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