The Great Partition (13 page)

In the prelude to Partition, therefore, the Congress Party itself might become implicated in violent action, just like the League, even when this had not been officially sanctioned by the upper echelons of the party. Nehru, although an impeccable pluralist and desperate for peace (personally risking his own life in order to break up fighting when he witnessed it in the streets of Delhi), wavered on the issue of violence in the heightened tension of 1946; could and should the Congress organise for self-defence if the Muslim League were the aggressors? Nehru spoke out against violence and suggested that people collect together in their
mohallas
for protection, and trust their local police force. He gave a frank, and pained, assessment to one correspondent: ‘You ask me about non-violence in these circumstances. I do not know what I would do if I was there [in Calcutta, during the riots of 1946] but I imagine that I would react violently. I have no doubt whatever that violence in self-defence is preferable to cowardly non-violence.’
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In the polarised atmosphere of 1946, the words used by numerous politicians became overtly incendiary and coasted perilously close to incitement to violence. Some now talked openly of civil war. It was widely reported that one of the foremost Congressmen, Vallabhbhai Patel, had declared, ‘Pakistan is not in the hands of the British government. If Pakistan is to be achieved the Hindus and Muslims will have to fight. There will be a civil war.’ A prominent Leaguer, Liaquat Ali Khan, echoed this inflammatory tone: ‘the Muslims are not afraid of a civil war,’ he told his listeners. Others invoked earthquakes, volcanoes, blood and fire to describe the revolution that was approaching.
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‘The triumvirate of Cabinet Ministers cannot realise with what hopes and misgivings their coming is awaited in this country,’ wrote the Punjabi physicist and chemist Ruchi Ram Sahni, in March 1946. Sahni was eighty-two years old at the time and approaching his last days in Lahore. He had seen India transformed since his birth in 1863 and had played his own part in this transformation by popularising science, setting up educational institutions and a library and, in his youth, giving incredibly popular scientific lectures in Punjabi to ordinary crowds of people gathered in parks, gurdwaras and in open stages, on topics from electricity to soap-making. Now, though, his mind was firmly turned to politics. ‘Attlee's own words inspire the hope that a heavy weight may soon be lifted from India's breast and that we may at last have a chance to stand erect like self-respecting men. For England no less than for other great nations of today it is a time of serious searching of the heart.’ Sahni's appeal was to three men, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and Mr A.V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, collectively known as the Cabinet Mission, or, in Wavell's words, ‘the three magi’. They had come to India to try and forge a compromise, to create a constitutional package for one united India and to plan the British handover of power.

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’.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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 many 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.