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Partition through the looking glass
Uday Balakrishnan
The Congress could have bargained for a better deal, had it taken into account Britain’s interest in the North-West
The India Office Records section of the British Library, London, is perhaps the most interesting place to be for anyone wishing to know how the British ruled India --- why they held on to it for so long and why they threw in the towel when they did, and walked away from a colony that was the centrepiece of their empire.
Sometime ago, at the end of a long day there, looking over now-declassified secret despatches, I was packing up to go when something interesting caught my eye.
This was in a no-longer top secret file that I was about to return. It was a despatch dated August 28, 1944, from the Viceroy Lord Wavell to the Secretary of State for India Lord Amery which included a ‘humorous’ report of a disaster that overtook a British battalion in an area where the Pakistan Army recently launched a military campaign against the Taliban.
“You may be amused to know”, Lord Wavell wrote, “the cause of a minor disaster in Waziristan a year or so ago. A battalion went out training in a normally peaceful area and were carrying out an exercise in withdrawal. They did it so indifferently that tribesmen, who were watching the performance with a professional eye but no particular hostile intent, could bear no longer to see such an opportunity to go abegging and waded in and inflicted some forty causalities and got away with that number of rifles”.
The NW of British India of which Waziristan was part, had always been a place of special interest for the British ever since they consolidated their rule in the Indian sub-continent not the least because of a perceived Russian threat.
There was great apprehension amongst the British that in an unguarded moment the Russians would sweep into British India all the way to the Arabian Sea. They were constantly at war in this area, starting with the first Afghan War in 1838 — only one Britisher returned from that — followed by two more, the last occurring in 1919.
Strategic areaThe north-western parts of the British India now in Pakistan has for long been an area of considerable Western strategic concern — even more so today with China replacing the Russians as the rivals to be checkmated.
In fact, some scholars have argued that one of the less known reasons for the Partition of India was Britain’s determination to retain a hold on a strategic area that abutted Russia and China.
This is a deliberately under-explored area of our contemporary history on both sides of the border. A former aide de camp to Mountbatten and later an officer of the Indian Foreign Service, the late Narendra Singh Sairala who has convincingly argued this point but has never been taken seriously by mainstream historians.
In his book The shadow of the great game — The untold story of India’s partition, Sairala makes a plausible case that Partition was engineered by the British to retain a toe hold just as Churchill wished ‘to keep a piece of India’. Given the developments after that one could well agree.
By 1958, the CIA had control of the Peshawar Air force Base. It was from there the U2 spy planes routinely flew over the USSR photographing military installations with impunity.
The fact that virtually after independence Pakistan has been a western ally — albeit a troublesome one — is not to be lost sight of. Without the Pakistan connection the Americans could never have sustained their long war in Afghanistan.
Was this then ‘the bit’ that — with tremendous foresight — Churchill got England to separate from a larger India? We may know for sure only after the Mountbatten papers go public. But we do need to ask whether the Congress Party blew an opportunity to get all of British India rather than just most it.
Did the breakup of the Raj diminish India? We are today a giant of an entity arguably with much less geo political importance than the Philippines or Indonesia, and definitely much less than what British India abutting West and Central Asia had.
Geopolitics at playAt nearly five million square kilometres the British Raj was strategically very relevant indeed. At one end it was close to West Asia sharing a long border with Iran and even longer one with Afghanistan. It was a stone’s throw from Central Asia and near the Persian Gulf; at the other through what is now Bangladesh, it connected to South East Asia.
The geopolitical importance of such an entity cannot be ignored or denied and should have been obvious to Nehru at least, more so for the Hindu Muslim accommodation and coexistence built over a thousand years that was broken in a welter of hate and gore by Partition. It is surprising how an otherwise sharp Nehru with a great sense of history lost sight of all this while so cavalierly agreeing to a breakup of the Raj.
In the lead-up to independence the Congress Party especially its principal leaders Nehru, Sardar Patel and Gandhi were astonishingly unstrategic. They blew every advantage that came their way, none more important than the limited but still critical control of much of India the Congress got after the 1937 elections.
The mishandling of the Cripps Mission was another among several others -- the Quit India movement and the resignation of all the provincial Congress Ministries topping the list.
Losing opportunitiesThrough its actions, the Congress was disconnected from its mass base almost till independence, allowing Jinnah to fill the gap. As the collapse of the second roundtable conference brought out, the Congress made very poor use of excellent opportunities.
Cripps was sent packing without any attempt at leveraging the negotiation opportunities he opened. Contrary to what Gandhi thought, the British never doubted their final success in the War. A secret letter of December 30, 1943, from Wavell to Amery, says: ‘..one point that I confess struck me was his ( Gandhi’s) insistence that every Indian still thinks that the Cripps offer was induced by fear and by the hope that we might rally Indian opinion for some sort of desperate resistance when invasion came…. It never crossed our minds here that there was any connection between the constitutional problem and the military one. We always assumed final victory’.
The way we interpret our recent past will determine how our future will be lived by generations to come. We can make a beginning by seeking answers to those uncomfortable questions that decades of Congress administration had stalled us from asking.
In doing so, we perhaps will be able to come to terms with the fact that at some points in the run-up to our freedom, rather inadequately thought out decisions were taken by our leaders which we now need to correct rather than defend — the loss of geopolitical importance that a united India could have given rise to, for one.
It is also possible that a fair rethink could at last lead to an Indo-Pak-Bangladesh memorial to Partition at which the people of the subcontinent can bow their heads in collective atonement for the short sightedness of our founding fathers. Great as they undoubtedly were, none was infallible as we have been led to believe.
The writer is with the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore
(This article was published on January 29, 2015)