Work in Progress : 3
Extract from ‘Rajendra Prasad: A
Political Biography’
Lot of literature is available on India’s partition. In
hindsight it appears the British government had all the while kept this cat
hidden in their bag, till they sent Mountbatten to let it out…
3.3 The Pity of
Partition
Be that as it may, but
the juggernaut of Mountbatten’s speedy power-transfer machine, co-piloted by
Nehru and his CWC colleagues, including Prasad and Patel, had started trundling
inexorably towards the ‘tryst with destiny’. Being now at the helm of the
affairs, both Nehru and Mountbatten decided to go ahead with the unavoidable
‘surgical cure’.
So those two brilliant
powerful men agreed on April Fool’s Day of 1947 that a swift surgical “cure”
dividing Punjab and Bengal would be India’s best medicine for the dreadful
sores of communal strife that kept erupting. Thus the knife was drawn that in
four and a half brief months would “vivisect”, as Mahatma Gandhi called it,
“Mother India’s body” politic. [SW1/138]
The surgical metaphor
is, indeed, most appropriate insofar as it drips as much with blood as with
irony and pity. Gandhi’s suggestion, however far-fetched it might seem, was the
only sane solution which Mountbatten summarily dumped into the waste basket.
And whereas Jinnah had subdued himself by agreeing to abide by a modified plan
envisaging a federal constitution for a united India, with two large groups of
autonomous Muslim majority provinces as the future map of Pakistan, history
puts the blame for the hasty partition squarely on the shoulders of Nehru,
Patel and all others in the CWC in collusion with the new Viceroy. Jinnah also
knew that the British haste and Congress’ eagerness for an urgent power tranfer
would precipitate a partition as a matter of course. He well knew by now that
the British were ready to quit any way. Hence, he would rather instigate the
Muslims to fight against the ‘Hindu’ Congress to force partition and gain a
sovereign Pakistan than direct the fight against the British who were already
half-willing for partition. Jinnah indeed had fully succeeded in creating
circumstances that made partition inevitable.
Had Gandhi’s radical
suggestion been accepted by the Congres of handing over power to Jinnah,
instead of Nehru, in the Interim government, it would have upset the entire
British plan of dividing the country. It would have killed the British excuse
of hurrying the partition on grounds of the worsening communal conflict. In
fact, Wavell’s replacement by Mountbatten itself was done only in order to
precipitate partition on the lure of speedy power transfer. Azad strongly
opposes Wavell’s replacement in his autobiographical book India Wins Freedom. He is also critical of the unrealistic
timeframe announced by Atlee and further preponed by the new Viceroy,
Mountbatten. Speaking of Wavell’s sagacity and forthrightness, Azad writes:
Lord Wavell did not
agree about the announcement of a date. He wished to persist with the Cabinet
Mission Plan for he held that it was the only possible solution of the Indian
problem. He further held that the British Government would fail in its duty if
it transferred political power before the communal question had been solved….He
therefore advised that the status quo should be maintained and every attempt
made to compose the differences between the two major parties….If Lord Wavell’s
advice had been followed and the solution of the Indian problem deferred for a
year or two, it is possible that the Muslim League would have got tired of
opposition….[Also] the Muslim masses of India would have probably repudiated
the negative attitude of the Muslim League. It is possible that perhaps the
tragedy of Indian partition may have been avoided. [190-92]
The political scenario
as it was allowed to evolve by the British government, however, escalated fast
towards partition. The British component of the Viceroy’s government had
practically brought the law and order machinery to virtual inaction. Jinnah had
already understood the British game and sensed the inevitability of the
partition. Patel and Nehru, two of the prime movers in the top Congress
leadership, now heading the Interim government, wanted full sovereign power
here and now and were too willing for the inevitable partition. Gandhi, too,
sunk in his morass of grief, betrayal and disillusionment, had reconciled
himself to the tragic denouement.
In such a confounded
scenario, Rajendra Prasad, Gandhi’s alter ego and one of the most senior
leaders in the Congress hierarchy, was in a terrible moral dilemma; though on a
different issue. At the end of his book At
the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi he speaks in a rather subdued manner of his
moral qualms about other peripheral issues of the moment like the election to
the Constituent Assembly chairmanship or to the Congress presidentship
simultaneously with his Cabinet responsibilities. But he does not discuss the
far more momentous issue of Gandhi’s radical plan of a Jinnah-led Interim
government as a solution to the fast-spreading riots in the country and the
impending partition of India. His silence on such a momentous issue is quite
inscrutable and rather mystifying. Unlike Azad, he neither rejects nor endorses
Gandhi’s solution, in this critical hour, which casts a shadow on his image as
a staunch Gandhi loyalist who would willingly accept even a ‘poison chalice’
from his mentor’s hand. The same holds true, in a contrary position, about
Patel to a more disparaging extent.
According to Azad, Patel had always been
a true Gandhian and one of the loyalest followers of the master. “Patel
belonged to Gandhiji’s inner circle,” he writes, “and was very dear to him. In
fact, Sardar Patel owed his entire political existence to Gandhiji….[both]
Sardar Patel and Dr Rajendra Prasad…were entirely the creation of Gandhiji.”
[234] But as the freedom movement headed towards its culmination after the War
and the sunset of the Raj loomed large on the horizon, their loyalties to
Gandhi started cracking up. Severely critical of Patel’s rigid pro-partition
stand, Azad observes: “It would
not perhaps be unfair to say that Vallabhbhai Patel was the founder of Indian
partition…Patel was so much in favour of partition that he was hardly prepared
even to listen to any other point of view.” [198,200]
Indeed, under the
terrible magnetic pull of political power they had all started cracking up,
except the ‘great soul’, ready now finally as if to leave the ‘body’ of the
Congress. Three of his ablest lieutenants, Nehru, Patel and Rajendra Prasad,
had already changed track and endorsed partition on the basis of Jinnah’s
two-nation theory in the CWC resolution of March 1947, ‘without consulting
Gandhi’. [DD/254] “Azad too acquiesced”, writes Rajmohan Gandhi. “These leaders
of the Congress’s establishment were eager for independence and office and were
getting old.” [247] Durga Das recalls Gandhi’s bitter reaction soon after the
latter’s meeting with Mountbatten, following the CWC’s acceptance of the
partition plan. “I called on Gandhi twice [he writes] and he told us that his
followers had let him down badly. Now that power was within their grasp, they
seemed to have no further use for him.” [DD/239]
Both the ‘ladder man’
(Gandhi) and the ‘ladder’ (Congress) had now become useless for them. Both had
served their purpose. The banners of ‘Truth’ and ‘Ahimsa’ could now be furled
and put away. Lives of millions of Indians – Hindus or Muslims – could be
sacrificed primarily not for gaining freedom from imperial rule – the
quintessential objective of decades of non-violent mass struggle and suffering
- but for acquisition of political
power at the price of dividing the
two vital cultural components of Indian polity who as inhabitants of their
motherland for centuries had no say in this entire anti-people political drama
of power transfer. As Azad rightly observes in his book:
The people of India
had not accepted partition. In fact their heart and soul rebelled against the
very idea….[Even among Muslims] there was a large section in the community who
had always opposed the League. They were naturally deeply cut by the decision
to divide the country. As for the Hindus and Sikhs, they were to a man opposed
to partition. In spite of Congress acceptance of the Plan, their opposition had
not abated in the least. Now when partition had become a reality, even the
Muslims who were the followers of the Muslim League were horrified by the
result and started to say openly that this was not what they had meant by
partition. [224]
Even Jinnah had to
swallow grudgingly the ‘moth-eaten’, hastily carved out Pakistan as a bitter
pill. If at all the partition served any purpose, it served only the selfish
interest of some of these top political leaders of different denominations in
grabbing power. It was a whirlpool of power politics, basically created by the British, that sucked all these
noble men into its vortex, leaving millions in the masses ravaged, ruined and
bleeding.
Events moved very fast after the CWC’s
acceptance of the partition plan in March, 1947. “The issue was clinched”,
writes Durga Das, “when Prasad, as the President of the Constituent Assembly,
read out on 28th April an authoritative statement of the Congress
stand, that no constitution would be forced on any part of the country that was
unwilling to accept it…. ‘This may mean [the statement ended] not only a
division of India but a division of some provinces. For this, we must be
prepared, and the Assembly may have to draw up a constitution based on such
division.’”[243] This was a clear assertion of the official Congress position
diametrically opposed to Gandhi’s, but to which Gandhi had to acquiesce against
his conscience.
Now there was no time
to lose for Mountbatten. He got down to giving finishing touches to the
partition plan at Simla where he took Nehru as his most trusted confidant. On
14 May he flew to London to acquaint Atlee with a suitably revised plan for
which he had already secured agreement of the Congress and the Muslim League.
It envisaged, along with the partition of the provinces, a preponement of the
dateline to 15 August, 1947, to both of which Atlee gave his assent, being in
equal haste to finish the job. Three weeks later, on 3 June at 7 p.m.,
Mountbatten announced the plan on All India Radio.
It was an ingenious
and seemingly flexible plan. “The Mountbatten plan”, explains Louis Fischer,
“provided for the division not only of India but of Bengal, the Punjab and
Assam if their people wished. In the case of Bengal and the Punjab, the
recently elected provincial legislatures would decide. If Bengal voted to
partition itself, then the Moslem-majority district of Sylhet in Assam would
determine by popular referendum whether to join the Moslem part of Bengal….Nor
is there anything in the plan to preclude negotiations between communities for
a united India….Bengal and the Punjab might vote to remain united, in which
case there would be no partition and no Pakistan. But even if Pakistan came
into being, it and the other India could subsequently unite.”[584-85] The plan
also proposed to antedate the transfer of power to 15 August, 1947. In case
partition was effected, both India and Pakistan would have dominion status with
separate Constituent Assemblies comprising members belonging to their
respective areas. These separate Constituent Assemblies were to frame the
constitutions of their respective dominions, and ultimately all these
provisions in the plan were to be incorporated in an Indian Independence Act to
be passed only a few weeks later by the British Parliament.
Prasad in At the Feet of Mahatma Gandhi is at
pains to justify Congress’s reluctant endorsement of this partition plan particularly in view of the constant
obstructive posture of the Muslim League memebers of the Interim government in
day-to-day governance.
…it was the Working
Committee, and particularly such of its
members as were represented on the Central Cabinet, which had agreed to the
scheme of partition. Mahatmaji himself had never thought that partition offered
the correct solution, nor had he ever subscribed to the principle on which the
partition was effected….We thought that, by accepting partition, we would at least govern the portion which
remained with us in accordance with our views, preserve law and order in a greater part of the country….It
was clear, however, that this partition was not going to solve the Hindu-Muslim
problem; for both in India and Pakistan a large minority would still be left,
and whatever could be done to protect it in the two parts could as well be done
in India as a whole. But that was not
acceptable to the Muslims. We had accordingly, no alternative but to accept
partition. [emphases added][302-3]
It was clearly on such
flimsy grounds that the partition was explained away by the Congress as a
necessary evil, a bitter pill to be swallowed in the interest of gaining
freedom both from the British Raj and the haemorrahaging communal politics of
the Muslim League. It was most certainly the easy way out for all the parties
concerned, except for the common masses. The partition plan may have suited
‘such of its members’ primarily in the interest to ‘govern the portion which
remained with us’. But it was surely an incorrect and sweeping statement to say
that partition was ‘acceptable to Muslims’ as a whole. To Muslim League, of course, yes; but certainly
not to the Muslim masses – a large minority population (nearly four and a half
crores) scattered sparsely all across the country - who, with their non-Muslim
compatriots, saw with wide-open eyes through this evil game of their leaders
bargaining only for the power (ironically) to ‘divide and rule’, rather than to
secure a transfer of power through more sensible and truly peaceful means, as
Gandhi had suggested. And then it would not have satisfied the vanity of a
Viceroy who thought he wielded a magic wand in his royal hand to solve a
decades-old complex problem!
Partition was now a
foregone conclusion. And yet the confusion remained unabated. “The AICC met on
14 June 1947”, writes Azad. “After the first day’s debate, there was very
strong feeling against the Working Committee’s resolution. Neither Pandit
Pant’s persuasiveness [who had ‘moved the resolution’] nor Sardar Patel’s
eloquence had been able to persuade the people to accept this resolution. How
could they when it was in a sense a complete denial of all that Congress had
said since its inception?” [214-15] Both Nehru and Patel had anticipated the
opposition and had astutely invited Gandhi to be present in this historic
session. According to Rajmohan Gandhi, they knew that without Gandhi’s formal
and ‘publically declared’ approval it would have been impossible to get the
resolution passed. And Gandhi fully convinced by now “that desire for power had
influenced their acceptance of Partition,…yet refused to obstruct his ‘sons’
while they collected crowns or medals for their faithful toil of three decades,
and he knew that the trophies were thorny”. [617]
Gandhi’s speech at the
session, full of deep anguish and irony, made an emotional appeal to the
opponents to support the resolution. “No one could be as much hurt by the
division of the country as I am”, he told them. But he now found himself
totally defeated and forlorn. Speaking of that ‘nucleus’ of Congress leadership
which had always stood firmly behind him, he said ruefully: “I criticize them,
of course, but afterwards what? Shall I assume the burden that they are
carrying? Shall I become a Nehru or a Sardar or a Rajendra Prasad?” [RMG/616]
There could be no subtler indictment of this core group of his loyal followers
and of all those others who finally voted for partition: 137 in favour and 27 against,
with 32 ‘remaining neutral’. According to Prasad, “he [Gandhi] decided to keep
quiet and not to oppose partition in any way.” [AFM/304] Once again then the
‘ladderman’ had provided the ‘ladder’ to his ‘sons’ to ascend to the throne,
himself swallowing the bitter draught of partition!
He was staying in
Delhi [writes Prasad] at the time when the actual scheme of partition was being
implemented in the Capital, that is to say, when the representatives of the
Congress and the League in the Government were actually engaged in dividing the
assets and liabilities of undivided India. A Partition Committee had been
appointed by Government on which Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and I were serving as
members on behalf of the Congress. It was this Committee which divided
everything – the assets and liabilities of the Government of India, the army
and military stores and equipment, the buildings, railways, etc.; so much so
that tables, chairs and typewriters and even Government servants were divided
to be shared between India and Pakistan.
While I was working on
that Committee, I would meet Mahatmaji every day during his morning walk. As a
matter of fact, he had himself asked me to meet him every morning. I had thus
an opportunity of communicating to him every day what happened in the Partition
Committee. I could see that he was not at all happy about what was happening,
but he did not like to raise any obstacles. He used to say: “Try, as far as possible,
to prevent injustice.” [AFM/304]
It was a disconsolate
patriarch seeing his family fragmenting; dividing not only the chairs and the
typewriters, but silently witnessing the slitting of Hindu and Muslim throats,
defiling of their helpless women,
and looting and burning of each other’s property.
Meanwhile a new
government, virtually split into two, furiously undergoing divisions at
multiple levels, with a lot of internal politicking and fighting going on, was
congealing into a weird shape. The British themselves, after igniting the
forest fire of communal frenzy, had assumed the passive role of nonchalant
onlookers, and the top political leaders in the Congress and the Muslim League
were busy in sharing the spoils of high office. The new Viceroy stood stoutly
at the Captain’s wheel with his plan ‘clear enough to him now: cut and run,
full speed ahead’.[SW1/141] Jinnah himself with his rapidly wasting tuberculous
lungs had come to be reconciled to his tattered ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan. And
Gandhi stood beyond the periphery seeking light in the deep darkness.
Under the shadow of
this dismal scenario, the interim government lay in a state of utter paralysis.
Nehru was the Prime Minister, Patel, the Home Minister and Prasad, the Food and
Agriculture Minister, with Muslim League’s Liaqat Ali Khan as Finance Minister
but, as Wolpert remarks, “the interim coalition government [had] virtually
ceased to function”. [SW2/334] . Prasad by then had moved from Sadaqat Ashram
in Patna – once the nodal point of Gandhi’s freedom movement in the east – to
Delhi; a rather symbolic shift from organizational work to real governance.
Besides, Prasad also had other important assignments. He was already serving as
president of the Constituent Assembly; a task, he says, ‘by no means less
important or less difficult’. [AFM/317] And with Patel, he was
to serve as a member of the Partition Committee overseeing the enormously
complicated division of assets and liabilities between the newly created two
Dominions of India and Pakistan. A little later, after the coming of
independence, he had also to shoulder the burden of Congress presidentship when
Kripalani resigned in November, 1947. But he would join Gandhi on the latter’s
morning walks or see him almost daily for apprising him with the latest
political developments. “Nevertheless [he writes], I would meet him once a day,
for I was preoccupied with three important matters about that time.”[AFM/318]
Although these three preoccupations were basically of an organizational nature.
The first was ‘to restore goodwill and friendly feeling beween the Hindus and
the Muslims’; the second, ‘amendment of the Congress Constitution’, and the
third, ‘Gandhiji’s constructive programme’. And all these were over and above
the various responsibilities he was saddled with in the Interim government.
A couple of months,
however, were yet to go before the coming of the long-awaited dawn of
independence. The provincial legislatures in Punjab, Bengal and Sind had passed
resolutions before June-end for the partition in the west and east. Mountbatten
had constituted a small partition committee of the Interim cabinet for the
purpose consisting of Patel and Prasad from the Congress and Liaquat Ali Khan
and Abdur Rab Nishtar from the Muslim League. Similarly a boundary commission
was also constituted comprising four high court judges, two each chosen by the
Congress and the League, and chaired by a British barrister, Sir Cyril
Radcliffe. “Radcliffe reached New Delhi on July 8”, writes Wolpert, “giving him
precisely five weeks to draw new national boundaries across whose lines,
bitterly disputed by both countries, approximately 10 million refugees would
run terrified in opposite directions”.[SW2/332]
Dissecting Punjab and
Bengal, the two major provinces under the partition knife, was of crucial
importance in dubious justification of Jinnah’s ‘two nation’ theory. And it was
Jinnah himself who had suggested Radcliffe’s name for drawing the dividing
boundaries in the two provinces. Radcliffe, when he arrived to take up this
critical assignment, was totally unfamiliar with the complicated and highly
sensitive communal situation in India; never having visited India before. And yet Mountbatten gave him full
authority and total secrecy to perform the sensitive task of dividing two
vitally unified provinces in the shortest possible time. What proved more
disastrous, however, was Mountbatten’s putting Radcliffe’s maps of proposed
boundaries in his locker ‘under his strictest embargo until after all the
jubilant independence day celebrations had ended’.[SW1/165] As Wolpert rightly
remarks: “[Mountbatten] cared nothing for the fact that a week’s advance notice
of the actual location of the new boundary would have given all those people
most frightened and eager to move enough time to do so before they found
themselves trapped in the wrong country”. [SW1/167] Indeed, even more than the
decision to divide India, the haste with which it was effected, and, worse, the
withholding of the public knowledge of the precise boundaries till after the
independence day, had its horrific consequences in terms of pitiful massive
cross-migrations and massacres of innocent humanity. Jinnah may have had his
own megalomaniac rationale for relentlessly pursuing his goal of partition, but
both Congress and the British government were equally to share the blame for
the unprecedented human tragedy which could have largely been avoided with a
little more political sagacity and respect for humanitarian values.
The British
Parliament, in the mean time, passed the Indian Independence Bill ‘setting up
two “Independent Dominions” of India and Pakistan on August 15, 1947’ and ‘King
George VI added his talismanic seal of assent to the new act’ on 18 July, just
a month before the historic ‘tryst’ with freedom. Yet it was only to be a
freedom marked by cataclysmic bloodshed and ruination; merely ‘the hollow husk
of freedom’. [LF/587] After decades of sustained struggle and immeasurable
sacrifice, freedom had been given but only like a broken jar, broken into two
or three jagged pieces. The partitioned freedom, in Gandhi’s phrase, was like a
‘wooden loaf’; merely a travesty of freedom. Freedom grudgingly conceded to a
people divided forever and condemned to perpetual animosity and acrimony.
Less than a month now
for the Union Jack to be lowered and replaced by the national tricolour in
Delhi and the green star-crescent in Karachi, the partition formalities went
ahead with a feverish speed. And simultaneously in a rising crescendo went on the
carnage, ruination and the massive cataclysmic cross-migration of population.
Totally disillusioned by the inexorable course of events Gandhi left Delhi, a
week before the day of independence, for Calcutta on way to Noakhali.
During July and
August, 1947, a fresh spate of virulent riots had broken out both in urban and
rural areas of the two ill-fated provinces of Punjab and Bengal, and
cross-migrations of refugees had begun on an unimaginable scale. As Wolpert
notes: “Human chains of tragedy would grow from fifty to one hundred miles in
length over the next few months, the refugees moving in opposite directions
towards accelerated death.”[SW1/169]
This tragic narrative
of the ‘pity of partition’ during those murderous summer months before the dawn
of independence gets a graphic and harrowing portrayal in Khushwant Singh’s
classic novella Train to Pakistan.
Muslims said the
Hindus had planned and started the killing. According to the Hindus, the
Muslims were to blame. The fact is both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and
speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped. From Calcutta, the riots spread
north and east and west: to Noakhali in East Bengal, where Muslims massacred
Hindus; to Bihar, where Hindus massacred Muslims….Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Sikhs who had lived for centuries
on the Northwest Frontier abandoned their homes and fled towards the protection
of the predominantly Sikh and Hindu communities in the east. They traveled on
foot, in bullock carts, crammed into lorries, clinging to the sides and roofs
of trains. Along the way – at fords, at crossroads, at railroad stations – they
collided with panicky swarms of Muslims fleeing to safety in the west. The
riots had become a rout. By the summer of 1947, when the creation of the new
state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people – Muslims and
Hindus and Sikhs – were in flight. By the time the monsoon broke, almost a
million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or
in hiding. [1-2]
But the final dark
footprint of death, in those wretched times, could be discerned in the tragic
comment of a nurse in a Lahore refugee camp: “The vultures were so fat they
could hardly get off the ground.”[PF/355] And though the over-gorged vultures
lay rooted in that landscape of horror, they inevitably cast ominous shadows
with their large flapping wings on the ceremonial ‘trysts with destiny’ that
were taking place on both sides of the divide.
