The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  (5) To operate effectively the communications of Hindustan and Pakistan must supplement each other as they were designed to do. Again, central control is essential.

  (6) In Pakistan there is almost no industrial development, Karachi is at the end of a long and vulnerable railway, and Chittagong is in a similarly exposed position. To fight a war Pakistan must rely on Hindustan for producing a part of the warlike stores required and for importing and transporting the rest. Without a central authority this would not be possible.

  (7) In the case of Pakistan (west) it seems likely that she would tend to identify her interests more with the Muslim lands of Central Asia, weak, unstable, and exposed though they may be, then [sic] with Hindustan. This might well lead to Pakistan being involved in wars not properly of vital importance to Hindustan, nor to India as a whole. Or she might through fear engendered by her own weakness uncover the vitals of India by not resisting on the natural battleground of the hills of the Indian frontier.15

  Attlee’s instructions suggest that in accepting the division of India, he wanted to act from behind a smoke screen. It appears incongruous that the chiefs of staff’s support for the creation of Pakistan contained in Paragraph 2 should be at such absolute variance with their own strong opposition to it as contained in Paragraphs 3 to 7 of their report. We get a whiff of what happened at the chiefs of staff’s meeting that was hurriedly summoned by Attlee on 12 April 1946 from its verbatim record. At this meeting Field Marshal Francis Alanbrooke, supporting the Pakistan scheme, told the gathering:

  Pakistan…was in fact militarily unsound but as chaos would probably take place in India if this scheme, which was a political one [italics added] was not put into effect…16

  The mention of the political factor by Alanbrooke discloses Attlee’s hand. It suggests that the field marshal had been briefed by the government to support the creation of Pakistan on the ground of avoiding chaos in the subcontinent. Thus, Attlee could take shelter behind ‘military advice’ for agreeing to the division of India.

  It is incongruous that Attlee should be so worried about the immediate possibility of disturbances erupting in India if Jinnah were not appeased that he should remain virtually unconcerned about the serious long-term threat to India from partition as sketched out by the chiefs of staff. Attlee had been consistently discounting Wavell’s warnings of a violent revolt in India, but did not hesitate to make it his justification for this decision. In any case, Jinnah could not possibly set the Ganges on fire if Attlee had the Congress Party on his side. The key to Attlee’s manoeuvres lay simply in obtaining the chief of staff’s support for partitioning India, despite the chiefs’ true opinions.

  The ‘three wise men’, after lengthy consultations with the Indian politicians and the viceroy, produced, on 16 May 1946, a plan for British withdrawal from India. Immediately, an Interim Government would be set up, with the leaders of the political parties replacing the nominated members in the Viceroy’s Executive Council. Elections would be held for a Constituent Assembly that would eventually draw up the constitution of the country. There would be an all-India Union Government and a legislature consisting of the British provinces to deal only with foreign affairs, defence and communications, the rest of the powers vesting in autonomous provinces. The Centre would be a weak one.

  As per the new plan, the legislators in the proposed Constituent Assembly would be representing one of the three following groups:

  (a) The six provinces with non-Muslim majorities excluding Assam, i.e., Madras, Bombay, Orissa, the Central Provinces, Bihar and the United Provinces;

  (b) the Muslim-majority areas in the northwest: the Punjab, the North West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan; and

  (c) Bengal and Assam.

  The legislators belonging to the last two groups and (which included all the British provinces demanded by Jinnah for Pakistan) would draw up the constitutions of their respective groups. The provinces would have no choice but to join the groups in which they had been placed. As soon as the elections for the Constituent Assembly were over (scheduled for July 1946), the legislators of all the three groups would come together to begin drafting the all-India constitution.

  The plan provided that, after ten years, the constituents of groups (b) and (c) would have the option of opting out of the Union on the basis of majority votes cast by their group legislators and could form an independent state or states, the individual provinces having no say in the matter. The incantations in the preamble of the plan rejected the division of India but left a large loophole for the creation of Pakistan, even larger than the one proposed by Wavell to London earlier that year.

  Woodrow Wyatt in his article (Spectator, 13 August 1997) reveals how he convinced Jinnah, who was suspicious about the plan since it rejected the idea of a sovereign independent Pakistan ‘in the immediate’, to accept it:

  ...I put to him that...though the statement announcing the Plan ruled out Pakistan, it was the first step on the road to it.… I spoke at length. When I finished his face lit up. He hit the table with his hand: “That’s it. You’ve got it.”17

  Wyatt was referring to the option for groups (b) and (c) to opt out after ten years. Jinnah never concealed the fact that he saw the plan as the first step in his journey towards the full-fledged Pakistan he had been demanding. In fact, he announced at a Muslim League public meeting in Bombay soon after the Cabinet Mission’s departure: ‘The Plan had conceded Pakistan.’

  The Sikh leader Baldev Singh was quick to inform Attlee that the Muslim League had accepted the plan with the main object of opting out and establishing an independent, sovereign state. Baldev Singh pointed out that the Sikhs in the Punjab would be especially vulnerable. So indeed would be the Pathans of the NWFP, who were with the Congress Party. In the east, Assam, which had a non-Muslim majority (30 per cent Christian) and a Congress Party Government as well as the non-Muslims of the metropolitan city of Calcutta, were being placed in the ‘nascent eastern Pakistan autonomous group’ with no guarantee that the all-India federation would survive and that they would not one day find themselves in Pakistan. Indeed, a delayed action bomb was being put in place, which would eventually go off and result in the British provinces of groups (b) and (c) breaking away from the proposed federation and chaos and violence ensuing in the meantime.

  If the Muslim League’s past policies were any guide, it would provoke communal violence against minorities in groups (b) and (c) to unite the Muslims in them behind the call for Pakistan and quitting the federation after the ten-year period. In case there was retaliatory communal violence in other parts of India, as was likely, this would only inflame the Muslims in the ‘nascent Pakistani autonomous groups’ against the minority communities in them, establishing a pattern of escalating violence. The Centre, paralysed as a result of serious divisions between the Congress and Muslim League ministers and, in any case with limited authority, would be helpless in controlling the situation. During partition in 1947, massive violence and largescale killing were confined to the Punjab. Under the Cabinet Mission plan, there was a danger of a much larger area getting engulfed in violence over a period of ten years with unpredictable consequences.

  Some felt, or hoped that, once an all-India federation was launched, a momentum for unity would be generated. But the situation, as it was developing, made this problematic.

  What about the princely states comprising one-third of India? Under the plan, all of them, big and small, would become legally independent and would be free to make their own arrangements. Such a provision led to the dicey question: How could the bigger princely states, that might seek independence, be prevented from breaking away, when the Central Cabinet would be a house divided against itself on the issue? The British chiefs of staff, in a memorandum issued as late as 7 July 1947 (referred to in Chapter 1), envisaged the availability of transit rights for British military aircraft in a few princely states. Thus, they foresaw the possibility of some large states (such as Hyderabad in the Decca
n plateau situated on the air route between the British garrisons in the Middle East and South-east Asia) becoming independent. Travancore state, on the southwestern coast of India, was trying to attract foreign companies to exploit its thorium deposits and also to become independent. So also Kashmir on the Afghan–Sinkiang border.

  And how could the overwhelming majority – the middling and small states – survive without any arrangements for support from the Centre? Lying interspersed with British Indian territories and dependent on them for communications, roads and railways, power, water for irrigation and so many other services, they would be easy targets for forced absorption by neighbouring Congress Party- or Muslim League-run provinces, resulting in mayhem. Would not Manipur and Tripura states – situated on the Burmese border and cut off from the ‘Hindustan’ provinces by Muslim League-dominated group (c) provinces and severely underpopulated – get settled by Bengali Muslims and forcibly incorporated into East Pakistan?

  At this stage, the Congress Party leaders were urged by some nationalists to renew the Quit India movement, this time using violent means. Certainly, circumstances were now more propitious for revolt than in 1942, when, in the middle of the war, Britain had the will, the forces in India and the support of international opinion to quash any rebellion. However, the Congress leaders turned away from this option. They feared the unpredictability of such an attempted solution, which would require them to establish their control over not only the whole of British India but also the princely states, many of which possessed armed forces. The realization that they had made a tactical mistake in choosing confrontation rather than cooperation with Britain at the beginning of the war also made them cautious. There was yet another factor. The flattering attention being paid by Attlee and Cripps to the Congress leaders made them complacent. Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru failed to foresee that their restraint could provide an opportunity to the Muslim League to launch ‘direct’ or violent action in order to exert pressure for the acceptance of its own point of view. And this is precisely what happened.

  To the Congress Party the most objectionable part of the plan was the possibility of groups (b) and (c) breaking away from the federation and forming a separate state or states. On the other hand, they were attracted by the plan’s proposal to set up an Interim Government with immediate effect. By assuming the reins of power in the Interim Government and by establishing a majority in the proposed Constituent Assembly, they hoped somehow to be able to muddle through and achieve a united India. Therefore, instead of rejecting the plan, they resorted to a half-baked legalistic stratagem to reserve their position on its long-term arrangements and accepted its short-term provisions. This stratagem was that since Britain had always insisted on the ‘provincial option’, there could be no other interpretation to the plan than that the provinces placed in the (b) and (c) groups obviously had the option under it to join or not to join these groups. If the Congress-dominated NWFP and Assam stood out of groups (b) and (c), any possibility of these groups quitting the federation in order to form Pakistan after ten years would disappear.

  The Congress interpretation of the grouping scheme was contrary to the Cabinet Mission’s intentions. In fact, the grouping scheme, as Wavell put it, ‘was the keystone of the whole edifice’. However, the Attlee Government was so keen to saddle Nehru and Patel with responsibility in the Interim Government, that it allowed preparations for the formation of such a government and the elections to the Constituent Assembly to go forward, turning a Nelson’s eye to the Congress Party’s self-serving interpretation of the grouping provision in the plan and to Wavell’s warning that the cabinet members were not playing straight with Jinnah. In fact, none of the three was playing straight with each other: not the Congress Party as stated above; not Jinnah, who was eyeing the plan, tongue in cheek; and not the British, making a show of doing one thing and doing the other.

  It is inconceivable that Attlee did not appreciate the disastrous potential of his Cabinet Mission scheme. In my view the plan was essentially conceived as a smoke screen to achieve the following objectives of Attlee’s policy:

  • First, by inducting Nehru and Patel into the Interim Government to prevent the possibility of the Congress Party organizing a revolt in India and side by side to placate Nehru and Patel.

  • Second, to whittle down Jinnah’s rising demands by placing on record the disadvantages of the Pakistan scheme, so that, at a later date, he could be browbeaten to accept the smaller or “truncated” Pakistan.

  • Third, to create the impression in the USA and amongst the ranks of his own Labour Party that he was doing his utmost to maintain the unity of India.

  Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state, was keenly following developments in India. He was impressed by Britain’s efforts to work for Indian unity, little realizing that a loophole had been left for partition of the country. He wired the US chargé d’affaires in New Delhi: ‘Assam and NWFP...have little economic importance and their strategic significance would in any event enable Indian Union Government through defence and foreign affairs to concern itself with developments there.’18 In fact, Assam’s economic wealth, in the form of tea, oil and timber, was not inconsiderable; and one may well ask: how would the Union Government impose its fiat on the NWFP and Assam, as Acheson proposed, when there would be fundamental differences between the Congress Party and Muslim League ministers on each other’s foreign and defence policy goals?

  In those days, the Americans’ understanding of India was extremely limited. To take an extreme example, John Foster Dulles, President Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had to be disabused by Walter Lippmann, during a conversation on SEATO as late as in 1955, that Gurkha troops were not Pakistanis.

  ’Look Walter’, Dulles said, ‘I’ve got to get some real fighting men into the south of Asia. The only Asians who can really fight are the Pakistanis. That’s why we need them in the Alliance. We could never get along without the Gurkas.’ ‘But Foster’, Lippmann replied, ‘the Gurkas aren’t Pakistanis, they’re Indians’. (Actually, Gurkhas are of Nepalese origin.) ‘Well’, responded Dulles, ‘they may not be Pakistanis but they’re Moslems.’ ‘No I’m afraid they’re not Moslems either; they’re Hindus’, Lippmann pointed out.19

  Ignorance about India was the reason why the Americans came to rely substantially on British advice on questions concerning the subcontinent after its independence.

  Wavell, whom Atlee did not take into confidence on higher policy, was alarmed at the turn of events; Jinnah even more so. What if the Constituent Assembly, in which the Congress Party would be in a majority, turned itself into a sovereign body and declared independence with or without British acquiescence? Would the Attlee Government have the requisite will or the means to oppose such a move, especially now that the US appeared to be lending support to the Congress Party? Jinnah’s political base was far from secure; the governments in the NWFP and the Punjab were in control of Muslim politicians not belonging to the Muslim League; British commercial interests might incline towards the larger and richer Hindustan; and Wavell’s friends, such as Churchill, had gone. Jinnah could by no means be certain that in case he instigated his supporters to revolt, the Muslim officers in the British Indian Army would desert and join him rather than remain loyal to the Army command structure, which was still dominated by British officers. The advantage he had built up during the war, when the British really needed him, appeared to be slipping away. The last straw on the camel’s back would be a rapprochement between the British and the Congress Party.

  The upshot of all this was that Jinnah, who had agreed to the Cabinet Mission plan, decided to repudiate it. On 6 July 1946 Nehru had announced to the press in Bombay that the Congress was committed to nothing beyond entering the proposed Constituent Assembly, a statement that provided Jinnah with a casus belli, although he himself had been equally provocative, boasting that the Cabinet Mission plan had opened the gates for achieving Pakistan. However, before turning to the soluti
on that Jinnah worked out to salvage his position, it would be necessary to consider Wavell’s recipe to block the Congress Party.

  On 30 May 1946, after the Cabinet Mission plan had run into difficulties, Wavell submitted a memorandum to the mission, which, inter alia, made the following points:

  It is going to be almost impossible to obtain Hindu–Muslim cooperation…. We should try and secure an orderly withdrawal but not necessarily from all India, certainly not from all India at once…. We must at all costs avoid becoming embroiled with both Hindu and Muslim at once…. We should hand over the Hindu Provinces [the Congress-ruled ones] by agreement and as peacefully as possible to Hindu rule, withdrawing our troops, officials and nationals in an orderly manner [into Muslim-majority provinces] and should at the same time support the Muslim Provinces of India against Hindu domination and assist them to work out their own constitution. We should make it quite clear to the Congress [Party] that it would result in the division of India…. This might compel them [the Congress] to come to terms with the Muslim League, i.e., agree to partition.20

  As for the Indian princely states, he noted:

  Kashmir, Baluchistan and the Punjab states would remain within the British sphere of influence in the northwest; Sikkim, Bhutan, Cooch Behar and Manipur, etc., in the northeast…rulers of Hyderabad would undoubtedly remain within the British orbit.21

  Wavell continued:

  It is not suggested that this arrangement should be a permanency…that would amount to a Northern Ireland in India. We should endeavour to bring about union on the best terms possible, and then withdraw altogether.22 [The last line appears to have been added for the record in deference to Britain’s public posture of working for a united India.]