Path to Partition: A witness account

A perceptive commentary on the political processes that led to the partition of India.

IN the entire corpus of American writings on India, this book stands out in all its uniqueness. Journalists have contributed reportage and scholars have written studies after research in India; both, for publication. Phillips Talbot wrote letters which were not intended for publication. He came to India having learnt Urdu which enabled him to move freely without an interpreter. He met Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Patel, Liaquat Ali Khan and others. He was present when the Vicero y Lord Mountbatten addressed Pakistans Constituent Assembly on August 14, 1947, and rushed in time to be present at the midnight session of Indias Constituent Assembly on August 14-15, 1947.

What is more, he watched closely as the last opportunities of seeing Indias unity were frittered away, saw the bitter aftermath of Partition, noticed the nuances of the Kashmir dispute, and made observations of enduring relevance, comments that have stood the test of time.

The career itself was unique. After an impressive academic record, he became a local reporter for the Chicago Daily News. He was interested in world affairs, but the editors thought he was too young to be sent out as a foreign correspondent. A small New York foundation, the Institute of Current World Affairs, offered to send him to India on a fellowship. His letters to its director, William S. Rogers, comprise the bulk of the book. He was 23 then. A year at the London School of Oriental Studies (now of Oriental and African Studies) in the company of probationers of the Indian Civil Service, and lessons in Urdu, equipped him well. His first two years in India (1939-41) were spent at the Aligarh Muslim University, a Vedic ashram in Lahore, Tagores Shantiniketan, the Kodaikanal Ashram and Gandhis ashram in Sevagram. A stint at Manila with the United States Navy, and he was back in India as U.S. Naval Liaison Officer in Bombay (now Mumbai) for two years. In 1946, the Chicago Daily News made him a foreign correspondent and sent him back to India.

The University of Chicago awarded him a doctorate in International Affairs. He came back to spend a year at a time in India and Pakistan, where he wrote reports for the American Universities Field Staff. President Kennedy appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. That he earned the megalomaniac Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraiths wrath is a plus point. He became president of the Asia Society, of which he is now President Emeritus. The volume concludes with an afterword on India-U.S. relations now.

There are delightful vignettes on cultural life, on the Indian temperament, on the ways of politicians and their interactions with crowds. A letter from Aligarh on January 23, 1940, describes vividly a mushaira (Urdu poets conclave): When that poet comes who can carry the crowd, the one whose voice is good and whose couplets are exciting, he is rewarded by almost breathless attention unsullied by sophisticated detachment. When he scores a touch, a deep rumble originates in the back of the room and rolls majestically forward. Vah, vah, the tribute greets him bahut khub, bahut khub, superb, superb. On feeling, more than hearing, the admiration expressed in these vibrations the pleased singer makes a sign of thanks, and moves forward into the next couplet.

On this night younger student poets recited first. They are amateurs who have found beauties in the Urdu language and who have attempted to do much with them. Hardly any, though, received a hearing. After them came some hands more adept at the craft, and then two or three poets Jigar and Ravish Siddiqi whose names are known across India. The minstrel Jigar, whose former propensity for drink has been tamed by tea and coffee, cuts an arresting figure with his hair dropping to curls at his shoulders and his loose, untidy dress. On the platform he gulped down four cups of tea during one recitation. It was such experts as he who kept the interest, until 1 a.m. of 600 students who rise and pray before sunup. Jigar was a legend in his lifetime.

There are perceptive profiles of leaders. Both Nehru and Gandhi took a liking for Talbot. He met Nehru in late 1939 at a United Provinces Congress Committee (UPCC) conference in Mathura. During my stay in the camp Nehru spent upwards of three hours explaining to me his view of Indian problems. He is a thorough-going socialist, though he unhesitatingly follows Gandhi in some most unsocialistic channels. Though a nationalist and sturdily opposed to the British government despite his Harrow and Cambridge education, he puts India in an international setting and describes its situation as one aspect of a world imperialist issue. He views America and Asia rather than Europe as the continents of the future. In some of his speeches he tells his peasant audience that In our battle for freedom the democratic sentiment of the United States of America is with us. Nehru lays the cause of communal strife at the door of economics (in accordance with his belief in the Marxist view of history). The Musalmans political organisation, he holds, is encouraged by foreign interests and is financed by the taluqdar, or landholding, class, a very important element in the Muslim community. It stands to lose from the advance of Congress doctrinology, with its End the feudal system in India! Therefore it may benefit through retention of power by the chief Congress opponent: the British government. But a pro-imperialism stand would be political suicide under popular government in India. Instead, the religious aspect of communalism is plumped for.

This preposterously shallow theory governed Nehrus disastrous policy towards the Muslim League. So Nehru foresees that the communal problem as such will fade if India is left to settle the matter herself and if economic factors come to the fore, causing groups to unite or divide on the basis of bread-and-butter interests rather than according to religious creed.

All of which shows how little Nehru understood India and the communal question which tore it apart. His arrogance and ignorance contributed not a little to the tragedy. During the First World War, socialists were dismayed to find the working class as nationalistic as any other in place of the solidarity which theoreticians accepted. Sixty years after Independence we face not only the communal question but also caste divisions.

His philosophy of social and economic reorganisation has been the driving force of his political crusade, but it clashes with Gandhis economic concepts. Recognising that any move away from Gandhi would serve to split the nationalist movement seriously, Nehru has fought between his beliefs and his loyalties. He was heard to say, in 1940, I could not write the Autobiography now. I am not sure enough of my ideas any more. One leftist labourite European expressed the opinion that Nehru was showing symptoms of schizophrenia. Once in power, Nehru came to value stability (his word) over everything else. In 1947, Nehru imagined that India as she is situated geographically and situated economically inevitably will become the centre of Asia. It has not, partly because of his policies.

There was nothing inevitable about Partition. On January 10, 1940, Talbot wrote: The Muslim League and the Congress are pulling in opposite directions, leaving the British to keep the peace. And the Leagues solution for the impasse? To carve India up into a Hindu country and a Muslim country, or at least into two federations within the gossamer net of a confederation. The trouble is that the Muslims themselves to say nothing of other interests havent yet agreed on any scheme which makes partition practical. Jinnahs letter to the London weekly Time and Tide (January 19, 1940) spoke of two nations who both must share the governance of their common motherland so that India may take its place amongst the great nations of the world (emphasis added throughout.) That implies not partition but power-sharing in a united India which, despite his two-nation theory, he wished to rank among the great nations of the world.

The Pakistan resolution was passed by the Muslim League on March 23, 1940, at a session in Lahore, at which Talbot was present. In February, Jinnah told Talbot that he could see no other solutions. Sir Abdullah Haroon gave Talbot copies of the eight proposals under consideration. The League had a catalogue of complaints against the Congress Ministries behaviour in the provinces, from real to fanciful. One of them was that the movie industry in the hands of the Hindus is surreptitiously replacing good Urdu vocabulary in Hindustani films with Sanskrit and Hindi words that will corrupt the Muslim language. The Leagues false claim that Urdu was a Muslim language did it incalculable harm.

One man who kept his head was the Leagues secretary Liaquat Ali Khan. Our stand is that we refuse to be dominated by the Hindus. If anyone can work out a plan better than partition to achieve that end, lets hear it. Seven years later, on April 10, 1947, he told Mountbatten: If your staff can work out exactly what partition means and then if you present the full difficulties to Mr. Jinnah he will of course understand them though he has not worked them out for himself. Talbot called the demand for Pakistan a backward step. It was deplored in London from The Times downwards.

There is a good profile of Jinnah in the volume: Sharp critics say in awe, You cant buy him. He has never accepted an honour from the British government; the prospect of personal gain or favour seems hardly to have affected his policy. Yet he is undoubtedly a megalomaniac (and a shrewd one). That is his driving power Mr. Jinnah stands as the mouthpiece, protector and defender of the Muslim peoples of India. In that capacity he castigates Gandhi, Nehru and what lesser Congress lights he deigns to notice. No man in Indian public life today uses such intemperate language in published references to other leaders. Few men could be less compromising. Yet none surpasses his skill in judging the temper of his partisans.

Little did Jinnah realise that his arrogance and bad manners undermined his attractiveness as a partner in power sharing.

Not that the Congress had any use for this idea. It sought a deal with the British over Jinnahs head, making the most of the threat of a Japanese invasion. Just before the Quit India resolution was passed by the All India Congress Committee on August 8, 1942, the government, which raided Congress headquarters and took many papers, has chosen to release long sections of the secret official minutes of a meeting of the Congress Working Committee in Allahabad in late April which purport to show that Nehru and Gandhi were in strong disagreement about whether the Axis would win the war and permitting that belief consciously or unconsciously to colour his whole thinking. I learned that Nehru, who is capable of white-hot temper, was in a blazing mood over what he considers the governments despicable trick.

Among the papers seized were the minutes of a meeting of the Congress Working Committee at Allahabad from April 27 to May 1, 1942, which the British published in 1943 in a White Paper entitled Congress Responsibility for The Disturbances 1942-43 (pages 42-46). It was a prelude to the Quit India resolution.

The minutes record that Nehru said the whole background of the draft [proposed by Gandhi to the Committee] is one which will inevitably make the world think that we are passively living up with the Axis Powers It is Gandhijis feeling that Japan and Germany will win. This feeling unconsciously governs his decision. By then the U.S. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had allied with the United Kingdom to defeat Germany and Japan.

Rajaji opposed Gandhis draft: Do not run into the arms of Japan which is what the resolution comes to. Vallabhbhai Patel said: I have placed myself in the hands of Gandhiji. I feel that he is instinctively right. Rajaji alone had the courage to dissociate himself from the movement. Nehru and his supporters, Azad, Pant and Asaf Ali, meekly complied. In his jail diary Nehru recorded their angry arguments in prison and his own bitterness towards Gandhi (Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru; First Series; Volume 13).

The atmosphere in the country was not only charged with tension but was fouled by poison. In a speech on February 5, 1938, Jinnah had proudly declared that the League had freed you [the Muslims] from that undesirable element of Maulvis and Maulanas. In 1939 came his two-nation theory which he discarded belatedly on August 11, 1947, at the inaugural session of Pakistans Constituent Assembly. By then the League had ardently sought the support of the maulvis he had decried.

Communal elements in the Congress needed no help from the League. Nehru noted in his Autobiography in 1936 that many a Congressman was a communalist under his nationalist garb (page 136). That included men who came to wield power at the Centre and in the States. Patel, Pant, Sampurnanand and Tandon, Ravi Shankar Shukla, B.C. Roy and Morarji Desai besides others. Rajaji provided a sterling exception until his death.

Talbot perceived keenly the trends early enough in both the camps. The pice de rsistance in the volume is a comprehensive report on The Independence of India dated March 19, 1947, in which he noted: At the same time the Congress has become more nearly a Hindu body than before. The rise of Muslim clannishness in India has inevitably evoked increased fraternal consciousness among Hindus. Even in the diffuse mould of Hinduism, the clan spirit has surged so violently that it has penetrated the thinking of Congress party policy makers. Nehru has not willed such a development nor, certainly, have ex-president Maulana Abul Kalam Azad or the Khan brothers of the Northwest Frontier. But in bargaining against the Muslim League they themselves have necessarily done the work of the Hindu communalists. Hindus have always been dominant in the Congress movement, partly because Muslims were generally slower to accept the West and its political concepts. Hindus form the bulk of society in the two-thirds of British India where Congress strength is concentrated. If Indian politics had divided on economic lines, the parallelism between Hindus and Congress political aspirations might have been avoided. As it is, the communal virus has done its work.

Despite Jinnah, the report noted, These mullahs and their disciples think of Pakistan in terms of a true Islamic state governed in accordance with the Shariat, which lays down domestic and social law. The head of the state, an amir or caliph, would exercise theocratic as well as secular powers. Non-Muslim residents would be subject to the jazia, or head tax, though it might not be regularly levied. Such a governmental form is favoured to a greater or lesser degree by many Muslims. In an extreme degree it would lead to thorough-going mullah influence in Pakistan. Compromise between the ideas of this band and the problems of modernisation might be difficult.

The two-nation theory spelt the death of secularism and encouraged sectarianism. Jinnahs responsibility is undeniable. Four months after Independence, Talbot saw the trends that had alarmed the distinguished Rajeshwar Dayal, then Chief Secretary, Uttar Pradesh, as he recorded in his memoirs A Life of Our Times. Talbot wrote on December 12, 1947: India is undergoing a Hinduistic resurgence. A political generation dominated by the Pakistan issue has stimulated what I suppose may be the most vigorous wave of sheer Hinduism since Buddhism was ejected from India. To take one small example: despite high-level statements of impartiality, the United Provinces has adopted Hindi, the Sanskrit derivative closely associated with Hinduism, as its official language instead of the mixed Hindustani of Sanskritic-Persian origins which Muslims prefer and which Gandhi recommended. Muslims in various Indian provinces are drastically on the defensive; many Hindus act as if they had entered the promised land. (An equal but opposite condition exists in Pakistan.) Politically the Congress remains the dominant organisation in India, and one-party rule seems indicated so long as the present veteran leadership keeps its grip. The Congress retains some of its old conglomerate character, but Hinduistic and bloated financial interests are extremely influential despite Nehrus resistance.

It was Nehrus consistent opposition and sustained eloquent espousal of the secular ideal and Gandhis martyrdom in 1948 that stemmed the tide of the resurgent Hindutva forces with which Patel & Co. were in sympathy. No wonder the Sangh Parivar hates Gandhi and Nehru, and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) chief M.S. Golwalkar denounced Gandhi in Bunch of Thoughts. The country owes a deep debt of gratitude to Gandhi and Nehru for its secular ideal.

By February 7, 1950, the RSS, banned in 1948, was back in business: If the Hindu communal movement makes material progress, the chief instrument may be the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The militant RSS appeases the frustrations of middle-class individuals in much the pattern of the various youth movements in Europe. The discipline shown at RSS rallies is sufficiently impressive to be frightening. The way in which its fanatical leader crisscrosses the country on tours that he denies are aggressive reminds me of a similar Muslim organisation, the Khaksars, that ripened nearly a dozen years ago. The Khaksars died an inglorious death when they thought themselves bigger than Mr. Jinnah. Whether the RSS could suffer a similar fate at the hands of, say, Patel would depend on whether Patel really wanted to suppress it and on the vigour of the Indo-Pakistan antagonism. One of the most dangerous features of continued controversy between India and Pakistan is the prospect that communal organisations of fascist character may thrive on the disputes . This is an aspect Nehru overlooked. Far from fortifying the cause, his confrontationist policy towards Pakistan on Kashmir undermined secularism in India and led to Sheikh Abdullahs disenchantment. The Jan Sangh and the RSS profited by it.

Patel is hailed as a realist as if the hard line is synonymous with realism. Read this: On an early morning walk one day in March 1947, three months before the Congress and the Muslim League accepted the June 3 plan that set the stage for Indias independence with partition, Patel talked with me about his partys determination to have a united country. If Jinnah should force partition, he said, We will go ahead and frame a constitution for the whole of India, making provision for areas that stay out at first to come in later. Within a year the Pakistan regions will be ready to join the Indian Union. The Muslim-majority areas would find they cannot stand alone. It would be best for them to come in and work out a single union government. Nehru also shared this belief.

A report dated January 15, 1948, sets out at length an account of the early stages in the Kashmir conflict as told to me by one of the participants on the Indian side. The account itself suggests that this was none other than V.P. Menon, which makes the volume a work of great importance. In pages 351-352, there is a revealing disclosure which could have come from V.P. Menon alone the troops were sent to Kashmir before the accession. Talbots perception was no different from Indira Gandhis on May 13, 1948 Pakistan would win the plebiscite. More relevant are two nuggets. Sheikh Abdullah told Talbot that Kashmir would be finished if it had to join one Dominion and thereby incur the enmity of the other. What he sought, he said, was an arrangement by which Kashmir could have normal relations with both countries.

But of immediate contemporary relevance is G.M. Sadiqs ingenious idea in 1950. He told me for the record that the United Nations should not try to mediate between India and Pakistan but between the two major groups in Kashmir itself (the National Conference and the Azad Kashmir Group). Sadiq supported the reunification of Kashmir to be accompanied by the establishment of joint relations with both India and Pakistan. On February 26, 1948, Mr. Gopalaswami Ayyangar said that the formula which he would adopt, if pressed in this matter, was that Sheikh Abdullah would certainly consider the possibility of including members of the Muslim Conference in his Cabinet. He pointed out that Sheikh Abdullah indeed even now hoped to persuade Ghulam Abbas (the head of the Muslim Conference in Kashmir) to come in.

This is strikingly akin to the Manmohan Singh-Musharraf consensus the Line of Control becomes just a line on the map. De facto Jammu and Kashmir becomes one under an India-Pakistan accord. Already by December 1947 Corruption in public life is gross. Large-scale bribery and refusal to pay income tax are phenomena of the final war years of the British period when contracts and the operation of various controls involved millions of rupees. This is an economic factor that the new government has inherited. Important members of the Congress as well as businessmen are involved.

Talbot noted that Generally speaking, Indians nerves are raw. Every issue tends to produce a crisis. An oversensitive nationalistic spirit is visible. Public irresponsibility surges ahead of government action. Again, a similar condition exists in Pakistan. Neither Dominion government, therefore, is able to guarantee implementation of its promises to the other. That remains true even now, 60 years later.

So also his comment on Indias Educated Classes and Poverty, written on September 14, 1940. To think of India as a starving, bankrupt, primitive and uncivilised country seems to me to be as narrow as to speak of America as a country only of ironclad Darktowns, Lower East Side New Yorks, and Near West Side Chicagos. The other side of the medal is that India is living up to her brilliant intellectual heritage. She has been called the mother of philosophy, and the debt of her children in other lands has been put by Max Muller in words marked more by fervour than moderation. But the important point today is that the attainment of a world point of view is a serious subject of thought and discussion in India among circles whose counterparts in America ordinarily quibble over the relative merits of Cubs and Giants. Economists working with or separately from British economists have developed an approach to national problems which is sound, progressive and forward-looking. Literature in Bengali, Urdu and other languages includes modern works that authorities who judge by world standards call significant; certainly Tagore and Iqbal could hardly be called provincial figures. In science too the country is holding up her head, pointing among her sons to three Nobel Prize winners and to a challenge to Einsteinism, which I do not pretend to understand, that has been accepted by academies of at least three countries. India has contributed professors to Oxford and American universities, editors to London publishers, religious leaders to the world. But those are her bright individuals. Among the less select circle of ordinary educated people there is breadth of culture that is sometimes missed by outsiders because it is not all in English. Few in our country know Greek and Aramaic as some of these people know Arabic and others Sanskrit. Few can recite Latin poetry with the delight that these people find in Persian couplets and the Ramayana. But even more general than that, the conversational level among educated Indians is high. Their interests are broad and their tongues usually adept at expression. They are cultured.

Talbots insights are critical but inspired by strong empathy for India. He richly deserved his Padma Shri.