The Indian Army and the End of the Raj

Title: The Indian Army and the End of the Raj

Author: Daniel Marston

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (First published 2014)

ISBN: 9781107067578

Pages: 386

 

The most surprising thing about the British occupation of India was that it was brought about by Indian mercenary soldiers commanded by a few thousands of British officers and administered by a few hundreds of British bureaucrats who in turn controlled tens of thousands of Indians working in lower levels. The British Indian army was undoubtedly the backbone of the system with the bureaucracy as its nervous system. The British used this massive fighting force to combat the dirty wars of the Empire in the two world wars. It was used even to reclaim colonies of British allies like France and Holland in Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender. The army was also constantly used as ‘Aid to the Civil Power’ in suppressing communal riots which sprang out unexpectedly but with unfailing regularity. In the last days of the Raj, the entire endeavor to broker independence rested on the loyalty and stability of the army. It went through a period of instability that could have destroyed any military organisation. The army’s experience in the events surrounding independence and partition is unique in the annals of military history. This book is about the last decade of the British Indian Army which successfully fought a world war, was tasked with suppressing nationalist forces in other distant colonies, had to undertake internal security duty to fight sectarian forces and finally had to undergo a painful division of itself into the regular forces of two sovereign nations. Daniel Marston is Professor of Military Studies at the Australian National University. His first book, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’ is an in-depth assessment of how the Indian army turned defeat into victory in the Burma campaign of World War II.

 

The representation of various provinces – or races, if you prefer – in the army was not evenly distributed. The British favoured the Martial Race Theory for recruitment. The Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Pathans were given undue opportunities to enroll as soldiers. The British presumed that only these people showed martial qualities. Even though Marston does not look deep into this hypothesis, we know that this theory developed after the 1857 Rebellion when the British started restricting military ranks only to those groups which sided with them in the rebellion. Bengalis and numerous groups from south India were deemed non-martial and kept away. People who lived in urban areas were not considered for entry. By 1914, 75 per cent of the army was recruited from the so-called martial races. During World War I, the requirement of more hands forced the authorities to overlook the martial race theory and open the window of enrolment up to other societies, and they fought remarkably well in the battlefields. But they were insensibly retrenched after the war and the martial race theory again took hold. But these races were not fit for becoming officers as they were mostly dumb intellectually. The Simon Commission’s report of 1930 stated that ‘broadly speaking, those races which furnish the best sepoys are emphatically not those which exhibit the greatest accomplishments of mind in an examination’. Punjab itself contributed 54 per cent of the total troops. However, the theory came to an end by World War II and the British finally acknowledged the fighting spirit of all classes and races of people.

 

By the end-1920s, it was widely felt that India would sooner or later be turned into a dominion or a fully independent nation with self-rule. This required an indigenous army which will be manned by Indians as ordinary troops and at all levels as officers. As noted earlier, there was considerable difficulty in selecting cadets from martial races as they lacked the educational qualifications. The Indian Military Academy was set up at Dehradun in 1932. However, the Indian officers who graduated from this institution could command only Indian troops. Their powers and wages were also less than that of British officers of the same rank. Their plight changed for the better after their remarkable performance in World War II. Even though the columns officered by Indians suffered defeat in the early days of the War, it bounced back in the latter half. The army expanded from 200,000 men and officers to more than one million between 1939 and 1941. The training given to the new officers before deploying them to foreign theatres of war was meagre which explains their initial defeat. This was soon rectified and the Indian army reaped the benefits. It destroyed the Japanese army in Burma and played significant supporting roles in defeating Italian and French forces in north and east Africa and Italy. Indian army landed in Kuwait and captured Baghdad in 1941. Later, it attacked Iran. All these happened while the army at home was carrying out frontier defence of NWFP and support to the civil power. At the end of 1945, there was no Indian officer above the Brigadier rank. Government then estimated that it would take a decade to educate and train enough senior officers to take over the higher levels and 20 years for complete Indianisation to occur. In the end, it took only a few years for this to come about!

 

The British used the Indian army to fight the colonial empire’s dirty battles. When the world war ended, a peculiar situation developed in Southeast Asia. The French and the Dutch – the colonists in that part of the world – had fled and evacuated their possessions when the Japanese army steamrolled them. After the Japanese were defeated, they wanted to reclaim their colonies. But the natives of these countries had taken up arms against them in the meanwhile with generous Japanese assistance in training and materiel. After the War, Indian troops were assigned occupation duties in the British colonies of Burma and Malaya, French Indo-China (Vietnam) and Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia). They had to fight the local nationalists in end-1945 and 1946 and these pointless battles had nothing to do with India or the British Empire. The European troops refused to join these fights and wanted to reunite with their families. Britain found Indian troops expendable. In a discussion of the battle plans and probable casualties, Lord Mountbatten made a specific request that Indian troops be used, saying that he did not want to see British wives widowed so long after the war’s official end (p.193). And you know one thing? Mountbatten was the most sympathetic to Indian causes among all the British functionaries who ruled over India. The demonic nature of the others can only be imagined!

 

Marston explains the farcical nature of the criminal trial of INA officers captured during the war. As the days went by, political pressure forced the British to grant more and more concessions to the prisoners at the cost of bitter resentment of white army officers. Eventually, they were let go without punishment. Discipline also suffered badly, leading to the Naval Mutiny of 1946 and several minor disorders. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of the military had to be demobilized at the end of the war as there was no requirement of such a huge number of soldiers to be maintained in peacetime. The demobilized soldiers and INA volunteers eventually ended up in communal militias and took part in communal riots. Their discipline and high level of organisation escalated their conflicts with police and army to the level of guerilla warfare. A large part of the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Noakhali was the handiwork of these former soldiers, encouraged by the Muslim League which was ruling the province of Bengal. This issue was especially troublesome in Punjab which had the largest number of ex-soldiers as most of the recruitment to the army was from there.

 

This book also provides the details of the division of military assets that took place. Stores, factories, vehicles and so forth were divided in the ratio of 30 to Pakistan and 70 to India. 140,000 out of 410,000 soldiers of the army (34 per cent) and 40 per cent of the navy and 30 per cent of the air force personnel were given to Pakistan. Here, we must pause to consider another statistic. The entire Muslim population in India in 1947 constituted only 24.3 per cent of the total, which included those Muslims who stayed behind in India. But the partitioned state was awarded more than 30 per cent when all else is factored in. So, this was a clean cut on the basis of religion, justifying exchange of populations. The author specifies that H S Suhrawardy, the premier of Bengal and Muslim League leader, recruited 600 Punjabi Muslims to Bengal police to offset the 1000 Gurkha policemen (p.290). Most brutal violence occurred in the Punjab while civil police ceased to function and law and order was ineffectually maintained by the newly constituted Punjab Boundary Force. The army of both the new nations was under the supreme command of Claude Auchinleck, but when India strongly objected to his partiality to Pakistan, he was removed from the post.

 

Even though the author fails to mention it specifically, the worst examples of colonial prejudice and supposed racial superiority fill up every chapter of the book. The numerous episodes of colonial occupation are saturated with racism like lichen sticking to an old wall. This wicked spirit so densely permeates the atmosphere and probably that may be the reason why Marston is unable to notice it. When native officers were introduced for the first time, they had no power of punishment over their subordinate British soldiers. His Majesty’s Government categorically stated that Indians should not have power of punishment over white men (p.91). This was partially lifted towards the later stages of World War II when Indian officers proved their mettle in the battlefields. Loss of rice-producing colonies like Burma to the Japanese and scarcity of vessels to transport the crucial cereal resulted in the Great Famine of Bengal in 1943 in which 3.5 million Indians died. Still, Churchill was reluctant to offer relief to the starving millions, saying that “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks” (p.109) and he directed the aid to Greece. The book also includes some pompous and condescending remarks of British officers of exalted rank who in fact did not comprehend how India worked. Fearing violence erupting in Punjab from which the major recruitment took place, one senior officer remarked: “if the Punjab burst, the chances were that the mixed unity of the Indian army would also burst and that all of India would collapse” (p.236). Another officer worried that ‘Indian officers are drunk with the prospects of early promotions and that the Indian army is due for imminent disintegration if India is divided” (p.254). In the end, India was divided, the Punjab did burst, but the Indian army and the people determinedly braved the deluge.

 

Even though parts of the book looks like an academic paper with footnotes sometimes reaching half of a page, it is eminently readable and nicely written. The Indian army had suffered heavily in both the world wars – In World War II alone, 24000 of its soldiers were killed, 64000 wounded, 60000 captured and 11000 went missing in action. The sad fact is that this valorous episode is seldom mentioned in India where the World War II is wholly submerged in the Quit India Movement which had a flawed start in August 1942 and dissipated a few weeks later. This book rectifies the shortcoming and makes it crystal clear that India was inexorably moving towards independence by the end of the War. The only uncertain thing was whether it would preserve its integrity or be divided into two or more units on religious lines. The sources of this book are from Britain which provides a focal point unfamiliar to Indians, but serves to explain the subject in full.

 

The book is strongly recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star