Vijay Simha, former Journalist Based in New Delhi
It was not the Britishers per se but Lord Mountbatten who ensured that the partition of India went in India’s favor.
To begin with Lord Mountbatten was not a Britisher in the real sense, but had German heritage. Both his parents had German lineage.
The Mountbatten family is a European dynasty originating as a branch of the German princely Battenberg family, which anglicized their names to Mountbatten.
The name was adopted on the eve of World War I by family members residing in the United Kingdom due to the widespread and boiling anti-German sentiment among the British public which forced his father, Prince Louis of Battenberg -to resign in disgrace as the First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy.
This incident was shocking to him, and this slight, he wanted to avenge by rising in his career by his own merit.
Increasing anti-German hysteria even threw suspicion upon the British monarchy and King George V was persuaded to change his German name of Saxe-Coburg und Gotha to Windsor and relinquish all German titles and styles on behalf of his relatives who were British subjects.
Mountbatten had a love affair in India with his future wife Edwina during his visit in March 1921, when he accompanied the Prince of Wales on a Royal tour of India and Japan.
Edwina and him had very fond memories of both the countries during their brief stay in 1921.
He liked both countries immensely, but ended up fighting against Japan in World War II as Supreme Allied Commander in South Asia and presided over the surrender ceremony of the Imperial Japanese Army in Singapore where he and his wife developed a close friendship with future Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru who had arrived just in time to witness the surrender.
Here is a photograph of Mountbatten as Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, riding with Jawaharlal Nehru in Singapore before attending the surrender ceremony of the Imperial Japanese Army.
When he came to India in 1947 as the Viceroy who was supposed to bring down the curtains of the British Raj, he was specifically instructed by Churchill, who hated the Indian Congress leaders to the core and had developed a friendly rapport with All India Muslim League leader M. A Jinnah, who collaborated completely with the British administration during the war years while the entire Congress leadership was in jail, owing to the British clamp down on the Quit-India movement, by providing a steady stream of Muslim soldiers from the Punjab, Northwest Frontier provinces and the United Provinces to augment the flagging British Army in North Africa during the Desert War against the Deutsches Afrika Korps (D A K) under General Erwin Rommel and his Italian allies.
The British armies received a major drubbing on June 21st 1942 with the fall of their fortress of Tobruk in North Africa after the battle of Gazala when more than 30,000 of them surrendered to the German (D A K) and Italian auxilliary armies and Churchill desperately needed foot soldiers (Cannon Fodder) to clear the extensive German minefields and shore up their defenses of Alexandria, Cairo and the Suez Canal.
Jinnah immediately came to Churchill’s rescue by organizing recruitment drives in the United Provinces, the Punjab and the North West Frontier Provinces to recruit Muslim soldiers for this purpose.
Churchill’s lively correspondence with Jinnah had started during the war years 1941–45, soon after he had heard about the Lahore declaration of March 23–24 1940 made by the Muslim league calling for a separate country for India’s Muslims in the subcontinent and he promised Jinnah - his pound of flesh and pail of blood - Pakistan - in 1944 itself and it was to be a substantial part of North India - All of the Punjab, all of Bengal, all of Sindh and all of Assam in addition to all those areas in Northern India with Muslim majorities.
This was Churchill’s way of thanking Jinnah for his unstinted help in supplying a lot of foot soldiers for the Allied North African campaign during the years 1942 and 43.
This confidential correspondence between the two leaders, which reveals in full measure, Churchill’s dastardly bias against the Hindus can be still gleaned from the archives in London, continued till 1947 and beyond.
In a letter dated June 20th 1946, Churchill chides M. A. Jinnah for his political inactivity and advises him to “Stir the pot quite a bit” .. “if you want your Pakistan to become a reality”.
In another letter to Jinnah dated August 3, 1946, Churchill wrote: “I am very much opposed to the handing over of India to Hindu caste rule, as seems very largely to be intended…”
Historians have long been aware of a nexus of sorts between Jinnah and Churchill, but these letters, for the first time, bring the relationship into public domain.
The letters also reveal that Jinnah used the Direct Action Day on August 27 as a strategic move to upstage both the Congress and the British.
In a missive dated July 7, 1946 to Churchill, Jinnah hinted that blood would soon flow on the streets of Indian cities — and it did. Nearly 6,000 people were killed in the bloodiest-ever communal riots in Calcutta, instigated by Muslim League vigilantes over Jawaharlal Nehru’s rejection of the Cripps Commission report which had given the option for Muslim majority provinces to secede from the Indian Union.
This was soon followed by the Noakhali massacres against the Hindus of Eastern Bengal.
Retaliatory rioting happened in Bihar where the Muslims came worse off and rioting occurred in Western Punjab and the North West Frontier provinces where Hindus and Sikhs suffered massacres.
India was literally in flames and needed a political solution urgently.
On 20 February 1947, Lord Mountbatten was appointed India’s last viceroy.
Soon after he landed in India, in March 1947, he did something unprecedented..
He threw open the Viceregal mansion- today known as Rashtrapati Bhavan - to the Indian public, something no viceroy before him had done and for the first time the common man in India could attend the tea party and sip tea a few meters away from the Viceroy while he chatted amicably with the leaders of the Indian Congress party and All India Muslim League, while also going on a guided tour of the mansion and admire the extensive rose garden in the backyard.
Mountbatten was fond of Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru and his liberal outlook for the country. He felt differently about the Muslim leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah, but was aware of his power, stating "If it could be said that any single man held the future of India in the palm of his hand in 1947, that man was Mohammad Ali Jinnah."
During his meeting with Jinnah on 5 April 1947,
Mountbatten tried to persuade Jinnah of keeping India united, citing the difficult task of dividing the mixed states of Punjab and Bengal, but the Muslim leader was unyielding in his goal of establishing a separate Muslim state called Pakistan
Discussions began with both the Congress leaders who did not favor the partition of India and with whom he got along well and the Muslim League leader Jinnah who insisted on it and came across as a cold and distant schemer.
He was rather irritated by Jinnah’s logic when Jinnah demanded that the whole of the Punjab and Bengal which had large Hindu majority regions and all of Assam, be made part of Pakistan.
Lord Mountbatten had an independent mind and knew right from wrong because of his German heritage. He was not going to follow anybody’s advice.. even if that advice and directive came from Winston Churchill himself.
He knew from personal experience, how horrible a person wronged by prejudice, felt, by looking back with remorse at the career of his own German father which had been cut short abruptly on the eve on World War I.
He did not share the withering, contemptuous and nauseating hatred the English upper classes had developed during the closing years of the RAJ towards the India’s Hindu people who they felt were the majority in India’s anti colonial struggle having allowed themselves to be lead by that “Half Naked Charlatan” - Gandhi to wrest the “Jewel in the Crown” from them.
He first reasoned with Jinnah against partition and pointed out to him the humongous human and material cost of such an undertaking and the bloodshed and misery it would cause and also the lasting ill effects it would bring to the entire subcontinent for decades to come.
When Jinnah with Churchill’s backing, was adamant and insisted on partitioning the country, he pointed out to Jinnah the flaws in his own theory.
His conversation with Jinnah in May 1947 went like this.
“Mr Jinnah you insist that India should be partitioned and Muslims cannot live with Hindus as minorities in this land.
How then do you suppose, that it is alright for the large Hindu populations of Eastern Punjab and Western Bengal to be under the rule of Muslim-majority Pakistan.
Sorry.. you cannot have it both ways…. If you insist on partitioning India, based on religious demography, then the Hindu majority regions of Eastern Punjab and Western Bengal including the city of Calcutta will have to be part of India and cannot be part of Pakistan.
Punjab and Bengal will have to be partitioned also, based on demographic realities…
Also, all of Assam cannot be part of Pakistan because there is clearly no Muslim majority in that region.”
Jinnah was taken aback by this and began to complain loudly about getting a “moth-eaten” Pakistan, but Mountbatten told him to sit down quietly and accept what was going to be been granted by the boundary commision which drew the borders between the two states.
Here is a picture of the final meeting where everybody was on board.
Mountbatten had verbally belabored Jinnah the previous day behind closed doors and ordered him to express his assent to the arrangement with a mere nod of his head.
Mountbatten had verbally belabored Jinnah the previous day behind closed doors and ordered him to express his assent to the arrangement with a mere nod of his head.
He threatened Jinnah, telling him in a very candid and stern manner that if he made any more unreasonable demands, then the whole “Pakistan affair” would be “Off” and consigned to the dustbin of history.
In some ways Mountbatten may have been under a lot of pressure from Churchill and others in the British government who desperately wanted to create a “client state” in India’s Northwest to check Soviet expansionism towards the Arabian sea.
Since the city of Lahore in the Punjab was given to Pakistan by the boundary commision, Mountbatten compensated India by awarding the city of Amritsar and the district of Gurdaspur to India at the last minute to assuage the feelings of the aggrieved Sikhs, who hated to see all of Western Punjab which had been their homeland and holy land for close to five centuries, being awarded to Pakistan.
Jinnah avenged these decisions which were very unpalatable to him, by not allowing Mountbatten to be Governor General of Pakistan in 1947 and appointed himself Governor General of that newly formed dominion instead.
Mountbatten remembered this slight and paid him in kind when it came to the Kashmir issue.
Churchill wanted the princely states to declare their independence from India.
He was always fond of uttering loudly the following sentence :
Pakistan, Princestan and what ever remains of that mess will be called Hindustan and that … will be the final fate of our Indian empire.
Lord Mountbatten overruled Churchill, torpedoed this atrocious plan which would have Balkanized India and told the princes that their fate was left entirely to their final decisions and they had to decide whether to join India or Pakistan.
Remaining independent was not an option for them.
Soon Hindu and Sikh majority princely states in the subcontinent joined India after being coerced by Sardar Patel and VP Menon and Muslim majority princely states like Bahawalpur and Khairpur, joined Pakistan.
When Jinnah pushed his luck and tried to annex the princely state of Kashmir by force, then Mountbatten who was Governor General of India clearly sided with Nehru after advising Nehru to FIRST secure in a legal manner, the instrument of accession to the Indian Union, from the vacillating Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir and then allowed the Indian army and airforce to airlift troops to the vale of Kashmir and defeat and drive out the armed Lashkars Jinnah had sent to take over the valley.
Frank Messervy, a general of the former British Indian Army who was Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army from 1947 to 1948, reported directly to Lord Mountbatten who had ordered him to stand down and do nothing when the Kashmir crisis unfolded.
Messervy overruled and openly disobeyed an exasperated Jinnah who repeatedly ordered him to send the newly formed Pakistan army to intervene with full force in Kashmir.
Messervy’s aide-de-camp later recollected that he would bang the phone down as soon as he heard Jinnah’s voice at the other end of the line pleading with him to do something.
The Pakistan Army stayed put in its barracks and consequently Jinnah had to rely on irregular Pathan Lashkars who were not a professional fighting force at all and were no match for the seasoned and professional Indian Army
Nehru very naively did not push matters too far, although he was advised by his astute Home Minister - Sardar Patel to wait till the Indian army had overrun all of Kashmir and not approach the United Nations Security Council, knowing fully well that a cease fire would be immediately ordered by the UN Body.
This blunder of Himalayan proportions, allowed Kashmir’s Northern areas: Gilgit Baltistan and a small portion of Kashmir which is today known as Pakistan Occupied Kashmir to remain under Pakistan’s control.
Kashmir did not see much rioting between Hindus and Muslims in 1947 or 1948 and the populace led by Sheikh Abdullah , a personal friend of Nehru, were at peace after their state was given a special status in the Indian Union.
Before Mountbatten returned home, in 1948, he made a startling and accurate prediction one day before his departure to England.
He said that this abnormal dominion of Pakistan will not last more than a quarter century before it breaks apart into two separate nations.
His prescient observation came true, a mere twenty four years later on Dec 16th 1971, when Jinnah’s Pakistan was sundered forever, following a humiliating surrender, when the East Pakistan Army surrendered to a joint command of the Indian Army and the Bangladesh Resistance Army at the Ramna Race Course garden, heralding the birth a new Nation - Bangladesh in the subcontinent.
East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
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After the final settlement in 1948, Winston Churchill, in London, looked testily at the new borders of India and Pakistan, fuming and fretting over what had transpired there under Mountbatten’s watch.
He flew into paroxysms of screaming rage whenever anyone mentioned India or Mountbatten to him.
The last meeting between Churchill and Mountbatten is retold here to help readers understand the situation caused by the British partition of India.
After Mountbatten had returned home, accomplishing his task of 'quitting and splitting' India in less than half the time allotted, August 1947 instead of June 1948.
He was given a hero's welcome.
Anthony Eden, hosted a Tory party dinner and invited Churchill also.
When Mountbatten spotted Churchill, he made a beeline for him and advanced with his arms open and a smile lighting up his face.
Churchill halted him with an upheld arresting hand with a pointing, accusing finger. He used Lord Louis's pet name to scream at the top of his voice ,
'Dickie, stand right there!' which caused the taller gentleman to halt in his tracks immediately with a look of complete surprise on his face and the audience all around to be shocked into silence as well.
“What you did in India was like whipping your riding crop against my face!'
The way you partitioned India was contrary to what I had imagined the final frontiers of the two countries to be.
You gave to those lowly, mangy and accursed Hindus a lot more land than to our friends - the Mussalmans of India - who stood by us during the war and you betrayed in the most foul manner, the Maharajahs of our Indian Empire by depriving them of their birthright to secede from India to form their own Independent Dominions “
The room had already fallen silent and everyone could hear each word clearly.
Churchill next turned on his heel and walked out of the room.
He never spoke to Mountbatten for the next seven years.
Source: wikipedia articles.
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