Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  Nehru was finding the British as difficult as ever during those June weeks, and despite both he and Mountbatten working hard at their relationship there were the inevitable flare-ups. He would frequently lose control in meetings. Mountbatten thought Nehru was not sleeping and that he was ‘under very great strain’.51 The Frontier issue still rankled badly with Congress. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the North West Frontier Province Congress party were openly urging people ‘who believed in a free Pathan state’ not to vote in the coming referendum. Mountbatten remonstrated with Nehru for saying in a press interview that Congress would probably boycott the referendum anyway,52 although he did finally give in to his and Gandhi’s demands that he sack Caroe. He wrote to Caroe on 6 June, a nice letter suggesting that, as all British governors would have to retire on 15 August anyway, perhaps he could go on leave until then? It would really help, he explained, to strengthen his hand with Congress.53 Caroe accepted his fate ‘with deep sorrow’ but with good grace and went on holiday to Kashmir. Nehru was delighted. ‘The part Sir Olaf played as Deputy Commissioner in Peshawar in 1930 when there was large-scale shooting and killing of peaceful demonstrators still evokes bitter memories’, he noted,54 although the League predictably immediately objected. Caroe’s successor was Lieutenant General Sir Robert Lockhart, who had been running Southern Command. His immediate concern was preparing for the referendum, planned for 6 to 17 July with a Congress ministry still in power who were violently opposed to it happening at all. The solution was to draft in a team of British army officers who knew the Frontier and get them to run it instead.

  Nehru and Mountbatten did, however, agree on the important issue of who should be the governor general. Another advantage Dominion status offered was that it meant there could be a governor general, a very different role to the pre-independence viceroy, who was also a colonial governor general, and more similar to the governors general in Canada and Australia. The role carried no real political power, and would be largely ceremonial, but could, it was hoped, act as an arbiter between the two new states until the full process of partition had been completed if so required. In June 1947, and particularly given the joint command structure envisaged for the armed forces, it seemed sensible that one person should combine this role for both India and Pakistan, thus keeping them in some sort of federated structure, however loose. Constitutionally it again made it easier for British officers to stay on with both the new administrations. Nehru had invited Mountbatten to be the first Governor General of India and it was assumed that Jinnah would extend the same invitation from Pakistan.

  By 23 June no answer had been received from Jinnah. He had already been making approaches to secure British officers as both provincial governors and as chiefs of the new armed services but remained silent on the issue of the governor general. Mountbatten was uneasy and prompted him for a definite reply.55 He had accepted the Indian offer on the understanding that he would also be asked by Pakistan and therefore able to carry out a useful function but on 2 July, Jinnah told him that he was going to be governor general himself. It was, in a history of fractious meetings between the two men, the worst so far. Mountbatten asked Jinnah if he realised what this might cost him, given that there would be no one person arbitrating the continued division of assets. Jinnah replied that, ‘It may well cost me several crores of rupees in assets’ to which Mountbatten replied acidly, ‘It may well cost you the whole of your assets and the future of Pakistan’. Mountbatten then got up and left the room.56

  It is difficult to understand Jinnah’s logic until one appreciates something that he alone knew at that stage. He was dying. His tuberculosis, not improved by his chain-smoking and drinking, was slowly killing him. He could not possibly have let this be known publicly. The whole idea of Pakistan was embodied in his person. However small-minded his decision seemed at the time, and it produced a furious reaction in Delhi and London, he undoubtedly felt he was not well enough to take on the enormous responsibility of being premier of a new country, split as it was by a thousand miles. He probably also thought that establishing Liaquat in that role while he was still alive and able to support him would give Pakistan a stable start. Mountbatten’s detractors say that Mountbatten’s reaction was caused by wounded pride but again that is not entirely fair. The logic in having one combined governor general was inescapable and would soon be proven in the bloodiest of circumstances. There was nothing for Mountbatten to gain personally although he was now faced with the issue of whether he should refuse the Indian offer, based, as it was, on the envisaged combination of role. After much soul-searching, consultation, and a masterly paper crafted by Vernon Erskine-Crum setting out the advantages and disadvantages of him accepting, the unanimous advice of King, prime minister and Cabinet was that he should still accept. He duly did so.57

  7. JULY

  CUIUS REGIO

  ‘How can we, the Rulers of Independent States, throw in our lot with a political party whose resolution is that India should become a republic?’

  (NAWAB OF BHOPAL)

  Lieutenant Colonel Mohindar Singh Chopra was one of the handful of Indian officers who, in 1927, had been educated at Sandhurst alongside his very good friend Mohammed Ayub Khan, who would go on to be both prime minister and president of Pakistan. Singh Chopra had a distinguished record of service, had fought in the Frontier campaigns of the 1930s with what was nicknamed the PIFFER Group, one of those forces the British were so good at assembling for irregular warfare, and raised a battalion of Frontier Force Rifles deep behind Japanese lines in Burma during the war. In early 1947 he was ordered to leave his comfortable post at Ambala, 120 miles north of Delhi on the Grand Trunk Road, and move, with his family, to Shillong, the capital of Assam, to assume command of the 1st Battalion of the Assam Regiment. His young daughter remembered the excitement of the journey, the three-hour crossing of the mighty Brahmaputra river, moving from the heat of the plains to the ‘Assam Hills with their evergreen forests, full of flora seldom seen in the north’, and the charm of Shillong ‘an extremely picturesque and English-looking town’.1

  No sooner had Mohindar Singh Chopra taken over his battalion than they were moved to Sylhet to support the referendum; although the East Bengal Assembly members had voted overwhelmingly for Sylhet to join their side of the soon to be partitioned province, part of the 3 June provisions was that there should be a referendum in Sylhet to confirm that this was what the people wanted. It was scheduled for 6 and 7 July and there was already considerable agitation by both Congress and, even more so, by the League, as they campaigned. Being an area with a large Muslim majority, the League had the upper hand and Singh felt that ‘Congress supporters definitely have the wind up’. Singh assumed command of a force of nearly two thousand men, partly infantry of his own Assam Regiment and partly transport troops, with a sizeable amphibious element, given that the easiest way to travel around the area was by water. The League, raw from their experience in Gurgaon, demanded that at least half Singh’s force be Muslim. Singh retorted, with some pleasure, that 75 per cent were either Christian or Animist.

  There were 239 polling stations and Singh had his soldiers conduct regular patrols around them accompanied by the local police. Carrying weapons had been banned on 3 July and in the event the referendum went off smoothly, although not without Congress accusations of foul play. The result was, predictably, a massive vote in favour of joining East Bengal. Apart from Singh’s frustration, when he had requested wellingtons for his soldiers operating in the soaking ground, at finding the army had then sent 13,000 left-footed ones, the whole process was judged a success. The planning and cooperation between the governor, Sir Akbar Hydari, who had taken over from Clow only the month before, his staff, the administration in Sylhet, the police and the army had been good. The first planning meeting had only been held on 20 June but two weeks later they had been able to hold a successful referendum across a huge area with difficult terrain and amid inter-communal friction. It was an experience Singh would remember
wistfully when he found himself six weeks later in the Punjab.2

  On 17 June, Jinnah had announced that the capital of Pakistan would be Karachi, the port on the Indian Ocean that was also the capital of Sind. The capital of East Pakistan would be Dacca, but Jinnah was finding it difficult to recruit a British governor. He first tried Lord Killearn, who refused; next he asked Sir Archibald Rowlands, who did not reply. He then asked Mountbatten to approach Sir Frederick Bourne, who accepted and was currently searching for a house suitable to his new status. Several of the League’s influential supporters were annoyed about Karachi. Apart from Liaquat himself, men like Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, a big League donor, and Malik Ghulam Mohammad, an important and aspiring League supporter, were Punjabis and there had been a assumption, given that Lahore was already the capital of the Punjab, that Rawalpindi would be chosen. There was a certain regional snobbery that made Punjabis look down on the Sindhis and not many relished leaving the Punjab’s dry and relatively agreeable climate for the unhealthy humidity of Karachi.

  Almost all the best property in Karachi belonged to Hindus or Parsis and was not easily available. Santdas Kirpalani went down to stay with his brother who had an important steel-importing business there and who lived in great splendour in the seafront area of Clifton. Having seen what was happening in Lahore he begged him to move but his brother, a close friend of the Premier of Sind, Sir Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah, told him he was scaremongering and Sir Ghulam, ‘a massive hulk of a man’, had promised to protect him. Within weeks Kirpalani’s brother had lost both his steel stocks and his house, which was requisitioned for a fraction of its value, a mere 300,000 rupees, something even the well-intentioned Sir Ghulam could not stop. Kirpalani’s sister also lived in Karachi. Her house was requisitioned too. A truck was sent to remove her furniture. Her sixteen-year-old son tried to remonstrate and blocked its passage. He was run over and killed. Kirpalani’s sister somehow blamed him for the boy’s death and would not speak to him.

  Liaquat had, not unreasonably, asked in the Partition Council that one of the six government printing presses be moved to Karachi so that Pakistan could start the business of government. In one of the petty rows that was to so damage relations over the next few months, Patel ‘flared up and said all the presses were fully occupied with Government of India work and none could be spared’. When asked to reconsider this somewhat unhelpful answer he shouted, ‘No one asked Pakistan to secede’. Mountbatten, who was present at this exchange, thought that, ‘It was a shocking spirit in which to start partition’.3

  Nehru was in as tense a mood as Patel but what was concerning them both was not the detail of dividing printing presses but the more substantial issue of what would happen to the Princely states, those mini kingdoms that occupied half the landmass of India and where lived a quarter of her population. The 3 June plan had been remarkably vague as to their future. It simply said that ‘paramountcy’, the relationship that ensured their allegiance to the British crown, the ‘Paramount Power’, would lapse on independence and that the states should enter into a federal arrangement with the successor governments. But not all the princes saw things that way.

  There was, as with so much in British India, little logic to the pattern of the Princely states. Some, such as the great Rajput states like Jaipur, Jodhpur and Udaipur, were immensely old. The rulers of Udaipur were of such ancient and respected lineage that they claimed descent from the sun; the first portrait in the long line of portraits in the maharajah’s dining room was a cheerful portrait of a radiant sun shining in all its glory. Most, however, originated from the break-up of the Moghul empire when its satraps had simply assumed ruling powers in the territories they were responsible for. The Nizams of Hyderabad, who ruled their vast central Indian territory of 82,000 square miles and 16 million subjects, had been the Moghul viceroys of the Deccan. The East India Company, whose interest was purely commercial and whose early governors found the business of government tiresome, allied themselves with successive states according to where they perceived the most profitable arrangements to be. Initially they made treaties with Hyderabad and Oudh as they fought the French. Later they fought Mysore and the Maratha chiefs as they needed to establish commercial dominance in central and southern India. The favourite possession of Tippu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, who was defeated and killed by Wellington (later of Waterloo fame) in 1799, was a mechanical model which showed a tiger devouring a British East India Company red-coated soldier.

  Most princes were happy to make arrangements with the company. They were left to rule more or less in peace and found the Company’s condition that they should accept British military protection not inconvenient. However, and as with so much in the decades leading up to the Mutiny, an increasingly moralistic Company began to question why they were protecting regimes that were largely feudal and in many cases medieval in their practices. One of the sparks that finally ignited the resentment that caused the Mutiny was Dalhousie’s annexation of Oudh on the grounds of mismanagement, something he was clearly warned by old India hands would be highly unpopular. This was appreciated in the post-Mutiny settlement and Queen Victoria’s 1858 declaration stated very clearly that ‘We shall respect the rights, dignity and honour of the native princes as our own’.4 The crown would continue to exercise ‘paramountcy’ and posted Residents to the princes’ courts but they were in practice little more than observers who were happy to be well provided with tigers and ducks to shoot and who were advised that ‘often not the least valuable part of their work was that which they left undone’.5 They put little, if any, pressure on the princes to introduce representative government and in turn, as the agitation against the Raj grew, the princes began to realise that their interests were best served by the continuing British presence. They also appreciated the British emphasis on display and pageantry in government, important in India, and the assistance they received with their state forces, something they amply repaid in their wartime service. It was, however, a curious position for the nation that boasted to be the mother of all democracies to preserve and protect autocracy over half its Indian empire.

  In the post-First World War reforms a Chamber of Princes was introduced into the Central Assembly, a sort of House of Lords but consisting of people who still wielded considerable power. Congress were more circumspect towards them as a group than may have been supposed for a republican party. Although Indian politicians saw the hypocrisy in concentrating their campaign just on the British provinces, the princes were at least Indians. India had long been comfortable with the tradition of personal rule and family dynasties; it would in fact continue long after independence with Nehru’s own family. Gandhi himself had grown up in a small Princely state and his family had been employed by the ruler. Yet there was an assumption by both Congress and the majority of princes themselves that when independence came they would be swept up into the new democracy. At the 1932 Round Table Conference they suggested that they join the new India on a federal basis, something eagerly seized on at the time and which, although it would later prove an anathema to Nehru, was used by the more pro-independence lobby in Westminster to encourage the conservative opposition. A federation of Princely states and self-governing provinces would not, they argued, be so much of a threat to British interests. The 1935 Act progressed very much on this basis.

  In 1938 Gandhi did turn on them, partly because the princes’ bloc vote in the Assembly was preventing Congress from controlling the Lower Chamber. He told them that they had better ‘cultivate friendly relations with the organisation which bids fair in the future, not very distant, to replace the Paramount Power’.6 Congress agitated in Jaipur, leading a civil disobedience campaign there and Gandhi started one of his many fasts to promote political reform in Rajkot. Yet it didn’t last very long. By 1939 Gandhi had called off all Congress campaigns in the states and even apologised to the Maharajah of Jaipur. He was worried that the campaigns could have caused communal violence, especially in Hyderabad and Kashmir and,
again, appreciated that Congress’ first priority was to get rid of the Raj. The princes could wait.

  By June 1947 there were 108 major states in India, whose rulers, autocrats over 60 million people, were automatically entitled to sit in the Chamber of Princes. Next came 127 middling states, who were represented by twelve elected members. The remaining 325 states were really just large private landholdings and were not considered as political entities. The chancellor of the Chamber of Princes, the Nawab of Bhopal until he resigned in disgust in June, was a powerful man in government circles and was assisted by a political department, the focus for the Residents, and run by the uncompromising royalist Sir Conrad Corfield, someone for whom Nehru reserved particular scorn.

  The princes were not only powerful but many were also spectacularly rich, wealth being a useful by-product of autocracy. The Nizam was reputed to be the richest, and the meanest, man in the world. Given, as he would say, that he did not have to impress anyone, he would habitually dress in threadbare clothes, wearing old ‘light brown socks lying loosely around his ankles, caramel coloured slippers and a brown fez perched on the top of his head’.7 But he was unusual and it is the images of the princely courts with their elephants, fabulous jewels, harems, tiger hunts and swaggering ceremonial that has done so much to create the impression many people have of India under the Raj. Their enormous wealth, their Rolls-Royces, their glamorous lives in London or the South of France and their exotic shoots, which did little to help India’s tiger population, have created a stereotype that is not altogether unfair. Stories of excess abounded. The Maharajah of Junagadh, who was excessively fond of dogs, spent £22,000 on the wedding of two of his favourites. The sinister Maharajah of Alwar, father of the man who was deploying his soldiers to assist the Hindu mobs in Gurgaon, eventually went so far that he was deposed. He had kept a fleet of Rolls-Royces to dispose of his household rubbish and set fire to his polo pony after a match in which it had displeased him. The Raj was accused of being party to this excess, having removed the princes’ real power, reducing them to a mere ceremonial role; certainly the rules that governed definition of status and protocol were Byzantine.