India: A History. Revised and Updated (92 page)

Not surprisingly, the negotiations which produced this catalogue of failures have been closely scrutinised. Gandhi’s 1944 initiative of direct talks with Jinnah, the first move towards a postwar settlement, has been criticised as a well-meaning blunder which served only to enhance Jinnah’s standing
and to entrench his demands. The Simla Conference of 1945 had a similar effect. Convened by Lord Wavell, Linlithgow’s successor as viceroy, it proposed transforming his Executive Council into something like a national government. But it floundered on a Congress insistence on its right to nominate amongst its representatives the odd Muslim and on Jinnah’s insistence that all Muslim representatives must be nominated by the League, Jinnah was allowed in effect to veto the initiative.

New elections in India, called by the incoming British Labour government of Clement Attlee and held in early 1946, confirmed the sectarian polarisation. As the first since 1937, a poll was long overdue and was a necessary prelude to further negotiations. But it was based on the existing, very limited franchise, and on the existing system of reserved electorates and seats as per the communal awards of 1936. With the League sweeping the reserved constituencies as convincingly as did Congress the unreserved, it deepened the religious divide. Except in the North-West Frontier Province – where tribal loyalties and the Pakhtun (Pathan) language underpinned a sub-separatist allegiance to Congress – and the Panjab, where some Muslims still adhered to the rural and non-sectarian Unionist Party, Jinnah’s claim to speak for Muslim India seemed vindicated; his demand for Pakistan began to look correspondingly irresistible. Conversely Congress, though enjoying a colossal majority, could no longer claim to represent all communities. Critics, principally from the left, maintained that had elections been based on universal suffrage the results would have been different. The League’s pretensions to represent all Muslims would have been exposed and, capitalising on industrial and agrarian grievances, a third force of cross-communal pedigree and impeccably socialist ideology would have emerged. The elections, in short, were yet another missed opportunity, another failure.

Wavell’s alarm at the outcome brought a top-level British Cabinet Mission to India in March-June 1946. The tortuous negotiations which followed were designed to set up both a Constituent Assembly (which would decide on a new constitution) and a transitional government to handle matters in the interim. Not for want of ingenious ideas, both bodies also proved to be failures. Jinnah seemed to back away from Pakistan when confronted with the proposition that, by the terms of the League’s own Pakistan Resolution, ‘Muslim majority areas’ must mean that Hindu majority areas in the Panjab and Bengal would have to be excluded from Pakistan. Instead he joined Congress in endorsing a complicated system of provincial groupings whence the Constituent Assembly was to be elected. This was hailed as a breakthrough. Although the provinces and their groupings would cede to the central government only such subjects as defence, foreign affairs and all-India
communications, this arrangement specifically excluded the possibility of an independent ‘Pakistan’. The subcontinent, albeit with a much weakened central government, stood within a whisker of remaining united. But not for long. Nehru, already determined to protect central authority at any cost, let slip that he did not regard the Cabinet Mission plan as binding, whereupon Jinnah not unreasonably withdrew his support. The terms were in fact so complicated that each side felt entitled to interpret them differently. Recriminations followed, including an August 1946 call by the League to the ‘Muslim nation’ to institute ‘direct action’; its results, though unforeseen, would be horrifying. As for the interim government, this also materialised, but only through viceregal appointment. With Nehru as prime minister and Liaqat Ali Khan of the League as a late-joining finance minister, it served to give a convincing demonstration of why a power-sharing coalition would not work.

In despair over London’s erratic support as well as India’s irreconcilable leaders, the well-meaning Wavell had earlier advocated as a last resort a ‘Breakdown Plan’. The ‘breakdown’ – which could well have been his own – in fact referred to the failure of Congress and the League to work together in the bodies proposed by the Cabinet Mission. This being now amply demonstrated, the British government examined the ‘Breakdown Plan’. As the supreme commander who in 1942 had overseen the Allied retreat from south-east Asia, Wavell was proposing a similar retreat in India, in fact a phased withdrawal of British troops and officials, first from the south to the north, then from the Congress-dominated provinces to those of the League. He also proposed an announcement that the withdrawal would be completed by 31 March 1948.

Although militarily sound, the political consequences of such a retreat were rightly deemed unthinkable. The ‘Breakdown Plan’ was revealed as more like a ‘break-up’ plan. Besides inviting a fragmentation of late-Mughal proportions, it looked like a safe bet for civil war. Only the idea of announcing a withdrawal date was adopted. In February 1947 Attlee declared that British rule would end by June 1948.

For once both Congress and League applauded. Urgency was thus injected into the discussions. But far from conjuring a spirit of compromise it fuelled Congress demands for the dismissal of unco-operative League ministers in the interim government, and fanned League attempts to topple the non-League governments in the Panjab and the North-West Frontier Province.

In March 1947, to meet its new deadline, the Attlee government replaced Wavell with Lord Louis Mountbatten and, more importantly, empowered him to obtain a settlement without the usual interference from London. Mountbatten looked to be a good choice. As a cousin of the King-Emperor
he enjoyed a regard which transcended politics, and as commander-in-chief in south-east Asia at the end of the war he had shown some sympathy for Indonesia’s nationalists. He had no preconceptions where India was concerned, and for the task in hand his insatiable ego looked no bad thing; before the credit could be claimed or blame evaded, something had to have been achieved. The appointment of Mountbatten was in fact as much an earnest of British intentions as the setting of a deadline. Nehru appreciated this. He got on well with Lord Louis and famously with his wife Edwina. Mountbatten’s legendary charm would ensure that two hundred years of colonial exploitation ended with warm smiles and hearty handshakes.

To all, including the disillusioned Wavell, it had by now become glaringly obvious that Jinnah would accept, and most Muslims would settle for, nothing short of a Pakistan to which sovereignty and power were directly transferred by the British. Mountbatten nevertheless pursued a proposal whereby power would be transferred to the provinces and the princely states, who might then choose whether to join India, Pakistan or neither. This was quite unacceptable to Nehru, who foresaw a ‘Balkanisation’ of India. By now Nehru was deeply suspicious of provincial schemes and preferred a strong central government even if it meant accepting partition. His protestations produced some hasty British revision and led Mountbatten to accept Partition as inevitable.

Thus in June 1947 the viceroy proudly announced Congress-League agreement to a formula whereby power would be transferred to two successor states. The option of provinces or states choosing independence was dropped; Bengal and the Panjab were to be partitioned along sectarian lines; and the princely states were to be urged to join either India or Pakistan. To speed up the constitutional formalities, ensure third-party supervision over the division of assets, and leave the British with a fig-leaf of imperial pride, it was also agreed that power should be transferred on the basis of dominion status; this would require only the amendment of the 1935 India Act, which could subsequently be repudiated or endorsed by the successor states. To preserve the tottering interim government, Mountbatten also brought forward the deadline to 15 August 1947. Ten weeks would suffice for the constitutional, social, military and infrastructural vivisection of a subcontinent.

Jinnah, anxious to emphasise that Pakistan was succeeding the British Raj and not seceding from an independent India, celebrated Independence in Karachi on 14 August. Mountbatten attended the ceremonies despite a bomb scare, then left in haste. Unlike Nehru, Jinnah had never buckled before Mountbatten’s boyish charm offensives. Rejecting the viceroy’s wish to be accepted as governor-general of both successor states, he now himself assumed the role of Pakistan’s first governor-general and president of its Constituent
Assembly. As the officially titled
Quaid-i-Azam,
or ‘Supreme Leader’, the Friday prayers were read in his name. He was not just head of state and father of the nation but its constitutional caliph. There was no room for a representative, however well-connected, of the House of Windsor.

From Karachi on the night of 14 August Mountbatten flew straight to Delhi, where the celebrations would prove much more gratifying. There the appreciative Nehru was that night intoning his most famous oration. Its style was unashamedly Churchillian, and the quaint suggestion of a ‘tryst with destiny’ echoed the ‘trysting hour’ in ‘Horatius’, a much-loved poem by the man who had once savaged Indian scholarship, Thomas Babington Macaulay. The speech, in short, was a performance for history’s consumption.

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of India and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity.

‘A MADNESS HAS SEIZED THE PEOPLE’

Nehru, Mountbatten and many of their associates were acutely conscious of making history. In speeches, memoirs and personalised chronicles they confidently wrote themselves into it. Historians are grateful. But there is a danger of the record reading like conference minutes or a Government House diary of who said what and when and why. Far from the dappled lawns of New Delhi, out of range of the loudspeakers on the municipal maidan, other agendas were being followed, and never more determinedly than in the heady days before and after Independence.

In a land of limited opportunity but boundless importunity the keeping of trysts and the redeeming of pledges could seem irrelevant; so could the sudden switch from bitter antagonism to mutual applause. Elsewhere a less self-conscious history was being made. Often more instructive and always more harrowing, it had a way of sabotaging noble sentiments and exploding grand creations, showing scant regard for the old or the new, let alone that ‘rare moment’ which distinguishes them.

In 1943, like an uninvited guest from the past, famine had swept through large parts of lower Bengal. Scarcity during this bleakest period of the war had been expected. Rice imports from Burma had ceased with that country’s occupation by the Japanese; domestic food-grains were in great demand for the military build-up in eastern India; and hoarding had resulted. Additionally, rail freight was being commandeered by the armed forces while Bengal’s riverine shipping had been largely requisitioned for fear of its use by Japanese infiltrators. Yet the shortfall in food-grains was not great, and with foresight, rationing, better distribution and vigorous action against black-market hoarding, it should never have come to famine. It was a failure of personnel as much as anything. When in July the walking dead began straggling into Calcutta to expire on the streets, Linlithgow was looking forward to England, leaving India, as he rashly put it, ‘in pretty good shape’. Bengal, too, had just had a change of government; the returning Muslim League ministry was shaky and inexperienced. Worst of all, the British governor of the province, to whom ample powers were reserved for just such a crisis, was supine and very sick.

Between July and November the famine raged almost unchecked. When in October the just-installed Wavell visited the affected areas, he acknowledged ‘one of the worst disasters that has befallen any people under British rule’. He was not exaggerating. Famine fatalities are notoriously unreliable; in this case the totals range from two million to four million. But even if the lower figure is accepted, the famine still killed more Indians than did two world wars, the entire Independence struggle, plus the communal holocaust which accompanied Partition. ‘Direct British rule had begun with a Bengal famine in 1770; it was now drawing to a close with a comparable calamity.’
¹⁰

At the time, with Congress banned and its leaders in gaol following the ‘Quit India’ movement, many of Bengal’s Hindu
bhadralok
had temporarily switched their support to the extremist Hindu party known as the
Mahasabha.
For the famine the
Mahasabha,
as was its wont, unhesitatingly blamed the Muslim League, accusing it of exploiting the disaster to obtain a monopoly of the lucrative distribution of relief. The League, on the other hand, blamed the hoarding and profiteering of the mainly Hindu grain-dealers. Out of famine, as out of other forms of agrarian and industrial distress (like recession in the jute industry), communal hatred was born.

But Hindu-Muslim, or ‘communal’, violence was not inevitable. According to leftist historians, had the Congress leadership been less bent on a quick transfer of power at any price, both Partition and the communal massacres which it prompted might have been avoided. In November 1945 the British had brought to trial in Delhi three members of Subhas Chandra Bose’s INA.
(Bose himself had died in a plane crash a few weeks earlier.) One of the accused was a Sikh, the second a Muslim and the third a Hindu, the idea being to avoid the accusation of discriminating against any particular community. The nationalist response partook of the same even-handedness. On behalf of the accused, student protesters in Calcutta, then mutineers from ships of the Royal Indian Navy at Bombay and Karachi, rallied beneath the green flags of Islam, the red of the communists and socialists, and the tricolour of Congress. It was a fine display of communal harmony to which labour unions and other civilian groups enthusiastically lent their support.