The Shadow of the Great Game

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The Shadow of the Great Game Page 20

by Narendra Singh Sarila

The concern that the British military felt about future Soviet intentions emerges clearly from a top-secret report on ‘the Security of India and the Indian Ocean’, prepared by the Post-Hostilities Planning Staff of the War Cabinet on Churchill’s orders. This report, which has been alluded to in Chapter 1, states: ‘The USSR is the only major power which would be capable of seriously threatening our interests in India and the Indian Ocean area by 1955–1960.’ The report also points out: ‘It is of paramount importance that India should not secede from the Empire or remain neutral in war.’ The strategic importance of India, according to this report’s analysis, were attributed to the following factors:

  (1) “Its value as a base” from where forces “would be suitably placed for deployment within the Indian Ocean area and in the Middle East and the Far East”;

  (2) “its position in relation to our air and sea communications; from the UK and the Middle East to Australia and the Far East”; and

  (3) the contribution which India is “capable of making to the war effort of the British Empire in consequence of its large reserve manpower (part of which is of high fighting quality)”.

  The report notes that: ‘Soviet oilfields in the Caucasus would be vulnerable to attacks from airfields in (northwest) India’ and since the ‘sea communications in the Persian Gulf and in the Arabian Sea carry a major portion of the oil produced in the Middle East and are therefore of great strategic value’. The report then hinted at the possibility of detaching a part of India to achieve British objectives:

  We must ensure that whatever constitutional changes occur, we retain the right to station military strategic reserves in India…. There might be political objections to stationing the strategic reserve in India proper after she has been granted Dominion Status…. Central Headquarters India have suggested that Baluchistan as an alternative to India proper, on the ground that it may be relatively easy to exclude this territory from the Dominion of India.

  The report also touched upon the role of the USA: ‘In the event of Soviet aggression early support from the US is essential to the security of our interests.’ It suggested how this support could be secured: ‘A World Organization might well result in the USA assuming definite military responsibility in the Indian Ocean area despite the fact that she has few direct interests there.’ However, it added: ‘It would be necessary to ensure that the USA would not regard participation in regional defence measures as a pretext for intervention in questions involving the relationship between Great Britain and India.’ The seeds of some form of partition of India and setting up of multinational defence arrangements – CENTO – can be discerned in this report as also the British anxiety to keep India away from the influence of its main partner, the USA.29

  The records do not show that Wavell was associated in any way with this assessment. However, his view that Britain’s prime interest in India was strategic because of its usefulness as a military base, transit point and contributor of fighting manpower, was exactly the same as in the report. Only on one point did his views differ: Whereas the report envisaged the possibility of the continuation of British control over India till 1955, Wavell had no such hope.

  Wavell’s most important meeting in London was with Churchill, which was held on 29 March 1945. A record of this meeting is unavailable. But one can get some idea of what was discussed from a cryptic entry made by the viceroy in his diary that night:

  The PM then launched into a long jeremiad about India which lasted for about forty minutes. He seems to favour partition of India into Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan.30

  On whether there was any talk on how such a goal was to be achieved, the viceroy’s diary is silent.

  Wavell’s talks with the members of the India Committee of the War Cabinet, headed by Clement Attlee, were spread over two months. They revolved round his proposal to hold a conference of Indian leaders to discuss the formation of a politically representative executive council that would contain an equal number of ‘caste Hindus and Muslims’ and would function with minimum interference from the viceroy. Further, Wavell felt that before the conference was called, those Congress Party leaders still in jail should be released. The War Cabinet finally agreed to the proposal but it was understood that Jinnah’s assent to the composition of the proposed executive council was a prerequisite. Initially, Churchill hesitated to take the plunge but later yielded after he was assured that he need have no fears that a government in India would result from the proposal and, indeed, the conference was destined to fail.31

  Despite these assurances, Churchill may not have given his consent to such experiments but for the necessity to trump pressure mounting once again from across the Atlantic. While Wavell was holding consultations in London, the British foreign secretary, Sir Anthony Eden, had travelled to the USA in April 1945 to attend the San Francisco conference to launch the United Nations. Taking advantage of this visit, the Americans decided once more to tackle the British on India. Both the US secretary of state, Edward R. Stettinius, and the assistant secretary of state, Joseph Grew, spoke to Eden on the necessity for constitutional advance in India. The gist of the conversations was recorded by Grew (on 17 May 1945) as follows:

  I had an opportunity to say [to Eden] that I thought that Mr Stettinius had already spoken to him of our feeling that our prestige in the Far East would be greatly improved whenever a solution to the problem of India is found and that we must always reckon with the future development of “Asia for the Asiatics Movement”. I added that progressive steps in India would tend to offset the strengthening of such a movement. Mr Eden made no comment except to say that he did not believe that the Indian problem would be settled as long as Gandhi lived.32

  Despite Eden’s stiff response, Britain, within a few days, was able to inform the Americans that arrangements had been made to set free the members of the Congress Working Committee (kept in detention since 1942) and that Lord Wavell had been authorized to make a fresh proposal to the Indians. Churchill had successfully trumped Roosevelt’s pressure tactics for granting self-government to India after the fall of Singapore by playing the Muslim (or the Pakistan) card through the Cripps mission. A Hindu–Muslim disagreement in a conference as proposed by Wavell would help to again quieten down the Americans.

  The Americans had continued their ‘friendly pressure’ on the British for granting self-government to India in accordance with the policy laid down by the president, as described in Chapter 4. In July 1944, John G. Winant, the US ambassador to the UK, on instructions from Washington, informed London ‘that a satisfactory solution of the Indian problem should contribute much to the successful prosecution of the war in the Far East and is of great importance to the future peace of the world’.33 However, Churchill ignored the advice. But in November 1944 the Americans got an opportunity to hit back. Drew Pearson, the well-known journalist, published a piece alleging that Ambassador William Phillips, the special representative of the US president to India, had sent the following report:

  (1) the morale of the Indian Army (which he termed a “purely mercenary force”) was low;

  (2) Britain had no intention to play much of a role in the war against Japan; and

  (3) Churchill did not wish to apply the Atlantic Charter to India.34

  This report made Churchill see red. Despite numerous urgent representations made by the British ambassador, Lord Halifax, that the White House or the State Department deny the report, the Americans refused to oblige, President Roosevelt concurring with the acting secretary of state that ‘we share in general the view expressed in the Ambassador’s letter’.35

  The conference of Indian leaders called by Wavell on 25 June 1945 was a charade from the beginning to the end. Delegates from all the major parties, the representatives of the Sikhs and the Scheduled Castes and premiers of British provinces present and former – including the Congress Party premiers who had resigned in 1939 – were invited to meet the viceroy in the Viceregal Lodge in the Raj’s summer capital of Simla, up in t
he Himalayas. It would transport the Indian leaders from the sweltering heat of the Indian plains in summer, some from jails, to a climate approximating summer in Scotland or Gstaad in Switzerland, amongst hillsides covered by pine, oak and deodar trees, with spectacular views of snow-clad mountains to the north. In Simla they would either walk to the Viceroy’s Lodge or be carried there in a rickshaw, for no car except that of the viceroy was permitted on the roads of this hill station. The rickshaw was a light wooden contraption with a double seat suspended over two wheels, which was pulled and pushed by five men with the help of poles attached to its front and rear. The lodge itself was a replica of a Scottish castle with towers and gabled windows, surrounded by sloping lawns, gravelled paths and miles of hedges of English summer flowers. Gandhiji also came to Simla, but did not attend the conference; Nehru was not invited because he did not fall within any of the categories for participation designated by Wavell. It was Jinnah, in his London suits, who was the star.

  The conference failed as it was planned to fail, because Wavell refused to veto Jinnah’s pretensions to represent all the Muslims of India. According to Durga Das, a journalist of great integrity, Jinnah told him in the lift of the Cecil Hotel, Simla (towards the end of the conference) that he had been assured by friends in England, through a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, that ‘if he remained firm on the demand [of exclusively representing the Muslims and thus breaking the conference] he would get Pakistan’.36 One of the two secretaries of the Simla Conference has written: ‘Hossain Imam, who attended the conference in his capacity as the leader of the Muslim League Party in the Council of States, stopped me on my way to the Cecil Hotel and said that a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council was advising Jinnah to stand firm.’37 These British counsels to Jinnah were merely by way of abundant caution, because Jinnah was already playing the British game. He used the Simla Conference to make a long statement, arguing fully the case for Pakistan and highlighting Hindu–Muslim differences, which provided enough material to London to pass on to the Americans. According to the US State Department secret documents, Wavell’s officers briefed the American Commissariat in Delhi on eight separate occasions during and after the conference.

  Providing parity to the Muslims in the envisaged Viceroy’s Executive Council could be understood as ensuring a safeguard for a minority. But sustaining Jinnah’s claim as the sole spokesman of all the Muslims of India, when in both the Punjab and the NWFP, ministries of Muslims opposed to Jinnah were in office and commanded majorities in the legislatures, demonstrated that the British aim was not to install a new government in India but something different. Wavell had before him the top-secret and personal telegram sent by Sir Bertrand James Glancy, the governor of the Punjab, dated 3 July 1945, stating: ‘Jinnah’s claim to nominate all Muslims appears to me in light of League’s meagre hold on Muslim-majority Provinces, to be outrageously unreasonable. If he is given three nominations out of, say, five Muslim seats he should account himself [sic] fortunate indeed.’38 And, on the same day, the governor of Bengal, Richard Casey (who later became the foreign minister of Australia) warned Wavell in a top-secret, personal message that Khwaja Nazim-ud-din (the ex-Muslim League Bengal premier) had informed him that ‘he believed Jinnah would accept a Punjabi Muslim who is neither a member of the Congress nor of [the] League’.39

  Wavell knew all along that Jinnah would stick to his guns, a stand that would be unacceptable to the Congress Party. He also knew that London would never agree to overrule Jinnah’s demand, however absurd it may be; or let the Congress Party enter his ‘cabinet’, without the countervailing presence of the Muslim League in it. Therefore, ‘enacting’ the Simla Conference had no other purpose except to build up Jinnah against his Muslim rivals in the Punjab and to head off renewed American pressure for Indian self-government. And in this, Wavell succeeded brilliantly. The results of Simla were recorded by the Punjab governor as follows: ‘Since Jinnah succeeded by his intransigence in wrecking the Simla Conference his stock has been standing very high with his followers and with a large section of the Muslim population. He has openly come out that the [coming] election will show an overwhelming verdict in favour of Pakistan. The uninformed Muslim would be told that the question he is called on to answer at the polls is – Are you a true believer or an infidel or a traitor? Against this slogan the Unionists have no spectacular battle cry.’40

  Glancy then warned: ‘If Pakistan becomes an imminent reality we shall be heading straight for bloodshed on a wide scale.’41

  H.V. Hodson, the former reforms commissioner and main adviser to the viceroy, concurs with Glancy: ‘Mr Jinnah’s demonstration of imperious strength at the Simla Conference was a shot in the arm for the League and a serious blow for its Muslim opponents especially in the Punjab…Lord Wavell’s sudden abandonment of his plan [to set up a representative executive council] was a decisive move that made the partition of India inevitable.… To twist Mr Jinnah’s arm, it is clear, was not part of the plan that he had so laboriously agreed with His Majesty’s Government.’42

  After Simla, Muslims with political ambitions, including those from other Muslim formations, began to switch sides to the League in large numbers, though, in the Punjab, Tiwana held his ground. Soon after the conference, the secretary of state, Leopold Amery, in a personal telegram to the viceroy, congratulated him: ‘The Congress Party, after all by coming into the Conference, abandoned their claim that they are only people to take over from us.’43 The same Amery who, in 1940, had warned Linlithgow of the dangers of Pakistan, had by now become an enthusiastic supporter of the partition of India. A Britain greatly weakened by the war needed allies in the subcontinent to help it to resist Soviet pressure in the fresh chukker of the Great Game, which was about to begin. For the British to listen to warnings of massacres and blood baths would be similar to the Americans denying support to the Mujaheedins against the Soviets in Afghanistan some forty years later, despite the ever-present danger of fuelling Islamic fundamentalism.

  Two unexpected developments took place soon after the breakdown of the Simla Conference that gave a jolt to the British in India. First, Churchill’s Conservative Party lost the general elections and a Labour Party Government, with Clement Attlee as prime minister, took office on 23 July 1945. This was a defeat for Churchill at the very moment of his triumph and attested to the changing mood of the British public against war and the Empire, which the new government could not possibly ignore. The second was the dropping of atom bombs by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought about the unconditional surrender of Japan on 15 August 1945. This military feat increased America’s confidence to follow its own agenda and, among other things, to insist on the application of the Atlantic Charter to European dependencies in Asia and see them freed from European control. Attlee frankly admits in his autobiography that Britain could not continue to hold on to India because of ‘American pressure against Empire’.44

  The trumpet for the British retreat was sounding from another quarter as well. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, warned the Labour Cabinet members soon after they assumed power that the British debt had risen to £3000 million. He also pointed out that ‘the expenditure which is wholly responsible for our financial difficulties is the 2000 million pounds on policing and administering the Empire’, a situation that another commentator described as one of the most outstanding examples of strategic overextension in history. Keynes concluded that ‘British financial independence from the US (so dear to some Labourites of the day) was impossible without substantial cuts in future spending’.45 And the harsh reality was that India could no more help to recoup the losses. British exports to India had declined from £83 million in 1930 to less than £40 million by the start of the great war (in 1939). The downfall was the result of competition from American and Japanese goods.

  Attlee, whatever his reservations about the Congress Party and its leaders, was anxious to retain, if possible, the goodwill of a future independent Hind
ustan, which even if India was partitioned, would emerge as one of the largest nations in the world, abutting a still-unsettled China and resource-rich South-east Asia. He and Sir Stafford Cripps also felt it in their bones that, if judiciously handled, Jawaharlal Nehru, the Harrovian, could be won over into some kind of a partnership. On his visits to England, they found that he shared the same Fabian ideals they themselves had been influenced by and they understood his anger at the beginning of the war as directed against Neville Chamberlain’s ‘reactionary’ government rather than at England as such. Had he not, in 1940, said that England’s difficulties should not be India’s opportunities, even though sometimes his actions did not match his words? And had he not maintained a channel of communication with Attlee and Cripps through the Labourite Krishna Menon, in London? They believed that Nehru’s ‘tireless energy’ could be diverted into ‘constructive channels’ and his ‘delusions’ curbed if he was saddled with responsibility. And whatever the viceroy’s views about him, they were unwilling to quarrel with a man with whose help they hoped to possibly reconstruct British–Hindustani relations.

  On the other hand, after the Labour Government took over power, Wavell became more assertive on his policy in favour of Jinnah and the Muslim League, probably believing that with Churchill dislodged, the Labour Government might ‘mishandle’ the India situation. For example, he wrote in his diary on 6 August 1945: ‘I know nothing of the new Secretary of State [Frederick William] Pethick-Lawrence. I fear he may have fixed ideas derived from Congress Party contacts.’46 On 20 August he alerted his new masters as follows: ‘HMG must be most cautious in any immediate announcement [on India] they wish to make. It is easy to say that the Muslims cannot be allowed to hold up the settlement; but they are too large a proportion of the population to be bypassed or coerced without very grave danger.’47 And when summoned to London for a policy review by the cabinet, he spoke as follows:

 

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