Zareer Masani, the son of Minoo Masani- a Socialist who turned into a proponent of laissez faire Liberalism- writes in the Spectator.
'Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.’ Imagine if those famous words had not been spoken by Jawaharlal Nehru 75 years ago today, as Pakistan and India announced their independence, but instead by a confederation of the whole Indian subcontinent.
In other words, imagine Nehru as the Prime Minister of a united India. But Nehru was unacceptable to the Muslim League. The only way there could have been a united India is if there had been a Muslim-Dalit-Mahasabha alliance supported by the Princely States. But in that case the first Prime Minister would have been either a lawyer like Sapru or an affable Princeling.
In this counterfactual, imagine this new united state as an independent dominion, like Canada and Australia, with the British monarch as king-emperor. It has a weak central government and strong, autonomous provinces like undivided Punjab and Bengal.
Which soon get divided when communal riots break out and escalate into ethnic cleansing. In the Punjab, some Princely states were using their own troops to foment violence.
The big problem was that both the Army and the Administration had already been 'communalized'. Patel soon discovered this when Liaquat, as Finance Member, was able to block anything he tried to do in the Home Dept.
Its constitution is based on the British government’s Cabinet Mission Plan of 1945, accepted by both the predominantly Hindu Congress and the separatist Muslim League.
The sticking point here was 'groupings'- in plain terms this meant whether Muslim majority Bengal would also get Assam and Muslim majority Punjab would also get the Sikh/Hindu districts. The answer to this was 'fuck off!'
To persuade Mohammed Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, already dying of tuberculosis, to abandon his largely tactical demand for Pakistan,
'Groupings' gave the Muslims more territory than Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs knew very well that they would quickly become a very vulnerable minority under a 'grouping'. In the case of the Punjab, from where a lot of soldiers were recruited, they would fight to keep those areas where they were in the majority. Even the Hindu Bengalis showed some fight in this respect.
Mahatma Gandhi has given him the premiership of a coalition government at the centre.
Had Nehru not got the premiership, he'd have gone over to the Socialists. The Congress vote would be split. Indeed, the Mahasabha would have taken most of the votes of conservative Hindus.
Nehru, whose arrogance and insistence on the top job had alienated Jinnah,
Who had already been alienated by Gandhi. It must be said that Motilal Nehru had primed Jinnah to oppose Non Cooperation- which is what destroyed his career within Congress. Motilal himself, it is said, was emotionally blackmailed by his son to support it. However, since the Mahatma had broken up Motilal's daughter's marriage to a Muslim- Gandhi even arranged a 'suitable' Brahmin boy for her to wed- Motilal owed Gandhi big time.
Anyway, the plain fact is, Congress wanted to do a deal with mofussil town Mullahs, not with clever urban lawyers representing the rising Muslim professional and mercantile class.
has been slapped down
Nehru couldn't be slapped down by anybody. His friends had come to power in London. The Americans approved of him. Gandhi was considered a crackpot who was responsible for the foolish 'Quit India' movement. In 1929 Gandhi could blackmail Nehru by threatening to publish his letters expressing skepticism of Gandhi's crackpot schemes. By 1943, Nehru was ready to break with Gandhi. A couple of years later, when Gandhi threatened him again, Nehru said the equivalent of 'publish and be damned!'
in a realignment of the Congress leadership: Gandhi joining forces with anti-Nehru conservatives like Sardar Patel and Chakravarty Rajagopalachari (Rajaji).
Rajaji had already come out for Pakistan. He had also opposed Quit India. Patel was a big wheel within the Party but little known to the wider public.
Nehru had been collaborating closely with Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, sent as viceroy by the new Labour government to ‘cut and run’ as quickly as possible. But the Nehru-Mountbatten axis is seriously discredited by a scandal about Nehru’s affair with Lady Mountbatten, including insinuations that the bisexual ‘Dickie’ was a willing participant in a menage a trois.
Who would have believed such a story? The Statesman, on orders from its owners, on orders from both Delhi and London, would have rubbished it. Those promoting it would have gone to jail on obscenity charges while publishers would have been bankrupted. London could cover up the Governor of Madras's stealing from the Red Cross. It could cover up the passing of naval secrets to the Japanese by a British Lord. As for Mrs. Simpsons scandalous past and her involvement with the Prince of Wales, the Press Barons ensured that the British public was kept almost entirely in the dark.
Mountbatten is packed off home in disgrace, while his perspicacious predecessor, Lord Wavell, returns as viceroy, resuming negotiations for a more gradual transfer of power to a united subcontinent.
But it was Wavell who had authored 'Operation Madhouse' for the evacuation of the White population. Atlee recalled ' ‘Wavell was frankly pretty defeatist by then. He produced a plan worked out by his ICS advisers for the evacuation of India with everybody moving from where they were by stages right up through the Ganges valley till eventually, apparently, they would be collected at Karachi and Bombay and sail away. Well, I thought that was what Winston would certainly quite properly describe as an ignoble and sordid scuttle and I wouldn’t look at it.'
This slowly results in a new national unity coalition between Jinnah and the Congress conservatives.
Why not one between the Communists and the Princes or better yet, a coalition of national unity between cats and dogs?
With Jinnah as his Muslim prime minister, Rajaji, a Hindu Brahmin, in due course succeeds Wavell as the first Indian governor-general of the newly independent dominion.
But Rajaji had no power base even in Madras precisely because he was a Brahmin and a promoter of Hindi and caste based education. Jinnah would have had no power over the Muslims because under the Cabinet Mission Plan, it was Chief Ministers, not the Prime Minister, who held power. Jinnah would have been ground down between the upper mill stone of the Princes and the lower mill stone of the Provincial Premiers. Meanwhile communal violence would have been sparked by all those who felt left out in the new dispensation. The Naokhali blood-letting had such an origin.
Hindu-Muslim tension, ratcheted up by the Pakistan demand and the Congress opposition to it, now subsides.
But such tensions were a feature of the Twenties and Thirties before there was any Pakistan demand!
Prime Minister Jinnah’s main powerbase, the influential Muslim minority of India’s central Hindi belt, is delighted with the new power-sharing deal.
But Congress workers aren't. They were perfectly capable of using 'cow protection' or some such claim to start slaughtering Muslims.
For them, Pakistan was always a tactical rather than a practical demand, because it would uproot them from their homes in a partitioned India.
But, in 1917, during the anti-cow slaughter riots, the Muslims of Bihar had been shown that majorities get their way by fair means or foul.
The two largest Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab are equally pleased, because they remain undivided with powerful, devolved governments of their own.
But the elected Government in Bengal chose to profit from famine and then launched 'Direct Action Day' so as to prevail in Calcutta where Muslims were in a minority.
A year later, Jinnah dies, and his successors as leaders of the Muslim League, lacking either his charisma or ambition, accept the role of second fiddle to the Congress.
Jinnah's successor would have been Liaquat- but for whom Jinnah would not have been able to make a political comeback. The thought of an erudite aristocrat like Liaquat playing second fiddle to Patel or Nehru is laughable.
Gandhi’s gamble has paid off, and he lives happily on for another decade, instead of falling victim to a fanatical Hindu assassin.
But Gandhi stops getting money for his Ashrams and crackpot schemes the moment Jinnah becomes PM. His gamble means he loses obligatory passage point status. He fades into obscurity.
Is this just a far-fetched, counterfactual scenario born of nostalgia and wishful thinking?
It is a fairy tale.
Or could it have become a reality if the partnership of Clement Attlee, Lord Mountbatten and Nehru hadn’t rushed through a premature transfer of power to satisfy their own personal and ideological ambitions?
No. A Muslim PM would have been expected to deliver Muslim hegemony. If he failed, he would lose votes to a more Islamist rival. True, a Muslim dictator- like Ataturk- could hew a secular path but to keep it on that trajectory he'd have had to become a Shahenshah like Reza Khan. That didn't end well did it?
The historical evidence suggests that there was no inevitability about Partition
Indeed. But the alternative would have been a policy of whole hearted co-operation from 1923 onward which tackled thorny subjects like land reform, creation of an all India Zollverein, equitable fiscal policy, reform of personal law, outlawing caste based discrimination, discouraging purdah, curbing the arbitrary powers of the Princes etc, etc. The plain fact is, neither Congress nor the League nor the Communists were prepared to supply any such thing. The 'Freedom Struggle' was about pushing out the Brits and moving into their nice bungalows or taking over their business enterprises at fire sale prices.
and that the key decisions were rather finely balanced.
If so, those decisions were reversible.
It’s something of a myth that Indian independence was won by direct action and that Partition was the inevitable price exacted by a colonial power determined to divide and rule.
It is a convenient myth. The truth, however, is obvious. Muslims want Islamic rule and, absent a dictator or powerful monarch, that is precisely what they get where they are the majority. It may be that an affluent and administratively strong Muslim State would protect minorities. But one which is poor, administratively weak, and where there is 'land hunger' will witness ethnic cleansing unless, as in Indonesia, Hindus and Muslims could get together to slaughter Commies.
Effective independence was implicit in the constitutional reforms of the Raj in 1909
No. It wasn't till 1917 that it became clear that the age of Emperors had come to a close. Colonies had to become Dominions to be credible and capable partners in collective defense. After the War, 'Geddes Axe'- i.e. defense cuts- made devolution or dyarchy the inevitable prelude to dominion status. The head of the Army, soon to be assassinated by the Irish, said that Britain could not hold India, Ireland, Egypt- indeed, in the event of a Bolshevik uprising, the Army hadn't the troops to be sure the Crown would prevail even in England's green and pleasant land. That's why Egypt, Afghanistan and Ireland got independence in 1922 after Gandhi unilaterally surrendered thus permitting Britain to maintain its position in the MENA and South East Asia. This would have been fine if Congress had cooperated and used dyarchy to gain administrative experience. It did not. It split into two deeply silly factions while communal tension increased.
and 1919, well before Gandhi launched his civil disobedience movement.
He should have done a deal with Reading as Sapru wanted. He first overplayed his hand and then folded ignominiously. During his sedition trial he admitted that India could not feed or defend itself without the Brits. That's why he resented them and had embarked on a crazy course which would have led to a catastrophe. He pled guilty and asked for the longest sentence possible under the law. He was let out early but remained quiet for the duration of the original sentence. As he told Hasrat Mohani in 1922, India could not become independent unless Hindus and Muslims were united and though Khilafat had indeed achieved this still Hinduism and Islam were separate and would remain so for untold generations. In other words, fighting for Independence was like fighting for Niceness. The goal would never be achieved till everybody couldn't be nicer though it would still be nice if they tried.
The Congress was knocking at an open door: the real point at issue was how to introduce parliamentary democracy in a subcontinent so diverse and largely illiterate.
The answer was by stages. Start with a limited franchise and expand. Ceylon got universal suffrage by 1931. It was richer and much smaller than India but the same mechanism could have been applied. After all, India was still very poor, diverse and largely illiterate when its first General Election was held.
The central problem with elected legislatures was to safeguard the interests of the Muslim minority, still rooted in its feudal past and fearful of domination by the more successful Hindu business and professional elites.
Muslims weren't a beaten down and dispirited people. Dalits were.
The solution accepted by a reluctant Congress was to have separate electorates for additional, reserved Muslim seats.
and reserved seats for Dalits, Zamindars, Europeans, Organized Labor, Cat fanciers, Dog walkers, etc.
What had still to be resolved was how to guarantee Muslim representation in newly devolved governments in the provinces and eventually at the centre.
Hilarious! What was never resolved was to how stop a Muslim majority ethnically cleansing kaffirs. On the other hand, it must be said, Muslims were also prepared to slaughter fellow Muslims if kaffirs were in short supply. I suppose the same could be said of Sikhs. We Hindus must do better in this department. People will think we are lazy.
Matters came to a head with the new 1935 constitution, under which provincial elections were held on a greatly expanded franchise. In the United Provinces, the largest province, the Congress swept to power, in alliance with the Muslim League against the loyalist landlords’ party. The logical outcome was a Congress-League coalition government, but Nehru turned down the League’s coalition offer and the Congress formed a majoritarian government on its own, leaving the League in opposition. This was precisely the scenario that Muslims dreaded at the national level, if independence were to mean majority rule.
Whereas the Hindus dreaded being killed, forcibly converted and turned into a permanent serf class as had happened in the past.
The United Provinces fiasco was a turning point in the radicalisation of the Muslim League and its very moderate, secular-minded leader, Jinnah.
After the Treaty of Lausanne and the partition of Ireland, it was obvious that 'moderate' or even 'secular' nationalists would want partition and even some degree of population exchange. The pure Islamists were internationalists and feared that Islamic territorial Nationalism (e.g. that of Ataturk or Reza Shah) would stand in its way. Iqbal vacillated on this issue. Jinnah, however, had no use for a Caliphate which could scarcely appeal to Shias.
The death of Jinnah's wife- who had been something of an embarrassment to him- was providential for the revival of his career. Since he lacked any constituency of his own and was an able enough negotiator, he was brought back into Indian politics by younger people like Liaquat in order to do a deal with provincial leaders giving them local power in return for the appearance of a united front at the center. This meant Jinnah had no substantive power or patronage till he became Governor General. But this also meant he hadn't made enemies or been accused of corruption.
It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely founder of a theocratic Islamic state than this whisky-drinking, pork-eating barrister,
But it is easy to imagine an anti-Ahmadiya poet philosopher- Dr. Iqbal- using impeccable Punjabi logic to arrive at the ludicrous conclusion that Muslims had to separate from Sikhs and Hindus so as to establish Socialism or whatever shite it was Mussolini had achieved in Italy.
with his London education and his immaculate suits, his love marriage to a glamorous Parsi socialite, and his disregard for Islamic rules.
Pakistan did not start of as a theocratic state. It wasn't till the Seventies, under Bhutto, that the Ahmadis were classed as non-Muslim. Sharia courts only came with Zia in the Eighties. Pakistan was like Lebanon- a state created so a minority could be a majority. It came into existence at about the same time as Israel- which was founded by secular Jews.
What turned this patriotic, pro-Congress Muslim into the sectarian separatist of the 1940s?
He was specifically brought back into Indian politics by UP Muslims some of whom got a soft landing in Pakistan though the vast majority lived to regret his return- if they lived.
Two of his recent biographers, Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani-American academic, and Jaswant Singh, a former foreign minister of India, have converged on the same answer: the arrogance and intransigence of Congress leaders – Nehru in particular –
who was pro-Muslim. If these guys couldn't stomach Nehru fuck would they have done if faced with a Patel?
and the pro-Nehru bias of the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten.
Labour had a pro-Nehru bias just as the Tories had a Muslim League bias. Mountbatten had a brief to get out without loss of European lives. He succeeded very well. His friendship with Nehru gave Britain a voice in India till Nehru's death. After that Mountbatten's own career came to an end.
‘Partition was the last thing Jinnah wanted,’ says Jalal,
In which case, he was a shit politician who fucked up totally.
and she agrees with Jaswant Singh that his demand for it was essentially a bargaining ploy.
True. Demanding Mike Tyson suck you off may be a bargaining ploy. You'd be happy to settle for an autograph. But you won't get Tyson's autograph. He will knock your fucking block off.
Previously, the Burmese demanded and got separation from India. The Sindhis demanded and got separation from Bombay Presidency. It was far from clear whether bigger states like Kashmir, Hyderabad etc would remain within the union. In the latter two cases, the issue was decided by force. It is difficult to see what 'bargaining ploy' is involved in any of this. Either you can control and defend your own territory or you can't. If you can, you still won't get any extra territory just for joining or not joining a larger union. Muslims could keep contiguous Muslim majority areas and so could the Hindus. True, the Hindus didn't do much ethnic cleansing but that could always change.
It wasn't vague at all. It specified that 'areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India, should be grouped to constitute “Independent States” in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.'
A vague 1940 Muslim League resolution adopting the goal of Pakistan left wide open whether it would be a single or multiple entity, a sovereign state or an autonomous state within a state.
Jalal emphasises that Jinnah’s two-nation theory was not a territorial concept, but a demand for parity between Hindus and Muslims.
Jalal is a cretin. When a demand is made and the demand is for territorial sovereignty and that demand is made good then there is a 'two nation' theory which has prevailed. Pretending Pakistan was created so as to raise up the Hindu minority there to a status of equal security with the Muslims is just foolish.
Most Muslims, after all, were minorities in Hindu-majority provinces, while the Muslim-majority provinces depended heavily on the commercial and professional skills of prosperous Hindu minorities.
Who stopped being prosperous quickly enough. Indeed, most had to run away or else were killed.
Gandhi’s Quit India movement of 1942 proved a spectacular own-goal for the Congress party, because
Gandhi's forte was the own-goal.
it landed most of its leaders and active cadres in jail for the rest of the second world war,
Safest place for them really. Look what Bose got up to.
while Jinnah filled the political vacuum, dramatically expanding his power base across India’s diverse Muslim communities.
Jinnah's standing rose and he did indeed become the 'sole spokesman' because Gandhi, who claimed that role for Congress, made him his interlocutor. But Jinnah felt he had been fooled before and would not be fooled again. Nehru, on the other hand, felt Jinnah had been appeased before- which was the only reason he had any standing among Muslims- but he wouldn't be appeased again. If he insisted on a Muslim state let him perish there himself.
At the end of the war, constitutional negotiations resumed under the viceroy Field Marshal Lord Wavell, a remarkable soldier-statesman with long Indian experience appointed by Churchill.
This is foolish. Churchill had been forced by the Americans, who were obsessed with China, to clear the Japs out of North Burma so that the 'Burma Road' to supply the KMT could be cleared. Wavell was the CinC, India. He was overoptimistic and committed poor quality troops to that theater in the winter of '42-43 with bad results. He was kicked upstairs to the position of Viceroy because he was not considered a good general. Eventually, it was Slim- considered to be of lower middle class origin- who won honors in South East Asia. I believe he was the first CIGS to have served in the Indian Army.
His objective was to transfer power to a united India and for Britain to stay long enough to broker a workable settlement.
Wavell informed Whitehall that this was no longer possible.
But for the new Labour government headed by Attlee, the priority was a rapid exit,
because the Americans wouldn't pay to keep Britain in India
winding up an expensive empire that had long ceased to pay for its keep.
The Brits were careful to keep, or try to keep, the profitable bits. Mossadegh in Iran was toppled because the Navy needed cheap Iranian oil. Still, the Brits did a good job ridding Malaya of Commies and standing up to Sukarno's threats.
Attlee sent out the Cabinet Mission, which did its best to reconcile the Congress goal of a majoritarian, unitary state with the Muslim League demand for effective safeguards and full autonomy for Muslim-majority provinces.
i.e. the right to kill Hindus and Sikhs while also holding onto Hindu and Sikh majority territory. That wasn't going to fly.
The outcome was an ingenious three-tier scheme in which sovereignty would be shared in a pyramid, with the provinces at its base, groups of provinces with either Hindu or Muslim majorities above them, and at the apex, an all-India centre for defence and foreign affairs.
Which the Muslims would only accept if they got Hindu majority territory. But the days of Muslim appeasement were over. Minorities were welcome to fuck off to where they were the majority. They would be slaughtered if they wagged their tail or were rumoured to have blasphemed or eaten the wrong type of meat.
This would have been a unique constitutional experiment, more akin to the present European Union than a nation-state, but well suited to India’s political diversity.
But Hindus decided there was a sufficiently strong Muslim and Commie threat to hang together rather than risk 'salami tactics'. That is why India still coheres. Also, it is very funny to hear guys with Hindu names pretend they care deeply about Muslims.
Both the Congress and the League reluctantly accepted the plan, but then fell out over its interpretation.
Nobody really accepted anything. There was maneuvering but no forward motion.
‘What the Cabinet Mission intended and the way we interpret what they intended may not necessarily be the same,’ Gandhi told the viceroy.
Cripps had made the mistake of talking to that old crackpot. But it was Congress as a whole which was the stumbling block. The days of tactical Muslim appeasement were over. The Hindus were determined to be masters in their own house.
‘This is lawyer’s talk,’ said an exasperated viceroy Wavell. ‘Talk to me in plain English. I am a simple soldier. You confuse me with these legalistic arguments.’
To this, Nehru quipped, ‘We cannot help it if we are lawyers.’
They weren't lawyers. They were liars. Most politicians are.
The coup de grace for the Cabinet Mission Plan was delivered by Nehru in July 1946, when he publicly announced that a new constituent assembly, which would obviously have a large Hindu majority, would modify the Plan as it pleased. The Muslim League promptly seized on this to back out as well, reiterating its demand for a separate Pakistan and launching ‘direct action’ to achieve it.
Direct Action Day in Calcutta started with Muslims killing Hindus but the majority soon got the upper hand. Thus Calcutta remained with India. Jinnah got a moth-eaten Pakistan and Indian Muslims lost all the supposed 'safeguards' enshrined in the 1935 Act.
Two of Nehru’s closest colleagues have laid the blame for this breakdown squarely at his door.
Why have colleagues if you can't shift blame to them?
Maulana Azad called Nehru’s statement ‘one of those unfortunate events which changed the course of history’, lamenting the fact that ‘he is at times apt to be carried away by his feelings’. Sardar Patel, too, criticised Nehru for acting ‘with childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly.’
Nehru's decisiveness on this issue ensured Congress remained the muscular right arm of the 'High Caste Hindus' who Gandhi said, in 1939, composed the INC.
Nehru himself maintained that he had acted out of the conviction that partition was preferable to a loose federation.
Which was true- for Hindus. Muslims would kill them in any case, unless the Hindus were united and had a big Army at their disposal. Still, in a Muslim majority area even Nehru's own clan would not be safe. This may change.
He wanted to be master in his own house, free to implement his socialist policies through centralised economic planning;
Nehru's first Finance Ministers were conservatives.
and the Muslim League, in control of large, autonomous provinces, would have been an unwelcome brake on all this.
It would have been a slaughter-house for Hindus. Indeed, that was the actual outcome.
Most important of all was Nehru’s visceral hatred of Jinnah,
Nehru would have no importance in Indian history if he had lurved Jinnah and tried to appease that old cadaver.
recorded with brutal candour in his diaries: ‘Jinnah…offers an obvious example of an utter lack of the civilised mind. With all his cleverness and ability, he produces an impression on me of utter ignorance and lack of understanding…. Instinctively I think it is better to [have] Pakistan or almost anything, if only to keep Jinnah far away and not allow his muddled and arrogant head from interfering continually in India’s progress.’
Gandhi had an even more muddled and arrogant head. Godse got rid of that problem. Odd how three people surnamed Gandhi have been killed to the great profit of the INC.
Wavell, who was trying to bring both sides back to the negotiating table, lamented in his diary early in 1947: ‘There is no statesmanship or generosity in the Congress.’ But Attlee decreed otherwise and summarily replaced Wavell with another, far more glamorous soldier-statesman. Earl Mountbatten of Burma came armed with the aura of his military victories, his royal lineage and his ‘progressive’ politics. In what Churchill called ‘a premature, hurried scuttle’, Attlee announced that, regardless of a political settlement, Britain would quit India by June 1948.
It is to Mountbatten's everlasting credit that he got Britain out ahead of schedule though he, personally, was asked by Nehru to stay on as Governor General.
Both Attlee’s deadline, and his choice of the man to implement it, proved disastrous.
Not to Britain. As for India- there was a 'responsible' indigenous Government which signed off on the transaction and thus had to take responsibility for what subsequently transpired.
Could the bloodletting be avoided? Yes, if the Indian Army remained cohesive. Indeed Cariappa made a bid for power but the fact is that the Army was already split on communal lines.
Mountbatten’s vanity was legendary. His chief concern on the eve of his departure for India was what he should wear on arrival. ‘They’re all a bit left wing, aren’t they?’ he asked one India expert. ‘Hadn’t I better land in ordinary day clothes?’ He was delighted to be told: ‘No, you are the last viceroy. You are a royal. You must wear your grandest uniform and all your decorations and be met in full panoply.’
The Empire was the gift of the Royal Navy. Sadly, only the last Viceroy was a sailor. But his influence with Nehru endured.
Three months after his arrival, Mountbatten suddenly announced that he was bringing forward the British departure to August 15, 1947, and transferring power to two successor states carved out of Hindu and Muslim majority areas.
So, he exceeded his brief. What's more he got the Whites out safely. The bonus was that both dominions remained in the Sterling zone.
‘The date I chose came out of the blue,’ he later boasted. ‘I chose it in reply to a question. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.’ He was even more cavalier at a public reception on the eve of Partition, saying that the best way to teach a youngster to cycle was to take him to the top of a hill, put him on the seat and push him down the hill – by the time he reached the bottom, he’d have learnt to cycle.
If you take a bunch of lawyers to the top of a mountain and push them off it then only the one wearing a parachute will survive. Mountbatten needed to get rid of the chatter-boxes by pushing the country off a cliff. Nehru had the parachute and thus would emerge as the supreme leader. Thus Nehru was grateful to Mountbatten who, it must be said, had first reassured himself that Patel would sweat the small stuff.
Rushing through Partition before the security forces were ready for it,
the security forces were mutinous and polarized along communal lines. It turned out the Pakistani Army could do genocide off its own bat.
Mountbatten made little attempt to explore the alternatives.
There were none. Either the Brits relinquished authority before the big blood-letting occurred or they ended taking the reputational hit for its occurrence. India was not different from Palestine in that respect.
In a meeting with the viceroy, Gandhi suggested that the existing interim government led by Nehru be dismissed and Jinnah invited to form a new one.
But Jinnah had refused such offers before. Gandhi said 'able advocacy' would enable Jinnah to get Congress to vote his way. This was a fantasy. A PM who does not have the confidence of the House is impotent. Gandhi was talking nonsense.
‘What would Mr Jinnah say to such a proposal?’ Mountbatten asked in surprise. The reply was: ‘If you tell him I’m the author, he will reply, “Wily Gandhi!”’ The viceroy made no attempt to follow up Gandhi’s wily offer, which might have changed the course of history by offering Jinnah an honourable retreat from Partition.
The Viceroy did talk to Nehru and Azad and so forth. They didn't think Jinnah would accept and pointed out the obvious problems that would arise if he were crazy enough to do so.
A major reason for Mountbatten’s failure to conciliate Jinnah was his all too obvious intimacy with Nehru.
This is a foolish argument. If Mountbatten was Nehru's puppet then Nehru could have persuaded him to do what Gandhi proposed.
Widely rumoured at the time, and now confirmed by the memoirs of his daughter, Mountbatten facilitated a love affair between his beautiful, wealthy and very independent wife and his handsome Congress premier. ‘She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together,’ he wrote to his elder daughter. ‘They really dote on each other. Pammy [his younger daughter] and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and helpful.’
This was a period when Churchill had used his own daughter-in-law to influence American generals. Duff Cooper used his wife, Diana, to influence Ernie Bevan. The aristocracy had its own way of doing things. What is certain is that Dickie retained great influence over Nehru from which Britain profited till 1964.
While his daughter saw this as ‘a happy threesome’, the bazaar gossip was less charitable. There’s one account of a handful of love notes between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten reaching Jinnah, who chivalrously returned them.
According to another account- mine- he he chivalrously returned them after jizzing copiously over them.
The most appropriate epitaph on the Raj was provided by the Punjabi official who declared: ‘You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it.’
That may be Punjabi logic but it isn't true. The British left India with the Hindu, for the first time in their history, united against the Muslims and Europeans.
As for Nehru, he first crowed about the mangled Muslim state that emerged from the cutting up of Punjab and Bengal, saying, ‘The truncated Pakistan that remains will hardly be a gift worth having.’
Unless the Pakistanis did sensible things which they did from time to time.
But a year later, he said, ‘Perhaps we acted wrongly… The consequences of that partition have been so terrible that one is inclined to think that anything else would have been preferable… Ultimately, I have no doubt that India and Pakistan will come close together… some kind of federal link… There is no other way to peace. The alternative is… war.’ Even as he spoke, the two new states were already at war over Kashmir.
Nehru was worried that a Hindu backlash would bring the Mahasabha to power in the elections. The truth is, Congress should have followed a policy of cooperation in which case State capacity would have increased and, if Partition was inevitable, an orderly exchange of population would have occurred.
For Jinnah, to get even a moth-eaten Pakistan was, as a leading imperial historian put it, ‘an amazing triumph, the outcome not of some ineluctable historic logic, but of the determination of a single individual.’
If it hadn't been Jinnah, it would have been Liaquat. If there was a single individual who determined the outcome, that individual was Atlee.
It is sobering to consider what might have happened if Mountbatten, instead of bringing forward the date, had delayed it. Jinnah, already in the final stages of tuberculosis, died 13 months after partition.
But the rioting had started before Mountbatten arrived. He transferred power in the nick of time because, the truth was, he only had enough power to evacuate the Whites.
The state he left behind was born to fail,
It has not failed.
and most Congress leaders expected that this malformed offspring would soon return, tail between its legs, to Mother India.
Nonsense! India would never again do 'reserved seats' or any other type of Muslim appeasement. Henceforth India would veer between Bureaucratic, rent seeking 'Secular' Socialism, doled out by elite Hindus and a militant Hindutva helmed by vernacular politicians closer to the mofussil.
It had virtually no industry, with the markets for its agricultural produce left behind in India; although it produced three-quarters of the world’s jute, the processing plants were all in India. The predominantly Hindu entrepreneurial classes had fled with their capital and expertise. The ruling elite of the Muslim League were mostly refugees from India and soon at odds with the predominantly Punjabi population they governed. The Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan had little in common with the western half, a thousand miles away.
But it wasn't ruled by Nehru. That was a great boon.
Little wonder that Pakistan fell prey to a series of corrupt and repressive military and civilian regimes and that its eastern wing, after another bloody war and an estimated 3 million casualties, broke away in 1971 to become Bangladesh. After the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan became the base for militant Islamists fighting the Russians, which further weakened its civil society and radicalised a younger generation that had already been incensed by India’s occupation of Muslim Kashmir.
Pakistan is the gift which keeps giving- to the BJP but only once Vajpayee's Nehruvianism had been abandoned.
The counterfactual story would have been far more positive. Granted, a united Indian federation, based on the Cabinet Mission Plan, would have had its share of friction and tensions;
Hindus would still have been ethnically cleansed from Muslim majority areas. The problem is that some such Hindus would have been spirited enough to return the favor.
but, over time, the glue of shared power might have held the Congress and the Muslim League together, at least on issues of external security.
Afghanistan would have used Islam to support an insurgency along the frontier and down into Baluchistan. Getting shot of Pakistan meant India did not have to pay for the defense of the North West Frontier.
India, without Nehru’s pro-Soviet brand of non-alignment, would probably have allied with the West
in which case it would have faced a Communist insurgency in the East and the South.
and, like the Raj, would have seen Afghanistan as a vital buffer state from which the Russians must be excluded.
But Afghanistan has a claim over Pakhtoon and Baloch areas. It wasn't a buffer state. It was the source of previous invasions.
Under Indian protection, Afghanistan would have remained a benevolent, westernising monarchy with little scope for the Taliban.
Coz India would have been militarily stronger than the USSR- right? It would also have been able to keep the Dalai Lama in power in Tibet and force Burma to hew to the path of democracy. Why stop there? Why not say India could have forced the Boers to give up Apartheid and secured the rights of homosexuals in a democratic Iran and Saudi Arabia?
Without a hostile Pakistan on its borders,
Pakistan is much smaller than India. It should be fearing Indian hostility, not the other way around. Americans aren't trembling in their boots because of a hostile Cuba.
India would also have been far better able to check communist China’s ambitions.
Ambitions don't matter. Hard work does. The Chinese worked hard and, if they did sensible things, rose up. India was democratic- i.e. preferred senseless talk to sensible policies
The Raj had seen an independent Tibet as a necessary buffer against Chinese expansionism. ‘Rather than see a Chinese occupation of Tibet’ a British general had warned in 1946, ‘India should be prepared to occupy the plateau herself.’
This would only have been possible with American money. But America was a big fan of the KMT- it had wanted to hand Hong Kong to them- so it would only have been interested in defending Tibet after the Communists came to power. But Nehru was soft on the Reds.
In 1959, a serious Indian ultimatum would probably have prevented China from occupying Tibet and ending its autonomy under the Dalai Lama.
Whereas a comic Indian ultimatum would have no such effect. The reason Chairman Xi is defying Biden is because the latter sticks chopsticks up his nose and tells Benny Hill jokes anytime they chat on Zoom.
If so, India would have been spared military defeat in the disastrous 1962 Sino-Indian War, for which the Nehru government was so patently ill prepared.
This was only possible if Nehru had not been Prime Minister. But the voters loved Nehru.
A decentralised union of sovereign provinces would not have been any less efficient or productive than today’s India, with its strong regional parties.
But a strong Center was needed so as to reconfigure the States so as to bring together linguistic groups- e.g. Telugu speakers- or religious groups- e.g. Sikhs in Punjab- or to improve administration- e.g. Chattisgarh, Telengana etc.
Over time, the Hindu-Muslim religious divide would perhaps have faded,
It may have done in the Fifties and Sixties and even the Seventies. But from the Eighties onwards there was a great resurgence of Islam across the globe. The truth is a Socialist tyrant is worse that an orthodox Religious leader who has no objection to people rising through their own hard work and enterprise.
given the myriad ethnic, regional and linguistic identities that make up the Indian mosaic. The union would also have been cemented by rapid growth, as a dynamic private sector, unshackled by Nehru’s state socialism, outstripped the mini-tiger economies.
The Indian private sector wanted the State to set up new industries but then privatize them and use the proceeds to set up higher value adding industries thus creating a virtuous circle. There were three problems with this- firstly Indian entrepreneurs were shit. Most British firms taken over by Marwaris quickly went bankrupt. Secondly, Labor was too militant. The only thing which would have worked would have been labor intensive industries employing girls from rural areas. But there is still resistance to this in much of India. The third problem was that public sector enterprises were ab ovo misconceived even if they were not badly run- the worst example was the Indian Railways- and accumulated losses drained the Treasury. They could only be privatized if loss making units were shut down. But this would harm depressed Regions disproportionately and thus would have political ramifications.
In the end, if there had been no Planning Commission and the Finance Ministry had just focused on raising revenue by encouraging labor intensive exports and letting foreign exchange accumulate to fund further import of capital goods then India would have had a decent five to seven percent secular growth rate. But the bigger problem- which the Brits had always recognized- was that there had to be transfers from the littoral states or those with a better entrepreneurial culture to the involuted agricultural regions. Indian democracy seems to have managed this well enough. The more advanced areas are also better at administration and thus get more funding under specific central schemes. The poorest areas also have the worst, most corrupt and criminalized, administrations and thus get much less than they should in the way of transfers.
Yes, a united subcontinent could have entered the 21st century as the world’s second largest economy, well ahead of China.
Alternatively, a subcontinent which remained united in 1948 could have split into hundreds of warring states by 1958. In addition to the Nizams and Maharajas you might have dynastic principalities founded by Congress or Muslim League politicians.
Masani assumes that Islam did not have a political horizon in the same way that Hinduism appeared to lack one. But the truth may be quite different. Hinduism may have needed Democracy and Socialism to move to a conception of Hindutva free of caste or gender bigotry. There is no reason Hindu India can't move forward rapidly simply by doing more of what works and less of what has obviously failed to work. As for Pakistan, now the war on Terror is over and it is securely allied with China which in turn is more closely allied with Russia than ever before, it may catch up with Bangladesh and surpass India. That is a healthy type of rivalry and would militate for an EU type arrangement so that intra-industry can burgeon and the entire area moves up the value chain.
We may not like Jinnah but we have to admit that his two Nation theory has stood the test of time. This does not mean any country gains by being nasty to its minorities. The fact is, minorities rise up if the concentrate on commercial, not political, activities. Fortunately, India does not have a culture of envy. The Parsis and Jains and Bohras and Marwaris were congratulated on their business success. Large groups- e.g. Patels, Sikhs, 'Andhrapreneurs'- gained a reputation for commercial savvy as well as agricultural prowess. They are being emulated by other groups with increasing success. Much has been achieved in India because au fond the people are hard working. Sadly, climate change is posing a bigger and bigger threat. But we are all in the same boat as far as that is concerned.
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