Excerpt: The Great India Game
Narendra Singh Sarila was an aide-de-camp (ADC) to Governor General Mountbatten before he joined the 1948 batch of India’s foreign service and went on to serve for thirty-seven years as an Indian diplomat. In his book on the ‘untold story’ of India’s Partition, Sarila emphasized a thesis that has since gathered wider support based on archival evidence. He argued that the Partition of India was firmly connected to the geopolitical ‘Great Game’ that was being played from the nineteenth century, between the British Raj and the Czarist empire, for control over Central Asia and Afghanistan. He thus laid the blame for ‘Divide and Quit’ at the door of the departing British Raj, rather than on either Jinnah or Nehru.
The nineteenth-century Great Game was being played out in Afghanistan and Central Asia. The British had fought wars in Afghanistan, built railway networks to the Khyber Pass, and helped the rulers of Kashmir extend their influence into Chinese Xinjiang: all to keep the areas of India’s western approaches from slipping into Russian influence.
Sarila demonstrated the British conviction in the 1940s that if they withdrew from India, Congress leaders would be unsympathetic to British military interests. He pointed out that Lord Wavell, who was the viceroy from 1943 to 1947, was among the first to be persuaded that while the Congress was unlikely to further British military interests, the Muslim League would be willing to do so. Hence, if the League were to succeed in separating India’s strategic north-west from the rest of the country, British interests would be better served by a military deal with this new state, particularly in defending the oil wells in the Middle East. As 1946 went by, Wavell’s point of view became acceptable in British military circles. Nehru’s oath in the Constituent Assembly to declare India a sovereign independent republic free from the Commonwealth, reinforced the assessment that a pliant western splinter state was more in the British interest.
Sarila has argued that midway through World War II, the British realized that they would have to quit India sooner than later, and in the process abandon a military base that had served them well for over fifty years. Their strategic thoughts then turned to closing the gap that would result in tying up a Commonwealth defence against the Soviet move to the south, towards the ‘wells of power in the Indian Ocean’. To find a solution, they looked for manoeuvres in India through what was described by Churchill as ‘opportunism and improvisation’.
Decades later, a brilliant Indian scholar-diplomat, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, delved deep into freshly declassified archives to decipher the colonial strategy of that period and came to similar conclusions as Sarila. He pointed out that after the Mountbatten Plan on the transfer of power to the dominions was finalized in June 1947, the British army, navy, and air chiefs met in July to reiterate that the ‘main and overriding consideration should be to retain both India and Pakistan within the British Commonwealth, or at any rate ensure that they will cooperate (militarily) with us’. The British strategic tilt towards Pakistan had become a strong factor in the India policy now being rolled out: the chiefs of staff concluded that ‘while the ideal outcome would be to secure the cooperation of both India and Pakistan, on the other hand, the area of Pakistan is strategically the most important in the continent of India and the majority of our strategic requirements could be met, though with considerably greater difficulty, by an agreement with Pakistan alone.’
Based on archival evidence, Dasgupta inferred that ‘by August 1947, the British authorities had determined that their strategic interests in the subcontinent lay primarily in Pakistan, though the hopes of a defence treaty with India as well had not yet been given up. The decisive consideration was the proximity of airbases in West Pakistan to the Gulf region.’
While British military officers were warmly welcomed in Pakistan, their reception in independent India was cooler. Nehru wanted complete nationalization of the armed forces by June 1948—the date originally determined for the transfer of power. When the date was abruptly advanced, the Indian leader had to reluctantly accept the persisting British presence, even as Partition changed priorities, but he continued to lament the structural anomaly. ‘It is incongruous for the army of a free country not to have its own officers in the highest ranks’, he wrote to Mountbatten in July 1947.
A crucial meeting of the provisional Joint Defence Council was held a fortnight before Independence, on 29 July 1947. Chairing the meeting attended by Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, and Sardar Patel, Mountbatten remarked that the forces of the two dominions would not fight each other, since ‘under no circumstances could British officers be ranged on opposite sides’. Later events would suggest that neither Patel nor Jinnah then fully registered the viceroy’s hint: the British would work against any national security choices made by the new countries they served if these choices would endanger their own officers. So, ‘…immediately after the transfer of power, secret orders were issued by Auchinleck to British officers, requiring them to “Stand Down” in the event of a conflict between the two dominions.’28 In other words, if either India or Pakistan were to attack the other, British officers in both armies were under orders to sabotage these plans.
A different point of view was also initially in currency, suggesting that British interest lay in leaving behind a united India. Its primary proponent was Field Marshal Claude Auchinleck, who felt that a united Indian Army— with British, Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim soldiers—could succeed in a united India and defend its overseas interests. But Lord Wavell’s argument was winning. He had a long discussion with Churchill in 1945 where he seems to have persuaded the British prime minister of the advisability of a partition.
The strategic calculation in the empire’s twilight was simple: Britain’s true Pakistan policy was to keep a part of its old Indian empire—that which jutted into Central Asia and lay along Afghanistan, Soviet Russia, and China—in the hands of the successor dominion that had promised defence collaboration. Britain openly supported Pakistan at the UN. In fact, US telegrams documented Britain’s pro-Pakistani tilt in Kashmir.
The agreement to partition India was announced in Delhi on 3 June 1947. Krishna Menon, who was then head of the India League in the UK, wrote a letter to Mountbatten on 14 June, while staying with Nehru in Delhi, which raised concerns on the British strategy. Did they intend to use West Pakistan and the princely state of Kashmir, asked the diplomat, as bases to contain the perceived Soviet desire to expand their influence in the Indian Ocean, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf?
British internal reports in 1947 were clearly emphasizing that British strategic interests in the subcontinent should be focused on Pakistan. There was also some hope that some large princely states may remain independent and even provide the right for military aircraft to use bases in Hindustan.
The geopolitics of the period marked the intersection of a nineteenth century contest with a twentieth-century dynamic. The post-war compulsions of the Cold War were still evolving, even as the nineteenth-century contestations were playing out their endgame. Pakistan was being used by the British as a bulwark against Russia and the colonial idea of Russia coveting the jewel in the imperial crown. There was a time right after the world war ended, when the Great Game and the Cold War overlapped in the subcontinent, from 1945 to 1947, to provide an additional impulse for the birth of Pakistan.
Some scholars however argue that the colonial role in Partition is overstated. After all, the British Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 proposed keeping India intact as a loose confederation with a centralized defence and foreign policy. But Partition, whatever its etiology, served British post colonial goals well.
The subcontinent was also impacted by the larger geopolitics of a world emerging from a crippling war. The incipient Cold War after 1945 meant that former world war allies were turning adversaries, and a tired Britain was passing on the baton to the United States for leading the emerging post-war West.
The post-war era was geopolitically less complicated for India. The US had not quite started playing a role in South Asia; it was just beginning to pick up its Cold War interests from the British. The Cold War strategy of containment of the USSR was still evolving, even though a US diplomat George Kennan had sent a long telegram from Moscow in 1946, advising his government to check the rise of the Soviet Union. Communist China was defining its relationship with the brotherly communists next door in the USSR and was still half a century away from its assertive rise. The only external force of consequence was the departing colonial empire with residual interests in the region.
Yet, India decided not to exit the British Commonwealth with Independence, privileging continuity over anger against colonial oppression. This showed great sagacity and restraint on the part of India, given the numerous provocations by the British. For instance, the British had earlier even refused to grant India ‘dominion’ status, as they had done for Canada. Consequently, the Indian National Congress had hardened its demand in 1930 for complete independence. By 1947, the unifocal attention of India’s leadership was on independence, rather than on questioning the colonial depredations of the past century, the famines, the killings. On the part of the British, the Commonwealth was being fashioned as a ‘third force’ in a world becoming bipolar. The decolonization project itself was only a tactical retreat: the British were keen to continue exercising influence over the strategic affairs of the subcontinent.32 The leaders of India, and even more those of Pakistan, saw some national interest being furthered by remaining plugged into Britain-led structures.