by Jon Wilson
In opposition to Congress’s vision of a centralized Indian state, the Muslim League insisted sovereignty lay with the provinces, which could then group themselves into more than one state, creating Pakistan if they chose. Rule by a government elected by India’s Hindu majority would, the League argued, ‘reduce Muslims, Christians and other minorities to the status of irredeemable helots’. Mohammad Ali Jinnah thought Muslims would be best protected if state power was divided into a federation of quasi-independent provinces, overseen by a weak central power where the interests of India’s Muslim minority would be grouped together and well represented. By the end of the war Jinnah’s public position was that a state of Pakistan should be created; but this notion of a separate Muslim state was a tactic designed to achieve a better deal for Muslims within a single federal state. Jinnah’s ploy refused to acknowledge how intense the passion for separation had become between many Muslims and Hindus during the previous few years. The hyper-rational, London-trained lawyer continually overestimated the power and patience of his interlocutors. War, famine and the separation of Indian between Congress and League provinces had already encouraged communities to separate, and led the British to believe they needed to leave fast.
By the summer of 1946 the Viceroy was bleak about the prospects of any form of British authority continuing in India for long. As early as April that year, Wavell’s priority had been to prevent India descending into chaos, irrespective of who was in charge. His ‘chief concern was to get a body of efficient administrators whom India would recognize as representative leaders of Indian public opinion’, as he put it. That meant transferring power to an entirely Indian regime as quickly as possible. Wavell proposed to hand day-to-day running of government to an Indian interim government. India would, at last, be treated ‘like a Dominion Government’, with the Viceroy doing nothing more than chairing meetings and overseeing the rapidly shrinking army. Wavell wanted the government to involve the Muslim League as well as Congress, but the League insisted on staying out until negotiations moved in their direction. At the beginning of September 1946, all the central Indian ministries were handed to Congress ministers. The Viceroy insisted Jawaharlal Nehru ‘was not Prime Minister or Chief Minister’, but only ‘the head of the popular part of the Government’. But Nehru chose the ministers, decided the business of government and had a private secretary who doubled up as secretary to the new cabinet as a whole. He was, in effect, Prime Minister.
If there was a single moment when the British transferred power over the central machinery of government in India this, not India’s independence in 1947, was it. From September 1946, the public language of rule subtly changed. From that date, Wavell called Congress ministers ‘colleagues’ in public at least. They governed as a ‘cabinet’, which made collective decisions. There were, the Viceroy noted, ‘minor skirmishes’, but ‘we have got on well on the whole’. ‘Our method of working’, Nehru insisted later in the month, ‘is for all of us to discuss common problems and to arrive at joint decisions for which we are jointly responsible.’ There were to be no subjects reserved only for Europeans. The government in London praised Wavell’s ‘handling of [his] colleagues’ in public at least, suggesting his ‘liberal concessions’ were a way the Viceroy could keep his new ministers ‘straight on essentials’. As Wavell knew, the new language of collaboration reflected the fact that government in India could only now rely on Indian organization rather than British power.45
From the end of August 1946, Congress’s high command behaved as if it was the central government of India. The interim government started to run its own foreign policy, independent of the British for example. As soon as the new ministers were appointed, the British Foreign Office in London appointed a High Commissioner to represent British interests in Delhi, treating India the same way as entirely self-governing members of the Commonwealth like Australia or Canada. Nehru started to establish diplomatic relations with other powers, particularly Soviet Russia. V. K. Krishna Menon, the London-based politician and co-founder of Penguin Books, was deputed as Nehru’s personal emissary to tour European capitals with the Government of India paying the bill. One of his first actions was to ask the Soviet Union to ship wheat to India to ease the likelihood of famine. Both Nehru and Menon started a campaign to have India be given a seat on the United Nations security council. The Viceroy thought Menon’s actions were ‘ill-advised and ill-timed’ but could do nothing to stop them.46
In August 1946, the only institution in British India still controlled by the British was the army; this was the subject of the only real conflict which developed in the interim cabinet. Two weeks after taking over, Nehru wrote to the Commander-in-Chief insisting that the army ‘make it feel that it is the national army of India’. Auchinleck’s response was not hostile to Nehru’s proposals. In his reply, he pointed out that the army had only defeated Japan by putting them into practice already; ‘national service’ had already become a vital element in the rhetoric used to persuade Indian soldiers to defeat the Japanese; troops were being recruited from every part of India; after the war, Indian soldiers were being withdrawn from postings overseas. Instead of defending the authority of Britons in India, Auchinleck was concerned that the army was not Indian enough. India’s middle classes were not coming forward in large enough numbers to staff the Indian army’s officer cadres. The imperial Commander-in-Chief turned the table on Nehru, calling for the putative Prime Minister of India’s help in nationalizing the army.
August 1946 was the moment when British officials made their final retreat from almost every corner of the Raj. From the end of the month, imperial secrets were safe nowhere other than in the inner core of the Viceroy’s private office. To prevent it falling into Indian hands ‘top secret’ imperial military correspondence was no longer sent even to the Viceroy or Commander-in-Chief.47 The impending arrival of nationalist ministers sparked the destruction of embarrassing files. In July 1946 the Viceroy’s secretary sent a note round the ministries, asking secretaries about documents ‘which might be used as material for anti-British propaganda’. Anticipating the need to retreat quickly, some departments replied that they had ‘been weeding documents out for upwards of a year’. Most were burnt. Four dispatch boxes full of files of ‘historical interest’ were sent to the Viceroy’s private office in Government House in Simla, the last exclusively British space left in the Indian government. On 29 August 1946, these boxes were taken to Delhi airfield. Accompanied by a British secretary from the war department, Mr Dundas, they were flown on BOAC flight 10F82 to London’s Heathrow airport, to eventually find their way into the India Office’s library. The Indian government file tracing their journey makes it clear what happened. Its title referred to ‘the disposal of old records . . . on the formation of a “National Government”’ in September 1946.48
These files were the first things Vallabhbhai Patel looked for when he arrived as India’s new Home Minister in the first week of September 1946. From Gandhi’s home province of Gujarat, Patel had started his political career by being elected sanitation commissioner in Ahmedabad in 1917. In the early 1920s, he organized peasant proprietors in campaigns against the payment of imperial taxes, but had become Indian nationalism’s greatest supporter of the use of strong, centralized state power to keep Indian united. It was Patel who persuaded Congress not to alter the structure and traditions of the Indian Civil Service once the British left the subcontinent. His robust willingness to talk about authority and efficiency helped him with Lord Wavell. ‘We get on well,’ Wavell wrote. The two men had a one-to-one dinner soon after Patel had taken over as Home Minister. Wavell asked him how he was getting on with the ‘Intelligence Bureau’. ‘They burned all the interesting secret records before I took over,’ Patel replied. ‘Oh yes, I told them to do that,’ Wavell said, and they ‘laughed in a friendly way’.49
The culmination of administration
In August 1946 it was not only paper that burnt. The impending creation of the Congress go
vernment sparked riots throughout India. Violence was worst in the increasingly divided city of Calcutta. The same day Wavell published the names of the interim administration, Mohammad Ali Jinnah announced that 16 August would be ‘Direct Action Day’, when Muslims would take to the streets to oppose Congress tyranny and support the creation of Pakistan. The Muslim League wanted their activists to target the British as much as Congress, to prove that the League needed to be taken as seriously as its rivals. But in India’s cities the British state had little physical presence. Protest, particularly in Calcutta, merged with the fears different communities had developed of being dominated by Indian rivals.50
Bengal’s Muslim League government called a one-day holiday and a mass demonstration, a sign for many Hindus it was intent on tyrannizing them. From first light, streams of Muslims walked from every part of the city to the maidan, the great open space in the centre of Calcutta. Skirmishes broke out from 7.30am as Muslim demonstrators tried to stop Hindu shopkeepers from opening their stores. The violence was driven by destitution and a desire for economic gain as much as communal anxieties. Some people smashed shops shouting, ‘we’ll fight and take Pakistan!’ Others simply looted, taking goods they could not afford to buy, not worrying about the religious affiliation of the shopkeepers. In the middle of the morning groups of Muslims on their way from Howrah, on the western side of the River Hooghly, walking to the demonstration at the maidan started to turn back, drawn more by the prospect of looting near the city’s railway station than the chance to demonstrate their support for Pakistan.
As looting spread, Hindus and Sikhs retaliated, resisting what they saw as their subordination to Muslim rule. Gopal Patha, one of the few killers whose words have been recorded, explained his actions like this: ‘if we became a part of Pakistan we will be oppressed so I called my boys and said, this is the time we have to retaliate, and you have to answer brutality with brutality.’ Patha was a butcher and a local boss, who had weapons and followers at his command; Patha himself went into the streets with two pistols he had bought from an American soldier. ‘[I]f we heard one murder has taken place, we committed ten more.’ Overall, in three days of rioting, more than 4,000 people died.51
On both sides, violence was led by mobs who lived in a city not their own; watchmen, coachmen, loaders, boatmen, sweepers, taxi drivers, slum dwellers, men with no family nearby, often uprooted by poverty from their home village who had no sense of belonging other than their religious community. Calcutta in 1946 had been swollen by famine in the countryside. It was a city of hundreds of thousands of ‘lone men’ who eked out an insecure existence in textile mills and munitions factories, but whose prospects had got worse after the end of the war. Pushed to the edge of civility by the pressures of depression and war, these men had nothing in common but the precarious way they earned a living and their membership of one religious community or another.
But these conditions did not create violence on their own. In Bengal in 1946, mass killings were driven by the fact that members of India’s two major religious communities both feared they were beleaguered minorities, facing destruction in the face of coercive state power unless they defended themselves with force. Muslims were frightened that unless they carved out an autonomous Pakistan they would be annihilated by a Congress-led, India-wide Hindu Raj. In Bengal, though, Hindus were only 45 per cent of the population, and had lived under a Muslim provincial government since 1937. Pakistan, or even an extension of provincial autonomy, would mean their being dominated by Muslims. Violence was not about religion or culture, but was driven by the fear communities had about other communities monopolizing state power. Weeks after the riots the Hindu nationalist leader Shyama Prasad Mookerjee noted accurately that ‘[w]hat happened in Calcutta was not the result of a sudden explosion. It was the culmination of an administration.’ What he missed was the fact that fear of administration motivated both sides.52
Hindus ‘got the better’ of the fighting in Calcutta, as Vallabhbhai Patel put it. But Muslims fled to small-town Bengal and the cycle of violence continued. While riots in Calcutta only lasted a few days in August, fighting endured from October to December in Noakhali and Tippera, two districts where the famine had been particularly devastating, and where anti-Hindu rhetoric against landholders was particularly strong. Violence there was encouraged by leaflets saying the Muslim community was in grave danger and calling on Pakistan to be created by force: ‘Our community is being hit by our enemies’; ‘learn the scientific method of destroying Hindu properties’; ‘with Pakistan established, the whole of India should be conquered’; ‘all Congress leaders should be murdered one by one’. Violence was heavily organized, focusing on sites symbolically important to rival communities, with the destruction of almost all Hindu temples and the forced conversion of large numbers of men and women. Just as rioting divided cities into Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods, violence partitioned the countryside by default, as those under attack fled to regions or relief camps where members of their community were in the majority. And as news spread quickly, riots in one place sparked fear in another, creating the strongest idea yet of religious communities which spread from one end of India to another. Hindus in Lahore held a ‘Noakhali Day’ to protest against violence against their co-religionists in Bengal; in Bombay, the stock exchange was quickly closed.53
As passions grew in the last quarter of 1946, the majority of political India thought the country was on the brink of civil war. Observers feared that millions on each side would be mobilized into volunteer armies, and mutual resentment would sustain conflict for years. The British government’s constitutional adviser Nicholas Mansergh noted that ‘ardent members of the Congress and of the League both spoke freely about the possibility of civil war’; both sides thought such a war could be won. Major General Shahid Hamid, the private secretary to the Commander-in-Chief, imagined that the Muslim League would recruit Muslims in the army, and that Congress would be joined by volunteers from the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Sarvajanik Samaj. ‘We are not yet in the midst of civil war’, Gandhi wrote on 15 September, ‘but we are nearing it.’54
Amid growing chaos, British officers in India imagined they faced a choice between their two usual options: coercion or retreat. Without a sustained commitment to maintain imperial power by the Labour government in London, the first was impossible. In India Lord Wavell thought ‘one must either rule firmly or not at all’, so without ‘a decision to rule India for fifteen or twenty years’ there was no choice but exit. The aim, as Wavell put it in a paper to the British cabinet, should be ‘to withdraw British authority with the minimum disorder and loss to Her Majesty’s Government and to India’. Three weeks after the Calcutta riots, Wavell drafted a scheme for the phased exit of all British personnel from India which he titled ‘Plan Breakdown’. British officers were to leave India province by province, starting with Madras, Bombay, Central Provinces and Orissa where Congress had a stable, well-entrenched regime. It was hoped that the ‘shock’ would force the Muslim League and Congress to agree a settlement. If they did not, areas ruled by the same party would presumably federate to form sovereign states. But India would achieve self-government first of all as a collection of independent provinces and principalities.
When it arrived in London, Wavell’s plan created outrage. The breakdown scheme was based on the Viceroy’s assessment of the facts of British power on the ground. As a soldier, Wavell was interested in the physical occupation of territory. He recognized where territory had been lost and where the pretence of power needed to be abandoned. But politicians in Britain were primarily interested in the formal display of sovereignty not the reality of local power. Their concern was the projection of power through the British manipulation of images of authority, which the age of the mass media allowed to be carefully controlled. Wavell’s scheme for retreat abandoned the pretence of sovereignty that the British empire in its last phases in India relied on. The Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Secretary of State Lord
Pethick-Lawrence knew the British had no choice but to retreat. But they believed retreat could occur while maintaining the illusion of a conscious, planned transfer of sovereign power; they wanted to propogate myth, in other words, that the empire ruled until the last, that it had willingly transferred power of its own volition.
Wavell was recalled. In his place, the charming, media-conscious Lord Louis Mountbatten was appointed to stage-manage the ‘transfer of power’ and protect the image of British sovereign authority. Announcing his appointment in February 1947, Attlee also declared that Britain would leave India by June 1948. Mountbatten arrived on 24 March 1947, by which time fear and rioting had spread from Bengal much further west. In Bombay, Muslim League guards had started escorting fellow Muslims going out to the cinema back to Muslim ‘zones’. In Amritsar, iron gates were erected separating Muslim from Hindu and Sikh streets.
The new Viceroy decided Britain’s governing infrastructure could not last much more than a year. It was, he thought, safest for the British to leave as quickly as they could. Mountbatten also accepted that the only way to quit was to turn the de facto division of India between different communities into the partition of Britain’s sovereignty into two states. The British were out in five, not fifteen months.
It was, ultimately the Congress leadership’s reluctant decision to accept partition which forced Mountbatten’s hand. ‘The truth’, Nehru admitted years later, ‘is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years . . . The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.’ India seemed to be on the brink of communal civil war. In addition, a peasant insurgency was growing in Bengal and the Deccan. In north and west Bengal’s tebhaga (two-thirds) movement, sharecroppers made the moderate demand that no more than one third of their crop should go to the landlord. But the movement saw the growth of communist organization for the first time outside the cities which housed the industrial working class. The proliferation of red flags in Indian villages frightened Congress and the British. To prevent revolution or political breakdown, the Congress leadership sought the means to achieve the quickest transfer of power to a strong central state. A united independent India would have led to years of negotiation in the constituent assembly. Nehru thought this would have stopped the country getting on with the urgent use of central state power to make India less poor; Patel thought it risked civil war. In the end, Congress’s obsession with central state planning trumped its desire to keep India united. The historian K. M. Panikkar used an appropriate metaphor to describe Congress’s view: ‘Hindustan is the elephant . . . and Pakistan the two ears. The elephant can live without the ears.’55
