Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  But what was the post-war army there for? Throughout all the reviews that had taken place, from the 1938 ‘Modernisation’ Committee,26 to Chatfield and to the 1945 restructuring, the role that was consistently prioritised remained internal security. The 1938 report looked at the requirements for ‘the maintenance of law and order in the event of widespread disaffection’, recommending a force of a minimum of fifteen British battalions and twenty-five Indian battalions or equivalent be held as a reserve. Chatfield went further. It examined how India could fight an external war while simultaneously dealing with ‘widespread civil unrest’. It identified the most likely areas for trouble as being the Frontier, the Punjab and Calcutta. It recommended increasing the forces to be held against these contingencies to twenty-one British battalions but reduced the Indian requirement to fourteen; the report’s authors, which included Auchinleck, discussed these numbers in detail with the relevant provincial governors. Critically they recommended that the British forces should now be grouped separately in mobile brigades.27

  For British soldiers stationed in India life was less glamorous. Before the war, their role, unless they were lucky enough to be sent to the Frontier, was simply to be there and they became very bored. There was no privacy, no social life, living in barrack rooms, being restricted to the barracks, with its canteen and cookhouse, no contact with women, not much training and just endless drill, kit cleaning and parades. The scheduled castes did their menial jobs for them in exchange for a few annas and most remembered spending hours and hours asleep on their beds trying to escape the dreadful heat. They still carried their rifles into church with them on Sundays just in case there was another mutiny. Many could never get over the poverty that surrounded them. Denis Lambert, a cavalry officer serving in Hyderabad in 1935, would always remember the locals being allowed as a privilege to take home the rats they found in the stables to feed their families, and that the children would go through the horse dung with their teeth to pick out the undigested ears of grain.28

  In 1945 many of the regiments that had fought in Burma with the 14th Army stayed on in India; the battalions of the Royal Norfolk Regiment, the Yorks and Lancs and the East Lancashire Regiment who restored order to Calcutta in August 1946 had all been in Burma the previous year. Although the longest-serving soldiers had already been sent back home under the scheme known as ‘Operation Python’, many soldiers who had been posted to their units more recently were still serving and keen to now be demobilised. Although post-war life for the soldiers in India was marginally better than it had been before 1939, it was still boring, hot and unattractive. It did not help much when, on 12 May, with consummate timing, the War Office decreed that canteen concessions and free airmail for British troops were being withdrawn.29

  In 1946 the Army headquarters held an exercise called ‘Embrace’ to ascertain exactly how the military might deal with widespread civil unrest; it looked specifically at moving units quickly to trouble spots in the event of ‘open insurrection’ and a breakdown of law and order. Much of this was still geared to the protection of Europeans. Then in August 1946 Tuker’s Eastern Command had intervened to stop the Great Calcutta Killings. They had used a mixture of British and Indian troops for this. Much of the security work was carried out by the British infantry, but they worked alongside Indian battalions such as the Rajputs, in other words soldiers from another part of India. They had also used the Gurkhas, the Nepalese battalions which formed such a major part of the Indian Army; by 1947 there were 32,440 of them serving in twenty-seven battalions. Six of these were deployed overseas but twenty-one battalions were available for public order duties in India.30 Although mostly Hindus, the Gurkhas were considered non-partisan.

  Early in 1947 Auchinleck’s staff assembled the lessons the military had learned from the previous year and published a comprehensive all India ‘Internal Security Instructions’. These took the 1938 and Chatfield recommendations, the results of Embrace and Tuker’s reports and turned them into an overall plan. This specified a series of strongpoints linked by mobile patrols, minimising the former but maximising mobility so that troops could cover as much country as possible. Special plans were made for the security of the railways. Detailed proposals were included for the Punjab. The old Rawalpindi, Lahore and Meerut districts were to be closed down and a new headquarters established in Lahore responsible for the Northern Command area. Brigades were to be stationed in Rawalpindi, Lahore, Ambala and Ferozepore. A similar plan was made for Calcutta. Armoured trains were to be kept, not to be regarded ‘as moving forts but as a means of moving quickly and safely from point to another’. There followed detailed instructions for how to ensure protection of vulnerable trains and the troops required to do so. The lines considered most at risk, and for which protection was carefully thought out, were the main Frontier routes from Delhi via Ambala, Julundur, Lahore and Rawalpindi to Peshawar and from Delhi to Landi Khana. The mobile British brigade groups, of which there were six totalling 30,000 men, together with 33,500 of the Royal Indian Air Force, of whom 11,273 were British, were considered vital to these operations.31

  Despite all this work, the strong warnings coming from Sir Evan Jenkins in the Punjab that in the event of partition a force of at least four divisions would be needed, Caroe’s call for extra troops for the Frontier and the experience of Sir Frederick Burrows and Sir Francis Tuker of using British and Indian troops together successfully in Bengal, Auchinleck now seemed fixated by the impossibility of dividing an army that was already organised to some extent on communal grounds and whose raison d’être was precisely the job the governors were demanding it should do. No wonder Mountbatten became frustrated. The anachronistic view that British troops were only there to protect Europeans remained prevalent among some of the senior staff, a continuing hangover from the Mutiny. This would soon have very serious consequences.

  Much as the military authorities played down the effect of the Indian National Army, the relative ease with which it had managed to recruit soldiers from among Indians taken prisoner by the Japanese and from the Indian civilian population in Burma had been unsettling. Militarily the INA never posed any serious threat. Allied intelligence staff rated the effectiveness of an INA brigade, about 5,000 men, at the same as a Japanese company, about 70 men. Neither did the Japanese take them seriously, some commanders regarding them as little more than a nuisance. Captain Shah Nawaz Khan was an officer in the 1/14th Punjab Regiment who went over to the INA when he found himself in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. He was captivated by Bose and ended up as a senior INA commander. He kept a diary during his service. He was ‘very disappointed at the type of work our soldiers have to do and their treatment by the Japanese’. He complained to his Japanese superior that his men were being treated as little more than labourers. On 4 July 1944, four Garhwalis died of starvation as they had not received any rations. Khan complained to Major Hikari Kikon but he did not seem to have taken the least notice. By 15 July, the men were beginning ‘to die like flies, with some committing suicide’ but the Japanese gave no help. In fact their answer to the shortage of rations was that ‘our sick men at Terraun should commit suicide’.32 All the time Bose was proclaiming that ‘our long awaited march to Delhi has begun and with grim determination we shall continue that march until the tricolor national flag that is flying over the Arakan mountains is hoisted over Viceregal Lodge and until we hold our victory parade at the ancient red fort of Delhi’.33

  When the Japanese tried to mount a clandestine mission to infiltrate some INA men back into India to stir up unrest, it was a fiasco. In April 1943 nineteen men were put on trial in Madras who had been landed in rubber boats from a Japanese submarine. They had been trained in the Japanese espionage school at Penang. All nineteen said they had been bribed to undertake the mission and had no intention of doing any spying once they had landed; they just wanted to get home. All had been working as civilians in Burma before the war rather than being prisoners of war. They had landed at night at Tanur
on the Malabar Coast beside a Muslim village but as it was during Ramadan the whole village was awake and eating. Their cover story, that they were on a pleasure trip from Travancore and had landed to fix a leak in their boat, was predictably unconvincing and they were quickly arrested.34

  The attitude of many INA soldiers was well summed up by a message from Supreme INA Headquarters in Rangoon in late 1944. ‘One thing is certain, that we can expect little help from the Nippon authorities. The feeling of impotence and frustration for not being able to do anything to lessen the suffering of our comrades is terrible.’35 But even if the INA was ‘not a success in material terms, it strained the administrative resources of the Raj and contributed to its declining prestige’.36 While its existence had no impact on the army’s morale, D. K. Palit thought most soldiers had never even heard of it, its existence was uncomfortable politically.37 Of the 60,000 Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese, approximately 20,000 had joined the INA, which was a discomfiting number. Even though Indian Army recruiting had been very successful in the early years of the war, it was difficult to sustain through into 1944 and 1945, by which time the Punjab alone had provided 700,000 men and the thriving wartime economy was providing more attractive alternative careers. By May 1944 one regiment was complaining that ‘recruiting for the army is well nigh impossible when ordinary labour is so much more profitable’. Desertion became a serious issue. Even in 1943 it was running at about three thousand per month.38

  The INA also had a deeper political impact. For the Congress leadership, who had seen their Quit India campaign of 1942 fail to gain real traction, the fact that so many of the men they had hoped would be campaigning for freedom had instead joined the British forces was galling. Gandhi was very direct about it. He told Wavell that he had ‘fallen into the common error of describing the Indian forces as having been recruited by “voluntary enlistment” ’ when he believed that ‘a person who takes to soldiering as a profession will enlist himself wherever he gets his market wage’. He was unhappy at the number of volunteers coming forward, and objected to the idea that they might in future fire on other Indians on British orders. ‘Were those who carried out the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre volunteers’, he asked, referring to Amritsar.39

  Nehru was also much affected and his dislike and distrust of the military grew as he languished in jail while his countrymen fought for the very regime he was trying to overthrow. He did not like the idea of soldiering per se and never really understood the army; later as prime minister he would keep the military distant from power. ‘The soldier drops his humanity and kills inoffensive and harmless persons who have done him no ill’,40 he wrote and he did not like the idea of the Indian Army being used to maintain internal order. He favoured expanding the police or creating a special Peace Preservation Corps instead, neither of which were practical ideas in 1947.41 This was soon to have serious repercussions. Congress took its lead from Nehru. There was no single person in its high command who made any attempt to understand the armed forces or why they were such an essential part of India’s fabric. To them the military remained a force of oppression, inextricably linked to the Raj. Patel had begun to grasp that once in power Congress would have to deal with military issues, hence his intervention in the naval mutiny, but his thinking seems not to have extended to embracing the army’s role in maintaining internal order.

  Nehru was, however, although cautious in public, an early if equivocal supporter of Bose, despite their political differences, and of the INA. In 1945 he became a key part of the defence of the INA soldiers put on trial for treason in Delhi, defending Shah Nawaz Khan among others. The trials themselves were turned by Congress, supported by the League, into a propaganda coup. How, Nehru argued, could soldiers who had been fighting for India be guilty of treason? The first three, including Shah Nawaz Khan, a captain in the Indian Army although promoted to major general in the INA, were convicted of treason and sentenced to death but the ensuing public outcry meant the sentences were commuted to cashiering, or being thrown out of the army without any benefits. By 1947 twelve INA remained in jail, all of whom had been convicted of war crimes rather than treason; one had been sentenced for having an Indian soldier publicly flogged to death. However, Nehru supported by Liaquat, maintained his campaign to have even this remaining handful released and was deaf to a plea from Attlee, who implored him not to undermine the morale of the army. The matter was still not resolved by April 1947, with a motion in the Assembly demanding their release, something Auchinleck and the army staunchly resisted.

  The League was generally more supportive of the military. Muslims made up about 38 per cent of the Indian Army. However, it suited Jinnah and Liaquat to exaggerate this figure, reinforcing the link between the Muslims and the British and strengthening their argument that dividing the army would be very difficult; at one point Jinnah had claimed that the army was 65 to 70 per cent Muslim.42 He had supported the 1945 Willcox proposals, which gave Muslims a greater share of jobs, and Liaquat wrote to Mountbatten on 7 April 1947 protesting, strongly, that the army was reducing Muslim numbers prior to partition.43 The idea of a loyal Muslim element in the army being betrayed by the British leaving was quite widespread. Ismay reported that an old friend of his, a senior officer, greeted him when he arrived in Delhi in March with the words: ‘ “We soldiers have trusted you for forty years, and now you are going to betray us”. With that, he walked out of my room – and out of my life’.44

  What really upset Auchinleck though was that 20,000 men of the British Indian Army should have changed sides in the first place, however brutal conditions were in the Japanese camps. He was now faced not only with doubts about the loyalty of the organisation that had been his home and his life since his late teens, but also the prospect of dividing and effectively finishing it off. Personally he had still not got over his divorce and the events of the next three months would see him having to work with politicians who disliked and distrusted everything he and his long career stood for. At a time when both the Indian Army and the British troops in India should have been fundamental to the planning and policing of what countless experienced people had warned would be a period of unparalleled violence, they instead marginalised themselves. Shahid Hamid claimed that Mountbatten constantly kept Auchinleck out of the loop, that he wasn’t invited to the governors’ conference and that ‘at no stage did he consult the Auk when he was preparing the Plan. He seems to have no confidence in the Commander-in-Chief and is doing his level best to keep him in the dark’.45 Even allowing for Hamid’s strong prejudice against Mountbatten, relations were clearly uneasy. As the bloody and violent days of May ground on, there appeared to be an increasing reluctance from the key players to use the one force that might be able to enable the transfer of power to happen with minimal bloodshed.

  Ismay arrived in London on 5 May and went almost immediately to brief the India and Burma Committee of the Cabinet. This group, chaired by Attlee and dominated by him and Cripps, also consisted of A. V. Alexander (defence secretary), Listowel (the new secretary for India) and Addison (Dominion Affairs and leader of the House of Lords). Although the full Cabinet would meet to discuss the plan, it was this small committee, together with Ismay and Mountbatten, they would be guided by.

  Ismay started by emphasising that the communal feeling in India ‘was far more bitter than he had expected and had become an obsession with both Hindus and Muslims’. He acknowledged that ‘no one in India thought the plan was perfect. Yet nearly everyone agreed that it was the only solution that had any chance of being accepted by all political parties. It was not’, he insisted, ‘a gamble’. Critically, Ismay briefed, both Nehru and Jinnah were happy with it. It is one of the oddities of the British system that the government will send its best people overseas, tell them that they will be guided entirely by their recommendations but then proceed to try to outguess them on the detail of critical policies with very little understanding of the context. Both Attlee and Cripps thought they knew India well an
d they now proceeded to make seven amendments to a plan the staff in Viceroy’s House had prepared in meticulous detail after hours of painstaking work. In fact the changes they asked for did not, as Ismay appreciated, change any of the fundamentals but they did give the impression that a meddling and out-of-touch British government was interfering in the nearest approximation to a plan for the smooth transfer of power as had yet been achieved.46

  The next five days saw an endless stream of telegrams between Whitehall and Delhi as the Cabinet Committee’s amendments were factored in. There wasn’t now much secrecy about the plan itself. The Hindustan Times had somehow got hold of a copy and published it on its front page on 3 May. Mountbatten was justifiably furious. An investigation in Viceroy’s House concluded that the culprit was either Nehru, Baldev Singh or Patel, most likely Patel who had probably acquired it from V. P. Menon. The accompanying leader read: ‘For the first time since Lord Mountbatten assumed the Viceroyalty the feeling that he may not be playing fair has come among some Congress and Sikh leaders’, and went on to get to the heart of what Congress was upset about. ‘The Congress Working Committee made the Frontier question a test case. It has been made clear to the Viceroy that any proposals to dismiss the Frontier ministry and hold fresh elections will make Congress change its entire attitude towards the British government’.47 Just when the British finally thought they had an agreed plan, Congress seemed determined not to give in to a plebiscite on the Frontier. They would now play Whitehall for two long weeks.