Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state, has noted in his memoirs: ‘Attlee was apt at operating behind a smoke screen.’3 Attlee now deployed this talent to the full to achieve two contradictory objectives: to secure the partition of India and also maintain good relations with the future ‘Hindustan’. In November 1945, Sir Stafford Cripps, who was Attlee’s pointsman on India and acquainted with Jawaharlal Nehru, got in touch with him. Nehru’s response was instantaneous and warm: ‘Many things that have been done during the past few years [meaning the Cripps Mission of 1942] have hurt me…but at no time did I doubt that you had the cause of India at heart.’ He promised: ‘We shall do our utmost to avoid conflict and to restrain the hotheads’.4 Cripps was delighted. Attlee’s greatest anxiety was that a full-blooded revolt would be launched by the nationalists in India, as predicted by Wavell, which the British had scant means at their disposal to suppress. Such a revolt might result in loss of control over the situation, bringing ignominy to Britain in the eyes of the world, particularly in the US.
The winter of 1945–46 was a winter of discontent for Britain in India. The disciplinary trial of the officers of Bose’s Indian National Army had backfired and raised public feelings against the Raj. There were mutinies in the Royal Indian Navy, Royal Air Force, the Royal Signals Corps and the Engineers and uncertainty about the loyalty of the Indian Army, as recounted in Chapter 7. Famine stalked the land, the morale of the civil services and the police was crumbling and Britain at home was facing a severe financial crunch. On 12 December 1945 Cripps replied to Nehru: ‘I am so glad you are convinced as I am, that we must do our utmost to restrain the use of force on either side and that we must concentrate on it [the problem’s solution] by reason.’ He then artfully posed the question: ‘If you were in the Viceroy’s place what line of action would you lay down to be followed after the elections?… Let me have an off-the-record answer to that!’5
The question appears to have tickled Nehru’s ego and he replied to Cripps in a letter that contained over 3500 words on 27 January 1946. It is not clear from the historical records whether he consulted any of his colleagues before doing so. The main points of the letter are as follows:
(1) The British Government should declare in the clearest terms possible that they accept the independence of India.
(2) The constitution of a free India should be determined by India’s elected representatives without any interference from the British side.
(3) The British Government should not encourage any division of India, the matter being left to the people of India themselves to be decided. The ideal would be a loose Indian federation with safeguards to protect the minority interests and in which powers, except for the defence, external affairs, communications and currency are left to the federating unit.
(4) Even if the inhabitants of any territorial unit wished to opt out this would only be done after a plebiscite and they would not carry with them inhabitants within the same unit who did not wish to opt out. The crux of the Pakistan issue is that [of] a Pakistan consisting of only part of Punjab and part of Bengal or no separation at all [italics added].
(5) In the event of separation, defence should still remain common.
(6) Since the North-West Frontier Province is unlikely to vote for separation, Pakistan is an impossibility.
(7) Vote for the Muslim League in the election is no vote for Pakistan, it is only a vote for the organization which represents a certain solidarity of Indian Muslims.
(8) The League agitation is on the surface and firm actions can defeat it.
(9) Some Princely States may be encouraged not to join the Indian Union if there is a Pakistan, only the larger states, probably a dozen, could survive as independent federal units, the others must be absorbed in the Provinces or amalgamate together to form big enough federal units with the same democratic liberties and forms of administration as in the Provinces…
(10) An increasing number of young men and women are convinced that only a big struggle can produce something worthwhile – this was the threat.6
Nehru had promised a negotiated and peaceful solution. This immensely relieved both Attlee and Cripps. Nehru had also mentioned the possibility of ‘separation’, though in guarded language. More evidence of the Congress Party’s flexible attitude on this aspect reached London on 10 January 1946. Woodrow Wyatt, the Labour Party MP, reported via the viceroy that in a four-hour discussion he had with him, ‘Nehru conceded that the British might have to declare for [sic] Pakistan but said there must be a plebiscite in border districts…so that solid blocks of Hindu territory were not included [in] Pakistan’.7
The viceroy had already cut out the non-Muslim areas from Jinnah’s territorial claims. The crucial question for the British was: Could the Congress Party now be induced to agree to a smaller, ‘truncated’ Pakistan? Nehru’s letter, holding out an olive branch, confirmed their own belief that the need of the hour was to keep talking to the Indians and even saddle them with real responsibility to squeeze out all confrontationist tendencies from them. In any case, it was an effort worth a try, but certainly not, Attlee felt, with Wavell negotiating with Gandhiji and Nehru, considering the deep distrust that existed between him and them. He therefore decided to send out Cripps with a team of cabinet ministers to New Delhi to explore matters further on the spot.
On 27 February 1946 the secretary of state for India wired to the viceroy as follows:
We do not feel able to take a decision on your proposal [on Pakistan] until the ground has been tested by the first stage of conversations and we shall have to take time to consider our course…. Failing agreement amongst Indians some other means of settling the Pakistan issue must be found.8
The cabinet ministers selected to accompany Cripps included Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the secretary of state for India (an elderly Quaker, who soon came to be called ‘pathetic’ Lawrence because of the somewhat loose assertion of his authority) and A.V. Alexander the First Lord of the Admiralty (‘a working class Labour stalwart with no experience of India…who found politicians dressed in dhotis “baffling and tricky”’). Cripps, greatly encouraged by Nehru’s letter, was brimming with confidence to secure a settlement.
Wavell failed to grasp that Attlee’s idea might have been to arrive at the same solution that he had suggested, but to be achieved in a way that would place the responsibility for partition squarely on Indian shoulders. He feared that his new masters may ignore Britain’s long-term strategic interests in the region. Thus, on 3 March 1946, he shot back:
The first, most important is [the] Pakistan issue. It is essential that HMG should have some policy on this…. They may decide that the unity of India is of such importance that they will in no circumstances allow a complete partition of India and discount the adverse effect this will have on Muslims not only in India but in other parts of the world and [are] prepared to face the consequences [that might include] civil war in India and enmity in other Muslim countries.9
The decision, he insisted, would affect not only India but also other parts of the world and requested that the precise areas to go to Pakistan should be worked out by the Cabinet Mission before leaving London.
In Wavell’s dispatches, appeasement of the Muslim League in India has been throughout justified on the ground that ignoring Jinnah’s demands in India would hurt the British position amongst the Muslims of the Middle East. The British were indeed anxious to retain the goodwill of the Arabs at a time when they were committed to permitting Jewish immigration into Palestine. But appeasing Jinnah was not quite relevant for this purpose, because there was no special sympathy for Jinnah or his movement in Muslim countries. Indeed, many people in these countries saw Jinnah as a British puppet. In the Middle East at that time, feelings of anti-colonialism, nationalism and socialism were stronger than those of the Islamic brotherhood. The Palestinians were fighting the Jews to prevent their land from being occupied on the basis of nationalism and not on communal considerations. The secular Baath party of Le
banon, which was to spread to Syria and Iraq, and later the phenomenon of ‘Nasserism’ in Egypt, attempted to adopt socialism and nationalism as their planks, essentially to create an ideological platform other than one based on Islam, on which people of other faiths could join Muslims in their struggle against foreign domination. In reality, Britain’s main concern was the USSR, i.e., about finding partners for the Great Game to block Soviet influence in the oil-rich Middle East.
Afghanistan was so hostile to Pakistan that it was the only country in the world to vote against the latter’s admission to the United Nations. There was no contact between Jinnah and Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family saw Muslim regimes that espoused secularism as a threat to their kingdom and to themselves. Mohammad Mossadeq, the prime minister of Iran, who nationalized oil, was moved by a secular impulse. Iran turned pro-Pakistan after the British and the Americans helped to build up the Pakistan–Iran axis under the umbrella of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact and the CENTO Pact.
Attlee was unwilling to show his hand to the viceroy. ‘You should discuss and explore all possible alternatives without proceeding upon any fixed or rigid preconceived plan’, he instructed the Cabinet Mission and the viceroy on 17 March 1946 and laid down three cardinal points to be followed:
(1) Constitutional protection for the minorities.
(2) Provision for the defence of India and the Indian Ocean area.
(3) The freedom to the princely states to make whatever arrangements they wished after British withdrawal.10
Just two days earlier, i.e., on 15 March 1946, in a debate held in the House of Commons on the Cabinet Mission’s visit to India, Attlee had declared: ‘What form of Government was to replace the present regime was for India to decide.’ He then bowled a smooth googly: ‘We are mindful of the rights of the minorities, on the other hand we cannot allow a minority to place a veto on the advance of the majority.’11. This was a dodge because the veto given to the Muslim minority on constitutional developments, embodied in Britain’s Declaration of 8 August 1940, was not to be revoked in the forthcoming talks and Jinnah’s intransigence remained the bedrock of British negotiating strength. However, Attlee’s statements prepared the ground for a friendly reception of the Cabinet Mission by the Congress Party. They also satisfied the Congress Party sympathizers in his Labour Party.
The results of the provincial elections had, meanwhile, come in. Even though the Muslim League emerged as the largest Muslim grouping, it made a poor showing in the Muslim-majority British provinces that had been earmarked by Wavell, either in whole or in part, for Pakistan. In the vital NWFP, with a 95 per cent Muslim population, the Congress Party was returned to power. In the Punjab, another crucial province if Pakistan were to be realized, a large proportion of the Muslims continued to side with the Unionists, who again formed a coalition government with the help of the Sikhs and Hindu groupings. In Assam a non-Muslim-majority province, contiguous with Burma, which was claimed by Jinnah, the Congress Party once more emerged victorious. In only two British provinces (Bengal and Sind), out of the five claimed by Jinnah for Pakistan (besides British Baluchistan), could the Muslim League form governments. In Sind, the governor’s intervention was needed since the League and the opposition had equal numbers in the legislature. All the impressive gains of the Muslim League were made in the six Muslim-minority provinces (5 per cent to 15 per cent of the population) that had been earmarked by Wavell for ‘Hindustan’, namely, the United Provinces, Bihar, the Central Provinces, Bombay, Madras and Orissa, even though in each of them the Congress Party was returned with overwhelming majorities.
All these developments served to confirm once again the prognosis that the Pakistan idea was catching on amongst the Muslims of the Muslim-minority provinces, where the cry of ‘Islam in danger’ could be raised, but not in the Muslim-majority areas, where the Muslims already exercised political dominance. The League’s campaign in the election had been strongly communal, the students of the Aligarh Muslim University in the United Provinces in their speeches to Muslim villagers invoking the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, and making out that in the new Congress (Hindu) Raj cows will be tethered to their mosques. Other such devices were also used to whip up communal frenzy. The success of the Muslim League in Muslim-minority provinces can also be attributed to the fact that no one explained to the Muslims in these provinces that if Pakistan was achieved they would be excluded from it. Even the educated Muslims failed to think through the Pakistan idea. As one writer has noted: ‘It stood for them as some sort of general salvation from Hindu domination and symbolized an Islamic revival in India.’12
Britain’s stated raison d’être for supporting Jinnah’s position was ‘to protect’ the minorities. But then what about the thirty million Muslims who were to be left out of Pakistan? Was not the selective concern for the Muslims of India not so much to protect them as to use a portion of them to realize Britain’s strategic goals? And how was the two-nation theory that Muslims could not coexist with people of other faiths within the same country to be squared with leaving these millions to do exactly that? Notwithstanding all these unanswered and inconvenient questions, confidential papers prepared for the Cabinet Mission indicate that Wavell’s plan for the truncated Pakistan had caught the British imagination and had become HMG’s goal, even though in public pronouncements, they continued to chant the mantra of unity. For example, on 13 March 1946, Francis Turnbull, assistant secretary in the India Office, London, suggested to the secretary of state in a note (also sent to Sir Stafford Cripps) on how to get the scheme for partition through:
Mr Gandhi has frowned upon a truncated Pakistan…. If the [Cabinet] Mission can avoid a discussion with Mr Gandhi in the opening stages there may be advantage…. If there is any hope of compromise, it is likely to be best worked out with [Maulana] Azad and Nehru…. If Mr Gandhi has not committed himself (at the beginning) he may be affected by the views of his supporters if they are sufficiently unanimous.13
The Cabinet Mission landed in Delhi in the middle of March 1946 when English summer flowers in gardens and the blue jacaranda and orange gulmohar trees on the roads were in bloom. But within a month the heat would set in, the flowers would wilt and the houses and offices of Indian politicians that were not airconditioned would become furnaces. New Delhi was built by Sir Edwin Lutyens as a winter capital to which officialdom descended for a few months from salubrious Simla. The square low white bungalows surrounded by large lawns recalled transient Persian or Mughal tent encampments set amidst gardens, though here the dwellings were of brick and mortar. This garden city was dominated by the massive red stone Viceroy’s House, the Imperial Secretariat with its two wings facing each other and, at a slightly lower level, the immense colonnaded rotunda of the Legislative Assembly. Eyeing these structures, when being built in 1919, M. Clemenceau (the French PM, who led his country to victory in the First World War) had quipped: ‘What magnificent ruins they would make.’
The heat did not bother Sir Stafford but old Pethick-Lawrence and A.V. Alexander suffered, with the latter, after a while, hardly venturing out of the airconditioned comforts of the Viceroy’s House. Despite all his enthusiasm, Cripps could not keep up the pace for more than a couple of months. And it was from the end of May, when Cripps fell ill, that Wavell was able to impose his agenda on Pethick-Lawrence.
By 11 April 1946, Cripps had worked out a plan, on which the Cabinet Mission and the viceroy sought Prime Minister Attlee’s instructions:
There appears to us two possible bases of agreement, the first a unitary India with a loose federation at the Centre charged primarily with control of Defence and Foreign affairs (Scheme A). The second based upon a divided India and the smaller Pakistan – [as in Wavell’s blueprint of 6/7 February 1946] – (Scheme B).14
Attlee’s response was immediate. On 13 April 1946 he wired back as follows:
You may work for an agreement on the basis of Scheme B (Pakistan) if it seems to be the only chance
of an agreed settlement. I send you in Paragraphs 2 to 7 the views of the Chiefs of Staff for your information and for the use at discussions.
The views of the chiefs of staff were as follows:
(2) An agreement involving a loose all-India federation is far better than Scheme B. We recognize however that this may be impossible of achievement. The alternative of Scheme B (Pakistan) in spite of the disadvantages listed below is better than no agreement at all as this would lead to widespread chaos.
(3) The disadvantages of Scheme B (partition) are as follows: Pakistan lies across the two entrances to India from Peshawar to the sea in the west and from the Himalayas to the sea to the east. In her hands would lie the responsibility to bar or open the road into Hindustan. Air bases from which India can be attacked lie in Soviet Central Asia and in Western China. The easiest and quickest routes to the large cities of India from these bases lie over the territories of Pakistan, both in the West and East of India. Similarly the air bases from which countermeasures can be taken lie mainly in Pakistan. It can therefore be said that the territory of Pakistan is vital to the defence of India as a whole.
(4) Scheme B would destroy the homogeneity of the Indian Army, which is now strong and well equipped and is charged with the defence of all India. There would evolve the forces of Pakistan, the forces of Hindustan and the forces of the many Indian States; each weak, each with its own standards of training, its own scale of equipment and its own tactical ideas. Even if all were acting in common for the defence of India, cooperation would be far from easy unless all acknowledged a central directing authority.
The Shadow of the Great Game Page 22