Mountbatten's views
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The only chance, and I am saying this now on the spur of the moment, it was the only chance we had of keeping some form of unified India, because he was the only, I repeat the only, stumbling block. The others were not so obdurate. I am sure the Congress would have found some compromise with them.
Q. With the Muslim League as well?
A.You see, I liked the Muslim League people-they were mostly the people from the officer class of the Indian Army-much more than the Hindus. We came around to the Hindus more after I got out to India than before. I wasn't pro-anybody, but I really did like the Muslims. I had so many friends. Don't forget the history of India is basically one of conquest. When the Moghuls came along they in fact, conquered India and ran India and people like the Nizam were the viceroys of the Moghuls in the south. The Hindus were completely militarily beaten and treated as an occupied people by the occupying power.
But they were good brains, much better brains than the Muslims. I'm generalizing; Hindus were good shopkeepers, good business people, good clerks, good civil servants, and were employed by the British and they fitted in very well. They enjoyed serving the British-they preferred to serve the British, don't forget, than to serve the Muslims who were prepared to be gracious as hosts and go hunting and that sort of thing, but did not like the idea of toeing the line to the British at all. They were prepared to enter the army and so forth, but in fact the Hindus got into the whole machinery; they got into it because the Muslims weren't prepared to work in that sort of way with us.
I think you'll find this one of the things that's not completely understood. The British out there were naturally more easily friends with Muslims because they played polo, they went out shooting, they mixed freely, they didn't have any sort of inhibitions. The Hindus didn't get on so well with the British. Frankly, no Muslim ever took part in any plotting against the British. They wanted the British to remain, it secured their position.
The last thing Jinnah wanted was that we should go. He said first he didn't want a separate Pakistan, just wanted us to stay and hold the reins for them. But the Hindus wanted us to go because they had gone to British universities, they were all terribly imbued with sort of Fabian ideas and they just thought it was wrong that the British should be ruling India. I mentioned that we ruled with the consent, with the affection, of the vast masses. No doubt of that. But the intelligent, educated people didn't like it. So that this is one of the things one was up against.
So how could we meet the Congress Party's desire without transferring power? We couldn't. We were obliged to the transfer of power. Nobody, particularly me, wished to have any partition in India. It was a ghastly thought. And it wasn't going to work. It wasn't really going to work because, you see, if you look at the distribution of the Muslim population in India, it's all over India. I don't suppose that we were able to separate more than half the Muslims and make them into East and West Pakistan. The rest of them were all over India. Most were perfectly happy to stay.
Now, I suppose my wife and I were about the first people to show genuine affection for Indians, irrespective of their creed. Don't forget you had Parsees and Jains also. The last Jain king lost his throne because as he was marching out to meet his enemy, the rains came and he cancelled the march, for fear of the tremendous loss of insect life his troops would cause marching across the marshes when the insects were coming out.
And there were the Christians also. The south of India became Christian about the first century A D under St. Thomas. So you will never understand the problem of India unless you realize it is not a country. Its called a subcontinent because it's attached to the continent of Asia, but it is, in fact, a continent. It's comparable to Europe in almost every way. The dimensions are not very far apart. The number of races, of languages, of dialects, of religions, is pretty near as great. And what the English did is produce a common market, run by them as sort of overlords 200 years ago. It's a very remarkable piece of social work which mustn't be minimized. So it is tragic that we should have had to divide it on leaving.
Q. Would you say you were pre-disposed in any way, before you reached India?
A. It is very difficult to say for certain what the state of my mind was on arrival. I was a great believer in a unified India. I thought the greatest single legacy we could leave the Indians was a unified country. It's a hell of an achievement to have a unified India. I realized I still had to unify the states with the rest of India.That, I thought was going to be the greatest difficulty and indeed it was an absolute miracle that we managed to get that straightened out.
I thought we should try everything we could to keep India united and I really was very keen that we should find a solution.
Q. What did the Hindu leaders think of partition?
A. Nehru was horrified by the idea of partition. He was an extraordinarily intelligent man. He saw the point on everything. He almost got himself in serious trouble when he saw the point on the Indian National Army court martials which no one else could see. He saw everything I was trying to do. I was completely in step with him. He would have given me any help he could to try and keep India unified if Jinnah had shown any sort of advance at all. Nehru was a first class chap.
Gandhi had no key at all. The key to the whole thing obviously was Jinnah. Not only that, but I believe there was confusion all the way through. Most people thought it was Gandhi. If they didn't think it was Gandhi they thought it was Nehru. But it wasn't Gandhi, it wasn't Nehru, it was Jinnah and Patel. They were the two people.
If Mr. Jinnah had died of this illness about two years earlier, I think we would have kept the country unified. He was the one man who really made it impossible. I didn't realize how impossible it was going to be until I actually met Jinnah.
I have the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right and intelligent thing, not because I am persuasive, so much, as because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favourable light. I didn't realize there was nothing at all you could do about Jinnah. He had completely made up his mind. Nothing would move him.
Q. There was an impasse?
A. All I could do was just to negotiate. For instance, he wanted to have the whole of the Punjab, the whole of Bengal, and I told him this was not on. And then of course there followed that amusing and rather tragic game of around and around the mulberry bush which I shall describe.
When I told Jinnah I don't want you to have a partitioned India, I gave him all my reasons, and he said, "Well, I am afraid we must. We can't trust them. Look what they did to us in 1938-39. When you go, we'll permanently be at the mercy of the elected Hindu majority and we shall have no place, we shall be oppressed and it will be quite terrible."
I told him I was quite certain that people like Nehru, and there were many of his colleagues like him, had no intention whatever of oppressing them.
He said, "Well, that's what you say, but Nehru was still the most important figure when they did, in fact, oppress us in 1938-1939. And he failed to stop it. But," he said, "you must give me a viable Pakistan. You must give me the whole of Punjab as well as Sindh and NWFP and Bengal and Assam, and I shall want a corridor to unite them."
I said, "Look, Mr. Jinnah, you have said that you won't agree to having a minority population ruled by a majority population."
"Absolutely."
"Alright, I happen to know that in the Punjab and Bengal there are wide areas where the opposite community is in the majority. It happens also that they just about divide east and west. So I'm afraid that if you want Pakistan, I shall have to arrange for the partitioning of both the Punjab and Bengal. You cannot take into Pakistan the Hindus of Punjab and Bengal."
"Your Excellency doesn't understand that the Punjab is a nation. Bengal is a nation. A man is a Punjabi or a Bengali first before he is a Hindu or a Muslim. If you give us those provinces you must, under no condition, partition them. You will destroy their viability and cause endless bloodshed and trouble. "
"Mr. Jinnah, I entirely agree."
"Oh, you do."
"Yes, of course. A man is not only a Punjabi or a Bengali before he is a Muslim or Hindu, but he is an Indian before all else. What you're saying is the perfect, absolute answer I've been looking for. You've presented me the arguments to keep India united."
"Oh, you don't understand. If you do that..." and so we'd start all over again.
"Look, Mr.Jinnah, it is a fact you want partition?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, if you want partition then you must have partition of Punjab and Bengal."
You know, not only did this go on for hours, it went over several discussions. He simply was caught in his own trap. He finally gave up and said, "So you insist on giving me a moth-eaten Pakistan."
I said,"You call it a moth-eaten Pakistan. I don't even want you to take it at all if it's as moth-eaten as that. I'd really like you to leave India unified."
But he was absolutely set on his great cry of no-he was the de Gaulle of his day-and when after about three or four of these sessions I realized the man was quite unshakeably immovable and quite impervious to any quarrel or logical argument and not even prepared to look at any safeguards which I might be able to devise, I told him, "Mr. Jinnah, if only you would believe me, if only you would accept some organization like the Cabinet Mission Plan you would find that you could have great autonomy, the Punjab and Bengal could rule themselves, it would be even more autonomous than the USA. It would be quite independent. What is more, you could have the great pleasure of oppressing the minorities in any way you wanted to, because you'd be able to prevent the centre from interfering. Doesn't that appeal to you?"
"No, I don't want to be part of India. I'd sooner lose everything than be under a Hindu raj."
He went on and on. Very early I realized what I was up against. I never would have believed, I had never visualized that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in England, was capable of closing his mind-it wasn't that he didn't see it-he closed his mind. A kind of shutter came down. Then I realized that while he was alive, nothing could be done. The others could be persuaded, but not Jinnah. He was a one-man band, and the one man did it like that.
Mind you, Jinnah is now forgotten. He was the man who did it. Bangladesh and all that misery which I forecast. Twenty-five years ago Rajagopalachari and I said it would last 25 years. It had to. . . It couldn't go on. All this misery and trouble was caused by Jinnah and no one else. And he hasn't had one word said against him. He was the evil genius in this whole thing. He presented a peaceful solution. He wouldn't play along at all. He was perfectly friendly and courteous and polite, at the end, emotionally pleased when I took him around and prevented him from being blown up[in Karachi, post-independence-blogger]. But with him there, you couldn't move him. You could move all the others. When Jinnah came to see me, he always sat there(relaxes, sits back easily), Ali Khan, when he came in with Jinnah sat right on the edge of his chair. He'd keep saying, "Yes, Qaidi." He would not even sit back.
The only difference between the scheme I was prepared to give Jinnah and that which he would have go under the Cabinet Mission Plan was that under the Cabinet Mission Plan he was obliged to accept a small, weak centre at Delhi controlling the defence, communications and external affairs. The three might really be lumped together under the general heading of defence.
That speech was absolutely the last plea for a united India. Please remember, every one of these interviews lasted one hour. They were reduced in my note to three or four pages. They represented, each page, 15 minutes of talking. Therefore, one-eighth of what was said was compressed into this.
I then realized that he had this faculty of closing his mind to the thing-he could see points, he was an able debater, he had a well-trained mind, he was a lawyer, but he gave me the impression of having closed his mind, closed his ears; he didn't want to be persuaded, he didn't want to hear. I mean whatever one said, it passed him absolutely by. In the case of partitioning Punjab and Bengal, he didn't even seem to have been listening to the previous thing at all.
His great strength. . . he got all this by closing his mind and saying, "No".And how anybody could fail to see Jinnah held the whole key to the situation, to the continent, in his hand, I fail to understand. I saw that dear old Gandhi held nothing at all in his hands.
I can remember when Jinnah had got his Pakistan. When the British Government was prepared to let me put forward the plan of June 3, when even the Sikhs had swallowed it, and the Congress. That is what he'd been playing for, and he'd got it. And he said, "No."
Actually what he said was, "I shall have to put it to the Muslim League Council."
I said, "I can give you until midnight. Or 8 a.m."
He said, "I can't get them here before a week."
I said, "Mr. Jinnah, if you think I can hold the position for a week you must be crazy. You know this has been drawn up to boiling point. A miracle has been achieved in that the Congress Party, for the first time, is prepared to accept this sacrifice of partition. But they are not going to be shown up. Having to wait for you to get your Muslim League to accept it tonight or tomorrow morning, it's out for good. And this is going to make a terrible mess and we aren't going to start again. You'll never again get the Congress Party to respond."
And we went on and on. And he said, "No, no, I must do this thing the logical, legal way, as is properly constituted. I am not the Muslim League."
I said, "Now, now Mr.Jinnah, come on. Don't tell me that. You can try and tell the world that. But please don't try to kid yourself that I don't know who's who and what's what in the Muslim League."
And then he said, "I must do this thing absolutely legally."
I said, "I'm going to tell you something. I can't allow you to throw away the solution you worked so hard to get. It's absolutely idiotic to refuse to say yes. The Congress has said yes. The Sikhs have said yes. Tomorrow at the meeting, I shall say I have received assurance from the Congress Party, with a few reservations, that I am sure I can satisfy and they have accepted. The Sikhs have accepted. And I had a very long, very friendly conversation with Mr. Jinnah last night, we went through every point and Mr. Jinnah feels this is an absolutely acceptable solution. Now, at this moment, I will turn to you and you will nod your head in agreement, and if you shake your head(to indicate disagreement) you will have lost the thing for good, and as far as I am concerned, you can go to hell."
I didn't know whether he was going to shake his head or nod his head the next morning.
I said, "Finally, Mr. Jinnah has given me his personal assurance that he is in agreement with this plan," and turned to him and he went like that.* [*Mountbatten nodded his head imperceptably-Authors]
Now I can tell you that if he had shaken his head, the whole thing would have been in the bumble pot. To think that I had to say yes for this clot to get his own plan through, it shows you what one was up against. This was probably the most hair-raising moment of my entire life. I've never forgotten that moment, waiting to see if that clot was going to nod or shake his head. He had no expression on his face. He couldn't have made a smaller gesture and still accepted.
The funny part is that the others, I knew, guessed that Jinnah was being difficult. And I think they realized the only hope for them to get a transfer of power quickly was to agree, and I think they allowed me to get away with it. They could have absolutely had me by questioning Jinnah, but they didn't. They knew pretty well what was going on.
You can't make too much of that, that dramatic moment when this great clot was about to throw everything away and I don't even know why. I can't imagine. He was the Muslim League and what he said, they did. He knew he'd got the last dreg. He knew as far as I was concerned, "You're out whether I shall stay or not, you're out. No one's going to deal with you if you reject this. You'll just have to fight for it."
But isn't it fascinating that the whole thing should have depended on which way he was going to shake his head.
Q. Was there a sense of relief among the others?
A. I, in fact, realized that none of them had the faintest conception of the administrative consequences of the decision they were taking. I'd given Ismay the special task with a high priority to work out all that had to be done. God knows, 30, 40, 50 major things. He produced this admirable paper on the administrative consequence of partition and transfer of power. That was brought down like an exam paper being issued by myself and that marvellous fellow Erskine Crum, and put around, and they couldn't resist looking at it and it destroyed the euphoria. I mean I'm nothing if not a stage manager. This was really stage managed. The result was that their whole attention was distracted by this. They came down to this. Even Jinnah was shaken. Then I did a thing that was very unpopular. To this day a lot of Indians hate it, even friends of mine like Mrs. Pandit. I had a calendar made, which showed how many days were left to the transfer of power.
They disliked it because they thought it was a trick of mine. I knew it was unpopular but I couldn't care less. It was unpopular because they felt they were being put under pressure and they were. The reason they were put under pressure was that if I'd let up on them the whole thing would have blown up under my feet.
I have no worry about Jinnah being shown up for the bastard he was. You know he really was. I actually got on with him, because I can get on with anybody. He made not a single effort at all. The worst thing he did to me was that he kept saying I mustn't go, that I must stay, that if I didn't stay they wouldn't get their assets transferred so that after the transfer of power I must stay out in over all charge.
When this was analyzed by my staff and myself, we realized that we couldn't have two governors-general with a viceroy over them after independence. Quite clearly the only way we could do the thing was if I was Governor-General of both provinces just for the transfer, and that was accepted tacitly as the solution. My staff talked about it with his staff. And indeed we know that this came about because of the Indian side which first suggested I should stay with them-and when they suggested that, which staggered me, that they were prepared to do it, then I said that I thought the solution would be if Jinnah wanted me to stay, then I must also stay as Governor-General of Pakistan.
It would have been absolute hell, living in two houses, it would be almost untenable, but I was prepared to try it. But he led us up the garden path. At the last moment this man-who obviously wanted to run Pakistan- instead of running it as a chief executive, i.e., the prime minister, decided to be the constitutional head of state who had no authority whatsoever under the Constitution.
When I discussed it with him I said, "You realize you've chosen the wrong thing. The man you want to be is the Prime Minister, he runs the country."
"Not in my Pakistan." he said, "there the Prime Minister will do what the Governor-General tells him."
So I said, "That's the whole reverse of the whole British concept of democracy."
"Nevertheless, that's the way I'm going to run Pakistan."
Then he said, "I'll accept you as Chairman of the Defence Council, a very important thing" - and he did until it finally broke down after the troubles. And he said, "I'll also accept the fact that you shouldn't feel that you can't accept the Indian invitation to be Governor-General of India. Please feel it would help us if you would, because the only way to retain my influence with them is by remaining as Governor-General. After all they've got everything and we've got nothing. We've got to get it out of them. Being Governor-General of Pakistan won't help you because we've got nothing to give, to transfer."
Q. What were your own feelings about this exchange with Jinnah?
A. You see, I found it very difficult to believe that an educated man, a man of apparently goodwill, with great affection and admiration for the British, a man who'd shown me consideration, although of a rather cold sort, I found it rather difficult to believe that he would accept India becoming a second class power, and destroy everything, and produce what he himself had said would be an unviable Pakistan. I had hoped that he would say, "If you give me absolute and complete autonomy, if you limit the centre's interference to inter-dominion committees which will sit and elaborate a common defence policy, I might go along with keeping India together."
Do you realize what he has done instead? He absolutely ensured the complete break-up of Pakistan because, you see, the wealth and population resided in East Bengal and they had loathed, they had learned to hate the others, and they've broken up completely. They're now making friends with India. And the little tribes up in the north will split up; if it wasn't for the Americans giving the others enormous aid, they couldn't continue to exist. They're finished the day America withdraws her aid. I don't see how they can survive. Even with an army, an air force, they'll be completely at the mercy of India. All this I tried to explain to Jinnah. I went on and on, and I am fairly glib, and I was very clued up.
I don't think people realized what a one man band this was. I don't believe people realize that nobody ever did any negotiating for me with anybody. Sometimes I'd try to get Ismay to go back to Jinnah to butter him up. He liked Ismay, but this was entirely a one-man band. Whereas before it was a negotiation by a sort of a committee, by sitting around a table and thrashing things out.
If you, in fact, are doing it yourself on the other hand, if you know that what you say goes and you can tell London what you've done, you don't have to ask their permission. If you're a complete negotiator like that, then you can get things very easily.
So it isn't surprising that it was a one-man band, that I knew all the answers. It had to be a one-man band. Even a stenographer sitting in the room would have absolutely killed the effect.They never in their lives had been faced with a Viceroy all by himself. They'd never in their lives had to deal with day to day conversations and continuing dialogue that went on day after day after day. They were used to round table conferences, to endless great discussions. This was something none of them had ever come across before.
It produced quite a different result. People saw points and moved and spoke in a way they'd never done before. I will at once confess that I failed with Jinnah. But let me tell you this, nobody else would have been any more successful. I don't believe there was any more you could do with Jinnah. I must take the responsibility myself. And it was done at very high speed.
