Wolpert - Shameful flight: the last years of the British Empire in India

The Last Years of the British Empire in India

STANLEY WOLPERT

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Copyright 2006 by Stanley Wolpert

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolpert, Stanley A., 1927

Shameful flight : the last years of the British Empire in India / Stanley Wolpert.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-19-539394-1 (pbk.)

1. BritishIndiaHistory20th century.2. IndiaHistoryPartition, 1947.3. IndiaHistoryQuit India movement, 1942.4. IndiaHistory20th century.I. Title.

DS480.45.W55 2006

954.03'59dc22

2006040121

IN MID-AUGUST OF 1947 the worlds mightiest modern empire, on which the sun never set, abandoned its vow to protect one-fifth of humankind. Britains shameful flight from its Indian Empire came only ten weeks after its last viceroy, Lord Louis (Dickie) Mountbatten, took it upon himself to cut ten months from the brief time allotted by the Labor governments cabinet to withdraw its air and fleet cover, as well as the shield of British troops and arms, from South Asias 400 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.

Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his cabinet gave Mountbatten until June of 1948 to try to facilitate agreement between the major competing political party leaders of India to work together within a single federation. But adrenaline-charged Mountbatten scuttled that last best hope of the British Imperial Raj ( Sanskrit for King or Ruler and by extension Rule or Government) to leave India to a single independent government, deciding instead to divide British India into fragmented dominions of India and Pakistan. The hastily and ineptly drawn lines of partition of North Indias two greatest provinces, Punjab and Bengal, slashed through their multicultural heartlands. They were drawn by an English jurist who had never set foot on the soil of either province. Following Britains flight, a tsunami of more than ten million desperate refugees swept over North India: Hindus and Sikhs rushed to leave ancestral homes in newly created Pakistan, Muslims fled in panic out of India. Each sought shelter in next-doors dominion. Estimates vary as to the number who expired or were murdered before ever reaching their promised land. A conservative statistic is 200,000; a more realistic total, at least one million.

Although I could more politely and at much greater length summarize the central thesis of my book, and what I have now long believed to be the primary cause of the tragedy of Partition and its aftermath of slaughter and ceaseless pain, I could not more pithily, nor aptly, state my own view of Mountbattens work in India. If for no other reason than to counter the many laudatory, fawning accounts of Lord Mountbattens splendid, historically unique, brilliant and wonderful viceroyalty that have for more than half a century filled shelves of Partition literature and Mountbatten hagiography, I feel justified in adding my Shameful Flight to historys list of the British Rajs last years. World War II, British politics, personal ambitions, and simple ignorance each added complexity to the picture, and I shall also have much to say about the roles of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, and viceroys Lord Linlithgow and Lord Wavell, as well as prime ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and president Franklin D. Roosevelt, though none of them played as tragic or central a role as did Mountbatten.

Ironically, it was the impact of World War I that brought the two major political parties of British Indiathe Indian National Congress and the Muslim Leaguetogether, though only briefly, on a single platform in 1916. Both parties supported the Allied War effort and jointly called for dominion status as their national goal after the war ended. It was a golden opportunity for India as a whole. The architect of that 1916 Lucknow Pact Regrettably, Jinnah and Gandhi, who both became barristers at Londons Inns of Court and were inspired by the same political guru to advocate Indian freedom from British Imperial rule, could never agree on the best tactics to win Indias liberation. Nor did they really like or completely trust one other.

Mahatma Gandhi had transformed himself in South Africa, abandoning his barrister dress and Western sophistication for the naked simplicity and poverty of rural India. He embraced this image with a passion that made him the revolutionary hero of Indias Hindu masses, depending as he did on ancient Hindu symbols and ideas to launch his satyagraha (Hold fast to the truth) campaigns of noncooperation against the British Raj. Jinnah cautioned Gandhi against the dangers of his revolutionary tactics, warning him of the potential for violence that could erupt from exciting too many illiterate, impoverished people to take to the streets or to lie down on railroad tracks as a way to oppose British rule and Western civilization. Though Jinnah came from a traditional Muslim family he developed a mind that was modern and secular, and was as brilliant and sharp as any of his adversaries or colleagues, whether Indian or British. Like the best pre-Gandhian leaders of Indias National Congress Party, such as Gokhale, Jinnah continued to work toward and hoped to win Indias freedom by his brilliant mastery of secular Western law and parliamentary rules of governance. He eloquently appealed to both the British viceroy in India and the British cabinet in London for expanding opportunities for more qualified Indians to take over jobs that Englishmen held at much higher costs, socially as well as financially, for India. Gandhi considered Jinnahs old-fashioned liberal appeals to Britains Parliament, or to viceregal sympathy, a waste of energy and time. Jinnah thought the Mahatmas revolutionary calls to action irresponsibly provocative madness. Had either of British Indias two greatest modern leaders been willing to subordinate his own ambitions to the leadership of the other, India might well have won its freedom much earlier and without Partition.

After World War I ended in Allied victory, the British no longer needed the million valiant Indian soldiers who had been shipped to the Western and Near Eastern fronts. Great Britains generals and Indias civil servants were more terrified by than grateful to demobilized native Indian troops. So instead of granting India the virtual sovereign independence of dominion status (within the British Commonwealth) that Indias National Congress Party and the Muslim League both demanded and expected as their reward for loyal service, Viceroy Lord Chelmsford extended Indias invidious wartime martial law ordinances. Those Black Acts, as Gandhi labeled them, removed the shield of British civil liberties and legal rights of due process from India, allowing any Indian subject to be arrested by a British officer of the Raj and held indefinitely under preventive detention, without being charged with any violation of law. Gandhi called upon Indians to refuse civilly to obey such Satanic laws as unjust. Jinnah, who had recently been elected to Bombays seat on the viceroys legislative council, resigned, because, as he informed the viceroy: The fundamental principles of justice have been uprooted and the constitutional rights of the people have been violated... by an over-fretful and incompetent bureaucracy which is neither responsible to the people nor in touch with real public opinion.