment, in which he found absolutely no discrimination. But after he joined the Gurkha Regiment of the Indian Army, he found some. For example, on guest nights, when the local British community members, including ladies, were invited, Indian officers were separated and had to take their meals in the card room or the billiard room. One of his colleagues, Captain Mohammad Ali, he recalled, lost his commission for being ‘politically minded’, or ‘maybe because he had married an English girl’. His British colleagues at times made snide remarks about Indian officers. Some British officers tried to create friction between the Indian officers to keep them apart.

  Major General Dube then said: ‘During the fighting in the Buthidong jungles in Burma, while bullets were flying from all sides, some Indian officers bumped off those British colleagues who they considered bullies’, thereby suggesting that some Indian officers at least had been strongly affected by real or imagined racialism or anti-Indian sentiments of certain British officers. Dube also said that ‘Wavell and [his successor] Mountbatten must have heard of these incidents’. He then stated: ‘I must not give you the impression that these problems prevented us, the Indian and the British, from fighting together against the enemy; but facts are facts.’

  General Stan Menzes has mentioned in his book* only one case known to him when a British CO was shot. Another Indian major general gave the following picture: ‘By 1941 the majority of Indian officers serving in units would have been under ECOs (Emergency Commissioned Officers, i.e., those commissioned during the war) and they did not suffer so greatly at the hands of the “Koi Hais”, as we regulars did pre-war. Most British officers would have been by 1942 uninhibited by colonial prejudices. It was the pre-war British Officer who was the enemy…I cannot imagine an Indian officer killing his superior officer just to settle a racial grudge! Can you?’15

  D.K. Palit was commissioned into the Indian Army in 1938 in the Baluch Regiment. He had spent his earlier years in England and was a keen polo player. He observes: ‘There was almost no social contact between British and Indian officers in the army…I was never asked by my commanding officer, my second in command or my company commander for a meal or a cup of tea in his [sic] house. There was just no contact even though the one army fought the same enemy and carried the same weapons. But we never mixed.’16 Khushwant Singh, the acclaimed writer, who has been an admirer of England all his life, has said: ‘If they [the British] ever made any friends, it was in a benign attitude towards their servants. Most of them hated this country when they were here.’17

  Lord Mountbatten, in one of his earliest weekly top-secret reports to the secretary of state in April 1947, states that he had to address the governors of British provinces, after he heard some English ladies talking offensively about his Indian guests at a reception at the Viceroy’s House, requiring them to absolutely ensure that such practices ceased forthwith. How much of such behaviour was the result of British hatred of people who were on the verge of snatching away from them the brightest jewel in the British Crown and how much pure racism is difficult to say. What, however, was clear was that an overwhelming majority of Englishmen in India by this time considered the Congress Party and the Hindus generally their enemy and the Muslims their friend. ‘The immense gulf between the Hindu religion and mentality and ours and the Moslem is the real core of all our troubles in India,’18 wrote Wavell in his diary.

  There have been changes in the British perception of Indian Muslims from one century to another – ‘humours turning with chimes and principles with times’. Up to the 1857 Mutiny, as recounted in Chapter 3, the Muslim had been Britain’s enemy number one. That year, Sir Henry Rawlinson, a member of the India Council in London, had spoken of the ‘seething, fermenting, festering mass of Muslim hostility in India’.19 But for much of the twentieth century the Muslim was Britain’s friend. Sir Olaf Caroe (once the governor of NWFP) rationalized that the Muslim had better absorbed Western values and was more dependable than the Hindu in India. Western opinion again turned against the Muslims in the twenty-first century after the Al-Qaida terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001.

  There were other reasons for Wavell’s view that the game was up. When he took up his post in 1943, famine was raging in Bengal. Over three million people died. Wavell wired to Leopold Amery a few months after assuming the viceroyalty:

  Bengal famine was one of the greatest disasters that has befallen any people under British rule and damage to our reputation here…is incalculable.20

  The situation was obviously not at all ‘trim’, as Linlithgow had imagined.

  There had been several famines in the 1930s, which clearly indicated the growing weakness of the administrative machinery and the impoverishment of the masses, because famines occur as much from faulty management of food stocks as from their scarcity. Essential services such as the police, posts and telegraphs, railways, courts of justice and land tax collection were impeccably maintained till the end of British rule. But there was minimal capital expenditure on developing the economic infrastructure after the First World War. Agriculture was the main source of revenue, but there was no constr
uction of new canals and dams for irrigation or roads to carry produce. The expansion of industries was not encouraged to preserve markets for British goods. Revenue from raw material exports was depressed in the 1930s because of worldwide recession. There was hardly any middle class to yield income-tax. The inevitable periodic jacking up of the tax on land to meet the rising civil and military budgets was the main cause of increasing poverty and rural indebtedness. For fifty years before independence (in August 1947), the per capita income in real terms in India had been rising only at 0.6 per cent per annum, whereas the increase in population was well over 3 per cent annually. A splendid new capital had indeed been built and British officials continued to live extraordinarily comfortably, with the governors of provinces maintaining summer retreats in the hills matching Scottish castles. But, by the end of the Second World War, there were neither the funds, nor the forces, nor the confidence – despite the brave words of Churchill and the British Tories – to sustain British rule in India.

  By 1944 a possible solution to the problem Britain faced had taken shape in Wavell’s mind. He believed that one way to retain the military base in the subcontinent, as Britain bowed out, would be to build up the ambitious Jinnah and, with his cooperation, to withdraw the British forces from the Congress Party-dominated parts of India into the Muslim-majority provinces. These territories would include the strategic northwest of India – and the port of Karachi – as they were the most suitable areas to counter any Soviet expansionist designs. Pakistan would become a dominion in the British Empire, while the rest of India would be left to its own devices, indeed, its potential for mischief neutralized by the Anglo– Pak alliance. This objective was achievable, considering the close cooperation his predecessor, Linlithgow, had developed with Jinnah during the war and keeping in view the promises the latter had made with respect to cooperation on defence matters.

  But Wavell felt that there was no point in consulting London, since Churchill was dead set against any move on India. He therefore began methodically and quietly to create the realities on the ground for the fulfilment of his objective at a later date. The first task he saw in this context was to build up Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

  The position of the Muslim League in India did not appear as comfortable to Wavell as Linlithgow had pronounced it to be at the time of his departure. In the east, the Muslim League Government in Bengal had fallen because of internecine quarrels and the Muslim League chief minister in Assam had to come to an arrangement with the Congress Party in order to survive. With regard to the west, Wavell noted in his diary: ‘The Sind Government seems to be revolting from League control, the NWFP (Muslim League) Government [is] likely to fall [and it fell in 1945] and the Unionists (the anti-Jinnah coalition) Ministry in the Punjab [is] consolidating itself.’21 This last development was the most galling to the viceroy, for, without the Punjab fully in Jinnah’s grip, Wavell could not possibly proceed with his plans to detach northwest India from the rest of the country.

  Linlithgow had been able to block the loyalist premier of the Punjab, Sikandar Hayat Khan, from opposing Jinnah on the wider Indian scene, but had been unable to supplant Sikandar Hayat Khan’s Unionist coalition of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs with a Jinnahite government. And even after Sikandar Hayat Khan’s death in 1941, the old Unionist coalition under Khizar Hayat Khan Tiwana continued to hold. The NWFP, another crucial province for the creation of Pakistan, was also outside Jinnah’s control. Indeed, the ‘Hindu Congress Party’ was in power in this totally Muslim province – ‘a bastard situation’, as Lord Hastings Ismay, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, was to describe it.22 But this was largely because of the traditional Pushtoon antipathy to foreign rule: once the British departed, they could be expected to turn against the control of the plainsmen from Hindustan. It was the Punjab that held the key to Pakistan. How was Jinnah’s supremacy to be established there?

  In the eight British provinces, where the Congress Party Governments had resigned at the beginning of the war, namely, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Orissa, Bihar, Bombay, Madras, Assam and the NWFP, British governors continued to rule. In all these provinces, and particularly in the United Provinces, the Muslim League strength was rising and rising fast. In the Muslim-minority provinces, the slogan ‘Islam in danger’ worked. It did not work in the Muslim-majority provinces, such as the Punjab or the NWFP, where it was the Muslims who ran the governments and dominated political life.

  The general attitude to the growing communalism in the United Provinces and the other British-ruled provinces was one of laissezfaire and certainly not of crushing it with an iron hand.

  Then, an event took place that provided Wavell the ideal opportunity to move Jinnah to the forefront in the Punjab. Gandhiji, still behind bars, had been impatient to stem the growing communalism, and had tried to contact Jinnah, in vain, from jail. After he was released on grounds of ill health at Wavell’s behest in mid-1944, the Mahatma decided to call on Jinnah. Their much-publicized meetings over several days took place in Jinnah’s villa on Bombay’s fashionable Malabar Hill. Hoping to curb the growing Hindu–Muslim cleavage, Gandhiji offered to appease Jinnah by promising to persuade the Congress Party to agree to district-wise referendums in the British provinces claimed by Jinnah and give these districts the option to opt out of India, with the proviso, that this opting out should take place only after the British quit India. Jinnah was emphatic that Gandhiji’s proposal would mutilate the boundaries of the Punjab, Bengal and Assam provinces, which he claimed in their entirety for Pakistan, thereby leaving the Muslims, as he put it, with ‘no more than a husk’. And, under Gandhiji’s scheme, even this truncated Pakistan was to be delayed till the British departed from India, with no statutory guarantee that it would be fulfilled. ‘This offer made to me is an insult to our intelligence’, Jinnah told a representative of the London News Chronicle.

  There was an episode during the talks that Hector Bolitho, Jinnah’s biographer, has recorded as follows:

  One day when Mahatma Gandhi went to see the Quaid-i-Azam [‘the great leader’] they ended their arguments and talked, simply, of their daily life. They were weary a little like exhausted boxers, finding relief in their parting handshake. Jinnah mentioned that, among his ills, one of his feet was troubled with a nervous rash. The Mahatma sank to the floor and insisted on removing Jinnah’s shoes and socks. The scene of Jinnah in his immaculate clothes, and Gandhi, robed in bare simplicity is at first amusing, and then touching. The Mahatma held the troubled foot in his hands and said, “I know what will heal you. I shall send it tomorrow morning.” Next day, a little box of clay mixture arrived. Jinnah did not use it, but he thanked Gandhi when he came that evening, for one more talk, and told him that the medicine had already relieved the pain.23

  Jinnah had exhibited exemplary manners, but Gandhiji’s gesture made no difference to his course. Indeed, Gandhiji’s attempt to reach out to Jinnah had the opposite effect of that intended. It convinced anti-Jinnah Muslims that partition in one way or the other was coming and therefore to oppose Jinnah was futile and attracted many opportunist Muslim leaders and job seekers to the Muslim League. Side by side, it reinforced the views of those in the League who believed that fanning communalism was the best way to pressurize the Mahatma. ‘This meeting must surely blast Gandhi’s reputation as a leader’, wrote the viceroy that night in his diary.24

  This was not the only result that flowed from this meeting. To Wavell, Gandhiji had, willy-nilly, accepted the principle of Pakistan, whatever the differences on its area and the timing of its coming into being. So, taking courage in both hands – for he had been warned not to take any initiative on his own in India – he wired directly to the great man:

  I think the failure of the Gandhi–Jinnah talks has created a favourable moment for a move by HMG…25

  Wavell argued that the British administrative machinery had become too weak to control nationalists’ pressure and that prolonging British rule by repression would not be acceptabl
e to the British public or to world opinion. He sought permission to return home for consultations, which he felt would help in working out a fresh British initiative. To convince Churchill, however, was not that simple. The prime minister had no intention of presiding over a reform packet for India. Wavell’s request was turned down, with Churchill wiring back: ‘These very large problems require to be considered at leisure and best of all in victorious peace.’26 Although rebuffed, Wavell persevered and, after five months and many more telegrams, was summoned home in early 1945.

  Wavell reached London on 23 March 1945, about a month and a half before the German surrender and the end of the war in Europe. The bonhomie engendered by the Yalta Conference between the British and Americans on the one hand and the Russians on the other had begun to flounder on the differences on the future government of Poland. In April 1945 Stalin accused the British and US generals of reaching an agreement with the Germans in neutral Switzerland that would ‘permit Anglo–American troops to advance to the east and the Anglo–Americans in return would ensure milder peace terms for Germany’.27 This charge infuriated the US president, Roosevelt, who, in a telegram to Stalin, termed it ‘a vile representation of my action or those [sic] of my trusted subordinates’.28 In the Middle East too the first chill of the Cold War became apparent in Anglo– Soviet relations, as Moscow tried to prize Azerbaijan away from Persia. Stalin’s announcement that the USSR’s production of oil was insufficient for its purpose further exacerbated British anxiety about a possible Soviet push towards the oilfields of the Persian Gulf and even into Afghanistan.