1757- East of the Cape of Good Hope

by Narendra Mehra

  LIBERTY DOES NOT DESCEND TO PEOPLE.

  A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEM SELVES TO LIBERTY.

  IT IS A BLESSING THAT MUST BE EARNED

  No doubt, the British were not shy of their hubris. They chiseled on the red stone walls of the new Secretariat building that India had not yet earned that Liberty. They reminded the natives to keep serving the White masters to earn that right. They chiseled in stone the contempt of the British. In politics, theater does matter; their decision to build a new capital was seen as an unnecessary luxury and provocation, in a time of war and poverty. It was an affront to the famished native sensitivity and their freedom drive from the foreign yoke. It only served to cement the very hard feelings both sides were developing for each other and sure indeed the citizenry paid a very dear price to get rid of the British in the end.

  The British also changed their tactics to match the changing circumstances. They tried to undermine the very foundation of the Indian National Congress as the representative body of political India. They started dealing directly with the Muslims, the Indian minorities and the Princes and bypassed the main political body to make them irrelevant. They started raising other interest groups as separate political classes needing separate political representation, such as the Harijans, who were Hindus but economically depressed segment. They did their best to fragment the freedom movement. They started grooming the Indian elite who had studied at Eaton, Harrow and donned Savile Row clothes. They hung carrots, delicious carrots, to Hindus and induced them to become Christians and offered those lucrative jobs and other entitlements. It was a very cynical approach and it damaged India as a nation even after the British were gone. The British thus created a very complicated political landscape, which turned out to be tragic for India and haunted the British too in the end. They created a very combustible environment by encouraging the incendiary personalities in the Muslim political body and sowed the seeds of Al- Qaeda movement. Most tragic of all was their involvement with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a lawyer practicing in London, who had gone there four decades earlier. Jinnah spear headed the Al Qaeda movement and declared himself Qaede-Azam, (leader of Al- Qaeda movement) to achieve his goal of a separate homeland for the Muslims.

  The British erroneously identified the freedom movement with the Hindus and encouraged the Muslims to demand separate political representation. The Muslims in India were an ethnic minority, representing about twenty percent of the population and they had lived side by side with the Hindus ever since they arrived with the Timurids, the Mughals and the Durranis. They were not the natives of India. Some Indian natives did convert to Islam but continued to function as a homogeneous group with other cultural groups. The British decided to use the Muslims as a wedge group thus paving the way for the partition of India. The Muslims in India however could not be convinced that it was a good idea and when Jinnah put the matter to a vote, he could barely garner five percent of the votes. The Muslims wanted to remain as a more decentralized group as they always had been. There never was a grass root movement in India demanding the formation of Pakistan and the local Muslim population in India had only a peripheral role in the formation of Pakistan. To appease them, the British started doling out public and civil service jobs disproportionately and they enjoyed fifty percent of those scarce jobs, while demographically they were only twenty percent. While that sudden change in the British political strategy was in progress, the Indian National Congress was in the midst of the Civil Disobedience Movement and the British arrested the leadership and put them in jail and proceeded with the First Round Table Conference in London. King George V opened the conference himself. The idea of a separate homeland, Pakistan, for the Muslims of India, originated during the First Round Table Conference in London.

  Another significant group was the Princes of India. They enjoyed politically independent status and the British started wooing them to sabotage the Indian freedom movement. The British Crown politically exploited the Indian Princes, by entering in to separate covenants. Later, those covenants became a big stumbling block as the Crown took a stand that they could not be negotiated.

  The Princes of India presented a great contrast to the poverty and simple life of an average Indian. They were flushed with money and they lived and behaved over the top and they flaunted their garish life styles. The British wooed them not only for political reasons, but for their wealth too. The British had the same attraction to money as a bee has to honey. The sumptuous images of luxury of Indian rulers, Rajas, Nabobs and the Princes attracted many Europeans to India seeking fortune including some women. Many of the Princes would have an Indian wife and an heir to the throne and they married the European women as well. The British snobbery did not take such alliances sportingly. They scoffed at the idea of calling such British girls princesses. Early in the twentieth century, the British Government decreed that such women would neither lose nor gain by such a marriage. The European women were not the only ones seeking fortune. Some of the famous jewelry and fashion houses, such as Cartier, Harry Winston, Louis Vuitton, Hermes of England and Europe, made quite a fortune, early fortune, off those Rajas and Princes. Many Europeans jewelry and fashion firms survived bankruptcy after the great depression of 1930s by selling them custom designed jewelry, gold plated cars and instrument dash boards studded in precious stones, chandeliers, diamond necklaces and custom made jewelry even for their pets, horses and elephants. Indian preoccupation with things European played in their hands and they took full advantage of that craze for European luxury goods. The famous jewelry houses published advertisements touting their business relations with the Indian Rajas and stoked the vanity of those Princes.

  After the British splintered the Indian freedom movement, they held the Second Round Table Conference in London and the British Viceroy Lord Irwin signed a pact with Gandhi as the sole representative of Indian National Congress, a far cry from the sole representative of Political India. Gandhi was too astute for the British and they were disappointed with him as he was not a walk over. Gandhi had dealt with the British before during his stay in Durban, South Africa. The British were disrespectful and as a strategic move, they decided to ignore Gandhi and started grooming Nehru, a product of their educational system and an Alumni of Eaton. Nehru ultimately became the first Prime Minister of India.

  Nehru represented the Indian elite class. He studied at Eaton and Harrow and was a product of the British schools. The British were comfortable dealing with him, though in fairness to Nehru, he spent a very long time of his adult life in the British jails and was a true nationalist. He presented a sharp image and had little in common with an average Indian. In their dual strategy of force and negotiations, the British shaped Nehru’s political trajectory. Nehru was an idealist and a theoretician not familiar with the ways of the world and he was responsible for agreeing to the partition of India, while Gandhi parted ways with Nehru on that critical issue.

  The British suppressed the Indian freedom movement by force during the intervening years leading to the Second World War as they were feverishly preparing for the war. Long before the war started, India had started building the infrastructure for the war and the so-called appeasement of Germany, was a ruse to gain time. India was a closed society and the war preparations were more and less concealed. One day, in 1939, the British viceroy came on the radio and declared that India was at war with no consultation with the Indian leadership. The Viceroy’s decision to break away with the Indian leadership incensed the political body and they in turn passed the Quit India Resolution. From that day in 1942, India was never the same again; the political temperature kept escalating with every passing day till the break up of India. From that day onward, there were nation wide strikes, mass arrests on charges of sedition, Hindu -Muslim riots, communal murders, curfews and martial law where people were routinely shot at sight. From the stand point of a common man, the normal peaceful life ceased to exist, the business activity came to a standstill, children could not go to school, and the brutal
ity and force used by the government was appalling and merciless. The British response was to arrest the entire leadership of the Congress and they stayed in jail till the end of the war.

  The British strategists worked feverishly to marginalize the Indian freedom movement and soon after the war started, by a strange coincidence, M.A. Jinnah, a Muslim lawyer practicing in London, suddenly appeared at the annual session of the Muslim League at Minto Park Lahore and moved the resolution for the formation of a separate nation, Pakistan. He was an alien, he had lived in London for forty years and he was repudiating India as one nation. Gandhi did all he could do, to undo the British mischief of separate representation for different segments of the Indian demographics. It was the Hindus versus the rest as far as the British were concerned and Hindus were eighty percent. Gandhi talked to Jinnah to promote Hindu- Muslim unity; Gandhi talked to the Harijans. He toured the NWFP (Northwestern Frontier Province) region with Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, much to the dislike and consternation of the British as they had different ideas for that region and wanted to keep it a directly administered territory. The boarder region of India with Afghanistan was a strategic territory for the British, as they wanted to carve a buffer zone with Russia. The imaginary line, known as the Durrand Line, was created by the British for that very purpose which passed through the Hindu Kush region in the north and Baluchistan in the south, which tore up families and communities and has been a sore point ever since. Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, affectionately called Sarhadi Gandhi (Boarder Gandhi) as he shared the principles of peaceful protest with Gandhi, was the local Pashustan leader who shared Gandhi’s love for the unity of India and resisted all British attempts to muzzle local opposition to their schemes. With such powerful forces against him, Gandhi had little success with Jinnah, after his meeting at Bombay in 1944 and he found him hostile to the idea of united India as one nation. After the Jinnah- Gandhi meeting, the relationship between the Muslims and the Hindus deteriorated rapidly and were soon followed by a blood bath.

  In the meantime, the war was not going well for Britain. In 1942, the Japanese captured Burma, which had common boarder with the Bengal Province and they bombed Calcutta as well. The threat of Japanese invasion became a real possibility and if ever there was a crisis and panic in the British ranks it was the loss of Burma. Britain lost access to the rice fields of Burma as well, which was vital for feeding the millions of soldiers fighting in the Far East, the Middle East and Africa. The British found India expendable to save the Empire and in that state of panic and loss of morale, they started hoarding food grains in India to feed their expatriates and the Allied fighting forces. Besides the British Civil Service personnel, Britain had a huge presence of commercial interests in Bengal; the people who were running their managing agency houses trading in tea, jute, coal mines, iron ore, steel, shipping and banking. Those people were clandestinely provided with the hoarded food grains at the expense of the local population. The Indian political leadership was in jail because of the Quit India Resolution, and all told some one hundred thousand people, were put in jail on charges of sedition. In the political arena, only the Muslims were left out to administer the province of Bengal and the British used them to buy and hoard the food. Thus were set in motion the forces that resulted in the great Indian famine of 1943 which resulted in the death of some four million natives, besides untold number of cattle. The famine ravaged for over two years till the fresh crops made up the scarcity and the British government and their Prime Minister Churchill, ignored all pleas for help as they had written off India as the sacrificial lamb.

  During the famine, the lush green countryside presented a horrible contrast and belied the usual images of famine such as wind swept cracked fields, water shortages, dust bowl, and tumbleweeds. But there was none of that in India as it was a man made disaster. The British government tried to keep the famine a secret, criticism of the British government became a crime, scores of newspapers were banned and put out of business, as the British realized, that they were going to lose India anyway either to the Japanese or to the Indian freedom movement. To compound the problem further, the British government started funding the war with paper money, thus unleashing uncontrollable inflation and the meager resources of the natives could not cope up with the rising prices, thus aggravating the man made British famine in India. With every passing day, during those horrible days, the food disappeared from the grain markets and hunger stricken villagers started streaking into the urban areas, only to die on the city streets and pavements. There were constant procession of families burning their dead and the wail of mothers crying after their infant babies. In the cities, food was strictly rationed well below the subsistence level, and the human skeletons walking the streets became a common sight. In the eighteenth century, when the British established their dominion in India, they had precipitated a massive famine in Bengal and near the end of their rule; they showed utter contempt for the lives of the natives and sacrificed millions of lives once again at the altar of British Imperialism.

  The Allied victory and the end of the famine coincided at the same time, but it was not good news for India. The British Prime Minister reneged on the promise of freedom in exchange for cooperation during the War. That promise was broken as Churchill said; “He was not His Majesty’s Prime Minister to liquidate the Empire.” The task for his successor Lord Clement Atlee was impossible. He was an astute politician, fully familiar with the politics and freedom aspirations of the Indians since he was a member of the Simon Commission. The British government did not want to lose their ‘Jewel in the Crown’; which had made her immensely wealthy. The British government therefore decided to dent the freedom movement by whatever means, and they set in motion once again series of missions and commissions to grant the Indians ‘home rule’ with dominion status.

  The British government decided to send a Cabinet Mission to India to give India autonomy under the dominion status. They wanted to frame a constitution, so that the Central Government would be responsible for foreign affairs, defense and communications. The entire exercise was to grant ‘home rule’ on a communal basis. The Muslim League and its leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah refused to cooperate unless he was promised division of India to create Pakistan. The British tried to use the Muslims, and the Muslims tried to use the British. The net result was that the British lost. The Muslims sensed correctly that the British had very little resources in the sub-continent and they rejected the Cabinet Mission plan and resorted to ‘direct action’. To underscore that point, Jinnah let lose his death squads and communal riots broke out. The black clad Muslim militias following strict Islamic code, that became the beating heart of the Islamic terrorist movement, started roaming the streets, terrorizing Hindu population. The rallying cry of those death squads was simple. ‘Islam was in danger’. Hundreds of those militia death squads patrolled the cities shouting slogans, brandishing knifes, shovels and pick axes and murdered non-Muslims. They were groups like, ‘al-Qaeda ‘and ‘Khaksars’, which later morphed along with the Mujahdeens in to the Al-Qaeda and Talibans of today. The British spawned the Al-Qaeda movement as a political counter weight to the Indian freedom movement, but it went horribly wrong and unwittingly they became the mid wife in its birth. During the entire period of the civil war, the British remained frozen and stood still while Hindu homes burnt and vast areas with men, women & children in their homes were burnt alive. Hindu men were murdered, their women abducted. The streets were littered with corpses, uncared and unknown with their pants generally downs, to make sure that the victims were uncircumcised, which was typical for the Hindus. The mayhem resulted in complete breakdown of the civil order and the red glow on the horizon from the burning cities and the smell of human flesh permeated the air for weeks.

  The toll of the civil war was heavy. Estimates vary, but it was believed that about two million people lost their lives and ten million people became homeless. The morally haunting question of what happened to those ten million people was never asked no
r ever answered. People lost all they had, their homes, their professions, their lifestyles, their culture, and their livelihood. People fled from the murderous mayhem with bare clothes on their bodies towards the Indian border. People were stripped of their dignity and self-respect. They lost part of them when they fled; they lost what made a person whole, the familiar surroundings, the moral pulse of their culture, the air they breathed, the surroundings of their birth and the most infamous of all, many women lost their honor. When the dust settled, the Indian government set up a commission to recover the abducted women. Some were recovered, others had given birth to children on the other side and refused to return, whereas many others committed suicide unable to face their shame.

  The British were not yet done. They tried to break India into one hundred different parts so that they could keep their foothold in India. They refused to negotiate the status of Princely States as the Princely Pacts were with the Crown and not negotiable. They subverted the working of the Indian National Congress by clandestinely opening up private negotiations with some of its members, they granted them special favors to create separate socio- economic groups, loyalist groups and worst of all, the British government did not trust her own Viceroy, Lord Wavell. He was a military man, not smart about the political ways; instead they used him to ferret out from Indian leadership, how they could be manipulated. Lord Wavell was ultimately sacked hours after her daughter was married. In came Lord Mountbatten as the next Viceroy, but the sun had already begun to set on their rule in India. Lord Mountbatten’s appointment in the spring of 1947 coincided with the complete breakdown of the civil order. The British also lost the trust of the Indian Army as they tried and convicted some twenty thousand members of the Indian National Army, which had joined the Japanese during the Second World War. The British did not have the resources and the military muscle to bring peace and order in the country, nor could they win back the trust of the natives, so they hurriedly packed and left in August 1947 while the country was still burning.