विभूतिमूर्ति

Work in Progress : 3

Extract from ‘Rajendra Prasad: A Political Biography’

The story of India’s freedom struggle is like a five-act Shakespearean play complete with its tragic hero Gandhi. Independence, however, came in the Last Act with all the blood and gore of the ‘vivisection’ of India. And the villain was not difficult to identify…

3.2 The Last Act

The last Act of the great tragedy had thus begun with the coming of the new Viceroy Mountbatten, a ‘favourite cousin’ of the King George VI, ‘a toy for Jawaharlal to play with’ as Patel had tartly remarked. Wavell’s opinion of his successor was still more disparaging, describing Mountbatten as ‘a little cock-sparrow who would like to be a peacock… without much ability or character but a very exaggerated idea of his own talents’. [PF/279] The Congress now wanted a swift transfer of power and Wavell was proving rather intractable and somewhat partial towards the Muslim League. Hence, Congress leadership had ‘discreetly conveyed to Whitehall the need for Wavell’s recall’. [DD234] Further, as Wolpert observes, “Krishna Menon, Nehru’s closest comrade, had tirelessly urged Atlee to send Mountbatten out to India to replace Wavell as Britain’s last Viceroy”. [SW1/129]. And Mountbatten did arrive on 22 March as the new Viceroy, barely five months before the hastily rescheduled date of India’s independence, 15 August, 1947.

The change over had become inevitable. The past four months had shown that the Congress-League coalition was not only hopelessly incompatible but positively dysfunctional. The total boycott of the Constituent Assembly by the Muslim League had further precipitated the crisis. The situation had become so critical that both Nehru and Patel had issued the ultimatum that ‘the Congress members would withdraw from the Cabinet if the representatives of the League did not quit forthwith’. [DD234]. At that critical juncture, as if to defuse the crisis, Atlee announced on 20 February, 1947, Britain’s firm resolve to leave India by June, 1948. And simultaneously he also announced Mountbatten’s appointment as the new Viceroy. Both moves were clearly intended to inveigle the two wrangling parties to reconcile to the fast developing political situation. To both parties, it was a warning signal as well as a clever snare: to accept a regional semi-autonomous Pakistan under a federal constitution of a united India or to face a bloody civil war ending in a limbo. The worst and the covert aspect of the plan was partition of Bengal and Punjab to create the two wings of Pakistan; a sinister plan that was certain to lead to unprecedented bloodshed and human suffering. And Britain could have hardly chosen a better protagonist to effectuate such a perilous plan than Mountbatten.

The time frame also had been unequivocally delineated. The ‘royal cousin’ had been empowered to do a smart job and do it swiftly. As Wolpert puts it, Mountbatten was ‘launched on the fastest mission of major political surgery ever performed by one nation on the pregnant body politic of another’, [SW2/311] and Mountbatten knew how to wield his scalpel adroitly. He was sworn in as India’s nineteenth and last Viceroy on 24 March, 1947, and thenceforward it was Mountbatten all the way, right up to the ‘tryst with destiny’. Atlee’s Labour government had sent Mountbatten with the clear mandate, ‘to obtain a unitary government for British India…through the medium of a Constituent Assembly’; and if that seemed impracticable, he was to report ‘to His Majesty’s Government on the steps which you consider should be taken for the handing over of power on the  due date’. [SW2/314] Read between the lines, the directive meant that the ‘option of unity’ being virtually impossible in the circumstances, the ‘option of division’ must be exercised even earlier, if necessary.

It was clearly an open-ended mandate and Mountbatten had a further advantage: ‘his innocence of Indian politics’. [SW2/313] Still more, his unusual affability and rapport with Nehru, Gandhi’s ‘anointed’ successor, and the most domineering face of the Congress. It mattered little – in fact, it helped – that Gandhi had been slowly sidelined. As Wolpert observes, Nehru no longer believed in Gandhi’s ‘going round with ointment trying to heal one sore spot after another on the body of India, instead of diagnosing the cause of this eruption of sores and participating in the treatment of the body as a whole’. [SW1/138] There was, however, an obvious fallacy in Nehru’s logic. No one had ever diagnosed the persistent malaise better than Gandhi. Gandhi did suggest the cure in absolute terms to Mountbatten when he met him in late March. But it was too radical and went against the grain of Nehru’s haste for power. His other Cabinet colleagues too had been cosily ensconced in the seats of power. They were no less in a hurry to enjoy absolute power than the British were anxious to relinquish it.

The Noakhali riots in Bengal had led to a terrible backlash in Bihar and Gandhi had rushed to Patna in early March after four month’s of an intensive peace march in Noakhali. It was in Patna that he learnt of the CWC’s resolution accepting partition, the only time when such a momentous decision – totally contrary to Gandhi’s fundamental objection to the ‘vivisection’ – was taken in his absence. The Bihar massacre of Muslims under the nose of a Congress government was too horrendous a tragedy for Gandhi to bear with or ignore. He would rather prefer in those difficult times to camp in Patna and tour around in the riot-affected countryside to admonish and persuade Hindus against their inhuman acts and assuage the pain and anguish of the devastated Muslims. He had even threatened a fast which he refrained from only when the riots braked to a halt after the threat. He met Mountbatten (once again, ironically, on 1 April, 1947) with the ultimate ‘solution’ he had already made a year before, ‘to invite Jinnah to form a new central  interim government with Muslim League members, [now] replacing the current one led by Nehru’. [ SW1/137]

The radical solution naturally shocked both Mountbatten and Nehru out of their wits, the latter even more; ‘to learn that his Mahatma was quite ready to replace him as premier with the quaid-i-Azam’. [SW2/316] A chagrined Nehru could only conceal his annoyance by saying that Gandhi ‘had been away for four months and was rapidly getting out of touch with events at the Centre’. Yet, perhaps, it was ‘a King Solomon solution’, according to Wolpert. “But Nehru had tasted the cup of power too long to offer its nectar to anyone else – least of all to that ‘mediocre lawyer’ [Jinnah]”.[SW2/317 ] When Mountbatten tried to sound Maulana Azad on Gandhi’s solution the next day, “[h]e staggered me by saying that in his opinion it was perfectly feasible of being carried out, since Gandhi could unquestionably influence the whole of Congress to accept it and work it loyally….he thought that such a plan would be the quickest way to stop bloodshed, and the simplest way of turning over power”. [SW1/139]

 

The plan may have been too quixotic, and, may possibly be, even unacceptable to Jinnah, but there was more to it than was apparent. It was a daring move to reverse the entire chessboard to a fresh configuration. It would have put not only Jinnah but also Nehru and all his senior colleagues now craving for a piece of the power-cake to a rigorous test of political commitment. It was also likely to have halted the bloodshed substantially, and taken the wind out of the sail of Muslim League’s demand for a sovereign Pakistan. As Azad believed, Gandhi’s strong moral hold over the Congress and the masses and the clear message of peace and harmony would have served a twofold purpose: to bring sanity to the centre-stage as well as make the process of power transfer smoother. Azad’s endorsement of Gandhi’s radical plan (particularly in view of the insults heaped upon Azad by Jinnah during his Congress presidentship) was in itself a ‘golden tribute to Azad’s integrity and selflessness’. As Wolpert says, “Azad neither loved nor admired Pandit Nehru any the less than he had before, but he was old enough and wise enough to know that Mahatma Gandhi’s solution was the one and only chance to save India, and Maulana Azad, like Mahatma Gandhi, loved India and its people far more than he craved political power for himself or his dynastic heirs”. [SW1/140]