The Shadow of the Great Game
Page 45
In the Punjab the only Muslim-majority District that would not go into Pakistan under this demarcation is Gurdaspur (51 per cent Muslim). Gurdaspur must go with Amritsar for geographical reasons and Amritsar being [the] sacred city of Sikhs must stay out of Pakistan.
In 1947 the territory of Kapurthala state, then an autonomous entity, blocked access to Amritsar from East Punjab. That was why Radcliffe awarded certain areas of Gurdaspur to India to connect the Sikh holy city with the Sikh-dominated East Punjab (and India).
Mountbatten continues to receive flak in Britain, Pakistan and India. Some of the British frustration at India’s independence (‘Of course he lost it’), not unnaturally, got rubbed off on the man who actually handed over power. The ex-viceroy, in his old age, talked a bit too much – about his success in India – which played into his detractors’ hands, with India being vilified in the process. His achievements for his country were very great, and as they say in England: Good Wine Needs No Brush!
Regarding the princes, unless some organic relationship could be established between the Central Government and the princely states, as was actually done through the process of accessions – into which the princes were no doubt stampeded by Mountbatten – a much worse fate awaited them. Ninety per cent of the princely states were too small to resist agitators entering from the Indian or Pakistani provinces and overrunning them, threatening their rulers’ lives and property. If some bigger states tried to break away by declaring independence, they would not have succeeded, because Britain was not in a position to come to their aid, and the United States was against the further Balkanization of India. The accessions saved the princely order, if not the princely states. They laid the foundation for a peaceful revolution. (It is another matter that the British paid scant regard to solemn treaties signed with the princes, whereas they laid so much stress on their obligations to mere declarations made in the British Parliament to safeguard minority rights. After all, Pakistan would be a partner in the Great Game after they quit India; the princes had outlived their utility.)
Many, including some prominent historians,* are of the view that Mahatma Gandhi remained opposed to partition till the very end. His absenting himself from Delhi on Independence Day is cited as proof. However, his conversation with Mountbatten on 2 June 1947, a day before the partition plan was announced, his statement at his prayer meeting that afternoon, and his advice to the All-India Congress Committee on 14 June, all suggest that he had accepted the division of India as a necessary evil. He absented himself from the Independence Day celebrations probably for a different reason. He would not have fitted in. His stature in India was far higher than that of either Nehru or Mountbatten. But these two alone would represent their respective countries at the official ceremony for the Transfer of Power. Can one imagine the Mahatma sitting propped up in an open landau with Lord and Lady Mountbatten and Nehru, the foursome driving through the Delhi crowds throwing back flowers hurled at them? It would be ridiculous!
Britain’s pro-Pakistan policy on Kashmir was based on its desire to keep that part of its old Indian Empire, which jutted into Central Asia and lay along Afghanistan, Soviet Russia and China, in the hands of the successor dominion that had promised cooperation in matters of defence. In the open forum of the UN, Britain could not conceal its pro-Pakistani stand. The Americans, in their internal telegrams, have left a record of Britain’s pro-Pakistani tilt on Kashmir.
It is not my purpose in this book to pontificate on the rights and wrongs of actions of countries whose interests were involved in Kashmir. It is primarily to suggest that the Kashmir imbroglio in 1947–48 proved once more that all that happened during the end game of Empire cannot be understood unless one keeps in view the overwhelming concern of the withdrawing power, as it pulled out, to secure its strategic agenda.
Nevertheless, I would like to touch upon two aspects of the Kashmir imbroglio.
First, to say that, to begin with, Kashmir was considered a territorial issue, not a communal one. The communal argument was injected by Britain and Pakistan in the UN debates to bolster the latter’s claim. Be it noted that when Sir Zafrullah Khan told the Americans that ‘Kashmir was essential to the strategic defence of Pakistan’,2 he was referring to Kashmir’s territory, not its people. Pakistan’s acquisition of Kashmir would compensate it for the ‘smaller’ territory it received than it had hoped for by partition, enhance its profile as a crucially strategic state in Asia touching the roof of the world – and help it to build relations with powerful states. Pakistan’s attempt to capture Buddhist Ladakh on Tibet’s border could not by any stretch of imagination be described as ‘a move to protect Muslims’.
In July 1947, Jinnah personally approached the Maharaja of Jodhpur and the Maharaj Kumar of Jaisalmer (as we have seen in Chapter 11) and offered favourable terms to the rulers of these wholly Hindu-populated states to accede to Pakistan. He also approached the rulers of the Hindu-populated states of Baroda, Indore and others through the Nawab of Bhopal. Jinnah did so because he knew very well that the affiliation of the princely states to one or the other dominion was left entirely to their rulers by the same British act that created Pakistan. It was not a Hindu–Muslim question. That is also why Pakistan accepted the accession of the Nawab of Junagadh, a Hindu-majority state.
Secondly, it would be wrong to believe that because Kashmir was 77 per cent Muslim, its people would, in 1947, have automatically wished to join Pakistan. The NWFP, next door, was 95 per cent Muslim but we have seen how its people resisted the Muslim League and British pressure and remained with the Congress Party, till 1947, when, this party’s leaders, in a quid pro quo with the British, abandoned them. In 1947, the overwhelming majority of Muslims of the Valley of Kashmir, where well over half of the people of the state lived, supported Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference Party. Whatever his other ambitions, Abdullah was absolutely opposed to Pakistan. Similarly, Jammu and its Dogra belt would have voted against Pakistan. The only Muslims of the state who would have supported Pakistan in large numbers at that time were those living along Pakistan’s border in the Poonch–Mirpur area.
Since Pakistan was created, the communal virus has spread to large parts of the subcontinent. I can’t say how the Kashmiris would vote today. But, in 1947–48, the majority, in all probability, would have supported the maharaja’s accession to India. And 1947–48 is the pertinent date, when considering the issue. In all fairness, the position that existed then cannot be brushed aside.
The successful use of religion by the British in India to gain political and strategic objectives was replicated by the Americans in Afghanistan in the 1980s by building up the Islamic jihadis, all for the same purpose of keeping the Soviet communists at bay. The Muslim League’s ‘direct action’ before partition in India was the forerunner of the jihad in Afghanistan. However, Al-Qaida’s attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001 woke up the West to the dangers of encouraging political Islam.
It was the Pakistan Government that, through the Jamaat-i-Islami, Pakistan, and their intelligence service, the ISI, created the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The preachings of the Jamaat’s founder, Abdul Al Mawdudi, a migrant from India, envisaged a clash of civilizations and governments founded strictly on the tenets of the Shariat; he counselled jihad against non-believers. These views found an echo in many Muslim lands; they influenced Osama bin Laden. Even after the US-backed jihad in Afghanistan had succeeded, Pakistan continued to help the Taliban train terrorists to fight non-believers in the name of Allah. Without Pakistan’s backing, it is doubtful whether Islamic terror could have spread so far and wide in the world, despite Osama bin Laden, Saudi and Gulf petro dollars and Arab suicide bombers. The Americans are now taking steps to rein in the export of terror from Pakistan. But the genie has escaped the bottle. Some of the roots of the present Islamic terrorism menacing the world surely lie buried in the partition of India.
The British brought
the ‘New Learning’ to India as well as the notion of the separation of religion from politics that had become the norm in Christian Europe after the Renaissance. These features opened up the possibility for secularism – anathema to orthodox Muslims – to take root among the Muslims of India and for them to work a democratic constitution together with people of other faiths; indeed, for India becoming a laboratory for enlightened Islam. At the same time, Western social mores helped foster among the individualistic Hindus a greater sense of responsibility for society and feeling of brotherhood between man and man. Shashi Tharoor, the writer, speaking of Hindus has asked: How can the followers of a faith without any fundamentals become fundamentalists? But lack of parameters and a sense of social responsibility can also lead to intolerance as well as to parochialism. The good done by the spread of British liberal ideas in India in the nineteenth century was undone in the twentieth by British politicians and viceroys, who introduced divisive policies such as separate electorates for Muslims (besides, of course, self-serving economic policies that overtaxed the farmers). British rule, to the end, maintained its duality: the civilizing mission and extreme selfishness mixed with cunning – though during its last days, ‘the Raj was about neither plunder nor civilization but rather survival’, as Fareed Zakaria, the columnist and writer, has put it.
There is, of course, the view that partition averted a worse disaster for India in the years to come. The past half a century has seen a phenomenal rise in Islamic fundamentalism and in the forces of political Islam. Such a development has drawn and deepened fault lines within many states with mixed populations of Muslims and others. Would it be possible in such circumstances, for the nearly 500 million Muslims (by the year 2010) of an undivided India to settle down peacefully under a democratic, secular constitution? Partition, by compartmentalizing Muslim political power in the two corners of the subcontinent, has weakened the jihadis and given time for the pressure from economical globalization and the technological revolution sweeping the world to overhaul or temper the intensity of the globalization of jihad and political Islam and ensure peaceful co-existence in the subcontinent.
All these are questions for the reader to ponder over. I can only express the hope that the knowledge of the hitherto not so well-known facts about the politics surrounding the partition of the subcontinent might help to ease the mutual misunderstanding in the relations between India and the West that crept in around half a century back with the forging of the alliance between Pakistan and the West. The awareness that it was global politics, Britain’s insecurity and the errors of judgement of the Indian leaders that resulted in the partition of India might help India and Pakistan in search for reconciliation.
Notes and References
1. The quotation is from the top-secret report of the British High Commission in India for the third quarter of 1950, written by Frank Roberts, the acting high commissioner. It fell into Indian hands and crossed my desk as private secretary to Sir Girja Shanker Bajpai, the secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs. The words of the analysis appeared so appropriate that they stuck in memory. Roberts was a highly thought-of diplomat who later became the UK’s ambassador in Moscow.
2. US FR 1948, Vol. V, p. 137.
* ‘Overidealistic, inexperienced in foreign affairs, and far too vain’ was the British High Commission’s (in India) top-secret assessment of Nehru.1
* The Muslim population of India has more than quadrupled in fifty years and today about 145 million Muslims live here with people of other faiths.
* Stanley Wolpert, after reading this manuscript, wrote to me that he believes that Gandhiji had not agreed to partition.
The (oil) wells of power around the Persian Gulf.
(Note: Borders depicted on the map are notional. The map is neither accurate nor drawn to scale; it is merely indicative of the geographical area.)
(Courtesy: India Today.)
Lord Linlithgow, viceroy of India from April 1936 to September 1943 on a picnic.
(Courtesy: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.)
The US president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill (both seated) among others. Standing behind Roosevelt is General George Marshall, the US secretary of state at the time of India’s independence.
(Courtesy: US Embassy, New Delhi.)
Top: Lord Wavell’s proposed demarcation line for the Punjab of February 1946.
Bottom: Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s award of August 1947 for the same province.
(The maps are neither accurate nor drawn to scale; they are merely indicative.)
(Courtesy: Transfer of power documents.)
Top: Lord Wavell’s proposed division of Bengal and Assam of February 1946.
Bottom: Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s award of August 1947 for the same two provinces.
(The maps are neither accurate nor drawn to scale; they are merely indicative.)
(Courtesy: Transfer of power documents.)
Field Marshal Lord Archibald Wavell, viceroy of India from September 1943 to March 1947, writing his journal.
(Courtesy: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.)
US envoys in pre-independence India.
Top row: Colonel Louis Johnson and Louis Phillips.
Bottom row: Henry F. Grady and George Merrell.
(Courtesy: US Embassy, New Delhi.)
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad at Simla (June 1945).
(Courtesy: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.)
Clement Attlee (with a pipe in his hand), prime minister of Great Britain, with Sir Stafford Cripps, his pointsman for dealing with Indian nationalists.
(Author’s collection.)
Sir Olaf Caroe (ICS), the governor of the North West Frontier Province from September 1946 to July 1947.
(Author’s collection.)
Lord Mountbatten of Burma, viceroy of India at the time of independence and thereafter governor-general till June 1948.
(Author’s collection.)
The Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, in 1947.
(Courtesy: Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi.)
Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten at The Retreat, Simla, 1948. The author is standing behind Lady Mountbatten.
(Author’s collection.)
V.P. Menon: Mountbatten’s counsellor.
(Courtesy: Rani Govind Singh.)
The areas in grey show the princely states that covered more than a third of the British Indian Empire.
(Note: Borders depicted on the map are notional. The map is neither accurate nor drawn to scale; it is merely indicative of the geographical area.)
(Courtesy: India Today.)
The contours of Jammu and Kashmir state after ceasefire was agreed to between India and Pakistan in January 1949.
(Note: Borders depicted on the map are notional. The map is neither accurate nor drawn to scale; it is merely indicative of the geographical area.)
(Courtesy: India Today.)
A tiger shoot in Bundi, Rajasthan, May 1948. (The author is behind Lord and Lady Mountbatten.)
(Author’s collection.)
Major Alexander Brown, head of the Gilgit Scouts, who unfurled the Pakistani flag over northern Kashmir on 2 November 1947. He was awarded the OBE in 1948.
(Author’s collection.)
Mohammad Ali Jinnah at the governor-general’s house in Karachi in early 1948.
(Courtesy: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.)
Gandhiji after breaking his fast a few days before his assassination on 30 January 1948 at Birla House, New Delhi.
(Courtesy: Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.)
Index
Abdullah, 19
Abdullah, Omar, 68
Abdullah, Sheikh, 320, 344-50, 370, 376-81, 384, 388, 396, 414
Abell, George, 233, 251
Abyssinia, 169
Acheson, Dean, 200, 215-16, 228, 256, 258, 259, 263, 265
Addison, Christopher, 384
Advance in date (of British departure), 410
Afghani, Maulana, 69
Afghanistan, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 19, 26, 30, 31, 68, 70, 124, 129, 163, 168, 188, 219, 244-46, 303, 304, 311, 331, 334, 335, 337, 341, 343, 374, 402, 413, 415
Afghan war, second, 244
Agra, 35, 66
Ahmedabad, 35
Ain-ud-Din, Sayed, 73
Air Force
Indian, 339
Pakistani, 338
Akali Dal, 284
Akalis, 284-85
Akbar the Great, 75, 342
Alexander, A.V., 203, 208, 211, 359
Ali, Agha Shaukat, 347
Ali, Aruna Asaf, 230
Ali, Asaf, 230, 257
Ali, Captain Mohammad, 174
Aligarh, 75
Aligarh Muslim University, 206
Ali, Ghazanfar, 72
Ali, Rahmat, 69-70
Allahabad, 100, 125, 153, 173
Allenbrooke, Field Marshal Viscount, 23
Allied cause, 158
Allied war effort, 153
All-India All-Party Conference, 83-84
All-India Congress Committee, 194, 307, 412-13
All-India Federation, 35, 48, 53, 70, 86
All-India Federation Act, 316
All-India Momin Conference, 69