Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  It was a three-tier structure. At the top was the ‘union of India’ embracing the entire country, including the princely states, to deal with three subjects: foreign affairs, defence, and communications. The middle tier was that of provinces grouped as (i) Madras (now Tamil Nadu), Bombay (split into Maharashtra and Gujarat), Bihar, the Central provinces (now Madhya Pradesh), and Orissa; this was the Hindu-majority group; (ii) Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, and Sind; this was the western Muslim-majority group; and (iii) Bengal, Assam; the eastern Muslim-majority group. Each of these groups was to be autonomous and frame its own constitution for all subjects apart from defence, foreign affairs, and communications. After elections under the new constitution, any province, if its legislature so decided, could leave any group in which it had been placed. The bottom tier was that of princely states. They were treated as provinces which could join either India or Pakistan or stay independent. The Parsis declared in a statement that despite their differences, they would stay with the Congress on the question of India’s freedom.

  The Mission rejected the suggestion of ‘partitioning’ Punjab and Bengal on the ground that it would be ‘contrary to the wishes of a very large proportion of the inhabitants of these provinces’, and that it ‘would of necessity divide the Sikhs’. Strangely, a few months later, Lord Mountbatten, repudiated this thesis while partitioning the two provinces, although Nehru was equivocal on this point at some stage.

  The Muslim League accepted the Mission’s proposal on 6 June as ‘the compulsory grouping of the six Muslim provinces’ was considered ‘the basis and the foundation of Pakistan’. Khurshid, Jinnah’s secretary, told me that Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission plan ‘honestly’ and admonished his critics in the League who wanted nothing but Pakistan. However contradictory, Jinnah wanted a Muslim state within undivided India.

  The Congress endorsed the plan on 26 June 1946 but interpreted the grouping of provinces to mean that they ‘shall make their choice whether or not to belong to the group in which they are placed’.

  The reservation on the part of the Congress sounded the death knell for the proposal. After its ratification by the All-India Congress Committee on 6 July 1946, Nehru, who had by then taken over the party’s presidency from Azad, said his party would be free to suggest in the constituent assembly modifications to the proposal. He hinted at changing both the grouping of provinces and the powers given to the Centre. He was echoing the fears of Gopinath Bardaloi, then Assam’s chief minister, who did not want Assam to stay in Group Three in which Muslims were in a majority.

  Azad differed with Nehru’s interpretation. He regretted having resigned from the Congress presidency, which he described, in Gandhi’s words, as a Himalayan blunder. Azad realized that he should have given his charge to Sardar Patel who would have implemented the Cabinet Mission plan. Azad stressed that it was incorrect to assume that the Congress was free to modify the proposal as it pleased. According to him, the Congress could not unilaterally change the grouping of provinces and the Central subjects without the consent of the other parties to the agreement.

  When the matter was referred to the Mission’s members, Pethick-Lawrence said that the parties could not go outside the terms in the constituent assembly. Cripps explained that a province could opt out of its particular group after elections had been held under the new constitution. The British government suggested that the matter could be referred to the Federal Court of India to advise on the Congress interpretation that a province need not join a group from the very outset. The Congress rejected London’s proposal.

  Jinnah reacted sharply and blamed Nehru for repudiating the grouping of provinces and the limited Centre, the ‘basic form’ on which the scheme rested. He made the All-India Council of the Muslim League change its earlier resolution by rejecting the proposal. He accused the Mission of ‘bad faith’ and the Congress of a ‘pettifogging and haggling attitude’. When I met Azad many years later, he held Nehru responsible for Jinnah’s reversal. In chaste Urdu, Azad said: ‘Woh tala jo kabhi khul nahin sakta tha Nehru ne uski chabi Jinnah ke hath main de di [Nehru gave to Jinnah the key of the lock which could not be opened].’

  In any event, Jinnah was chafing over the results of the elections to the constituent assembly which had given the League 76 seats as against 292 to the Congress. There was, however, nothing he could do as the scheme was based on electing one member for every million of the population. This gave Hindus a head start given their greater numbers. Jinnah had yet another grievance: The Mission shelved the formation of an interim government at the Centre. Here, he was himself to blame because he had insisted that Muslim members should be from the Muslim League alone.

  The pluralistic Congress claiming to represent the nation as a whole could not agree to this demand. However, it accepted that the cabinet should have an equal number of Hindu and Muslim ministers. I wish the Cabinet Mission plan had borne fruit, this being the only way of keeping India united. Defence, foreign affairs, and communications with the Centre would have ensured a federal structure with the states enjoying autonomy. I apprehended that after Partition the two countries would treat each other as enemies, given the estranged relations between Hindus and Muslims. These fears were not unfounded.

  The Congress assured the League that any major legislation would require the support of a majority of Muslims in the Central legislature. This was yet another undertaking to assure the Muslims that their voice in a united India would be crucial. The proposal did not, however, appeal to Jinnah who was looking for an opportunity to withdraw his support to a scheme suggesting togetherness. Observations made by the Congress, particularly Nehru, that the constituent assembly could amend the Mission’s recommendations gave Jinnah an opening to forcefully renew his demand for Pakistan. He realized that the constituent assembly would have a preponderant Hindu majority.

  Jinnah gave a call for Direct Action, not against the British but as a show of strength on the part of Muslims as the Congress had treated their demand with ‘defiance and contempt’. He argued the Congress was not willing to accept even the proposal conceding only a ‘limited Pakistan’. This was false propaganda because the Congress had come round to accepting the Cabinet Mission plan, but after raising doubts that made Jinnah wary. That might have been why, when Mountbatten offered a partition proposal a year later and asked Jinnah whether he would accept some links with India, he said: ‘I do not trust them now.’

  When asked whether Direct Action would be violent or non-violent, Jinnah said: ‘I am not going to discuss ethics.’ Direct Action was undertaken only in Calcutta and that too merely for a day (16 August 1946). The Muslim League government in Bengal declared a public holiday on that day, despite warnings and protests by the Opposition. The League organized a ‘grand rally’ over which Chief Minister Shaheed Suhrawardy himself presided. Bands of Muslim League National Guards forced their way into Hindu areas and asked for subscriptions, sometimes as much as Rs 1,000. Returning from the rally, the League’s National Guards began looting Hindu shops for not paying subscriptions or not responding to the League’s call for a hartal on that day. Hindus and Sikhs were attacked and the entire event appeared to have been pre-planned.

  Soon Calcutta was engulfed in a communal riot, with Hindus and Sikhs retaliating against Muslims. Parts of the city were reduced to rubble. Over 5,000 people lost their lives in less than three days in what came to be known as the ‘great Calcutta killing’, a phrase coined by the Statesman, the influential British-owned newspaper. Jinnah laid the blame on the Cabinet Mission, the Congress, and Gandhi. Surprisingly, Jinnah found no fault with his National Guards who had pledged themselves before the carnage ‘to strive for the achievement of Pakistan and glory of the Muslim nation’. The Statesman laid the blame on the British governor and Chief Minister Suhrawardy. ‘Arson, looting, murder, abduction of women, forced conversions and forced marriages are everywhere and by every investigator spoken of as the characteristics of lawlessness.’

&nb
sp; Such large-scale killing and looting should have been a warning to Jinnah that the tension between the two communities had reached dangerous levels. A haystack of hatred was just waiting to be lit. When Jinnah came to Law College in 1945 in Lahore where I was in my second year and was part of the audience he addressed, I told him we would jump at each other’s throats after the departure of the British. This was before the Direct Action Day. He disagreed with me and said some nations had killed millions of each other’s nationals and yet an enemy of today was a friend of tomorrow. ‘That is history.’ He told me how France and Germany had fought for hundreds of years, ‘But today they are best friends. We shall be friends,’ he assured me.

  I knew he was wrong and could envisage what would happen once the British left. Surprisingly, Jinnah did not see things that way. I asked him another question. If a third country attacked India, what would be Pakistan’s response? He said the Pakistani soldiers would fight side by side with Indian soldiers to defeat the assailants. ‘Young man, remember blood is thicker than water,’ he said, another statement that proved to be false.

  Before the great Calcutta killing, the viceroy had revived the proposal to constitute an interim government at the Centre as the Cabinet Mission had suggested. The Congress had accepted it and had joined the Viceroy’s Council. The League, which had rejected it, now indicated its willingness to join. The Council was reorganized on 15 October to include the League’s nominees.

  Stories in the press told us that the presence of both the Congress and the League ministers in the central government had not in any way improved relations between Hindus and Muslims. I could see the killings in Calcutta had set in motion riots in Bihar, UP, Punjab, and elsewhere. With the communal virus contaminating the lower echelons of the administration, including the police, controlling the riots had become still more difficult. Over the years, the number of British officials considered ‘neutral’ had decreased because there had been no British recruitment to the civil services in India since 1939 when the Second World War broke out. Even those who were in India were losing interest as they could see the end of the Raj.

  Thousands died in the riots. The British government was so perturbed over the disastrous events that it asked the viceroy to prepare a secret plan for withdrawal. The plan, appropriately called, ‘Mad House’, was for the evacuation of British troops and British civilians by March 1948, beginning the process from southern India.

  London was concerned over Jinnah’s call to the League members not to take their seats in the constituent assembly which was to meet in Delhi from 9 December. A final effort was made to get both the Congress and the League to participate in its proceedings. Nehru, Jinnah, Liaquat Ali, and Baldev Singh, the Sikh minister at the Centre, were invited to London on 3 December. The meeting ended in a fiasco. After three days in London, Nehru returned home disappointed. It was clearer to him than ever before that His Majesty’s Government would not withdraw from India unless the Muslim League joined in framing the new constitution, and the former made no secret of this.

  That meant that even if the constituent assembly were to declare India a sovereign republic, the British would not be bound by the decision if the Muslim League did not concur. This took the wind out of the Congress sails as the party had announced that the constituent assembly was a sovereign body. How then could it give the veto power to London or the League?

  The Congress went ahead and elected the constituent assembly. At a public meeting on 15 December in Banaras, Nehru said: ‘We have not entered the constituent assembly in order to place our decisions on a silver plate and dance in attendance on the British Government for their acceptance.’ The Objective Resolution he moved in the constituent assembly stated: ‘The Constituent Assembly declares its firm and solemn resolve to proclaim India an independent sovereign republic and to draw up for her future governance a Constitution.’ The Muslim League boycotted the constituent assembly but continued to remain in the interim government, its only way of forming a part of the administration. Nehru complained to Archibald Wavell, the penultimate viceroy of India, that the League could not be part of a government which it was committed to oppose. Patel publicly declared that if the League members were to remain in the interim government, the Congress members would resign.

  Even otherwise, the experiment of the interim government was not working in spirit to bridge the distance between the Congress and the League. Nehru was exasperated because only a united government could give support to an independent foreign policy, build a strong defence apparatus, and formulate a plan for economic development. What persuaded Nehru and Patel to accept Partition was not Jinnah’s arguments, but the unworkability of the joint interim government. The two Congress leaders were convinced that India would not be able to move forward if the ‘intransigent’ League was yoked with the Congress at the wheel. On 13 February, Nehru formally wrote to the viceroy demanding an immediate dismissal of the Muslim League members. There was no response.

  Wavell could see the division of India coming. He prepared a scheme for Partition and sent it to London. This came in handy when India was actually divided. Anxious, Attlee announced the replacement of Wavell with a new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten.

  Attlee did something else. On 20 February 1947 he announced that the British would quit after transferring power to Indian hands ‘by a date not later than 6 June 1948, whether as a whole to some form of central government for British India or in some areas to the existing provincial government, or in such other way as may seem most reasonable and in the best interests of the Indian people’. The future the of princely states would be decided after the date of the final transfer was finalized.

  Cripps’s elaboration in the British parliament was: ‘We could not accept the forcing of unwilling provinces into a united India,’ implying that the creation of Pakistan in some form was on the cards. This was not acceptable to the Congress, but it could also see that the Pakistan of Jinnah’s dream would not be possible because the party would insist on dividing Punjab and Bengal. After Attlee’s announcement, Nehru told Krishna Menon, who was heading the freedom movement in London, that a truncated Pakistan would hardly be worthwhile for Jinnah who might join the Indian Union on ‘special terms’.

  Nehru personally approached Liaquat Ali Khan, Jinnah’s second-in-command, pleading that they should not speak to each other ‘from a distance’ because the British were fading out. Liaquat did not respond. In the meantime, Mountbatten replaced Wavell who went unsung. Azad was one of the few who appreciated Wavell’s efforts and wrote him a letter of appreciation, which was disapproved by other Congress leaders.

  Mountbatten, while still in London, felt that there was ‘no escape from Pakistan’ after meeting the Mission leaders and Attlee. He told me this when I interviewed him in 1971 for my book Distant Neighbours. He said he had not even heard of Pakistan until the offer of viceroyship was made to him. By the time Mountbatten arrived in New Delhi on 23 March 1947, the Congress and League ministers in the interim government were thoroughly sick of each other, the League thwarting the Congress at every turn. It was in the government yet against it.

  Unwittingly, the Congress was itself responsible for the situation. At the time of the interim government’s reconstitution, following the League’s decision to join, Wavell had indicated that either home or finance, preferably the former, should go to Jinnah’s men, but Patel, who was then home minister, did not want the intelligence department and the police to go to the League. Patel said he would rather quit the government than give up the ministry. Azad, however, favoured handing it over to the League.

  Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, a senior nationalist Muslim leader, who later became India’s most successful food minister, said that finance was such a technical subject that the League itself would say ‘No’ when it was offered. Little did the Congress leaders realize that Chaudhary Mohammed Ali, a brilliant Muslim officer in the finance ministry at that time, had secretly contacted the League and assured its leaders that he
would make the Congress rue the day when it parted with finance.

  This proved to be true. Every proposal of every government department had to go to the finance ministry for funds. So much so, that the Congress ministers could not appoint even a petty clerk without the sanction of the ministry. Patel, who himself had preferred home to finance, felt so exasperated that he began saying openly that it was far better to divide India than to face a situation where the Congress was paralysed. The League pressed its advantage hard by presenting a central budget on 28 February 1947 which, while appearing to reflect some of Nehru’s progressive thinking, hit the Hindus hard because they were comparatively rich. When the Congress protested against a particular section of people being ‘purposely’ targeted, the League retorted that the Congress was upset because industrial houses like the Birlas and the Tatas, which had contributed money to its coffers, were affected.

  For Mountbatten, this was an ugly situation at the start of his innings. He, however, felt gratified that the Congress party was so exasperated that it was willing to accept ‘anything’ to be independent of the League. Patel was the most disgusted. Mountbatten saw the prospects. He appointed V.P. Menon, then the reforms commissioner and a close confidant of Patel, to his staff. Menon’s job was to remain in touch with Patel and report on how his mind was working.

  ‘Wavell committed the mistake of bypassing Patel, but we depended on him, and that explains why we succeeded,’ Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mountbatten’s press secretary, told me years later in London. ‘Patel conveyed to Mountbatten through Menon that whatever they wanted to sell to Nehru they should do it through him [Patel].’ Indeed, it was Patel who helped Mountbatten (through Menon) evolve the Partition plan. The viceroy could never imagine that Partition, like a ripe apple, was ready to be plucked. He wanted to test the waters.