July
14, 2006
Mountbatten
Messed up Partition of India
In his latest work entitled
“Shameful Flight” Prof. Stanley Wolpert,
the academician acknowledged as an outstanding authority
on South Asia, focuses attention on the developments
during the last years of the British Empire in India.
The tremendous loss of life and property and the
terrible mess that came in the wake of partition
could be foreseen and mitigated, if not avoided
altogether, had the situation been handled adroitly
and in consultation with all prominent leaders of
the time by Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of
India. That impression of a student of history is
reinforced by the account of Prof. Wolpert.
He certainly does not place the entire responsibility
on Mountbatten for “the tragedy of Partition
and its more than half century legacy of hatred,
fear, and continued conflict … might well
have been avoided, or at least mitigated, but for
the arrogance and ignorance of a handful of British
and Indian leaders.”
But then he quotes a highly remorseful Mountbatten
as telling a BBC rep about his assignment in India:
“I fucked it up”.
On appointment as the Viceroy of India in March
1947, he was given till June 1948 to accomplish
the transfer of power to the successor state/states.
Had he resumed negotiations and tried earnestly
to ensure smooth and peaceful transfer of power
and worked for unambiguous decisions on the future
of princely states, judicious demarcation of boundaries,
division of the armed forces and other assets, he
could have avoided the onslaught of the holocaust.
He had no contingency plans; even the recommendations
of the Radcliffe commission with regard to the partitioning
of Bengal and Punjab were kept by him under lock
and key till after the declaration of Independence.
The inevitable havoc claimed the lives of over a
million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. He thought, wrongly,
“that speed is the essence of the contract.
Without speed, we will miss the opportunity.”
His obscene haste accomplished little and left behind
a legacy of problems that haunt the subcontinent
even today.
The British cabinet that had all along been closely
monitoring the developments in India was pressured
by him to let him have the discretion to settle
himself issues that were not of major consequence.
“The cabinet agreed”, records Wolpert
as it was “caught up in the magic web of speed
and rush their Viceroy wove.”
To illustrate the folly of this decision, we may
consider the mess he made of the Bengal Province
as much as that of Punjab. The then Chief Minister
of Bengal, H.S. Suhrawardy and many other Bengali
leaders, including Kiran Shanker Roy, leader of
Bengal Congress party, and Sarat Bose, the respected
elder brother of Subash Chandra Bose, wanted the
Province to constitute a separate dominion at par
with India and Pakistan. When the idea was put to
Mr. Jinnah, “he readily agreed to Bengal remaining
united and becoming independent”.
As for Gandhi, Wolpert has pointed that he “had
been willing to help Bengal win its peaceful independence,
and most of the Hindus in east would have much preferred
that to partition, but Nehru’s insistence
that West Bengal’s Hindu majority districts
and Calcutta must remain in Indian Union sealed
Bengal’s fate. Mountbatten agreed with Nehru’s
judgment”. He was under the spell of Nehru’s
charm and more often than was often seen as being
led by him.
A quarter century later, an independent Bangladesh
did emerge but only after a catastrophic war and
so much death and destruction.
Communal riots took the heaviest toll in Punjab.
Almost a million lost their lives and ten times
as many were displaced. The havoc shook Nehru from
his very roots. He admitted his deep shame over
the events, and remarked, “We must cooperate
in the process of exchange of population wherever
that is possible.” As pointed out by Wolpert,
he had previously refused to agree to the massive
population transfers proposed by Punjab Sikhs, “but
he now realized that it was perhaps the only way
to save countless lives.”
Mountbatten was in the mode of ‘cut and run’.
He wanted to go back to his naval career and was
expecting that Prime Minister Attlee would recommend
him for an earldom. No matter what the setback,
he would always present a rosy picture to the king
and the PM. He would indulge, if need be, in doublespeak
to achieve this.
Narcissistic by temperament, he always dressed in
his resplendent white uniform with all the awards
and decorations glittering on his chest. He had
no dearth of sycophants around him to buttress his
ego, and he was not modest about his royal descent.
He did, however, carry a certain charm -a factor
in favor of his selection as Viceroy. What he needed
most was an investment of his time and effort in
the task he was expected to accomplish under his
watch in India.
Wolpert has aptly summed it up: “No viceregal
time had been wasted in planning for the feeding
and housing and medical needs of ten million refugees.
No British officers or troops remained to keep the
peace in shattered Punjab, or in Bengal, nor in
the state of Jammu and Kashmir, left in deadly limbo
to become the source of increasingly violent conflicts
between India and Pakistan, the cause of three wars
to be waged between them over the next fifty-five
years.
Mountbatten arrived in New Delhi on March 22, 1947,
he had some 14 months to arrange the transfer of
power. Sir Winston Churchill had regarded this period
as too short for sorting out a complex matter. He
called the time limit ‘a kind of guillotine’
and wondered whether the British government was
engaging in an ‘Operation Scuttle’.
In the same address to the House of Commons, he
called the plan a “Shameful Flight”.
Prof. Wolpert has selected that _expression to be
the title of his book under review.
On arrival in New Delhi, Mountbatten developed a
deep affection and respect for Pandit Nehru –an
outstanding Indian aristocrat. Under Nehru’s
constant goading, he developed distaste for Jinnah.
The bitterness became more pronounced after the
latter refused to accept Mountbatten as the Governor
General of Pakistan also.
He called Jinnah ‘mediocre’, ‘negative’
and a ‘psychopath’, while Nehru was
‘charming and wise’. Gandhi was a half-naked,
‘treacherous’ old fakir and a ‘fool’
hence unreliable.
Had he seriously considered the views of Gandhi,
Jinnah and Suhrawardy and Sikh leaders, instead
of relying mainly on the advice of Nehru, many tragedies
could have been avoided.
Stanley Wolpert, is a prolific writer who has to
his credit a number of well-researched books on
the history of India and the leaders who played
significant roles in its making. In the book under
review, he has covered only the last years of the
British Empire in India. Considering his steadfast
objectivity, and his meticulous documentation of
all statements made, this is undoubtedly the best
book on the subject and unlikely to be excelled.
-arifhussaini@homail.com July 7, 2006
