Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  There was a third, more radical faction in Congress, which took particular exception to the 1928 constitution. This was led by Subhas Chandra Bose, an upper-class Bengali Hindu, again educated at Cambridge and who had passed into the Indian Civil Service, as that august body started to accept more Indians, but refused to actually serve in its ranks. Bose was virulently anti-British, believing that ‘only on the soil of sacrifice and suffering can we raise our national edifice’.15 He opposed Gandhi’s policy of non-violence and agitated for more direct action. Building up a power base in Calcutta, where he was mayor in 1930, he campaigned against Gandhi who did his best to prevent him gaining influence. Like Nehru he travelled widely in Europe, visited Ireland, learned about leading revolutions against Britain from Michael Collins and the IRA and, like all Congress leaders, spent a fair proportion of the 1920s in jail.

  The 1935 Government of India Act, the longest piece of parliamentary legislation on the British statute book, was seen by some in Congress as offering a way forward but by others, such as Nehru and Bose, as inadequate, with Nehru describing it as a ‘new charter of slavery to strengthen the bonds of imperialist domination’.16 They did, however, decide to work within it although they remained determined to ‘combat it and seek the end of it’.17 Congress agreed to contest the ensuing 1937 elections. Their subsequent success and the emergence of a strong ‘Congress Centre’, which gave direction to the various Congress provincial governments, offered India that brief period of stability she enjoyed before the start of the war. It also taught men like Nehru and Patel, intelligent students of how the Raj had managed to exercise total control across India with only the slenderest of resources, the importance of maintaining a tight central grip on power in Delhi. Looking back to the original ‘Reserved Subjects’ of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, and later seeing how the Raj managed both the military and the economy during the coming war, they realised that a country as diverse as India, with its many different nationalities and languages, would only work when they were finally in government if they held the key levers of the administration – defence and security, foreign affairs, communications and finance. It was a lesson that was to make Congress very wary of federalisation to the extent that partition would come to be seen as preferable to power sharing.

  Tensions in Congress remained, with Bose getting himself elected as president much to Gandhi’s disapproval in 1938, and arriving to assume his position in a chariot pulled by fifty-one bulls, reinforcing his strong Hindu and nationalist credentials as well as his tendenecy to the dramatic, but it was the outbreak of war that imposed the more serious strain on party unity. Despite Linlithgow’s arbitrary declaration of war, and the resignation of the Congress ministries, Gandhi and Nehru were initially supportive of the war aims, even more so once Hitler invaded Russia. Nehru saw it as a just war against fascism but wanted India to participate as a nation that had been promised independence rather than as part of the British Empire.

  Bose on the other hand, and ‘the extreme end of Congress believed they should do some sort of deal with the Japs’. They saw the war as an opportunity.18 Although he was elected a second time as Congress president in 1939, Gandhi managed to secure the position for Nehru. Bose was anyway put under house arrest for encouraging civil disobedience in reaction to Linlithgow’s declaration. In early 1941 he escaped and, travelling via Afghanistan and Russia, reached Berlin. Here he started the Indian Legion of prisoners of war captured by German troops in North Africa. Its members had to swear allegiance to both Hitler and Bose himself and it would later form part of the Waffen-SS. However, Bose correctly sensed richer pickings in Asia, and reasoned that by joining forces with the Japanese he could threaten British India. Transferring by submarine to Tokyo, in 1943 he founded the Indian National Army (INA). The INA was never effective as a military force, and Bose himself was killed in an air crash in 1945, but its legacy lived on not just in the very public trials, which demanded Wavell’s attention in February 1947, but also in Bose’s own radical followers in Congress.

  The Japanese victories of 1942, the failure of the Cripps mission and Congress frustration at extracting any guarantee of post-war independence led, as we have seen, to the Quit India movement of August 1942 and the subsequent imprisonment of the Congress leadership. For nearly three years, Nehru and the key Congress leaders had been incarcerated, only being released in June 1945 as Allied victory seemed certain. Gandhi’s imprisonment had ended a year earlier in May 1944 because Wavell was worried he would die after one of his periodic hunger strikes. Their conditions in prison were comfortable enough, with free association. It was one of the curious aspects of the British relationship with Congress that the Raj would try to make their confinement as civilised as possible; Gandhi himself was held in one of the Aga Khan’s palaces near Poona. On their release he insisted on the long-suffering Vallabhbhai Patel accompanying him to a natural health clinic to have his spastic colon treated. Yet they had still been denied their freedom at a critical time when Jinnah was consolidating the position of the Muslim League. Confronted within two months of their release by the King’s Speech, which at last promised a real opportunity of realising their goals, Congress needed quickly to re-establish the initiative.

  By 1946, although it was as near the universal voice of the Hindu majority as it could be, V. P. Menon looked at Congress as three distinct factions.19 First there was Gandhi, the spiritual inspiration, and while now not involved in daily politics still hugely influential and capable of taking his own line as he had done over civil disobedience in 1921 and Quit India in 1942. Gandhi’s view on partition was, however, uncompromising. He saw India as an indivisible unity where it did not matter whether people were Muslim, Christian or Hindu. It was a laudable but ultimately unrealistic position. Wavell, who could never see him as anything other than ‘an inveterate enemy of the British’ was relieved that in February he was conducting ‘village meanderings in East Bengal, where he reminds me of a submarine re-charging its batteries on the surface well away from any hostile craft’.20 Then there were the hard, pragmatic nationalists, epitomised by men like Patel. They wanted a rapid, complete transfer of power that preserved a strong centre. They understood the depth of communal rivalry and by February 1947 were beginning to realise that partition might just be acceptable if it let Congress govern. They were ‘for working with HMG [His Majesty’s Government] on the Cabinet Mission Plan’ thought Wavell, as the best option currently on the table to achieve that.21 They were also ‘strongly influenced by the Capitalists’ and Wavell thought that Patel lived ‘in the pocket of one of them – G. D. Birla’.22

  Thirdly, there was Nehru and the socialists, equally as determined to get on with self-government, but who continued to see India in economic and social terms. Religious creed was also unimportant to them but for different reasons to Gandhi. While Nehru was centre left, there was a more extreme ‘left wing’, led by ‘Jai Prakash Narain and Sarat Chandra Bose, brother of the now deceased Subhas, who were ‘anti any co-operation with the British at all’.23 On the far right of the nationalist movement were the more extreme Hindus who would accept no compromise with the Muslims and who were epitomised by the paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or the RSS. They would soon make their mark, but in the early months of 1947 they were too disorganised and lacked influential support.

  Despite these groupings, which were not formalised, the ‘quixotic, emotional, socialistic’ Nehru, as Wavell described him to Mountbatten,24 was the undisputed leader and although his relations with Patel were worsening, and would ultimately lead to a very public break, that was in the future. Nehru also still regarded Gandhi as his father figure, however much he may have been exasperated by him, consulted him frequently and respected him deeply. Gandhi in his turn promoted and protected Nehru, likewise beginning to turn against Patel, becoming increasingly critical of his interventions and ‘firing off venomous letters’ to him, despite his paternal concern for his insides.25 Nehru was also vice preside
nt of the Executive Council in the Interim Government established the previous September and Minister of Foreign Affairs; Patel, the practical realist, held the Home Affairs portfolio, Rajendra Prasad, who would evolve to be one of the key influences on the Congress high command, was responsible for agriculture and Rajagopalachari for education. A Sikh, Baldev Singh, whom Wavell thought ‘rather a light weight’26 was defence minister while the highly respected ‘very sensible, level-headed and quite imperturbable’27 Liaquat Ali Khan, the League’s representative, was in charge of finance. Mighty as these ministerial portfolios were, there were two central issues that dominated all their thinking: how to make the British actually hand over power and how to do so without partitioning India into Hindu and Muslim blocs.

  The answer to the first question was not long in coming. In an increasingly fractious correspondence in the first three weeks of February 1947, Wavell, Pethick-Lawrence and Attlee struggled to agree on a way forward. It was clear to everyone that the League’s withdrawal from the Constituent Assembly had left that body dead; Congress had followed up Jinnah’s announcement by demanding that the League withdraw its members from the Interim Government.28 Wavell now reverted to his earlier suggestion, which the Cabinet had considered carefully, of Britain simply stating that she would leave India on a given date whatever the state of internal politics. Wavell set out his argument in a minute to London on 3 February. ‘Since HMG has refused to accept my proposal for a phased withdrawal’, he started, rather peevishly, before going on to say that ‘we no longer have any real power to control events’ and that ‘if we stay we may become involved in a situation like Palestine’. He said that the final departure date should be linked to the final withdrawal of British troops, harking back to the still-prevalent fear of mass violence against Europeans, the 80,000 still present, and that it should be in the last quarter of 1948.29 Wavell had still not at this stage received Attlee’s letter sacking him; on the very day he was writing this minute, his successor, Mountbatten, was already asking Attlee to put Cripps into the India Office and planning his own staff.30

  Wavell’s mood predictably did not improve when Attlee’s letter finally arrived. ‘You are causing me to be removed’, he remonstrated to him, ‘because of what you term a wide divergence of policy. The divergence, as far as I see it, is between my wanting a definite policy for the interim period and HMG’s refusing to give me one’.31 Yet Attlee was now working towards the very policy Wavell had been advocating. On 8 February he showed Mountbatten a draft with a withdrawal date of 30 June 1948, earlier than Wavell had suggested but still in line with his overall recommendation. Wavell saw the draft on 10 February and it was circulated around the provincial governors. Their reaction was not encouraging. Sir Frederick Burrows, the Governor of Bengal, said that ‘announcement of a definite departure date could lead to widespread unrest and disorder’; Sir Evan Jenkins, the Governor of the Punjab, agreed.32 Wavell now did something really very odd, even allowing for his poor relations with Whitehall. He wrote back to Attlee saying that he had changed his mind and that he did not think there should be an announcement of a firm date after all. It is hard not to sympathise with Attlee’s reply, as angry as the stilted protocol of government correspondence allows, pointing out that it was Wavell who first encouraged the government to adopt such a policy ‘yet we are now faced by the opinions of provincial governors that publication will be likely to cause grave disturbance if not civil war’.33 ‘Your views’, added Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, ‘have placed us in a most difficult position. The proposal to announce a definite date for the withdrawal of British authority was an essential feature of your original plan’.34

  Attlee ignored Wavell. On 20 February he made a statement to the House of Commons announcing that Britain would leave India by a date not later than June 1948. He also announced that Mountbatten would take over from Wavell as viceroy.35 The initial reaction in India was euphoric. ‘The British Government has at last seen the light and taken a historic decision’ triumphed the Hindustan Times although more soberly it went on to say that ‘The Muslim League and Mr. Jinnah are now face to face with reality’. Predictably the League’s paper, Dawn, took the opposing view saying, ‘It is a rebuff to Congress . . . HMG will now have to enter into agreements for Muslim majority areas with the Muslim League’ and that ‘Muslims welcome the declaration as it justifies their position that the Constituent Assembly was invalid’.36,37 Nehru said that the announcement was a ‘wise and courageous one’38 and the Nawab of Bhopal, Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes, said that, ‘The [Princely] States now have their chance of playing a vital role in helping to construct the new India’ although he went on to say, more circumspectly, that the announcement should ‘bring home to people . . . the stark realities of the situation which faces them’.39

  However upbeat the Hindustan Times and Dawn may have been, and however welcome the change in the attitude to the British, the situation across India by late February showed that it was Bhopal who was the most prescient. The announcement of 20 February was indeed historic and had answered the first of the two great issues that confronted Congress. The question now was how to answer the second and to do so within sixteen months. While the Raj, Congress and the League debated and argued, India slowly continued to burn.

  Reviewing the returns from the provinces on 12 February, the staff at Viceroy’s House noted that in the United Provinces, the ‘UP’, robbery had increased by 56 per cent in the last year, murder by 47 per cent and dacoity, that peculiarly Indian form of violent assault, up 60 per cent. Wavell wrote to London to tell them that of the British ICS officers who still ran fourteen of the nineteen key departments of the government, three had resigned and seven had applied for long leave.40 Francis Tuker noted that in Bengal there had been a dramatic increase in the underground arms trade with both Hindu and Muslim communities frantically buying weapons. Revolvers in the port city of Chittagong were now selling for up to £50 and rifles £60.41 Tuker was particularly irritated with the American forces who had been stationed in Bengal during the war and had been very careless in disposing of their surplus ammunition. Much of it would be used to kill in the coming months.

  In Lahore the Sikh Aridaman Singh Dhillon recalled that he was now told not to play with Muslim children at school. Local politicians went round stirring up their respective communities. It was not hard. ‘Distrust was already there. It had been there for centuries’, Dhillon added. Som Amand, a Lahore Hindu, remembered: ‘My mother’s attitude – she didn’t allow a Muslim to enter her kitchen’.

  Zahoor al Din, a Muslim wrestler, said that when he went to drink water the Hindus wouldn’t let Muslims use their glasses; they ‘considered us as more untouchable than the untouchables’.42 Bir Bahadur Singh, a Sikh from near Rawalpindi, thought the way his community treated Muslims was shaming. He had been taught by a Muslim woman, and thought that

  when we needed them they were always there to help, yet when they came to our houses we treated them so badly . . . If a Musalmaan was coming along the road, and we shook hands with him, and we had, say, a box of food or something in our other hand, that would then become soiled and we could not eat it; if we were holding a dog in one hand and food in the other, there’s nothing wrong with that food . . . how can it be that two people living in the same village, and one treats the other with such respect and the other doesn’t even give him the consideration due to a dog?

  Bir Bahadur would pay horribly for those slights by his community.43 Now the prospect of the British leaving and uncertainty as to what would happen to the Punjab was beginning to expose these deep-seated grudges. ‘The Sikhs are greatly agitated over what is happening . . . they cannot contemplate a Muslim League dominated Punjab’, wrote Baldev Singh to Wavell on 6 February.44 The British governor, Sir Evan Jenkins, agreed. ‘It is’, he thought, ‘quite impossible for one community to rule the Punjab within its present boundaries’.45

  Meanwhile the Wavells were preparin
g to leave India. Attlee’s letter was not only a professional blow but its timing was also personally inconvenient. The Wavells’ daughter was due to get married on 20 February and 800 guests had been invited to Viceroy’s House. Wavell asked Attlee to delay the handover. ‘You can hardly have failed to appreciate the inconvenience and expense which you are causing me and to the whole of my large personal staff . . . I hope I shall be given until the second week in March to avoid the indignity as well as the inconvenience of a scuttle.’46 The handover was eventually settled for safely after the wedding, on 23 March. Wavell and Mountbatten knew each other well and corresponded amicably enough, despite Wavell’s hurt. Mountbatten wrote to him on 18 February saying he ‘was absolutely staggered when [Attlee] told me that the Cabinet wanted me to succeed you’, which was slightly tongue in cheek as Mountbatten had in fact known since December and had been negotiating details with Attlee ever since.47 Wavell had already sent his congratulations and went straight into the important detail: ‘Horses we will keep for you. Grandee is still here and I have one nice horse but they are getting difficult to come by. Do you want saddlery?’48

  But the last weeks in Viceroy’s House were not happy ones. Wavell told Auchinleck privately that ‘he had been dismissed as if I were a cook’.49 ‘What a shabby way of treating a great man who gave the best years of his life to the service of the State’, thought Shahid Hamid, Auchinleck’s Muslim ADC who kept a diary throughout the year.50 At the private dinner party he gave for his staff, Wavell typically summed up his feelings by quoting some lines of poetry: