Partition

Title: Partition – The Story of Indian Independence and the Creation of Pakistan in 1947

Author: Barney White-Spunner

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2017 (First)

ISBN: 9781471148002

Pages: 419

This is yet another routine book on the Partition of India in 1947 when the country was divided into two nations - Pakistan for Muslims and India for the others and also for those Muslims who did not want to leave. More importantly, it was a firm indicator that nations could be carved out of nothing more solid than religious belief. Hardly a year after Pakistan's birth, the second nation was created on the basis of religion - Israel. The actual process of partition was inevitable when looking back, but the two countries even now approach the issue differently. Indians – many of them – still think of the partition as a grave error. However, Pakistanis – all of them – treat it as a pragmatic decision which would have been better if taken a little earlier. Accusations were flung far and wide among Indian political parties as late as December 2019 on who was responsible for partition. In this background, this book is especially relevant as it gives a bare bones analysis of events and helps to identify the politicians responsible for India's division. It also provides a vivid description of the brutal violence that engulfed the divided province of Punjab in which nearly a million people lost their lives and ten times that amount lost their homes. Barney White-Spunner is a British military officer who had commanded allied troops in Iraq during the US invasion of 2003. He is a military historian with a few books to his credit.

Politics is usually not familiar territory for military historians, but White-Spunner makes a short analysis of the state of Indian politics during and after the Second World War which led to partition. The Congress threw away the ministries they had formed in the provinces on the flimsy premise that they were not consulted before India was formally committed to the World War. This made the party utterly powerless in the turbulent post-war period. Their leaders were imprisoned for most of the latter half of the war because of their ill-timed, violent and eventually futile anti-British campaign christened ‘Quit India’ in 1942. The Muslim League flourished in the interval and commanded favourable response from the British. By the end of the war, it was evident to all that Britain would hand over power very soon. It was more a question of when than if. India erupted through all outlets at the prospect of impending freedom. In 1946, there had been 1629 strikes involving the loss of 1.2 million man-days. In January 1946, the Royal Air Force mutinied in Karachi. It consisted only of a series of sit-down protests, but on 18 February, the Navy mutinied and had to be disarmed by the army. Bihar Police rioted in May and the problems of demobilizing two million men drafted for war-time service proved yet another challenge. Widespread communal riots added to the administration’s woes. The civil service was tired, demoralized and lacked support with an intractable political situation in a crumbling country. The book presents a grim picture of the British Raj withering away on a daily basis.

The author brings to light the pitiable condition of the minorities in both countries. They were subjected to loot, arson, rape and murder in India. In Pakistan, they had to endure all of these in addition to forced conversion to Islam. In Thoa Khalsa village near Rawalpindi Muslim mobs were more considerate! They demanded ‘only’ the Sikh women to be handed over to them. The horrific details of the atrocities on Sikhs and Hindus are given in the book (p. 82-3). The Punjab Police, which was ninety per cent Muslim at that time, openly sided with the assailants and facilitated their attacks on helpless minorities. This brutal assault is known as the ‘Rape of Rawalpindi’ (p.84). In Bengal, the level of violence was slightly muted as compared to Punjab. Still, one Muslim organisation in Bengal offered 25 rupees for every Hindu killed and 15 rupees for everyone injured (p.137). When news of this violence spread, Indian Muslims had to endure equally brutal acts of atrocities at the hands of Hindus and Sikhs.

The Congress party enjoyed a good rapport with the British Labour party who came to power in 1945. Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, Stafford Cripps, the minister for India and Nehru were from that generation of socialist politicians who saw problems only in social and economic terms and underestimated the depth of religious feeling in Indian society. Nehru’s disastrous attempt to obtain accession of the Muslim-majority North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to India proves this in embarrassing detail. The province was ruled by Congress, but this was solely due to the personal charisma of the much respected Abdul Ghaffar Khan who led the party in that province. The people wanted to join Pakistan. Nehru visited the province in an effort to convince the tribal elders which turned out to be a nightmare for him. A jirga of Afridi leaders refused to meet him. In Waziristan the locals said plainly that they did not like him or Congress. Nehru then accused them of being the paid pensioners of the British. At Landi Kotal at the foot of the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, the army had to open fire to extricate Nehru from a hostile crowd. In Malakand, his car was fired on. With a badly bruised ear and chin and an even more bruised ego, Nehru accused the Raj and their political agents for organizing the protests (p.128).

This book fixes the responsibility for the decision of Partition on the shoulders of Nehru and the Congress party. His back channel influence on Atlee through V K Krishna Menon often bypassed Lord Mountbatten, who was the Viceroy. Nehru implored him to consider handing over power in June 1947 itself since Congress was impatient for power (p.170). Mountbatten was putting into practice what the Congress wanted. It also finds one of the prime reasons for the Pakistan army’s influential role in that country’s politics then and later. Immediately after independence, Pakistan struggled to establish itself as a country from nothing of the basic institutions a country needs. The army stepped in to a central role and maintained that role in the years to come in the face of repeated floundering of democracy run by incompetent and corrupt politicians.

Generally, the books on India's partition penned by European and American authors tend to be well-balanced and convincingly impartial. Unfortunately, White-Spunner is a disappointing exception to this rule. The book’s anti-Sikh bias is disturbingly open and jarringly evident. He singles out Sikhs as the perpetrators of the most grievous violence. On many occasions, he describes Sikh violence in graphic detail presenting the horrors in revolting openness. He then signs off with a one-liner that similar things had happened in Pakistan also. In one instance, he compares the Sikh mob to ‘dogs taken to killing sheep’ (p.254) and opines that Sikh savagery was appalling. The author seems to have accorded undue credibility to funny anecdotes we usually hear in office lore. He recounts an incident of V P Menon diving under the table when the Maharaja of Jodhpur threatened him with an improvised revolver immediately after signing away the papers of accession to India.

The book is split into chapters reserved for each month of the year 1947. This is not a good division structurally or content-wise, but can be read like a diary. The author does not seem to be much knowledgeable about India and its history. He repeats the conclusions proposed by earlier historians which are sometimes way off the mark. He claims that Islam spread in India not by conquest, but by the preaching of Sufis and that most of the converted people were of lower castes. The research for this book is laughably thin, probably reflecting the standards acceptable in sensational journalism or pulp fiction. Collins and Lapierre’s ‘Freedom at Midnight’ finds references many times in the narrative. White-Spunner’s total unfamiliarity with India can be seen in such comments in which he terms Travancore as a huge state in geographical terms (p.105).

This book is recommended for extremely light reading though many readers will be upset by its marked anti-Sikh bias.

Rating: 2 Star

The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905-19

Title: The Nonviolent Struggle for Indian Freedom, 1905-19

Author: David Hardiman

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670091089

Pages: 280

Of all the imperialist powers, the British Empire was the most far-flung. Britannia was said to be ‘ruling the waves’ and the sun never set on its wide borders. India was their most prized possession, in fact, a jewel in the crown. It is an everlasting wonder of history that this powerful empire let go of India as a result of a series of non-violent protests organized by a British-educated Indian lawyer, who combined deft political maneuvering with naïve exploitation of popular sentiments. India’s official history of the independence struggle eulogizes nonviolence to the level of gospel. This book is a timely mirror on the origins of passive resistance in India that was adopted and transmogrified by Gandhi into his Satyagraha. Most of it was, unfortunately, nonviolent in all but name. Any credible Indian historian don’t subscribe to the view that freedom came entirely as a result of Gandhi’s nonviolent struggle. David Hardiman is a professor of history at the University of Warwick. This book is an outcome of the author’s longstanding interest in Indian Nationalist Movement and Gandhi’s role in it. It is here combined with a recent engagement with the theory and practice of nonviolent resistance. The author’s research is split into two volumes, this being the first to cover the period from 1905 to 1919 that narrates the development of civil forms of protest under the rubric of ‘passive resistance’.

As a preliminary exercise, the book clears away notions that credit Gandhi with the invention of nonviolent passive resistance in the world. The enormity of this falsehood is further driven home by the uncertain and bungling modus operandi he employed in his earlier satyagrahas. The Chartist Movement of the 1830s combined the diligent activism of high-minded proponents of ‘moral force’ with the more turbulent protest of the advocates of ‘physical force’. Passive resistance was a strategy to make administration impossible. This was adopted in Ireland by Parnell when he organized a campaign of rent refusal and persistent obstruction of all Irish business in Westminster. The first ever concentrated and sustained mass protest in India began in 1905 with the partition of Bengal when Gandhi was still in South Africa. Swadeshi movement was tasked with the aim of buying only indigenous produce. Volunteers helped enforce the boycott, sometimes physically. People who violated the restrictions were subjected to social ostracism by caste councils. This was not very effective in the end. In addition to several clashes with the protesters, Muslims did not support the agitation to revoke the partition of Bengal (p.25). But passive resistance promoted a spirit of national unity and independence that had atrophied for India. It afforded the best training for these qualities.

Hardiman subjects the protestors to a class analysis that is generally not seen outside leftist studies. He observes two distinct objectives for the elite and the subaltern who took part in the struggle. The elite sought to win constitutional power and deployed agitation to this end. Elite nationalists were not committed to giving the subaltern any real power, often withdrawing protest when they were seen to pose a challenge to Indian elite groups. This led to the elites stressing nonviolence, as it offered a lesser threat to their power. Indian national Congress, in its initial stages, represented the interests of a middle class that had benefited from British rule and which then claimed that it had reached that stage of civilized development at which it deserved a share of imperial power. This period saw a clear shift from its earlier practice of meek petitioning and initiating respectful requests to the British to honour their promises. Indian national movement’s three stages of development are also spelt out in the book. These consisted of the moment of departure, manoeuvre and arrival. The first was a period of mild reformist demands with minimal mass engagement. The second was synonymous with the emergence of Gandhi and the elites’ embracing of populist politics that gave the impression that they were champions of the people. The third phase came as it became clear after about 1937 that the British would soon yield power and the nationalist elite developed agendas to consolidate their class power in an independent India. Populism was then abandoned, except during short periods such as the Quit India movement.

Contrary to popular misconception, the book establishes that Swadeshi movement had come into being almost a decade before Gandhi returned from South Africa. But this took on curious social guises. Imported goods were thought to be not only an economic evil, but a threat to caste purity as they were allegedly contaminated with ritually impure substances. This strengthened the social prejudices rather than undermining them. The practice assumed a distinctly communal tone. Surendranath Banerjee encouraged people to take a vow before a Hindu deity to support Swadeshi products and the boycott of foreign goods. This was anyhow logical, as the Muslims never took part jointly with the Hindus against the British except on the two occasions of the 1857 Mutiny and the 1921 Khilafat. The passive resistance method was also pragmatic, considering the immense firepower of the British who used to spend almost a quarter of the national income on defence and police. This was especially suited to countries where the government depends mainly for the continuance of its administration on the voluntary help and acquiescence of the subject people. Its applicability in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia was rather doubtful. The novel kind of protest also confused the police on how to deal with it. They had been able to crush unruly assemblies by the lower classes with few scruples. Now they found it hard to know how to respond to protests by the ‘respectable’ classes. In East Bengal, the protestors belonged to landlord class and they strongly opposed government attempts to record the rights of tenant farmers.

The author gives due prominence to Gandhi even though he came on the scene rather late in the period under scrutiny in this book. A primer on his South African career is also included. His track record there was not scintillating by any stretch of the imagination. His campaigns against the 1907 Registration Act and laws that nullified Hindu and Muslim marriages were dubious in its efficacy. Gandhi's strategy was to win over the opponent in a spiritual way and class solidarity was not given any weightage. During the white railway workers’ strike in 1913, Gandhi suspended his movement to help the government break the strike. The truth is that Gandhi could never extract anything more solid than a few pragmatic concessions the other side was willing to concede. Gandhi’s three Indian campaigns of Champaran (1917), Kheda (1918) and the Rowlatt satyagraha of 1919 are covered in this volume. The first was a partial success, the second a failure and the third a total disaster. Even during 1917-18, Gandhi projected himself as a well-wisher of the British Empire who supported the war effort and asked Indians to enrol in the army. In Champaran, he gave orders that there was to be no mention of Congress or Indian nationalism lest it antagonise the British officials. Gandhi lost control of the masses very quickly and then they indulged in an uncontrolled orgy of violence. Tagore had warned Gandhi that he was playing with fire just before the Rowlatt satyagraha began. True to his prophecy, it ended with the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Gandhi himself later admitted that it was a ‘Himalayan miscalculation’. The book includes a detailed description of the violence during the protests.

A crucial highlight of Hardiman’s arguments was that Gandhi idealized the village society out of ignorance of them. The typical Indian village was riven by inequalities and hierarchy and all of them were not half-starved as Gandhi wrongly thought. Also, violence was routinely employed in the villages to enforce the will of the dominant against subordinate castes and by men against women. The peasants who provided the backbone to the movements in Champaran and Kheda were from a wealthy village oligarchy. They were not fighting to end the inequality within the villages but to end their oppression at the hands of white planters. The agrarian legislation which came as a result of the agitation in 1918 benefited mainly wealthier peasants. The poor farmers were quite scathing about Gandhi and his legacy for the area. Caste organisations were also mobilized in support of satyagraha. They enforced the social boycott of anyone who paid taxes. This book includes the story of another satyagraha at Bijoliya in Rajasthan which was guided by Vijay Singh Pathik. This was a profound success and Pathik never worried that the masses would get out of hand as Gandhi always feared.

The book is interesting to read and provides a refreshingly new perspective of the nonviolent movement keeping aside reverence to the Father of the Nation wherever it was not due nor deserved. A good bibliography is a boon to the readers who want to pursue further from where the author has stopped.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Honourable Company

Title: The Honourable Company – A History of the English East India Company

Author: John Keay

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1993 (First published 1991)

ISBN: 9780007431557

Pages: 475

The English East India Company arrived in India as a trading concern and set up shop here to control its trade between India and Europe and to China and the Spice Islands. The Mughals kept them under a tight leash. However, the empire tottered after the death of Aurangzeb and a state of anarchy set in. As the provincial governors assumed sovereignty, the British saw their chance when the empire was tearing itself apart. They took sides with the contestants and extracted privileges when their protégés were hauled to the throne. It was then only a matter of time when the Company assumed the onus of ruling large areas of the Indian subcontinent by itself. When the Company eventually overstepped the limits of Indian tolerance with its expansionist and ill-timed social reform policies, the Mutiny of 1857 broke out. The British prevailed in the bloodbath that ensued, but at a great cost in human lives. Piqued at the inept handling of a delicate situation the Crown took over the administration and the company itself was dissolved in 1873. This book tells the story of the East India Company, except for about the last few decades of its life. John Keay is a British historian, journalist, radio presenter and lecturer specializing in popular histories of India, the Far East and China. He is a prolific author with some twenty-five titles to his credit.

The book dispels the myth that the East India Company was formed solely to deal with Indian spices. The Company was established in 1600 as The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies. In the seventeenth century, the words ‘India’ and ‘Indies’ had no precise geographical connotation. They were used indiscriminately to describe anywhere east of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Azores. This is in effect the whole of the world except Europe, Africa and the Asian landmass. Except pepper, all major spices came from the archipelago now known as Indonesia. The Coromandel and Gujarat coasts were linked to Spice Islands for trade. They exchanged Indian cotton pieces for Indonesian spices. The Gujarati merchant marine then sailed annually to the Red Sea ports to sell the spices. It was to exploit these trade links, not to open up India’s internal trade or to gain a political toehold on the subcontinent that the Company first directed its ships to India. They had only British woolen clothes to sell, which did not find any takers in Asia. This necessitated export of bullion from England to pay for spices. This situation was not conducive to two-way commerce and not at all sustainable in the long run. Keay thus ensures the moral necessity of the British to devise some novel ways to stay in business.

The chapters on the development of the Company’s operations in India stresses on the hesitation of the Company’s officials to venture into anything not connected with trade. They were fearful of the cost, risks and delay, making them reluctant warriors. Each journey was separately financed, accounted and dividends paid. Instead of getting a market for English broadcloth which was used in India as horse blankets, India’s cotton caught on in England. In a way, the East India business generated the London money market just as it did the London docks. Money was converted to Spanish silver rials, which was the only designation accepted in India. This caused a huge drain on precious metals in England. By the 1680s, the Company exported 240,000 kilograms of silver and 7,000 kilograms of gold to the Mughals. As trade improved, the economies of the two regions became more intertwined. The manufacturing industries of Gujarat, the Tamil country and Bengal had come to depend on European trade of cotton and silk.

Another revelation of Keay’s work is the details of the hard working environment of the Company on the home front. Its monopoly was deeply resented by rivals who wanted to enter the trade. Some did it covertly, earning the sobriquet ‘interlopers’. The company also lost a substantial portion of its business to the private trade of its own employees. They could influence the crown only if they had had money to loan him or to extend other favours. Its monopoly was ended before a century of its beginning of operations. Another company competed with it for a while, but the two were amalgamated soon enough to create a united company. Around this time, the Mughal economy became dependent on the company’s bullion export. The Mughals did not employ a navy worth its name and the English presence remained the Mughals’ only guarantee of a safe passage to its shipping in the Arabian Sea which was infested with European pirates, some of whom had been in the employ of the European companies.

The book describes the chaotic political climate of Northern India with the weakening of Mughal authority. The company was forced to ensure the defence of its establishments with a private militia. Slowly, this transformed into regular troops. The company’s journey to the position of power in India began with a ‘farman’ (decree) issued by the Mughal Emperor Farrukhsiyar in 1717. This waived the customs dues in favour of an annual lump sum payment of Rs. 3,000. Villages adjacent to the British Presidency settlements were handed over to them. The company was allowed to mint coins out of its bullion imported to India. An extradition treaty was signed to apprehend and hand over criminals escaping to Company territory. The most outrageous concession was that all goods carried under a pass (dastak) issued by the company’s officials could be transported freely in the empire without interference from royal officials or attracting taxes. The British company officials also had to contend with rival European companies whose battles at home spilled over to Indian soil. However, so long as Mughal authority lasted, it acted as an effective brake on the rivalries of the European companies. But once it crumbled, there would be nothing to stop every European quarrel from spreading to the trading settlements and then to the hinterland. Keay also explains why Indian troops appeared to stand no chance in a frontal battle with the Europeans. The ideas of drill, arms and tactics had scarcely progressed in India after Akbar while in Europe they had undergone steady refinement and development in a host of campaigns. Warfare in India was still a sport and in Europe it was a science. The pathetic state of Indian military tactics was seen in 1746 at the Siege of Madras. The Nawab of Carnatic’s soldiers were scattered by the numerically smaller French forces. It seemed that every French gun had the firepower of thirty Indian guns and every French trooper could comfortably account for ten ill-armed Mughal mercenaries.

It was in the eighteenth century that the company began its brutal exploitation of India. The Mughal emperor’s farman enabled them to collect revenues from territories ceded to them. This source of income helped stop the import of gold and silver to cover the heavily unbalanced payments. China stood firm a little longer, but the company found opium to be much in demand if it could be clandestinely transported there. The opium producers in India thus became the unwitting pawns in a cruel trade game. Proceeds from the sale of opium were used to buy tea which took England by storm,but it wasn’t contained in a tea cup. The company fought two actual wars with China for ‘establishing’ its right to sell the narcotic to Chinese people against the wishes of its emperor. The company was also oblivious to the fate of the people living in their territories in India. A famine raged in Bengal in 1770 in which up to a third of the total population perished. The company utilized this unsettling time to enhance the land revenue to ten per cent. Any relief measures were unheard of.

While it is true that the company was indifferent to the well-being of Indians living under their protection, readers are not to be deluded with the thought that the Mughals, their governors and vassals were any better. The author comments on the miserable existence of the Tamil people under the Nawab of Arcot – “The Tamil-speaking Hindus were already in a state of abject subjugation. No ruler, from the Nawab down to the pettiest poligar (feudal chief)seems to have been of Tamil birth. Nor were any of his troops. While the Tamil peasant took cover amongst the palmyras, the armies, including those of the English and French, which trampled his paddy and commandeered his buffalo, were composed of Punjabis, Afghans, Rajputs, Pathans and Marathas. All were outsiders, adventurers, mercenaries who when not fighting one another were employed in exacting tribute in the guise of revenue. Government was simply a euphemism for oppression under the imperial sanction of Mughal authority” (p.292)

The book’s readability is rather mediocre, as the text is peppered with extensive quotes from contemporary sources with strange spellings and arcane constructs. The final chapters of the book lack a clear sense of direction as if the author is at a loss on how to finish the story. Narratives of a large part of far-eastern trade carried out by the company are crammed into a few pages. The book is interesting only in those areas where it deals with India. At all other places, it pours out travels and fighting in search of trade with disconcerting precision. Almost half of the text is devoted to the company officials’ sea voyages in search of material for trade. It is adorned with an excellent and comprehensive bibliography. Typically Indian comparisons are also seen like this one – “the Mughal Empire crumbled like a crushed pappadam”.

The book is recommended only to serious readers of history.

Rating: 3 Star