It may be because of the obvious parallels with Iraq today, or the fact that there is now a whole new generation of young Britons of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi descent who are interested in their parents’ past, but the 60th anniversary next week of the partition of the Indian Subcontinent has already aroused an amazing amount of media coverage here.
That is not so surprising when you consider the consequent history of the countries concerned. Bangladesh, submerged by some of the worst floods in its history, is under military rule. So is Pakistan, further than ever from the democratic and multicultural (secular indeed) vision of its founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. As for India, basking under the praises of a Western world that has decided it is the next global supercompetitor, the British inheritance and the circumstances of its birth just seem an irrelevance from the past.
It may come as a shock to the British historians and writers intent on resurrecting the Empire as an exemplar of peace and prosperity (if only the US could model itself on it, is the implication), but to the Indian elite the two centuries of British rule have never seemed more than a small blip on their long history, the temporary intrusion of a foreign military rule.
That is as it should be. Indian partition had huge consequences, still very much with us today. But the manner and matter of it was primarily a British responsibility, of historical concern to us more than the subjects of it. For most of the postwar period the British have congratulated themselves on giving up Empire, and in particular granting independence to Pakistan and India, as an unprecedented gesture of voluntary abnegation.
The documentation as it has come out, however, paints a rather less flattering view of the dissolution of Empire. True we did give it up voluntarily and in rather better spirit and with less meddling than the Russians gave up the Soviet Empire after the fall of the Berlin Wall for example. But in India at least the sordid truth is that we — and in particular our last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten — cut and ran.
There were good reasons, no doubt. Britain was exhausted, and virtually bankrupt, by the end of the World War II. There was neither the will nor the means to hold onto a country whose leaders had been promised independence and were in no mood to wait. Sectarian conflict was already erupting in the major cities at the prospect of self-rule. The political leadership of the Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims was difficult to deal with, given to wild rhetorical demands, divided among themselves and often contradictory in their demands. Gandhi hardly helped with his impractical pronouncements from the sidelines. Expectations, and events, were gathering pace at such a tempo that independence, and partition, could not be resisted for long.
All that is true from a British point of view. But it is also true that Mountbatten rushed into partition 10 months before the original due date with barely a thought, and certainly no properly prepared handover plan, for the consequences of his actions. Vain, duplicitous (it was said of him by Gen. Montgomery — admittedly no praiser of fellow commanders — that “if Dickie swallowed a nail, he would shit it out as a corkscrew”) — and obsessed with his own reputation, the new governor general came, saw and determined to get out before he could be blamed for what was bound to ensue. Having switched precipitously from seeking to keep the Indian territory whole to determining on partition, Mountbatten rushed at it fearing the worst but determined to get it done as quickly as practically possible. The boundary lines were drawn up by a man who’d never been to the place. East Pakistan was casually determined when everyone knew it was unsustainable without a capital in Calcutta (Chittagong was never a substitute). The Punjab was divided up, with Lahore going to Pakistan partly to ensure that the Sikhs couldn’t have the separate state they wanted so dearly. Worst of all, the police and then the army were allowed to disband into separate religious arms well before partition actually happened.
This is in no way to denigrate the valiant efforts of the British officers and civilian authorities who remained, desperately trying to prevent the worst of bloodshed occurring. Nor is it to remove the responsibility of the inhabitants and their local leaders who allowed, and in many cases encouraged, the massacres which occurred.
One of the perversities of the recent BBC series in which British people of Indian descent have turned to the subcontinent is the way in which the tales of horrors are always from people bewailing the past as victims of it. There is never any questioning of communities as perpetrators. Yet some of the worst massacres of all were carried out by the Sikhs as well as ordinary Hindu and Muslim villagers, swept along in a tide of unfathomable violence towards neighbors, friends and colleagues.
Perhaps it was all inevitable. Maybe nothing that the British could have done would have prevented the sectarian catastrophe that followed on partition. Indian politicians still think wistfully of a better outcome had India been kept whole. Gandhi even suggested making Jinnah prime minister and having a Muslim-led government to achieve that end (the Congress party soon squashed that one).
But the forces of separation were probably uncontrollable by then. Certainly neither Nehru nor Jinnah acted in a way that might have made a federal, greater India possible.
But there were consequences: In the Sikh separatism that eventually cost India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, her life; in the breakaway of East Pakistan to become the almost impossible state of Bangaldesh; in the suppression of minorities, whether the Naga in the Indian northeast or the tribes in Pakistan’s northwest.
And there were, and are, lessons, not least for Iraq. If the Americans and British had read the history of partition, they would never have disbanded the Iraqi police nor the army in the way they did, nor would they have attempted to impose a skewed democracy based on sectarian division. And as Britain now faces the prospect of disengagement, the questions haunting 1947 re-occur.
Maybe sectarian violence and partition of Iraq are inevitable, as they seemed to the British in India. The eruption of sectarian killing back then has never been properly explained, nor are the children of that time in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh interested in trawling over the events, for understandable reasons. In retrospect (and to many at the time), we should have set a reasonable deadline for British withdrawal and then worked out an agreed plan for security and civil authority to take us to it. We cut and ran 60 years ago. It would be a terrible indictment of us if we did it again.
