HINDSIGHT ON INDIA
By BRIGADIER DESMOND YOUNG
JOBBING backwards, the exercise of what the Americans call "hindsight," is not often a profitable occupation. But since many people in Britain have an uneasy conscience about India, it may be worth considering whether anything we could have done or left undone would have got the two new Dominions away to a better start. Could we, for example, have prevented the butchery which followed the Independence Day celebrations on August 15th and, with it, the appalling increase in communal bitterness? There are few, I think, with knowledge of India in recent years who would maintain that the grant of independence was itself a mistake. It had been demanded and conceded in principle for so long that any attempt to delay it for further tuition in the art of self-government would have resulted in a rising against the British in which all the major communities would have joined. Those who were in India at the time of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny will remember that anti-British feeling reached a level higher than at any time since the Mutiny and permeated classes which had always previously been "loyal." The elaborate preparations for "Operation Asylum" showed how serious a view the-authorities took of it ; the fact that the "top secret" plans for the operation were promptly published in the People's Age, the Bombay Communist paper, together wits many other leakages of "top secret" documents, showed that the British Raj could no longer depend upon Indian civilian personnel, even at G.H.Q.
Had a rising taken place, it could perhaps have been suppressed, though the task would not have been easy, with British battalions composed mainly of young conscripts with no heart for the job. The Indian Army would, indeed, almost certainly have stood firm, but its discipline and loyalty would have been subjected to a test which could not fairly have been asked of it. In any case, a cam- paign for the reconquest of India with Indian troops—or, for that matter, with British—would have been an outrage on British and world opinion. Moreover, if India was not already as fit for self- government as, say, certain Middle Eastern countries, Egypt, Iran or Irak—a proposition which takes some swallowing—there was not the slightest reason to suppose that she would be any more fit for it in another ten or twenty years. On the contrary, the "steel frame" of the British administration was already so weakened, and those who composed it already so resigned to the relinquishment of power, that it was impossible not to feel, on the spot, that initiative had passed from our hands and that we had "sat too long for any good we might have been doing." India is a country where Theodore Roosevelt's "Govern or get out" especially applies, and, as we had lost the will to govern and much of our belief in our supreme capacity to do so, it was time we got out. The act of voluntary abdication was regarded by liberal-minded Englishmen as well as by Indians as evidence of supreme statesmanship, and I believe it will be so regarded by historians of the future, whatever consequences may follow from it.
Many who will accept this contention nevertheless consider that the supersession of Lord Wavell was a mistake, and that Lord Mountbatten, taking over from him, "rushed his fences" too blindly. No one watching the work of Lord Wavell could feel anything but admiration for his great skill and astonishing patience in the unfamiliar field of political negotiation ; there is no one who would not wish that his removal had been conducted a little more graciously. The fact remains that he had gone as far as he could go, and had allowed himself, perhaps inevitably, to become en- wrapped in a cocoon of bargaining, hair-splitting and verbiage at which Indian politicians are past-masters. The impact of Load Louis's forceful personality and astonishing energy produced electrifying results. He swept the Indian political leaders along at
such speed that they had no time to draw breath to quibble. More- over, even the tortuous mind of Mr. Gandhi recognised that here was someone who meant business. The Viceroy's simple device of supplying all concerned with a tear-off calendar on which each day was marked, "— days left for the transfer of power," gave a sense of urgency that made British and Indians alike work at a pressure never before known in New Delhi. In this highly charged atmo- sphere partition was pushed through before Hindu hatred of the idea had time to gather weight, as it has done since. That it was a retrograde step most will admit that it was inevitable in the circumstances, and with the existing state of Muslim feeling no one with recent experience of India can well deny.
Lord Mountbatten worked wonders, even in such comparatively minor matters as his handling of a difficult and suspicious Press ; and the flamboyance which many Englishmen dislike went down well in India. On balance, and in the light of after-events, he can perhaps be charged with two major mistakes. The first was not only to consent to the splitting of the Indian Army, but to insistl on accelerating the process. The ideal, as we can all see now, would have been to retain the Army intact, with its British officers, under Field-Marshal Auchinleck, and a Joint Defence Council for, say, two years from Independence Day, to assist the two Governments impartially in the maintenance of order as well as to provide a unified defence force. Had this been done, we should probably have seen no massacres in the Punjab, or they would have been quickly stopped. Whether such a course would have been politically possible is quite another matter, particularly as an Indian Defence Minister had already been appointed in the interim Central Govern- ment. It would certainly have been strongly opposed by all Indian politicians, and it is fair to say that the scale of the outbreaks in the Punjab took all concerned (except the Sikhs) by surprise. Nevertheless, the need for such a force was apparent, and had Lord Mountbatten and the British Government made its retention for a strictly limited period a condition of the transfer of power, they might have got their way—if only because they had, in Field- Marshal Auchinleck, the one man in India whom Indians implicitly trust.
If, however, the division of the Army at an earlier date was inevitable, enough time should have been given for it to be done efficiently. In fact, partition was so rushed that the machinery seized up in spite of the best efforts of all concerned, and this magnificent instrument, one of the finest fighting forces in the world and the greatest unifying influence in India, has simply disintegrated. This is a major tragedy which only those who have known the Indian Army in peace and war can fully appreciate. The measure of disintegration of morale can be judged from the fact that a Muslim officer of my acquaintance, seeking shelter during the riot- ing in Amritsar, was refused admittance to a Hindu battalion mess, an incident unthinkable a few weeks earlier. (Yet the Muslim jawcrns [private soldiers] of a battalion of the Punjab Regiment protested on the final parade against the splitting of the unit, and swore that in no circumstances would they ever fire on their Hindu comrades-in-arms.) As a result of this premature and precipitate partition, the Boundary Force was too weak for the task allotted to it, and in many cases the troops, knowing what was coming, could not be relied on in the absence of British officers. With the Army and its traditions will presumably go the boys' companies attached to regimental training centres. Hardly heard of in this country, they were producing a disciplined and non-communally- minded type of boy who might in time have done much to change the face of India.
Lord Louis's second error was to accept the Governor-Generalship of the Indian Union when Pakistan refused to agree to a joint Governor-General and appointed Mr. Jinnah. His acceptance, perhaps under pressure from H.M.G., inevitably put him in a false position in the eyes of Muslims when trouble started, and the fact that he is reported to have asked for his term of office to be shortened presumably shows that he realises the mistake. Lastly, when the Punjab "blew," and it was seen that Indian Sepoys could no longer be trusted to act against their co-religionists, British, troops, to my mind, should have been drafted into the area by arrangement with the two Dominions. From the point of view of the British Government, there was every objection to allowing British soldiers to be used for suppressing communal riots when power had already been handed over, and it is easy to imagine the questions that would have been asked in Parliament. Neverthe- less, when a house is burning one cannot stand aside because one's lease is up.
Many officers who were there have told me that the sight of even one British battalion would have stiffened their troops, and that the jawan himself continually asked, "Where are the British?" I myself saw how a few military police of the Royal Scots Fusiliers restored confidence in Delhi in September merely by driving through the streets in a jeep. This may be a valuable argument for those who regard our withdrawal from India as a betrayal. My point is simply that, so long as we were there, we had a duty to the unfortunate peasantry, and that, had we been able to stop the butchery at the start, the whole future of the Indian Union and of Pakistan might be brighter than it appears at present.
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