Inglorious Empire

by Shashi Tharoor

  Part of the problem at the time may well have lain in a profound miscalculation on Nehru’s part about the true intentions of the British. Cut off by imprisonment from the political realities of world affairs, Nehru came to Simla believing (as he asserted to Phillips Talbot) that perfidious Albion was still trying to hold on to her prized imperial possession by encouraging division amongst the Indian parties. Talbot felt that Nehru had simply not realized that Britain was exhausted, near bankrupt, unwilling and unable to despatch the 60,000 British troops the government in London estimated would be required to reassert its control in India. London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to ‘cut’ the country quite literally before running. Nehru, still imagining an all-powerful adversary seeking to perpetuate its hegemony, and unaware of the extent to which the League had become a popular party amongst Indian Muslims, dealt with both on erroneous premises. ‘How differently would Nehru and his colleagues have negotiated,’ Talbot wondered, ‘had they understood Britain’s weakness rather than continuing to be obsessed with its presumed strength?’ The question haunts our hindsight.

  When the Simla Conference began on 9 May 1946, Jinnah who was cool but civil to Nehru refused to shake hands with either of the two Muslim Congressmen, Maulana Azad or Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan; he wished to be seen as the sole spokesman of Muslim India. Nonetheless, when the Cabinet Mission proposed a three-tier plan for India’s governance, with a weak centre (limited to defence, external affairs and communications), autonomous provinces (with the right of secession after five years) and groups of provinces (at least one of which would be predominantly Muslim), the League accepted the proposal, even though it meant giving up the idea of a sovereign Pakistan.

  The viceroy, without waiting for the Congress’s formal acceptance of the scheme, invited fourteen Indians to serve as an interim government. While most of the leading Muslim Leaguers and Congressmen were on the list, there was a startling omission: not a single Muslim Congressman had been invited to serve. The Congress replied that it accepted the plan in principle, but could not agree to a government whose Muslim members were all from the League. Jinnah made it clear he could not accept anything else, and the resultant impasse proved intractable. The Cabinet Mission left for London with its plan endorsed but this dispute unresolved, leaving a caretaker viceroy’s council in charge of the country. Ironically, its only Indian member (along with seven Englishmen) was a Muslim civil servant, Sir Akbar Hydari, who had made clear his fundamental opposition in principle to the idea of Pakistan.

  Meanwhile, the problem of the Cabinet Mission’s proposed government remained to be addressed. Both Congress and the League had accepted the plan in principle; the details were yet to be agreed upon. Nehru, newly restored to the presidency of the Congress, chaired a meeting of the AICC in Bombay at which he rashly interpreted Congress’s acceptance of the plan as meaning that ‘we are not bound by a single thing except that we have decided to go into the Constituent Assembly’. The implications of his statement were still being parsed when he repeated it at a press conference immediately afterwards, adding that ‘we are absolutely free to act’. Nehru stated specifically that he did not think the grouping of provinces, so important to the League, would necessarily survive a free vote. An incensed Jinnah reacted by withdrawing the League’s acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan.

  Nehru was widely blamed for his thoughtlessness in provoking the end of the brief hope of Congress–League cooperation in a united Indian government, even on the League’s terms. But even had Nehru held his tongue in July 1946, it is by no means clear that a common Congress–League understanding would have survived. Azad had been willing to relinquish the claims of Muslim Congressmen to office in the interests of unity, but the party as a whole was not prepared to concede the point to Jinnah. In stating that the grouping of provinces was not immutable, Nehru was echoing the letter of the Plan if not its spirit. (The League could have been accused of doing the same thing when it declared that the Plan gave it the basis to work for Pakistan). To see him as wrecker-in-chief of the country’s last chance at avoiding partition is, therefore, to overstate the case. As his biographer M. J. Akbar put it, ‘Pakistan was created by Jinnah’s will and Britain’s willingness’—not by Nehru’s wilfulness.

  On 8 August 1946, the Congress Working Committee, bolstered by the admission of fresh faces appointed by the new president (including two relatively youthful women, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur), declared that it accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan with its own interpretations on issues of detail. But this was not enough to bring Jinnah back into the game. Nehru met with him (at Jinnah’s home in Bombay) to seek agreement on an interim government, but Jinnah proved obdurate: he was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared 16 August 1946 as ‘Direct Action Day’ to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta. The police and army stood idly by: it seemed the British had decided to leave their former imperial capital to the mob. Three days of communal rioting in the city left death and destruction in their wake before the army finally stepped in. But the carnage and hatred had also ripped apart something indefinable in the national psyche. Reconciliation now seemed impossible.

  Yet a week later Wavell and Nehru were discussing the composition of an interim government for India, to consist of five ‘Caste Hindus’, five Muslims, a Scheduled Caste member, and three minority representatives. They agreed that Jinnah could nominate his representatives but could have no say in the Congress’s nominations including, in principle, of a nationalist Muslim. Though the League was still deliberating about whether to join, an interim government of India was named, and its Congress members sworn in, on 2 September 1946. Nehru, in a broadcast on 7 September, saw this as the culmination of a long struggle: ‘Too long have we been passive spectators of events, the playthings of others. The initiative comes to our people now and we shall make the history of our choice.’

  But the British remained supportive of the League and of its government in Bengal, which had allowed the horrors of Direct Action Day to occur. ‘What is the good of our forming the Interim Government of India,’ Nehru wrote indignantly to Wavell about conditions in Bengal in the wake of the Calcutta killings, ‘if all that we can do is to watch helplessly and do nothing else when thousands of people are being butchered…?’ But he went too far in insisting upon visiting the overwhelmingly Muslim, though Congress-ruled, North-West Frontier Province. The British connived in League-organized demonstrations against him at which stones were flung and Nehru was bruised. More importantly, the fiasco suggested that Nehru, as a Hindu, could never be acceptable to the province’s Muslims as a national leader.

  Meanwhile, British pressure on Congress to make more concessions to Jinnah in order to secure the League’s entry into the interim government prompted Gandhi and Nehru to relinquish voluntarily their right to nominate a Muslim member. This had been a deal-breaker for Jinnah, and he now seemed ready, in discussions with Nehru, to find a compromise. But after their talks had made headway, Jinnah once again insisted that Congress recognize the League as the sole representative of Indian Muslims. Nehru refused to do this, saying it would be tantamount to a betrayal of the many nationalist Muslims in Congress, and a stain on his own as well as the country’s honour. The viceroy thereupon went behind the Congress’s back and negotiated directly with Jinnah, accepting his nominations of Muslims as well as of a Scheduled Caste member. On 15 October, the Muslim League formally announced that it would join the interim government.

  But the League had done so only to wreck it from within. Even before its nominees were sworn in on the 26th, they had made speeches declaring their real intention to be to work for the creation of Pakistan. The League’s members met by themselves separately prior to each Ca
binet meeting and functioned in Cabinet as an opposition group rather than as part of a governing coalition. On every issue, from the most trivial to the most important, the League members sought to obstruct the government’s functioning, opposing every Congress initiative or proposal. Meanwhile, the party continued to instigate violence across the country; as riots broke out in Bihar in early November (with Gandhi walking through the strife-torn province single-handedly restoring calm), Jinnah declared on 14 November that the killing would not stop unless Pakistan was created. The British convened talks in London in December to press the Congress to make further concessions to the League in order to persuade it to attend the Constituent Assembly. Nehru, still burned by the reaction to his Bombay press conference, was at his most conciliatory, but Jinnah saw in the British position confirmation that his party’s fortunes were in the ascendant, and escalated his demands. To Nehru it seemed the British had learned nothing from the failure of the policy of appeasement in Europe in the 1930s.

  The Constituent Assembly met as scheduled on 9 December, without League participation, but was careful not to take any decisions that might alienate Jinnah. Nonetheless, on 29 January 1947, the Muslim League Working Committee passed a resolution asking the British government to declare that the Cabinet Mission Plan had failed, and to dissolve the assembly. The Congress members of the interim government in turn demanded that the League members, having rejected the Plan, resign. Amid the shambles of their policy, the British government announced that they would withdraw from India, come what may, no later than June 1948, and that to execute the transfer of power, Wavell would be replaced.

  Into the midst of this stalemate came His Excellency Rear Admiral the Right Honourable Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas, Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, KCG, PC, GMSI, GMIE, GCFO, KCB, DSO, the outgoing Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia. A blue-blooded patrician of royal lineage (Queen Victoria was his great-grandmother and he was therefore the reigning monarch’s cousin), Mountbatten was also vain, charming, superficial and impulsive. ‘I’ve never met anyone more in need of front-wheel brakes,’ his own Chief of Staff, General Ismay, admitted.

  Sadly, such brakes were what India needed, as it plunged headlong into disaster.

  Two Surrenders: The British Give Up and the Congress Gives In

  It was now increasingly apparent even to Nehru that Pakistan, in some form, would have to be created; the League was simply not going to work with the Congress in a united government of India. He nonetheless tried to prod leaders of the League into discussions on the new arrangements, which he still hoped would fall short of an absolute partition. By early March, as communal rioting continued across northern India, even this hope had faded. Both Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Nehru agreed that, despite Gandhi’s refusal to contemplate such a prospect, the Congress had no alternative but to agree to partitioning Punjab and Bengal; the option of a loose Indian union including a quasi-sovereign Pakistan would neither be acceptable to the League nor result in a viable government for the rest of India. By the time Mountbatten arrived on 24 March 1947 the die had been cast. It was he, however, who rapidly ended the game altogether.

  Mountbatten later claimed he governed by personality, and indeed both his positive and negative attributes would prove decisive. On the one hand he was focused, energetic, charming and free of racial bias, unlike almost every one of his predecessors; on the other, he was astonishingly vain, alarmingly impatient, and easily swayed by personal likes and dislikes. His vicereine, Edwina, was a vital partner, one who took a genuine interest in Indian affairs. Theirs was a curious marriage, marked by her frequent infidelities, which he condoned, and it has been suggested that her affection for Nehru played a part in some of his (and Mountbatten’s) decisions relating to Indian independence. There is no question that Nehru and Edwina indeed became close, but it does not seem likely that this had any political impact.

  Meanwhile, the breakdown of governance in India was gathering pace. Communal violence and killings were a daily feature; so was Jinnah’s complete unwillingness to cooperate with the Congress on any basis other than that it represented the Hindus and he the Muslims of India. The British gave him much encouragement to pursue this position: the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, the pro-League Sir Olaf Caroe, was unconscionably pressing the Congress government of this Muslim-majority state to make way for the League, since its continuation would have made Pakistan impossible.

  As the impasse in the interim government continued, Mountbatten and his advisers drew up a ‘Plan Balkan’ that would have transferred power to the provinces rather than to a central government, leaving them free to join a larger union (or not). The British kept Nehru in the dark while Plan Balkan was reviewed (and revised) in London—all the more ironic for an empire that liked to claim it had unified India. When he was finally shown the text by Mountbatten at Simla on the night of 10 May, Nehru erupted in indignation, storming into his friend Krishna Menon’s room at 2 a.m. to sputter his outrage. Had the plan been implemented, the idea of India that Nehru had so brilliantly evoked in his writings would have been sundered even more comprehensively than Jinnah was proposing. Balkanization would have unleashed civil war and disorder on an unimaginable scale, as provinces, princely states and motley political forces contended for power upon the departure of the Raj.

  A long, passionate and occasionally incoherent note of protest from Nehru to Mountbatten killed the plan. But the only alternative was partition. In May, Nehru saw the unrest in the country as ‘volcanic’: the time had come for making hard and unpleasant choices, and he was prepared to make them. Reluctantly, he agreed to Mountbatten’s proposal for a referendum in the North-West Frontier Province and in the Muslim-majority district of Sylhet, gave in on a Congress counter-proposal for a similar approach in regard to Hindu-majority districts of Sindh, and most surprisingly, agreed to Dominion status for India within the British Commonwealth, rather than the full independence the Congress had long stood for.

  As long as the British gave Jinnah a veto over every proposal he found uncongenial, and as long as they were about to give up the ghost, there was little else Nehru could do but give in to Partition. Nor is there evidence in the writings and reflections of the other leading Indian nationalists of the time that any of them had any better ideas. The only exception was Mahatma Gandhi: Gandhi went to Mountbatten and suggested that India could be kept united if Jinnah were offered the leadership of the whole country. Nehru and Patel both gave that idea short shrift, and Mountbatten did not seem to take it seriously.

  There is no doubt that Mountbatten seemed to proceed with unseemly haste, picking a much earlier date than planned—15 August, a date he chose on a whim because it was the date he had accepted the Japanese surrender as Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia—and that in so doing he swept the Indian leaders along. Nehru was convinced that Jinnah was capable of setting the country ablaze and destroying all that the nationalist movement had worked for: a division of India was preferable to its destruction. ‘It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals,’ Nehru told his party, ‘though I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right course.’ The distinction between heart and head was poignant, and telling.

  On 3 June, Nehru, Jinnah, and the Sikh leader Baldev Singh broadcast news of their acceptance of partition to the country. The occasion again brought out the best in Nehru: ‘We are little men serving a great cause,’ he said. ‘Mighty forces are at work in the world today and in India… [It is my hope] that in this way we shall reach that united India sooner than otherwise and that she will have a stronger and more secure foundation… The India of geography, of history and tradition, the India of our minds and hearts, cannot change.’ But of course it could change: geography was to be hacked, history misread, tradition denied, minds and hearts torn apart.

  Nehru imagined that the rioting and violence that had racked the country over the League’s demand for
Pakistan would die down once that demand had been granted, but he was wrong. The killing and mass displacement worsened as people sought frantically to be on the ‘right’ side of the lines the British were to draw across their homeland. Over a million people died in the savagery that bookended the freedom of India and Pakistan; some 17 million were displaced, and countless properties destroyed and looted. Lines meant lives. What Nehru had thought of as a temporary secession of certain parts of India hardened into the creation of two separate and hostile states that would fight four wars with each other and be embroiled in a nuclear-armed, terrorism-torn standoff decades later.

  Gandhi was not the only one to be assailed by a sense of betrayal. The Congress government in the North-West Frontier Province, let down by the national party, chose to boycott the referendum there, which passed with the votes of just 50.49 per cent of the electorate (but nearly 99 per cent of those who voted). Mountbatten, who had seen himself serving for a while as a bridge between the two new Dominions by holding the governor-generalship of both, was brusquely told by Jinnah that the League leader himself would hold that office in Pakistan. The outgoing viceroy would therefore have to content himself with the titular overlordship of India alone.

  Amidst the rioting and carnage that consumed large sections of northern India, Jawaharlal Nehru found the time to ensure that no pettiness marred the moment: he dropped the formal lowering of the Union Jack from the independence ceremony in order not to hurt British sensibilities. The Indian tricolour was raised just before sunset, and as it fluttered up the flagpole a late-monsoon rainbow emerged behind it, a glittering tribute from the heavens. Just before midnight, Nehru rose in the Constituent Assembly to deliver the most famous speech ever made by an Indian: