Viceregal Lodge and the Partition

By V.N. Dutta

The old Viceregal Lodge, was vitally connected with several important political developments, leading to the partition of India in 1947. A Muslim delegation of 35 men led by Sir Agha Khan met the Viceroy, Lord Minto, at this place on October 1, 1906, and presented a memorial emphasising their pitiable plight and requesting him for the protection of legitimate rights of Muslims as a political community. The Viceroy assured the delegation of his full support. Three months later, the Muslim League was founded, and the principle of separate electorate was incorporated into the Government of India Act (1909).

Professor Mansergh’s volumes of the Transfer of Power give a blow-by-blow account of the Simla Conference held in this room from June 25, 1945, to July 14, 1945, where leaders of the principal political parties met with the aim to resolve the constitutional question facing the country. The conference failed. Jinnah wouldn’t accept the inclusion of a Muslim as a member in the Viceroy’s Executive Council who did not belong to the Muslim League. On the opening day of the conference just outside the main building, Jinnah refused to shake hands with Maulana Azad, and this the Viceroy Wavell reported to the Secretary of State. Wavell did not consider it a good augury for the conference. There were also heated exchanges between Jinnah and Dr Khan Sahib at the conference.

Again in April 1946, the Cabinet Mission headed by Pethick Lawrence, A.V. Alexander and Cripps held meetings with a number of leaders of important political parties in the building. From the contemporary records it appears that in the presentation of the case, outstanding contributions were made by Jinnah, Maulana Azad and Gobind Ballabh Pant. In desperation, the Mission gave up hope because the political parties could not agree to a settlement. Ultimately the Mission prepared its own proposals, which later became a subject of controversy between the Congress and the Muslim League.

Nehru and Krishna Menon came here as Mountbatten’s guests and from May 8 to 13, 1947, one of the most momentous decisions was taken in the political history of India to which I will come later. In a room upstairs close to the Director’s, the Partition Plan was signed by the Congress and the League. In early August, 1947, Lord Radcliffe, Chairman of the Boundary Commission, accompanied by four judges, prepared here his final award for the delimitation of the boundary between India and Pakistan.

It is not often realised that on March 8, 1947, the Congress Working Committee passed a resolution demanding the partition of Punjab. This was five months before the partition of India, and three months before the Partition Plan was announced. The resolution no. 3 of the Congress Working Committee laid down that the Hindu-dominated areas in Punjab should be separated from the Muslim-dominated areas. The Congress emphasised that the decision was taken in the light of the most serious demonstration of violence in Punjab.

Why did the Congress, that had stood for the unity of India, ask for the Partition? The Mahatma had declared that the Partition would be made over his dead body; and Nehru’s Discovery of India was an intellectual riposte to Jinnah’s two-nation theory. To the Congress President Azad, Jinnah’s two-nation theory was a perversion and a myth.

Seizing on the Congress resolution as mentioned above, Ayasha Jalal produced a Cambridge Ph.D. thesis: The Sole Spokesman published in 1985, which remains perhaps the most influential work on the Partition. Historians have a tendency to repeat. History does not repeat itself, but historians do. Jalal’s conclusion is that Jinnah did not want Pakistan, nor did he will it, and that his demand for Pakistan was just a bargaining counter, a sort of bluff, a poker game he was playing, and that it was a strategy designed by him with meticulous care to assert his authority as the sole spokesman of Muslims whose future he was determined to protect. The Jinnah that emerges from Jalal’s work is a sad, lonely, dying man, humbled by the Congress, looking like a sick eagle at the sky. I do not think that this is the Jinnah who was fighting the Congress and Mountbatten. My own view is that Jinnah was determined to fight for Pakistan to the last, and that there was no question of bargaining. When he was browbeaten by Mountbatten on April 3, 1947, he said, in anguish, that he would prefer to have a few acres of Sind desert provided it was his own.

The Mahatma was unhappy about the Congress decision on the Partition. He knew that it was Vallabhbhai Patel’s doing. Therefore he wrote a curt letter to Patel asking him to explain the Congress Resolution. Patel was not the Congress President. Patel wrote an equally curt letter to the Mahatma that the decision on the partition of Punjab was taken after great deliberation, and that the military was forced to take control of it. From 1945, when Congress leaders came out of jail, there was a complete collapse of Gandhian leadership in the Congress. The pilot had been dropped! It was the Patel-Nehru combine, of course assisted by the two Menons, Krishna and VP, that ensured the transfer of power to India within the framework of British Dominion.

History is a continuous structure of analysis, and it is difficult to divide it, and it is just for convenience that we pick-up some pivotal situations, by virtue of their importance. I should say that the launching of the Quit India Movement in 1942 proved inimical to the interests of the Congress, and eventually led to the strengthening of the Muslim League and the emergence of Jinnah as the supreme leader of the Muslims. The result was that by 1945 the Muslim League enjoyed the status of party government in Sind, the North-West Frontier, Bengal and in the Hindu-dominated province of Assam. In his prison diary at Ahmednagar Fort, Nehru expressed his anguish over the wrong policy the Congress pursued. I think the Congress was too confident to be prudent. Gandhi thought that the allied powers were going to lose the war, and that Britain’s difficulty was India’s opportunity for capturing power. Nehru and other Left-wing leaders dependent on the goodwill of Roosevelt and Chiang-kishek who, they thought, would promote India’s cause for self-determination. The Congress showed a profound lack of suppleness and elasticity of mind in comprehending the reality of situation. Nor did it comprehend the versatility of Jinnah in the skilful game of realpolitik.

Though history may appear to be a universal account of the progression of events, its interpretation generally remains stubbornly nationalistic. A great deal of history written on the Partition in this country presents an Indian version of the events. We tend to produce that type of interpretation of the Partition which is appropriate to the temper of our times, caters to the needs of some political party or bows to some vested interests.

By 1943, the Pakistan issue was of crucial importance. The British recognised that Jinnah held the key to the solution of the Indian problem, and that he could no longer be ignored. Jinnah was not a rationalist in politics, in the sense that politics for him was not theory but practice. It was empirical, it was to bend circumstances to one’s interests, a game of chess to be played with skill involving alternative moves. Jinnah had said that he would not mind allying with the devil if it promoted his interests.

In June, 1945, E.P. Moon, who was to assist Mansergh later in editing the Transfer of Power volumes, wrote a long note emphasising that the Pakistani issue could no longer be dodged, and that it should be faced without any loss of time. Emphasising that Jinnah had almost won over Punjab, Moon urged the government to ‘come down’ on the side of Pakistan and use its power and influence to that end. Moon stressed in his note that from his long experience of service he could say with confidence that the Hindus would willy-nilly accept Pakistan, but Muslims would never give in and go on fighting to the end. Wavell forwarded Moon’s view to the Secretary of State for India. Quite a number of high British and Indian officials, constitutional experts and public men, including Reginald Coupland, Ambedkar, Maurice Zinkin, Dr John Mathai and G.D. Birla, examined the Pakistan issue and justified its political and economic viability.

In his communication to the Secretary of State on February 7, 1946, Wavell emphasised that the Pakistan issue must be faced, and he even drew a boundary line between Pakistan and India, including Gurdaspur district in Pakistan. It seems that this scheme was actually prepared by V.P. Menon and B.N. Rau. The matter doesn’t rest there! K.M. Pannikar, a skilled opportunist, who nursed ambitions of being appointed the Viceroy’s constitutional head, had a written note emphasising that the country be partitioned, and he laid down the guiding principles for the delimitation of the boundary. He did not append his signatures to the note. It is interesting to see how the Menon-Rau note and Pannikar’s communication became a basis for the actual Radcliffe award.

The Cabinet Mission proposals had founded on the rock of disagreement between the Congress and Muslim League in their interpretation. Communal violence had vitiated the political atmosphere. The interim government where the Viceroy acted as an arbiter of the contending party became a scene of mutual recrimination. Six times Nehru threatened to resign; and Liaquat Ali refused to recognise him as head of the government. The British administration was running down. Gandhi had ceased to matter in Congress politics. It is absolutely clear that on the Congress side, Patel was the central figure in the decisions on the transfer of power. Contemporary evidence, including Raj Mohan Gandhi’s use of Mani Behn’s Diary, shows Patel’s decisive role in arriving at a settlement with Mountbatten on the transfer of power to India. In the whole transaction, V.P. Menon acted as Patel’s supporter and a close link with Mountbatten.

When Nehru and Krishna Menon were staying with Mountbatten in early May, 1947, it was Patel’s telephonic conversations through V. Shanker that clinched the issue. The condition was that India be partitioned along with the division of Punjab and Bengal within the framework of British dominion. This scheme eminently fitted in with Mountbatten’s plan. Jinnah was still unwilling to accept the division of Punjab and Bengal. Ultimately, it was Churchill’s threat that made him yield. Churchill sent a message to Jinnah, ‘This is a matter of life and death for Pakistan, if you do not accept it with the both the hands’. In case Jinnah did not agree, Churchill advised Mountbatten to threaten Jinnah to ‘take away all British officers’. Churchill added, ‘By God, Jinnah is the only man who can’t do without British help.’

Overwhelmed by events, the political leaders failed to understand the political situation and lacked the gift of seeing how things would turn out. In the realm of political action such skills are necessary. And they were unable to gauge the turn of events. Statesmen who make no allowance for the unknown mortgage the future of their country.