The outcome was an escalation of hatred.
In the summer of 1946, while the Cabinet Mission was in India, Congress selected a new President. At Gandhi’s instance, Jawaharlal succeeded Azad. Most provincial Congress committees had preferred Patel, but Nehru’s younger age, wider popularity, international standing, and greater acceptability to the Left and to India’s Muslims influenced Gandhi’s choice. Vallabhbhai withdrew when the Mahatma gave the word. It was a re- enactment of the 1929 story.
This intervention by Gandhi in April 1946 was his last decisive act in Congress affairs. After 25 June, when the Working Committee silently allowed him to leave, Gandhi functioned as one who had yielded the reins. He would continue, if asked, to counsel them, but the lieutenants — principally Nehru, Patel, C.R., Prasad and Azad — had taken over.
After Nehru formally named C.R. to the Working Committee — he had served as a regular invitee for some time now —, Subbaroyan referred to Congress’s acceptance of the grouping of Muslim provinces and said publicly that ‘what Rajaji said in 1942 has proved right in 1946’ (Hindustan Times, 11.7.46).
Nehru was offended. In a private letter to Subbaroyan, of which he sent a copy to C.R. with the covering remark, ‘I hope you will understand,’ Jawaharlal said that Congress ‘functioned today in continuation of the policy of 1942’ and that ‘if in the future a conflict arises between this policy and what used to be Rajaji’s policy in 1942, it will be difficult for Rajaji and me to be in the same executive.’8
Yet Nehru made no public contradiction. He could not have comfortably done so, for in a ‘Note for Congressmen’ he sent out four months earlier Nehru was willing to concede ‘some kind of separation’ — though defence and foreign affairs ‘were obviously common subjects’ — and a ‘division of the Punjab and Bengal’ — almost the Rajaji Formula of 1944.9
The truth was that Jawaharlal so hated the idea of Pakistan that he tended to deny Congress’s, and his own, concessions towards it, including the acceptance of grouping. Four days before shooting off the letter to Subbaroyan, he had in fact declared that grouping would probably never come to fruition, and that the Constituent Assembly would have the power to alter the Mission plan.
Jinnah exploded. First he demanded that the British dismiss Congress’s acceptance and, in view of the League’s ‘genuine’ acceptance, invite him to form a government. Next, when there was no sign that the British would do what he wanted, he had the League rescind its acceptance. The British, he charged in the middle of July 1946, had surrendered to the ‘fascist, caste Hindu Congress.’ At last, said Jinnah, ‘bidding goodbye to constitutional methods,’ the League would — on 16 August — launch Direct Action to achieve Pakistan. He described Direct Action as a pistol, comparable in his view to Britain’s pistol of authority and Congress’s pistol of mass struggle.
The League’s withdrawal from 16 May deprived it of the right of inclusion in a new government. Alienated, in any case, by Jinnah’s threat, the Raj invited Nehru to bring a Congress team into an Interim Government. Though Ministers would technically be subject to the Viceregal veto, Wavell assured them of ‘the greatest possible freedom in the exercise of the day-to-day administration of the country.’10
Nehru had wanted an explicit promise on the veto but C.R. and Patel were satisfied, and the Working Committee authorized Nehru to accept the Viceroy’s invitation. Not to do so, C.R. argued in a letter to Patel, would invite the charge of ‘funking responsibililty’ when Jinnah had ‘declared civil war.’11
Direct Action Day proved frightening. Bengal’s League Ministry, led by H.S. Suhrawardy, had declared it a public holiday. There was murder, arson, rape and looting while the police watched. For two days Hindus were at the receiving end. Retaliation followed. About 5,000 were killed and 15,000 injured in five days of rioting. On 21 August, Patel wrote to C.R.:
This will be a good lesson for the League, because I hear that the proportion of Muslims who have suffered death is much larger.12
C.R.’s remedy was the dismissal of Suhrawardy and the Bengal. Governor’s direct rule. Burrows, the Governor, had in any case told Wavell that ‘Suhrawardy had forfeited everyone’s confidence.’13
But the Viceroy’s response to the Great Calcutta Killing was different. Summoning Gandhi and Nehru, he demanded their signatures to an acceptance of compulsory grouping. Gandhi called his language ‘minatory’ and Nehru said Congress could not yield. Though rebuffed, Wavell lacked grounds for rescinding the invitation to Congress; instead he resolved to bring the League also into the Interim Government.
This was C.R.’s wish too. ‘There will be no rejoicing until the League also shares responsibility,’ he said before he was sworn in — nine days after his colleagues — as a Minister in the Interim Government. It would be the first job in the North for C.R., now almost 68.
The Ministry — formally still described as the Viceroy’s Executive Council — also included Nehru, who though designated Vice-President functioned as a de facto Premier, Patel, Prasad, Asaf Ali, Sarat Bose and Jagjivan Ram from Congress, two independent Muslims, Shafaat Ahmed Khan and Syed Ali Zaheer, and — to represent, respectively, Sikhs, Christians and Parsis — Baldev Singh, John Matthai and C.H. Bhabha.
Nehru, who kept External Affairs, and Patel, the Home Minister, inaugurated with this Interim Government the efficient, often uneasy and at times tense duumvirate that governed India from the summer of 1946 to the end of 1950. They offered Finance to C.R., who however asked for a lighter burden. He got the portfolio of Industry and Civil Supplies. In his journal the Viceroy wrote that C.R. would ‘obviously be a considerable addition to the debating and administrative strength’ of the cabinet.14
Technically, these former rebels against the Raj were now Ministers under the Viceroy, and so appointed, on HMG’s recommendation, by the King himself. In fact, however, they owed their seats of power to the lead of another man. On three successive days C.R. called on Gandhi, who was staying in one of Delhi’s sweepers’ settlements. His lieutenants moved into the Raj’s abodes.
The house that C.R. was allotted was the first on Clive Road, named after one of the Raj’s founders. A stone’s throw from the Viceroy’s House, it was a comfortable dwelling with a garden. Namagiri and Narasimhan accompanied C.R. into it.
Patel had invited C.R. to move into his house on Aurangzeb Road. Both were widowers needing for the first time to live in Delhi. A shared house might offer practical advantages. But C.R. declined the offer. He could not afford to be seen as belonging to the Sardar’s ‘camp.’ Over the years he had been closer to Patel than to Nehru, but the latter two now needed a neutral colleague.
Yet C.R.’s rapport at this juncture with Patel is noteworthy. ‘There are many things to talk to you,’ Patel had written at the end of August. He wanted C.R. to ‘think out . . . the plan that we may have to follow on the first sitting of the Constituent Assembly’ and help ‘evolve a rough scheme of the provincial constitution and also of the Union Constitution that we may like to push through.’
On another occasion Patel wrote: ‘We will have to discuss . . . the election of the next President as a sequel to the expected resignation of Pandit Nehru [and] about allocation of portfolios also . . . You must be here at that time without fail.’
C.R. had proposed to Patel the inclusion in the Cabinet of Ghaffar Khan, whom he called ‘a sturdy and straight representative of the NWFP.’ When Patel learned of the delay in C.R.’s arrival in Delhi, he wrote: ‘New intricate problems and difficulties arise every day and we have to face them without your help or advice. The sooner you come the better.’
On his part, C.R. acknowledged, in a letter to Patel, the latter’s role in Congress’s acceptance of 16 May: ‘The violence of Mr Jinnah’s chagrin is the measure of the wisdom of our decision at a critical moment. It is all due to your firm and thoughtful stand.’15 Sadly, the violence of the months that followed would call into question this unqualified praise of Congress’s decision of 25 July.
Three days after C.R. was sworn in, the dark-green Plymouth assigned to C.R. was shot at while it turned into Curzon Road (now Kasturba Gandhi Marg) from Connaught Circus. Fortunately C.R. was not in the car, having alighted some minutes earlier and climbed up to his daughter Lakshmi’s second-floor flat on Connaught Circus. The bullet, fired from the rear, pierced the hood of the boot. The assailant was not identified.
‘If you want to see Jinnah, I cannot prevent you.’16 This was Nehru’s response to the Viceroy when, on 11 September, Wavell told him of his intention to invite the League into the Interim Government. Jinnah told the Viceroy that the League would come in but not commit itself to 16 May, the Constituent Assembly or a Union. Wavell did not object: if Congress could come in without accepting compulsory grouping, why fetter the League?
This time — at last — the Viceroy disallowed a League veto on a Congress Muslim in the Council. Jinnah’s reply to this was to include a (Hindu) Scheduled Caste leader from Bengal, J.N. Mandal, among his nominees. The League leader kept himself out: he would not function under Nehru.
One Congress Minister, Sarat Bose, and two independent Muslims, Ali Zaheer and Shafaat Ahmed Khan, were dropped to make room for the League’s nominees, who numbered five as against the six from Congress that remained.
Wavell pressed the Congress to let the League have the Home portfolio, but Patel made it plain that he would rather resign than give up Home. As a solution, Finance, held by Matthai, was offered to the League. C.R., who said that Matthai could have Industry instead, found himself as Education Minister.
The League’s team, led by Liaqat Ali Khan, who took the Finance portfolio, acted from the start as a parallel government, ignoring Nehru’s status as the Council’s Vice-President. The ‘coalition government’ was openly a house at war. Ispahani, Jinnah’s ‘personal envoy’ in America, said at the end of October: ‘The League’s participation . . . only means that the struggle for Pakistan will now be carried on within as well as without the Government.’17
Invited by HMG to London, Nehru, Jinnah and Liaqat defended their conflicting interpretations of the 16 May document there. Thereafter, on 6 December, a Cabinet Declaration pronounced in the League’s favour: provinces had to join their Groups and abide by the constitutions that Groups made for them.
However, Jinnah was still not willing to accept 16 May or join the Constituent Assembly. As a result, Congress demanded the League’s ouster from the Interim Government. The deadlock was complete. And passions were fierce.
On 20 February 1947, HMG made a historic move. Attlee announced that Britain would ‘transfer power . . . by a date not later than June 1948’ to ‘some form of Central Government . . . or in some areas to the existing Provincial Governments’ or in other ‘reasonable’ ways. As for the princely states, the Raj’s Paramountcy would end with the transfer of power; the successor government(s) could not automatically claim it. The Premier added that Wavell would leave and be succeeded by Lord Louis Mountbatten.
As Gandhi pointed out in a letter to Nehru, the Declaration afforded scope for ‘Pakistan for those provinces or portions which may want it.’18 In London, Churchill denounced the ‘shameful flight’ and ‘premature, hurried scuttle’ he saw in the Declaration, but the House of Commons backed Attlee.
If Britain seemed ready to contemplate India’s independence and partition, Congress’s will to resist partition was weakening. If the deadlocked Cabinet was an indication of what was in store in a united India, was the latter worth fighting for? C.R., Patel or Nehru could not propose an appointment or a transfer without encountering a demand from the League that the Viceroy should decide.
Three days before the Attlee announcement, Patel told Wavell that he was ‘quite prepared to let the Muslims have the Western Punjab and Sind and NWFP if they wished to join, and Eastern Bengal.’19
HMG’s word that independence might in some cases go to provinces ignited a struggle for their control. Already running Bengal and Sind and able to count on Baluchistan, the League mounted a campaign to obtain the Punjab and the NWFP as well, and to bring down Assam’s Congress Ministry.
Targeted as a stooge of Islam’s enemies, Khizr Hyat Khan resigned the Punjab Premiership on 2 March. The next day, the Governor asked the Khan of Mamdot of the League to form a new Ministry, whereupon the leader of the Sikhs, Master Tara Singh, exhorted Sikh youths to act.
Different private armies now took to arms. Killings began, Mamdot was dismissed, and the Governor took over, but within days at least a thousand had been killed in riots in Rawalpindi and elsewhere in the Punjab.
On 8 March the Congress Working Committee, inclusive of C.R., Nehru and Patel, met in New Delhi and proposed — without inviting or consulting Gandhi, who was in Bihar — the partition of the Punjab. In effect, Congress was conceding Smaller Pakistan.
Wavell left India on 23 March. A man of few words, he did not like the idea of a divided India, but his greater dislike of Congress ascendancy made him sympathetic towards the League. Yet C.R. was prepared to acknowledge, in a farewell letter, the ‘justice, firmness, patience and ability’ with which the retiring Viceroy had ‘worked for an honourable settlement.’20 Wavell’s Journal shows that his talks with C.R. often went past politics to history and literature.
Cripps had considered coming out as Wavell’s successor. His wife Isobel, stopping in New Delhi in December on her way home from a visit to China, asked C.R. for his advice. Replying frankly that Nehru continued to lack confidence in Cripps, C.R. discouraged the idea.21
The Crippses accepted the advice — and persuaded the Mountbattens to succeed the Wavells. A General was followed by a handsome, well-connected Admiral with enormous natural abilities as a diplomat.
Since HMG had fixed the June 1948 deadline and given Mountbatten plenipotentiary powers, Indian politicians took care not to offend him. Mountbatten realized, too, that by then Congress would not resist partition. Patel and Nehru were frank with him about their disillusionment with the ‘coalition’ Government. On 11 April C.R. told him that ‘a unified India could not be imposed by force’ and that attempts to do so ‘could lead to civil war.’ But he asked for a provision for reunion if partition was decided upon, and for some common arrangements — C.R. had not forgotten his Formula!
This was a line that Jinnah had steadfastly opposed, and even Nehru and Patel now wanted a swift, clean, total cut. As for Gandhi, he made one final, unexpected move to preserve Indian unity.
Arriving in Delhi from Bihar, he proposed to Mountbatten and the Congress Working Committee that Jinnah be invited to form a government for India as a whole. We saw that C.R. had made an identical ‘sporting offer’ in February 1940. But now, along with the rest of the Working Committee, he opposed the idea. In a terse entry in an engagements diary, C.R. wrote on 13 April: ‘Gandhiji’s ill-conceived plan of solving the present difficulties’ was ‘objected to by everybody and scotched.’22
We know from a letter from the Mahatma to Mountbatten that one Working Committee member, Ghaffar Khan, did support the plan. The rest, including C.R., thought that Jinnah no longer merited the offer. Gandhi’s last throw was in vain.
The Mountbatten Plan now took shape. It laid down that India, the Punjab and Bengal would be divided. Both India and Pakistan would be Dominions. The princely states would have the right to join either Dominion or stay out: HMG’s Paramountcy would end. Congress realized that accepting Dominon Status would increase New Delhi’s leverage with potentially troublesome princely states, and elicit the goodwill of the British officials, civil and military, still serving in India. Through Kripalani, who had succeeded Nehru as President, the Working Committee assented to the Plan.
Jinnah was hardly enthusiastic about a truncated Pakistan but nodded his acceptance after Mountbatten told him th
at ‘the only alternative was to keep India completely united.’23 On the night of 3 June, Nehru on behalf of Congress, Jinnah for the League and Baldev Singh for the Sikhs aired their acceptance on the radio. On 15 August India would be free and divided.
When the AICC met in the middle of June, Gandhi asked for an endorsement of the Working Committee’s decision. His lieutenants — Nehru, Patel, C.R., Prasad, Azad, Kripalani, Pant and others — had not heeded him but he was not going to defy them: apart from the fact he had built much into them and shared their struggle for thirty years, he did not see a team that could replace them.
In his speech before the AICC, Nehru said that the Mountbatten Plan had been anticipated by what Rajaji had proposed in 1942-44. Patel said that the Plan would give them ‘70 to 80 percent’ of India, after the ‘removal of a poisoned limb.’ By 157 votes to 29, 32 remaining neutral, the AICC ratified acceptance. C.R. did not speak to the AICC, but in an article for the Hindustan Times (22.6.46) he claimed:
We offered this to Mr Jinnah three years ago. We have not agreed to anything which Gandhiji had not freely offered to Mr Jinnah then. ‘Why then has Mr Jinnah agreed [now]?’ . . . Let us drop all this analysis . . . There is no other part of the world where four hundred million are furnished with a single democratic state.
Though the Mountbatten Plan was not quite the Rajaji Formula under another name — unlike the Formula, the Plan envisaged no formal bonds between India and Pakistan —, Khaliquzzaman, the League leader, would ask in 1961 why the Formula was turned down if ‘it was the intention of Mr Jinnah to agree to a truncated Pakistan.’24
More than territory was being split. The division of the country’s civil servants, defence forces, institutes, records and a variety of assets and liabilities had to be worked out. It was a prodigious task, largely accomplished by officials, but politicians too played a helpful part. Along with Patel and Prasad, C.R. was a member of the Partition Council formed for the purpose: Jinnah, Liaqat and Nishtar sat opposite.
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