Mountbatten on trial for partition pains

There is a serious proposal in certain academic circles to hold a trial of Lord Mountbatten, inviting scholars from Pakistan and Great Britain to participate in it.

The purpose is not to apportion blame to the last Viceroy for India's division – something which he could not help – but to delineate his role in the murder of more than one million people and the uprooting of another 20 million.

The charge against him is that the holocaust was due to Mountbatten's wrong decision to advance the date of partition from June 3, 1948 to August 15, 1947, some 10 months earlier.

I recall how Mountbatten's announcement came as a bombshell to us in Sialkot city, now part of Pakistan. There was suddenly a sense of fear and insecurity. The borders of India and Pakistan had, yet to be demarcated, and the fate of the entire population of Punjab, Bengal and Assam hung in the balance. Both Hindus and Muslims began to pass anxious moments because they did not know through which area the dividing line would run.

Rumours were so strong that people were willing to believe even the impossible. They were confused. That partition was inevitable was beginning to seep into their mind. But they were not preparing to leave their home or hearth.

By advancing the date by 10 months, he had unwittingly caused the murder of one million people. I told this to Mountbatten when I interviewed him at his sprawling mansion in Broadlands near London in October 1971, for my book, Distant Neighbours.

As if I had touched a raw nerve, he felt uncomfortable and lapsed into silence. He admitted that at least one million people died during partition. But his defence was strange: He had saved from starvation three times the numbers during the 1943 Bengal famine by giving 10 per cent of space in his ships for the transport of good grains.

This was despite the opposition of Churchill, the then Prime Minister. Mountbatten was then Chief of the Allies' Naval Operations in South Asia.

"Well, before Providence, I can say that the balance is in my favour," said Mountbatten. And then he added: "Wherever colonial rule has ended, bloodshed has been there. This is the price you pay."

Why did he advance the date? I asked Mountbatten. He said he could not hold the country together. "Things were slipping from my hands." The great Calcutta Killing, one year before partition, had taken place and communal tension prevailed all over. On top of it, there had been the announcement that the British were leaving.

"Therefore, I myself decided to quit sooner," said Mountbatten. "This was not to the liking of Lord Attlee (then the British Prime Minister) but he had given me full powers."

The comment by first Indian Governor General Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was: "If you had not transferred power when you did, there would have been no power to transfer."

When I checked with Campbell-Johnson, Mountbatten's press secretary, the reason for advancing the date, he said that August 15 was the date when Mountbatten had heard for the first time in Churchill's room the news of the Japanese surrender, which ended World War II.

However, the impression of some British foreign office men was that Mountbatten was in a hurry to get back to a bigger position in the British Navy.

What Mountbatten did not realise was that the pent-up feelings in the hearts of Hindus and Muslims in the wake of communal propaganda and riots were bound to find a vent.

At least government servants should not have been allowed to move from one country to another on the basis of their religion. Both Hindus and Muslims in the military, the police and other security forces had got contaminated over the years.

To expect them to be impartial and punish the guilty from their own community was to hope for the impossible, particularly when they knew that they would go scot-free in their "own country."

Looking back, however, one cannot but blame Mountbatten for doing so little to ensure protection for the minorities. He had assured Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a top leader in the Congress, "I shall not use merely the armed police, I will order the army and the air force to act and I will use tanks and aeroplanes to suppress anybody who wants to create trouble." Not a fraction of that happened. It was a free-for-all.

When Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, suggested handing over the cities to the military, Mountbatten's response was feeble. It may be an uncharitable remark to make but he appeared more interested in becoming the common Governor General of India and Pakistan – an office that Mohammed Ali Jinnah did not let him have – than dousing the fire of communalism.

The Punjab Boundary force, which Mountbatten formed on August 1, 1947, to quell the riots, did little to stop the killings of men, women and children.

In its report, it said the defence of the force is: "Throughout the killing was pre-medieval in its ferocity. Neither age nor sex was spared; mothers with babies in the arms were out down, speared or shot – both sides were equally merciless."

In terms of men, the force had strength of 55,000 including Brigadier Mohammad Ayub Khan, who later became Pakistan's first martial law administrator. The force had a high proportion of British officers.

In fact, this proved to be its undoing. The officers were interested in repatriation to Britain, not in an operation that might tie them down to the subcontinent for some more time. The British commander of the force, General Rees, had reportedly instructions not to get involved and to protect only "European lives."

The reports of the Boundary Commission, appointed soon after the partition, to delineate the borders between the Punjabs, Bengals and the Assam-Sylhet sector, added more fuel to the fire. Cyrill Radcliffe, a British lawyer who chaired the commission, earned the wrath of both the Congress and the Muslim League.

After failing to get the UN to nominate the Boundary Commission's members, Jinnah had suggested to Mountbatten the name of Radclifee, whom he had seen arguing intricate cases in London courts. Nehru had also approved his name after consulting "that sneaky fellow Krishna Menon," as Radcliffe put it during his talk with me at his flat in London in October 1971.

Hindus were expecting Lahore to be included in India and Muslims were thinking that Calcutta would go to Pakistan. Both were disappointed. Radcliffe told me that he never had the slightest doubt from the beginning that Calcutta (Jinnah had said earlier it was no use having East Bengal without Calcutta) should go to India and Lahore to Pakistan.

"I had to give them Lahore because they had to have a big city in West Punjab," he said.

After deciding that the rest of the job was only to draw the lines, he did what "came to that much." He was so "rushed" that he had "no time" to go into the details, Radcliffe said. "Even accurate district maps were not there and what material there was, was also inadequate. What could I do in one and a half months?"

True, but what a way to divide the subcontinent and decide the future of millions of people. The trial of Mountbatten may assuage the feelings of