Partition

I have now finished reading the book at reference 1 about the partition of what was the Raj in 1947, first noticed at reference 2. It would have been an easy read had it not been so depressing; for some reason far more so than, for example, the first part of the book at reference 3, which covers much of the same ground and was, as it happens, bought from same discount store (The Works in Exeter) as my first book by White-Spunner. The reading of the book at reference 3 was noticed at reference 4.

So depressing in that the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs should have managed to kill, often atrociously, somewhere between 500,000 and a million of each other in the course of the first few months of independence, with by far the worst of the killing arising from the partition of the Punjab. With a knock on effect of there being maybe as many as 10 million refugees to be dealt with by two brand new countries, with India only ever having existed as a whole, if ever, at about the time of the Roman Republic, near two thousand years previously.

Apart from those who actually did the killing, perhaps most of the responsibility lies with the British; we should have started getting out of India after the first world war, if not before. Had we made a proper start at the right time, the outcome might have been so much better. Exactly the same mistake as we made (with rather less tragic results, at least in terms of numbers) in Ireland, at about the same time. And possibly made for the same reasons - the Tory Lords blocking progress in the House of Lords. And Sir Winston Churchill might not have been a Tory Lord but he was also very firm about hanging onto India forever.

I had not realised what a large contribution British India made to the allied effort in both world wars, with their army at the time of the second of these wars being of the order of a million strong - a million which included a leavening of British troops and a lot of senior officers - but which was mainly Indian; that is to say Hindu, Muslim and Sikh.

But given that we had got to 1945, when at last Attlee, whose government had close links to Nehru and his party, made it clear that we were leaving, could things have been better? One thing that might have helped would have been more attention from Westminster. Apparently we devoted far more time and attention to events in Palestine than to those in India, despite the disparity of numbers.

And White-Spunner, writing as a soldier, seems fairly sure that timely and determined deployment of the army, most of which was still more or less intact at the time, would have stopped the worst of the killing.

It also seems to be the case that blunders on all sides in the course of the first half of the century meant that by 1947 independence as a union, somewhat after the fashion of the US (or to a lesser extent of the UK), was no longer an option. And once that became clear, few of the leaders of any of the parties involved foresaw, let alone forestalled, the violence which was to follow. The record of the senior management team was not good.

Worth noting in closing that the British record is even worse in respect of the Bengal famine of 1942-43, which probably killed two or three times as many people.

But on the credit side, at least after a fashion, most multi-cultural, multi-racial empires seem to end in tears. The emperors succeed in keeping the lid on things for a while, perhaps brutally and perhaps with the help of a large army, but they do not succeed in leaving gracefully. This despite, in our case, many of our servants there having had a deep and abiding love of the country and its peoples.

PS: I have now bought the White-Spunner book on Waterloo, to add to my collection of same, having almost been put off by the puff explaining that it was very much drawn from contemporary accounts from participants. We shall see whether my initial doubts about this format were justified.

Reference 1: Partition: the story of Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan in 1947 - Barney White-Spunner - 2017.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/trolley-114.html.

Reference 3: India after Ghandi: the history of the world's largest democracy - Ramachandra Guha - 2007.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=guha.