Feroz R Khan July 29, 2001

Tags: Philosophy , History

The truth is out there in Cambridge

rel="tag" href="/tag/Pakistan">Pakistan and the name Mountbatten evokes a similar response in the Pakistani lexicon as the name Benedict Arnold does in the American history. On the Indian side of the debate, Mountbatten is associated with the cardinal sin of rendering the unity of India asunder and for this one act of omission, his legacy in India, as the last viceroy of the British Raj, has never been immaculate. In both the nations of Pakistan and India, the name Mountbatten revives the horror of the partition and the remembered images of a tedious line of refugees streaming across the newly demarcated borders. Mountbatten’s living memory in South Asia is the still unresolved issue of Kashmir, which has bedeviled the relations between India and Pakistan for the last 54 years.

Two score and fourteen years have passed and much new historic evidence has emerged, which sheds new light on the events of the summer of 1947. What ever may be the utility of these new revelations that are slowly seeping out, there are at best inconclusive in describing the role played by Mountbatten in the partition of India in August 1947. Lord Louis Mountbatten’s personal papers, from his vice-regal tenure in India - papers, which may highlight what his personal reasons, not historic conjectures were, in the division of India are residing in the archives of the India Office at Cambridge University. The Mountbatten Papers have been, on the request of the Mountbatten family, sealed for an indefinite period of time and it seems quite probable that they will not be unsealed for a long time to come. Till the Mountbatten Papers are released and the historians are able to pour over them and discern Mountbatten’s logic in the events leading up to that fateful midnight in August 1947, Mountbatten’s actions in the partition of India will remain in the realm of historic speculation.

In the fifty-four years since the independence of India and Pakistan, history of the events of 1947 has been revised so many times that it has become difficult to separate reality from fiction. The mooted questions asking “who was right and who was wrong” seems have to consumed the historic reasoning in India and Pakistan and the answers, which emerge from these questions, are more provoked by the appeals to nationalistic vanity than they are motivated with desire to seek the historic truth. The historic revision of the events of 1947 began in earnest, when Mountbatten concerned with his role, started to minimize the number of people killed prior, during and immediately after the partition.

Maybe, again this is historic speculation, but it is instructive that Mountbatten might have harbored a guilty conscience upon his return to London in November 1947, because in a speech he gave, he estimated the number of the dead to be, in his words, “only 100,000”. Mountbatten, to the show the relatively low death toll of partition, compared this number with the Bengal famine, during the war years, in which the death toll was estimated to be about one million dead. Mountbatten’s figure of 100,000 dead as a result of partition was cruelly mocked by Winston Churchill, who had in a speech to the House of Commons in October 1947, had pegged the death toll at 500,000 and the number of refugees at about seven or eight million people. Churchill’s figures seemed to agree with Sir Lawrence Graffey-Smith’s, the High Commissioner of Karachi during partition, when he estimated that about 800,000 people had died as a result of partition.

In fact, no one in Britain disputed the figures suggested by Churchill and in 1951, at a dinner in honor of Queen Mary, Churchill had said that, “more than a million people have died as a result of Mountbatten’s policies” and to which Mountbatten’s dismissive comment was only to suggest, “that this grand old man is really past his prime.”

Sir Penderel Moon, a British civil servant serving in Punjab in 1947, in estimating the death toll of partition was more gracious to Mountbatten by suggesting, in 1961, that 200,000 people had died as a result of Mountbatten’s actions. Sir Penderel went on say that, “it may be accorded a mercy Lord Mountbatten did not foresee more clearly the magnitude of the calamity that threatened Punjab. Had he done so, he might have fumbled and faltered”. Many British civil servants and army officers who were posted in Punjab shared Sir Penderel’s caustic remark in describing Mountbatten’s criminal indifference to the security situation in Punjab and his complete disregard for the law and order situation in the province as a result of his policies.

Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck, the commander-in-chief of the British Indian Army, in giving his opinion on the timing of the partition to Mountbatten echoed the concerns of his battalion commanders that partition should be delayed until 1948. Auchinleck was of the opinion that by 1948, the newly created police and armed forces of India and Pakistan would have organized themselves and would be functioning properly and thus, could offer some measure of security to the refugees. Auchinleck, who had started his military career in the northwest frontier province and who loved India, never forgive Mountbatten’s hasty decision to divide India in 1947.

Many British officers like Sir Francis Tucker, commanding officer of Second Battalion of the First Gurkhas, were of the opinion that had Mountbatten given the British Army the responsibility of the law and order situation in Punjab and not to the police and army units of the newly formed states of India and Pakistan, the British army would have stringently enforced the law and order regime in Punjab and would have prevented many unnecessary deaths. Sir Francis would record his impressions on the hasty decision to divide India, in his diary, after traveling with his battalion from Peshawar to Allahabad on August 31, 1947 and seeing a train at Lalamusa filled with the mutilated bodies of over 200 Muslims killed by the Patiala Sikhs.

This almost insane persistence by Mountbatten to move forward the date of partition from 1948 to 1947 prompted Mohammad Ali Jinnah, to whom the division of India would have been the crowning glory of his political life, to question Mountbatten’s intentions. Jinnah had come from Bombay to New Delhi to meet Mountbatten on April 5, 1947 and when he was told by Mountbatten that partition would be in 1947 and not 1948, Jinnah was forced to ask Mountbatten if his intention was to risk chaos and civil war and bloodshed.

Jinnah was not alone in his horrified reaction to Mountbatten’s plan for an early partition. Sir Evan Jenkins, the Governor of Punjab, when told of Mountbatten’s intentions at a meeting of India’s provincial governors, held from April 15-16, 1947 in New Delhi, was shocked. In fact, Sir Evans along with the Sir Eric Mieville, the Principal Secretary, and George Abell, the Private Secretary, and Ismay, the Chief of Staff to Mountbatten, had warned Mountbatten not undertake this decision, because if he did, Punjab would “blow up” and there would be a “worst case scenario” – a term in the British Army which meant civil war and for which the British Army was prepared.

Mountbatten’s reaction to the advice from the “old India hands” was to ignore them as being alarmist. Mountbatten believed he had what the Germans called ein fingerspitzengefuhl; an instinct or a sixth sense and he believed that he knew the situation in India better than the people who had spent their entire professional lives working in India. This was to be a recurring theme of his vice-regal stay in India. Even more than this, what galled the “old India hands” even more was that Mountbatten, by his actions, seemed determined to destroy legacy build by the British in India over 250 years. To the “old India hands” it was a professional rebuke from Mountbatten to their life’s service in India that Mountbatten was giving British civil servants in India, who had a genuine love for India and its people, only 100 days to wind up Britain’s 250 years’ association with India.

Ismay, Mountbatten’s chief of staff, never attempted to down play what was happening and in a letter to his wife, dated August 10, 1947, he would remorsefully mention that the British, “would have to return home with all our work destroyed and leaving behind anarchy, misery and measureless slaughter”. Ismay would share his sense of despair on the dismantling of the law and order situation, in mid-September 1947, when he would write a letter to Jinnah in Karachi describing the breakdown of the civilian authority in New Delhi as: “fighting between large bodies in some districts; arson, looting, and individual murder in others; crowds of destitute refugees; food supplies disrupted, telephone system dislocated; the hospitals choked with the wounded and the dying and dead laying where they had fallen, because there was no one to collect and bury them”.

Ismay would personally blame Mountbatten for the complete collapse of the law and order situation by citing the fact that Mountbatten never took action against the people responsible for the worst acts of inhumanity. According to Ismay, Mountbatten did not want to arrest the groups or individuals without “concrete proof” of their ill doings as his liberal socialist political philosophy balked at the idea of instituting harsh measures in order to arrest the deteriorating, law and order situation. Even though British officers of the Indian Police and army had prior warnings of acts of revenge or acts leading to the disintegration of the law and order, Mountbatten was hesitant in ordering their arrests, because no crimes had been committed and his liberal political inclinations did not allow him to arrest people on the mere suspicion of an illegal act. As Ismay would go on to suggest, had Mountbatten done what to the other viceroys was second nature and dealt with the lawbreakers harshly, the law and order situation would not have been so deplorable.

Also according to Ismay, Mountbatten was acutely worried about the safety of American and Commonwealth representatives in New Dehli. Mountbatten was well aware that his image might be tarnished if something happened to the Europeans, specially the Americans in New Delhi. With the memories of how the Japanese soldiers had treated their European captors in the Second World War still fresh, Mountbatten was determined to avoid jeopardizing the safety of the Europeans at the hands of enraged Asian mobs. In order to protect the foreign diplomats and other Europeans living in New Delhi, Mountbatten had ordered that a large police force to be deployed for their protection and in order to rush them to safety, if the need arose, he had earmarked a large number of army trucks for their transportation. The end result of this was that a sizable number of the police force, which could have been deployed in some other area to maintain law and order was rendered useless and trucks, which could have transported people to the hospitals or the refugees out of the city, were parked idle outside the diplomatic enclaves of New Delhi.

Whatever may have been Mountbatten’s intentions will never be known until the Mountbatten Papers are released and made open to the historians. Till those papers see the light of day, Mountbatten’s actions in that fateful summer of 1947 will be a source of endless speculations and historic distortions. There is a wide spread believe in Pakistan that it was Mountbatten’s friendship with Jawahrlal Nehru and Nehru’s relationship with Edwina, Mountbatten’s wife, which was to influence Mountbatten’s actions against the creation of Pakistan. Historically speaking, it is difficult to suggest that it was Nehru’s influence over Mountbatten or Edwina’s support of Nehru, which tilted the scales against Pakistan in the events leading up to August 1947.

Mountbatten and Nehru were friends even before Mountbatten became the viceroy. Nehru became acquainted with Mountbatten, when the latter was serving as allied commander-in-chief for the India-Burma Theater of Operations during the Second World War. They became close friends, when in 1945, at the end of the war; Nehru would travel to Singapore to see the release of Indian soldiers from Japanese imprisonment. Mountbatten was attracted to Nehru’s brand of socialism and Nehru saw Mountbatten as a liberal with a rebellious streak - a person who was not a typical British royalty, but a progressive looking and thinking British member of royalty. The fact that both, Nehru and Mountbatten, had socialist leanings would cause them to admire each other and from this, as a basis for mutual understanding, their friendship would grow. There is no denying that Nehru enjoyed the personal confidence of Mountbatten and he used his personal friendship with “Dicky”, Mountbatten’s nickname, to get some political benefits, but there is no evidence to suggest that he was able to influence Mountbatten’s decisions and the role Mountbatten played in the partition of India to a degree as the speculation in Pakistan would seem to suggest.

In a similar sense, Edwina’s affair with Nehru has been castigated in Pakistan as having influenced Mountbatten’s decisions against Jinnah and Pakistan. Again, there is no direct evidence that suggests that Edwina acted as a liaison between Mountbatten and Nehru in deciding the division of India. Like her husband, Edwina had certain liberal tendencies and the fact that she might have liked Nehru could be attributed to her marriage with Mountbatten. After being married for nearly twenty-five years, the Mountbattens’ had grown distant and seemed to have adopted an indifferent attitude towards each other’s martial infidelities. This is speculation, but it is possible that Edwina, a middle-aged woman, might have turned to Nehru for attention and their relationship was, as Edwina would claim to Mountbatten, “spiritual”.

Whether Mountbatten believed her or not is another question. The other interesting question is what did Nehru and Edwina find so interesting in each other and what did Mountbatten feel about his wife’s affair with Nehru? Nehru’s affair with Edwina was well known in the social circles of New Delhi and the question was often asked as to what did Nehru “see in that woman?” Even if Nehru, the experienced politician, did mange to derive some political benefit from Edwina, it is doubtful if she could have influenced Mountbatten in Nehru’s favor.

Mountbatten was too self-absorbed and too egoistical to be swayed by the opinions of his wife, and given Edwina’s affair with Nehru, it seems that Mountbatten did not seem to mind it. Though he was uncertain as to the extent of the affair and whether it was merely “spiritual” or more than that, Mountbatten trusted Nehru as his friend not to betray his trust. There is ample speculative material on the affair between Edwina and Nehru and nothing can be said, with certainty, as to what role it played in the partition of India and how influential was it in winning Mountbatten to Nehru’s point of view on how partition should proceed.

It is highly unfortunate that history is often personalized in Pakistan and India and the weight given to the Edwina-Nehru affair, in Pakistan, as a final “parting kick to Pakistan” should be only a distraction to the historian. However, where this romance between two middle-aged people takes on added significance is, because of the implications it would have on the final division of India and for this reason only, it could be a subject of serious historic study.

Having said this, the romance between the Vicereine and Nehru may have played a small, if not a critical role in the events of 1947, but it still does not explain Mountbatten’s role in the partition of India. The fact that Mountbatten was responsible for causing misery and death on such a large scale during partition cannot be solely attributed, or in part, to the influence Edwina had on his final decisions. A more credible reason explaining Mountbatten’s actions in the summer of 1947 probably lies in Mountbatten’s own vanity and the political aims, with which he arrived in India in April 1947. When Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, informed Mountbatten that he was be a Viceroy to India, Mountbatten had a series of meetings with Attlee during which the British government gave him a set of specific instructions on what Mountbatten’s role would be in India. Mountbatten, himself, was responsible for crafting the role he would play in India and the instructions he helped to formulate included certain conditions, which had to be satisfied before independence would be granted to India and Pakistan.

Mountbatten’s instructions from the British government were to obtain a unitary form of government for India (similar to the proposal’s of the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946); secondly, partition and “transfer of power to the new dominions” should be around June 1948; thirdly, Mountbatten was to “persuade” the princes to enter into a “fair and just arrangement” which favored the political and administrative unity of British India; the fourth condition was that Mountbatten was to seek the co-operation of Muslims and Hindus in the decisions dealing with partition based on a “fair and just” representation of their interests; and lastly, Mountbatten was instructed by the British government, upon his own recommendations, to avoid a break “in the continuity of the Indian Army”.

Having said this, Mountbatten was confident that he would be able to implement all the instructions of the British government and he was quite confident that his charm “would carry the day in India”.

Mountbatten’s first indication that he would be failure came during his first meeting with Jinnah on April 5, 1947. During this meeting, Mountbatten’s charm did not have the desired effect on Jinnah and after the meeting, Mountbatten would refer to Jinnah as the, “most frigid, haughty and disdainful” man he had ever dealt with. There is enough historic evidence to suggest and confirm that Mountbatten did not personally like Jinnah and seemed to have a better affinity with Nehru, whom he saw as “fellow aristocrat” in same mould as himself. Given the fact that Jinnah was demanding Pakistan and his demands for Pakistan were posing a direct hurdle in Mountbatten’s ability to carry out his instructions, it is safe to suggest that Jinnah became the personification of Mountbatten’s failure in India. To Mountbatten with a successful Royal Navy career and his service in the Second World War still fresh in his mind, Jinnah’s insistency for Pakistan on conditions exactly opposite to Mountbatten’s instructions, suggested an impending defeat for Mountbatten’s mission in India and this was an insufferable reality for Mountbatten’s personal vanity to accept.

There is enough evidence to suggest this correlation that Mountbatten might have been tempted to push forward the date of independence from June 1948 to August 1947 for a couple of reasons. The foremost being that by bringing the date early, Mountbatten was limiting the time in which elections could be held to decide which states opted for Pakistan or India. The agreed principle of ascension to either India or Pakistan, agreed to in the meeting of June 3, 1947, was that plebiscites would be held to decide the state’s choices in joining either Pakistan or India. Mountbatten was hoping that by narrowing the time needed to hold plebiscites, the most states would be forced to join India in situ.

The reason behind this was that Mountbatten was of the opinion that a larger independent India would be better for the British interests in the region and a smaller Pakistan would sooner or later be forced to re-enter the Indian union. Since Mountbatten, after having failed to convince Jinnah to forego partition, became determined to offer Jinnah partition on conditions that would make it impossible for the new state of Pakistan to survive on its own for long. It was with this logic in mind that Mountbatten became determined to create impossible conditions for Pakistan to survive, because in Pakistan’s failure, as a nation-state, lay Mountbatten’s personal salvation. According to Mountbatten’s view, if Pakistan failed and entered the Indian confederation of states, Mountbatten would have succeeded in fulfilling the conditions given to him by the British government. In this sense, to Mountbatten the partition of India became a matter of his personal honor and prestige and it would be his fear of failure, which would cause him to disregard the advice of the “old India hands” and cause Ismay and others to question his actions in the partition of India.

It was not only in his dealings with Jinnah that Mountbatten’s personal vanity seems to have gotten a better of him. According to Sir Paul Corfield, the Political Advisor for the states, Mountbatten’s progressive views seemed to clash with the politics of the princely states and Mountbatten did not like the idea that princes could, on their own choice, settle the fate of their subjects by opting for independence. The principle of hereditary and a lack of democratic choice offended Mountbatten. Corfield was of the opinion that the certain states, like Mysore, Hyderbad and Kashmir, could have survived as independent states and certain regional arrangements would have been much better for the states than joining India or Pakistan.

Mountbatten, in complete disregard of the British government’s instructions asking him to act as an impartial representative of the British Raj to the princely states, opted to pressurize them in joining either India or Pakistan and not to declare their independence. It was highly ironic that Mountbatten, as a self-professed champion of democratic accountability, would undertake actions in lieu of Kashmir and Hyderbad that he himself detested in the princely states: lack of democratic accountability. In each and every objective of the British government, which he had himself helped in creating, Mountbatten took a course of action that went against their intentions. The question of why did Mountbatten go against the instructions of the British government and do the exact opposite is an interesting one, which may finally shed some light on the real reasons behind why the partition of India was filled with blood and tears. There is enough circumstantial historic evidence to suggest that Mountbatten’s decisions might have been motivated by personal ambition and not by the considerations of British policy towards India in 1947.

There is enough evidence to speculate Mountbatten’s intentions, but until the Mountbatten Papers are released, the whole sorry episode of the summer of 1947 will remain mired in the realm of historic revisionism and conjectures. After nearly 54 years, the living memory of partition is dying out as the last survivors of that cataclysmic event are dying from old age and soon partition will be nothing more than a tale in some history book, “…full of sound and fury…”. It is for the benefit of the future generations of Pakistan and India that the Mountbatten Papers should be immediately released so that a painful chapter in the lives of two young nations may be closed forever. India and Pakistan have better and more pressing concerns to address than to continually revive the memories of 1947 by being perpetually caught up in a historic time warp from, which they cannot escape. Nearly half a century later, all the doubts, suspicions, and speculations related to partition must be laid to rest in hopes that by settling the past both India and Pakistan can have a new beginning.

Until time that the Mountbatten Papers are finally released and the truth about what really happened is known, Mountbatten’s legacy in India and Pakistan could be best summed up by paraphrasing the words of Sir Winston Churchill: never in the history of two nations did one man cause so much grief for so many in so short a time.