The Great Partition Read online

  The three British men had arrived in India on 25 March 1946, just as the temperature was starting to climb, charged with the task of trying to resolve the constitutional deadlock which India faced. This was, as everybody was aware, the last push for peace and the best chance of achieving the agreement between the different parties that was vital if Britain were to relinquish its imperial control. Under the arresting title, ‘Friends! This is for you,’ Ruchi Ram Sahni sent his article to the head of the delegation by registered post. ‘I appeal to you,’ he wrote, ‘to approach your great task in the spirit of ministering angels to the good of India and to humanity at large.’ Over the preceding weeks, which rolled into months, as the Cabinet Mission repeatedly extended the length of its stay in India, Ruchi Ram Sahni wrote seven more open letters which he posted one by one to the delegation. In them, it is possible to trace the steady deterioration of hope and expectation which accompanied the mission's arrival and the steady descent into gloom and pessimism about the future among the Indian populace. At the end of three months of negotiations between the political parties, the mission went home empty handed, and the question of apportioning power in a fair constitutional settlement remained unresolved. ‘I am pained to bring to a close this long series of articles on a note of hopelessness suddenly turned into one of disappointment,’ Sahni was writing by June, although not, he added, one ‘of helplessness’.38

  Sahni was one of hundreds of correspondents, of a myriad political persuasions, to write addresses, memos and appeals; the Cabinet Mission was overwhelmed by the weight of correspondence during its stay. In Britain and India all eyes were turned to the delegation; in Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury led prayers for the success of the negotiations. Administrators and soldiers in the Indian provinces looked on, and gave portentous warnings of the risk of failure. ‘If the situation arises in which the Muslim League are bypassed,’ reported one army major, ‘I think they will be able to mobilise violent resistance on a large scale. In the Punjab they are busy contacting and training demobilised soldiers and are even training women to use arms.’39 Adding to the confusion were reasonable doubts – based on past disappointments – about the British intention finally to relinquish its Indian empire after two centuries. Back in Britain, over a thousand Indians in Bradford, mostly seamen and industrial workers, waited nervously and planned a mass fast. A sit-down demonstration in front of the House of Commons was attended by Indian delegates from London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Wolverhampton and Coventry in support of the mission's success. ‘They doubt the sincerity of the Cabinet Mission and are making preparations for demonstrations in case it fails.’ In early 1946, doubts about whether the British were really genuine in their desire to relinquish their Indian empire were still heartfelt.40

  Despite all this pressure from home and abroad, after weeks of initial wrangling in Delhi, attempts at negotiation between the parties failed to achieve any concrete results. The Cabinet Mission persisted with its task of trying to arrange an interim government and a smooth handover of power to a representative government and in early May the leading politicians of the League and Congress were invited to Simla to resume talks. Over a hundred journalists accompanied them, crammed into the hotels and restaurants of the sleepy hill station perched in the Himalayan foothills. The town was packed with politicians, while the streets hummed with political conjecture about the shape of the agreement. The Indian public, though, despite its intense interest in the negotiations, remained in the dark about what was happening behind the closed doors of the viceregal summer lodge.

  In contrast to previous negotiations, the politicians and administrators remained tight-lipped, and leaks were studiously avoided. ‘We realise that the public is entitled to a report of what has happened,’ announced the Congress President, appealing on the steps outside to the press to avoid speculation, ‘but in view of all the circumstances we hope that for a brief period our reticence will be understood and appreciated.’41 Outsiders were kept guessing about developments inside this tightly knit, secretive inner circle. When it was finally announced that these talks had also failed, politics spilled on to the streets and Muslim League and Congress supporters paraded Simla's central Mall shouting slogans at each other. Armed police were called to keep the crowds apart.42 Politicians, who had been remarkably accessible and unprotected in the past, were allocated bodyguards. The tension of the failure to patch up an agreement at the centre had immediate resonances in the anxious networks of supporters and crowds backing the parties.

  The cabinet delegation had decided to try an entirely different approach. Rather than persist with fruitless negotiations they opted to present a fait accompli to the Indian population. On 16 May 1946 word circulated that there would soon be an important radio announcement. People tuned in or gathered in the streets to hear the clipped tones of Lord Pethick-Lawrence's broadcast at 8.45 in the evening. ‘The words which I shall speak to you are concerned with the future of a great people – the people of India,’ he began. ‘There is a passionate desire in the hearts of Indians expressed by the leaders of all their political parties for independence. His Majesty's Government and the British people as a whole are full ready to accord this independence whether within or without the British Commonwealth and hope that out of it will spring a lasting and friendly association between our two peoples on a footing of complete equality …’ And so it went on, for over fifteen minutes, a long, complicated constitutional proposal in English.43

  In essence, the mission presented the parties with a complete proposal for a future constitutional settlement. They could choose either to accept or to reject the plan in its entirety. The plan was intended to circumvent the main objections and anxieties of all the leading players. It was designed to deliver Pakistan in spirit if not in letter by devolving power to Muslims within a united India. India would be governed by a three-layered federation in which a central government would take charge of portfolios such as defence and foreign affairs. Provinces would have autonomy on some matters but, crucially, would be grouped together to deal with other questions of their choosing collectively. If agreed, large Muslim blocs would be able to act in concert within the Indian Union, in order to preserve or defend their own welfare. As one newspaper headline put it, this was a straightforward decision, a ‘Choice between peace and civil strife’. Both parties did – at moments and with reservations – agree to the Cabinet Mission plan and this has given it poignant fascination. There was a moment of great optimism and relief, which was quickly dashed. If successful, it would have meant that Pakistan as we know it today would never have come into existence.

  Reactions to the plan in India's towns and cities were mixed and uncertain. The elderly, maverick Urdu poet Hasrat Mohani, an old supporter of the League, was on his summer holidays, visting Sufi pilgrimage sights in the historic town of Rudauli. He had been taking part in the celebrations of a Sufi saint when he returned to his lodgings and heard the Cabinet Mission proposals announced on the radio. Mohani was a latecomer to political office but had recently secured a seat in the elections. He was delighted with the news of the Cabinet Mission plan. The future looked bright; he was planning to perform the hajj by air. For many Muslims living in the provinces where they were a minority, this version of ‘Pakistan’ was good enough. There would be a form of devolution, Jinnah had extracted some major concessions from the talks and the Congress and the League could move towards power-sharing at the centre. The information ‘from Muslim quarters’, among the elites of North India, was that Muslim leaders were ‘pressing Jinnah to accept the scheme’.44 Depending on political persuasion and regional location, there were lots of good reasons for Muslims to accept the plan.

  Interpretations of the plan mattered, though. As the press was itself already polarised, and journalists were often party members, the interpretations of the mission plan were frequently at odds with its ‘real’ meaning. In Sind, banner headlines in League papers proclaimed ‘Pakistan rejected’ and man
y Muslims felt dejected by the idea that Pakistan had somehow been ‘lost’, a feeling confirmed by the decisive rejection of a ‘sovereign Pakistan’ in the mission statement's preamble. Among many Muslims the lack of clarity about the meaning of Pakistan, and its double usage, both as shorthand for a millenarian aspiration and as the title of a new country, muddied the waters. Was the mission plan delivering Pakistan or not? Could it, or could it not, be celebrated as a victory by the League? Popular hype and expectations of freedom which had taken on euphoric qualities in some places could barely be assuaged by the complex and conciliatory Cabinet Mission plan.

  Conversely, there were many on the lower rungs of the Congress Party who felt aggrieved by the suggestion that there had been any concession to the Pakistan demand at all, and fully exploited this in the post-war vocabulary of ‘Nazi appeasement’. In their eyes, the Cabinet Mission plan was as good as granting Pakistan, and made a travesty of swaraj. In the solidly Congress provinces, where Muslims made up a sliver of the population and the League presence was weak, such as the Central Provinces, it seemed that the British were bowing to League pressure and granting unnecessary concessions. The agreement looked a step too far: it meant caving in to local opponents for no apparently good reason. For these reasons, Gandhi, never a fan of the English language in any case, told listeners at his prayer meetings to study the fine details of the plan in their own language, rather than in English, to make up their own minds about its meaning and not to borrow their opinions from newspapers.45

  From their perspective, mill-owners and mighty Indian industrialists, men such as G.D. Birla, saw in the plan all their dreams for a strong, centralised India leaking away. Birla, like many, was hoping for a powerful central government in free India, footing the bill for capital-intensive projects, paving the roads and pumping the power and water supplies that India desperately lacked. The Cabinet Mission plan seemed a cruel watering down of all these plans.46 Similarly, some regional Congress politicians believed they had little to gain by making sentimental or generous concessions to Muslim interests when Independence, and their own power in a national parliament, was frustratingly within reach. ‘The Congress premiers of Bombay, UP, Bihar, Central Provinces and Orissa pressed for the establishment of a strong centre and said that the Muslims had been given far more concessions than they were entitled to,’ recorded the Viceroy in his diary.47 Elsewhere, regional sensitivities took precedence. In Assam, where local leaders feared being swamped by their arbitrary grouping together with Bengalis in the proposed scheme, opposition was instantaneous and vociferous.

  To add to the complexities, many Sikhs felt that they had been entirely overlooked. The proposed settlement threatened to put their own regional interests in the hands of the Muslim League. The president of the Sikh Party, the Akali Dal, said the plan was adding insult to injury and appealed for a united Panth and for Sikhs to prepare to ‘stake their all’; the Sikh Panthic Conference resolved that the mission's recommendations ‘liquidated the position of the Sikhs in their homeland’; while Sardar Sarmukh Singh Chamak told worshippers at the shimmering Golden Temple, the holiest place for the community, that the British were ‘trying to atom bomb the Sikhs’.48

  In short, there were doves and hawks in all communities. Needless to say, in the end, the plan failed. It became obvious by June that both the plans for a federal solution and even attempts to put into place some form of provisional, interim government had come to nothing. The Cabinet Mission represents a galling missed opportunity and exactly why the Cabinet Mission failed so spectacularly has long been the stuff of nuanced debate about the intentions and motives at the top level of negotiations. The bottom line was a failure of trust, with both Congress and the League unwilling to take the leap into an unknown future without cast-iron guarantees that the plan would be interpreted in precisely the same way by all parties once the British had departed.

  Very many Indians across the social spectrum were deeply disappointed by the failure. But it was a boon for the most vocal, well-organised nationalist hardliners. The uncertainties and hesitancies in the politicised grassroots of the League and Congress about the meanings of swaraj and Pakistan, and about how these hopes were going to be fulfilled, played a supporting role. ‘There was absolutely nothing settled about what would be the shape of things in India once Independence was achieved,’ reflected the writer Nasim Ansari, still casting his mind back four decades later and trying to unravel what had gone wrong in the build-up to Partition. ‘The urge for freedom was common to both Hindus and Muslims but no one had any clear idea of what should follow independence. So misunderstandings grew, and developed to such an extent that such fraternal unity, as existed earlier, was never seen again.’49 It was an onward march towards an uncertain destination. Old ways of life were crumbling, and the nervous anticipation of a settlement ratcheted up a sense of both insecurity and exhilaration.

  By the time the dejected Cabinet Mission boarded their aeroplane for their return to Britain on 29 June the power that they thought they were trying to broker had already slipped out of British hands in the towns and cities of provincial India. Partition was closely entwined with this slow, protracted passage of decolonisation, which has been masked by the pedantic language of the transfer of power. Cumulative, minor cracks were building all over the Indian urban landscape. Even more ominously, the loud, omnipresent calls for Pakistan or for swaraj had been taken up by militias and strongmen, middle-class students and their urban supporters. These calls were being made more urgently and repeatedly than ever, and were shattering the peace of the cities where smaller groups were being pushed to the political margins. British responsibility for control, at the provincial level, already seemed to have been abandoned. As one governor reported: ‘I spoke to Pant [the Congress premier of United Provinces] sometime back about communal organisations, the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh [RSS] and the Muslim National Guard. I told him that there was a whirlwind coming which somebody would have to reap. It probably wouldn't be me, for I would be gone.’50 In the logistical calculations of British withdrawal, armed groups which posed no direct challenge to British interests proved neither especially interesting nor especially threatening to the government.

  ‘In Karachi the other day the accidental dropping of an onion from a verandah by a child nearly started a communal fracas.’51 An exaggeration, perhaps. But by the second half of 1946, the British administration knew, after the failure of the Cabinet Mission's attempt to forge a settlement, that the state was cracking. Wavell's personal diary, in which the Viceroy scribbled his musings, was verging on the apocalyptic. There had been tension in the past and this had sometimes resulted in major riots between Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Small riots when they occurred had caused deaths in the tens, though rarely in the hundreds and never in the thousands. They had tended to be set pieces, predictably coinciding with religious festivals. Now the violence, when it broke out, seemed stranger and less manageable. In July 1946 there was rioting in the Gujarati city of Ahmedabad and random stabbing attacks started to occur in the city. From the middle of the year, urban riots between bands of political activists broke out in city streets, as processions clashed and men fought pitched battles, throwing stones and brickbats. As soon as the Cabinet Mission plan failed, urban scraps and stabbings intensified in frequency.

  The big names at the top of the party hierarchies were finding it harder and harder to intervene and to control events. Vallabhbhai Patel, second in command to Nehru in the Congress, didn't go and visit Ahmedabad, a city of fellow Gujaratis, when riots and sporadic stabbings started there in July as his offer to visit was rejected by local leaders. Party activists started snubbing leaders who urged quiescence and calm. That month, two Gandhian workers who tried to intervene to halt riots there succumbed to the knives of rioters. Near to the very place where Gandhi had grown up and had started his experiments in non-violence, Gandhian workers were being murdered: the despair of peace workers and faithful followers of Gandhi is
visceral. They appealed to Gandhi for help: ‘Two of our Congress workers, Shri Vasant Rao and Shri Raja Bali, went out in such a quest and fell a prey to the goonda's knife,’ wrote their co-workers. ‘They laid down their lives in pursuit of an ideal and they deserve all praise. But no one else had the courage to follow in their footsteps. They have not the same self-confidence. If they had it, there would be no riots, and even if riots broke out, they would never assume the proportions and the form that the present day riots do.’52 As old certainties broke down, Gandhian workers – and even Gandhi himself – seemed to be losing moral authority.

  The impartiality of Indian policemen, administrators and politicians was also coming under public suspicion and intense scrutiny. Militias snowballed in size as news of the rejection of the Cabinet Mission plan spread. This paved the way for the breaking of trust which was already well under way, but reached a crisis with the events which took place in Calcutta in August 1946. This would be swiftly followed by devastating attacks in Noakhali in East Bengal and in Bihar from October, followed by Garhmukhteshwar in the United Provinces in November. All occurred outside Punjab, where worse was yet to come. In all these places, the nature of the killing would become brutal, sadistic and grisly; women and children were attacked, and rapists worked alongside the killers. Everywhere, there was an element of planning and organisation involved and a sense of immunity from the governing provincial party – whether League or Congress. By the end of 1946, there was a collapse of faith between the parties, largely because of the graphic news of these attacks. Most ominously of all, when people asked for, or resisted, the idea of Pakistan, or clamoured for swaraj, it was without any clear idea at all of what the real costs of this were going to be for the Indian state and its people.