India

by John Keay

  British attitudes were now heavily conditioned by the war effort. To secure India’s military support and its political acquiescence, initiatives and incentives came thick and fast. Schemes for party representation in the central government and in the conduct of the war, as well as offers of a constituent assembly and dominion status, climaxed with a mission by Sir Stafford Cripps in March 1942. By then Singapore had fallen, 100,000 imperial troops, mostly Indian, were in Japanese detention, and Japanese forces were rapidly advancing through Burma on India itself. It was a moment for closing ranks, for the bold gesture and the magnanimous response. The Cripps Mission, brainchild of the Labour leader Clement Attlee and headed by a man known to be sympathetic to Indian independence, was seen by the British as just such a move. To previous offers it added a clear pledge, as soon as the war was over, of a dominion status which, as recently redefined, amounted to full independence.

  Two years earlier such terms might have been welcomed. But, as so often in the past, London was advancing what India already banked on. By now the issue was not so much independence, or even when, but whose; and in this the Cripps offer was deeply disappointing. Gandhi mischievously likened it to a post-dated cheque on a failing bank. But the real problem lay not with the bank or the date but the name of the payee. For the Cripps offer, like all the others, betrayed a British willingness to appease Muslim nationalism, princely autonomy and provincial aspirations by endorsing the possibility that some provinces and states might eventually secede. This was still anathema to all shades of Congress opinion. It challenged the idea of a single and indivisible Indian nation on which Congress’s demands for independence had always rested; it contradicted the idea of Congress as a secular party representing all of India’s communities and transcending all religious differences; and it cast doubt on the primacy of democratic representation on which both the national consensus and Congress’s supremacy relied.

  ‘It is possible, though by no means certain, that if from the outset the British had made it clear that they would never countenance the partition of India, the demand for Pakistan would have been dropped.’9 Like many other British Indian officials, Penderel Moon, himself a key figure in the Partition saga, would see the break-up of India not just as a colossal human tragedy but as an enduring political tragedy. Had Linlithgow, the wartime viceroy, been less ‘casual’ about the demand, and had he tried ‘to heal the breach between Congress and the League’, Jinnah might have been forced to compromise. But the priority for Linlithgow, as for all his beleaguered countrymen, was the war. Post-imperial strategies were an indulgence which the desperate battle for survival, in Asia as in Europe, as yet precluded. Confronting Jinnah over Pakistan and so inviting the League’s hostility at a time when Congress was already refusing to co-operate with the war effort was unthinkable. It could in fact be argued that it was Congress which badly miscalculated; by withholding its support for the war, indeed endeavouring to exploit Britain’s wartime predicament, it practically obliged the British to play along with the Pakistan idea.

  Personally both Gandhi and Nehru wished the Allies well. But to Gandhi the pacifist, all wars were anathema; and to Nehru the socialist, this particular war between rival imperialisms should never have involved India. Prior to the Cripps Mission a limited form of anti-war protest had already landed Nehru and some twenty thousand other satyagrahis in gaol. They had since been released but, after the disappointment of the Cripps Mission, and at a time when the first Japanese bombs were falling on Indian installations, Gandhi in particular lost patience. Arguing first that only immediate British withdrawal and a declaration of Indian neutrality could save India from Japanese attack, then that only immediate independence would ensure whole-hearted resistance to the Japanese, he secured support for what he called a final ‘do or die’ challenge to British rule.

  It was, of course, to be non-violent, but his pre-emptive arrest, and that of other Congress leaders, in August 1942 made this ‘Quit India’ movement a more random, spontaneous and violent outburst than any of its predecessors. As well as strikes and boycotts, telegraph and railway lines were sabotaged, police and railway stations blown up, and in large areas of Bihar and eastern UP the government temporarily ceased to function. Viceroy Linlithgow reckoned it ‘the most serious rebellion since 1857’. Given the wartime paranoia, he ordered massive repression, which involved the deployment of tens of thousands of troops, a like number of arrests and perhaps a thousand deaths.

  Although the worst violence was all over within a matter of weeks, and although a few misty-eyed imperialists like Churchill and Linlithgow were thereby confirmed in the belief that Britain still had a vital peace-keeping role in India, most British politicians now concurred with international, especially American, opinion in dismissing the possibility of a post-war British Raj. ‘Quit’ they now must, for repression on such a scale in peacetime would be unthinkable and probably impractical; Gandhi’s point had been made, if not in the manner he approved. However, for the Congress Party the 1942 Quit India movement was much less successful than the Rowlatt-Khilafat protests of 1919–21 or the salt-and-civil-disobedience campaign of 1930–1. The arrest of its leaders meant that the party was unable to direct the movement or to profit from it, and their detention for most of what remained of the war meant that the party would be singularly ill-prepared for the post-war endgame. The League on the other hand, unchallenged by either the British or Congress, continued to proselytise, organise and mobilise.

  THE TRYSTING HOUR

  Three years of intensive negotiations led up to the final transfer of power from the British Crown to the two successor states of India and Pakistan in 1947. The peaceful conclusion of these negotiations was hailed as a triumph. It was celebrated as such even by the British, and it appeared all the more remarkable in the light of the armed confrontations then getting underway in Indonesia and Indo-China. But the triumph was compounded of failures and betrayals.

  For Nehru, Congress and most citizens of the Republic of India, Pakistan itself was just such a failure – historically indefensible as well as humanly catastrophic. Many British officials agreed, seeing it as a betrayal of the united India which they liked to think of as their own creation. The British in turn stood accused of having failed the princes who, without the umbrella of federation, were left to negotiate entry into the successor states with a nationalist leadership they had long distrusted. The League for its part had obviously failed those of its supporters who lived in Muslim minority areas which would not be included in Pakistan. Similarly Congress stood accused of betraying its supporters in what became Pakistan, most notably the Pathans of the North-West Frontier Province who had consistently opposed the League and Partition. More obviously, in the two partitioned provinces of Bengal and Punjab, all parties to the negotiations had failed those Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus who would experience death and dispossession on an unprecedented scale as their homelands were divided, their economic links severed and their shared cultures dismembered.

  Not surprisingly, the negotiations which produced this catalogue of failures have been closely scrutinised. Gandhi’s 1944 initiative of direct talks with Jinnah, the first move towards a post-war settlement, has been criticised as a well-meaning blunder which served only to enhance Jinnah’s standing and to entrench his demands. The Simla Conference of 1945 had a similar effect. Convened by Lord Wavell, Linlithgow’s successor as viceroy, it proposed transforming his Executive Council into something like a national government. But it floundered on a Congress insistence on its right to nominate amongst its representatives the odd Muslim and on Jinnah’s insistence that all Muslim representatives must be nominated by the League, Jinnah was allowed in effect to veto the initiative.

  New elections in India, called by the incoming British Labour government of Clement Attlee and held in early 1946, confirmed the sectarian polarisation. As the first since 1937, a poll was long overdue and was a necessary prelude to further negotiations. But it was based on the existing, ve
ry limited franchise, and on the existing system of reserved electorates and seats as per the communal awards of 1936. With the League sweeping the reserved constituencies as convincingly as did Congress the unreserved, it deepened the religious divide. Except in the North-West Frontier Province – where tribal loyalties and the Pakhtun (Pathan) language underpinned a sub-separatist allegiance to Congress – and the Panjab, where some Muslims still adhered to the rural and non-sectarian Unionist Party, Jinnah’s claim to speak for Muslim India seemed vindicated; his demand for Pakistan began to look correspondingly irresistible. Conversely Congress, though enjoying a colossal majority, could no longer claim to represent all communities. Critics, principally from the left, maintained that had elections been based on universal suffrage the results would have been different. The League’s pretensions to represent all Muslims would have been exposed and, capitalising on industrial and agrarian grievances, a third force of cross-communal pedigree and impeccably socialist ideology would have emerged. The elections, in short, were yet another missed opportunity, another failure.

  Wavell’s alarm at the outcome brought a top-level British Cabinet Mission to India in March – June 1946. The tortuous negotiations which followed were designed to set up both a Constituent Assembly (which would decide on a new constitution) and a transitional government to handle matters in the interim. Not for want of ingenious ideas, both bodies also proved to be failures. Jinnah seemed to back away from Pakistan when confronted with the proposition that, by the terms of the League’s own Pakistan Resolution, ‘Muslim majority areas’ must mean that Hindu majority areas in the Panjab and Bengal would have to be excluded from Pakistan. Instead he joined Congress in endorsing a complicated system of provincial groupings whence the Constituent Assembly was to be elected. This was hailed as a breakthrough. Although the provinces and their groupings would cede to the central government only such subjects as defence, foreign affairs and all-India communications, this arrangement specifically excluded the possibility of an independent ‘Pakistan’. The subcontinent, albeit with a much weakened central government, stood within a whisker of remaining united. But not for long. Nehru, already determined to protect central authority at any cost, let slip that he did not regard the Cabinet Mission plan as binding, whereupon Jinnah not unreasonably withdrew his support. The terms were in fact so complicated that each side felt entitled to interpret them differently. Recriminations followed, including an August 1946 call by the League to the ‘Muslim nation’ to institute ‘direct action’; its results, though unforeseen, would be horrifying. As for the interim government, this also materialised, but only through viceregal appointment. With Nehru as prime minister and Liaqat Ali Khan of the League as a late-joining finance minister, it served to give a convincing demonstration of why a power-sharing coalition would not work.

  In despair over London’s erratic support as well as India’s irreconcilable leaders, the well-meaning Wavell had earlier advocated as a last resort a ‘Breakdown Plan’. The ‘breakdown’ – which could well have been his own – in fact referred to the failure of Congress and the League to work together in the bodies proposed by the Cabinet Mission. This being now amply demonstrated, the British government examined the ‘Breakdown Plan’. As the supreme commander who in 1942 had overseen the Allied retreat from south-east Asia, Wavell was proposing a similar retreat in India, in fact a phased withdrawal of British troops and officials, first from the south to the north, then from the Congress-dominated provinces to those of the League. He also proposed an announcement that the withdrawal would be completed by 31 March 1948.

  Although militarily sound, the political consequences of such a retreat were rightly deemed unthinkable. The ‘Breakdown Plan’ was revealed as more like a ‘break-up’ plan. Besides inviting a fragmentation of late-Mughal proportions, it looked like a safe bet for civil war. Only the idea of announcing a withdrawal date was adopted. In February 1947 Attlee declared that British rule would end by June 1948.

  For once both Congress and League applauded. Urgency was thus injected into the discussions. But far from conjuring a spirit of compromise it fuelled Congress demands for the dismissal of unco-operative League ministers in the interim government, and fanned League attempts to topple the non-League governments in the Panjab and the North-West Frontier Province.

  In March 1947, to meet its new deadline, the Attlee government replaced Wavell with Lord Louis Mountbatten and, more importantly, empowered him to obtain a settlement without the usual interference from London. Mountbatten looked to be a good choice. As a cousin of the King-Emperor he enjoyed a regard which transcended politics, and as commander-in-chief in south-east Asia at the end of the war he had shown some sympathy for Indonesia’s nationalists. He had no preconceptions where India was concerned, and for the task in hand his insatiable ego looked no bad thing; before the credit could be claimed or blame evaded, something had to have been achieved. The appointment of Mountbatten was in fact as much an earnest of British intentions as the setting of a deadline. Nehru appreciated this. He got on well with Lord Louis and famously with his wife Edwina. Mountbatten’s legendary charm would ensure that two hundred years of colonial exploitation ended with warm smiles and hearty handshakes.

  To all, including the disillusioned Wavell, it had by now become glaringly obvious that Jinnah would accept, and most Muslims would settle for, nothing short of a Pakistan to which sovereignty and power were directly transferred by the British. Mountbatten nevertheless pursued a proposal whereby power would be transferred to the provinces and the princely states, who might then choose whether to join India, Pakistan or neither. This was quite unacceptable to Nehru, who foresaw a ‘Balkanisation’ of India. By now Nehru was deeply suspicious of provincial schemes and preferred a strong central government even if it meant accepting partition. His protestations produced some hasty British revision and led Mountbatten to accept Partition as inevitable.

  Thus in June 1947 the viceroy proudly announced Congress – League agreement to a formula whereby power would be transferred to two successor states. The option of provinces or states choosing independence was dropped; Bengal and the Panjab were to be partitioned along sectarian lines; and the princely states were to be urged to join either India or Pakistan. To speed up the constitutional formalities, ensure third-party supervision over the division of assets, and leave the British with a fig-leaf of imperial pride, it was also agreed that power should be transferred on the basis of dominion status; this would require only the amendment of the 1935 India Act, which could subsequently be repudiated or endorsed by the successor states. To preserve the tottering interim government, Mountbatten also brought forward the deadline to 15 August 1947. Ten weeks would suffice for the constitutional, social, military and infrastructural vivisection of a subcontinent.

  Jinnah, anxious to emphasise that Pakistan was succeeding the British Raj and not seceding from an independent India, celebrated Independence in Karachi on 14 August. Mountbatten attended the ceremonies despite a bomb scare, then left in haste. Unlike Nehru, Jinnah had never buckled before Mountbatten’s boyish charm offensives. Rejecting the viceroy’s wish to be accepted as governor-general of both successor states, he now himself assumed the role of Pakistan’s first governor-general and president of its Constituent Assembly. As the officially titled Quaid-i-Azam, or ‘Supreme Leader’, the Friday prayers were read in his name. He was not just head of state and father of the nation but its constitutional caliph. There was no room for a representative, however well-connected, of the House of Windsor.

  From Karachi on the night of 14 August Mountbatten flew straight to Delhi, where the celebrations would prove much more gratifying. There the appreciative Nehru was that night intoning his most famous oration. Its style was unashamedly Churchillian, and the quaint suggestion of a ‘tryst with destiny’ echoed the ‘trysting hour’ in ‘Horatius’, a much-loved poem by the man who had once savaged Indian scholarship, Thomas Babington Macaulay. The speech, in short, was a performanc
e for history’s consumption.

  Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

  ‘A MADNESS HAS SEIZED THE PEOPLE’

  Nehru, Mountbatten and many of their associates were acutely conscious of making history. In speeches, memoirs and personalised chronicles they confidently wrote themselves into it. Historians are grateful. But there is a danger of the record reading like conference minutes or a Government House diary of who said what and when and why. Far from the dappled lawns of New Delhi, out of range of the loudspeakers on the municipal maidan, other agendas were being followed, and never more determinedly than in the heady days before and after Independence.