The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  Marshall and Acheson were soon to realize that their hopes of a united India had been dashed. It is worth noting that the Indian nationalists never exploited the potential of US support in favour of a unitary solution. They did not realize the growing influence of American policy on Britain, as Jinnah did. The Americans, ultimately, not only reconciled themselves to the formation of Pakistan but also, some years later, developed a defence partnership with this strategically located new state. Without partition, Indo–US relations might not have plunged to the extent they did during the Cold War era. The division not only removed the adversarial factor in Anglo– US relations because of their differences on policy towards India (which has been discussed in Chapter 6) but also increased British influence over US policy in South Asia.

  If there were misgivings in certain British quarters on the wisdom of dividing India, the performance of the nationalists in the Interim Government helped to dispel them. The passage of the resolution in the Congress Party-dominated Constituent Assembly on India’s intention to leave the Commonwealth was a shock to the British. It signalled the foreclosing of the hoped-for continued cooperation of the Indian armed forces in Commonwealth (Empire) defence. Then, the foreign policy pursued by Jawaharlal Nehru created apprehensions that unless a part of India was detached – a part on which they could rely – Indian independence might prove an unmitigated strategic disaster for England. In any case, the assessment of the director of the Intelligence Bureau (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) that ‘Pakistan is likely to come from “Congresstan” [the acceptance of office by the Congress Party]’, had proved prophetic.

  Notes and References

  1. TOP IX, p. 304, enclosure.

  2. US FR 1946, Vol. V, pp. 92–93.

  3. Ibid., pp. 93–94.

  4. TOP IX, S. No. 69.

  5. US FR 1946, Vol. V, p. 94.

  6. Wavell, The Viceroy’s Journal (Oxford University Press, London, 1977, p. 343).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Patel, Collected Works, Vol. X (Government of India, New Delhi, p. 230).

  9. Ibid., p. 257.

  10. TOP IX, p. 304, enclosure.

  11. Wavell, op. cit., p. 315.

  12. Ibid., p. 336.

  13. Ibid., p. 330.

  14. TOP VIII, p. 286.

  15. TOP IX, p. 35 (Attlee’s undated note).

  16. TOP VIII, p. 501 (Paras 3, 8 and 11).

  17. Ibid.

  18. Sudhir Ghose, Gandhiji’s Emissary (First Cresset, London, 1967, pp. 25–26).

  19. Wavell, op. cit., p. 349.

  20. H.V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan (Oxford University Press edition, Delhi, 2000, p. 173).

  21. Patel, op. cit., Vol. X, pp. 252–53.

  22. Hodson, op. cit., p. 180.

  23. US FR 1947, Vol. III, p. 139.

  24. TOP IX, p. 224, annexure, dated 30 August 1946.

  25. COS (46) 229 (O), appendix (OIC, British Library, London).

  26. Private telegram from Auchinleck to Mayne, No. 270087/CGS, dated 14 September 1946.

  27. TOP VIII, p. 371.

  28. Ibid., p 537.

  29. TOP IX, p. 338, enclosure, Para 7 (ii).

  30. TOP VIII, p. 228.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Foreign Office files (1946), p. 479.

  33. Stanley Wolpert, Roots of Confrontation in South Asia (Oxford University Press, London, 1982, p. 67).

  34. R/3/1/92, File No. 243/8/99 (43–46), Packmans to Caroe (OIC, British Library, London).

  35. Ibid., DO No. 911–16, Caroe to viceroy, 23 October 1946, Paras 3, 6, 12 and 15.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid.

  40. TOP IX, p. 49, para 6.

  41. Ibid., p 166.

  42. Patel, op. cit., Vol. X, S. No. 367, 15 December 1946.

  43. Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, Vol. 2 (India Research Press, Delhi, 1999, p. 1162).

  44. V.P. Menon, Transfer of Power in India (Longman Green, London, 1957, pp. 358–59).

  45. Ibid., p. 359.

  46. MBI/D/241 (Broadland Archives, University of Southampton).

  47. Ibid.

  48. US FR, 1946, Vol. V, p. 87.

  49. Ibid., p. 91.

  50. Ibid., p. 97.

  51. Ibid., p. 98.

  52. Ibid., p. 99.

  53. Ibid., pp. 103–04.

  54. TOP IX, p. 170.

  55. US FR 1946, Vol. V, pp. 103–04.

  56. Ibid., p. 105.

  57. Ibid., p. 106.

  58. Ibid., pp. 106–09.

  59. US FR 1947, Vol. III, pp. 137–38.

  60. Correspondence M.A. Jinnah–Isfahani: 1936–48 (Karachi Royal Book Co., Karachi, 1976).

  61. Dennis Kux, Disenchanted Allies (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2001, p. 8).

  62. US FR 1947, Vol. III, p. 141.

  63. TOP IX, p. 438.

  64. Ibid., p. 469.

  65. Khaliq-uz-Zaman, Pathway to Pakistan (Longman Green, London, 1961, p. 375).

  66. US FR 1947, Vol. III, p. 143, Para 4.

  67. Ibid., pp. 151–52.

  68. Ibid.

  69. TOP, Vol. IX, p. 511, Para 4.

  70. US FR, Vol. III, pp. 152–54.

  * Rs 30 million annually, equivalent to Rs 1500 million at present or about $30 million dollars.

  * Quaid-i-Azam means ‘great leader’, the title used for Jinnah.

  10

  Mountbatten’s Counsellor

  REAR ADMIRAL EARL LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA REACHED DELHI on 22 March 1947. He had been the supreme commander of the South-east Asia Command and had taken the surrender of the Japanese forces in Burma, Malay, Indo–China, Indonesia and Singapore. He had been appointed supreme commander by Prime Minister Winston Churchill over the heads of several senior British service officers. Churchill considered him an outstandingly innovative and positive leader who, with the force of his personality, could match the aplomb of General Douglas MacArthur, ‘the American Caesar’, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. In South-east Asia, he showed a capacity to get on with people of every race and to comprehend ‘the vitality of Asian nationalism’.

  He had won his spurs as the chief of Combined Operations, a new formation, set up in 1941, ‘to organize raids of ever-increasing intensity across the Channel combining Naval [sic], Army and Air Force, the main object being to prepare for [the] invasion of France’.1 Churchill had himself briefed him: ‘Your whole attention is to be concentrated on offensive action.’2 The post gave him an opportunity to deploy his innovative talents and unconventional ideas to the full. As chief of Combined Operations, he soon started to sit with the other three chiefs in the top military echelon that conducted the war. This position enabled him to rub shoulders with top British and American brass, including US Generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower, who both liked him; in fact, more than his English seniors who considered it wrong that a mere naval commodore in rank should receive so much attention.

  Mountbatten was a cousin of the King Emperor George VI and married, in July 1922, one of the richest heiresses in England, Edwina Ashley, who was considered one of the most sought-after girls in London for her ‘fierce brilliance and elegance’.3 Her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, a Jewish banker, had emigrated from Germany to London at the end of the nineteenth century and had become a close friend of King Edward VII. He had left behind a fortune of £7.5 million, together with Brook House, his London residence, and £30,000 a year, to his sister for life and then to Edwina, his favourite granddaughter, who also got the lion’s share of the residue of £2.3 million. So this was also an alliance in which royal blood on one side balanced a great fortune on the other. The young couple’s lifestyle in London’s merry 1920s was, what would be called today, that of jetsetters. For their honeymoon they travelled to the United States, Mountbatten taking an instant delight ‘in the brash, vibrant, enthusiastic society of New York’.4 In Hollywood they were entertaine
d at the houses of major stars, including Charlie Chaplin, and found time to even make a film. Mountbatten noted in his diary on 18 October 1922: ‘It was fascinating work. Edwina and I are “lovers” in it.’5

  Mountbatten’s pay at this time was £310 a year and his income from dividends provided an additional £300.6 His father, Admiral Prince Louis of Battenberg, a migrant from the principality of Hesse on the river Rhine in Germany, had been a naval officer during his entire career and was by no means rich. He had migrated to England because of his passion to serve in the Royal Navy, the greatest navy in the world at that time. The English Battenbergs made up for their modest means by the importance of their connections not only with the British royal family but also with most of the royal houses of Europe. Czar Alexander II of Russia had married a sister of Mountbatten’s grandfather; a daughter of Empress Victoria had married into the Hesse family and it was through her that the future viceroy was a great-grandson of the British Queen. His own sister was married to the king of Sweden. According to his biographer, Philip Ziegler: ‘The genealogy which he worked out enumerated the channels that divided him from Emperor Charlemagne and the intricate web of cousinship which bound him many times over to the Wittelsbachs and the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns.’7 At his birth, Queen Victoria had insisted on adding her husband’s name, Albert, to his others, which lengthened to Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Battenberg. The Earldom, the Garter and other honours came his way, as his career progressed and made him one of the most decorated Englishmen of that era.

  Neither his high connections nor his wife’s wealth detracted Mountbatten from his utter devotion to his career in the Royal Navy, earning from one of his colleagues the sobriquet ‘an undersexed workaholic’.8 He was determined one day to head the British Navy, a post that his father Admiral Battenberg had held and from which, at the beginning of the First World War, he was allowed to resign by Churchill, the then secretary of the Navy, because of his German birth. It was during the First World War that the family anglicized its name to Mountbatten.

  Whatever else, Louis Mountbatten, nicknamed Dickie, did not lack gumption and showmanship. In May 1941, when HMS Kelly, the destroyer he was commanding, received direct hits from German Junker bombers off the coast of Crete and started to capsize, he believed that he ought to be the last to leave the ship. ‘I left it a bit late…’, he recounted to his daughter, Patricia. ‘Then I started swallowing water. I knew I would be finished, if I couldn’t stop this. So I put my left hand over my mouth and nose and held them shut. Then I thought my lungs would burst. Finally, I began to see daylight and suddenly shot out of the water like a cork released.’9 According to the crew, as soon as Mountbatten found a raft to hold on to, he rallied others who had survived and were on other rafts to call for three cheers as the Kelly finally went down. ‘Mi Lord’ was always popular amongst the crew much more so than amongst his senior officers, who felt that he was not averse to taking short cuts to further his career.

  Churchill harboured a life-long guilt for not standing up to defend Mountbatten’s father. In 1941, after he lost Kelly, Churchill, through Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s troubleshooter, had the ‘dashing and well-connected young sailor’10 invited on a lecture tour to the United States to recount British naval exploits against the Germans ‘to make propaganda and cultivate useful contacts’.11 Lady Edwina accompanied him on a goodwill tour to thank the American Red Cross for all its help. According to Ziegler: ‘His tour of the United States turned into a triumphal progress. Everywhere he was feted by the rich and the powerful.’12 Thrice he dined at the White House, on the first occasion talking to the president till 1 a.m. ‘He has done more than anyone else to instil and to encourage American admiration for Britain’, observed a commentator.13 ‘Mountbatten has been really useful to our Navy people’, the president himself wrote to Churchill.14 It was while he was still on his American tour that Churchill recalled him to be groomed to become the chief of Combined Operations.

  India was a not totally new country to Mountbatten. He had first visited it on a lengthy trip as companion to the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) in 1921 and had noticed both the Indian animosity towards the British and also his British compatriots’ pleasant lifestyle in India – polo, pig-sticking, hunting and shooting (he shot his first tiger on this trip, of which then there were 40,000 in the Indian jungles), the pageants, the ballroom dancing as well as the merry making in the courts of the Indian princes. No one could have then imagined that the end of Empire was only a little more than a quarter century away. It was while on this trip that he got engaged to Edwina Ashley in Delhi. She had wangled an invitation from the viceroy, Lord Reading (Rufus Isaacs) and the vicereine, to be their guest. On appointment as the supreme commander of the South-east Asia Command (SEAC), Mountbatten was in India once again. The HQ of the SEAC was first located in Delhi, before he shifted it to Kandy, the hill station in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).

  Attlee and Cripps also thought highly of Mountbatten. ‘He was an extremely lively exciting personality,’ wrote Attlee. ‘He had an extraordinary faculty for getting on with all kinds of people…. He was also blessed with a very unusual wife’.15 Cripps admired him for his qualities of leadership that he himself lacked. It is said that it was Cripps who, in March 1946, manipulated a visit for Jawaharlal Nehru to South-east Asia and to be the guest of the Mountbattens in Singapore. Nehru had never received such friendly treatment from any other British official and fell under his spell. It was also here that Nehru first discovered Lady Edwina, indeed rescued her, after she had got knocked down to the ground in a melee of enthusiastic Singaporeans at a reception.

  This background is important for an understanding of Mountbatten’s impact on the Indian political scene. On the one side were his high royal connections, the confidence reposed in him by both Churchill and Attlee and his handsome and, in a way, flamboyant presence. On the other was his utter lack of lordliness or stiffness in dealing with his Indian interlocutors, showing no hesitation to stoop to conquer. These qualities had an immediate effect on the Indians. And so did his wife: by her indefatigable capacity to undertake tours to refugee camps and hospitals, day in and day out, a wealthy grand lady, she cared for the poor and shared their suffering and misery.

  Mountbatten had not been sent out to India in 1947 to persuade the Indian leaders to accept the partition of the country. That had already been agreed to in principle. What he had been sent out to do was to:

  (1) Fix responsibility for the division of India squarely on Indian shoulders;

  (2) persuade the Congress Party leaders to abandon their demand for the inclusion of the North West Frontier Province in India (thereby clearing the way for this strategic area to be placed in Pakistan’s hands) and for Jinnah to forego his claim for the whole of the Punjab, Bengal and Assam (to make partition palatable to the nationalists); and

  (3) ensure that, after independence, India would remain a member of the British Commonwealth – Jinnah’s Pakistan was expected to do so anyway.

  General Lord Hastings Ismay, who had been Churchill’s chief of staff during the war, came out as chief of staff to Mountbatten. In the 1930s he had initially served in the North West Frontier Province and later as military secretary to the viceroy, Lord Willingdon (Freeman Freeman-Thomas). Lord Ismay was acquainted with Churchill’s policy on India as well as with Attlee’s views on the country. Although Churchill’s and Mountbatten’s views on India were dissimilar, this did not make any difference to Ismay’s loyally serving Mountbatten. Indeed, Ismay was a friend of Mountbatten, who sometimes asked him to intervene in order to soothe his quarrels with Edwina. Ismay had acquired great influence in the British establishment because of his discreet and unassuming nature. He has left behind hardly any personal papers or diaries on the principle that public servants involved in the highest secrets of state should keep their mouths sealed. His natural inclination was to side with the Muslims in India and one of the duties assigned to him
was to keep in touch with Jinnah. On the other hand, he cooperated fully with Mountbatten to consolidate India after the agreement on partition was announced. Differences arose between Mountbatten and Ismay only after partition, because the latter felt that the former was playing too pronounced a role as governor-general of India and might get identified with the policies of India as against those of Pakistan.

  To any Indian leader he met for the first time, Mountbatten told Ismay, ‘I…started off with my usual lecture on a strong Union of India’. This opening was no doubt to establish his credentials as one opposed to partition. ‘I was determined’, he emphasized ‘that so far as possible the decision whether to have partition or not should rest on the shoulders of the Indian peoples themselves and that the accusation against Britain having divided the country should thus be avoided.’16 He was equally determined to keep India within the Commonwealth. This was not only because he had been directed by Attlee to do so but also because of his own strong personal convictions. Mountbatten believed that for Britain ‘to continue to play a major role in the post-war world, the old Empire should be transformed into a multiracial and worldwide association of free nations remaining linked to Britain through the membership in the Commonwealth’.17

  After being named viceroy, Mountbatten did not wait to get to India before embarking on his mission. He contacted Krishna Menon, Jawaharlal Nehru’s confidant and main interlocutor with the Labour Party leaders in London. The following sentence in a letter Krishna Menon wrote to Mountbatten a little later gives us a glimpse into what the two discussed:

  When I first submitted to you ideas on what may be done and we had talks in London last March, the one thing we both thought fundamental was that in any partition which I put forward (i.e., suggest to Nehru) as necessary to a solution, the outer line of India must remain intact – all secession must be subject to it.18