What by now (2007)should be a well- (although not yet widely) known fact; is that the partition of India in August 1947, was very much connected with the British concern about the possibility for the USSR acquiring influence in the area lying between Turkey and India. The USSR's victory over Germany in 1945 had increased Joseph Stalin's ambitions As we also will be able to demonstrate in the following series of studies (of which the current briefest one of all, acts as a sort of powerful as it is-- introduction) to extend his country's influence into Asian territories, just as he had already started to do so in Eastern Europe. To the Soviet Union's southern border lay the region of the Persian Gulf with its oil fields - the wells of power - that were of vital interest to the West.
Already in the summer of 1940, Leopold Amery, the secretary of State for India, wrote a (secret) letter to Lord Linlithgow, the viceroy, in which he noted: If our [British] tradition is freedom-loving and our domestic development centuries ahead of the continent, that is largely because we are an island. If the Prussian tradition is one of militarism and aggression, it is largely because Prussia had never had any natural frontiers. Now India has a very natural frontier at present. On the other hand, within herself she has no natural or geographic or racial or communal frontiers - the north-western piece of Pakistan would include a formidable Sikh minority. The north-eastern part has a Muslim majority so narrow that its setting up as a State or part of a wider Muslim State seems absurd. Then there is the large Muslim minority in the United Provinces, the position of Muslim princes with Hindu subjects and vice versa. In fact, an all-out Pakistan scheme seems to me to be the prelude to continuous internal warfare in India. (MSS/EUR F 9/5, S. No. 32, p. 190 (Oriental and Indian Collection, British Library, London).Thus Britain, in 1940, hoped to stay on in India for many decades more. Therefore, its leaders had no interest in the creation of a sovereign state of any denomination in the subcontinent, Muslim, Hindu or any other at the time.
In fact the only person who ever suggested the partition of India before Jinnah was inspired to do so by the British in 1940 was one thirty-six-year old individual named Rahmat Ali (1897-1951). In 1933 he published a pamphlet from Cambridge in England titled 'Now or Never'. In this pamphlet, he proposed the creation of a separate sovereign state in the north-western region of India. He also coined the word 'Pakistan'* for it. But the idea was so unpopular among Muslims that he was totally ignored.
In fact Stanley Wolpert, the well-known American historian, in his book ]innah of Pakistan speculates whether even Rahmat Ali's ideas might not have been inspired by the die-hard British Conservatives. Churchill and his friends were dead set against an All-India Federation that was being considered by the British Government in the wake of the Round Table Conferences of the early 1930s. They feared that whatever the safeguards incorporated in such a federation, it might encourage the Indian parties and religious groups to work together and start India's slide towards political unity and self-rule. They would rather have three mutually antagonistic entities emerging in India: 'A Muslimstan, a Hindustan and a Princestan', as described by Viceroy for India Lord Linlithgow to Jinnah on 13 March 1940 and later by Churchill to the next Viceroy Lord Wavel. Such a trifurcation would 'institutionalize' differences among the Muslims, the Hindus and the princes and would enable Britain, by playing one against the other, to rule for decades to come.
When the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was received in London on the evening of 7 December 1941. Winston Churchill records in his memoirs his feelings of relief and elation that Japan had, by this act, drawn the United States into the war: 'So we had won after all, Britain would live. The Commonwealth and Empire would live. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not end.... Being saturated and satisfied with emotion and sensation I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. (Winston Churchill, Memories of the Second World War, Vol. 6, War Comes to America, London, 1950, pp.209-10).
On waking up the next morning, his first act was to plan to go to Washington to review with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt 'the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts as well as the problems of production and distribution'. It was during this visit, recounts Churchill, that Roosevelt 'first raised the Indian problem with me on the usual American lines', meaning on anti-'Empire' lines. He continues: 'I reacted so strongly at such length that he never raised it verbally again.' (Ibid,p.188.).
Immediately after getting back to London, worried that Roosevelt would return to the Indian situation, Churchill asked the War Cabinet to develop a policy to forestall American pressure for self-government in India. As he writes: 'The concern of the Americans with the strategy of a world war was bringing them into touch with political issues on which they had strong opinions and little experience .... In countries where there is only one race broad and lofty views are taken on the colour question. Similarly, states which have no overseas colonies or possessions are capable of rising to moods of great elevation and detachment about the affairs of those who have:'4 Roosevelt's interest in India was based on enlisting popular support there against the advancing Japanese, ensuring India's freedom and the subsequent building up, after the war, of a post-colonial order in Asia.
Britiains’s planned strategy succeeded brilliantly from there on. Pakistan, together with Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Britain, joined the Baghdad Pact and later, CENTO, which the US also joined, to form the defence barrier against Soviet ambitions in the Middle East. In 1954 Pakistan entered into a bilateral pact with Britain's ally, the USA, and, in 1958, provided an air base in Peshawar to the CIA for U-2 spy planes to keep a watch on military preparations in the Soviet Union. Then, in the 1970s, Pakistan helped the US establish relations with China, to pressurize the Soviet Union from the east. And, in the 1980s, Islamabad provided the forward base from which the US could eject the Soviet forces from Afghanistan, precipitating the collapse of the USSR and altering the world balance of power.
On the other hand, the 'Pakistan strategy' did not prevent the Soviet Union from reaching out to India. This it did by supporting India against Pakistan, which had the backing of the Western powers, on Kashmir, in the 1950s. In August 1971 an Indo-Soviet treaty, with a defence-related clause in it, was signed. This treaty restrained China from interfering in the forthcoming Indo-Pakistan war on Bangladesh. Treaties may be like flowers and young girls that last while they last, as Charles de Gaulle said, but the process of India purchasing Soviet arms on rupee payment and barter that started in the early 1960s has become an important and longstanding feature of Indo-Soviet relationship. Would the collaboration between these two countries have developed but for partition?
Partition also helped China extend its influence right up to the mouth of the Persian Gulf - via Pakistan. In 2004, hundreds of Chinese were building a port in Gwadur in Baluchistan, at the mouth of the Gulf. What facilities China will get from Pakistan remain undisclosed. To begin with, China befriended Pakistan so that the latter would not permit separatist Islamic influences to reach the Muslims of Sinkiang through the British-built road from the subcontinent via northern Kashmir to Kashgar - 'the main artery into Central Asia', as Ernest Bevin once described it to George Marshall. From the 1980s, China has helped Pakistan neutralize the larger Indian conventional force, by supplying it directly, and through North Korea, nuclear weaponry and missiles. One may indeed ask: Would the 1962 Sino-India clash have occurred had India remained united? Would the Indian subcontinent have been nuclearized in the twentieth century but for partition?The unobtrusive, but steady, pressure exerted by the US on Britain in favour of India's independence and unity from 1942 to 1947 has been (strangely) neglected by historians so far. Roosevelt made several attempts to persuade Churchill to grant self-government to India after the fall of Singapore, but in vain. As soon as an Interim Government under Jawaharlal Nehru was formed in 1946, the US recognized it and sent an ambassador to Delhi, to the consternation of the British. The Americans thereafter advised Britain to keep India united. They feared that India's Balkanization would help the communists. It was only after March 1947, when the Congress Party itself accepted the division of the Punjab and Bengal, that the US found itself helpless to do any more. 'The Congress leaders had in fact abandoned the tenets which they supported for so many years in the campaign for united India', wired the American Embassy in Delhi to Washington.
The US pressure on Britain led to one predictable result. To fend it off, Churchill, in 1942, played the 'Muslim' or the 'Pakistani' card: that it was not British reluctance to grant self-government to India, but the serious differences amongst Muslims and Hindus on India's future that was creating the problem. Such a move brought Jinnah's 1940 scheme for partition and his two-nation theory centre stage. The theory of 'the provincial option', which created the constitutional channel by which partition could be put into effect, was concocted in London in 1942.
That by 1943 India had become an important adversarial factor in Anglo-US relations is not well known. This factor could have been liquidated by Indian disenchantment with America, or vice versa, or both. The record shows that Mountbatten, Krishna Menon and Attlee worked on Nehru to raise his suspicions about the US motives in Asia. Side by side, British speakers and diplomats propounded the idea in the US that the Indian Muslim had better imbibed the Western legacy and was a more reliable partner than the basically feeble and unreliable Hindu. The Indian leaders' ambitious foreign policy after independence, combined with their inexperience, took no time to collide with the Americans' impatient and demanding nature, mixed with their ignorance about India.
The Americans, to begin with, showed more understanding of India's position on Jammu and Kashmir than did Britain. Throughout 1948, the US insisted that J&K's accession to India could not be brushed aside unless it lost the plebiscite that India itself had offered and, meanwhile, Pakistani forces that had entered the state had to be withdrawn. It was this US stand that prevented J&K's accession to India being negated, at British behest, by the UN Security Council. But while Britain was able to maintain good relations with India, the neutral Americans were cast as the villains of the piece. This was largely due to Nehru's basic distrust of capitalist America, his faith in socialist Britain and the personal ties that the Mountbattens had developed with him.
To bring to light an important, but ignored, historical truth is by itself worthwhile. This is all the more appropriate because India has never recognized the goodwill that the US showed for India's independence and unity during the end game of Empire. Admittedly, today, given Russia's retreat from Central Asia and the growing mutual concern about terrorism and political Islam, a new chapter is opening up in Indo-US relations.
The story is also a cautionary tale for Indians. The leaders of the Congress Party were inspired by high ideals. They built up a broad-based all-India organization without which the struggle for independence would not have been possible. They revived the sagging morale and confidence of a fallen people, contributing to 'India's great recovery', to use K. M. Panikar's phrase. They devised instruments such as satyagraha (peaceful mass protest or resistance), answering violence by non-violence. Such measures put moral pressure on the democratic British people to push their government to recognize India's legitimate demands. These were great achievements.
But the Indian leaders remained plagued by the Indians' age-old weaknesses of arrogance, inconsistency, often poor political judgement and disinterest in foreign affairs and questions of defence. Overconfidence made them ignore the dangers of rejecting, from the Congress Party's fold (in the 1920s), the secular and very able, though egocentric, Jinnah. They failed to include, after the party's massive victory in provincial elections, in their governments, in 1937, those Muslim League lea<:,lers who wanted to taste the plums of office. The British archives reieal that in their negotiations with the viceroys in the 1940s, there was no consistency - without which there could be no success in diplomacy or war - or indeed a clear, realistic policy. The Congress Party resolution of 11 April 1942 rejected the Stafford Cripps offer that sought to divide the country by giving the provinces the right to stand out, but spoke elsewhere of the right of units to break away from the Indian Union. (For details of the latter deal, see Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game, HarperCollins, 2005, pp. 110-111.) In his talks with Jinnah in September 1944, Mahatma Gandhi suggested district-wide referendums in British provinces claimed by Jinnah, thereby accepting the principle of some kind of partition (Narendra Singh Sarila, 2005, p. 179). In his letter to Cripps of 27 January 1946, Nehru mentioned the possibility of the division of Punjab and Bengal (Sarila, 2005, p. 201). In fact, they could not even make up their minds on whether or not to accord priority above all else to India's unity or to consider non-violence a higher duty.
One should also understand that during the first half of the 20th Century (that is until after ‘independence’ around 1950) social contact, except with the princely order and some selected Indians, did not exist, even between British and Indian officers in the Army. Indians were unwelcome in train compartments occupied by Britishers even when they held valid tickets. British clubs excluded Indians. Indians dismounted from their ponies or other conveyances to salute the 'Sahib' if they happened to cross one on the road. That Harcourt Butler, the governor of the United Provinces, sent a bottle of champagne to the jail cell of Motilal Nehru, jawaharlal's father, on his first night in prison for participating in Gandhiji's civil disobedience, in remembrance of the many drinks they had together, was an exception that proved the rule. Further, the onerous challenges of a worldwide empire required British belief in their own superiority and pre-eminence. This resulted in slogans like the 'white man's burden'. Christian missionaries who entered India in the nineteenth century were sustained by donors back home and it was only natural for them to project the worst possible picture of those to be redeemed, so as to obtain funds. And sex, the great equalizer, lost its humanizing influence, as faster ships made it possible to bring out British wives to India, To protect them too the race card had to be played to the full. In 1947, 50 per cent of the senior civil services, 60 per cent of police officers, and all posts above lieutenant colonel in the Army, were held by Britishers.
Not mentioned in Alex Von Tutzemann’s “Indian Summer” (2007), for example is that the Mountbattens whose portrait covers the book in question (see our website above), made it a rule that no less than 50 per cent of those invited to their garden parties, lunches and dinners shortly before ‘Independence’ should be (Princely in that case) Indians , when until then few, if any, Indians had been invited to such functions. He took an Indian aide-de-camp - the first ever appointed. 'These measures were not popular among certain class of Europeans', he reported. 'This was made clear when my younger daughter (Lady Pamela) standing near two English ladies to whom she had not been introduced, heard one say to the other: "It makes me sick to see this house full of dirty Indians."(Quoted in Report on 'The Last Viceroyalty', Part A, Para 112, OIC, British Library, London).
Most Indian leaders in the forefront of the independence movement continued to be victims of the age-old legacy. They did not devote much thought during the freedom struggle to external relations or how the defence of the country would be organized after independence had been achieved.
Resigning from governments in British provinces in 1939 and launching the Quit India movement in 1942 proved counterproductive. For Nehru to agree to include Muslim League ministers in the Interim Government in September 1946, before the League had entered the Constituent Assembly and agreed to stop 'direct action' or terrorism, was another blunder. To prematurely declare in December 1946 that India would become a republic, while engaged in delicate negotiations with the Attlee Government on a future settlement, was a mistake. By the end of 1946, they had been manoeuvred into such a corner that if Sardar Patel had not stepped forward 'to have a limb amputated', as he put it, and satisfy Britain, there was a danger of India's fragmentation, as Britain searched for military bases in the bigger princely states by supporting their attempts to declare independence.
Protected by British power for so long and then focused on a non-violent struggle, the Indian leaders were ill prepared, as independence dawned, to confront the power play in our predatory world. Their historic disinterest in other countries' aims and motives made things none the easier. They had failed to see through the real British motivation for their support to the Pakistan scheme and take remedial measures. Nor did they understand that, at the end of the Raj, America wanted a free and united India to emerge and to find ways to work this powerful lever. Glaring mistakes were made in handling the Kashmir imbroglio.
For example Alan Campbell-Johnson, the governor-general's press attaché wrote : Since returning to Delhi [from London] Mountbatten had seen Gandhi and VP. [Menon] who were both favourably inclined to the invocation of [the] UNO. And today [11 November 1947] he had a further talk with Nehru whose attitude to the idea is now less inactive than it was at Lahore [at the meeting between Nehru and Liaqat Ali Khan three days earlier]. Alan Campbell-Johnson,Mission with Mountbatten, Delhi, 1994, diary entry of 11 November 1947.
Earlier, in September 1947, when Gandhiji however approached Mountbatten with the suggestion that Attlee be requested to mediate between India and Pakistan to avert a clash between the two countries as a result of the conflagration in the Punjab. Gandhiji since a large majority of British Officers where not in the Indian but what was now the Pakistani armies; wanted Attlee to ascertain 'in the best manner he knows who is overwhelmingly in the wrong and then withdraw every British Officer in the service of the wrong party'. (Broadlands Archives (BA), University of Southampton. MBI/E/193/2).
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Attlee had parried the request: 'When political tragedies occur', he informed Gandhiji, 'how seldom it is that, at all events at the time, the blame can be cast, without a shadow of doubt substantially on one party alone'. (Ibid. Message to Gandhiji from Attlee.) Gandhiji was very disappointed. Mountbatten's own comment on Gandhiji's proposal (in a letter to Lord Ismay) was as follows: 'He seems to ignore the fact that if we expelled Pakistan from the Commonwealth, Russia would obviously step in. Mountbatten, much later then wrote to Gandhiji as follows: 'An alternative means is to ask UNO to undertake this enquiry and you would have no difficulty in getting Pakistan to agree to this.' (Ibid. Mountbatten to Gandhiji, 29 September 1947. Nothing came of this proposal, but this was how a reference to the UN came to be broached.Vallabhbhai Patel and Mountbatten had worked together on the division of India and the integration of the princely states into the Indian dominion, but after independence, Mountbatten found him less tractable than Nehru. Mountbatten was aware of the growing rift between Nehru and Patel. When Nehru had submitted to him the list of independent India's first cabinet in August 1947, according to H.V. Hodson, Patel's name was missing from it. It was Mountbatten who, on v.P. Menon's prompting, made Nehru include Patel in the cabinet. v.P. Menon argued that an open clash in the Congress Party Working Committee between the two might result in Nehru's defeat.For this see H.Y. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain-India-Pakistan (Oxford University Press edition, Delhi, 2000, p. 381). It should be noted that Hodson was meticulous in his research and had access to Mountbatten while writing his book The Great Divide in the 1960s. Hodson said that the Mahatma possibly wanted Patel to lead the recast Congress Party that he was then planning.
One of the other problems at that time concerned the division of the assets of undivided India between the two dominions. The crux of the issue was one of transferring the second instalment of Rs 550 million (equal to about half a billion US dollars today) to Pakistan. (Until then only the first instalment of Rs 200 million had been transferred.) Nehru had told C. Rajagopalachari on 26 October 1947: 'It would be foolish to make this payment until this Kashmir business had been settled.' (C. Rajagopalachari, a prominent Congress leader from South India, succeeded Mountbatten as the governor-general of India).
Mountbatten has recorded how he convinced Gandhiji of the validity of the Pakistani claim: I told him that I considered it to be unstatesmanlike and unwise (not to pay). The documents also bring out the anti-Congress Party and anti-Hindu sentiments of the British officers serving in the country even as they prepared to quit India. Most such officers, who stayed on after independence, went over to serve Pakistan and did their damnedest against India.
Was it possible to have avoided partition by 1946-47? It may be worth dwelling on this question for a moment.
Besides the strategic factor, there were other reasons for Britain to favour partition. One was the doubt in the British mind that India might not have a very good chance of surviving as an independent state. A top-secret appreciation, prepared in the Commonwealth Relations Office soon after British withdrawal, elaborates this doubt. Factors such as India's heterogeneous population, the North South divide, the communal problem, the unruliness of the Sikhs and the policy of the Indian communists to spread dissension are cited in this context. One can't say how far Attlee, or how many of his colleagues, accepted this analysis. But notions of India's instability were deeply embedded in the thinking of British officials, senior Conservative politicians and many journalists, including editors of newspapers. In the circumstances, it is not surprising that the British would hesitate to put all their eggs in the Indian basket.
There was another reason for the British tilt towards the creation of Pakistan. I have referred to the hatred for Indian leaders in general and for the Hindus in particular that most British civilians and military men in India had started to feel by 1947. The nationalists' non-cooperation in the war effort had created deep distrust for them in Britain; so also in several countries of the British Commonwealth, particularly in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Therefore, the emotion among the English in favour of Pakistan was very great. (It has not subsided entirely even to this day.)
The Indians too faced difficulties in cooperating with Britain.
The British support for the Muslim League as well as for the Pakistan scheme had created a general and widespread suspicion of their intentions among the public. Besides, there were specific points of disagreement. Jawaharlal Nehru was willing to cooperate with Britain on several issues, including that of supporting the Commonwealth concept, which, he believed, would help to balance American influence in the world. But he was absolutely opposed to getting entangled in any schemes to contain or confront the Soviet Union and China. Also, he was bent upon fighting European colonialism as well as apartheid, even if his stance embarrassed Britain and its friends. A possibility that greatly excited him was the opportunities independence would offer India to mediate for peace between the West and the East and, in so doing, strike out a new path in world affairs. By appealing to the deep-felt urges of mankind for freedom, equality and peace, he believed that India could develop a diplomatic reach, which would be as effective in influencing world events as power politics and military strength. These concepts, of course, would be difficult to marry with British ideas, and were unlikely to persuade Britain to abandon the Pakistan scheme. , inexperienced in foreign affairs, and far too vain' was the British High Commission's (in India) top-secret assessment of Nehru. (This was written by Frank Roberts, the acting high commissioner. It fell into Indian hands and crossed my desk as private secretary to Sir Girja Shanker Bajpai, the secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs.)
Many Indians, by and large, do know that the Imperial power supported the partition plan to weaken India, so that it remained dependent on Britain even after independence. This is however only half the truth. The British left no stone unturned to push their allies, the princes - whose territories constituted one-third of the Raj - into the arms of India, except for Jammu and Kashmir. This step helped unify disparate and fragmented parts into a cohesive country. If the British were out to weaken India, why should they have done this, or left the Andaman and Nicobar as well as the Lacadive Islands in Indian hands, which increased India's naval reach in the Indian Ocean? Or, indeed, why should they have whittled down Jinnah's territorial demands to the minimum required for Britain to safeguard its defence requirements?
The English and people abroad generally believed that India was divided because Hindus and Muslims could not live peacefully together in one country and, a separate state - Pakistan - needed to be carved out of India for the Muslims. But the fact is that such a division of the two communities was never made. Nearly thirty million Muslims, or a third of the total Muslim population of India, were excluded from Pakistan. These Muslims residing in Indian provinces, in which they were minorities, were the only ones who could be said to be vulnerable to Hindu pressure or domination. The creation of Pakistan was justified in order to protect them, but they were left behind in India." The areas placed in Pakistan (the NWFp, West Punjab, Baluchistan and Sind) had Muslim majorities with no fear of Hindu domination and were being ruled by governments dominated by Muslims. Indeed, the NWFP and the Punjab had governments opposed to Jinnah's Muslim League. But they were placed in Pakistan.
These four provinces/units, however, had one common feature: the British chiefs of staff considered their territories of absolute importance for organizing a defence against a possible Soviet advance towards the Indian Ocean.
Partition was a politico-strategic act. It was not to 'save' Muslims from Hindus; nor was it to weaken India. 'Everyone for home; everyone for himself.'
The British adopted the policy of divide and rule in India after the bloody revolt or the Great Mutiny of 1857. This was a policy to control Indians, not to divide India. The latter question arose when the British started to plan their retreat from India, the facts about which are the subject of this story. If the impulse was Churchill's, it was Attlee who implemented the scheme. Working behind a thick smoke screen, he wove circles around Indian leaders and persuaded them to accept partition.The belief that the Cabinet Mission plan sought to avoid, or would have succeeded in avoiding, partition is mistaken. This plan would have intensified communal tension and most probably Balkanized India. However, it served HMG's purpose as follows. It delivered a shock to Jinnah that the Attlee Government might move away from partition and prepared the ground for him to accept the smaller Pakistan. The entry of the Congress leaders into the Interim Government kept them from revolting; it softened them up to ultimately accept the Wavell-Attlee plan. The exercise served British public relations; it created the impression in the United States that Britain was working for Indian unity.
The plan for the smaller Pakistan was not worked out by Mountbatten in 1947, as generally believed, but by Lord Wavell in 1945, who submitted its detailed blueprint to London in February 1946. Mountbatten implemented the plan by persuading the two main Indian parties to accept the same. Advancing the date of British departure from June 1948 to August 1947 is often blamed for the chaos and killings in Punjab. The date was advanced after the Congress Party, in May 1947, agreed to accept the transfer of power on a dominion status basis, provided Britain pulled out of India forthwith. The Indian acceptance of dominion status, even temporarily, was important for Britain. ('The greatest opportunity ever offered to the Empire.') It would facilitate the passage of the Indian Independence Bill in the British Parliament, by appeasing the Conservative opposition. It would prove to the world that India had willingly accepted partition; otherwise why should it agree to remain a British dominion? It would gain time to persuade Nehru and his friends to abandon their commitment to leave the British Commonwealth.
Penderel Moon, civil servant and historian who was on the spot, has written: 'The determination of the Sikhs to preserve their cohesion was the root cause of the violent exchange of populations which took place; and it would have operated with like effect even if the division of the Punjab had been put off another year.' Admittedly, the Muslim attacks on Sikh farmers in the villages around Rawalpindi in March 1947 confirmed this community's worst fears that the Muslim League was out to cleanse West Pakistan of non-Muslims, which actually happened. However, Linlithgow and Wavell cannot escape the responsibility for the Punjab massacres. They ignored the warnings of their governors, Henry Craik and Bertrand Glancy, that strengthening Jinnah's Muslim League in the Punjab at the expense of the Muslims of the Unionist Party, who were opposed to partition - Shaukat Hayat used to call it 'Jinnahstan' - would result in a blood bath in the province. Wavell did forward Glancy's warning to London, but the policy to build up Jinnah as the sole spokesman of the Muslims continued.
The view that Britain, by staying on longer, might have avoided the Punjab troubles ignores the fact that the British neither had the troops nor the administrative capacity to control events in India by the summer of 1947. The vigour and speed with which Lord Mountbatten acted at least had the merit of confining the conflagration to the Punjab.
The British focus was no doubt on Pakistan as a future defence partner in the Great Game, but India too had its value. If it remained in the British family of nations, i.e., in the Commonwealth, this retention would add to British prestige and influence in the postwar world. How Mountbatten juggled the above two British goals, none-too-easy a feat, has been covered in the earlier chapters. While viceroy of India, he prized away the North West Frontier Province from the Congress Party's control and, while India's governor-general after independence, he restrained it from occupying the whole, or more areas, of Kashmir. This made it possible for Pakistan to be formed as a defence bastion. Simultaneously, he was able to build bridges between the British and India that led to the latter remaining a member of the British Commonwealth.
The view that Mountbatten helped India to gain Kashmir, by persuading Sir Cyril Radcliffe to allot parts of the Muslim-majority areas of Gurdaspur district (in the Punjab) to India, is not well founded. A fair-weather road through this district was indeed the only route that connected the state with India. But it was Wavell's blueprint for Pakistan, sent to London on 6 February 1946, which has to be studied in this context. The allotment had nothing to do with Kashmir or Mountbatten. Wavell had recommended:
In the Punjab the only Muslim-majority District that would not go into Pakistan under this demarcation is Gurdaspur (51 per cent Muslim). Gurdaspur must go with Amritsar for geographical reasons and Amritsar being [the] sacred city of Sikhs must stay out of Pakistan.
Mountbatten continues to receive flak in Britain, Pakistan and India. Some of the British frustration at India's independence ('Of course he lost if), not unnaturally, got rubbed off on the man who actually handed over power. The ex-viceroy, in his old age, talked a bit too much - about his success in India - which played into his detractors' hands, with India being vilified in the process. His achievements for his country were very great, and as they say in England: Good Wine Needs No Brush!
Regarding the princes, unless some organic relationship could be established between the Central Government and the princely states, as was actually done through the process of accessions - into which the princes were no doubt stampeded by Mountbatten - a much worse fate awaited them. Ninety per cent of the princely states were too small to resist agitators entering from the Indian or Pakistani provinces and overrunning them, threatening their rulers' lives and property. If some bigger states tried to break away by declaring independence, they would not have succeeded, because Britain was not in a position to come to their aid, and the United States was against the further Balkanization of India. The accessions saved the princely order, if not the princely states. They laid the foundation for a peaceful revolution. (It is another matter that the British paid scant regard to solemn treaties signed with the princes, whereas they laid so much stress on their obligations to mere declarations made in the British Parliament to safeguard minority rights. After all, Pakistan would be a partner in the Great Game after they quit India; the princes had outlived their utility.)
Many, including some prominent historians like Stanley Wolpert (today 2007), are of the view that Mahatma Gandhi remained opposed to partition till the very end. His absenting himself from Delhi on Independence Day is often cited as proof.
Britain's pro-Pakistan policy on Kashmir was based on its desire to keep that part of its old Indian Empire, which jutted into Central Asia and lay along Afghanistan, Soviet Russia and China, in the hands of the successor dominion that had promised cooperation in matters of defence. In the open forum of the UN, Britain could not concede its pro-Pakistani stand. The Americans, in their internal telegram, have left a record of Britain's pro-Pakistani tilt on Kashmir. So also the Kashmir imbroglio in 1947-48 proved once more that all that happened during the end game of Empire cannot be understood unless one keeps in view the overwhelming concern of the withdrawing power, as it pulled out, to secure its strategic agenda.
In July 1947, Jinnah personally approached the Maharaja of Jodhpur and the Maharaj Kumar of Jaisalmer and offered favourable terms to the rulers of these wholly Hindu-populated states to accede to Pakistan. He also approached the rulers of the Hindu-populated states of Baroda, Indore and others through the Nawab of Bhopal. Jinnah did so because he knew very well that the affiliation of the princely states to one or the other dominion was left entirely to their rulers by the same British act that created Pakistan. It was not a Hindu-Muslim question. That is also why Pakistan accepted the accession of the Nawab of Junagadh, a Hindu-majority state. It furthermore would be wrong to believe that because Kashmir was 77 per cent Muslim, its people would, in 1947, have automatically wished to join Pakistan. The NWFp, next door, was 95 per cent Muslim but its people resisted the Muslim League and British pressure and remained with the Congress Party, till 1947, when, this party's leaders, in a quid pro quo with the British, abandoned them.
In 1947, the overwhelming majority of Muslims of the Valley of Kashmir, where well over half of the people of the state lived, supported Sheikh Abdullah and his National Conference Party. Whatever his other ambitions, Abdullah was absolutely opposed to Pakistan. Similarly, Jammu and its Dogra belt would have voted against Pakistan. The only Muslims of the state who would have supported Pakistan in large numbers at that time were those living along Pakistan's border in the Poonch-Mirpur area. But since Pakistan was created, the communal virus has spread to large parts of the subcontinent. I can't say how the Kashmiris would vote today. But, in 1947-48, the majority, in all probability, would have supported the maharaja's accession to India. And 1947-48 is the pertinent date, when considering the issue. In all fairness, the position that existed then cannot be brushed aside.
The successful use of religion by the British in India to gain political and strategic objectives was replicated by the Americans in Afghanistan in the 1980s by building up the Islamic jihadis, all for the same purpose of keeping the Soviet communists at bay. The Muslim League's 'direct action' before partition in India was the forerunner of the jihad in Afghanistan. However, Al-Qaida's attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001 woke up the West to the dangers of encouraging political Islam.
It was the Pakistan Government that, through the Jamaat-iIslami, Pakistan, and their intelligence service, the ISI, created the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. The preachings of the Jamaat's founder, Abdul Al Mawdudi, a migrant from India, envisaged a clash of civilizations and governments founded strictly on the tenets of the Shariat; he counselled jihad against non-believers. These views found an echo in many Muslim lands; they influenced Osama bin Laden. Even after the US-backed jihad in Afghanistan had succeeded, Pakistan continued to help the Taliban train terrorists to fight non-believers in the name of Allah. Without Pakistan's backing, it is doubtful whether Islamic terror could have spread so far and wide in the world, despite Osama bin Laden, Saudi and Gulf petro dollars and Arab suicide bombers. The Americans are now taking steps to rein in the export of terror from Pakistan. But the genie has escaped the bottle. Some of the roots of the present Islamic terrorism menacing the world surely lie buried in the partition of India.
The British brought the 'New Learning' to India as well as the notion of the separation of religion from politics that had become the norm in Christian Europe after the Renaissance. These features opened up the possibility for secularism - anathema to orthodox Muslims - to take root among the Muslims of India and for them to work a democratic constitution together with people of other faiths; indeed, for India becoming a laboratory for enlightened Islam. At the same time, Western social mores helped foster among the individualistic Hindus a greater sense of responsibility for society and feeling of brotherhood between man and man. Shashi Tharoor, the writer, speaking of Hindus has asked: How can the followers of a faith without any fundamentals become fundamentalists? But lack of parameters and a sense of social responsibility can also lead to intolerance as well as to parochialism. The good done by the spread of British liberal ideas in India in the nineteenth century was undone in the twentieth by British politicians and viceroys, who introduced divisive policies such as separate electorates for Muslims (besides, of course, selfserving economic policies that vertaxed the farmers). British rule, to the end, maintained its duality: the civilizing mission and extreme selfishness mixed with cunning - though during its last days, 'the Raj was about neither plunder nor civilization but rather survival', as Fareed Zakaria, the columnist and writer, has put it.
There is, of course, the view that partition averted a worse disaster for India in the years to come. The past half a century has seen a phenomenal rise in Islamic fundamentalism and in the forces of political Islam. Such a development has drawn and deepened fault lines within many states with mixed populations of Muslims and others. Would it be possible in such circumstances, for the nearly 500 million Muslims (by the year 2010) of an undivided India to settle down peacefully under a democratic, secular constitution? Partition, by compartmentalizing Muslim political power in the two corners of the subcontinent, has weakened the jihadis and given time for the pressure from economical globalization and the technological revolution sweeping the world to overhaul or temper the intensity of the globalization of jihad and political Islam and ensure peaceful co-existence in the subcontinent. Plus the awareness that it was global politics, Britain's insecurity and the errors of judgement of the Indian leaders that resulted in the partition of India might help India and Pakistan in search for some form of reconciliation at one point.
Colonel Elahi Baksh, the doctor who attended on Jinnah during his last phase of his illness in August-September 1948 at Ziarat near Quetta, reported he heard his patient say: 'I have made it [Pakistan] but I am convinced that I have committed the greatest blunder of my life.' This was reported also, around the same time by Liaqat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, upon emerging one day from the sick man's room after receiving a tongue-lashing, was heard to murmur: 'The old man apparently discovered his mistake.‘ See Member of Parliament Dr M. Hashim Kidwai's letter printed in The Times of India, 27 July 1988, on the basis of reports published in Frontier Post, Peshawar, and Muslim India, New Delhi.