Читать книгу Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day - John Keay - Страница 11

In the early afternoon of 24 March 1946 three members of the British Cabinet, plus their staff, were driven from Delhi’s makeshift airport to the monumental residence built for the Viceroy of what was still British India. The traffic was light – it was a Sunday – and along the capital’s leafy avenues the cars were outnumbered by carts, some of them high-sided haywains drawn by enormous white oxen, others rubber-tyred flatbeds hauled by wispy-haired water-buffalo whose languid pace allowed for a snatched bite at the herbaceous bounty provided by the municipal groundsmen.

New Delhi, the garden city laid out as the capital of British India only twenty years earlier, dozed in the afternoon heat, unroused by the visiting Cabinet Ministers, untrodden by policemen or postmen – both were on strike – and unbothered by the post-war turmoil beyond India’s distant frontiers. It was just eight months since the British Labour Party had taken office in London, and seven since Japan’s surrender had brought an end to the Second World War. Half the world was still in uniform. A blitzed and rationed Britain faced the biggest reconstruction crisis in its history. Yet in London Prime Minister Clement Attlee had reconciled himself to dispensing with three of his most senior colleagues for what would turn out to be a hundred-day absence. Their mission was that important.

Of the three Cabinet Ministers, Lord Pethick-Lawrence was there as of right: as Secretary of State for India he headed a branch of the London government whose personnel and budget exceeded those of both the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. Another of the delegates, Albert Victor Alexander, later Earl Alexander, had responsibility for safeguarding the British Empire’s maritime links as First Lord of the Admiralty; and the third, Sir Stafford Cripps, had led an earlier mission to India, was the prime mover in the present one, and was currently President of the Board of Trade. All were men of high principle. Pethick-Lawrence had once received a custodial sentence for encouraging suffragette defiance; Cripps, a vegetarian and a teetotaller, had once been expelled from the Labour Party as too left-wing; and Alexander, a blacksmith’s son, had been known to double as a lay preacher. All sympathised with India’s national aspirations and shared its leadership’s socialist values. Their integrity, their seniority and their extended leave from Cabinet duties bespoke their government’s intent. Britain’s Labour Party had already committed itself to ‘freedom and self-determination’ for the peoples of India; now it must deliver. As per its instructions, the delegation’s task was ‘to work out in cooperation [with India’s political leaders] the means by which Indians can themselves decide the form of their new institutions with the minimum of disturbance and the maximum of speed’. Thus would be consummated what the mission’s statement called ‘the transfer of responsibility’ and what the delegates themselves called ‘the transfer of power’.¹

The Cabinet delegates, all of them aged around sixty, reeking of tobacco and unaccustomed to the ease of light linen suiting, were immediately dubbed ‘the Magi’ by Lord Wavell, the current Viceroy. The Indian press preferred to call them ‘the Three Wise Men’. They might have come from the West and arrived by plane, but the treasure they bore was indeed priceless. India was at last being proffered the means of securing full and unconditional independence. After decades of sacrifice and disappointment, of repression and obfuscation, protest and imprisonment, azadi (‘freedom’, ‘independence’) was within the grasp of the subcontinent’s four hundred millions.

In the history books this first post-war initiative in the endgame of British rule is known simply as ‘the 1946 Cabinet Mission’, an impersonal phrasing that has deterred scrutiny and obscured its importance. Within a year the new Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, would steamroller through a very different handover of power that would relegate the Cabinet Mission and all its doings to the India Office’s bulging archive of begrudged concessions and aborted proposals. Yet, for all this, the Mission deserves recognition as one of the twentieth century’s milestones. It marked the beginning of the end for the British Empire in India; it was the first such overture to offer independence on a plate – to India or anywhere else. And it was the last to provide any real hope of staving off a division of the South Asian subcontinent.

Only in retrospect was it a failure. Both of the main contenders for power in India – the Indian National Congress guided by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Muslim League headed by Mohamed Ali Jinnah – would in fact accept a Mission proposal that emphatically rejected any division of the country; the demand for a sovereign state of Pakistan was so hopelessly impractical, declared the proposal, as ‘not to be an acceptable solution’. Even Jinnah, the man who epitomised the demand for a separate Muslim homeland called Pakistan, would not demur over what he called merely these ‘injudicious words’. Fitfully and faintly, a hint of consensus arced across India’s dark horizon of sectarian rivalry. The rainbow would soon fade, but throughout 1946 the country lay within a whisker of attaining full independence as a single sovereign state. Partition, in other words, was no more a foregone conclusion in the run-up to Independence than was the genocidal mayhem of its aftermath.

Rolling up their shirtsleeves of sea-island cotton, the Cabinet Ministers got down to work in the hermetically air-conditioned offices of a wing of the viceregal palace (‘one of the biggest residential buildings in the world’, it is now Rashtrapati Bhawan, the official home of the Republic of India’s President).² For two weeks they listened – to the views of the Viceroy and his Executive Council, to the Governors of British India’s fourteen constituent provinces, the representatives of its several hundred quasi-sovereign princely states and the spokesmen of its main political parties and communal groupings; in all they would interview ‘472 people on 181 separate occasions’.³ Then for four weeks they drafted – first an outline of the likely constitutional options (a large two-tier federal India versus two or more smaller one-tier Indias) – followed, when the Muslim League rejected both, by a statement of their own that proposed a large three-tier federal India. This too was unacceptable; but hoping that common ground would emerge through direct Congress–League contact, the Cabinet Mission invited the interested parties to send representatives to a conference.

By now it was early May. The thermometer on the terrace outside the viceregal palace hovered in the upper thirties centigrade. Tarmac bubbled like porridge, and it was the turn of the railways to be paralysed by strike action. A suggestion that the delegates repair to Simla, 350 kilometres to the north and 2,000 metres higher, promised some welcome relief plus a tantalising glimpse of the Himalayan snowline. It was approved in a rare show of unanimity; elevation was just what the discussions needed. With the railways at a standstill, the Mission flew to Simla’s nearest airstrip at Ambala before addressing the hairpin bends of the near-perpendicular ascent to the town by car.

But ‘the Queen of Hill Stations’, as so often, disappointed. The change of scene brought no change of heart. Simla’s pine-scented zephyrs neither cooled heads nor cleared the air. The conference lasted over a week and served only to highlight League–Congress differences. Consultation degenerated into altercation. By 13 May the delegates were trailing back empty-handed to the inferno that was Delhi. Pethick-Lawrence was getting tetchy, Cripps, the Mission’s intellectual heavyweight, was wilting with diarrhoea which might have been dysentery, and Alexander had discovered an urgent need to visit a British naval base in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon).

Nevertheless, three days later, the Mission came up with its own solution. All its ‘proposals’ having been shot down by either Congress, the League or both, the Mission had decided to stop inviting comment and instead to table a ‘recommendation’. This favoured another three-tier, one-state constitution. Of the three tiers, the first would be comprised of British India’s fourteen directly administered provinces. Their recently elected legislatures would then take their provinces into three predetermined regional ‘groupings’ roughly corresponding to the north-west, the north-east and the remainder of the country, this being the second tier. And the groups would then arrogate to the central government – the topmost tier – certain all-India responsibilities like foreign affairs, defence, communications and some revenue-raising powers. The groups might award to the centre other responsibilities. They might also determine their own constitutions. Although a cumbersome device, the importance of the groups lay in the fact that two of them, those in the north-west and north-east, corresponded to the Muslim-majority regions earmarked by the Muslim League for its putative ‘Pakistan’. The League could thus reassure itself that the substance of a Muslim homeland had not been entirely precluded, while the Congress could reassure itself that the principle of an undivided India remained intact.

Overall the structure was essentially a graduated federal pyramid, with the fourteen provinces tapering to the three groups and then the one centre. Residual sovereignty would lie with the provinces and the groups, while the central government was comparatively weak. But provision was also made for an all-India constitution-making body, or Constituent Assembly, to give effect to the whole plan. The Constituent Assembly’s members would be selected by the provincial legislatures on a religious basis: Muslims would choose Muslim members, Sikhs Sikh members, and the great majority would choose ‘general members’, a term designed to avoid identifying the supporters of the determinedly secular Congress as overwhelmingly Hindus.

All the recommendations contained in this 16 May statement had been pre-agreed with London and anticipated by some of the earlier proposals. It was a longish document, and a particularly taxing one, with more than the odd devil in its considerable detail. In fact the detail was so complicated that it required weeks of clarification by the Mission, then exhaustive debate within the two main parties. Yet, not without grave misgivings and reservations, on 6 June Jinnah and the Muslim League accepted it; and so too, though anxious over the interpretation of some clauses and in the face of disapproval of the confessionally based groups from Mahatma Gandhi himself, did Congress on 25 June.

For the moment Partition was ruled out, as was a sovereign Pakistan; from Afghanistan to Burma an independent India would have the same dimensions as British India. On this happy note the members of the Cabinet Mission began packing their bags. Exhausted, they flew back to London on 29 June.

We ask the Indian people to give this statement calm and careful consideration [Cripps had pleaded at a press conference]. I believe that the happiness of their future depends on what they do now … But if the plan is not accepted, no one can say how great will be the disturbance, or how acute and long the suffering that will be self-inflicted by the Indian people.⁴

*

The disturbance and suffering began within a matter of weeks. For the Cabinet Mission, despite its apparent success on the constitutional front, had inadvertently made things worse. A constitutional framework had been agreed, but an actual constitution would have to wait on the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly. These could take months – as indeed they would (or, as in the eventual case of Pakistan, decades). In the meantime, Congress insisted that an interim government composed of Indian nationals should take over the reins of power. In Nehru’s view and in that of Gandhi, a constitution must be the product of an independent nation; freedom, if it meant anything, must include the freedom to formulate one’s own institutions; de facto independence must therefore precede the constitution-making process. The League took the opposite view: as Jinnah saw it, an interim government that inherited the paramount powers and patronage of the British Raj would be at liberty to influence the Constituent Assembly’s interpretation of the 16 May statement, even overrule it. If there had to be an interim government, therefore, Jinnah demanded a safeguard: half the interim government’s members must be Muslims nominated by his Muslim League, so negating any hostile intervention by the other half consisting mainly of Congress ‘general members’.

‘Now happened one of those unfortunate events which change the course of history,’ noted Maulana Azad, a scholarly and emollient Muslim who, unlike Jinnah, rejected the idea of Pakistan and was at the time President of the Congress Party. At a press conference Nehru was asked whether Congress accepted the 16 May plan in toto. Off the cuff Nehru replied that Congress would indeed enter the Constituent Assembly, but then added that it would do so ‘completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise’. In effect, concluded Maulana Azad, Nehru was claiming for Congress the right to ‘change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan as it thought best’. This ‘astonishing statement’ called into question the good faith of one of the main signatories and so undermined the whole agreement. Maulana Azad, as a Congress Muslim from a Muslim minority province that was never likely to be part of any Pakistan, had a vested interest in an undivided India; he was horrified. Jinnah was perhaps less so; in Nehru’s casual admission that he did not consider the agreement binding, Jinnah saw his often-aired fears confirmed. If the other signatory reserved the right to change or modify the agreement ‘as it thought best’, the League wanted nothing to do with it. It therefore withdrew its earlier acceptance.⁵

Meanwhile Congress had decided to withhold support for the proposed interim government. This time it was not Nehru who was responsible but Gandhi; for if Nehru had put his foot in it over the Constituent Assembly, Gandhi put his foot down over the interim government. No longer a Congress office-holder but still very much the party’s conscience, the seventy-six-year-old Mahatma baulked at that parity between Muslims (comprising roughly 30 per cent of India’s population) and non-Muslims (comprising 70 per cent) implied by the proposed make-up of the interim government, and he took particular exception to Jinnah’s insistence that only the Muslim League was entitled to nominate Muslim members.

Thus, within days of the Cabinet Mission emplaning for London, the Constituent Assembly was being boycotted by the League while the interim government was being boycotted by the Congress. Of the two representative institutions set up under the Mission’s plan to expedite the handover of power, neither was left with more than a single rickety leg to stand on.

Landed with this tottering structure, Wavell, the Viceroy, would do his best. Nehru would revise his position and Jinnah would be credited, wrongly, with second thoughts; a Constituent Assembly would indeed assemble and an interim government would be formed. Though the transactions of neither would induce a spirit of collaboration, well into 1947 all the interested parties remained engaged in a constitution-making process based on the Cabinet Mission’s recommendations – including its insistence that the territories comprising British India should continue as a single sovereign state.

It was events rather than debates that poisoned this uncertain process, then rendered it redundant. Back in 1942 Congress had severely embarrassed the British with a mass movement designed to sabotage their war effort and persuade them to ‘Quit India’ immediately. The movement had been suppressed, but only with great violence and thanks to some draconian wartime regulations. Now, according to the League, in the dog days of 1946, the British were fearful of a new wave of Congress non-cooperation that would be impossible to contain without the troop levels that had pertained in war and must therefore lead to the ignominy of forced eviction. It was this consideration that had led the Cabinet Mission to overlook Nehru’s ambivalence about constitution-making and to indulge Gandhi’s intransigence over Muslim representation in the interim government. In other words, the Muslim community was being ‘betrayed’, as Jinnah put it, by a British government reluctant to risk Congress retaliation. A record of mass menace was evidently more persuasive than one of reasoned argument; and taking this lesson to heart, on 29 July Jinnah announced that ‘this day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods’.⁶ In the first all-India protest it had ever organised, the Muslim League called on its supporters to stage their own brand of ‘direct action’. It also named the day – Friday (the Muslim day of prayer), 16 August.

The League’s protest was to be framed as a demand for ‘Pakistan’, a term that was already understood to mean an independent homeland for the League’s Muslim constituency – or what Jinnah called the ‘Muslim nation’. But what this ‘Pakistan’ would actually mean in respect of territory, population transfers and relations with the rest of India was far from clear. Jinnah preferred it that way: the vaguer the term, the more elastic its scope and the more electric its appeal. Yet despite the ‘Pakistan’ banners and posters (there was as yet no Pakistan flag or anthem), and despite the vast crowds of demonstrators and the usual scuffles, ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August occasioned no major confrontations in the great north-western centres of Muslim India – Delhi, Lahore, the Punjab – that would witness the worst atrocities of an eventual Partition. Instead it was Calcutta, then India’s largest conurbation and business capital, that exploded.

As in Dhaka, where lesser disturbances had been ongoing for weeks, the explosion was triggered by a minor local issue which, magnified in a prism of economic grievances, industrial disputes and confrontational party politics, assumed the black-and-white, them-or-us terms of the city’s already endemic Hindu–Muslim animosity. In the gory press reports of ‘the Great Calcutta Killing’ that ensued, the word ‘Pakistan’ received scarcely a mention; nor was it prominent among the declared demands and anxieties of the combatants. Partition, and its implications for Calcutta, a city with a Hindu majority but which was the capital of a province (Bengal) with a Muslim majority, was little understood; likewise the niceties of constitution-making and government-formation in far-off Delhi were irrelevant. Rather, the spark that ignited the explosion of violence was an innocuous and apparently commendable resolution of Bengal’s provincial assembly. Passed on a show of hands by its incumbent Muslim League ministry, it simply ordained that, to minimise the inevitable friction if non-Muslims worked while Muslims marched, ‘Direct Action Day’ should be observed by all as a public holiday.

‘CALCUTTA IN GRIP OF INSANE LUST FOR FRATRICIDAL BLOOD’ ran the 17 August 1946 headline in the People’s Age, the nation’s Communist (and so confessionally neutral) mouthpiece. The riots amounted to ‘a communal orgy the like of which had never been seen before’. Indeed, the Muslim League’s ‘Direct Action Day’ on the 16th had ‘turned into an open civil war between Hindus and Muslims’.⁷ Thousands were being killed, the streets were strewn with corpses, the hospitals were overflowing with the wounded, fires raged unchecked, and whole districts were being looted. One witness told of corpses being roped together like sporting trophies, another of babies being hurled from balconies, children clubbed to death, and mothers and daughters abused and butchered. Only the British, usually the butt of Bengali protests, had been left unmolested; and only the police had been minded to observe the declared holiday.

The politicians of both sides had to bear much of the responsibility. Congress members, after walking out of the Bengal Assembly in protest over the holiday resolution, had publicly denounced the League in the most intemperate terms. The League had responded with equally inflammatory sentiments. Both had welcomed the support of known criminal elements whose actions they had subsequently declined to condemn. The League government had at first delayed recalling the police and had then deployed them less than even-handedly; and when the situation was clearly beyond its control, it had failed to call on Bengal’s British Governor to send in the army. The Governor, in turn, should have acted sooner, whether asked to or not. As it was, the killing went on unopposed for two days and unquelled for four. Four thousand died, 11,000 survived serious injuries.

In retrospect, ‘the Great Calcutta Killing’ would come to be seen as the turning point, ‘the watershed’, in South Asian relations. For decades nationalists of every hue had concentrated their fire on British imperialism; a common enemy cemented a common sense of purpose. Now, with independence as good as won, nationalists turned on nationalists in a ‘civil war’ between the country’s two main communities. It was Gandhi’s worst nightmare, Nehru’s idea of madness; and it seemed unstoppable. Rightly or wrongly, the outbreak in Calcutta would be construed as the first eruption in a chain reaction of communal atrocities that, spreading erratically, gained in intensity until a year later they climaxed in the mass genocide of Partition.

Calcutta certainly set the pattern of savagery. No one knew who started the killing. Rumour raced ahead of verifiable report. The gangs responsible, whether Hindu or Muslim, invariably claimed to be avenging prior atrocities or acting in self-defence. Street talk of ‘massacres’ no more captured the full horror than the official designation of the disturbances as ‘riots’. Even ‘civil war’ was something of a misnomer. Some parts of the city were unaffected, with the Communist People’s Age smugly noting that ‘reports from the working-class belt indicate that the hysterical frenzy has not contaminated the workers’. The combatants were divided along purely communal lines, their object being not to expel or detain their opponents but to terrorise, desecrate and exterminate them. Age went unrespected and innocence unacknowledged; just to be of the wrong community was provocation enough. Votive objects – a domestic deity here, a treasured Quran there – were trashed and fouled. Mosques were defaced, shrines burned. Women, the embodiment of every community’s exclusivity, were a particular target. Of those ‘lucky’ to be still alive, some had been raped or abducted, while the dead had been physically incised with the religious hallmarks of their murderers. Either way, the objective was the appropriation of all that the other community held sacred.

As with the later massacres, the scale and the intensity of the Calcutta killings took both British and Indians by surprise. ‘No Indian political leader … neither the [Bengal] government, the opposition nor the press anticipated the magnitude of the tragedy.’ As later too, the national politicians in Delhi seemed more obsessed with the squabble for power than with its consequences for the febrile communities they represented. Like the frailest of firefighters, Gandhi alone would track the flames of violence, touring the stricken areas – Dhaka, then Noakhali (both in eastern Bengal) and then Bihar, all before the end of 1946 – as he fasted, marched and painfully practised the communal harmony that he so tirelessly preached. His colleagues preferred to accuse their political opponents either of starting the troubles or failing to suppress them, both of which only stoked the fires of hatred for the next round of atrocities. No one seemed capable of comprehending the scale and obscenity of the killing. In the midst of forming the interim government, Nehru breezily declared that his arrangements must ‘not be upset because a few persons misbehave in Calcutta’; Jinnah similarly refused to believe that any member of the Muslim League ‘would have taken part in using any violence’. A joint inquiry might have cleared the air. Neither party would agree to it. Instead both conducted their own inquiries. Each duly found against the other.⁸

Ironically, the effect on the British was wholly counter-productive. ‘Direct Action Day’, though conceived by Jinnah as a way of demonstrating that the League could bite as well as bark and must therefore be taken seriously, merely impressed the British with the urgency of disengaging. The Viceroy and his advisers were convinced that the situation was getting out of control. An all-India civil war seemed imminent, with the British ill-equipped to prevent it and in danger of being caught in the crossfire. Not for the first time, Wavell wavered over the prospects for a peaceful transfer of power and began drawing up a plan B. The ‘B’ stood for ‘Breakdown’ – a breakdown in the constitutional process and a breakdown in law and order. To a military man who had presided over the Allies’ wartime retreats in both North Africa and South-East Asia, a carefully phased withdrawal was the obvious answer, first from the comparatively peaceful south of India to the Gangetic plain, then to the strategic redoubt of the Punjab and the north-west. In this scenario, Jinnah’s Pakistan, if it ever materialised, would come piecemeal, later rather than sooner, and by agreement with Westminster regardless of Congress. The Calcutta Killings had neither advanced the League’s cause nor made Pakistan inevitable. What they did make inevitable was an early British departure and the near certainty of constitution-making being sacrificed to the exigencies of the moment, while the apprehensions of undivided India’s four hundred million citizens were left to fester.

*

‘Pakistan? What good is that to us? We want oil, cloth, sugar, wheat. And we want justice – that is all.’

Such were the sentiments expressed by a couple of Qureshi Muslims when, in March 1947, they were asked how they felt about a Pakistan that was looming larger with every communal massacre and constitutional impasse. Qureshis claim descent from the Arab invaders who first brought Islam to India in the eighth century; these ones had bicycles and were heading for a building site near the Narmada river in what is now Madhya Pradesh. Famed for speaking their mind, Qureshis might have been expected to welcome the idea of Pakistan. But in this case their response was wholly negative, and it was not untypical. It echoed that of sundry Pathans, Punjabis, Jats, Mewatis and Rajputs – Muslims and Sikhs as well as Hindus – whose opinions had been quietly canvassed over the previous four months by the inquisitive Malcolm Lyall Darling.

An ageing Quixote on a small grey horse, Darling had ridden out of Peshawar one raw November morning in 1946. From a start within sight of the Khyber Pass, he had been ambling east and south ever since. By March 1947 he was nearing the end of his epic ride in what was roughly the centre of India. Dressed in creaky leather boots, tweeds of many pockets and an outsize sola topi to protect his hairless pate, he looked exactly what he was: ex-Eton, ex-Cambridge and ex-ICS (Britain’s elite Indian Civil Service). But not for him the face-saving constitutional conundrums of Delhi or the peacekeeping anxieties of Calcutta. Darling was controversial. A gentle critic of many aspects of British policy, he had turned to Nehru when planning his itinerary, and would report to Gandhi on the findings of his trip. During thirty-six years’ service his speciality had been setting up agricultural cooperatives and encouraging ‘the Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt’ (as per the title of one of his books). Rural life remained his passion. An hour or two spent chatting with agriculturalists under the village pipal tree he accounted well spent and entirely pleasurable. The diary of his 3,000-kilometre ride from the Indus to the Narmada during what would be north India’s last winter as an undivided land affords the most comprehensive investigation on record of rural opinion at this critical moment. Ministers in limousines might be deciding the subcontinent’s future, but it was the threadbare figures aboard the oxcarts, whether in the boulevards of New Delhi or in the back of beyond, who would have to live with the consequences – or die because of them.

Oddly, Partition and Pakistan, though hotly debated and now only a matter of months away, were not yet, according to Darling, at the top of the villager’s agenda. Mention of azadi did occasion excitement – and more especially so after February 1947, when the British finally announced a deadline for their departure. At the time Darling was trotting through a yellow sea of oil-seed rape between Gwalior and Jhansi. He approved the deadline. He had in fact been urging commitment to a cut-off date for years, if only to concentrate the minds of the constitution-makers. Now, though, the announcement hinted as much at necessity as tactics. Despairing of the Congress–League negotiations – or the lack of them – desperate to depart ahead of any communal bloodbath and highly doubtful of Wavell’s step-by-step ‘Breakdown Plan’, the London government had decreed that, agreement or not, it would pull out of India by June 1948.

Yet however imminent, even azadi was seen by the toiling masses less as a national triumph than as an economic panacea; for with self-government there would surely come the ‘oil, cloth, sugar, wheat and justice’ that were everywhere in such desperately short supply. Oil for lamps and cooking, cotton cloth for clothing (a single outfit of turban, trousers, shirt and shawl took twenty yards, ‘and women require considerably more’), sugar for sweets and treacly tea, and wheat (or rice) as the staple of subsistence – without these things life was barely supportable. Yet rationing, a wartime necessity in India as in Britain, had slashed their availability, while the combination of inflation and distributive corruption had pushed the prices of the little that was available way beyond the set rates. Incomes had roughly doubled in the previous five years, but ‘even the controlled price [of wheat] – Rs 10 a maund – is four times what it was before the war, and “in the black” [i.e. on the black market] it is Rs 14 to 16’, reported Darling.

As we rode, we were waylaid again and again by officers, other ranks, headmen and peasants, drawn up by the roadside in long lines headed by some medalled veteran. They all had the same complaint – the complaint that has run like a telegraph wire all along our road for the last sixty or seventy miles. ‘We have nothing to eat, we are dying of hunger, there is no sugar, no cloth, no matches. Look at our children, how ragged they are! Our lot is unbearable!’ No one of course was dying of hunger, and many were tolerably well dressed. But … in ten to fifteen days 80 per cent of the people … [will] have to buy their food and most of them will have to do this ‘in the black’ … All agree that, if sufficient grain is not imported in the course of the next fortnight, there will be sheer starvation.⁹

This was the situation in the extreme west of the Punjab, a province which was generally reckoned the most productive in the country. Darling found the same in what is now Haryana, and the refrain, echoed by those Qureshi contractors, continued right down into Madhya Pradesh. Even in the cities, where the fixed-rate allowances of cloth and foodstuffs were on a more generous scale, the poor were feeling the bite. The widespread protests – the endless strikes, shut-ins, shut-outs and often bloody confrontations – were more about the cost of living than the iniquities of foreign rule. ‘It was a time,’ notes the editor of a recent collection of contemporary reports, ‘of remarkable, indeed unprecedented, labour unrest and it saw the beginnings of several powerful peasant movements.’ If Calcutta’s ‘working class belt’ had really resisted the frenzy of the August killings, it may have been because, while celebrating solidarity with the striking postal workers, the labouring classes were readying themselves for upcoming strikes in the docks and on the tramways. ‘The range of participation [in the unrest] … extend[ed] from sweepers through miners and railwaymen to white collar employees in post offices, banks and military establishments. Even policemen [were] affected, and that across several provinces … Taken together these [outbreaks] illuminate certain alternative possibilities that have been almost forgotten today.’¹⁰

Rather more than a ‘possibility’ is the inference that sectarian bigotry was by no means the only cause of civil strife in 1946–47. The Communists were as active as the ‘communalists’ (India-speak for religious zealots). The waves of protest that had until lately buffeted British imperialism now pounded the ramparts of capitalism just as much as they undermined the breakwaters of secularism. A strike in a railway workshop in far-off Madras province had turned violent almost as readily, and at about the same time, as had ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta. Nehru and Jinnah might paint glossy word-pictures of ‘the great future that beckons us’, but their roseate visions were often lost on a hungry and fearful public. In rural areas, starvation was no idle threat. Only three years earlier millions had died in the great Bengal famine of 1943. Though blamed primarily on the British and their World War, it was common knowledge that the famine had been exacerbated by the inadequate relief effort of Bengal’s government and by the hoarding and profiteering of Bengal’s grain contractors. The Bengal government had been that of the Muslim League, giving Congress a ready scapegoat; and the contractors were mostly Hindus, giving the Muslim League a ready scapegoat. All too easily distress of any sort could be translated into the confrontational rhetoric of Congress–League rivalry and so, by extension, into the incendiary terms of sectarian hatred.

Darling found the same thing happening along the line of his epic ride across north-west India. Power and responsibility in the provinces had been handed over to elected governments back in 1937. It was they – Congress-run in most provinces, League-run in a few – who had imposed the rationing, who had lately tightened it, and who were responsible for administering it. Hence, just as the incumbent League ministry in Bengal bore the brunt of the blame for the Calcutta Killings, so the Congress ministries in three of the five provinces through which Darling rode were being blamed for the economic hardship. The accolade of ‘most corrupt [department] in a very corrupt province … is now universally accorded to the Food Supply [Civil Supplies] Department and its satellite traders who, controlling the very basis of life, exploit their neighbours to the full, as they once did with their money-lending’.¹¹ This was à propos the North-West Frontier Province, where a Congress ministry presided over a largely Muslim population; but it applied equally to the Punjab and the United Provinces (UP). Congress governments stood accused of rewarding their supporters with lucrative posts in the Food Supply Department, from where, abetted by Hindu contractors and moneylenders, their largesse was channelled exclusively to Hindu recipients and Congress voters. According to one of Darling’s informants, it was this situation rather than the prospect of Pakistan that accounted for the growing popularity of the League among Punjabi Muslims.

The chief spur is the fear of Hindu domination, deriving from the domination of the Hindu money-lender and trader which … has taken a new lease of life with the control of supplies. The fear is widespread and the bloody doings in Bengal [the killings in Calcutta and Noakhali] and Bihar have created, to quote the Assistant Registrar, some hatred in their hearts …¹²

As yet the hatred was only a presentiment, continued Darling’s informant; the relationship between the different communities in this particular Punjabi village was ‘still a happy one’. But by March, when Darling was reaching the end of his ride, it was not at all happy. From Calcutta and Bihar the inter-communal killing had spread to Garhmukteshwar in UP, then to the villages of western Punjab. As Darling closed his diary on the Narmada, his first informants back beside the Indus were already succumbing to the madness. As victims, perpetrators or both, many more would follow them before his diary was published in 1949.

*

When traversing the north-west, including its several princely states, it was impossible for the wayfarer not to be reminded of the complexity of the subcontinent. Preserving the unity that both British administrators and Indian nationalists so cherished was all very well on government-headed paper; but on the ground, amid the heat and the dust, an undivided India (bharat akhand) could look to be wishful thinking. The four hundred millions now hammering ‘at Freedom’s Door’, as Darling put it, were converging from all points of a finely calibrated social, religious and political compass. Beneath the village pipal tree literally dozens of conflicting identities awaited the visitor, some so subtle as to be scarcely discernible, others starkly distinct. Counterposing just Muslims and Hindus – a practice long favoured by the British and now championed by Jinnah, endorsed by the Cabinet Mission Plan and fitfully contested by Congress – woefully oversimplified the situation.

For one thing, it ignored the Sikhs. Though statistically irrelevant in the rest of India, in the Punjab the followers of the ten Gurus and the Granth Sahib made up around a quarter of the population and were, reported Darling, as evenly distributed about the province’s Muslim and Hindu majority areas ‘as the ingredients of a well-made pilau’. This was the problem. Muslims and Hindus enjoyed majority status in numerous provinces; if sovereignty was to reside in the provinces and groups as per the Cabinet Mission Plan, each was assured of a share of power. But it was not so with the Sikhs. A minority in their Punjab homeland, they were, like the titbits of mutton in the pilau, so nicely spread about the plate as to be minorities even in most of that province’s districts and sub-districts.

The Cabinet Mission had been made aware of this problem. Sikh spokesmen had lobbied for a settlement that would afford them some guarantee of local autonomy and religious freedom, and that would not further fragment them by dividing the pilau – the Punjab – between a Muslim Pakistan and a non-Muslim ‘Hindustan’. (At the time it was assumed that an India without its Muslim majority areas would call itself ‘Hindustan’, the land of the Hindu, rather than lay claim to the term ‘India’.) Partition would, of course, produce precisely this disastrous bisection of the Sikh community. But the Cabinet Mission’s masterplan for a united India was equally objectionable, in that it consigned the Sikhs to demographic inconsequence within a Muslim-dominated Punjab that would itself be attached to the Muslim-dominated north-western ‘group’ of provinces. ‘We have been thrown into a pit,’ moaned a young Sikh to Darling.¹³

In making almost no provision for the Sikhs, the Plan ignored a community that was arguably the most distinctive and assertive in the whole country. Uncut hair, billowing beards and tightly tied turbans positively trumpeted the identity of all Sikh Sardars; their neat fields and thriving agricultural cooperatives brought a special glow to Darling’s heart; and their disproportionate representation in British India’s regiments, not to mention their familiarity with firearms and their attachment to costume weaponry (dirks and swords), left little doubt that they would defend their interests. These interests were not purely doctrinal. Muslims were sometimes accused of embracing independence as a chance to put the clock back to a pre-British India when the Muslim Mughals ruled most of the subcontinent. Sikhs felt somewhat the same about their province. The Punjab had been British for less than a hundred years. Before the 1840s it had been the heart of an independent Sikh kingdom – or sometimes ‘empire’ – extending from the Khyber Pass to Tibet. As champions of the Punjabi language and as the region’s erstwhile rulers, the Sikhs effectively defined the province. Their ‘empire’s’ political capital of Lahore was still the administrative capital, and their spiritual capital of Amritsar was still its only rival. Sites associated with the triumphs and tribulations of early Sikhism were scattered right across the province, as were Sikh shrines, places of pilgrimage and centres of worship. Whatever the electoral mathematics, the Sardars felt entitled to special consideration. Their dream of an independent ‘Khalistan’, like the Muslims’ dream of ‘Pakistan’, was as yet more a battle-cry than a realistic proposition, but as the Punjab began to shatter along its Hindu–Muslim faultline, the idea of an autonomous Sikh homeland was becoming ever more attractive.

Another casualty of the constitution-makers’ tendency to polarise Hindus and Muslims (and indeed Sikhs) was the rich matrix of customs and values that both communities shared. In the villages of central Punjab even the experienced Darling sometimes had difficulty telling who was a Muslim and who a Hindu. They were hard to distinguish because Muslims (and Sikhs) were often descended from converts whose caste or tribe was still that of their Hindu neighbours. There were thus Hindu Gujars and Muslim Gujars, and Hindu Jats, Muslim Jats and Sikh Jats. It was the same with Rajputs.

Riding along this morning, I asked a Muslim Inspector [or Zaildar] …, whether Muslims ever have their horoscopes read. ‘Yes,’ he replied, and added, ‘all Bhatti Rajput Muslims have this done by the family Brahmin.’ The Naib-Tehsildar [Deputy Officer], a Hindu, joining in, said: ‘The Zaildar and I are of the same tribe. He is a [Muslim] Bhatti and I am a [Hindu] Bhatia; our origin is the same.’¹⁴

Further on, Darling heard tell of some fifty Rajput villages that had converted to Islam in around 1700. Recently they had offered to ‘return to the Hindu fold on the one condition that their Hindu kinsfolk would give them their daughters in marriage’. This was refused and they remained Muslims; ‘but they still interchange civilities at marriage, inviting mullah or Brahmin, as the case may be, to share in the feasting’. Such communal harmony was by no means unusual. Oral testimony has amply confirmed that even in Bengal and Bihar, the scene of the first great killings, Muslims commonly participated in Hindu festivals and Hindus in Muslim festivals. Each might also consult the other’s holy men, share their myths, mimic their greetings and in some cases partake of their food. Conduct might be no more reliable in deciding who was a Hindu or a Muslim than ethnicity.

South of Delhi, Darling’s route lay among the Meos of a region known as Mewat. ‘Clanny and feckless’, he thought, the Meos were once reputed a criminal tribe who lived by highway robbery. Few outsiders entered their often scruffy villages (one of which, Gurgaon, now challenges Delhi with its shopping malls and call centres), and here, for a change, Darling found the tables turned: it was the villagers who were quizzing him about his own caste. (‘No, I am not a Muslim.’ ‘Then are you a Hindu?’) The Meos had a particular interest in the matter because their own identity was problematic. Officially they were regarded as Muslims and, according to Darling, they already favoured the League. But fellow Muslims were not always anxious to acknowledge them as such, nor to intermarry with them. This was because they combined irregular attendance at the mosque and erratic performance of namaz (the Muslim prayers) with a passionate devotion to Lords Krishna and Rama.

Sadly, according to Shail Mayaram, a latterday champion of the Meos, such bi-confessionalism was being eroded from two sides. On the one hand, the tract-distributing Tablighi ‘mission’ was actively promoting Islamic orthodoxy among the Meos; and on the other, zealots of the Mahasabha, the Hindu triumphalist party, were actively promoting anti-Muslim sentiment among the Meos’ Hindu neighbours. Willy-nilly, the Meos were coming to think of themselves as Muslim because that was how others saw them. In an increasingly polarised society there was no place for a cross-communal community. Come Partition, the Meos would pay dearly for their heterodoxy, experiencing death and dispossession at the hands of their Hindu neighbours, then rebuffs and rejection at the hands of their Muslim ‘brethren’.¹⁵

Most of the Meos’ neighbours in that part of the Punjab that is now the Indian state of Haryana were Hindu Jats. Relations between the two communities had been cordial until the 1930s. Then population pressures had led to a period of agrarian unrest as the Jats coveted the Meos’ land. There were armed affrays and the troops had to be called in. But religion had not been an issue at the time. It only became so when Congress and the League squared up to one another in the 1940s. And in the country south of Delhi, all the way to Agra and Jaipur in fact, this politicisation of communal sentiment had especially dire consequences. For here agrarian, ethnic and religious tension was exacerbated by what was undoubtedly the greatest anomaly of all in a supposedly ‘united India’ – namely that much of it was far from united in that it was not actually ruled by the British. Indeed it never had been, for this was princely India.

Long before he reached Mewat, Darling’s equestrian odyssey had repeatedly taken him into territories whose administration owed nothing to his former fellows in the Indian Civil Service and everything to the good sense or otherwise of one of India’s innumerable princes. In the Punjab the princely states of Patiala and Nabha, both ruled by Sikh Maharajahs, had yielded a rather frosty welcome, and Bahawalpur state, ruled by a Muslim Nawab, was beset by poor harvests. Villages in the princely states were less likely to have a school than in British-ruled India, noted Darling, and the people were therefore less well informed.

There was, though, he thought, something to be said for princely rule. Justice – a commodity that his Qureshi informants found as scarce as cloth, sugar and wheat – tended to be abundant there. It was swifter, cheaper and more effective than under the British dispensation. As a result, crime was rarer and the roads safer. The classic case was Swat, a long sub-Himalayan valley that debouched into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and which Darling had skirted in the first week of his ride. In Swat’s alpine setting, holidaymakers pitched their tents and anglers cast their lines without a care for the notoriously unruly Pathan clans of the valley. It was all thanks, explained one of Darling’s informants, to the Wali (or ruler) of Swat rigidly enforcing ‘the Shariat, the Law of God’. ‘[In Swat] a man commits a murder and in twelve hours he will be arrested, tried and shot. Here [i.e. in the British-run NWFP] it may take a year or two and as likely as not, when tried, he will get off, and then a blood feud starts.’ On the whole, Darling thought this ‘a sad reflexion on our [i.e. British] rule’.¹⁶

Sixty-three years later, when sharia law was reintroduced into Swat by Taliban zealots, it would receive no such endorsement. The government in Islamabad at first prevaricated, then panicked. Mobile-phone footage of a convicted adulteress being publicly flogged brought howls of protest from Benazir Bhutto’s Western backers and prompted a massive military intervention by the Pakistan army. Thousands died; and in scenes reminiscent of Partition’s aftermath, hundreds of thousands streamed out of the valley to avoid the carnage. Almost no one recalled that sharia law had a long pedigree in Swat and might not be entirely distasteful to the Swatis. Though rough and gender-biased, it slashed the crime rate, ensured the security of property and persons, and was a more effective deterrent than the slow, corrupt and painfully overloaded judicial system operating in the rest of Pakistan.

In 1947, along the sandy trails south of Delhi, Darling found justice less of an issue than religion. Mewat – it simply means ‘the Meo country’ – extended from British-administered Gurgaon deep into the territories of three princely states, two of which (Bharatpur and Dholpur) had Hindu Jat Maharajahs. Entering Bharatpur, Darling noted how the traffic tailed off and the wayside murmurings became a veritable ‘cataract of complaints’. Here the export of grain was forbidden, that of cattle taxed, the land revenue was higher, the corruption worse, ‘and of course no one had any sugar or cloth’. The Meos were reduced to rags, with not a garment that was free of holes. (Darling suggested darning, then remembered the state of his socks.)

For these woes, Meos and Jats were united in blaming the Maharajah of Bharatpur’s administration; but they did so for different reasons. ‘There is a good deal of political agitation going on in the State,’ explained Darling, ‘sponsored, if not engineered, by supporters of Congress, and doubtless this [cataract of complaints] was an echo of it.’¹⁷ But while the Meos blamed the Congress agitators for turning the administration against them as Muslims, the Jats took exception to the Congress agitators as godless secularists who were indifferent to Hindu rights and were anti-monarchist republicans to boot. Their Maharajah Brijendra Singh was himself in no way to blame. On the contrary, the Jats looked to him as their saviour. They saw no contradiction between nationalism and princely absolutism because the nation to which by preference they subscribed was Jat, not Indian, and their Maharajah epitomised it.

A ‘Jatistan’ along the lines of the Muslim ‘Pakistan’ or the Sikh ‘Khalistan’ was already being bandied about. Just six weeks after Darling passed through the Jat country, it would surface in a pithy slogan: ‘With biri in hand and pan in mouth we are busy making Jatistan.’ Biri, the peasant’s smoke, and pan, his betel-leaf digestif, were markers of Hindu identity. The Jat’s sub-nationalism thus announced its Hindu credentials. In this it had the full backing of the Maharajah. As a patron of the ultra-Hindu Mahasabha, His Highness’s Hindu supremacism was as far to the right in terms of India’s religious spectrum as his monarchist convictions were in terms of its constitutional spectrum.

Fatally, if rather desperately, in the spring of 1947 the Meos met this Jat challenge with calls for their own ‘Meoistan’. While accommodating their unorthodox beliefs, Meoistan was to be an agrarian republic informed by both the Communist class struggle and consensual village custom. It was thus ‘both a radical and a traditional [alternative] based on a vision of intercommunal solidarity and a decentring of power’. But come the summer, continues Shail Mayaram, ‘what it elicited was a mass extermination campaign’ – one in which the campaigning was done mainly by the Bharatpur Jats and the extermination was suffered mainly by the luckless Meos.¹⁸ Many thousands would be massacred, many thousands more ‘converted’, and many hundreds of thousands would swell the flood of refugees. Within the context of Partition all of them would be seen, and counted, simply as casualties of the great Hindu–Muslim conflagration. As elsewhere, their sub-national agrarian, economic and governmental anxieties went largely unrecorded.

Those know-alls in the newsrooms and the corridors of power who simply counterposed Hindu and Muslim when agonising over the partition of a ‘united India’ ignored a host of other identities and relevant factors. In reality the rising tide of communalism was obliterating existing communities as readily as it fashioned new ones. The polarisation of Muslim and Hindu, while providing the impetus for the Pakistan movement, was also the product of that movement.

*

Although the Cabinet Mission Plan took no account of all these sub-national identities, its failure to clarify the future status of the princely states themselves was surprising. By leaving open the question of what was to become of the states, the Plan not only generated unrealistic expectations (like that for ‘Jatistan’) but also ensured that the princely issue would loom large in the final run-up to Independence. Thereafter it would dog Indo–Pakistan relations, and in the case of Kashmir rankle to this day. All of which was also somewhat ironic, in fact doubly so. For while the existence of the princely states belied the notion of pre-Independence India being a single entity, it was the terms of their accession that would ensure that post-Independence India was not a single entity either. Indeed, the new ‘India’ would remain pretty much the same size as the old, since ‘the combined area and population [of the princely states] nearly matched that of the districts claimed by the [Muslim] League for Pakistan’.¹⁹

In total, the princely states accounted for about 40 per cent of India’s territory and 25 per cent of its population. Their number is usually put at around six hundred, though most were quite insignificant, being little more than fragmented landholdings, perhaps embracing a village or two. In Saurashtra (now in Gujarat but then an intricate tapestry of mini states), the nicely named principality of Veja-no-ness extended to under an acre ‘and had a population, in 1921, of 184’.²⁰ Another was apparently little more than a well. Once traded as jagirs – revenue-yielding fiefs – among rulers and their allies, such holdings had been frozen in time at the moment of British conquest. Their incumbents, assuming they had either assisted the British or not opposed them, had been recognised as rightful rulers in return for their own recognition of the British Crown as the paramount power. This involved surrendering the right to conduct their external relations and accepting a degree of British supervision in respect of their internal affairs.

But in practice such arrangements involved all manner of different relationships. Smaller states like Veja-no-ness had no jurisdictional powers and could scarcely claim even a residual sovereignty; the larger ones were effectively self-governing, maintained their own forces and jealously clung to all the trappings of a sovereignty that was freely acknowledged by the paramount power.

Of these larger princely states, over a hundred were accounted ‘salute states’, their rulers being entitled to proclaim their sovereignty on ceremonial occasions with a gun salute of up to twenty-one salvos. About a dozen of them were vast, their territories, populations or both exceeding those of most member states in the newly founded United Nations. The composite state of Jammu and Kashmir, a Himalayan spin-off of the former Sikh ‘empire’, claimed a land area bigger than France; Hyderabad in the south had a population equivalent to that of Italy. Nor were they all cesspits of reaction and feudal privilege. Travancore on the Kerala coast boasted a literacy rate far above that of directly ruled India; others had developed an industrial capacity or were richly endowed with mineral resources; and several had endorsed some form of popular representation and set up consultative or legislative bodies.

Although many of the smallest states were concentrated in western India, the rest were scattered fairly evenly about the subcontinent and were not often contiguous. Maps thus gave the impression of British India’s fabric being as perilously holed as a Meo’s outworn kurta. Yet this was only half the story. Their variety was as challenging as their distribution. Some were ruled by Muslim Nawabs (including Hyderabad’s Nizam and Swat’s Wali), others by Maharajahs, Rajahs or lesser variants of the same who might be either Hindu or Sikh; and whatever the ruler’s faith, it was not uncommon for the faith of the majority of his subjects to be different. Famously, the greatest princes commanded immense wealth and built ever more fanciful palaces; less famously, the least were hopelessly in debt and lived in shabby obscurity. And not even the mapmakers of the Survey of India had been able to do justice to the unconsolidated nature of princely holdings. Erratic boundaries and isolated enclaves and counter-enclaves abounded. Communications suffered accordingly. As Darling had discovered, road transport was stifled by innumerable state customs barriers where duties were levied, bribes extorted, and some goods could not pass at all. It was the same with the railways and the postal service. Fifty years later Indian Railways would still be grappling with the illogic of state-centred networks and the numerous different rail gauges bequeathed by princely whim.

All this rendered the states highly vulnerable. Making a case for hereditary monarchy in the mid-twentieth century was difficult enough, and it was not helped by the reluctance of many rulers to welcome reform. Inevitably it was the princes’ outrageous eccentricities and their lavish expenditure on foreign travel, luxury cars and well-stocked zenanas that made the headlines. All, great or small, recognised that their best chance of retaining their rights lay in presenting a united front, yet their wildly different circumstances seldom admitted of their sustaining it. The smaller states resisted federating with the larger; and the larger resented their claims to special treatment being muddied by the unrealistic expectations of the smaller.

Of course national sentiment, not to mention common sense, demanded that they throw in their lot with either Congress or the League. It would dispel the suspicion that they were British puppets, be welcomed by most of their subjects, and deserve a generous response from the political parties. For Congress and the League badly needed the states. Without them, an independent India would be denied the territorial uniformity expected of a modern nation state and be incapable of planning an integrated economy. And the same went for a possible Pakistan: without the states and some semi-autonomous tribal areas, its territory would be even more perforated than the ‘moth-eaten’ periphery for which Jinnah would eventually have to settle.

On the other hand, and much to British relief, individually the states were still less viable. All of them depended to some extent on the directly administered provinces not just for ‘oil, cloth, sugar and wheat’ but also coal, power and even water. Moreover, not one of them was readily defensible. A few had written treaties that obliged the British to afford them indefinite protection; but in the absence of British troops this would scarcely be practicable, and Westminster therefore had no intention of honouring the treaties. According to Cripps, ‘the efflux of time and change of circumstances’ had rendered the treaties no longer ‘appropriate to the conditions of the modern world’. With the departure of the paramount power, ‘paramountcy’ – one of those barely definable terms, like ‘suzerainty’ and ‘dependency’, with which empires disguise their dominion – would lapse. Although Congress demanded that all such obligations pass to the new paramount power as part of the ‘transfer of responsibility’, the Cabinet Mission had demurred. In a rare reference to the matter, it reiterated the British contention that ‘all rights surrendered … to the paramount power will return to the states’. At a press conference Cripps went even further, opining that the states would thus ‘become wholly independent’.

This was music to princely ears. Hyderabad and Travancore immediately gave serious thought to joining the world’s concourse of sovereign nations by despatching ambassadors and applying for UN membership. They and many other states expected to retain their links with the British Crown by negotiating their individual or collective entry into the British Commonwealth. And all recognised that the retraction of paramountcy did at least improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis the new political leadership represented by Congress and the League.

The League was generally supportive of the states; its desired Pakistan would contain comparatively few, of which only Kashmir was a possible contender for independence. But it was otherwise with Congress. As the voice of all India’s peoples it claimed to represent the subjects of the princely states as well as those of British India. In the Chamber of Princes (the princely forum), Congress was thus confronted by a second grouping of potential secessionists who, though less vociferous than the League, could be just as unaccommodating.

While insisting that paramountcy must lapse, the British government had urged the princes to negotiate their future status with the nationalist leadership. Indeed, the Cabinet Mission Plan had envisaged the princes participating in both the Constituent Assembly and the interim government. But, like the League, the Chamber of Princes had prevaricated. It too insisted on disproportionate representation in the Constituent Assembly, while demanding numerous concessions in respect of the legitimacy of monarchical government and a large measure of autonomy in the states’ internal affairs. In early 1947 Nehru, whose centrist, socialist and democratic sentiments were no secret, steeled himself to offer sufficient safeguards to split the princely Chamber into pro- and anti-accessionists. But there still remained the problem of how to win over the latter, and anyway the Constituent Assembly had been prorogued in the face of Jinnah’s refusal to participate. Meanwhile the British government’s February announcement of a deadline for independence had left the future status of the princes unchanged.

What did change was the Viceroy. In March 1947, just as Malcolm Darling was completing his long ride, Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived as Wavell’s replacement. Unlike Wavell, the new Viceroy enjoyed Whitehall’s utmost confidence plus the luxury of having drafted his own brief. With numerous other advantages – a royal connection, an open mind, an attractive wife and an infectious sense of urgency – Mountbatten would plunge straight into the constitutional impasse between Congress and the League. The princes would therefore have to wait.

In May 1947, a year after it had been tabled, the Cabinet Mission Plan was finally ditched along with the all-party Constituent Assembly. The demands of Congress and the League remained irreconcilable, but an uneasy lull in the massacres in the Punjab offered some hope. June brought the critical turnaround, when Mountbatten endorsed Partition and quickly followed this by announcing an earlier deadline for its enaction. Only in July, as the days ticked away and Congress agonised over the loss of Pakistan, did it dawn on Mountbatten that it was the princely states that ‘held the key to a negotiated settlement …’

V.P. Menon, Mountbatten’s ‘political reforms commissioner’ and the unofficial intermediary between Congress and the Viceroy, has been credited with coming up with the terms of the deal. These had something for everyone. Mountbatten would dragoon the states into signing Instruments of Accession to the new India (and in a few cases to Pakistan); Congress, in return, would accept Partition and the loss of Pakistan; and the princes would be mollified by having to hand over their powers only in respect of defence, foreign affairs and communications – in effect no more than they had surrendered under the system of paramountcy. Moreover, by way of further reassuring them with a residual British connection, India and Pakistan would join the British Commonwealth, so giving Mountbatten something to crow about and saving British blushes with a face-saving formula that was of some strategic value in an increasingly bipolar world.

Given the urgency of the situation, it was a persuasive package. But as with Partition itself, the self-imposed haste so concentrated ministerial minds that the wider issues of implementation received little attention. The princes would not all sign on the dotted line, Congress would honour the terms of their Instruments of Accession only for a matter of weeks, the Muslim League would do its utmost to render India as ‘moth-eaten’ as Pakistan by encouraging princely defections, and Mountbatten would wash his hands of the whole business as quickly as he could. In short, the power-brokers seemed oblivious to the anxious faces under the countless village pipal trees in the back of beyond. Chauffeur-driven negotiators sped down the Delhi boulevards without sparing a thought for the dark moustachioed drivers in undarned cotton rags atop their creaking bullock carts.