Giants
and Myths
Milestones on the Road to Partition- Part 12 (Final)
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
The
Cabinet Mission Plan was the last hope for keeping
India united, giving a chance to the two great
religious communities to work together. With the
failure of this plan, India took a tortuous and
precipitous slide towards partition. The constituent
assembly met but the League boycotted it. Weary
of the mounting tensions in India and alarmed
at the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy, the British
cabinet sent a new viceroy, Mountbatten, to Delhi
to arrange for a transfer of power. Since the
League was boycotting the constituent assembly,
Mountbatten invited Nehru to form a cabinet. Jinnah
was furious. He saw this as proof of the duplicity
of the British and the connivance of the Congress.
He called for “Direct Action Day”
on August 16, 1946.
Until the 16th of August 1946, the leaders of
the Congress and the League were in control of
history. After that date it was history that was
in control of them.
The Direct Action day was conceived as a day of
peaceful protests. But in the communally charged
atmosphere of India any excuse was sufficient
to start a riot. The day passed peacefully in
most parts of India but Calcutta was the scene
of horrific riots with 6,000 dead and more than
20,000 injured. Some chroniclers have put the
number of injured at over 100,000. Hindus, Muslims
and Sikhs burned each other’s homes and
stabbed innocent men, women and children. For
five days, Calcutta burned. The army which was
still under the control of the British did not
intervene until it was too late. So ferocious
were the riots that they destroyed whatever hope
still lingered for a negotiated settlement of
the Hindu-Muslim issue.
Some historians have blamed Suhrawardy who was
the Muslim League chief minister of Bengal for
the riots. However, the British, after a thorough
investigation concluded that this assessment was
incorrect. The viceroy Wavell wrote to the British
Secretary of India Patrick Lawrence in August
1946: "Last weekend has seen dreadful riots
in Calcutta. The estimates of casualties are 3,000
dead and 17,000 injured. The Bengal Congress is
convinced that all the trouble was deliberately
engineered by the Muslim League Ministry, but
no satisfactory evidence to that effect has reached
me yet. It is said that the decision to have a
public holiday on 16th August was the cause of
trouble, but I think this is very far-fetched.
There was a public holiday in Sind and there was
no trouble there. At any rate, whatever the causes
of the outbreak, when it started, the Hindus and
Sikhs were every bit as fierce as Muslims. The
present estimate is that appreciably more Muslims
were killed than the Hindus".
Jinnah realized that staying out of the cabinet
would be a tactical error as it would give the
Congress a free reign over policies at a time
when the British were seriously contemplating
a transfer of power. A coalition interim government
was formed in October 1946. Pandit Nehru served
as the prime minister of the interim government,
Sardar Patel was the home minister, while Liaqat
Ali Khan became the finance minister.
So intense was the animosity between the League
and the Congress that the interim government became
an arena for political one-upmanship rather than
a platform for efficient administration. There
was daily acrimony between the two sides. The
League and Congress ministers held separate meetings.
Instead of a give and take required in a democratic
setup, each side sought to curtail the activities
of the other. Liaquat Ali used his position as
the finance minister to subject the Congress ministries
to intense scrutiny. Bitterness grew among the
cabinet members. Far from cementing a working
relationship between the Congress and the League,
the experience of the coalition interim government
solidified the conviction of even reluctant observers
that partition was inevitable.
Mountbatten was eager to finish the job of power
transfer and return to London. He pushed the idea
of partition, converted Nehru and Patel to his
point of view and sold the project to the British
cabinet. A divided India was more to the liking
of Churchill who was now the opposition leader
in the British parliament. Jinnah was still under
the impression that partition would bring the
provinces of Punjab and Bengal in their entirety
into Pakistan. It came as a shock to him when
the Congress advanced the position in March 1947
that partition of the subcontinent would also
mean a partition of the great provinces of Punjab
and Bengal. Only the Muslim majority districts
would be included in Pakistan. East Punjab and
West Bengal would stay in India. The 572 princely
states were given the option of acceding to either
India or Pakistan keeping in view their geography
and the wishes of their people. Jinnah argued
passionately to keep Punjab and Bengal united
in Pakistan but failed to convince Mountbatten
of his position. Reluctantly, he agreed to “a
moth-eaten Pakistan”.
Widespread riots engulfed the Punjab starting
in March 1947 and continuing through the end of
the year. Ethnic cleansing on a scale rarely witnessed
in human history was practiced on both sides of
the new proposed border. No one knows how many
innocent Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs perished in
the riots. Estimates range from half a million
to two million. Entire villages were decimated.
Towns went up in flames. Thousands of women were
abducted and raped. Children were burned. Fifteen
million refugees crossed the new border.
Hindustan wept even as it rejoiced. And the new
nations of India and Pakistan came into existence
immersed in flames of hatred and soaked in rivers
of blood. They have fought three wars and a fourth
has been narrowly avoided.
Ibn Khaldun, the celebrated father of historical
sciences wrote in his Muqaddmah, “The
science of history is a noble, useful and honorable
discipline because it shows us the character and
events of previous generations. It throws light
on the paths of the Prophets and informs us of
the condition of rulers in the context of politics
and governance so that if one wants to follow
them, one may use history as a guideline”.
There are lessons in the partition of British
India for future generations.
Of late, there is movement towards a détente
between India and Pakistan. I hope that the process
continues, leading to lasting peace in the subcontinent
and prosperity for the teeming millions of South
Asia.
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