Indians commonly refer to the past seventy years not as the “post-Independence era” but the “post-Partition era”. It is as if the achievement of freedom was eclipsed by the territorial division that accompanied it. The 1947 dissection of Britain’s Indian empire into a diminished India and a two-part Pakistan (itself dismembered into Bangladesh and a smaller Pakistan in 1971) is seen as a high price to have paid for self-determination and as a source of lasting hostility between the principals, both now nuclear powers. Infinitely worse, though, was the human tragedy that Partition occasioned. Around 15 million people were forced to flee their homes. Hundreds of thousands were raped, mutilated or forcibly converted. And in what ranks with the Holocaust as one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of blood-letting, perhaps a million former countrymen horribly massacred one another. The imprecision of the figures is testament not just to the scale of the tragedy but to its still contested nature.
All three of these fraught processes – the independence struggle, the acceptance of partition, and the genocidal madness it unleashed – are addressed in Barney White-Spunner’s grim but admirably impartial Partition. Like everyone else, White-Spunner wonders why it all went so wrong: who was to blame, why was the violent fallout not foreseen, and why did the killing go unchecked? But unlike other writers on the subject, White-Spunner is neither an academic, an old India hand, nor an empire disloyalist. He is the lieutenant general who commanded the British forces in Basra in 2008 and later mustered the Barbour-clad battalions of the Countryside Alliance. He understands the limitations of deployment, knows the challenges of disengagement, and feels strongly about the political constraints under which military commanders are expected to help to keep the peace.
Lord Mountbatten and colonial administrators discuss Partition, 1947
These insights serve him least well when assessing the British response to the freedom struggle. “It was [Britain’s] refusal to compromise, while not having the resources nor the real willingness to administer and develop India in the way the country so badly needed, that was the main cause of the tragedy in 1947.” In India, as in Iraq, the British outstayed their effectiveness. The moment to have disengaged was in early 1919. Indians’ expectations of recognition for their wartime contribution should have been met with an offer of the Dominion status already enjoyed by Canada and Australia. There would then, says White-Spunner, have been no call for partition. “India would have stayed as a united nation in the Commonwealth, with a British governor general and a British hand, albeit a light one, in defence and foreign policy but essentially self-governing.” Would it, though? Gallipoli and Mesopotamia had already undermined the mystique of imperial invincibility. Brigadier Dyer’s massacre of peaceful protesters in Amritsar was about to radicalize nationalist sentiment. Would figures such as Dyer have loyally accepted Indian direction? And would self-governing Indians have happily sunk their communal differences, approved the country’s massive military budget, and signed up to fight the Axis powers in 1939? The counter-factual is counterintuitive.
Partition is on firmer ground when dealing with Partition itself. Thirty years ago it was generally accepted that if any individual was responsible for dividing India it was the spare and inflexible Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His leadership of the Muslim League certainly mobilized Muslims in favour of the creation of Pakistan while apparently rejecting any compromise. But since the publication in 1985 of Ayesha Jayal’s biography of Jinnah (The Sole Spokesman), a new orthodoxy has gained acceptance. White-Spunner endorses it. Jinnah’s insistence on India’s “Muslim nation” having its own independent Pakistan is seen as a bluff; he would seemingly have preferred a Pakistan consisting of British India’s Muslim-majority provinces grouped within a loosely federal but unitary India. Indeed, he indicated as much by accepting a proposal along those lines from the 1946 Cabinet Mission. But the Cabinet Mission plan fell foul of Congress leaders such as the secular socialist Jawaharlal Nehru. Perhaps rightly, Nehru insisted that only a strong central government could address the urgent challenges of integration (especially of the princely states), social justice and grinding poverty. So Jinnah’s bluff was called. In the final negotiations it was not he who argued for Partition but Congress. Push came to shove when, as the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten lent to it his imprimatur and cherished reputation.
More intriguing are White-Spunner’s military insights into the mayhem that followed. The violence was not unanticipated. It had been erupting for over a year; in Calcutta, boots were already on the pavements. But they were not in the Punjab. There the Governor, Evan Jenkins, repeatedly warned of the conflagration to come. So did the British commander of the Punjab Boundary Force, Major General T. W. Rees. This was a supposedly neutral and 50,000-strong peacekeeping unit that never reached half that number, and whose neutrality was so compromised by its composition that it was disbanded before it was effectively deployed.
The warnings were there, but they were ignored. White-Spunner blames everyone. Militarily ignorant politicians like Nehru and Jinnah were simply out of their depth. Mountbatten was not as personally culpable as is often supposed and, suprisingly, the man he blames most is Claude Auchinleck, the Indian army’s much-loved commander-in-chief. “The Auk”, it seems, saw Partition as a threat to his army rather than to the Indian public. He starved the Punjab of troops and, even when the scale of the tragedy was apparent, declined to deploy British regiments on the grounds that their job was to protect British personnel, not Indians. In Barney White-Spunner’s highly readable account, this is probably the greatest surprise. Coming from the pen of another likeable general it carries conviction.
These insights serve him least well when assessing the British response to the freedom struggle. “It was [Britain’s] refusal to compromise, while not having the resources nor the real willingness to administer and develop India in the way the country so badly needed, that was the main cause of the tragedy in 1947.” In India, as in Iraq, the British outstayed their effectiveness. The moment to have disengaged was in early 1919. Indians’ expectations of recognition for their wartime contribution should have been met with an offer of the Dominion status already enjoyed by Canada and Australia. There would then, says White-Spunner, have been no call for partition. “India would have stayed as a united nation in the Commonwealth, with a British governor general and a British hand, albeit a light one, in defence and foreign policy but essentially self-governing.” Would it, though? Gallipoli and Mesopotamia had already undermined the mystique of imperial invincibility. Brigadier Dyer’s massacre of peaceful protesters in Amritsar was about to radicalize nationalist sentiment. Would figures such as Dyer have loyally accepted Indian direction? And would self-governing Indians have happily sunk their communal differences, approved the country’s massive military budget, and signed up to fight the Axis powers in 1939? The counter-factual is counterintuitive.
Partition is on firmer ground when dealing with Partition itself. Thirty years ago it was generally accepted that if any individual was responsible for dividing India it was the spare and inflexible Muhammad Ali Jinnah. His leadership of the Muslim League certainly mobilized Muslims in favour of the creation of Pakistan while apparently rejecting any compromise. But since the publication in 1985 of Ayesha Jayal’s biography of Jinnah (The Sole Spokesman), a new orthodoxy has gained acceptance. White-Spunner endorses it. Jinnah’s insistence on India’s “Muslim nation” having its own independent Pakistan is seen as a bluff; he would seemingly have preferred a Pakistan consisting of British India’s Muslim-majority provinces grouped within a loosely federal but unitary India. Indeed, he indicated as much by accepting a proposal along those lines from the 1946 Cabinet Mission. But the Cabinet Mission plan fell foul of Congress leaders such as the secular socialist Jawaharlal Nehru. Perhaps rightly, Nehru insisted that only a strong central government could address the urgent challenges of integration (especially of the princely states), social justice and grinding poverty. So Jinnah’s bluff was called. In the final negotiations it was not he who argued for Partition but Congress. Push came to shove when, as the last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten lent to it his imprimatur and cherished reputation.
More intriguing are White-Spunner’s military insights into the mayhem that followed. The violence was not unanticipated. It had been erupting for over a year; in Calcutta, boots were already on the pavements. But they were not in the Punjab. There the Governor, Evan Jenkins, repeatedly warned of the conflagration to come. So did the British commander of the Punjab Boundary Force, Major General T. W. Rees. This was a supposedly neutral and 50,000-strong peacekeeping unit that never reached half that number, and whose neutrality was so compromised by its composition that it was disbanded before it was effectively deployed.
The warnings were there, but they were ignored. White-Spunner blames everyone. Militarily ignorant politicians like Nehru and Jinnah were simply out of their depth. Mountbatten was not as personally culpable as is often supposed and, suprisingly, the man he blames most is Claude Auchinleck, the Indian army’s much-loved commander-in-chief. “The Auk”, it seems, saw Partition as a threat to his army rather than to the Indian public. He starved the Punjab of troops and, even when the scale of the tragedy was apparent, declined to deploy British regiments on the grounds that their job was to protect British personnel, not Indians. In Barney White-Spunner’s highly readable account, this is probably the greatest surprise. Coming from the pen of another likeable general it carries conviction.
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