PARTITION 1947 PART 1

PARTITION 1947

I t took the British more than three hundred years to build up their Indian Empire. They dismantled it in just over seventy days in 1947. Such a rapid collapse of imperial structures would hardly surprise anyone today in the light of what has been happening in Eastern Europe. In 1947, however, the European empires still seemed solid enough edifices (despite the lesson of the Japanese conquests half a decade earlier). The true weakness of the British position was not widely appreciated. In fact, after the terrible winter of 1946-47 Britain was on the verge of financial catastrophe. In February 1947 the Attlee Cabinet had to adopt a policy of a drastic reduction of overseas responsibilities. It resolved to abandon its role both in combating the Communists in Greece and in supporting the economy of Turkey. It decided to give up the thankless task of mediating between Arab and Jew in the Palestine Mandate which it now declared would be handed back to the United Nations (successor to the League of Nations which had granted it just after World War I) by June 1948. Finally, it announced that by the same date it would transfer power in the Indian subcontinent to a successor regime or regimes. This was the background to the Mountbatten Viceroyalty (22 March to 15 August 1947) which not only brought the British Indian Empire to an end but also saw the first stage of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. The logic behind the Cabinet decisions of February 1947 was clear enough. Britain could no longer afford costly imperial entanglements of the kind already present in the Eastern Mediterranean and which threatened to develop in India. She should cut her losses. If so, then the more rapidly this were done the better. In a crisis one could not take into account every long term consequence. It followed that if it were good to get out of India by June 1948, it might well be preferable, at least from the British point of view, to get out rather earlier. When on 4 June 1947 Mountbatten announced that the British departure date would now be 15 August 1947, a day possibly symbolic as the second anniversary of the end of the War with Japan. he was certainly acting in the spirit of the British Cabinet decisions of  February 1947, even though he may on his own initiative have accelerated somewhat the timetable.' It was also quite in keeping with this spirit that, it has been said, the basic final plan for the dividing up of the British Indian Empire was drawn up in four hours (by V.P. Menon) and accepted by the British Cabinet after a discussion lasting all of five minutes. Having failed to persuade the two challengers to their position in India, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, to accept any formula for continued unity, the British Government accepted that a particularly drastic partition of their Imperial legacy, into Muslim and non Muslim-majority sectors, offered the best way forward; and this would now be implemented by means of a crash programme. Partition was widely seen to be preferable to the alternative of "Plan Balkan" and its variants, the break up of the British Indian Empire into its myriad component parts.' The haste with which Partition was executed guaranteed that there would be serious problems to plague the successor states to the British Raj. Such traumatic surgery was unlikely to heal without complications. One side effect was the exacerbation of communal tensions in the subcontinent resulting in massacre and migration on a colossal scale: another was the set of circumstances which resulted in the outbreak of the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir. Some observers have blamed Mountbatten for causing these unhappy consequences of Partition. Denying the inevitability of M.A. Jinnah's Two Nation India, they have argued that had Partition been delayed, its very necessity might have been avoided. They point out that in 1947 Jinnah was already terminally ill. Had Partition been postponed to a point when Jinnah was actually on his deathbed (as would have been the case if the original date of June 1948 had been adhered to), would there have been the will to create a Pakistan at all? Perhaps, without an active Jinnah the Muslim League might yet, when faced with the practical difficulties of Partition, have opted for some kind of federal structure which preserved the basic unity of the old British Indian Empire. Such speculation is not particularly fruitful; but it has appealed to many Indians who have never been able to come to terms with the underlying logic of Partition. Given, many Indian commentators have said, that India is a secular state in which as about as many Muslims live as in Pakistan, what need has there ever been for an Islamic State at all? Perhaps Pakistan, it could have been argued, was no more than a temporary expedient devised by the British to solve a transient problem. This, it seems certain, was Jawaharlal Nehru's view in 1947. AI Nehru put it, in a letter to K.P.S. Menon (Indian Ambassador in China) on 29 April 1947: he was in no doubt that eventually India rvould have to become a single country, and it could well be that tJ;irtirion war but a stepping stone on the path towards that goal." Strt ti reasoning woirlcl certainly go far to explain why ~awaharlal  Nehru, and some of his Congress colleagues (notably Sardar Valabhbhai Patel and the Congress President, Acharya Kripalani), collaborated so wholeheartedly in the hasty Partition plan proposed by Mountbatten and worked out in detail by V.P. Menon (who was probably as much Congress's man as the Viceroy's). The reality, of course, was that, whatever the merits of secularism might or might not be, by 1947 there existed no practicable alternative to some kind of division of the British Raj between Muslims and non-Muslims, though this might have been achieved in practice in a number of ways. In the event, by May 1947 the type of Partition proposed by Mountbatten seemed to offer the only escape from a political impasse. The last Viceroy may well be blamed for the manner, and the speed, of its execution; but he was not responsible for the necessity for Partition as such. This was a product of the historical evolution of the subcontinent with a dynamic which no man could withstand. The mechanics of Partition as applied to the Punjab, more than any other single factor, created the immediate background to the Kashmir dispute. The theory was that all Muslim-majority districts contiguous to the Muslim core of the Punjab would go to Pakistan. In the event, with the awarding of three out of the four tehsils (subdistricts) of Gurdaspur District to East Punjab (that is to say the part of the Punjab which was to be Indian), the accession to India of the State of Jammu and Kashmir became a practical, as opposed to theoretical, possibility. Because two of these tehsils, Batala and Gurdaspur, were areas with significant Muslim majorities (only Pathankot tehsil then had a small Hindu majority), this award seemed to go against the basic spirit of Partition; and the Gurdaspur decision has consequently been the subject of a great deal of discussion ever since. Mountbatten has been accused, particularly in Pakistan, of having participated in this manipulation of Partition with the deliberate intent to favour the interests of India over those of Pakistan. The practicalities of Partition, arising out of the so-called Mountbatten Plan of 3 June 1947, with the new deadline of 15 August 1947 announced the following day to replace what most observers had hitherto anticipated would be the moment of the final act of the Transfer of Power, June 1948, involved two Boundary Con~missions. both to be under the Chairmanship of a distingi~ished British jul-ist. Sir Cyril Radcliffe (Vice-Chairman of the English Bar Col~ncil). One Commission would deal with the Partition of Bengal and the other ~vould concern itself with the Punjab. In both Commissions SilC;yril Radcliffe would be assisted bv four Commissioners from the Dominions-to-be, India and Pakistan, two A/luslin~s and two nonMuslims, all senior Judges. The decisions of the two Con~nlissions would be final; and the leadership of both the h,Il~sliln Lengl~e ;ind the Congress agreed to abide by them. In the case of the Punjab the Muslim Commissioners were Din Mohammed and Mohammed Munir; and the non-Muslim Commissioners were Mehr Chand Mahajan (Hindu) and Teja Singh (Sikh). In the event, since the Commissioners consistently voted on communal lines with Mahajan and Teja Singh acting in concert, Sir Cyril Radcliffe had to make his awards by the liberal application of his casting vote. Sir Cyril Radcliffe's major qualification for this task, it appeared, was his almost total ignorance of Indian affairs: he had never before set foot in the subcontinent. Radcliffe arrived in New Delhi on 8 July 1947 and the final award was ready and in the hands of the Viceroy's staff on 12 August 1947 following a preliminary version on 8 August. The terms of reference of the Commission for the Punjab were these: the Boundary Commission is instructed to demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims. In doing so, it will also take into account other factors. What "other factors" were involved was never spelled out: nor, given Radcliffe's inexperience in Indian affairs, was it made clear who would draw the Commission's attention to them. There was an understanding latent in the whole process, however, that they would be 'tjudicial" rather than "political", that is to say that they would relate to practical geographical, economic and structural matters rather than to the aspirations of the leaders-to-be of the two successor states to the British Raj. The question of the Princely States and their future was certainly not part of the Commission's brief: in the Punjab it was concerned solely with the devising of a line which ran from the border with the State of Jammu and Kashmir to that with the State of Bahawalpur (which was destined to join ~akistan).~ The Commission's deliberations were to be secret and its work was to be isolated entirely from the all political pressures which those concerned with other aspects of the Transfer of Power might wish to exert. This was the theory. In practice, of course, everything that the Commission did was "political" in that it affected the future of both India and Pakistan and of millions who would be citizens of one or other Dominion. Anything that was to contribute to the death of some 500.000 people and the uprooting of millions more, as was the most immediate consequence of the Partition of the Punjab, was surely rather "political" than "judicial". Secrecy was impossible to maintain as the Muslim and non-Muslim Commissioners showed no reluctance in communicating what they knew to leaders of the Pakistani and Indian sides. The isolation of the Commission from political pressures was an ideal; but many observers at the time  doubted its reality. It was hard to believe that such serious matters of policy would be left entirely to the casting vote of one man who had no previous experience of Indian affairs. Moreover, Sir Cyril Radcliffe was accommodated while in India in Viceroy's House (if not in the main building, then in a guest house in the compound) where willy nilly he was in contact with Mountbatten and his staff. It seemed unlikely that they never discussed Boundary Commission matters with the Chairman. We will never know the detailed story of the Boundary Commission since its records have not survived. When Sir Cyril Radcliffe left India on 15 August 1947, the day of the Transfer of Power but before the Commission's awards had been published (though they were known to the leadership both in India and Pakistan), he took no papers with him; and his subsequent comments threw scant light on what had gone on. The Boundary Commission proceedings in the Punjab, in that they relate to the Kashmir dispute, raise two major questions. First: did Mountbatten have a policy of his own as to the future of the State of Jammu and Kashmir which involved the fate of that crucial access to it from India by way of the Gurdaspur District; and, indeed, did he actually appreciate the importance in this context of that District? Second: if so, did that policy and that appreciation in any significant way influence the final decision of the Boundary Commission which awarded the three key tehsils of the Gurdaspur District to India despite the fact that two of them had Muslim majorities? These are not easy questions to answer, even now. Many Pakistani writers have maintained that the Radcliffe Commission was somehow manipulated by Mountbatten to ensure that the State of Jammu and Kashmir retained that essential access to India provided by the three eastern tehsils of the Gurdaspur District and so avoid the necessity of joining Pakistan. Others, including one of Nehru's biographers, Michael Brecher, and more recently the official biographer of Mountbatten, Philip Ziegler, have declared that the evidence cannot support any such chargen5 ~ountbatten, they affirm, had absolutely nothing to do with Radcliffe's award. These latter versions of Mountbatten's part in the Gurdaspur affair, however, can no longer be accepted uncritically. The official publication in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1983 of the four final volumes of a selection of the British documents relating to the Transfer of Power in India has made easily available a great deal of information which throws light, directly or indirectly, on the history of Partition. It is now possible to offer some analysis of British attitudes towards both the future of the State of Jammu and Kashmir and the part to be played by the Radcliffe Commission on the basis of something better than indignation, spec~~lation ad partisan argument: and this is what will be attempted here.