Opinion

Mountbatten’s Bloodied Sunset
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA

Once the Second World War ended, it was clear that the sun was about to set on the British Empire. Worn out by years of conflict, London was ready to yield its leadership of the West to Washington.
Churchill’s parliamentary defeat to Atlee cast the die for Britain’s imperial possessions. Even India, the proverbial jewel in the crown, would be sacrificed. It mattered little that the Last Lion felt its native leaders were “men of straw.”
On an American tour, Winston Churchill talked about the “Iron Curtain” that had fallen in Europe. Now it would be the job of the US to lead the West in the new war that loomed on the horizon.
As Britain planned to pull out of India, its Muslim community worried that a Hindu Raj rise in place of the British Raj. They longed for the days when Mughals graced the Peacock throne in Delhi. Their fears were compounded when the Hindu-dominated Congress Party swept the national polls in 1937 and 1946, bringing communal violence in its wake. The two-nation theory was bolstered and Partition seemed inevitable.
But, as argued brilliantly by Stanley Wolpert in a new book, there was nothing inevitable about the carnage that followed the transfer of power. Called “Shameful Fright,” from yet another expression of the silver-tongued Churchill, the narrative begins in February 1942, as Singapore falls to the advancing Japanese forces. It ends with the first Kashmir war in 1948.
So much has been written about the hurried exit of the Raj from India that one would not have expected to find anything new on the topic, even at the hands of a historian and biographer as gifted as Wolpert. But the reader is in for a pleasant surprise. Wolpert draws upon in-depth interviews with several individuals and a careful reading of original source documents to shed new light upon the subject. This is history at its finest.
The book leaves little doubt that the lion’s share of the blame for the carnage that followed Partition lay on the British and in particular on Lord Louis Mountbatten, the great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Known as “Dickie,” Wolpert says he was chosen to be the last viceroy of India largely because of his royal birth.
Wolpert interviewed Mountbatten in 1979, the year when he was blown up by the Irish Republican Army. In the book, the greatness of Mountbatten’s ego is perfectly counter-balanced by the littleness of his intellect. This is not the knight in shining armor that emerges from the pages of populist histories such as “Freedom at Midnight.” Instead, Mountbatten is a man who is out of his political depth, one with limited foresight to anticipate political violence and even less ability to control it.
US General Joseph Stilwell had worked with Mountbatten during the War when the latter, a Rear Admiral, was Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia. Stilwell found him to be a “glamour boy,” not a military man. Early in the war, Mountbatten had sailed his destroyer into a minefield before ramming it into another British ship. After exposing his ship to German torpedo fire, Mountbatten finally saw it being sunk by German dive-bombers off the coast of Crete.
The big mystery, of course, is why Mountbatten moved up the date for Indian independence from June 30, 1948. In June 1947, he announced that independence would take place on August 15. He then entrusted the task of partitioning India, a nation of 400 million, of whom a quarter were Muslims, to Barrister Cyril Radcliffe, a man who had never visited India. Radcliffe, given only 40 days to complete the assignment, blundered badly.
By failing to grasp the deep economic ties that existed between rural and industrial areas in Bengal, he deprived the Muslim majority in the eastern region of its major port city, Calcutta, condemning East Pakistan — and, later, Bangladesh — to decades of rural backwardness.
He did even worse in Punjab, where Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs had lived together for centuries. Millions found themselves on the wrong side of the Radcliffe line. Ten million attempted to move to the Promised Land. A million did not make it and countless lives were scarred.
A terrified Radcliffe never returned to India. Just before his death, in 1977, he told a journalist, “I suspect they’d shoot me out of hand — both sides.”
Jinnah, of course, had opposed the partition of Punjab and Bengal, knowing that it would spell disaster. As Wolpert points out, he was prepared to accept an independent Bengal but Nehru had ruled that out, saying that would make Hindus a permanent minority.
A year after Partition, Mountbatten was being regaled at a grand Tory party thrown for him by Anthony Eden when he spotted Churchill. Walking toward him with open arms and a warm smile, Mountbatten was stunned when Churchill shouted, “Dickie, stand there! What you did in India was like whipping your riding crop against my face.” He then strode out of the room and would not speak with Mountbatten for seven years.
Of course, the carnage did not end with the Partition. Over the ensuing decades, the pre-Partition communal conflict morphed into an international conflict. A key aide to Nehru asked him to hand over the bone of contention, Kashmir, to Pakistan. Panditji brushed it off, saying it would lead to more violence.
Kashmir was destined to remain the biggest unfinished business of partition, as Zhou Enlai famously averred. Three major wars and several minor wars would be fought there, killing at least 50,000 Kashmiris and condemning millions throughout the subcontinent to a Hobbesian life, “nasty, brutish and short.”
In 1965, after the second war over Kashmir had ended, Mountbatten conceded to a reporter from the BBC that he had got things so badly wrong with the Partition that the only way to describe his feelings was to use the vernacular and confess that he had “fucked it up.”
Postscript. In his book, “The Garrison State,” Tan Tai Yong argues that the Pakistani army was the true heir to the British Indian army, which had been built around the theory of martial races. As one reflects on the last 60 years of Pakistani history, with its multiple interludes of martial law, something that the British had practiced frequently and that had drawn the ire of both Nehru and Jinnah, an inconvenient truth surfaces. In their desire to avoid a Hindu Raj, the Muslim subscribers to the two-nation theory did not know that they were about to inflict a Khaki Raj on their new nation.

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