The Shadow of the Great Game
Page 21
There was no possibility of a compromise between the Muslim League and the Congress (Party) and we…have to come down on the side of one or the other…. It was most unlikely that Mr Jinnah would now enter into discussions without a previous guarantee of acceptance in principle of a Pakistan. While it was possible to overestimate the importance of any individual political leader [his] own judgment [was] that Jinnah spoke for 99 per cent of the Muslim population of India in their apprehensions of Hindu domination…. Before further progress could be made, we should face up to the root cause which was the problem of Pakistan.48
Wavell further clarified his views in a note for the cabinet’s consideration (on 31 August 1945). In this note, he stated: ‘The draft declaration of 1942 [the Cripps offer] proceeded on the assumption that partition in the last resort provided solution of the Hindu– Muslim question.’ But, in 1945, the Cripps offer would not any more be acceptable to Jinnah because the Muslim majorities in the Punjab and Bengal were too slim and he could not be sure whether these two provinces would definitely vote for Pakistan. ‘If a plebiscite was held of the whole population, the Punjab would quite possibly not vote for Pakistan.’ Further, Jinnah would not welcome the idea of a Constituent Assembly as envisaged in the Cripps offer at the end of hostilities, unless Pakistan was accepted in principle.
Wavell then called attention to the fact that since no agreement between the parties was likely to be reached, ‘the nature of the secession safeguard…to the Muslim majority’ may have to be the acceptance by HMG of the Pakistan scheme. However, Wavell put in a rider that not all the territories demanded by Jinnah could be conceded because the Punjab and Bengal would need to be divided: for the entire Punjab to go to Pakistan would be totally unacceptable to the Sikhs and to award the Hindu-majority Calcutta and West Bengal to Pakistan would be patently unfair to the Hindus.49
It becomes obvious from the foregoing discussion that Wavell was relentlessly pursuing the policy he had had in his mind soon after he became viceroy. It is also noteworthy that while Labour ministers in their public pronouncements and briefings to the Americans were singing the tune of a united India, they were seriously contemplating the least controversial way of dividing the country. And all these events occurred two years before India’s independence and subsequent partition and long before Lord Louis Mountbatten, who is generally blamed for partition and the Punjab bloodbath that followed partition, appeared on the scene.
While in London, Wavell, on 31 August 1945, called on Churchill. According to Wavell’s account: ‘He warned me that the anchor [himself] was now gone and I was on a lee shore with rash pilots.… His final remark, as I closed the door of the lift was: “keep a bit of India.”’50
Britain’s position at this stage could be summarized as follows:
(1) The British military was emphatic on the value of retaining its base for defensive and offensive action against the USSR in any future dispensation in the subcontinent;
(2) Wavell was quite clear that this objective could only be achieved through partition – keeping a bit of India – because the Congress Party after independence would not cooperate with Britain on military and strategic matters; and
(3) while Labour leaders did not agree with Wavell that all was lost with the Congress Party, Attlee was, nonetheless, ready to support the division of India as long as the responsibility could not be attributed to Britain.
Significantly, Gilbert Laithwaite, the former private secretary of Lord Linlithgow and a strong supporter of Jinnah, was appointed the secretary of the India Committee of the British Cabinet and Lord Ismay, the alter ego of Churchill during the war, became a senior member of the British Cabinet Secretariat. It was the latter who provided the liaison between Attlee and the British chiefs of staff.
Elections in India to the Central and Provincial Legislatures had been announced for the winter of 1945. These elections were to be held on the basis of the franchise as hitherto, i.e., only 14 per cent of the population voting, with separate electorates for the Muslims. It is amazing that the Congress Party did not object to such a low franchise in an election that would be considered by the rest of the world as a sort of referendum on the question of India’s division. It was also announced that, after the elections, a constitution-making body would be convened and, in the meantime, an executive council having the support of the main Indian parties would be formed to help run the government and ‘to enable India to play her full part of working out a new World Order’.51 The last formulation was expected to make the scheme attractive to Nehru, who, Cripps and Attlee knew was waiting breathlessly like a runner at the start of a race to enter office and win laurels for India in the international arena.
Subhash Chandra Bose was believed to have been killed in an air accident in Formosa in 1945, soon after the British forces reconquered Rangoon. However, the trial of the three INA officers – one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh – at the Red Fort in Delhi for treason in 1946 excited so much emotion around the country that, after being sentenced, these officers had to be pardoned and the trials of the others more or less abandoned. The rebellion in the British Indian armed forces soon erupted and many nationalists felt that the moment to ‘do or die’ was now, when the British were exhausted after the war and demoralized in India, a moment more opportune than the one Gandhiji had chosen in 1942. ‘Our struggle was gradually affecting the Indian Army…there would have been a fight, many of us would have died, but there would have been far less bloodshed than in 1947’, claimed one of the leaders of the naval mutiny.52 The Intelligence Bureau’s view was that communal disorders were an antidote to the agitation taking an anti-British course. Conversely, the launching of a full-blown revolution by the nationalists might have been an antidote to Jinnah’s threats of starting a civil war and may have possibly headed off his flashing of the sword – in the form of the historic ‘direct action’ – a few months later.
While the new Labour Party ministers cogitated on the next step, in India, Wavell launched a frontal attack to make them accept the principle of partition and foreclose the issue. On 6 November 1945 he sent a top-secret memorandum to the secretary of state:
We are now faced in India with a situation of great difficulty and danger…. The Congress leaders intend to provoke or pave the way for mass disorder…counting on the INA as a spearhead of the revolt. They would suborn the Indian Army if they could, and hope that their threats will impair the loyalty and efficiency of the Police.… They have been encouraged by events in French Indo–China and Indonesia which they are watching carefully, and a good deal may depend upon what happens there and in Syria and Palestine…. There is no doubt about the growth of Hindu enthusiasm for the Congress…. The British members of the ICS [Indian Civil Service] and IP [Indian Police] are dispirited and discontented…while the Indian subordinates on whom the administration so largely depends are naturally reluctant to make enemies of the future masters of India.53
He followed up this cannonade with another telegram on 27 December 1945, recommending that Britain should base itself on the following two principles:
(1) If Muslims insist on self-determination in genuinely Muslim areas this must be conceded; and
(2) on the other hand there can be no question of compelling large non-Muslim populations to remain in Pakistan against their will.54
Jinnah, meanwhile, was working independently to achieve the recognition of the principle of Pakistan. Woodrow Wyatt, a Labour Member of Parliament, records that Jinnah told him emphatically on 8 January 1946 that he ‘will not take part in any Interim Government without a prior declaration accepting the principle of Pakistan, though he would not ask at that stage for any discussion or commitment on details’. Jinnah then added: ‘Hindus would accept it [Pakistan] as it would give them three-quarters of India, which is more than they have ever had before.’55
The Congress Party Working Committee in its resolution of September 1945, while forcefully reiterating its demand for independence and unity, ha
d, nevertheless, declared that ‘it cannot think in terms of compelling the people in any territorial unit to remain in [the] Indian Union against their declared and established will’. This rider in regard to the right of secession was roundly attacked at the All-India Congress Committee and not passed. But it gave an indication to the Muslim League (and the British) that the Congress Party’s objections to some sort of partition could be overcome by further manoeuvring and by applying pressure. The Congress Party’s preoccupation with appearing to uphold lofty principles more than once led to their being hoist by their own petard. In any case, the Congress Party leaders did not threaten to revolt.
On 29 January 1946, the secretary of state in London finally reacted to Wavell’s messages by sending the following telegram: ‘It would help me to know when I may expect to receive your recommendations as regards definition of genuinely Muslim areas if we are compelled to give a decision on this.’56 It was in response to this telegram that Wavell, on 6/7 February 1946, forwarded the blueprint of the future Pakistan, which was implemented almost to the letter when India attained independence eighteen months later. This was one of the most important communications sent by any viceroy of India ever since the inception of that office, though ignored by most historians:
(1) If compelled to indicate demarcation of genuinely Moslem areas I recommend that we should include:
(a) Sind, North-West Frontier Province, British Baluchistan, and Rawalpindi, Multan and Lahore Divisions of Punjab, less Amritsar and Gurdaspur districts.
(b) In Bengal, the Chittagong and Dacca Divisions, the Rajshahi division (less Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling), the Nadia, Murshidabad and Jessore districts of Presidency division; and in Assam the Sylhet district.
(2) In the Punjab the only Moslem-majority district that would not go into Pakistan under this demarcation is Gurdaspur (51 per cent Moslem). Gurdaspur must go with Amritsar for geographical reasons and Amritsar being sacred city of Sikhs must stay out of Pakistan…
(5) We should make it clear in any announcement that this is only an indication of areas to which in HMG’s view the Moslems can advance a reasonable claim, modifications in boundary might be negotiated and no doubt the interests of Sikhs in particular would be carefully considered in such negotiations. Some such saving clause is indicated by importance of preventing immediate violence by Sikhs.
(6) In Bengal the three Moslem-majority districts of Presidency division must I think be included in Pakistan, though this brings frontier across the Ganges. The demarcation includes in Pakistan all Moslem-majority districts and no Hindu-majority districts.
(7) There is no case, consistent with the principle suggested in [the] breakdown plan, for including Calcutta in Pakistan. The Moslems will probably try to negotiate for its being made a free port. If negotiations fail Eastern Bengal’s prospects as a separate autonomous State will be seriously affected. But Moslems, if they insist on Pakistan, must face up to this problem.57
About two years after leaving India, Wavell addressed the Royal Central Asia Society in London (June 1949):
There are two main material factors in the revolutionary change that has come over the strategical face of Asia. One is air power, the other is oil…. Oil, which is the source of air power, concerns very deeply that part of Asia with which this society deals, since the principal known oil reserves of the world lie in the Persian Gulf. The next great struggle for world power, if it takes place, may well be for the control of these oil reserves. It may centre on Western Asia, the Persian Gulf, the approaches to India…. This may be the battleground both of the material struggle for oil and air bases, and of the spiritual struggle of at least three great creeds – Christianity, Islam, Communism – and of the political theories of democracy and totalitarianism. In such a struggle the base of the Western Powers must surely be in the Middle East…58
He did not, of course, even hint that he had played a part in laying the foundation of a state that would help buttress the British military position in the Middle East.
Notes and References
1. See Wavell, The Viceroy’s Journal (Oxford University Press, London, 1977, p. 463).
2. Patrick French, Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (HarperCollins, London, 1995, p. 173).
3. Wavell, op. cit., p. 111.
4. French, op. cit., p. 171.
5. Wavell, op. cit., p. 24.
6. Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, Vol. 2 (India Research Press, Delhi, 1999, p. 1129).
7. C. Dasgupta, War and Diplomacy in Kashmir: 1947–1948 (Sage, New Delhi, 2002, p. 18).
8. Wavell, op. cit., p. 499.
9. Ibid.
10. TOP VI, p. 532, dated 13 August 1945.
11. Penderel Moon, op. cit., p. 1127.
12. TOP VII, S. No. 286.
13. Wavell, op. cit., p. 245 and TOP VII, S. No. 641, Appendix.
14. Ibid.
15. From a letter to me from Ms Talbot Rice, military researcher, London, dated 17 August 2001. (She withheld the name of the officer.)
16. Trevor Royle, The Last Days of the Raj (John Murray, London, 1997, p. 269).
17. Ibid., p. 271.
18. Wavell, op. cit., p. 271.
19. Henry Rawlinson, England and Russia (John Murray, London, 1875, pp. 279–80).
20. TOP IV, S. Nos. 706–07.
21. Wavell, op. cit., pp. 185–86.
22. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten (Atheneum, New York, 1986, p. 54).
23. Hector Bolitho, Jinnah (John Murray, London, 1954, p. 25).
24. Wavell, op. cit., p. 91.
25. Ibid., p. 99.
26. TOP V, S. No. 111.
27. Winston Churchill, Memories of the Second World War: Triumph and Tragedy (Cassell & Co., London, 1950, pp. 105–06).
28. Ibid., pp. 107–08.
29. All extracts from Post-Hostilities Planning Staff report dated 19 May 1945, top secret PHP (45) 15 (O) [Oriental and Indian Collection (OIC), British Library, London].
30. Wavell, op. cit., p. 120.
31. Penderel Moon, op. cit., p. 1137.
32. US FR 1945, Vol. VI, p. 251.
33. US FR 1944, Vol. V, p. 240.
34. US FR 1943, Vol. IV, pp. 220–22.
35. US FR 1944, Vol. V, p. 242.
36. Durga Dass, India from Curzon to Nehru and After (HarperCollins India, New Delhi, 2000, p. 216).
37. V.P. Menon, Transfer of Power in India (Longman Green, London, 1957, p. 241).
38. TOP V, S. No. 565.
39. Ibid., S. No. 566.
40. TOP VI, S. No. 29.
41. Ibid.
42. H.V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan (Oxford University Press edition, Delhi, 2000, p. 127).
43. TOP V, S. No. 598.
44. Clement Attlee, A Prime Minister Remembers (Heinemann, London, 1961).
45. TOP VI, S. Nos. 484 and 486.
46. Wavell, op. cit., p. 161.
47. TOP VI, S. No. 47.
48. Ibid., S. No. 78.
49. Ibid., S. No. 82.
50. Wavell, op. cit., p. 168.
51. TOP VI, S. No. 99, Annexure II.
52. C.R. Das, quoted in Minoo Masani, Our India (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1953, p. 126).
53. TOP VI, S. No. 194.
54. Ibid., S. No. 316.
55. TOP IV, S. No. 323, Enclosure.
56. TOP VI, S. No. 387.
57. Ibid., S. No. 406.
58. Quoted in Olaf Caroe, Wells of Power (Macmillan, London, 1951, p. 184).
* Fidelity and Honour: The Indian Army from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-first Century (Penguin, New Delhi, 1993, p. 357).
8
Attlee’s ‘Smoke Screens’
LORD WAVELL’S RECOMMENDATION THAT HMG MAKE AN AWARD TO divide India was thoroughly unwelcome to Prime Minister Attlee. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mountbatten’s press attaché, once told me: ‘Attlee was decisive, but supersensitive to the charge of dividing India,
especially in the face of the US Government’s view that the partition of India may give a fillip to the leftist forces in the subcontinent.’ Further, such an award would mean a clean break with the Congress Party, which the British Labour Party leaders were anxious to avoid. Attlee broadly agreed with the thrust of Wavell’s policy to create the smaller Pakistan to safeguard British strategic purposes but wanted this done, if possible, with the assent or at least the acquiescence of the Congress Party. It is important to bear in mind that Attlee was throughout his own secretary of state.
Attlee, later in life, admitted: ‘You might have got a united settlement at the beginning of the 1930s’,1 thereby implying that, in his view, a united India was no longer possible by 1946. As deputy prime minister and chairman of the India Committee in Churchill’s War Cabinet from 1942 to 1945, he was fully aware of the steps that had been taken by Britain on India’s partition, though the matter was kept locked in a closet. The British secretary of state, Leopold Amery, had written to the viceroy, Linlithgow, in 1942 (as recounted in Chapter 4) that Attlee was facing pressure from his party to adopt a more liberal stance on India, meaning that if left to himself, he might have been more helpful to the Conservative point of view on India. Lord Listowel (William Hare), who was the secretary of state at the time of India’s independence, told a London audience in 1967: ‘Attlee was much more conservative on India than is generally believed.’2
This does not mean that Attlee was unsympathetic to Indian aspirations, as Churchill was. In 1947 he helped to strengthen India by permitting Mountbatten, despite protests by Lord Listowel and the India Office, to stampede the Indian princes to accede to India that prevented their vast territories from breaking away. Against the objections of the chiefs of general staff, he handed over the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, situated in the Bay of Bengal, to India. This acquisition increased India’s reach into South-east Asia. He wanted not only a Pakistan that could assist British policy in the Middle East, but also an India that would cooperate with and assist Britain in South-east Asia. For him, while two ‘Indias’ were desirable from the point of view of British strategy, more than two – a ‘Balkanization’ – as hoped for by the Tories, would be counterproductive.