India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition

by Ramachandra Guha

  The election results were a striking vindication of the League’s campaign. Across India, in province after province, the Congress did exceedingly well in the general category, but the Muslim seats were swept by the League, fighting on the single issue of a separate state for Muslims. In the province of Bengal, for example, the League won 114 out of 119 seats reserved for Muslims; since the strength of the assembly was 250, it required little effort to cobble together a majority. In the United Provinces the Congress won 153 seats out of a total of 228, and so formed the government. But within this larger victory there was a significant defeat, for of the 66 Muslim seats on offer in the United Provinces the League won a resounding 54. Even more striking were the results in the southern province of Madras, which even the most devoted follower of Jinnah would not claim for a prospective Pakistan. Here the Congress won 165 out of 215 seats, but the League won all 29 seats reserved for Muslims. Overall, in the general constituencies, the Congress won 80.9 per cent of the votes, whereas in the seats reserved for Muslims the League garnered 74.7 per cent.

  After the results had come in, the League’s paper, Dawn, proclaimed that ‘Those who have been elected this time to the Legislatures have been charged by the voters with the duty . . . of winning Pakistan. Within and outside the Provincial and Central Assemblies and Councils that and that alone is now the “priority job”. The time for decision is over; the time for action has come.’

  This was written on 7 April 1946. Three days later Jinnah convened a meeting in Delhi of the 400 legislators elected on the Muslim League ticket. This convention reiterated the call for an independent Pakistan. However, in early May Jinnah attended a conference in Simla, where attempts were being made by the Cabinet Mission to find a unitary solution. Through the next two months various drafts were passed round, allowing for one nation-state but with provinces having the option to leave if they so desired. The Congress and the League could not agree on the conditions under which provinces would join or leave the projected union. Another sticking point was Jinnah’s contention that the Congress could not nominate a Muslim as one of its representatives to the talks.9

  Jinnah bargained hard, knowing now that he had Muslim popular sentiment behind him. By the end of June 1946 it was clear that no settlement could be reached. The Cabinet Mission returned to London. The League leaders met on 29 July and affirmed that ‘the time has now come for the Muslim nation to resort to direct action in order to achieve Pakistan and assert their just rights and to vindicate their honour and to get rid of the present slavery under the British and contemplated future of Caste Hindu domination’.

  Two weeks later was Direct Action Day, and the beginning of the end of the dream of United India.

  II

  Gandhi was not alone in choosing to mark the day of Independence for India, 15 August 1947, as a day of mourning rather than celebration. Across the border in Pakistan, where independence had come a day earlier, the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz wrote of

  This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled –

  This is not that long-looked for break of day,

  Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades

  Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void

  Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place,

  Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,

  Somewhere the anchorage for the ship of heartache.10

  The lament here was not so much for the fact of Partition, as for its bloody costs. For at least by the end of 1945, and possibly earlier, some form of Pakistan seemed inevitable. It could not now be stopped by Congress magnanimity or a sudden show of modesty on the part of Jinnah. But the poet’s lament impels us to ask one further question – if Partition had to happen, did it necessarily have to cause so much loss of life?

  To answer this, we need to briefly rehearse the events of the last six months of the Raj. On 20 February 1947 the Labour government in London announced that the British would quit India by June 1948, and that the viceroy, Lord Wavell, would be replaced. On 22 March the new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, assumed office. Over the next few weeks he discussed the terms of the British withdrawal with the relevant parties. He found that most Congress leaders were coming round to the inevitability of Partition. They saw that the ‘immediate independence of the major part of India was preferable to the postponement of the independence of the whole of India’.11 Gandhi made a last-ditch effort to save unity by asking Jinnah to head the first government of free India. But this offer did not have the backing of Congress, and Jinnah did not accept it in any case.

  On 2 May the viceroy’s chief of staff, Lord Ismay, was sent to London with a plan for Partition. He obtained Cabinet approval, but the plan had to be redrafted several times on his return, so as to satisfy both Congress and the League. (At one stage Jinnah, brazen to the last, asked for an 800-mile-long corridor through India to link the eastern and western wings of Pakistan.) The revised plan was taken by Mountbatten to the British Cabinet.

  All this took the better part of a month. On 3 June Mountbatten, back from London, announced the Partition plan on All-India Radio. He was followed on the microphone by Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh (speaking for the Sikhs). The next morning the viceroy addressed a press conference in the Legislative Assembly building. It was here that he suggested, for the first time, that the British would leave not by June 1948 but by the middle of August 1947, that is, in less than ten weeks.

  The decision so dramatically to shorten the time frame of the British withdrawal was taken by Mountbatten himself. His biographer, Philip Ziegler, justified the decision as follows:

  Once the principle of partition had been accepted, it was inevitable that communalism would rage freely. The longer the period before the transfer of power, the worse the tension and the greater the threat that violence would spread. Today it was the Punjab, tomorrow Bengal, Hyderabad, or any of the myriad societies in the sub-continent where Hindu and Muslim lived cheek by jowl. Two hundred thousand [dead] could have become two million, even twenty million.12

  In fact, even while Ziegler wrote (in 1985), the toll of the Partition violence was estimated at a million dead; some later scholars have suggested the figure is closer to 2 million. How many would it have been if the British had left, as planned, in June 1948? In a blistering attack on Mountbatten’s reputation, Andrew Roberts accuses him of softness and vacillation – ‘whenever he had to exhibit toughness, Mountbatten took the most invertebrate line possible’ – of being unwilling to crack down effectively on communal violence and, more specifically, of understaffing the Punjab Boundary Force and not supplying it with air cover. Contra Ziegler, Roberts is convinced that the ‘overhasty withdrawal’ led ‘to more rather than fewer deaths’.13

  Some contemporary observers also felt that the decision to undo in two months flat an empire built over two centuries was poorly conceived. In the summer of 1947 the man occupying the hottest of hot seats was the governor of the still undivided Punjab, Sir Evan Jenkins. In early May Jenkins wrote to Mountbatten urging him to ‘reconsider the terms of any early announcement embodying a solution of the Indian political problem. In the Punjab we are going to be faced with a complete refusal of the communities to co-operate on any basis at all. It would clearly be futile to announce a partition of the Punjab which no community would accept.’14 The decision was made regardless, and the governor was left with the task of maintaining law and order while the Punjab was divided. On 30 July he wrote to Mountbatten again, explaining that the prospect of Independence with Partition evoked anger rather than enthusiasm. The Muslims had hoped for the whole of the Punjab, whereas the Sikhs and Hindus were fearful that they would lose Lahore. ‘It would be difficult enough’, archly commented the governor, ‘to partition within six weeks a country of 30 million people which has been governed as a unit for 98 years, even if all concerned were friendly and anxious to make progress.’15

  Jenkins did in fact ask several times for more troops
and for a ‘Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron’. One reason there were too few troops available to deal with rioters was that they were busy guarding the paranoid rulers, who were convinced that British civilians would be attacked as soon as the decision to leave was made public. This feeling was widespread among all sections of Europeans in India: among officers, priests, planters, and merchants. In the summer of 1946, a young English official wrote to his family that ‘we shall virtually have the whole country against us (for long enough at all events to wipe out our scattered European population) before the show becomes, as inevitably it will, a communal scrap between Hindus and Muslims’.16

  To make the protection of British lives the top priority was pretty much state policy. In February 1947 the governor of Bengal said that his ‘first action in the event of an announcement of a date for withdrawal of British power . . . would be to have the troops “standing to” and prepare for a concentration of outlying Europeans at very short notice as soon as hostile reactions began to show themselves’.17 In fact, in the summer of 1947 white men and women were the safest people in India. No one was interested in killing them.18 But their insecurity meant that many army units were placed near European settlements instead of being freed for riot control elsewhere.

  The instinct of self-preservation also lay behind the decision to postpone the Punjab boundary award until after the date of Independence. On 22 July, after a visit to Lahore, Lord Mountbatten wrote to Sir Cyril Radcliffe asking him to hurry things up, for ‘every extra day’ would lessen the risk of disorder. The announcement of the boundary award before Independence would have allowed movements of troops to be made in advance of the transfer of power. The governor of Punjab was also very keen that the award be announced as soon as it was finalized. As it happened, Radcliffe was ready with the award on 9 August itself. However, Mountbatten now changed his mind, and chose to make the award public only after the 15th. His explanation for the delay was strange, to say the least: ‘Without question, the earlier it was published, the more the British would have to bear responsibility for the disturbances which would undoubtedly result.’ By the same token, ‘the later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British’.19

  As a rule, one must write of history only as it happened, not how it might have happened. Would a more extended time frame – an announcement in April 1947 that the British would quit in a year’s time – have allowed for a less painful process of division? Would more active troop deployments and an earlier announcement of the Radcliffe award have led to less violence in the Punjab? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. As it turned out, the most appropriate epitaph on the last days of the Raj was provided by the Punjab official who told a young social worker from Oxford: ‘You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it.’20

  While the debates continue to rage about the causes of Partition, somewhat less attention has been paid to its consequences. These were quite considerable indeed – as this book will demonstrate. The division of India was to cast a long shadow over demography, economics, culture, religion, law, international relations, and party politics.

  3

  Apples in the Basket

  The Indian States are governed by treaties . . . The Indian States, if they do not join this Union, will remain in exactly the same situation as they are today.

  SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS, British politician, 1942

  We shall have to come out in the open with [the] Princes sooner or later. We are at present being dishonest in pretending we can maintain all these small States, knowing full well in practice we shall be unable to.

  LORD WAVELL, Viceroy of India, 1943

  I

  FEW MEN HAVE BEEN so concerned about how history would portray them as Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy and governor general of India. As a veteran journalist once remarked, Mountbatten appeared to act as ‘his own Public Relations Officer’.1 An aide of Mountbatten was more blunt, calling his boss ‘the vainest man alive’. The viceroy always instructed photographers to shoot him from six inches above the eyeline because his friend, the actor Cary Grant, had told him that this way the wrinkles didn’t show. When Field Marshal Montgomery visited India, and the press clamoured for photos of the two together, Mountbatten was dismayed to find that Monty wore more medals than himself.2

  Altogether, Mountbatten had a personality that was in marked contrast to that of his predecessor, Lord Wavell. A civil servant who worked under Wavell noticed that ‘vanity, pomposity and other such weaknesses never touched him’, another way of saying that he did not look to, or care about, how history would judge him.3 Yet it is Wavell who should get most of the credit for initiating the end of British rule in India. While sceptical of the political class, he was, despite the reserve which he displayed to them, deeply sympathetic to Indian aspirations.4 It was he who set in motion the discussions and negotiations at the end of the war, and it was he who pressed for a clear timetable for withdrawal. But it was left to his flamboyant successor to make the last dramatic gestures that announced the birth of the two new nations.

  After Mountbatten left India he worked hard to present the best possible spin on his tenure as viceroy. He commissioned or influenced a whole array of books that sought to magnify his successes and gloss his failures. These books project an impression of Mountbatten as a wise umpire successfully mediating between squabbling schoolboys, whether India and Pakistan, the Congress and the Muslim League, Mahatma Gandhi and M. A. Jinnah, or Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel.5 His credit claims are taken at face value, sometimes absurdly so, as in the suggestion that Nehru would not have included Patel in his Cabinet had it not been for Mountbatten’s recommendation.6

  Curiously, Mountbatten’s real contribution to India and Indians has been rather underplayed by his hagiographers. This was his part in solving a geopolitical problem the like of which no newly independent state had ever faced (or is likely to face in the future). For when the British departed the subcontinent they left behind more than 500 distinct pieces of territory. Two of these were the newly created nations of India and Pakistan; the others comprised the assorted chiefdoms and states that made up what was known as ‘princely India’. The dissolution of these units is a story of extraordinary interest, told from a partisan point of view half a century ago in V. P. Menon’s Integration of the Indian States, but not elsewhere or since.7

  II

  The princely states were so many that there was even disagreement as to their number. One historian puts it at 521; another at 565. They were more than 500, by any count, and they varied very widely in terms of size and status. At one end of the scale were the massive states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, each the size of a large European country; at the other end, tiny fiefdoms or jagirs of a dozen or less villages.

  The larger princely states were the product of the longue durée of Indian history as much as of British policy. Some states made much of having resisted the waves of Muslim invaders who swept through north India between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Others owed their very history to association with these invaders, as for instance the Asaf Jah dynasty of Hyderabad, which began life in the early eighteenth century as a vassal state of the great Mughal Empire. Yet other states, such as Cooch Behar in the east and Garhwal in the Himalayan north, were scarcely touched by Islamic influence at all.

  Whatever their past history, these states owed their mid-twentieth-century shape and powers – or lack thereof – to the British. Starting as a firm of traders, the East India Company gradually moved towards a position of overlordship. They were helped here by the decline of the Mughals after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707. Indian rulers were seen by the Company as strategic allies, useful in checking the ambitions of their common enemy, the French. The Company forced treaties on these states, which recognized it as the ‘paramount power’. Thus, while legally the territories the various Nawabs and Maharajas ruled over were their own, the British retained to themsel
ves the right to appoint ministers and control succession, and to extract a large subsidy for the provision of administrative and military support. In many cases the treaties also transferred valuable areas from the Indian states to the British. It was no accident that, except for the states comprising Kathiawar and two chiefdoms in the south, no Indian state had a coastline. The political dependence was made more acute by economic dependence, with the states relying on British India for raw materials, industrial goods, and employment opportunities.8

  The larger native states had their own railway, currency and stamps, vanities allowed them by the Crown. Few had any modern industry; fewer still modern forms of education. A British observer wrote in the early twentieth century that, taken as a whole, the states were ‘sinks of reaction and incompetence and unrestrained autocratic power sometimes exercised by vicious and deranged individuals’.9 This, roughly, was also the view of the main nationalist party, the Congress. From the 1920s they pressed the state rulers to at least match the British in allowing a modicum of political representation. Under the Congress umbrella rested the All-India States Peoples Conference, to which in turn were affiliated the individual praja mandals (or peoples’ societies) of the states.

  Even in their heyday the princes got a bad press. They were generally viewed as feckless and dissolute, over-fond of racehorses and other men’s wives and holidays in Europe. Both the Congress and the Raj thought that they cared too little for mundane matters of administration. This was mostly true, but there were exceptions. The maharajas of Mysore and Baroda both endowed fine universities, worked against caste prejudice and promoted modern enterprises. Other maharajas kept going the great traditions of Indian classical music.

  Good or bad, profligate or caring, autocratic or part-democratic, by the 1940s all the princes now found themselves facing a common problem: their future in a free India. In the first part of 1946 British India had a definitive series of elections, but these left untouched the princely states. As a consequence there was a ‘growing antipathy towards princely governments’.10 Their constitutional status, however, remained ambiguous. The Cabinet Mission of 1946 focused on the Hindu–Muslim or United India versus Pakistan question; it barely spoke of the states at all. Likewise the statement of 20 February 1947, formally announcing that the Raj was to end, also finessed the question. On 3 June the British announced both the date of their final withdrawal and the creation of two dominions – but this statement also did not make clear the position of the states. Some rulers began now ‘to luxuriate in wild dreams of independent power in an India of many partitions’.11