On 14 November, Indian troops reached Mahura and reconnected the power supply to Srinagar. ‘Srinagar gay again after days of panic’, said the New York Times.36 The next day they entered Uri. Here they stopped. Instead of continuing their advance west, sweeping up what remained of the lashkar, taking the next few miles of road, dominating the crossing over the Jhelum, and then ‘liberating’ Muzaffarabad, they were told to turn south. While the situation in Kashmir had taken the world’s attention, not least because of the large number of foreign correspondents who were either in Srinagar when the raid started or who managed to get themselves up there, an equally serious situation had developed in Poonch. The beleaguered Indian garrison there needed help.
The failure to ‘complete the job’ in Kashmir has become one of the big arguments of modern Indian history. Had Brigadier Sen and his troops continued they would, it is contended, have been able to dominate western Kashmir preventing future moves by Pakistan and thus ending the ‘Kashmir problem’ to India’s advantage. That may be wishful thinking on India’s part. The area beyond the Jhelum bridge was pretty solidly Muslim and any move to Muzaffarabad would have threatened the approaches to Rawalpindi, making actual war with Pakistan more likely. In the north of Kashmir, in the high tribal areas approaching the Karakoram Pass, dominated by the peaks of Nanga Parbat and K2, the enterprising commanding officer of the Gilgit Scouts, Major Willie Brown, had hoisted the Pakistani flag and declared for Pakistan. The Gilgit Scouts were the only effective force in the vast area they controlled, which was now closed to India. Brown had, to the rage of his British superiors, acted entirely on his own initiative. With these proliferating threats on the flanks, there was a strong military argument for India to consolidate what it had gained.
The situation in Poonch was, however, the most demanding problem facing India and her newly arrived general, Kulwant Singh, in Srinagar. Here the Muslims were much better organised and behaved than the tribesmen of Khurshid Anwar’s lashkar. With their high proportion of ex-military men they had effectively trapped the maharajah’s remaining forces in Poonch; India had to relieve them. Sen’s men headed south over the Haji Pir Pass to try to do so.
D. K. Palit had recently taken command of 3rd Battalion 9th Gurkhas, his Indian Gurkha battalion. They had been moved into Poonch in the third week of November but were soon surrounded, alongside the rest of the Indian garrison, by the Muslim irregulars, Abdul Qayyum Khan and his Azad Kashmir men. Palit found himself defending a perimeter of two miles; there were 35,000 non-Muslim refugees trapped with them and a serious problem of resupply. There was, when they arrived, no functioning airstrip in the enclave. Another problem was that they were subject to constant mortaring, directed accurately by the ex-regulars, which caused many casualties. They would try to push the perimeter outwards partly to force the mortar crews out of range of the refugees and partly to seize food supplies. As soon as they did they were counter-attacked by, they said, Pakistani troops; in fact they were mostly tribal irregulars who moved backwards and forwards at will although they were helped by elements of the Pakistani force deployed to secure the border. The Indians’ main effort was to repair and extend the airstrip to six hundred yards so they could bring supplies in and get the refugees out. Initially it was four hundred yards, which led to some brave if hazardous flying by Indian Air Force crews. But by the end of November it was still a very long way from being ready and Palit and his men faced a long winter under siege.37
While the fighting was intensifying there was some sort of dialogue, albeit a fairly unfriendly one, between Nehru and Liaquat, who had taken over direction of the Pakistani side from the bedridden Jinnah. Liaquat went to Delhi on 26 November. He had been ill, under considerable strain, and was ‘Obviously tired and weak’.38 The meeting started badly. Liaquat said that he had recently visited Sialkot and heard the most terrible stories about Sikhs in Jammu massacring every Muslim man they found and abducting their women who they were keeping as sex slaves in a concentration camp. He was losing support in Pakistan because he refused to commit Pakistani troops to help the Muslims despite strong public agitation. The only way forward was for a full Indian withdrawal and establishing an impartial administration to conduct a plebiscite. He could not resist a bitter personal attack on Sheikh Abdullah, who he knew was a close friend of Nehru’s, and whom he called a ‘Quisling’. Nehru retorted that the reports of the lashkar ‘having indulged in the most ghastly atrocities, including the wholesale murder of non-Muslims and the selling of Kashmiri girls’ were commonplace. Patel and Baldev Singh had just visited Jammu and brought back terrible stories of atrocities against non-Muslims there. How could he withdraw all Indian troops? Even if he could physically get them out he would be leaving Hindus and Sikhs in Poonch to the mercy of the Azad Kashmir militias. How could he also fail to help Sheikh Abdullah’s government when it was running the Vale of Kashmir with strong popular support? Mountbatten presided and suggested that a way forward was for Ismay to sit down with Menon and Mohammed Ali for Pakistan to try to find some points of agreement. ‘We drafted and re-drafted for a full three hours’, wrote Ismay. ‘In the end we were rather proud of our handiwork but our hopes were dashed. Both sides thought that our paper was too biased in favour of the other to merit discussion.’39 November ended in political stalemate as the massacre of Muslims in Jammu and non-Muslims in Poonch continued; it is estimated that total casualties by 30 November were 200,000.
However laudable Auchinleck’s intervention with Jinnah had been, his next suggestion was less sensible. He now proposed to Mountbatten that he should send British troops into Kashmir to rescue the four hundred-odd British and the several hundred other Europeans who lived in the vale. Mountbatten correctly refused. Auchinleck remonstrated with him, telling him that they ‘will be murdered and their blood will be on your head’.40 Mountbatten replied that it was a responsibility he was willing to take. It was an extraordinary thing for Auchinleck to have asked and says much about his concept of what British troops in India were for. Having strongly opposed deploying British and Gurkha troops into the Punjab, where they would have significantly reduced the slaughter, Auchinleck was now proposing to send them into the middle of a burgeoning conflict between India and Pakistan. Most of the British and Europeans were either people like Mrs Burton, enjoying the weather in Nedou’s Hotel, timber merchants, missionaries like the community in Baramulla, or retired Raj officials and Indian Army officers who were mostly safe in their lakeside cottages. It is an interesting reflection on the priorities of a man who had spent his life in an Indian Army that was still the child of the Mutiny. British troops, to Auchinleck, were there to protect British lives, to ensure that there was no repeat of the grisly events of 1857 in Cawnpore and Lucknow and to protect people like poor Miss Hotz who had been so upset to find her Muslim staff butchered outside Wildflower Hall.
On 15 November Auchinleck presided over his last commander-in-chiefs’ conference. He told the three service chiefs that there was ‘no hope of reconciliation between the two Dominions and that events may lead to war’.41 It was a depressing finale for a man who had first arrived in India in 1903, who had fought with his Punjabis through Mesopotamia in the First World War, commanded Indian troops on the Frontier, in North Africa and been commander-in-chief during India’s herculean efforts in the Second World War. Attlee still wanted to give him a peerage, something Mountbatten continued to press him hard to accept, but Auchinleck refused. Hamid, reflecting the general Pakistani view of Mountbatten, said that he rejected it because it was Mountbatten who had first recommended it and he was ‘the person whom the Auk considers has made a mess of things’.
Auchinleck himself, interviewed many years later, offered a more profound reason. He had, he said, ‘a great sadness when I left. A sadness of failure at the latter end. A feeling of sorrow. It had to be’, he acknowledged, ‘it was inevitable’ but, ‘at the end of a career of forty years, in an army that I loved, I was almost in a state of despair. I felt respo
nsible for what had happened to the Indian Army. I felt it was the destruction of a life’s work. I didn’t feel it was an achievement that should be celebrated with a peerage’.42
Many in India felt he was being hard on himself. They thought he had been badly treated by Nehru and Patel and by Mountbatten. Tributes poured in during his last weeks in Delhi. They came from the predictable sources, from past politicians and viceroys he had served; Wavell, a man who felt he had been treated in a similar way, wrote a particularly charming latter. Yet letters also came from many unexpected people. Amar Nath Jha, chairman of the Public Service Commission in the United Provinces, told him he ranked with Roberts and Kitchener as one of the greatest chiefs and the Begum of Bhopal wrote that he had ‘cherished, loved and served’ India with ‘all his heart and might’. She felt, she concluded, very sad for him. Yet ultimately Auchinleck allowed sentiment to cloud objectivity. Armies exist to serve the needs of the societies that generate them and the governments that represent those societies. They do not have, nor should they have, any pretension to being an independent entity. They must also reflect the changes that society undergoes. Auchinleck’s idea of the Indian Army was out of date by 1945, when he established the Willcox Committee; it was out of tune with Congress, when they were clearly the successors to the Raj; it was out of sympathy with India when he objected so strongly to intervention in the Punjab and it was out of order with Mountbatten whom, however much they disliked each other, was his political master. He was a great man in so many ways. He loved India and was loved by Indian soldiers, but as a man who wielded enormous power, power on a scale which few if any British senior officers have exercised since, he could have done so much more to prevent the tragedy of 1947.
Auchinleck refused a valedictory dinner and on 25 November had lunch with Mountbatten as governor general. He left at 8.00 p.m. the next evening, again refusing any farewell parade or even a guard of honour, slipping quietly away to Bombay. Mountbatten wanted his house to be given to the British high commissioner. The Russians said they had already claimed it for their ambassador. In the end Nehru moved in. Today it is a museum on the making of modern India.
12. DECEMBER
A DOUBTFUL LEGACY
‘Is this to be the culmination of British rule in India and the fulfilment of our great mission?’
(ISMAY)
John Christie and his family had been cut off in Simla for a month but ‘gradually, with fewer unprotected Muslims left to kill, the situation was brought under control’ and ‘as the freshness of autumn began to change to the chill of winter and the cold weather line of dusty haze hardened over the plains’ they moved back to Delhi in a convoy protected by British soldiers of the Royal Scots Fusiliers.1 The coming of the cooler weather seemed to calm the killing across the Punjab although there were still violent incidents. A party of 184 Sikhs who were being evacuated from Sind, and staying in the supposed sanctuary of a gurdwara in Karachi, were attacked by a Muslim mob. Sixty-four were killed and most of the rest wounded. The mob then set about looting whatever non-Muslim-owned shops in the city they had so far spared. Jinnah, who returned to Karachi from Lahore at the beginning of the month, was furious and horrified; he ordered soldiers onto the streets and gave them instructions to shoot rioters on sight. Order was quickly restored.2 But such attacks were becoming less common. Fewer refugees were on the move and the problem now became not so much how to protect their struggling columns as to provide for them in the destitute squalor of the makeshift camps. ‘The vast task of resettlement and rehabilitation had just begun.’3
The problem that Sandtas Kirpalani and his ministry faced was that the Indian government had no power to control the movement of refugees once they had arrived from Pakistan. As citizens of the new India, they had ‘an inalienable right to go anywhere’. Anything was preferable to the camps and people with relations or money made up their own minds. Many West Punjabi Sikhs just wanted to stay in East Punjab as did quite a number of West Punjabi Hindus. Others were determined to make for the United Provinces, considered a wealthy province where they might make a living. There was also a rush for Delhi. The camps set up around the capital were very soon overflowing and people spilled out to live on the pavements and in the alleys. Connaught Circus, the ‘erstwhile impeccable and showy shopping centre of New Delhi became home to thousands of pedlars and beggars’.4 Yet millions had no choice but to stay in the camps that were run by a combination of central and provincial governments. The main Punjab camp, Kurukshetra, twenty miles south of Ambala, and which had nearly one million people, was run centrally. Providing food and clean water remained a huge challenge, as did warm clothing, once the weather cooled. India responded, as had Pakistan, with a mass quilt-making movement. Kirpalani was full of praise for Edwina Mountbatten who chaired a Volunteer Workers Council which brought together the energy and resources of the numerous and well-found Indian voluntary sector. Ultimately twenty-eight bodies worked under her auspices, Kirpalani and Neogy being amazed at her ‘enormous organising ability’.5
As much of a problem was the mental state of many of the refugees, not just from what they had experienced, but from enforced idleness, particularly among people who had been tradesmen and artisans, many of whom could see little future for themselves. Camp discipline was fragile, and the government was the obvious target for the refugees’ rage and hurt. Predictably the army was soon put in charge. Schools were set up for the children but were swamped by the sheer numbers. The urgent problem quickly became not material provision but rehabilitation. The task facing the new Indian government was vast. They could not build millions of new homes quickly and providing new jobs and rehabilitation would inevitably take years. There were several major strands to the programme. The first was simply to give each provincial government an allocation of refugees and tell them to provide for them. It was a crude measure but it did at least serve to disperse people around India. Bombay, India’s richest city, agreed to take 1 million, the Central Provinces 500,000, Rajputana 250,000 and so on. There were also centrally organised schemes to provide work. The long-awaited Bhakra-Nangal dam project in northern India was expedited; it would become India’s third-largest reservoir and irrigate over ten million acres. When it was finally opened, Nehru, sensitive to the suffering endured by those who had worked on the project, called it, ‘A new temple of resurgent India’. Others worked on the new state capital of the East Punjab at Chandigarh or on the somewhat misnamed Green Belt development of residential areas around Delhi, which would begin the transformation of the small capital of the Moghuls and the Raj into the suburban sprawl of the contemporary mega-city. But much of this was in the future, and for most people in the camps that December, the months ahead held little promise other than the shelter of a mud hut or a bustee and the struggle to rebuild their lives having lost almost everything.
Kirpalani was visiting a camp near Bombay when the director told him that one of the refugees had said that he knew him. It turned out to be his old friend Punwani. They had been at school together. Punwani had gone with a Sindhi company to Trinidad where he had done very well for himself. Kirpalani had stayed with him once and marvelled at his very comfortable life. But Punwani said that he had been away from India for thirty years and longed to go home. He sold up everything in Trinidad and bought property in Karachi. Here he was now, huddled with his wife and two children in a tiny room in a mud-hut dormitory no more than ten feet square ‘with two hemp-string beds and a reed curtain at the door. He was dry-eyed and articulate. He was grateful that he and his family had escaped unhurt’. Kirpalani could not help but admire such calm amid such massive adversity. He could never get that meeting out of his mind.
On another visit he was approached by an old man with tears streaming from his eyes and emitting a ‘blood-chilling low moan’. He was a rural postman from the Jhelum district. His daughter had been abducted by a Muslim mob. Kirpalani must, he insisted, provide him with a plane so he could go back and find her. Kirpalani pati
ently explained that this was impossible but the distraught old man did not hear what he said, just continuing to moan, ‘My daughter! O my daughter’. Later they discovered that the poor girl had committed suicide. Kirpalani’s orderly, Kashi Ram, was so affected he took the old man home to care for him but he died a few days later. Kirpalani could not get this image out of his head either. ‘For many, many nights the spectre of the old man haunted me and I could hear the dirge of his moaning in the small hours.’
One morning, visiting the hospital in Kurukshetra, he saw a young woman, surprisingly fair, of about thirty. A week before she had given birth to a stillborn baby; ‘big tears rolled silently from her limpid brown eyes’. The doctor told Kirpalani that she had been crying for a week but refused to speak. Kirpalani begged her to tell him her name. Eventually she offered that it was Shanti and that she came from the North West Frontier Province. Kirpalani urged her to give her husband’s name so that they could try to trace him. ‘Don’t you understand’, she replied, ‘I am a Hindu wife. How can you ask me to voice my husband’s name?’ She would ‘not budge from this stance’ despite her terrible circumstances. Kirpalani reflected that his own well-educated and articulate wife, to whom he had been happily married for thirty years, had never once ‘hailed me by name’. But for him Shanti’s adherence to Hindu tradition at such cost merely added to the pathos of a terrible time.6
The human cost of partition would be born by a generation of Indians and Pakistanis. So would the physical cost. It is estimated that Indian refugees leaving West Punjab left behind 6.729 million acres of which 4.3 million were canal-irrigated, so productive and valuable. They also left 500,000 urban houses and 12,000 industrial premises. India calculated this as being worth about 8 billion US dollars. Muslim refugees from East Punjab left less: about 4.73 million acres of which 1.32 million were irrigated. For both governments the issue of how to allocate this and how to calculate compensation would take years. An argument developed over the relative values of this abandoned land and assets. Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab had certainly been richer than Muslims in East Punjab; many were, as we have seen, landowners and businessmen. India reckoned their assets to be worth at least five times those Muslims had left behind in the east. Inevitably Pakistan disagreed. Nehru’s laudable aim of not reallocating the property of families who might still return would slowly, as the borders and attitudes hardened, become impractical.7
Partition Page 37
