Attempts by the sailors to enlist the Mahrathas failed, and after the appearance of the cruiser Glasgow and the buzzing of the rebellious ships by Mosquito bombers, the mutiny collapsed. Both the government in Delhi and Congress were stunned by the mutiny which seemed to suggest that the authority of both might be on the verge of disintegration. Many British official files on the mutiny and its aftermath are still inexplicably closed, but local intelligence sources suspected that Communist agitators had been at work in the Bombay docks.16 Since December 1945, military intelligence had been nervous about Russian agents exploiting the situation in India, and a careful watch was kept for evidence of Communist subversion.17
The RIN mutiny was followed by more outbreaks of unrest, including so-called strikes by Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) men, a mutiny by seventy-five signallers at Allahabad, and a walkout by 300 policemen in Delhi.18 There was also a steady trickle of desertions to the Indonesian nationalists by Indian troops serving in Sumatra. Congress had condemned these operations and demanded that the government stopped using Indian soldiers as mercenaries of imperialism.19 By the end of March, military intelligence considered all army ancillary units, the RIN and the RIAF as still ‘suspect’, and was apprehensive about the Indian army’s future loyalty, for ‘only day to day estimates of its steadiness’ could be made.20 With such gloomy reading on his desk, it was not surprising that Wavell wrote to King George VI that India was now beset by a ‘general sense of insecurity and restlessness’.21 In June, the defence committee of the cabinet concluded that no evacuation of India could be allowed if the Indian army’s constancy was in doubt. In this event, five divisions of British troops would be required to keep order in India, although their deployment would pose a heavy strain on commitments elsewhere.22
What was surprising about the unrest among Indian servicemen was the absence of hostility to Britain. In the final days of the raj, relations between the British and Indians were better than they had been for the past thirty years, or so Auchinleck believed.23 This cordiality may have owed much, if not everything, to the fact that every Indian knew the British were about to leave. But there was still no timetable for their departure nor, more importantly, a form of government for independent India. In midsummer 1946 the cabinet mission recommended an elaborate constitution with a federal government for the whole country and, below it, two layers of local and provincial assemblies, which were designed both to satisfy and safeguard minorities. At first both Congress and the Muslim League acquiesced to this formula, but mutual suspicion proved too deep-rooted, and the two sides were soon squabbling over minutiae and the balance of communal representation. The upshot was Jinnah’s determination to go it alone and demand an independent Pakistan.
Jinnah called a Muslim hartal in Calcutta on 16 August. Four days of religious riots followed in which 4,000 were killed and 10,000 wounded. The British general whose Anglo-Indian forces restored order thought the slaughter many times worse than the Somme. News of what was happening in Calcutta sparked off massacres in Bombay where 1,000 died and over 13,000 were wounded. In Bihar, where the allegiance of the local police was wobbling, Hindus murdered 150 Muslim refugees in November. Here and elsewhere, the victims of religious frenzy were poor and humble; some months later a British journalist observed that few of their bodies were ever claimed from the police morgues.24
As the religious massacres proliferated, India appeared to be moving inexorably towards a civil war. After visiting Calcutta, Wavell concluded that the game was up, and drew up exigency plans for the evacuation of all British civilians and servicemen. Their safety was paramount, and if necessary they would depart before any political settlement, and certainly before the onset of the bloodbath which Wavell expected.
Wavell’s scheme was political disaster for India, Britain and the Labour party. Attlee was determined to prevent it, and in December Wavell was removed. He was succeeded as viceroy by Mountbatten, Attlee’s choice and a brilliant one in terms of Realpolitik. Attlee had been impressed by his conduct in Burma (that country’s descent into anarchy was not yet underway); he was a member of the royal family; and his nephew, Philip, was about to marry Princess Elizabeth. At a time when the royal family was held in almost pious awe, Mountbatten was more immune to public criticism than other comparable figures in public life. Most importantly, he saw eye-to-eye with Attlee on what had to be done in India and the speed with which it had to be accomplished. His brief gave him some leeway in negotiation, but Attlee always remained the master and the Viceroy his servant. There was close contact between Downing Street and Delhi; Mountbatten was recalled to London at a crucial moment in May, and himself suggested that Attlee went to India to deal personally with matters concerning partition.
Mountbatten arrived in India at the end of March 1947. He threw himself into his tasks with immense zeal and energy, using every ounce of his charm to persuade and cajole India’s tribunes, although he was brusque with Jinnah to the point of rudeness. He was assisted by his wife, Edwina, who had an engaging manner and a cocktail-party vivacity which captivated Nehru, now prime minister in an interim government and the voice of Congress. The Mountbattens at Viceregal House were a refreshing change from the staid Wavells; the Field-Marshal was a scholarly, contemplative and shy figure, and Lady Mountbatten once remarked that Viscountess Wavell dressed like her maid.25 Whatever else they did, the Mountbattens ensured that, at the top level at least, the final act in the drama of India’s independence was played out with panache.
The new viceroy’s most important duty was to stick as closely as possible to the revised timetable for self-government that had been set by Attlee. Previously, power was to have been handed over in June 1948, but in the light of the gradual disintegration of public order the date was brought forward to 15 August 1947. The new schedule was revealed by Mountbatten at a press conference on 4 June and was received with a mixture of delight, amazement and, in some quarters, foreboding. Soon after, he issued his officials with a ‘tear-off calendar indicating the days left for the partition’ as if the event was the last day of a public-school term.26 The divorce of Hindu and Muslim India had been a political reality since the December 1945 and March 1946 local and provincial elections, in which Hindu Congress candidates had secured 90 per cent of the votes in the predominantly non-Muslim regions, and Muslims had come out on top in their areas. No number of intricate political checks and balances could have prevented the polarisation of India and preserved it as a single polity. This was reluctantly recognised by Congress, and during May a plan for partition was agreed by Mountbatten and the Indian leadership, and subsequently rubber-stamped by the cabinet in London.
Winding up the raj was a relatively easy business which had been quietly underway for the past twenty years. By 1946, more than half the 1,026 senior officials of the Indian civil service were Indians, and the total of native Indian army officers had risen from 1,000 in 1939 to 15,750 in 1946. Old traditions of discipline and comradeship made it possible to break down the multi-racial and religious units of the Indian army, separate them, and apportion officers and men to the new forces of India and Pakistan. This minor triumph was achieved with a minimum of fuss and considerable goodwill, thanks to the patient wisdom of Auchinleck, who predicted that his men would find it easy to shift their loyalties from the king emperor to their new communities. For one Subadar-Major, the whole thing was an expression of British genius. During the parade to mark Pakistan’s independence, he remarked to a British officer, ‘Ah, Sahib, the British have been very cunning. We Muslims have our Pakistan; the Hindus have their Hindustan; and the British soldiers will be able to go home.’ Sadly, it was not that simple. Not far away, Hindu and Sikh troops sulked and refused to join the march past for Jinnah.27
Their recalcitrance was understandable given the events which had occurred in the three months before independence. It would have been beyond the wit of any man to have created boundaries which would have satisfied everyone; there were bound to be communities w
ho found themselves on the ‘wrong’ side of the frontier and felt isolated, outnumbered and frightened.
Fear was greatest in the Punjab, home to a substantial portion of India’s five-and-a-half million Sikhs (one in six of the province’s population), which was to be split between India and Pakistan. The Sikhs rejected Muslim domination and answered Jinnah’s newly-coined slogan Pakistan Zindabad! (Long Live Pakistan) with Pakistan Murdabad! (Death to Pakistan). By late spring, the Punjab was wracked by massacres, counter-massacres, looting and arson. Their heritage of Muslim persecution and their historic reaction to it gave the Sikhs a peculiar resilience, and a powerful urge to seek revenge. An indication of their sufferings and present temper may be found in a leaflet circulating at the beginning of April 1947:
Thousands of Sikh and Hindu women have been murdered; Keshas [long tresses] and beards of hundreds have been chopped off and an effort has been made to convert them to Islam; hundreds of women have been abducted. Whole villages have been burnt up … Rest assured, as it is only a small specimen of Pakistan and more terrible incidents are yet to come. But Khalsaji [warriors], we are Sikhs of that Guru who having had his four children slaughtered said, ‘What if four have fallen? Thousands will survive.’ We have to fight this tyrannical Pakistan …28
A British civil servant, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, drew the line which bisected the Punjab. It was a thankless task whose consequences haunted him until his death. What he and others had decided was kept in Mountbatten’s safe for publication after Independence Day, when the whole affair would no longer be Britain’s responsibility. There had been leaks about the future of the Chittagong region which had sparked off a minor row, and this was enough to convince Mountbatten that secrecy was best.
His primary duty was to the British government; he had already stated that British forces would be evacuated as quickly as possible, which ruled them out as an impartial police force during the enforcement of partition, and he had an overriding wish to see that power was handed over with decorum. The shows (there was one in Delhi and another in Karachi) came first.29 The official ceremonies passed off smoothly; the declaration of the partition award, made the following day, did not.
The massive bloodletting which occurred across northern India after partition is well known. Perhaps half a million died, although no one has ever calculated the exact numbers killed. The details were reported by newspapermen, most notably Louis Heren of The Times. He and others heard the grisly catalogue of past outrages which were the murder gangs’ justification for their crimes. In August, Sikhs and Hindus were killing Punjabi Muslims in revenge for the massacre of their co-religionists in Rawalpindi the previous March. This holocaust was vengeance for the slaughter of Muslims by Hindus in Bihar five months before, and, in turn, this was retaliation for the bloodbath in Calcutta in August 1946.30 British and Indian officers who watched and, where they could, attempted to stop the slaughter, told Heren it was ‘a thousand times more horrible than anything we saw in the war’. One eyewitness description of events in Lahore (Pakistan) in mid-August, a soldier’s, may stand for many others:
Corpses lay in the gutter. Nearby a posse of Muslim police chatted unconcerned. A British Major (a sapper) had also arrived. He and his driver were collecting the bodies. Some were dead. Some were dying. All were horribly mutilated. They were Sikhs. Their long hair and beards were matted with blood. An old man, not so bad as the rest, asked me where we were taking them. ‘To hospital,’ I replied; adding to hearten him, ‘You’re not going to die.’
‘I shall,’ he said, ‘if there is a Muslim doctor.’31
There is no simple answer to the question whether all this could have been avoided. Mountbatten’s reactions showed him at his most shallow; back in England in November he tried to minimise the scale of the disaster, and claimed that it had surprised him.32 But there had been a steady build-up of violence since August 1946 and military intelligence knew that it would worsen. Aware of this, Auchinleck had wanted to keep British troops behind after independence, but had been overridden by Mountbatten.33 And yet, if such a course had been followed, British servicemen would have become embroiled in a struggle from which it might have been very hard to extricate them. Major-General T.W. Rees’s short-lived and undermanned Punjab Frontier Force accomplished wonders, but this is not to say that larger detachments would have enjoyed the same success.
Senior military men in India, including Auchinleck, were critical of Mountbatten, whose Toad-of-Toad-Hall exhibitionism irritated a caste which traditionally prized reticence and self-effacement. Lieutenant-General Sir Reginald Savory, Adjutant-General of the Indian army, accused him of having ‘tried to make it appear to India and the world and to ourselves that we were committing a noble deed’.34 This charge confuses Mountbatten’s self-publicity with government policy; he was always Attlee’s agent, carrying out the will of the cabinet and parliament. He thought he had done the job rather well, and said so so often that it was easy to forget this fact.
What he had accomplished was essentially a pragmatic measure which was, as Attlee appreciated, a sensible reaction to historic forces which had been gathering momentum for thirty years. The raj could not be maintained by force, for its end was wished by the great mass of the Indian people, and there is no reason to believe that the British would have been willing to see it prolonged at the cost of an interminable war of repression. Even if it had been contemplated, such a policy would have played havoc with Britain’s commitments elsewhere. These were stretched to breaking point and, in 1946, the government was worried about the consequences for industry of having 18.6 per cent of the country’s manpower in the services. The choice facing Attlee was graphically portrayed in a Daily Herald cartoon of 24 May 1946. Two saloons labelled ‘Labour Government’ and ‘Dominions’ surge forward along a road, while a jalopy inscribed ‘Jingo’ plunges over a cliff, its blimpish driver and passenger calling out, ‘Come On! This Way !’ There were some on the right who muttered about a failure of ‘nerve’ in India and elsewhere in the empire, but nerve without muscle could not have saved the raj or the colonies.
The loss of India was felt most keenly by the men and women who had served there and devoted their lives to its people’s welfare. Many old servants of the raj were bitterly dismayed by the unseemly haste of the transfer of power and its baleful consequences. But those who had connections with the raj represented a narrow section of British society. In June 1946 there had been 44,537 civilians and 10,837 service wives and children in India, together with the garrison and Indian army officers. They were the last representatives of a British population which, since the days of Clive, had been transient. Men and women came to India, performed the duties they had been sent to undertake, and then returned home. Even so, the rearguard of 1947 and previous exiles found it extremely hard to accept the emotional break with a country and a people which they had come to love and to which they had given so much of their lives. Forty-five years later, newspaper announcements of various Indian reunion dinners, usually regimental, in London clubs are a testament to their sense of comradeship and nostalgia for the raj.
The strategic and psychological consequences of the loss of India were enormous but their effect was, at first, limited. Mountbatten had not clinched a military alliance with either India or Pakistan, although both elected to enter the Commonwealth. Ceylon was more accommodating and agreed to allow Britain use of its bases, so Britain could maintain its old, dominant position in the Indian Ocean. This was small consolation for control over India. A pantheon of statesmen from Disraeli to Bevin had convinced themselves and the country that ownership of India was the key to Britain’s greatness. Take away India, Curzon had warned, and Britain would become a second-rate power.
Strategists from Wellington to Attlee’s chiefs-of-staff agreed, and the latter feared that Britain’s future as a world power would be in jeopardy without India’s reserve of manpower, which had proved so vital in two world wars and sundry smaller imperial campaigns throughout
the Middle East, East Africa and the Far East. Within a year of Indian independence, a senior officer was calling for the creation of an Anglo-African army on the lines of the Indian:
If British units were mingled with East African units on a similar but miniature model of the recent Army in India, their standard of efficiency and pleasure in soldiering could rise to unprecedented heights. The British ranks of the African units could be filled by the cream of those attracted by the life and people.35
As has been seen, Attlee was eventually attracted by this idea, But mass standing armies were expensive to maintain in peacetime. Since mid-1946, British strategic planners had been concentrating on a cheaper source of strength that was more relevant to Cold War needs; long-range bombers and atomic bombs. As a source of power and prestige, the Indian army had become an anachronism, although its loss would be felt in the so-called ‘bush-fire’ campaigns of the Far and Middle East during the 1950s and early 1960s.
These were the years during which the British public found itself slowly coming to terms with the delayed trauma of imperial decline. The slowness of the reaction owed much to the fact that the Commonwealth had served as an invaluable shock-absorber in the years immediately after 1947. It had helped salve pride hurt by the loss of territory and prestige, and appeared to offer compensation for both. It gave Britain a special moral status at a time when France was fighting two bloody colonial wars. For those whose political opinions were primarily determined by ethical considerations, it embodied all the old idealism of benevolent imperialism without any of the guilt associated with alien rule. Reporting with approval the 1956 Young Commonwealth conference, the Observer referred to the ‘moral benefits’ which delegates felt they had acquired during discussions on such matters as literacy campaigns.36 It was all very earnest, and heartwarming for those of the left and centre who had never quite lost their pre-war faith in international cooperation.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 68
