Perspective: Who divided India? Jinnah or Nehru? | John Cheeran

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White-Spunner has relied on many sources—books, interviews, newspapers—to write his account of Partition but chief among them is The Transfer of Power papers, a massive twelve-volume compendium of all official correspondence

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: The Times of India
By John Cheeran | August 23, 2017

Nehru did not believe religion held such sway in India. Jinnah did not understand Punjab. Mountbatten hardly knew India.

What led to India’s Partition? Could it have been avoided? If not Partition, the bloodbath that claimed the lives of more than 1 million people?

In a brilliant, must-read effort, noted military historian Barney White-Spunner recounts what happened in 1947, freedom and its aftermath, in 12 riveting chapters, each earmarked for a month from January, in Partition: The Story of Indian Independence And The Creation of Pakistan in 1947 (Published by Simon and Schuster, Pages 419, Price Rs 699).

How much of Mahatma Gandhi’s famed non-violence was a sham or an ineffective ploy could be understood from reading this brutally honest account of Partition. The killings had begun much earlier than August 15, 1947.

It is important to give the background of the author. White-Spunner has commanded British and allied troops at every level from troop to field army, including the elite 16 Air Assault Brigade, whom he took into Kabul in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. He has also led operations in the Balkans and Iraq, as well as Africa and Asia. The robustness of his prose in Partition—clear, sympathetic but unsentimental—is a testament to his qualities as a fighter. He enters where it matters, the end of the Raj.

White-Spunner picks up his pieces from the time Field Marshal Lord Archibald Wavell, Viceroy of India, gets his marching orders from the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee on January 31, 1947. On February 20, Attlee made a statement to the House of Commons announcing that Britain would leave India by a date not later than June 1948. He also announced that Earl Mountbatten would take over from Wavell as viceroy.

White-Spunner offers us a soldier’s perspective. He says it is important to accept that events of August to November 1947 were a terrible tragedy, not just in bloodshed and human misery but in their consequences. Were they avoidable and who was responsible for them?

He says Britain should have handed over power to Indians in 1919 after the end of the first World War as recognition of India’s extraordinary generous contribution to the British war effort, both in the number of men who volunteered and in money. The call for Pakistan had not become shrill or sharper at that time. But White-Spunner points out that Britain’s refusal to leave while not having the resources nor the real willingness to administer and develop India in the way the country so badly needed, was the main cause of the tragedy in 1947. He also says the year 1935 presented another opportunity when the government of India Act offered the logical moment to grant Dominion status but again it was missed. “By 1947 there was little of the Raj still functioning apart from the army. India was disintegrating.”

Many have said, including Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal, that it was Congress’s hunger for power that led to the Partition. But White-Spunner makes the picture clearer when he writes that Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had their own reasons for rebuffing Muhammad Ali Jinnah. “Had Congress reacted more favourably to Jinnah’s approaches in 1937, then things might have turned out differently but their (Nehru and Patel) experience in the Interim Government had shown them that they were better without the League. For Congress, it was essential to maintain that strong central government without which they feared they could not keep the country together. For Jinnah, whose vision was a federal India with the League sharing power and exercising control over the Muslim majority provinces on the original Palestine model, this was a bitter blow. He never got what he wanted.”

White-Spunner has relied on many sources—books, interviews, newspapers—to write his account of Partition but chief among them is The Transfer of Power papers, a massive twelve-volume compendium of all official correspondence relating to Indian Independence and Partition between 1942-47. Published by the British government between 1970 and 1983, it is a godsend for a historian, gathering as it does all the government documents in one well-edited series. There is no doubt that the strength of White-Spunner’s account is ToP papers.

So instead of blaming Jinnah for the Partition, he says it was Nehru and Patel who decided to get on with it quickly. It may be stunning to know that Nehru, with Mahatma Gandhi’s support, even tried in May to get the British to hand over in June. Congress was impatient for power.

But it was not the rush for power that caused the slaughter but the inability by all the key players to foresee it. Nehru did not believe religion held such sway in India. Jinnah did not understand Punjab. Mountbatten hardly knew India.

White-Spunner says that the only way to prevent the slaughter was to police the Punjab properly. He significantly points out that there is no excuse for not using British and Gurkha troops and deploying alongside them those non-communal units of Indian troops who would not be affected by local affiliations.

Mountbatten was against it. White-Spunner argues that there was ample time to brief and deploy the army, with the accompanying air power in July. He notes that while Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims slaughtered each other in August 1947, over half a million servicemen stood idle.

But there are other views as well. A K Damodaran, the Congress activist and a future Indian diplomat, differed with the view that Mountbatten rushed it. In 1988 he told the BBC that “despite the Calcutta killings, the cosy Delhi elite had an overromantic view of the Punjab. They never expected what happened. We took a very purist Hindu logical view of partition. In retrospect we were being too clever by half.”

So while India had its heroes during its struggle for Independence and during its hour of freedom, it had none during the terrible days of Partition. A tragedy, indeed.


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