Analysis of the underlying strategic imperatives behind India's Partition. The author was the aide-de-camp to India's last viceroy, then later went on to have a long diplomatic career for India.
1) Draw arbitrary borders through and around your colonies to make a patchwork of pseudostates,
2) Make sure that within those arbitrary pseudostates are different peoples who hate each other,
3) Use these antagonisms: favor one group and then another, establish a client oligarchy with one and then another, etc. Maximize animosity and conflict where you once ruled.
4) Sit back, relax, and enjoy neo-colonialism! You've now established near-permanent economic dominance over your former colonies.
There's a further irony: if you correctly follow the above steps, your former colony will continue to allow you, even ask you, to meddle in its internal affairs thanks to the very instability you created.
Understanding this "game" [*] helps you see things like "peacekeeping missions" and IMF "rescue packages" in a totally different light. It explains the geopolitical axiom "instability abroad produces stability at home." It illustrates such astoundingly cynical zero-sum thinking among the geopolitical architects of the 20th century that it really makes you wonder what could happen if we could just figure out a way to pull together, rather than work at odds.
Finally, it also makes you wonder how soon a large number of countries will unite and throw off the EU/NATO/USA neo-colonialist yoke once and for all. It's coming.
It took me a while to make my way through this book, in part because the events of the Partition are enormously complex, with intrigues, backroom deals, doublecrosses and incessant conflict and bickering among the various factions involved. And there are a lot of factions: the mostly-Hindu Congress Party, the Muslim League Party, Sikh minorities throughout the subcontinent, the Portuguese-colonized portions of India, the various Princely States and of course the British government. On top of that were the various individual leaders: Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Mountbatten and many others, all with their own goals, agendas and principles (or in some cases, lack of principles). The timeline and all the moving parts are quite complicated and difficult to follow, especially if you're a newbie like I am to this period of history. It reminds me a little of all the complex drivers of the American Civil War: you can put the work in to understand them, or you can give it the high school essay treatment and just put "slavery" down as the cause. Which is what most people would do.
Reading this book along with other works related to India's Partition era has been a useful cognitive exercise for me to train myself to avoid simple (or worse, simplistic) explanations, and to hold multiple factors in my mind at the same time while I think through a complex historical period. Most major historical events have multiple causes, multiple drivers, as well as multiple potential counterfactuals. It certainly keeps one epistemically humble.
One more thing: somehow my speech-to-text app on my phone recognizes all of this book's Indian proper names, and, astoundingly, spells them all correctly.
[*] It's of course appalling to use the word "game" in this context, but the more I read about history, and in particular the more I read about post-colonial history, the more I understand the cynical darkness of this word and the reason for its use.
[As usual, please save yourself and don't read any further, what follows are just my notes on the text.]
Notes:
9-10 "Once the British realized that the Indian nationalists who would rule India after its independence would deny them military cooperation under a British Commonwealth defence umbrella, they settled for those willing to do so by using religion for the purpose. The problem could be solved if Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League Party, would succeed in his plan to detach the northwest of India abutting Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang and establish a separate state there--Pakistan."
12 "...the Western policies of exploiting political Islam to pressurize India have run their course."
12 The author's "thesis statement" is essentially that Britain protected its strategic and economic interests after withdrawal from India "by outmaneuvering the Indian leaders and partitioning India."
Chapter 1: The Great Game
15 Faint praise here for Nehru's defense minister, Krishna Menon: "Menon's ego had then not inflated to the extent that was to warp his thinking and judgment after Nehru made him defense minister."
16ff In the 1800s India and surrounding states served as buffers between the Russian and British empires; the rivalry and indirect conflict between the British Empire and Russia, especially in Asia, was termed the "tournament of shadows" by Count K. V. Nesselrode because there was no direct Anglo-Russian clash of arms. The expression "the great game" came from Kipling's novel Kim and then passed into common usage.
19 Good review here of how England, after World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, was able to redraw several states from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan, and thus establish more direct control in the Persian Gulf region.
22 Interesting to hear England's strategic plans after World War II with regard to the Indian Ocean, the Middle East and the Far East; maintaining their military presence; their role opposing Soviet expansion, etc. It all sounds so delusional in retrospect as England's role would be completely secondary to the United States, and then within a matter of a few years they lose control of India entirely.
22 Partitioning India in some way had already come up as a strategic idea as early as 1945.
23ff Key ideas here: India's "usefulness" to Britain was for defense, not as a market any more. Britain would have to withdraw from India sooner rather than later. The Congress Party leadership in India were unlikely to cooperate with Britain on military matters, whereas the Muslim League Party, which wanted a partition, were willing to cooperate. If Britain could separate India's strategic Northwest from the rest of the country this would give it a place from which they could defend both the Middle East and the Indian Ocean area against Russia. Also Britain wanted to score points with the Islamic world, partly as a bulwark against Communism but also to curry favor with other Islamic states of the Middle East.
29 Note that the Labour government that took over under Clement Atlee closed ranks with the Tory leadership and supported the partition of India: Labour kind of fucked India over despite being more sympathetic to India and the Indian independence movement.
29 Pakistan ultimately joined the Baghdad Pact and CENTO (a union of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, England and the USA against the Soviet Union); likewise Pakistan entered a bilateral military pact with the USA as well--so the USA could run U2 planes over the Soviet Union (!)
Chapter 2: The Anglo-Muslim League Alliance
34 Absolutely fascinating quote here from Gandhi speaking to one of the British leaders in India shortly after Hitler had overrun France in 1940: "Let them [the Germans] take possession of your beautiful island, if Hitler chooses to occupy your homes, vacate them, if he does not give you free passage out, allow yourself, man, woman and child to be slaughtered." The author was asked whether Gandhi was turning senile. This turned out to be the first of a number of misunderstandings (on a number of levels) between the British and the Congress Party.
36 The author suggests that had India appeared more unified or unifiable, and had it looked like it would help carry out at least some essential British interests, England never would have looked towards Jinnah and the Muslim League, and the partition probably would never have taken place. Obviously this is a counterfactual but it is interesting to think about, a lot of bloodshed could have been saved.
38 Resignation of the Congress Party government in protest for being dragged into World War II without any consultation, as well as without a guarantee of freedom for India after the war; this led to a significant increase in power of the Muslim League, which before couldn't gain any meaningful control nationally in India; the Congress Party made a tremendous blunder here, both by rugpulling England and essentially leaving open a power vacuum for the Muslim League to seize.
38 See also Winston Churchill's "continuous jibes" that Gandhi was "a charlatan and a humbug."
40 Subhash Chandra Bose, a Bengali, a rival to Nehru: he opposed Gandhi's non-violence policy and wanted to pursue an active and violent struggle to overthrow the British. Bose split with the Congress Party and formed his own party, the Forward Bloc, in 1940.
40 Note also India didn't want to support Britain in the second World War without a clear guarantee of freedom afterwards because of the brutal suppression of India's independence movements after India gave Britain so much support after World War I. They couldn't forget how England doublecrossed them after WWI.
45 The author calls the 1939 mass resignations of the Congress Party from provincial governments across India (they resigned in protest of perceived prevarication from Britain about a path toward Indian independence after the War) as "interpreted by many in England as its refusal to support Britain in its life-and-death struggle against the Axis powers. It turned out to be a watershed in Indo-British relations."
50ff Jinnah announces on March 24th, 1940 that "the Muslims are a separate nation... and they must have their own homelands" while suggesting the creation of autonomous and sovereign states in the Northwest and Eastern zones that were both majority Muslim. The way Jinnah played it was to frame up a partition where there would be an Anglo-Muslim League alliance versus a Congress Party-Hindu India; these would be the key power blocs. The idea of having a separate Muslim state that would be "dependent on British support" but that would also "safeguard British interests" in the region was the idea here and this is ultimately what happened.
53 The author has a gift for a run on sentence: see this horrendous example:
"In May 1940 as the German panzers smashed through the low countries and raced towards Paris, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as the prime minister of Great Britain and Leopold Amery, who had been two years senior to Churchill at the Harrow School and who had hurled the Cromwellian words 'in the name of God, go!' at Chamberlain, on the floor of the House of Commons, succeeded Lord Zetland as secretary of state for India." Whoa.
53 Churchill's ascension to Prime Minister in 1940 was "ominous" for India; Churchill "had no qualms regarding how many pieces it was broken up into." Churchill hates India and everything to do with it according to notes from Lord Wavell, the future viceroy.
54ff Another striking, actually shocking, quote from Gandhi in a letter that he wrote to viceroy Linlithgow: "You are losing: if you persist it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man. If you call it off to-day he will follow suit. If you want to send me to Germany or anywhere else I am at your disposal." Horrendous on a number of levels: first, failing to understand what was really going on in Europe; second, to antagonize England with these statements was foolish from India's perspective too, it's just going to turn Churchill and Churchill's government even further against India's goals. Worst of all this could be viewed as totally hypocritical and in contradiction to Gandhi's overt support years earlier for Britain's military in World War I. Also at this time some 200k Indian recruits were volunteering for military service each month and Indian industrialists were producing goods for the British army.
57 Note that at this time in 1940 there is significant opposition to the separatist policies even within the Muslim League. See for example Muslim League leaders of the Punjab and Bengal were both totally opposed to the concept of a Muslim nation.
58ff When the Hindu Congress Party sent its members to speak in public to protest against recruitment into the British army, with the specific intention of getting arrested (Nehru was the second leader to do so); this happened until all the leaders of the Congress Party were jailed. According to British intelligence the point of this was to embarrass the British government morally. Note however while it happens there was almost no public knowledge of it because the press had been muzzled; people hardly knew what was going on; the peak arrests were some 15,000 in this movement; and per the author the effect on India's war effort was "nil" as some 2 million Indians joined the British Indian armed forces by the end of the war. Worse, it gave tremendous gains to the Muslim League and to Jinnah in particular.
Chapter 3: The Pakistan Scheme and Jinnah
65ff "In fact, an all-out Pakistan scheme seems to me to be the prelude to continuous internal warfare in India." Private letter from Leopold Amery, Secretary of State for India, to Viceroy Lord Linlithgow, 1940. Note that at this point England expected to stay on in India for many decades, there was no interest among English leadership to create a separate sovereign state, Muslim or anything else, and England had not begun to think of how to fit India into any kind of post-war defense strategy at this point.
66 Note that many if not most Muslim leaders were not interested in withdrawal and confinement to the two upper corners of the subcontinent; they had no interest in abandoning the heartland of India, which meant abandoning some of the most important symbols of Muslim power and glory. Mohammed Jinnah's scheme appeared defeatist to many Muslims.
70 British conservatives wanted to keep India divided all along, with a Muslimstan, a Hindustan and a Princestan (the Princely states).
73 See also the hostage theory: because there were Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India this would restrain Hindus from acting against Muslims left behind in India.
74 Another irony about Mohammed Jinnah: that for the first 60 years of his life he fought for Hindu-Muslim political unity and a united independent India. [The subtext here (the author doesn't state it outright) seems to be that he was used by the British somehow or was a useful idiot to them in some way.]
75ff Some background here on how the Portuguese reached India under encouragement from the Papacy to get "rearwords of the land of the Moors"; but then the British defeated the Portuguese, then fought against Muslim rulers; see the Battle of Plassey, 1757, when the Hindu General Mir Mardan led a Bengali Muslim army and Muslims and Hindus fought side by side against the British. After the 1857 mutiny, Britain began a strategy of divide and rule, joining up somewhat with Muslims, getting them to bury the hatchet in order to manage the country and control it better; note that many Muslims (particularly Shia) were spread all over the British Empire and were dependent upon British protection; see leaders like Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98) and Agha Khan (late 1800s) both of whom spoke for Anglo-Muslim cooperation.
77ff Per the author, Jinnah was not a practicing Muslim, did not follow the prayers or read the Quran, he drank alcohol, ate pork, never performed the Hajj, etc. He saw himself as a modern secular man, had a large ego and ambition; also apparently hypocritical, he was against the Muslim League's demand for separate electorates for Muslims but then did not hesitate to contest elections on these terms later, he also appeared to discover that he could dominate Muslim politics by joining the Muslim League and moving forward as both a participant in the Congress Party and the Muslim League at the same time; he was also likely an elitist: he didn't believe it was a good idea to truck with the ignorant and illiterate masses as Ghandi was doing.
79 See how Jinnah and Gandhi flip-flopped their arguments for supporting the British war effort from World War I to World War II; Gandhi supported the British Indian army supporting England in World War I but then used Jinnah's argument to argue against India supporting England in the second World War: demanding to be treated equally or as equal subjects under the king; this was Jinnah's argument for World War I, while Jinnah later argued that Indians should go and fight for England in World War II in order to obtain benefits later, which was Gandhi's argument for the first World War! Wild.
80ff Jinnah strikes the reader as politically opportunistic, brittle and easily insulted, not held back particularly by any Muslim beliefs, but willing to opportunistically use those beliefs if it would lead him to power.
85 Jinnah's wife Ruttie leaves him in 1928 to live separately in Bombay, she then dies a year later.
86ff Jinnah goes back to London to practice law, he's wealthy, lives very well, but it wasn't enough; he wanted to get back and get involved in political leadership in India. Also using the idea of separating Pakistan as an avenue to power once it was clear he wouldn't be able to obtain very much political power in a unified India. [It's interesting here to see what goes into making an ideal "client" for a colonialist power]. Likewise at this time the Hindu Congress Party was increasingly alienating the Muslim League leadership.
92 Jinnah now has a lung cancer diagnosis, it is terminal, 1939. "Whatever had to be done, had now to be done fast." And when the Congress Party walked out of provincial governments, Britain looked to the Muslim League, and by extension Jinnah, as a mechanism of power to support the war effort.
93ff more comments on Jinnah's lapsed Islamism, his vanity, his large houses despite his lack of family or children, he had no son and it only willed his daughter a tiny amount. He becomes the first governor general of Pakistan then dies about a year after the creation of Pakistan, which one would think would be his crowning achievement, but he was overheard by his doctor to have said "I am convinced that I have committed the greatest blunder of my life."
Chapter 4: The Churchill-Roosevelt Clash over India
97 Churchill who "slept the sleep of the saved and thankful" as he wrote in his diary after learning about Japan bombing Pearl Harbor in 1941; he then goes to Washington to work out a war plan with FDR, and during this visit Roosevelt first raised the Indian problem on an anti Empire line. Churchill commented: "I reacted so strongly at such length that he never raised it verbally again."
99ff Interesting to read Clement Attlee's language at the same time: "The hitherto axiomatic acceptance of the innate superiority of the European over the Asiatic sustained a severe blow... The reverses which we and the Americans are sustaining from the Japanese at the present time will continue this process... The fact that we are--necessarily--driven to a belated recognition of China as an equal and of Chinese as fellow fighters for civilization against barbarism makes the Indian ask why he, too, cannot be master in his own house." Atlee advocated sending a representative to India with wide powers to draw up some sort of unspecified negotiated agreement with India.
101ff The so-called Cripps Mission, which failed: it "promised" India full independence (either in or out of the Commonwealth) based on a constitution framed by the Indians themselves, but the conduct of the war would remain in British hands; however, the Indians must accept any British Indian province or princely state has a right to stay out of the proposed Indian Union, and likewise India would accept the principle of partition after Britain withdrew after the war; note also Churchill thought very little of Cripps, saying, crushingly: "The trouble is his chest is a cage in which two squirrels are at war, his conscience and his career."; the Cripps mission contained a "cuckoo's egg" of Pakistan; the deal opened the door for the creation of Pakistan; note also England maintained of public position of "our ideal remains a United India" despite quietly making the Cripps deal.
103 "Evidence suggests that by 1945 defence had certainly become the prime factor for Britain's India policy." Thus the importance of creating a separate Muslim Pakistan to maintain a sphere of influence in the Middle East as well as control (and freedom from Russian influence in) the Straits of Hormuz near Iran as well as in the Persian Gulf; also control/influence over oil interests in Iran, Iraq and Arabia.
103ff note that by 1942 the USA was concerned about India from the standpoint of Japanese power; that Japan could attack India "virtually unopposed" if they knew the real situation there.
105 [I fell down a rabbit hole right here looking up Pamela Churchill Harriman, an American socialite who probably slept her way to the top, ultimately getting a diplomatic post in France; she was married to Winston Churchill's son, a dissolute gambler, while married to him she had an affair with Averil Harriman; she later married Harriman decades later for her third marriage. Avril Harriman during World War II had the job of voicing Roosevelt's views on India to Churchill over Churchill's objections.]
106 Churchill view was since 75% of the Indian soldiers are Muslims from the northern provinces (and most of the rest of India is passive), thus Churchill would not take any step to alienate the Muslims; note that it was actually the case that only 35% of the troops were Muslims. Churchill in a telegram to Roosevelt also played up the idea to not "throw India into chaos on the eve of invasion." Churchill appears here to be quite a skillful prevaricator! Note also his famous quote "In war the truth must sometimes have an escort of lies."
111 Another interesting nuance: the Congress Party (the Hindu political power structure) had sort of a complicated set of wishes and complicated set of disagreements with England, while Jinnah and the idea of "partitioning off Pakistan" was a simple, tractable idea that "projected an impression of strength of his position, even when it was inherently weak." Interesting how perception often drives reality.
111 Also interesting to think about how sending a sham mission that was doomed to fail from the start can actually produce a success: the failed Cripps mission made one of Churchill's political opponents suffer, it harmed the opposition party slightly, it showed the Americans how complex Indian politics were, and it set the stage for a better long-term strategic situation for England, albeit not so good for India. Also afterwards there are all these political points to score! "The cheek of the man [Cripps] to think that he could do in a fortnight what his lordship has not been able to do in six years."
112ff Roosevelt saw through the deliberate failure of the Cripps mission, he likely knew that it was designed to fail and gave Churchill pushback; but a lot of this moved to the back burner as the invasion of Europe and North Africa had to be mapped out between England and the US. Roosevelt basically backed off for the time being (however a few months later, when Churchill and Gandhi clashed during the Quit India movement, the US played another role which will be covered in a later chapter).
119 "If the forging of the Linlithgow-Jinnah alliance in 1940 was the first step that opened the way for the creation of Pakistan, Churchill's putting forward the idea of the provincial option in 1942, was the second step towards this goal.... If the first grave error the Congress Party committed at the end game of Empire was to resign from provincial ministries in 1939, which left the field open for Jinnah, its second was to spurn the Cripps offer."
Chapter 5: The Mahatma's Fury
123 "Gandhi had now begun to feel that his supposed partner, the British viceroy [Linlithgow], had betrayed him and used this period of relative peace [the 1940-41 period when the Congress Party adopted a generally passive role] to build up the separatist Jinnah against other Muslim leaders who favored a United India and had indeed forged an alliance with the Muslim League Party... The Cripps proposal, by sowing the seeds of partition, was the proverbial last straw. Gandhiji, therefore, felt that he had to rethink his approach." Note however that Linlithgow saw Jinnah as the better bet because Jinnah was dependent on him; also, India under the Congress Party and Gandhi was now in opposition to the war under Gandhi's non-violence principle.
123ff Subhash Chandra Bose, disappearing from house arrest, breaking with the Congress Party and forming the Forward Bloc; disavowing Gandhi as well as nonviolence and pacifism; he was one leader of the Indian freedom movement who was not implicated in the creation of Pakistan. Bose later surfaced in Berlin, his flight was the stuff of legend, it was a slap on the British face; he was also creator of the salutation "Jai Hind," ("victory to India") which remains a common greeting today; Germans then transported him by submarine around the Cape of Good Hope and handed him over to Japan.
125ff Gandhi begins the Quit India resolution, the idea here was if the British could not be persuaded to go they would have to be thrown out; once they were removed India would be no longer threatened by Japan because Japan's quarrel was with Britain; even if Japan invaded India it would be met with non-violent resistance, note also the even stationing of foreign soldiers, including Americans, on Indian soil was a menace to Indian freedom. Note that Nehru objected because this would mean India would become a passive partner of the Axis; Note also that the British couldn't allow India to be used by Japan against them. Note also Nehru stated "It is Gandhiji's feeling that Japan and Germany will win. This feeling unconsciously governs his thinking." Note that this statement was picked up by London from British intelligence and they used it by telling Roosevelt about it and denouncing Gandhi as a quisling, this was also very useful for British "don't meddle with us in India" propaganda purposes in the USA.
134ff The famous "Quit India" resolution passes, August 1842, calling for mass non-violent agitation and mass non-cooperation to force Britain to quit India immediately. English authorities promptly arrested the leaders, including Gandhi; then the Quit India movement fell into the hands of more violent revolutionaries right afterwards, producing quite a bit of damage to infrastructure and impacting production of war supplies in India; it was seen as the most serious revolt against British rules since the 1857 great mutiny; "It took fifty-seven battalions and severe repressive measures, such as the machine gunning of mobs from aircraft to restore order." Note also this was happening at a catastrophic time for England in the war, they were getting destroyed by Japan in the east, by Germany in Africa, Germany was rampaging through the Soviet union, etc; it was seen by the British public as India stabbing England in the back "at the moment of their direst peril."
137ff See the delusional letters that Gandhi wrote to Hitler and Mussolini, imploring them to use non-violence; Gandhi's biographer Robert Payne wrote, "In the quiet of the ashram the greater quiet of the gas chambers was inconceivable; he did not have and could not have any imaginative conception of their [the Jews] plight, nor had he much conception of dictatorships."
139ff Gandhi shakes himself out of this situation with his 21-day fast in February of 1943; comments here from the author on Gandhi and his mystique and his influence; comments on satyagraha or non-violent non-cooperation: "The true power of satyagraha lay in provoking deep moral stirrings in the oppressor by the willingness of the oppressed to withstand all atrocities, even to the extent of calmly facing self-annihilation." The problem with satyagraha, however, it is that it does not work for sovereign states fighting oppression or aggression by another country; it can be used to fight racism or colonialism but not in modern war between nation states and it can't be a policy against say for example a dictatorship with completely different ethical system. Per the author: "It was unfortunate for the country that he [Gandhi] could not sort out this confusion in his mind or draw a clear line between tolerance and appeasement as India became independent."
142 The 1982 film about Gandhi "did not adequately portray the later Gandhi" according to the author. He had lost his clear vision and practicality that he had in the 1920s and 30s.
142-3 See also the great "Poona Pact" that Gandhi negotiated in 1932 dealing with lower castes; note also that the lowest castes today constitute 20% of India's population up from only 6% half a century ago, increasing in absolute numbers from 24 million to 200 million people (!!) Thus these people cannot be ignored politically at all [this also starts to show how caste systems, class systems, any kind of system of control, can become inverted, the last shall be first, and demographics drive everything].
Chapter 6: India, the UK and the USA
146 "Most Congress Party leaders did not pay much attention to foreign affairs; nor indeed did Gandhiji. However, Nehru, who did, was concerned about the American and Chinese reactions to Gandhiji's moves."
147ff Gandhi and Chiang Kai-Shek writing to the US president FDR to influence him on India; the back and forth infuriated Churchill who saw Gandhi as defeatist and even pro-Japanese. Note that Britain thought the US was meddling in their affairs with their typical "American sentimentalism" when it came to India, but the US wanted to establish itself as the friend of peoples all over the world and therefore it verbally argued for the right for people to choose their government; Churchill turned this around by saying that such a view would cause Arabs to expel the Jews from Palestine, warning the Americans of unforeseen consequences of declarations like this; the US even warned Indian nationalists that too much civil disobedience would reduce American public support for their freedom movement; also England framed Gandhi as pro-Japanese to rein in American support for Indian "insta-independence"; all of this was happening in the 1941-42 time period.
158 "To become partisan of either Great Britain or India would seriously handicap us in dealing with the other side." These are basically FDR's instructions to the US's special representative in India, eventually the USA gets religion on how to handle the situation.
162ff Extended comments here on the evolution of Indian knowledge about the US during this period: Indians went from knowing literally nothing--only knowing about our cars and our films (although the films never reached the villages it was just the idea of Hollywood--to being shocked that Americans were the primary partner in the global war effort; mostly they viewed English and Americans as "whites" or red-faced monkeys; also any Indian who was educated in England tended to have leftist and English-type prejudices about Americans (that they were ignorant and uncouth for example); Indian Communists also viewed the US was just a capitalist country out to snatch India for its own, away from Britain; Note how Indian communist support shifted to British and the US immediately after Hitler attacked the Soviet Union... Gandhi displayed hardly any interest in the United States; Nehru sought Roosevelt's help but later came to distrust the Americans; in the 1940s there was no actual conflict of interest between the US and India, "actually quite the opposite" but "the possibilities of misunderstandings remained enormous."
164 "Churchill had trumped Roosevelt's intervention for self-government in India by playing 'the Pakistan card', i.e, by highlighting the value of the Muslim connection to the West." Later what happened was Pakistan became an important ally to the US in the Cold War with great strategic importance to the Middle East.
Chapter 7: Wavell Plays the Great Game
167 "In the British administrative system, the man on the spot traditionally enjoyed considerable authority... a viceroy with definite views had the means to influence high level policy back home." Here the author is setting the stage for what happened after Lord Archibald Wavell replaced Linithgow as viceroy; in particular producing a blueprint for how India would be partitioned and what would go to Pakistan without giving the impression that the British had a hand in the division of India.
168 Interesting discussion here on how even with access to secret archives you don't know what the government's intentions or policy really is even after the documents are released, partly because nobody writes down everything, partly because many things are written to give an impression and also, many things are not written under any circumstances. Then you have the actions taken by important officials to take into account, as well as any circumstantial evidence; also the Labour Party after World War II "sought to live down their country's reputation for 'divide and rule'": they also had to avoid giving any appearance of helping communist advocates in India, and they had to reckon with American public opinion.
169 "Churchill considered Wavell overcautious and defeatist, 'eminently suited to run a provincial golf club'" and didn't expect him to do much of any significance in India. "The irony is that one whom Churchill considered so mediocre has come to be acknowledged by several historians as the most important viceroy of India since Lord Curzon. His forte was his lack of illusions; and his achievement, the division of India."
170 Linlithgow and Wavell agreed on only one point: that British position in India depending on the goodwill of the Muslims and on the Muslim League party.
171ff Note Wavell saw that the British position in India was tenuous at best; note Indian soldiers and POWs in Singapore switched sides to the Japanese under the influence of Subhash Chandra Bose. See also various naval mutinies that occurred in the port of Bombay in 1946; as well as unrest in the Indian Air Force and other military branches; all of this was triggered by a commanding officer's racist comments, but it obviously had an ultimate cause of a deeper disaffection and conflict between India and its British occupiers.
174 The author here explores the racism of the British and how it caused significant antipathy in the British Indian army; many anecdotes from different sources here.
175ff By the mid to late 1940s most English men in India considered the Hindus and the Congress Party their enemy and the Muslims their friend. Note this was the exact opposite leading up to the 1857 mutiny when the Muslim was "Britain's enemy number one." And of course Western opinion turned once again against the Muslims after the World Trade Center attacks.
176 On the 1943 famine in Bengal which according to Wavell did "incalculable" damage to Britain's reputation.
177ff Wavell saw a solution to Britain's problems in the subcontinent and a way to retain a military presence even as India obtained independence: it would be to build up Jinnah and withdraw British forces to the Muslim majority provinces, particularly the port city of Karachi; this would be the best way to counter Soviet expansionism, and Pakistan would become a dominion of the British Empire regardless of what happened in India; also it would be a way to maintain a power base if Britain were totally thrown out of India. This solution sort of covered all bases; note Wavell did not consult London on this because of Churchill's position against any move towards Indian independence.
180ff Gandhi accepts the principle of Pakistan without any real thought or strategy; suddenly the Muslims are all convinced that partition is coming: thus they had better unite under somebody. Also there was a failed summit between Gandhi and Jinnah, and Wavell used that summit to work out a British initiative and eventually persuade Churchill to go forward with Partition. Note also that England was more concerned about Soviet expansionism towards the Middle East than towards the subcontinent, they realized that Russia was the real threat once World War II was over; thus India clearly had much more strategic importance. Thus Wavell "hinted at the possibility of detaching a part of India to achieve British objectives."
185ff Wavell calls/hosts a conference of Indian leaders in June of 1945, designed to fail, "a charade from the beginning to the end." This gave legs to the idea of Pakistan and united the Muslims as a bloc.
188 Churchill and the Conservative party lose general elections in July 1945; Clement Atlee as Labour party leader takes over as prime minister. Atlee and England recognized the United States now as the leading global (and nuclear) power, and saw that the USA was also willing to exercise its agenda limiting European Empire globally. Also John Maynard Keynes warned the Labour cabinet that the Empire was costing them 2 billion pounds to police and administer, a tremendous overextension of England's fiscal budget.
191 Other problems: "The Punjab and Bengal would need to be divided: for the entire Punjab to go to Pakistan would be totally unacceptable to the Sikhs and to award the Hindu-majority Calcutta and West Bengal to Pakistan would be patently unfair to the Hindus."
191 Wavell at this time (as well as the Labour ministers) were seriously contemplating dividing the country more than two years before India's independence, and long before Lord Louis Mountbatten took office as viceroy, despite this Mountbattan was blamed generally for the Partition and the bloodbath that followed.
191 Churchill to Wavell after he left office: "keep a bit of India" (e g., Pakistan).
192ff Subhash Chandra Bose killed in a suspicious air accident in Formosa in 1945 after the British reconquered Rangoon. Also a rebellion in the British Indian armed forces over a trial of three Indian officers (one Hindu, one Muslim and one Sikh) in Delhi for treason.
193 The case for partition was made when Wavell said mass disorder was coming, that the Indian Army would spearhead it, that the Indian administrators in the colonial government would be unlikely to stop it because they didn't want to make enemies of their future masters, etc. [Of course it did turn out that there was tremendous violence anyway...]
194 Jinnah: "Hindus would accept it [Pakistan] as it would give them three-quarters of India, which is more than they have ever had before."
195 Then in response to a request from the UK secretary of state for recommendations for how to do the partition, Wavell responded with a telegram with a blueprint of a future Pakistan "which was implemented almost to the letter," a document ignored by most historians and per the author "one of the most important communications sent by any viceroy of India ever."
Chapter 8: Attlee's 'Smoke Screens'
199ff Clement Attlee was against partition, but by the time he took office he knew it a united India was impossible. He also wanted a partitioned India while maintaining good relations with Hindustan.
204 Note that the idea of Pakistan is a member of Muslim brotherhood globally was hilarious on some level; Afghanistan was so hostile to Pakistan that it was the only country to vote against its admission to the UN, and there was zero contact between Jinnah and Saudi Arabia.
205 Note also the Hindu Congress Party gained power in regional elections throughout many of the Muslim majority territories earmarked to become part of Pakistan.
206ff There were other hypocrisies surrounding Pakistan as an idea: it wasn't so much to protect Muslims but to protect Britain's strategic goals; and, how could there be a "Two Nation" theory where Muslims could not coexist with other Indians if so many millions were going to be doing exactly that outside of Pakistan?
210 Note the multiple smoke screens that Attlee used to shield the idea of partition in the first place: first of all to blame the need to partition India on the lack of India's ability to unify itself without violence, secondly he wanted to put the idea on to his military as if it was advice from them for why he agreed to dividing India; [the smoke screen concept is kind of interesting, it's a metaphor for other government plans that are being planned for us but that need to be released conceptually when it's possible to do so, when it's inevitable or somehow necessary based on conditions the government is set up, we can look maybe at aspects of the pandemic or the Ukraine war as genres of this type of smoke screen mechanism]
214ff More on the smokescreens at play here: the Congress Party was led to believe that they would be running an interim government, this would placate Nehru and distract them with governmental responsibilities while also getting them to not use/plan any kind of revolt in India. Also the British government would openly trumpet the disadvantages of the Pakistan scheme in order to whittle down Jinnah's demands and create smaller or "truncated" Pakistan. All of this gave the impression to the USA and Clement Attlee's own Labour party that England was doing its utmost to maintain the unity of India.
216 [Kind of a depressing blurb here about how clueless Americans were about India even at the highest levels of government: there's a conversation here between famous propagandist and presidential advisor Walter Lippman and Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles where Dulles has no idea of the different people's of India, confusing Gurkhas with Pakistanis; he's not sure who is Hindu and who is Muslim, etc. Recall that these are genuinely brilliant statesman; thus it's painful to imagine the far larger ignorance of the intellectual dwarfs running the USA in today's much more hypocognizant era.]
219ff Wavell then framed Pakistan in the context of a "breakdown plan" in case Britain lost control in India and its military, or if there were a violent revolt, or if events got out of control; the British would remove to the Pakistan region, this is another set of reasons for making the Pakistan partition plan happen, obviously Britain had longer term strategic and military interests in this plan as well, not just in the short run.
222ff The Calcutta riots: Muslim-organized violence in Calcutta began on August 16th, 1946, ("Direct Action Day"); riots, looting stores, also the British brigadier in Calcutta confined his troops to the barracks for that day. 5,000 dead and 20,000 injured; this was blamed on chief minister Huseyn Suhrawardy (who according to this author was the Muslim League's most unscrupulous leader), who gave a speech to an assembly of 100,000 Muslim listeners that turned out to be "an open invitation to disorder"; listeners began looting shops as soon as they left this meeting. The Hindus and Sikhs struck back; then Gandhi rushed to Calcutta and threatened to fast until death, this caused the violence there to die down, although it quickly spread to other places in the country. Note that these riots were used as convincing proof that Muslims and Hindus could not be expected to coexist in the same country; note also that the question of whether they could be successfully separated into two distinct subsidiary countries was ignored.
Chapter 9: Nehru in the Saddle
[This is the most disorganized chapter of the book, although admittedly it also reflects the disorganization of the historical events themselves, as they start to move rapidly and become more and more complex and confused while still somehow setting the groundwork for Partition]
228 Britain chooses Nehru as vice president of the executive Council of the interim government, effectively a prime minister of this interim government.
229 Dean Acheson writes a memorandum to President Truman suggesting recognition of the interim government in India and an exchange of ambassadors with the USA; Truman approves. The British government was displeased with this American move saying it might give Nehru too much encouragement to do things contrary to British interests.
233ff August 1946: Wavell revives his breakdown plan, setting the Calcutta tragedy as an example of what could happen, this plan was to be put into effect as soon as there were any breakdown in negotiations with Nehru/the interim government.
235ff A coalition government formed: the Congress Party includes the Muslim League in control of the interim government; continued riots and violence all over the country, it became clear that "Hindus and Muslims were best separated."
238ff Note the innocence/naivete, bombast and apparent unreliability (from England's perspective) of the interim government under Nehru, as they joined a UN assembly protesting apartheid in South Africa, protested modern colonialism etc., doing things that England saw as loose cannon behavior; this was seen as "lack of experience" "impatience" and "irresponsibility" by the British foreign office; it also rattled England because they didn't know if they could depend on India. India did not appear to be willing to be "reliable" in the great game, at least from the English viewpoint.
244 On the unsettled and impenetrable boundary region between Afghanistan and India--the Northwest Frontier Province--this border was drawn in 1893 by the British and never accepted by Afghanistan to this day; Afghanistan as buffer empire between the British Empire and Russia dating from the 1907 Anglo-Russian convention. [Holy cow there's a whole rabbit hole here of England's involvement/meddling over the past few centuries in this region, more books to add to the reading queue!!] Note that this region was populated by Pathan/Pashtun peoples, 95% Muslim, it couldn't be divided like other regions of India by Britain; these people also saw Jinnah as a stooge of the British and were (somewhat) more amenable to the Hindu Congress Party than other majority Muslim regions of what would later be Pakistan. See also Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly called the "Frontier Gandhi."
247ff Nehru visited the NWFP region in 1946 and was met with hostility (much of it organized by the Muslim League); he lost his cool, was overly optimistic that he would win over this region, etc.; in a way his visit sealed the fate that Partition would happen.
253 The Congress Party and the Hindu establishment starts to see how partitioning India would also make that easier for them to control what's left, including the various Princely States which covered something like 1/3 of the territory of the country. Realpolitik at its finest here.
254ff Note that many of the experienced British officials in India who knew the country well recognized that at least with Pakistan there would be a unifying force of Islam; Pakistan thus might be more likely to remain an independent state than the rest of India! "Such views influenced British policy makers not to put all their eggs in the Indian basket." They saw India as a potential battleground among Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Communists, etc., basically with no real holistic or unifying culture at all. Thus Pakistan was more of a known quantity in this general view about uncertainty about what India would do once it had Independence; it convinced many British policymakers to join on the side of Partition.
255 Note however the assumption that Muslims would hang together and Hindus would hang together wasn't even accurate--at least not from the standpoint of Islamic Pakistan, because in 1971 Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan while polyglot India survived in one piece.
259 Rioting and violence in Bihar as Hindus massacre Muslims in response to the Calcutta riots [Gandhi broadcasts by radio a threat to fast until death unless the violence is stopped. Nehru even threatens to bomb Hindu rioters from the air...]
261ff On February 20, 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee announces Britain will depart from India no later than June 1948, a major statement; also replaced Wavell with Mountbatten as (last) viceroy of India. "Mountbatten was being sent out to use his well-known charm and negotiating skills to get the Congress Party to agree to Partition... And to get Jinnah's agreement to the 'truncated' Pakistan that Wavell had recommended the previous year."; "It may turn out all right" Wavell said, and even though he "was being dismissed from the viceroyalty, his policy was emerging triumphant!"
255 It's interesting to see how with India and the Congress Party and Nehru being so mercurial and unpredictable in their relations with England almost forced the Partition, because England needed some country in which they had a mutual dependence, a country who depended on them and who they could depend on. "Pakistan is likely to come from 'Congresstan'"
Chapter 10: Mountbatten's Counselor
269ff Mountbatten had been supreme commander of the Southeast Asia command, had taken the surrender of Japanese in Burma, Malay, Indochina, Indonesia and Singapore; Churchill considered him an outstandingly innovative leader; US generals George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower both liked him (they worked together on the invasion of France); in the 1920s he was a wealthy young jetsetter who married one of the richest heiresses in England; Mountbatten himself was a cousin to King George VI, he was also interconnected with a lot of European royalty; his family was originally from Germany and had the name Battenberg, his father was allowed to resign from the British Navy because of his German heritage during World War I and the family anglicized its name to Mountbatten.
273 Mountbatten was handsome, flamboyant, but lacked any kind of British "lordliness" and the Indians liked him; he mingled well with them and his wife frequently went to refugee camps and hospitals and cared for the poor, they were both very popular in India.
273ff Note also Mountbatten was not sent to India to persuade the Indian leaders to accept Partition, this was already agreed to; he was sent to put responsibility of the division of India squarely on the Indians' shoulders, and arrange for India to remain a member of the British Commonwealth (while Pakistan was expected to do so anyway).
276ff At this point Gandhi is mostly sidelined from political power. "No one listens to me anymore; I'm crying in the wilderness." Mountbatten and Lady Mountbatten give him all their time to listen to what he had to say. Mountbatten skillfully used his conversations with Gandhi to understand the latest thinking among other Congress Party leaders.
283 A brief ploy to have an independent Bengal (which would have kept Calcutta and that region as a client state of the British Empire): it had a distinct culture and language and most British commercial interest in India were there, there was a provision to make it independent if its legislators so decided.
284ff Discussion of the Sikhs: formally a religious sect of Hindus that sought to purge elements of Hindu society like the caste system, but by the 17th century had become a militant community with a distinct identity due to the leadership of "the illustrious Maharaja Ranjit Singh"; they became known in the Punjab for a reputation as warriors. They also organized themselves well later during the actual partition, and moved collectively out of regions that were going to be part of Pakistan, while Hindus remained in districts like Lahore and elsewhere in West Punjab until it was too late and thus suffered heavily.
288ff A key summit meeting May 7th, 1947, where the British were determined that India remain in the Commonwealth and were you willing to yield a great deal to have it so; India was willing to give up territory and make other concessions to get independence as early as possible. The deal would use elements including partitioning India using the "smaller Pakistan" version (Wavell's original plan); have both successor states become independent but part of the Commonwealth immediately; give the Northwest Frontier Province and Balukistan to Pakistan in return for India "getting" most of the Princely States; this would more than compensate India for the territory lost to Pakistan.
290 V.P. Menon, credited with successfully negotiating this deal, "probably the ableist Indian civil servant produced during the British Raj." Most historians have ignored his role; he was the closest advisor of the Mountbattens.
295ff Interesting anecdote about Mountbatten returning to London and meeting with Churchill (then leading the opposition party in Parliament); Churchill wouldn't speak to him while he was abed with a cold and growled "I know why you've come to see me." Basically he was angry about losing India and had hoped Mountbatten would be a leader of Empire rather than one who dismantled it. Mountbatten won him over by saying that both Pakistan and India would stay within the Commonwealth. Later, while Churchill was under the misguided impression that this Dominion status would be permanent (note also Churchill was expecting multiple dominions to emerge from India, not just two), he "hurled angry words" at Mountbatten at Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth's wedding in November of 1947, stormed off and "refused to talk to Mountbatten for many years thereafter."
Chapter 11: The End Game of Empire
299ff Various last-minute bargaining, adjustments and referendums in different regions to make sure that Pakistan happens; particular controversies in the Northwest Frontier Province, the Pathan region, Balukistan, certain princely states, etc. India was really close to total balkanization here, but it was averted.
306ff June 3 1947: formal agreement to Partition from Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh (representing the Sikhs); that evening both Indian independence and Partition are announced in the media. Mountbatten then skillfully sold Gandhi on the idea that rather than the Mountbatten plan it should be called the Gandhi plan because all the salient ingredients involved Gandhi's ideas and suggestions. Gandhi went on to say that the viceroy "is left with no choice" and "The British government is not responsible for partition." This help from Gandhi was decisive in persuading everyone to agree to the plan.
311 Discussion of various US State Department communications suggesting the US had hesitancy to speak directly to the princely states and even to establish relations too quickly with Pakistan in order to avoid offending India as well as avoid further balkanization of India. Interesting here also to see how the US was aware that Mountbatten had warned Nehru against "dollar imperialism."
313ff On the integration of the Princely States: this happened way more smoothly than anybody gives Mountbatten and the new Indian government credit for; these states were something like a third of the landmass of the subcontinent, they were autonomous but subject to British "paramountcy" but that paramountcy would lapse with British departure and nobody had any plan for what the relationship would be to the post-independence Indian government; these regions were interspersed all over India and depended on the rest of the country and other regions for communications, currency, electricity, water, imports and exports etc.; there were some 350 Princely States but only five or six were big enough to survive as independent entities. Regions like Hyderabad and Kashmir were problematic but imagine if there were 10 or 50 more Kashmir-type mini-states!!
[It's another rabbit hole to fall down reading about the Princely States and the pointed comments from Nehru that not one of them could survive militarily against a United India and that Princely States that would not unite with (read: give up their power to) India would be seen as enemy states... You can really burn hours and hours reading on Wikipedia about this stuff; note that most of these states just gave up and joined either Pakistan or India very quickly after Independence; Kashmir tried to stay independent but when invaded by Pakistan agreed to join India; Hyderabad also opted for independence but was invaded military by India, etc.]
316ff The author writes about the meeting of the Chamber of Princes July 1947 with Mountbatten, persuading the princely states to join with India with a variety of reasons: that they were getting an offer politically that was not likely to be repeated when Britain left; many of the leaders or key lieutenants of the princely states were too thick headed to understand what was really going on; an overwhelming number of states quickly acceeded to India.
317 Bhopal state did not attend, saying "they were being invited like the Oyster to attend the tea party with the Walrus and the Carpenter." [This is a reference to the story from Alice in Wonderland where the oysters end up getting eaten... you can see in some ways indications of what might have happened across human history around the world: on how various mini-kingdoms in antiquity might have been incorporated into a larger, more centralized nation, either by persuasion or force; and then later those nations were incorporated into nation-states that were even more scaled and large. Some of these mini-kingdoms and ministates might take the deal to join peacefully, some don't, some attempt to remain independent, most don't survive; some get invaded and wiped out, etc.]
318ff What follows here are various discussions of various Princely States and what Mountbatten had to do to persuade them to "join" along with the help of Jinnah or Patel depending on the country; who would take them over; the idiosyncratic demands or complaints each of the Princely States' leaders had; some of the princes became unhinged afterwards and couldn't adjust to the new era although some of their children did adapt; in fact one Princely State had a son elected to Parliament and a grandson elected to the legislative assembly of one of India's states, etc; see also Patiala State: the misdeeds of their princes chronicled in the best seller Maharaja by Diwan Jermani Dass; see also Travancore State, which sought Independence; it had thorium deposits for nuclear energy, it was also a much more advanced state than most other areas of India with universal education, better treatment of untouchables, aluminum manufacturing, etc., this state believed joining India would set it back; they were quickly persuaded by Mountbatten (as well as by evidence of internal trouble that would be started there if they didn't cave in to Indian control), the collapse of this state persuaded many other princes who had not yet made up their minds to join India, leaving only Hyderabad State, Junagadh State and Kashmir State.
322 See Philip Sigler's quote in Mountbatten's biography about the sunset of "princely India": "It was a world which he had helped to destroy; but the inevitability of its passing made its attractions no less seductive."
323ff Interesting thoughts here from the author about the tortured, complicated relationship between the English and Indians, very little interaction, a lot of "superiority" from the British; Indians were excluded from clubs and train compartments and even were expected to dismount from their horses or other conveyances to "salute the sahib" if they happen to cross one on the road; superiority-based attitudes that the author claims weren't the case in the 17th and 18th centuries when British and Indian military strength was more equal; per the author, "equality and battle breeds mutual respect, even fraternity." But by the 19th century Britain had absolute ascendency compared to India and per the author "weakness is what weakness does." [Quite an interesting quote here from the author about his own people.] He goes on to say that respect for India was largely destroyed and any impression of India as a rich country with an ancient civilization disappeared, giving way to ideas like "The White Man's Burden."
327 Note that India and Pakistan celebrated Independence while "not knowing where exactly their boundaries would be" and "the Punjab holocaust had begun and the war in Kashmir that renewed Indo-British differences was a couple of months away."
Chapter 12: The Kashmir Imbroglio I: Gilgit and Poonch
[This chapter covers how Mountbatten frustrated Indian efforts to absorb Kashmir into India; London expected it to join Pakistan.]
330ff There were two areas of Jammu and Kashmir state that Britain wanted to keep in Pakistan, both for Britain's world strategy as well as Pakistan security: these were the northern areas of the state along the Chinese and Soviet frontiers, as well as a strip of territory in the west with a common border with Pakistani Punjab; see also the Sinkiang region (now Xinjiang, an Uighur-peopled region now incorporated into China), which in the mid 1940s was a sort of no man's land full of tension under the declining authority of China's Kuomintang regime and soon to be entered and conquered by China's Red Army; thus control over the Gilgit region would have limited any Soviet moves from this region; the idea was to give Gilgit region over to Pakistan.
332ff Note the actions here of two key British officers who remained to serve the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir state: Major William Alexander Brown and Captain A.S. Mathieson; Brown described his action of transferring Gilgit to Pakistan as a political act, even as a "coup d'etat" on the eve of the transfer of power; Pakistan then stepped in to take control. Note there was a brief interregnum where this region declared autonomy but it was quickly suppressed.
335 The Kashmir War: October 1947 to January 1949; the ceasefire left Gilgit region in Pakistan's hands.
336 It was important to British and American geopolitical positioning that Gilgit remain in Pakistani hands because they didn't trust Nehru with control of this main artery leading into Central Asia. [It's also quite amazing how there's all this fighting between India and Pakistan and they still dispute this region, thanks to some treachery from England, over a stupid road that led into Xinjiang Province in China! Something that doesn't even matter anymore at all today, but yet leaves behind it decades and decades of dispute and conflict]. This whole region was very complicated because India and Pakistan thought of them as strategically important boundary regions with Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and China; but so did England! Thus from England's perspective it was better if it remained in Pakistan's hands.
341 Discussion of the geography and topography of J&K state; nearly the size of France, a vast area with different racial groups, different cultures, different languages and different faiths; a patchwork of mountain ranges: K2, the Himalayan range etc; half the 1940s-era population of about 4 million lived in 10% of the land area of the Kashmir Valley; the Kashmir Valley had been ruled by both Buddhist and Hindu dynasties, later supplanted by Muslim rulers, then under the control of the Afghans, then under the Sikh King; thus it passed from place to place and from power to power; the origin of the state in the modern era dated from 1846 after the British had defeated the Sikhs decisively; the Russian started moving southwards in the 1860s, beginning the Great Game; then England started to build key routes through this region, exercising greater control over the territory in the late 19th century; Kashmir became even more important after the Bolsheviks took control of Russia in the 1920s and started to penetrate its frontiers with ideology "sending communist agents and literature into India." [See F.M. Bailey and his self-told book Mission to Tashkent]
344ff Recall that many of the Princely States thought they could choose independence (at least the biggest ones like Kashmir) and yet remain associated with Britain, but British policy changed on this, which was a shock to Kashmir's then-ruler Maharaja Hari Singh. Sing absolutely was unwilling to join Pakistan but if he joined India he would alienate a large section of his Muslim subjects. Either way he would lose his throne.
349ff Pakistan starts pressuring Kashmir, first with an economic blockade, the key road out of Kashmir led into Pakistan territory; Kashmir was also isolated during the winter; Pakistan also recruited Muslim League tribesmen from frontier areas to use as proxies in an indirect conflict in Kashmir; recruited by Pakistani officers and to be rewarded with loot and more; the idea was that Pakistan could keep an indirect fight going and then "solve" the situation with negotiations. The incursion met with more resistance than Pakistan expected, the incursions slowed and failed; the tribesman basically gave up fairly quickly; these attacks happened within ten weeks of the establishment of the state of Pakistan, and, per V.P. Menon, "its very first act was to let loose a tribal invasion through the north-west."
355ff Note also that Britain and Prime Minister Atlee sent an icy message to Nehru about Kashmir and indirectly supported the Pakistani tribals in the region, Mountbatten fell into step with his own government "good soldier that he was"; Britain supported Pakistan but didn't want it to take actions that would result in India invading this area, and Britain certainly did not want a full-scale war between India and Pakistan.
358 Mountbatten accused by Churchill of planning and organizing "the first victory of Hindustan against Pakistan" by sending British-trained soldiers and equipment to suppress Muslims in Kashmir.
361 By May 1948 the regular Pakistan army had now entered Kashmir (as India had also), the Pakistani reinforcements caused India's attack to capture the Domel and Muzaffarabad regions to "fizzle out"; soon thereafter the UN commission for Indian-Pakistan arrived, causing India to suspend military operations, and then eventually producing a ceasefire, but not before intensified fighting, which is the subject of the next chapter.
Chapter 13: The Kashmir Imbrolio II: At the UN
[This chapter is difficult, lots of minor details about various pacts, resolutions, agreements and bickerings between the various participants]
365 Hindu Indians being (according to the author) closed off from the world, naive about other cultures, not paying proper attention to international relations, etc. Even Nehru, who was internationalized, was ignorant and naive about how the UN Security Council worked.
371 Nehru escalates the situation saying that "Under international law we can in self-defense take any military measures to resist it [the Pakistan-aided invasion of Kashmir], including the sending of our armies across Pakistan to attack their bases near the Kashmir border." Clement Atlee dresses him down for this, and England asks the US to dial back their approach separately, without reference to Attlee's comments to Nehru, which the US did in a formal note to India, saying it risked jeopardizing its "international goodwill and prestige"
374ff England also recognized that if war developed it would unite India and probably bring about the downfall of Pakistan; this would probably bring in Afghanistan, Russia, etc., this would be disaster. England's policy was a strict impartiality but they were concerned that Pakistan, being too weak, would be at risk. England somehow had to step in without getting the impression that it was siding with Pakistan and against India. [Now we see tremendous meddling from the entire British and American establishment in the subcontinent, but events started to get serious enough to require it.]
381ff India enraged by the idea that the US would throw its weight behind Pakistan in Kashmir because it was more anti-Communist whereas India was seen as ambivalent toward Communism at best.
385 Note during this time the Soviet Union not really giving a shit about this conflict at all; Stalin had shown no interest in India after independence; Nehru even sent his sister to be ambassador to the USSR but she was never granted an audience with Stalin even once during her stay in Moscow. [!!]
388ff Pakistan plays an interesting trump card here: they offer a defense alliance with Britain, citing their concerns of the danger posed by Communism. Britain responded by starting to ship arms to Pakistan, although it did not form a formal public military pact. Pakistan likewise plays the same card with the United States and Secretary of State George Marshall around the same time (October 1948) although the US didn't respond with any actions other than encouraging Pakistan to settle all its major differences quickly and that the US could not "ship arms to India or Pakistan while Kashmir was the point of friction."
395ff The Operation Venus offensive December 1948 planned and executed by Pakistan and several British officers; it badly damaged a strategically important bridge, and a ceasefire was agreed to as Pakistan gave in to accept the United Nations resolution ending hostilities January 1st, 1949; in the coming years and when the Cold War started in earnest the UK formed the so-called Baghdad Pact in 1955 with Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey to create a brick wall to thwart Soviet ambitions: in 1959 this pact evolved into CENTO, the Central Treaty Organization, with the US taking over command; the Great Game had assumed global dimensions and had come to be called the Cold War.
Chapter 14: Postscript
402 Britain's Pakistan strategy succeeded brilliantly, according to the author; Pakistan joined the Baghdad Pact as a barrier against Soviet ambitions in the Middle East; there was an air base established in Peshawar in 1958 for the CIA to fly U2 spy planes across the Soviet Union; in the 1970s Pakistan helped the US establish relations with China; and in the 1980s Islamabad was the forward base from which the US could eject Soviet forces from Afghanistan, precipitating a collapse of the USSR. Note however also there was a 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty that has been a long-standing feature of the relationship between those two countries. Also China has been able to extend its influence into Pakistan in the years since.
403ff The author notes the friendly pressure the US exerted on England in favor of India's independence which was largely neglected by historians; the author further claims that India itself has not fully appreciated the goodwill of the United States "for India's independence and unity during the end game of Empire."
406ff On India's "arrogance," "often poor political judgment" and ignorance of global power politics once it became independent; how they were ill prepared to deal with a much more predatory world than they were ready for.
408ff Was partition avoidable? Because of India's structural instability it was difficult to imagine the British putting "all their eggs in the Indian basket." See also British tilt towards Pakistan because of their disdain for a new culture and distrust of Hindu people, note that the suspicion was mutual because of Britain's support for the Muslim League as well as for Pakistan itself. Also according to the British High Commission, Nehru was "overidealistic, inexperienced in foreign affairs, and far too vain." The author doesn't think Pakistan or Partition was avoidable after all.
408ff Note also that England didn't support Partition so much as a weakened India; they could have easily weakened India by letting the Princely States stay independent, but rather they pushed them to join India. If they really wanted a weakened India why would they do this? There was a general belief everywhere that India had to be divided because Hindus and Muslims could not live together, but these two communities were never divided even after Partition. [The more you read history, events like this tend to repeat: it makes you realize most things are really pointless, they're going to involve a lot of fighting about things that eventually won't even matter, and things turn out way different than how you expect anyway.]
410 The author notes that British authorities ignored warnings of the coming bloodbath in the Punjab as the Muslim League was out to cleanse West Pakistan of non-Muslims.
412 On the flack and Mountbatten continues to receive in Britain, Pakistan and India; also on how he "talked a bit too much" in his old age about his success in India "which played into his detractors' hands."
412ff Regarding Gandhi's view on partition; historians debate this, many think he opposed to partition until the very end but his conversation with Mountbatten in June 1947 suggested he had accepted it as a necessary evil.
415 The author makes interesting and probably unsubstantiated claims that Islamic terrorism menacing the world today "surely lie buried in the partition of India" as he cites Pakistan's backing of the export of terror, their support for Osama bin Laden, helping to train the Taliban, etc.
417 "...it was global politics, Britain's insecurity and the errors of judgment of the Indian leaders that resulted in the partition of India..."
Vocab:
Resile: to abandon a position or a course of action.
Satyagraha: non-violent non-cooperation.
Chukker: each of a number of periods (typically six, of seven and a half minutes each) into which play in a game of polo is divided.
Turn a Nelson's eye: to turn a blind eye: this is a reference to the 1801 Battle of Copenhagen where British naval commander Horatio Nelson put a telescope to his blind eye in order to not see a signal.
Hartal: a general strike; a concerted cessation of work and business especially as a protest against a political situation or an act of government.
Laodicean: lukewarm in religiosity, half-hearted; "a Laodicean speech."
Locus standi: legal standing; the ability to show sufficient harm to bring a case.
To Read:
***Sir Olaf Caroe: Wells of Power
Rudyard Kipling: Kim
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad: India Wins Freedom
***Stanley Wolpert: Jinnah of Pakistan
Stanley Wolpert: Roots of Confrontation in South Asia
Hector Bolitho: Jinnah
V.P. Menon: The Transfer of Power in India
Louis Fisher: The Great Challenge
Robert Payne: Life and Death of Gandhi
***Philip Ziegler: Mountbatten
***Diwan Jermani Dass: Maharaja
***F.M. Bailey: Mission to Tashkent
Lars Blinkenberg: India and Pakistan: The History of Unsolved Conflicts (Vols 1 and 2)