By
Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
The 1947 Partition created two newly-independent states - India and
Pakistan - and triggered perhaps the most significant
movement of people in history, outside war and famine. About 12 million
people became refugees. Between half a million and a million people were killed
in religious violence.
The partition of India in August 1947 was, to a degree, related to
British concerns about the possibility the USSR could acquire influence.
The USSR's victory over Germany in 1945 had increased Joseph Stalin's
ambitions, just as he had already started to do so in Eastern Europe. To the
Soviet Union's southern border lay the region of the Persian Gulf with its oil
fields - the wells of power - that were of vital interest to the West.
Already in the summer of 1940, Leopold Amery, the secretary of State
for India, wrote a (secret) letter to Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, in which he
noted: If our [British] tradition is freedom-loving and our domestic
development centuries ahead of the continent, that is large because we are an
island. If the Prussian tradition is one of militarism and aggression, it is
largely because Prussia had never had any natural frontiers. Now India has a
very natural frontier at present. On the other hand, within herself, she has no
natural or geographic or racial, or communal frontiers - the north-western
piece of Pakistan would include a formidable Sikh minority. The north-eastern
part has a Muslim majority so narrow that it's set up as a State or part of a
wider Muslim State seems absurd. Then there is the large Muslim minority in the
United Provinces, the position of Muslim princes with Hindu subjects, and vice
versa. An all-out Pakistan scheme seems to be the prelude to continuous
internal warfare in India.1
Thus, Britain, in 1940, hoped to stay in India for many decades.
Therefore, its leaders had no interest in creating a sovereign state of any
denomination in the subcontinent, Muslim, Hindu, or any other at the time.
The only person who ever suggested the partition of India before Jinnah
was inspired to do so by the British in 1940 was one thirty-six-year-old
individual named Rahmat Ali (1897-1951). In 1933 he published a
pamphlet from Cambridge in England titled 'Now or Never. In this pamphlet, he
proposed the creation of a separate sovereign state in the north-western region
of India. He also coined the word 'Pakistan'* for it. But the idea was so
unpopular among Muslims that he was ignored.
Stanley Wolpert, the well-known American historian, in his book ]innah of Pakistan, speculates whether the die-hard
British Conservatives might not have inspired even Rahmat Ali's ideas.
Churchill and his friends were dead set against an All-India Federation that
the British Government was considering in the wake of the Round Table
Conferences of the early 1930s. They feared that whatever the safeguards
incorporated in such a federn, it might encourage the
Indian parties and religious groups to work together and start India's slide
towards political unity and self-rule. They would rather have three mutually
antagonistic entities emerging in India: 'A Muslimstan,
a Hindustan and a Princestan', as Viceroy for India
Lord Linlithgow to Jinnah on 13 March 1940 and later by Churchill to the next
Viceroy Lord Wavel. Such a trifurcation would 'institutionalize'
differences among the Muslims, the Hindus, and the princes and would enable
Britain, by playing one against the other, to rule for decades to come.
When the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was received in
London on the evening of 7 December 1941. Winston Churchill records in his
memoirs his feelings of relief and elation that Japan had, by this act, drew
the United States into the war: 'So we had won, after all, Britain would live.
The Commonwealth and Empire would live. We should not be wiped out. Our history
would not end... Being saturated and satisfied with emotion and sensation, I
went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.1
On waking up, his first act was to plan to go to Washington to review
with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt the whole war plan in the light of
reality and new facts as well as the problems of production and distribution.
It was during this visit, recounts Churchill, that Roosevelt' first raised the
Indian problem with me on the usual American lines', meaning on anti-'Empire'
lines. He continues: 'I reacted so strongly at such length that he never raised
it verbally again.'2
Immediately after returning to London, worried that Roosevelt would
return to the Indian situation, Churchill asked the War Cabinet to develop a
policy to forestall American pressure for self-government in India. As he
writes: 'The concern of the Americans with the strategy of a world war was
bringing them into touch with political issues on which they had strong
opinions and little experience... In countries where there is only one race,
broad and lofty views are taken on the color question. Similarly, states
which have no overseas colonies or possessions are capable of rising to moods
of great elevation and detachment about the affairs of those who have:'4
Roosevelt's interest in India was based on enlisting popular support there
against the advancing Japanese, ensuring India's freedom and the subsequent
building up, after the war, of a post-colonial order in Asia.
Britain's planned strategy succeeded brilliantly from there on.
Pakistan, together with Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Britain, joined the Baghdad
Pact and later, CENTO, which the US also joined, to form a defense barrier
against Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. In 1954 Pakistan entered into a
bilateral pact with Britain's ally, the USA, and, in 1958, provided an air base
in Peshawar to the CIA for U-2 spy planes to keep a watch on military
preparations in the Soviet Union. Then, in the 1970s, Pakistan helped the US
establish relations with China to pressurize the Soviet Union from the east.
And in the 1980s, Islamabad provided the forward base from which the US could
eject the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, precipitating the collapse of the
USSR and altering the world balance of power.
On the other hand, the 'Pakistan strategy' did not prevent the Soviet
Union from reaching out to India. This it did by supporting India against
Pakistan, which had the backing of the Western powers, in Kashmir, in the
1950s. In August 1971, an Indo-Soviet treaty with a defense-related clause
was signed. This treaty restrained China from interfering in the forthcoming
Indo-Pakistan war on Bangladesh. Treaties may be like flowers and young girls
that last while they last, as Charles de Gaulle said, but the process of India
purchasing Soviet arms on rupee payment and the barter that started in the
early 1960s has become an important and longstanding feature of Indo-Soviet
relationship. Would the collaboration between these two countries have
developed but for partition?
Partition also helped China extend its influence right up to the mouth
of the Persian Gulf - via Pakistan. In 2004, hundreds of Chinese were building
a port in Gwadar in Baluchistan, at the mouth of the Gulf. What
facilities China will get from Pakistan remain undisclosed. To begin with,
China befriended Pakistan so that the latter would not permit Islamic
separatist influences to reach the Muslims of Sinkiang through the
British-built road from the subcontinent via northern Kashmir to Kashgar - 'the main artery into Central Asia,' as
Ernest Bevin once described it to George Marshall. Since the 1980s, China has
helped Pakistan neutralize the larger Indian conventional force by supplying it
directly and through North Korea's nuclear weaponry and missiles. One may
indeed ask: Would the 1962 Sino-India clash have occurred had India remained
united? Would the Indian subcontinent have been nuclearized in the twentieth
century but for partition?
The unobtrusive but steady pressure exerted by the US on Britain
in favor of India's independence and unity from 1942 to 1947 has been
(strangely) neglected by historians so far. Roosevelt made several attempts to
persuade Churchill to grant self-government to India after the fall of
Singapore but in vain. As soon as an Interim Government under Jawaharlal Nehru
was formed in 1946, the US recognized it and sent an ambassador to Delhi to
consternate the British. The Americans thereafter advised Britain to keep India
united. They feared that India's Balkanization would help the communists. Only
after March 1947, when the Congress Party accepted the division of the Punjab
and Bengal, did the US find itself helpless to do any more. 'The Congress
leaders had abandoned the tenets which they supported for so many years in the
campaign for united India', wired the American Embassy in Delhi to Washington.
The US pressure on Britain led to one predictable result. To find it
off, Churchill, in 1942, played the 'Muslim' or the 'Pakistani' card: that it
was not British reluctance to grant self-government to India but the profound
differences amongst Muslims and Hindus on India's future that was creating the
problem. Such a move brought Jinnah's 1940 scheme for partition and his
two-nation theory center stage. The theory of 'the provincial
option', which created the constitutional channel by which partition could be
put into effect, was concocted in London in 1942.
That by 1943, India had become an essential adversarial factor in
Anglo-US relations is not well known. This factor could have been liquidated by
Indian disenchantment with America, vice versa, or both. The record shows that
Mountbatten, Krishna Menon, and Attlee worked on Nehru to raise his suspicions
about the US motives in Asia. Side by side, British speakers and diplomats
propounded the idea in the US that the Indian Muslim had better imbibed the
Western legacy and was a more reliable partner than the feeble and unreliable
Hindu. The Indian leaders' ambitious foreign policy after independence,
combined with their inexperience, took no time to collide with the Americans'
impatient and demanding nature, mixed with their ignorance about India.
The Americans, to begin with, showed more understanding of India's
position on Jammu and Kashmir than did Britain. Throughout 1948, the US
insisted that J&K's accession to India could not be brushed aside unless it
lost the plebiscite that India itself had offered. Meanwhile, Pakistani forces
that had entered the state had to be withdrawn. This US stand prevented
J&K's accession to India from being negated by the UN Security Council at
the British behest. But while Britain was able to maintain good relations with
India, the neutral Americans were cast as the villains of the piece. This was
largely due to Nehru's basic distrust of capitalist America, his faith in
socialist Britain, and the personal ties that the Mountbattens had
developed with him.
To bring to light an important but ignored historical truth is
worthwhile. This is all the more appropriate because India has never recognized
the goodwill that the US showed for India's independence and unity during the
end game of the Empire. Admittedly, today, given Russia's retreat from Central
Asia and the growing mutual concern about terrorism and political Islam, a new
chapter is opening up in Indo-US relations.
The story is also a cautionary tale for Indians. High ideals inspired
the leaders of the Congress Party. They built up a broad-based all-India
organization without which the struggle for independence would not have been
possible. They revived the sagging morale and confidence of a fallen people,
contributing to 'India's great recovery', to use K. M. Panikar's phrase.
They devised instruments such as satyagraha (peaceful mass protest or
resistance), answering violence with non-violence. Such measures put moral
pressure on the democratic British people to push their government to recognize
India's legitimate demands. These were great achievements.
But the Indian leaders
remained plagued by the Indians' age-old weaknesses of arrogance,
inconsistency, often poor political judgment, disinterest in foreign affairs,
and questions of defense. Overconfidence made them ignore the dangers of
rejecting, from the Congress Party's fold (in the 1920s), the secular and very
able, though egocentric, Jinnah. They failed to include, after the party's
massive victory in provincial elections, in their governments, in 1937, those
Muslim League leaders who wanted to taste the plums of office. The British
archives reveal that in their negotiations with the viceroys in the
1940s, there was no consistency - without which there could be no success in
diplomacy or war - or indeed a clear, realistic policy. The Congress Party
resolution of 11 April 1942 rejected the Stafford Cripps offer that sought to
divide the country by giving the provinces the right to stand out but spoke
elsewhere of the right of units to break away from the Indian Union.4 In his
talks with Jinnah in September 1944, Mahatma Gandhi suggested district-wide
referendums in British provinces claimed by Jinnah, thereby accepting the
principle of some kind of partition.6 In his letter to Cripps of 27 January
1946, Nehru mentioned the possibility of the division of Punjab and Bengal.7
They could not even make up their minds on whether or not to accord priority
above all else to India's unity or to consider non-violence a higher duty.
One should also understand that during the first half of the 20th
Century (that is, until after 'independence' around 1950), social contact,
except with the princely order and some selected Indians, did not exist, even
between British and Indian officers in the Army. Indians were unwelcome in
train compartments occupied by Britishers even when they held valid tickets.
British clubs excluded Indians. Indians dismounted from their ponies or other
conveyances to salute the 'Sahib' if they crossed one on the road. That
Harcourt Butler, the governor of the United Provinces, sent a bottle of
champagne to the jail cell of Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal's father, on
his first night in prison for participating in Gandhiji's civil disobedience,
in remembrance of the many drinks they had together, was an exception that
proved the rule.
Further, the onerous challenges of a worldwide empire required British
belief in their superiority and pre-eminence. This resulted in slogans like the
'white man's burden'. Christian missionaries who entered India in the
nineteenth century were sustained by donors back home, and it was only natural
for them to project the worst possible picture of those to be redeemed to
obtain funds. And sex, the great equalizer, lost its humanizing influence as
faster ships made it possible to bring out British wives to India. To protect
them, too, the race card had to be played to the full. In 1947, 50
percent of the senior civil services, 60 percent of police officers, and all
posts above lieutenant colonel in the Army were held by Britishers.
Below Nehru, Jinnah,
and Mountbatten:
Not mentioned in Alex Von Tutzemann's "Indian
Summer" (2007), for example, is that the Mountbattens
made it a rule that no less than 50 percent of those invited to their garden
parties, lunches, and dinners shortly before 'Independence' should be (Princely
in that case) Indians, when until then few if any, Indians had been invited to
such functions. He took an Indian aide-de-camp - the first ever appointed.
'These measures were not popular among a certain class of Europeans', he
reported. 'This was made clear when my younger daughter (Lady Pamela), standing
near two English ladies to whom she had not been introduced, heard one say to
the other: "It makes me sick to see this house full of dirty
Indians."7 London).
Most Indian leaders at the forefront of the independence movement
continued to be victims of the old legacy. They did not devote much thought
during the freedom struggle to external relations or how the country's
defense would be organized after independence had been achieved.
Resigning from governments in British provinces in 1939 and launching
the Quit India movement in 1942 proved counterproductive. For Nehru to include
Muslim League ministers in the Interim Government in September 1946, before the
League had entered the Constituent Assembly and agreed to stop 'direct action'
or terrorism, was another blunder. To prematurely declare in December 1946 that
India would become a republic while engaged in delicate negotiations with the
Attlee Government on a future settlement was a mistake. By the end of 1946,
they had been maneuvered into such a corner that if Sardar Patel had
not stepped forward 'to have a limb amputated, as he put it, and satisfy
Britain, there was a danger of India's fragmentation, as Britain searched for
military bases in the bigger princely states by supporting their attempts to
declare independence.
Protected by British power for so long and focused on a non-violent
struggle, the Indian leaders were ill-prepared, as independence dawned, to
confront the power play in our predatory world. Their historic disinterest in
other countries' aims and motives made things none the more accessible. They
had failed to see the British motivation for supporting the Pakistan scheme and
taking remedial measures. Nor did they understand that, at the end of the Raj,
America wanted a free and united India to emerge and to find ways to work this
powerful lever. Glaring mistakes were made in handling the Kashmir imbroglio.
For example, Alan Campbell-Johnson, the governor-general's press
attaché, wrote: Since returning to Delhi [from London] Mountbatten had seen
Gandhi and VP. [Menon] who were both favorably inclined to the
invocation of [the] UNO. And today [11 November 1947], he had a further talk
with Nehru, whose attitude to the idea is now less inactive than it was at
Lahore [at the meeting between Nehru and Liaqat Ali Khan three days earlier].9
Earlier, in September 1947, Gandhiji approached Mountbatten with the
suggestion that Attlee is requested to mediate between India and Pakistan to
avert a clash between the two countries as a result of the conflagration in
Punjab. Gandhiji, since a large majority of British Officers were not in the
Indian but what was now the Pakistani armies, wanted Attlee to ascertain 'in
the best manner he knows who is overwhelmingly in the wrong and then withdraw
every British Officer in the service of the wrong party.8
Attlee had parried the request: ‘When political tragedies occur’, he
informed Gandhiji, ‘how seldom it is that, at all events at the time, the blame
can be cast, without a shadow of doubt substantially on one party alone.9
Gandhiji was very disappointed. Mountbatten’s comment on Gandhiji’s proposal
(in a letter to Lord Ismay) was as follows: ‘He seems to ignore the fact
that if we expelled Pakistan from the Commonwealth, Russia would step in. Much
later, Mountbatten wrote to Gandhiji: ‘An alternative means is to ask UNO to
undertake this inquiry, and you would have no difficulty in ge‘ting
Pakistan to agree to this.’ (Ibid. Mountbatten to Gandhiji, 29 September 1947.
Nothing came of this proposal, but this was how a reference to the UN came to
be broached.
Vallabhbhai Patel and Mountbatten had worked together on India’s
division and the princely states’ integration into the Indian dominion. Still,
after independence, Mountbatten found him less tractable than Nehru.
Mountbatten was aware of the growing rift between Nehru and Patel. When Nehru
had submitted to him the list of independent India’s first cabinet in August
1947, according to H.V. Hodson, Patel’s name was missing from it. Mountbatten,
on v.P. Menon’s prompting, made Nehru
include Patel in the cabinet. V.P. Menon argued that an open clash in
the Congress Party Working Committee between the two might result in Nehru’s
defeat. For this, see H.Y. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan
(Oxford University Press edition, Delhi, 2000, p. 381). It should be noted that
Hodson was meticulous in his research and had access to Mountbatten while wri’Ing his book The Great Divide in the 1960s. Hodson said
that the Mahatma possibly wanted Patel to lead the recast Congress Party he was
planning.
One of the other problems at that time concerned the division of
the assets of undivided India between the two dominions. The issue’s crux was
transferring the second installment of Rs 550 million (equal to about half a
billion US dollars today) to Pakistan. (Until then, only the first installment
of Rs 200 million had been transferred.) Nehru had told C. Rajagopalachari on
26 October 1947: ‘It would be foolish to make this payment until this Kashmir
business had been settled.’ 9
Mountbatten has recorded how he convinced Gandhiji of the validity of
the Pakistani claim: I told him that I considered it to be unstatesmanlike and
unwise (not to pay). The documents also bring out the anti-Congress Party and
anti-Hindu sentiments of the British officers serving in the country even as
they prepared to quit India. Most such officers, who stayed on after
independence, went over to serve Pakistan and did their damnedest against
India.
Was it possible to have
avoided partition by 1946-47? It may be worth dwelling on this question for a
moment.
Besides the strategic factor, there were other reasons for Britain
to favor partition. One was the doubt in the British mind that India
might not have a good chance of surviving as an independent state. A top-secret
appreciation, prepared in the Commonwealth Relations Office soon after British
withdrawal, elaborates this doubt. Factors such as India's heterogeneous
population, the North-South divide, the communal problem, the unruliness of the
Sikhs, and the policy of the Indian communists to spread dissension are cited
in this context. One can't say how far Attlee, or how many of his colleagues,
accepted this analysis. But notions of India's instability were deeply embedded
in the thinking of British officials, senior Conservative politicians, and many
journalists, including editors of newspapers. In the circumstances, it is not
surprising that the British would hesitate to put all their eggs in the Indian
basket.
There was another reason for the British tilt towards the creation of
Pakistan. I have referred to the hatred for Indian leaders in general and the
Hindus in particular that most British civilians and military men in India had
started to feel by 1947. The nationalists' non-cooperation in the war effort
had created deep distrust for them in Britain and several countries of the
British Commonwealth, particularly in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.
Therefore, the emotion among the English in favor of Pakistan was
very great. (It has not subsided entirely even to this day.)
The Indians, too, faced
difficulties in cooperating with Britain.
The British support for the Muslim League as well as for the Pakistan
scheme had created a general and widespread suspicion of their intentions among
the public. Besides, there were specific points of disagreement. Jawaharlal
Nehru was willing to cooperate with Britain on several issues, including that
of supporting the Commonwealth concept, which, he believed, would help to
balance American influence in the world. But he was opposed to getting
entangled in any schemes to contain or confront the Soviet Union and China.
Also, he was bent on fighting European colonialism and apartheid, even if his
stance embarrassed Britain and its friends. A possibility that greatly excited
him was the opportunities independence would offer India to mediate for peace
between the West and the East and, in so doing, strike out a new path in world
affairs. By appealing to the deep-felt urges of mankind for freedom, equality,
and peace, he believed that India could develop a diplomatic reach, which would
be as effective in influencing world events as power politics and military
strength. These concepts, of course, would be difficult to marry with British
ideas and were unlikely to persuade Britain to abandon the Pakistan scheme,
inexperienced in foreign affairs, and far too vain' was the British High
Commission's (in India) top-secret assessment of Nehru. (This was 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.)
Many Indians, by and large, do know that the Imperial power
supported the partition plan to weaken India so that it remained dependent on
Britain even after independence. This is, however, only half the truth. The
British left no stone unturned to push their allies, the princes - whose
territories constituted one-third of the Raj - into the arms of India, except
for Jammu and Kashmir. This step helped unify disparate and fragmented parts
into a cohesive country. Suppose the British were out to weaken India. Why
should they have done this or left the Andaman and Nicobar as well as
the Laccadive Islands in Indian hands, which increased India's naval
reach in the Indian Ocean? Or, why should they have whittled down Jinnah's
territorial demands to the minimum required for Britain to safeguard
its defense requirements?
The English and people abroad generally believed that India was divided
because Hindus and Muslims could not live peacefully together in one country,
and a separate state - Pakistan - needed to be carved out of India for the
Muslims. But the fact is that such a division of the two communities was never
made. Nearly thirty million Muslims, or a third of the total Muslim population
of India, were excluded from Pakistan. These Muslims residing in Indian
provinces, in which they were minorities, were the only ones who could be said
to be vulnerable to Hindu pressure or domination. The creation of Pakistan was
justified to protect them, but they were left behind in India." The areas
in Pakistan (the NWFP, West Punjab, Baluchistan, and Sind) had Muslim majorities
with no fear of Hindu domination and were ruled by Muslim governments. Indeed,
the NWFP and Punjab had governments opposed to Jinnah's Muslim League. But they
were placed in Pakistan.
However, these four provinces/units had one common feature: the British
chiefs of staff considered their territories of absolute importance for
organizing a defense against a possible Soviet advance toward the
Indian Ocean.
Partition was a politico-strategic act. It was not to 'save' Muslims
from Hindus, nor was it to weaken India. 'Everyone for home; everyone for
himself.'
The British adopted the policy of divide and rule in India after the
bloody revolt or the Great Mutiny of 1857. This was a policy to control
Indians, not to divide India. The latter question arose when the British
started to plan their retreat from India, the facts about which are the subject
of this story. If the impulse was Churchill's, Attlee implemented the scheme.
Working behind a thick smoke screen, he wove circles around Indian leaders and
persuaded them to accept partition.
The belief that the Cabinet Mission plan sought to avoid, or would have
succeeded in avoiding, the partition is mistaken. This plan would have
intensified communal tension and most probably Balkanized India. However, it
served HMG's purpose as follows. It shocked Jinnah that the Attlee Government
might move away from partition and prepare the ground for him to accept the
smaller Pakistan. The entry of the Congress leaders into the Interim Government
kept them from revolting; it softened them up to ultimately accept the
Wavell-Attlee plan. The exercise served British public relations; it made the
United States impression that Britain was working for Indian unity.
The plan for the smaller Pakistan was not worked out by Mountbatten in
1947, as generally believed, but by Lord Wavell in 1945, who submitted its
detailed blueprint to London in February 1946. Mountbatten implemented the plan
by persuading the two main Indian parties to accept the same. Advancing the
date of British departure from June 1948 to August 1947 is often blamed for the
chaos and killings in Punjab. The date was advanced after the Congress Party,
in May 1947, agreed to accept the transfer of power on a dominion status basis,
provided Britain pulled out of India forthwith. Even temporarily, the Indian
acceptance of dominion status was important for Britain. ('The greatest
opportunity ever offered to the Empire.') It would facilitate the passage of the
Indian Independence Bill in the British Parliament by appeasing the
Conservative opposition. It would prove to the world that India had willingly
accepted the partition; otherwise, why should it agree to remain a British
dominion? It would gain time to persuade Nehru and his friends to abandon their
commitment to leave the British Commonwealth.
Penderel Moon, civil servant, and historian who was on the spot, has
written: 'The determination of the Sikhs to preserve their cohesion was the
root cause of the violent exchange of populations which took place, and it
would have operated with like effect even if the division of Punjab had been
put off another year.' Admittedly, the Muslim attacks on Sikh farmers in the
villages around Rawalpindi in March 1947 confirmed this community's worst fears
that the Muslim League was out to cleanse West Pakistan of non-Muslims, which
happened. However, Linlithgow and Wavell cannot escape the responsibility for
the Punjab massacres. They ignored the warnings of their governors, Henry Craik
and Bertrand Glancy that strengthening Jinnah's Muslim League in Punjab at the
expense of the Muslims of the Unionist Party, who were opposed to partition -
Shaukat Hayat used to call it 'Jinnahstan' - would
result in a blood bath in the province. Wavell did forward Glancy's warning to
London, but the policy to build up Jinnah as the sole spokesman of the Muslims
continued.
The view that Britain, by staying on longer, might have avoided the
Punjab troubles ignores the fact that the British neither had the troops nor
the administrative capacity to control events in India by the summer of 1947.
At least the vigor and speed with which Lord Mountbatten acted had the merit of
confining the conflagration to Punjab.
The British focus was no doubt on Pakistan as a
future defense partner in the Great Game, but India too had its
value. If it remained in the British family of nations, i.e., in the
Commonwealth, this retention would add to British prestige and influence in the
postwar world. How Mountbatten juggled the above two British goals was
none-too-easy a feat. While viceroy of India, he prized away the North West
Frontier Province from the Congress Party's control and, while India's
governor-general after independence, he restrained it from occupying the whole,
or more areas, of Kashmir. This made it possible for Pakistan to be formed as
a defense bastion. Simultaneously, he was able to build bridges
between the British and India, which led to the latter remaining a member of
the British Commonwealth.
The view that Mountbatten helped India to gain Kashmir by persuading
Sir Cyril Radcliffe to allow parts of the Muslim-majority areas of Gurdaspur
district (in Punjab) to India is not well founded. A fair-weather road through
this district was the only route connecting the state with India. But it was
Wavell's blueprint for Pakistan, sent to London on 6 February 1946, which has
to be studied in this context. The allotment had nothing to do with Kashmir or
Mountbatten. Wavell had recommended:
In Punjab, the only Muslim-majority District that would not go into
Pakistan under this demarcation is Gurdaspur (51 percent Muslim). Gurdaspur
must go with Amritsar for geographical reasons, and Amritsar, being [the]
sacred city of Sikhs, must stay out of Pakistan.
Mountbatten continues to receive flak in Britain, Pakistan, and India.
Some British frustration at India's independence ('Of course, he lost if), not
unnaturally, got rubbed off on the man who 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 done
through the process of accessions - into which the princes were no doubt
stampeded by Mountbatten - a much worse fate awaited them. Ninety percent 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 like Stanley Wolpert (today
2007), believe that Mahatma Gandhi remained opposed to partition till the
very end. His absenting himself from Delhi on Independence Day is often cited
as proof.
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 defense. In the open
forum of the UN, Britain could not concede its pro-Pakistani stand. The
Americans, in their internal telegram, have left a record of Britain's
pro-Pakistani tilt on Kashmir. So also, the Kashmir imbroglio in 1947-48 proved
once more that all that happened during the end game of the Empire could not be
understood unless one keeps in view the overwhelming concern of the withdrawing
power, as it pulled out, to secure its strategic agenda.
In July 1947, Jinnah personally approached the Maharaja of Jodhpur and
the Maharaj Kumar of Jaisalmer and offered favorable 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. It furthermore
would be wrong to believe that because Kashmir was 77 percent Muslim, its
people would, in 1947, have automatically wished to join Pakistan.
The NWFP, next door, was 95 percent Muslim but 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 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. But 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
existing position 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 the West to the
dangers of encouraging political Islam.
The Pakistan Government created the Taliban movement in Afghanistan
through the Jamaat-iIslami, Pakistan, and their ISI
intelligence service. 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 counseled jihad against non-believers. These views echoed
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
petrodollars, 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
are buried in India's partition.
The British brought the 'New Learning' to India and the notion of
separating religion from politics that had become the norm in Christian Europe
after the Renaissance. These features open the possibility for secularism -
anathema to orthodox Muslims - to take root among the Muslims of India and work
on 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 a feeling of brotherhood between man and man.
Shashi Tharoor, the writer speaking of Hindus, has asked: How can faith
followers without any fundamentals become fundamentalists? But lack of
parameters and a sense of social responsibility can lead to intolerance and
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, selfserving economic
policies that taxed 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 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 more than 500 million Muslims 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 economic 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. Plus, the
awareness that it was global politics, Britain's insecurity, and the errors of
judgment of the Indian leaders that resulted in the partition of India might
help India and Pakistan search for some form of reconciliation at one point.
Colonel Elahi Baksh, the
doctor who attended Jinnah during the last phase of his illness in
August-September 1948 at Ziarat near Quetta, reported he heard his patient say:
'I have made it [Pakistan], but I am convinced that I have committed the
greatest blunder of my life.' This was also reported around the same time by
Liaqat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, upon emerging one day from the
sick man's room after receiving a tongue-lashing, was heard to murmur: 'The old
man discovered his mistake. 'See Member of Parliament Dr. M. Hashim Kidwai's
letter printed in The Times of India, 27 July 1988, based on reports published
in Frontier Post, Peshawar, and Muslim India, New Delhi.
1. MSS/EUR F 9/5, S. No. 32, p. 190, Oriental and Indian
Collection, British Library, London.
2. Winston Churchill, Memories of the Second World War, Vol. 6,
War Comes to America, London, 1950, pp.209-10.
3. Ibid,p.188.
4. For details of the latter deal, see Narendra Singh Sarila,
The Shadow of the Great Game, HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 110-111.
5. Narendra Singh Sarila, 2005, p. 179
6. Sarila, 2005, p. 201
7. Quoted in Report on 'The Last Viceroyalty', Part A, Para 112,
OIC, British Library,
8. Broadlands Archives (BA), University of Southampton.
MBI/E/193/2.
9.Ibid. Message to Gandhiji from Attlee.
10. Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mission with Mountbatten, Delhi, 1994, diary
entry of 11 November 1947.
11. C. Rajagopalachari, a prominent Congress leader from South
India, succeeded Mountbatten as the governor-general of India.
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