The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  Pakhtoonistan is being vigorously advocated and the idea, I think, proving attractive to many Pathans. Rumours and reports of the Fakir of Ipi flow in details [Ipi wanted to proclaim himself the Amir of Wazirstan]…the revival of talks (commentaries) on the Kabul radio and articles in the Afghan press…is also disturbing.7

  These were now matters to be dealt with by Jinnah: the Indian leaders had washed their hands off the frontier. A vague bitterness was to linger in the minds of the pro-Congress Party Pathans that the party’s high command had betrayed them.

  In Baluchistan the vote was cast by the members of the Tribal Jirga (Assembly) and the members of the Quetta Municipality, as sketched out in the Ismay plan. No way to work out a more democratic procedure, as demanded by Nehru at Simla in May 1947, could be found. The result was predictable.

  Sir Olaf Caroe was sacrificed by Mountbatten to get the Congress Party to accept a referendum in the NWFP. In fact, his views were more complex than presumed by Indian leaders. It is worth touching upon these views since they have some bearing on the situation that developed in the NWFP and Afghanistan later. Caroe believed that the real challenge to Britain (and the West) from the Soviet Union would come via Afghanistan, which he called ‘the uncertain vestibule’, while talking to the American diplomat Ely E. Palmer (see Chapter 1). This challenge, he felt, could best be faced if Britain retained control of the Indian frontier from the Pamirs to the Arabian sea, after India’s independence; that is, control over northern Kashmir, the NWFP and Baluchistan – all territories west of the Indus river. Caroe believed that Britain had not only the expertise to control the warring tribes in the area but also, through its military presence close to Afghanistan, to influence Afghan policy, which the Indian Muslims (i.e., the Pakistanis) would be unable to do, not the least because of limited financial resources. He was not for Britain getting enmeshed in the communal problems of India by supporting the Muslims there in order to safeguard its vital interests in the eastern Middle East. Instead, he wanted Britain to work for the independence and separation of these territories from India and continue to maintain direct relations with their tribal chiefs and people in order to protect its interests. (The other view was that an independent NWFP linked to Baluchistan, Chitral and the ‘Gilgit Agency’, if it managed its own foreign relations, might become the target of foreign intrigue.)

  Caroe’s view, to an extent, proved prophetic. The Soviets did ultimately move south through ‘this uncertain vestibule’ in the late 1970s. Pakistan could never influence Afghan policy and, when in the 1990s, it tried to do so by exporting Islamic fundamentalism to Afghanistan, it got badly mauled by the Arab terrorists it had recruited to help in the enterprise. In 2000–01 the US established its presence in the NWFP to control the Pathans (and the Pakistanis) on the two sides of the Durand line.

  As late as 22 May 1947, Caroe continued to advocate a separate Pathan state. In a telegram to the acting viceroy, Sir John Colville (while Mountbatten was finalizing the brief on the referendum in the NWFP with Attlee in London), he wrote

  my Ministry and Abdul Ghaffar Khan have started propaganda on a theme which I advised them to take up some months ago: that of a Pathan national Province under a coalition if possible, and making its own alliances as may suit it. When I put it to them then, they professed what amounted to fury at the mere suggestion. There is a good deal in the theme itself, and the appeal is a far more constructive one than that of Islam in danger. The switchover has probably come too late, but to my mind it is a strength, and not a weakness, that Pathanistan cannot subsist financially or otherwise on its own legs. The weakness is that the Pathans have hitherto been too divided among themselves to set up a stable State, and where they have ruled they have ruled as conquerors of alien populations. They themselves had always been in a state of anarchy right through history until we came and put them in order. [Afghanistan is not really a Pathan State at all.]8

  As soon as a firm decision not to permit an option for the NWFP to become independent was taken, Caroe immediately fell in line with government policy. He then, in his retirement, concentrated on the second best alternative, that of tying Pakistan firmly to the West. No other old India hand did more ‘to sell’ Pakistan to the Americans on the basis that it was the West’s best defence prop in the region. (Some of his efforts have been referred to in Chapter 1.) His bestselling book, The Wells of Power, is built around the same theme.

  Despite the growing turmoil in the NWFP as a result of the agitation by the Muslim League against the Congress Party rule there, Mountbatten continued to refuse Jinnah’s request to sack Dr Khan Sahib’s Government and impose governor’s rule before the referendum there. It was Muslim Pathan pitted against Muslim Pathan, though this was not an unusual situation for the Pathans as history can show. B.M Segal, who has been referred to in Chapter 9, told me that, by May 1947, it was clear to the small minority community of Sikhs and Hindus that they would have to move out whatever the province’s future. The only Pathan in whom they had confidence was Dr Khan Sahib. The Frontier Gandhi, according to Segal, was so concerned with avoiding bloodshed amongst his race that he was ever willing to turn the other cheek to the aggressor. (It was in memory of Khan Sahib that the evacuees from the frontier had the Khan Market in Delhi built some time later.)

  The few effective Pathan political leaders who existed were with the Congress Party. Jinnah therefore tapped people other than Pathans or politicians to reinforce his position in the tribal belt. Iskander Mirza, a Bengali Muslim nobleman, was a member of the Indian Political Service that managed relations with the tribes of the NWFP. In 1947 he was serving as joint secretary in the Ministry of Defence in New Delhi. He was an outstanding officer who had spent most of his career in the NWFP. (In the 1950s, he was to become the president of Pakistan.) Jinnah had first met him in 1943, introduced by Liaqat Ai Khan. He now sent for him and spoke as follows, according to his son, Humayun Mirza:

  While he intended to continue with his negotiations with vigour, he felt it prudent to be prepared for the worst…. He asked Iskander Mirza to resign from the Government of India and return to the tribal territories he knew so well. There he was to start a Jihad (Holy War)…urging him to take this extraordinary step to preserve the interests of the Muslims of India. Jinnah’s request stunned Iskander Mirza…. He knew that if the tribes were persuaded to rise in revolt, there would be considerable bloodshed as a result of raids on border villages in the settled areas…. Yet…he could not refuse Jinnah…so he told Jinnah that money would be needed to undertake this immense task, particularly if it involved inciting the tribesmen in Wazirstan, Tirah and the Mohand country…. When asked how much, Iskander Mirza estimated one crore of rupees [equivalent to Rs 50 crore at the end of the twentieth century]…Iskander Mirza was given Rs 20,000 for immediate expenses and told that the Nawab of Bhopal would provide the rest. As for cover, he would be told of it at the right time.9

  Humayun says that after some time (he does not say when) ‘Jinnah informed him that Pakistan had been won and there was no longer any need for a Jihad’.

  Iskander Mirza’s expertise with tribal affairs came in handy to Pakistan, when as defence secretary in the new state, he helped to organize the tribal lashkar (militia) that invaded Kashmir a few months later.

  On his return from London, Mountbatten found Jinnah in a rebellious mood. He continued to oppose the division of Bengal and to press for the province to be given the option to choose independence. On 22 May, ‘in an interview with Reuters correspondent’, records Mountbatten, ‘Jinnah had gone even further, stating that he would resist to the last the partition of Bengal and the Punjab and demanding a corridor between East and West Pakistan’.10 (The corridor would presumably pass through Delhi, the old Mughal capital; the Muslim princely state of Rampur; Lucknow, the former capital of the Shia Muslim state of Oudh; and Patna the capital of Bihar, the old domain of the Afghan Sher Shah Suri.) These demands may have been the reason why Mountbatten armed himself with Churchi
ll’s message, when he saw him that day, to discipline Jinnah. Jinnah finally yielded on Bengal, the corridor forgotten, but he pressed for six months of joint control of Calcutta. When Mountbatten sought Patel’s view on this topic through V.P. Menon, arguing that it might help in avoiding trouble in the city during partition, Patel replied: ‘Not even for six hours.’11

  On 3 June Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh (for the Sikhs) gave their formal assent to the plan – Jinnah merely by a nod. The same evening Indian independence and partition were announced to the world from Delhi and London.

  The following day Mountbatten requested Gandhiji to see him again. ‘I told him that although many newspapers had christened it “the Mountbatten plan”, they should have really christened it “the Gandhi plan” since all the salient ingredients – such as leaving the choice of their future to the Indian people themselves, avoiding coercion, and transferring power as soon as possible – were suggested by him.’ And Mountbatten knew from Gandhiji’s statements in the earlier days that ‘he had not been averse to Dominion Status’.12 Pyare Lal, Gandhiji’s secretary, has written that Mountbatten put his case to the Mahatma with a skill, persuasiveness and flair for salesmanship which the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People might well have envied. The same evening Gandhiji told his prayer meeting: ‘The British Government is not responsible for partition. The Viceroy had no hand in it…. If both of us, Hindus and Muslims, cannot agree on anything else then the Viceroy is left with no choice.’13

  Gandhiji’s intervention in the All-India Congress Committee on 14 June was decisive in persuading the party to accept the 3 June plan:

  The Congress was opposed to Pakistan…. Yet he had come before the All-India Congress Committee to urge the acceptance of the Resolution on India’s division. Certain decisions, however unpalatable they might be, had to be taken.14

  Govind Ballabh Pant had moved the resolution. He put the situation before the committee in stark terms: ‘The choice today was between accepting the 3 June Plan or committing suicide.’ Patel said: ‘Had they accepted it (the Cabinet Mission plan of 16 May 1946) the whole of India would have gone the Pakistan way. Today they had 75 per cent to 80 per cent of India which they could develop and make strong according to their genius. The League could develop the rest of the country.’ The Muslims in the Congress Party and members of the Hindu minorities to be placed in Pakistan opposed the resolution. In an impassioned speech Purshotamdas Tandon forecast: ‘The Plan would benefit neither the Hindus nor the Muslims. The Hindus in Pakistan would live in fear and the Muslims in India would do the same’. The resolution was carried by one hundred and fifty-seven votes, with twenty-nine to thirty-two members abstaining.15

  The die was cast.

  It was Patel who first grasped the dangers to India of continued confrontation with Britain. This opened the door for the creation of the smaller (Wavell’s) Pakistan and the amalgamation of the princely states with India. Nehru, for whom Linlithgow had no time at all, Wavell considered charming but unbalanced and other Britishers found supercilious, according to Mountbatten, proved ‘indispensable’ in the final Indo–British negotiations. Many of his English interlocutors found it hard to stomach his vanity. But, all in all, this old Harrovian found Englishmen more congenial and was less stuck up with them, than with other foreigners, Western or Eastern. (Did not Zhou En Lai, the Chinese premier, remark in Bandung in 1955 how arrogant he found Nehru?)

  Soon after Nehru became prime minister of India, George McGhee, the US assistant secretary of state, prepared a note on him for President Harry S. Truman. In this note, among other things, he touched upon this aspect:

  The effects of Nehru’s high-caste Hindu background were reinforced by his education in the aristocratic tradition of the English public school and university thirty-odd years ago. It is significant that his closest British friends are found among the nobility and the intelligentsia. Occasional overtones of disdain creep into Nehru’s dealings with the British Labour Government and, politics apart, it would be reasonable to assume that he would find a closer kinship with a Churchill than an Attlee… he cannot find in his heart sincere appreciation of our efforts during and immediately after the war to persuade the British to accept their fate in India…16

  Heavily weighted as they are against us, we should bear in mind that many of these biases also operated against the British and that Nehru’s attitude towards the UK is still replete with inconsistencies and contradictions. Nonetheless Nehru has reached an accommodation with the British generally satisfactory to both sides.17

  It was soon after the announcement on partition that the foreign secretary in the British Cabinet, Ernest Bevin, stated at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Margate in England that ‘the British withdrawal from India will help to consolidate Britain in [the] Middle East’. Pakistan was to become the lynchpin in British defence plans for the Middle East and the Indian Ocean area, as is clear from the British chiefs’ report dated 7 July 1947 (quoted in Chapter 1).

  How was the Soviet Union reacting to the goings-on in India? On 25 March 1947 the British ambassador to the USSR met Stalin and briefed him on the subject. Stalin, reported the ambassador, ‘agreed that India was a difficult question. He said that Russia was not interfering and that they wished success to Great Britain in the enterprise she had started in India.’18 The Soviet press was less circumspect. ‘The British Plan for the partition of India’, wrote I. Petrov in the Red Star of 31 July 1947, ‘by artificially separating the industrial from the agricultural areas, sought to disrupt the economic life and this will result in weakening the political economy of India.’19

  Further evidence of Soviet views was provided by a lecture on 4 June 1947 by Yuri Zhukov, a member of the Academy of Sciences and one of the recent Soviet participants in the Inter-Asian Conference held in New Delhi in March 1947. Referring to Attlee’s offer of dominion status, he said, ‘although overdue, it was even now aimed at postponing the grant of independence’. Zhukov opined: ‘In view of the successful post-war struggle for independence of the “colonial” peoples in North East Asia and of the development of a working class movement in India, Britain had been compelled to find a new form of relationship to cover continued domination of India by British capitalists…. The Labour Government had promised independence “knowing they could turn it into a fiction. Although British forces were being nominally removed, the principalities were being turned into British bases whence British domination of India would be maintained by force…. Indian parties and leaders, all…from the bourgeoisie, feared their own exploited working class and preferred the maintenance of close ties with Britain…. The essence of the Ghandi [Gandhi] programme is to keep the people disarmed and to retard progress”.’ The Pakistan scheme is said to have been inspired ‘by the British as a means of dividing and ruling, while placing Britain’s main hopes upon Pakistan’. Nevertheless, Zhukov said: ‘The Moslem League was somewhat more progressive than Congress.’

  Zhukov then explained how the Indian communists saw the matter, views that he probably heard from them during his visit to Delhi. ‘The Indian Communist Party wished to see the country divided into independent States’, Zhukov observed, ‘with the right of self-determination and social and cultural development, economic unity, and the right to join or remain outside an all-India Union. This was the only correct way to grant true independence to different communities.’20 They obviously saw greater opportunities if India was Balkanized.

  Meanwhile, Jinnah had started to woo the Americans. After seeing him on 2 May 1947, Raymond A. Hare of the US State Department reported to his headquarters that Jinnah had told him that the ‘establishment of Pakistan is essential to prevent “Hindu Imperialism” from spreading into Middle East; Muslim countries would stand together against possible Russian aggression and would look to us for assistance’.21 Nehru had expressed a different view to Henry Grady, the US ambassador in India. Nehru had told him, as reported by Grady to the State Department on 9 July 1
947, that ‘India’s foreign policy is based on a desire to avoid involvement with any particular bloc’. The ambassador further reported that Nehru made the following points:

  (1) While there was some fear in India of US economic penetration, India would want US…capital goods;

  (2) While USSR in the past had held considerable attraction for Indians, internal troubles now are such that interest in USSR had declined;

  (3) Indian economy would probably tend to follow the trend of British economy under socialist government…. Certain large industries would probably be nationalized; and

  (4) India was opposed to Afghanistan’s efforts to claim the Pathan-inhabited NWFP.22

  A measure of American caution towards establishing ties with Pakistan is apparent from the telegram sent by the secretary of state to the US Embassy in Delhi dated 20 June 1947, a fortnight after the announcement for partition had been made. A Reuters dispatch had quoted the US consul in Karachi saying that an American Embassy would be established in Karachi, which was earmarked to become the capital of Pakistan. George Marshall thereupon stressed ‘the need to avoid premature indication of any US intention regarding establishment of additional Diplomatic Missions in India (that is, in Karachi) or that the question is engaging the attention of US authority this time’.23

  The US attitude towards the princely states of India is plain from the secretary of state’s telegram, dated 16 July 1947, warning the US Consulate at Madras about an enquiry from the Travancore state whether the US Government was interested in its strategic minerals. (Travancore had thorium.) The telegram states: ‘Direct and formal correspondence should be avoided (with officials of Indian princely states) since it definitely encourages US Government giving support to moves by certain Indian States to assert their independence from rest of India…. Such correspondence inconsistent with standing instructions…. We do not wish to take any action that might interfere with the sound objectives of avoiding further balkanization of India.’24