Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  It was in this last week of April that Congress ‘explicitly denied Jinnah’s ultimate hopes; this was the decisive reversal, not Mountbatten’s froth and fury’, nor the endless carefully worked drafts flowing from V. P. Menon’s pen. ‘The price of keeping the Muslim provinces inside the union had to be a weak federal centre incapable of controlling any of its provincial arms.’58 This was unacceptable to the Congress High Command. Congress had decided that Pakistan should therefore be an independent state and that British India should be partitioned. It was a state which they thought would not last, and one with which some key functions could be shared, such as defence, but one that needed to be established so that they could govern. ‘It was Congress that insisted on partition.’ It was Jinnah who was against it.59

  5. MAY

  PLAN AND COUNTER PLAN

  ‘The proposals would only encourage chaos and disorder. The transfer of power would be obstructed by a mass of complications and by the weakness of the central government and its organs’

  (JAWAHARLAL NEHRU)

  By the beginning of May the heat in Delhi was oppressive, almost unbearable. Nehru was ‘overworking to the point of a breakdown’1 and becoming very difficult. Krishna Menon, out in Delhi specifically, so he told the viceroy, ‘in the hope of being of use to him personally as a friend’,2 asked Mountbatten to take him away on holiday. In a very public speech in Gwalior, Nehru had said that the Princely states must either join the Constituent Assembly or be considered ‘as hostile’.3 It was not helpful, nor what Nehru meant as he subsequently clarified. Mountbatten himself was tired. He had been working seventeen-hour days since he arrived and also had to continue the round of normal viceregal entertaining and ceremonial. Viceroy’s House was constantly busy with dinners and receptions, and he was amused to hear one Raj old-stager complain of Lutyens’s great palace that ‘it makes me absolutely sick to see this house full of dirty Indians’.4 Mountbatten estimated that during their viceroyalty he and Edwina Mountbatten had 15,000 people to dinner and 12,000 to lunch,5 although this does seem like an awful lot.

  The heat and the uncertainty were affecting Calcutta as badly. Congress leader M. N. Saha complained to Rajendra Prasad on 4 May that there was ‘no law and order, people are being murdered in broad daylight’. One Muslim organisation, he maintained, was paying 25 rupees for every Hindu killed and 15 rupees for every one injured. In the border areas outside the city Hindus had to abandon their homes. Several prominent men had been murdered. Dr Abani Nath Sarkar, son of the highly respected historian and ex-vice chancellor of Calcutta University, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, was stabbed by an assassin on the footpath near the church at Dhurmatollah Esplanade at 6.00 p.m. in full daylight and many people watching. Sir Jadunath felt the shock so much that ‘he has aged considerably and his life has been shortened’.6

  The Hindi Rashtra Seva Dal, not the most militant of the militias, ‘since all they taught in most places was squad drill, P.T., the control of crowds and the preservation of order’, was recruiting vigorously.7 It is amazing anyone joined up, since the initial syllabus demanded recruits master twenty-four different drill movements, including ‘Dressing at Intervals’, but sign up they did so that by May the Bombay branch had 56,868 members.8 Arms continued to flow into Calcutta, many taken from the American dump at Kanchrapara before the army had cleared it. There was continuing violence on the railways and riots at Dacca University where Muslim students demonstrated at the rustication of one of them for allegedly pushing a Hindu girl. On 15 May, they demonstrated again, this time rather less seriously, walking out of their exams as they said the questions were too hard.

  More serious unrest was developing in Gurgaon, in south-east Punjab, and only twenty miles from Delhi. Today it is very close to the new Indira Gandhi airport. The minority Muslim Meo tribe was being harassed by the Hindu Jats, who greatly outnumbered them. It was clear that, however the Punjab was divided, the Meos, living so far from the main Muslim areas, could not hope to be in Pakistan. They were seen as fair game by the Jats and

  arson, looting and killing has been going on over a wide area. Trouble had been developing since February when a false report that a Hindu boy had been stabbed by a Muslim led to riots in the major Gurgaon town of Rewari but came to a head in April when a Hindu mob burned the Meo village of Khori Kalan. Normally the villagers ran away when the mob approached but this time they were surprised and had no time to run. Twenty-six were burned to death, including women and children. In retaliation the Meos burned seven Hindu villages.9

  Then ‘Jat mobs numbering up to 30,000 now began to besiege Muslim villages, destroy the houses and then kill the inhabitants’.10 It sounded very similar to the Rape of Rawalpindi two months previously, only this time it was the Muslims who were the victims. Even in Delhi the violence was rising; twenty-two people had been killed on the streets in April with sixty-seven injured.11

  In Viceroy’s House a team had been put together under Ismay, consisting of George Abell and Eric Miéville, to turn V. P. Menon’s initial draft into a fully worked up plan. Ismay left to take this to London to get Cabinet agreement on 2 May. The plan had been formed as a result of the many meetings with Indian political leaders, the governors’ conference and the pressure that was growing daily to move the process forward before India imploded. Ismay sent it to Mountbatten on 25 April with a covering note that warned that British authority was ‘in the process of liquidation. If we stick to the last date and the last hour, we shall probably find the country in turmoil and a measure of responsibility for this state of affairs will be attributed to HMG’.12

  What was properly known as ‘A Plan for the Demission of Power’,13 V. P. Menon’s Plan Balkan was so called because it was seen to divide India into a series of loosely correlated states, and accepted some degree of partition but in a way that still allowed considerable leeway for the provinces to choose. Each province would elect their own Constituent Assembly, which would appoint an Executive Council. His Majesty’s Government would hand power over to these councils who could then choose to join the existing Constituent Assembly in Delhi, in other words to be part of Hindustan, as India was then still referred to, or to join a new Constituent Assembly for Pakistan. There would be a joint council with equal numbers of representatives from Hindustan and Pakistan, presided over by a governor general and which would decide on the three ‘reserved subjects’ of defence, foreign affairs and communications. The armed forces, which the plan accepted had to be divided, would answer to the commander-in-chief and the governor general via their respective Executive Councils thus preserving operational coherence. The idea behind this was optimistic. The plan envisaged that it would take both Hindustan and Pakistan four to five years to frame their respective constitutions during which time it was felt that ‘so many matters would require joint agreements that they may ultimately come round to the view that an impassable barrier cannot be created between the two Indias and that after all a unified constitution is better for all concerned’. It was to prove a vain hope but it was very much the spirit in which Ismay and Abell would portray it.

  The plan was based on Madras, Bombay, United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa and the Central Provinces and Berar all choosing to be part of Hindustan. In Bengal and the Punjab the existing assemblies would be asked to sit in two factional parts. In Assam ‘territorial constituencies’, including Sylhet, would be invited to sit separately. It was confirmed that there would be a plebiscite in the North West Frontier Province. The Sind, the new assembly in the North West Frontier Province and the split assemblies in Bengal, the Punjab and Assam would then be invited to elect representatives on an agreed quota and vote on whether their provinces should be divided. Thereafter, dependent on the results, representatives of the provinces or subsequent half provinces would be asked to decide which Constituent Assembly they wished to join or act on their own. The Princely states would also be free to join whichever Constituent Assembly they chose.

  It was, on the surface, a masterpie
ce of Indian Civil Service drafting. The issue was then how far it should be cleared with the Indian political leaders before Ismay took it to Attlee. The intention had been to do so but Mountbatten, always conscious of maintaining support in London, thought that the Westminster Cabinet should see it first. In the end it was agreed to show it just to Nehru and Jinnah. Miéville took it round to them while Mountbatten was away in Peshawar. Whereas Jinnah ‘protested strongly against the partition of the provinces and demanded the immediate dissolution of the [existing] Constituent Assembly’,14 Nehru appeared to be content with it apart from the provision for fresh elections in the North West Frontier. Whether he was just tired, with too much on his mind, or whether the fact that it was Miéville who briefed him rather than Mountbatten himself, Nehru evidently did not take in, or chose not to take in, the importance of what he was being told. In fact on 1 May he wrote to Mountbatten asking why he had not seen the draft Ismay was taking to London, emphasising again that Congress would accept partition although he did not go as far as saying that they were now actually planning on it.15 No one seems to have reacted to that letter, evidence again of an overworked staff with too much to do. What Ismay was even then about to brief in Whitehall would be irrelevant without Congress support. The realisation that they now controlled merely the process, while Congress made policy, had not yet dawned on the Raj.

  On 1 May, Mountbatten told Attlee, referring to the violence that would inevitably accompany partition, that his staff were discussing the troop deployments necessary to ‘nip such trouble immediately in the bud’.16 Yet the military staff in Delhi, and Auchinleck himself, appeared to be more concerned with the appalling prospect of dividing their beloved Indian army between Hindustan and Pakistan. On 3 May, Auchinleck appointed Major General Irwin, the Deputy Chief of the Indian General Staff, to head a committee charged with doing so. Armies exist to do the bidding of their governments and of the taxpayers who pay for them; they should not adopt a persona of their own, thinking that they are in some way separate from or above the political system that sustains them. Yet this is exactly what the Indian Army had done for decades and which now, when it would be needed more than ever to maintain law and order, it allowed to become all-consuming.

  To be fair to it, the Indian Army was a particularly complicated and sensitively adjusted body, which had previously partly achieved its mission, historically preventing unrest within India, through its communal, or ‘class’, organisation. Until 1939 it had remained, despite its distinguished performance in the First World War, a child of the Mutiny, and as the body the Raj looked to for protection against riot and revolution and any chance of the terrible events of 1857 being repeated. It measured its operational effectiveness partly by how it maintained law and order on the Frontier, where it was organised into specific task forces for the purpose, and partly by its ability to fulfil its communal recruiting quotas. The measures taken after the Mutiny were still largely in place in 1939. The army favoured recruiting from what it thought as the ‘martial races’. Consequently just over half its soldiers, 55 per cent, came from the Punjab, being about 20 per cent Sikh and 35 per cent Punjabi Muslims. Of the remaining 45 per cent, 10 cent were Dogras from Jammu and Kashmir, about 8 per cent Hindu Jats, 7 per cent Pathans from the Frontier, 6 per cent Hindu Rajputs, with 4 per cent Mahrattas from Bombay and 3 per cent from Madras.17 There were very few Bengalis, who were believed, incorrectly, to be militarily unreliable. D. K. Palit, a Bengali who would end up as a major general, ‘was surprised I got into the Army. Bengalis were always seen as anti-Brit’.18 Taken together, the Punjab and the Frontier, which represented just 7.5 per cent of India’s population, accounted for around 60 per cent of her army. This was seen as manifestly unfair by those outside the favoured provinces, given that the army provided good salaries, pensions and grants of land to veterans.

  The system of recruiting specific ‘classes’ to companies and squadrons also persisted, so that a regiment might have one company of Punjabi Muslims, one of Sikhs and one of Hindus. Frequently whole sub-units would come from a particular caste or tribal group. Recruiting, usually in the hands of retired soldiers in a locality, would favour particular families and villages. This was popular with the regiments as they had a trusted source of manpower and one that was fairly effortless to find but it was also both unfair and inflexible when mass recruitment was required. This had been the case in 1914 and again in 1939. Officers remained predominantly British although ‘Indianisation’ was slowly increasing. In 1923 two cavalry regiments and six infantry battalions had been selected as guinea pigs to have Indian officers. In 1932 an Indian military academy was established at Dehra Dun. Lastly British troops continued to be ‘brigaded’ with Indian regiments, a system that lasted until the outbreak of war.

  By the end of the 1930s not only was the ‘martial races’ policy being questioned but the governments in both London and Delhi were wondering whether the Indian Army was really producing value for money, consuming, as it did, approximately 26 per cent of the Indian national income. Why was such a large army still required to maintain law and order and to police a frontier that seemed to have stabilised at a routine level of violence? In 1938 the government in London asked Admiral Sir Ernie Chatfield to assemble a committee of experts to report on the defence of India. The resulting Chatfield Report recommended an urgent review of that ‘Forward’ policy, whereby military effort was concentrated on the Frontier and said that instead India should focus on strategic threats from the east and on the security of her sea lanes.19

  The Chatfield recommendations, prescient as they were to soon prove, were almost immediately overtaken by events. Between 1939 and 1945 the army increased from 120,000 to nearly 2 million men, with 15,700 Indian officers, and the old class recruiting system was found to be inadequate.20 Many new recruits now came from what had been thought of as ‘non-martial’ classes, with full regiments being raised from Madras, Bihar, Assam and from caste groups previously thought unmilitary. By proving itself conclusively as a fighting force in Burma the army showed that the previous structure was an anachronism. Nevertheless, bizarrely, as early as 1943 Churchill was asking for confirmation that the ‘martial class’ composition was not being diminished too far, requiring Auchinleck to reply that the ‘Teeth Arms’, the fighting arms of the armoured corps and infantry, were still predominantly ‘pure’.21 What made this intervention even stranger was that the Royal Indian Navy and Royal Indian Air Force operated a system where all ‘classes’ and creeds were inextricably mixed.

  In 1945, with the Japanese defeated, the issue the army had to resolve was how it should structure itself for the future. It obviously had to reduce in size and by 1947 it was down to 561,000,22 but how should it now recruit and for what roles should it be trained? Auchinleck appointed a committee under Lieutenant General Sir Henry Willcox, until recently commander-in-chief of Central Command, to examine this. There was criticism that the committee was not headed by an Indian but it was an interesting group, which included both Brigadier Enoch Powell, later to become a well-known British politician, and Brigadier K. M. Cariappa, who would become India’s first post-independence commander-in-chief. They recommended, strongly, reinstating the old ‘class’-based system, arguing that even by 1945 there was an obvious risk in bringing new and untried classes such as Bengalis into the army.23 By mid-1947 much of the army was therefore reorganised along its old class lines, despite the fact that very few of its pre-war officers, who had been its principal advocates, remained in regimental posts.

  Many thought the old army had gone with the war. Veterans like Evan Charlton remembered the pre-war army as a family affair. Recruiting tours in the Punjab were almost a triumphal procession. As the regimental party approached they would be met by a band and escorted to the centre of the village where there would be a white cloth on a table and a bottle of whisky. The officers and non-commissioned officers would talk about old times while the young recruits, the sons and cousins, were produced and marc
hed off to join the Colours, giving their families status and income. It was not, Charlton thought, ‘so much an army – more a way of life’. The soldiers certainly engendered a unique and special loyalty to each other, the regimental spirit which meant so much. ‘The loyalty and bravery of the Indian Army was quite unique’, Charlton thought, ‘they were prepared to die on a battlefield fighting for something in which they had no vested interest themselves’.24

  The army was certainly seen as glamorous and exciting, the stuff of the tales of Indian life that captured the imagination of schoolboys at home. The comedian Spike Milligan was brought up in military camps as his father was an artillery officer. The picture of the colourful parades and ceremonial stayed with him all his life.

  O God the picture! The elephant batteries came on six in a line, with their leather harness all polished up and the regimental banner was hung on the forehead of the lead one – the one in the middle. The mahouts wore a striped turban, and they used to come on with a drum beat, and they got those elephants to put their trunks up all together as they went past the stand of course to a storm of applause. And of course band music was always playing – as one faded into the distance a fresh one came on so there was an endless conveyor belt of music and colour and all this dust rising up from the maidan. It looked like a dream picture – something through a strained gauze curtain – marvelous. It was only after the war when they tried to mechanise these regiments one realised it had all been a dream. It was something that would never, never come again.25