PAST & PRESENT
Could Partition have been made less bloody?
RAMACHANDRA GUHA
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It could be one of the most tantalising questions of modern Indian history.
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PHOTO: THE HINDU PHOTO LIBRARY.
THE INEVITABLE: Lord Ismay (third from left), Advisor to the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, discussing the plan of Partition in 1947, with Jawaharlal Nehru (left) and Jinnah (extreme right).
THE most tantalising question of modern Indian history undoubtedly is: "could the Partition of India have been avoided?" Ever since August 15,1947, this question has been asked by all kinds of Indians, who, naturally, have given all kinds of answers. An equally important question, yet one much less frequently asked, is the following: "Even if Partition was, by 1946 or so, inescapable, could it have come about with less loss of life?"
In February 1947, the Labour Government in London announced that the British would quit India by June 1948. Three months later, the new Viceory, Lord Mountbatten, decided to dramatically foreshorten the date of departure, bringing it forward to August 1947. His official biographer, Philip Ziegler, has justified the decision in the following words: "Once the principle of Partition had been accepted, it was inevitable that communalism would rage freely. The longer the period before the transfer of power, the worse the tension and the greater the threat that violence would spread. Today it was the Punjab, tomorrow Bengal, Hyderabad, or any of the myriad societies in the sub-continent where Hindu and Muslim lived cheek by jowl. Two hundred thousand could have become two million, even 20 million."
Blistering attack
In fact, even while Ziegler wrote (in 1985) the toll of the Partition violence was estimated at one million dead; some later scholars have suggested the figure is closer to two million. How many would it have been if the British had left, as planned, in June 1948? In a blistering attack on Mountbatten's reputation, Andrew Roberts accuses him of softness and vacillation — "whenever he had to exhibit toughness, Mountbatten took the most invertebrate line possible" — of being unwilling to crack down effectively on communal violence and, more specifically, of understaffing the Punjab Boundary Force and not supplying it with air cover. Contra Ziegler, Roberts is convinced that the "over-hasty withdrawal" led "to more rather than fewer deaths".
Mountbatten had been warned by officials who knew the province that the Punjab was where the worst violence would occur. If, when the time came, there weren't enough troops to deal with rioters, one reason was that the British were paranoid that they, the rulers, would be attacked as soon as the decision to leave was made public. This feeling was widespread among British officials, priests, planters, and merchants. In the summer of 1946, a young officer wrote to his family of how he thought that when the British left, "we shall virtually have the whole country against us (for long enough at all events to wipe out our scattered European population) before the show becomes, as inevitably it will, a communal scrap between Hindus and Muslims".
The policy of the Raj in its last days was to make the protection of British lives top priority. In February 1947, the Governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burrows, stated that his "first action in the event of an announcement of a date for withdrawal of British power ... would be to have the troops `standing to' and prepare for a concentration of outlying Europeans at very short notice as soon as hostile reactions began to show themselves". In fact, in the summer of 1947, a white man (or woman) was the safest person in India. No one was interested in killing them. But their imagined insecurity meant that many army units were placed near European settlements, instead of being freed for riot control elsewhere.
Postponed
The instinct of self-preservation also lay behind the decision to postpone the Punjab Boundary Award until after the date of Independence. The Punjab Governor, Sir Ewans Jenkins, was very keen that the award be announced as soon as it was ready, so that district officers could be placed in their respective Dominions, Indians in India and Pakistanis in Pakistan; and troops moved to key locations in advance of the transfer of power. The man charged with drawing the boundary lines, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, was ready with the award on August 9 itself. Yet Lord Mountbatten chose to make the award public only after August 15. The Viceroy's explanation for the delay was strange, to say the least: "Without question, the earlier it was published, the more the British would have to bear responsibility for the disturbances which would undoubtedly result". By the same token, "the later we postponed publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British".
In other words, let the natives cop the blame for the horrible fall-out of Independence and Partition.
As a rule, one must only write of history how it happened, not of how it might have happened. Would a more extended time frame — an announcement in April 1947 that the British would quit in a year's time — allow for a less painful process of division? Would more active troop deployments and an earlier announcement of the Radcliffe Award have led to less violence in the Punjab? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. As it turned out, the most appropriate epitaph on the last days of the Raj was provided by the Punjab official who told a young social worker from Oxford: "You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it".
E-mail: ramguha@vsnl.com
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