Forgotten Wars (41 page)

A year on from the end of the European war and the death of Hitler, the world seemed no closer to reaching lasting peace. In Britain prosperity remained elusive. As a winter of bitter cold and gnawing food shortages drew to a close, labour disputes reached a crescendo. To no avail: the socialist millennium was indefinitely postponed. Abroad, British troops were spread thinly in Germany, as relations between the Allies and the Soviet Union deteriorated. They were also spread desperately thinly across Southeast Asia. Acute shortages of manpower eventually resulted in the British garrisons pulling out of Indonesia and Indo-China. This brought relief to the British alone, for as soon as they withdrew bloody fighting erupted between the nationalists and the Dutch in Indonesia and the Viet Minh and the French in Indo-China. Moreover, the British troops released from Indonesia and Indo-China faced likely redeployment in the region. Burma and Malaya were seething with ethnic and industrial conflict. In the one, Dorman-Smith’s unceremonious exit had left a dangerous vacuum that the perennial administrative ‘Mr Fixit’, Governor Knight, was scarcely able to fill. In the other, Sir Edward Gent’s plan for a Malayan Union ran into ferocious constitutional opposition from Malays at the very time that Chinese and Indian labour unions were flexing their muscles.

It was by only a small margin that the communists in Burma and Malaya failed to take to arms in early 1946. A fair wind seemed to be blowing for revolution as Mao Zedong and his red cadres declared
all-out war against Chiang Kai Shek and capitalized on their gains during the war. If Southeast Asian communists had followed the Chinese, the British would have been in an impossible position. British troops had to be demobilized to kick start the home economy in a period of desperate financial crisis. That old standby, the Indian Army, could no longer fill the gap as Nehru and Patel were demanding that Indian troops be brought home. In India itself, the results of the March provincial elections led to an impasse between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs worse than anything the gloomy and mordant Wavell had predicted. Calcutta daily inched closer to riotous violence and mass murder. Meanwhile, Sarat Bose and other Indian radical politicians played up the issue of the INA detainees for all they were worth. Ironically, Britain’s real saviour in these dark days of the eastern empire was the Japanese army. ‘They have been carrying out their “defeat drill”’, Esler Dening told Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, ‘with the discipline and determination which characterised their aggression.’
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Deprived of British and Indian troops, the British authorities used Japanese POWs to put down Indonesian and Vietnamese insurgents, police a restive Burma and build a real Fortress Singapore.

Though Attlee was beginning to tire of Wavell’s pessimism, it was to be several months before he confirmed the rumours of Mountbatten’s ‘monumental appointment in the East’.
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Mountbatten and Malcolm MacDonald had similar views about the future of empire, although they approached the issue from a different social perspective. Mount-batten was a high aristocrat with a popular touch, a military man who could deal with nationalists, who saw himself as a kind of latter-day Lord Durham, turning the old empire into a commonwealth of free nations. MacDonald, a member of the Scottish socialist elite who tended towards liberal Toryism, had a similar vision, but none of the military or royal charisma of Mountbatten. While Mountbatten delighted in state pageantry, MacDonald opted for the more intellectually respectable ceremonial of university degree days. He much preferred attending meetings in an open-necked shirt and was famously denounced by the colonial press in Singapore for not possessing a tailcoat or dinner jacket. Mountbatten seems to have got on with Indian leaders precisely because he was a royal, but formed few intimacies. MacDonald reportedly had a string of Chinese and Eurasian
girlfriends and adopted a Dayak family in Borneo. When the Sultan of Johore loaned him what his frequent guest, the Eurasian writer Han Suyin, called the ‘Walt Disney fantasy castle’ at Bukit Serene, MacDonald had some Dyak friends to stay. The sultan was incensed: ‘Why’, he expostulated, ‘should I have his damned Dyaks with their backsides in my chairs and in my bed?’ He cut off the water supply to the swimming pool.
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Yet MacDonald did not find India’s intense and intellectual politicians entirely to his taste. Like Mountbatten, who had accompanied the Prince of Wales on his unhappy tour of India in 1921–2, MacDonald had had an earlier introduction to Indian politics. He had acted as a go-between for his father with Gandhi when the latter had visited London for the second Round Table Conference in 1931. MacDonald found the Mahatma to be both charming and perplexing but remembered particularly his strangely shaped set of false teeth.
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MacDonald’s own rather prominent teeth left much to be desired, but, like the handsome Mountbatten, he nevertheless delighted in the company of stage and screen celebrities. He was to remain in the region in high office for eight years. He oversaw, though never directly managed, the exit of Burma from the Commonwealth and the Malayan Emergency. He underestimated the strength of communism in Indo-China, but helped to lay the foundations of the economic rise of Singapore and Malaya. The British Empire had entered a new and final phase.

For one last time events in India changed the situation in Burma and sent shock waves speeding towards Malaya. Following the Congress’s great victories in the March 1946 elections, it had become obvious to Wavell and Auchinleck that the Indian Army could not be used to put down a revolt in Burma. This conclusion had already been forcibly impressed on Dorman-Smith. Now, as the impasse in Indian politics deepened, it also became clear that the British withdrawal from the country would be faster than anyone could possibly have predicted. The political outcome of the elections in the Punjab in the spring had left the Muslim League deeply embittered, although it had done rather well in several other provinces, notably through its proxies in Bengal. Sir Stafford Cripps, now President of the Board of Trade, A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, and Pethick-Lawrence on their Cabinet Mission failed to find any common ground between warring politicians in Simla or Delhi.
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Congress refused to allow the Muslim League ‘parity’ of power in a future independent central government.
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The only alternative for Jinnah and the Muslim League was a weak centre in Delhi, with powerful provinces, so ensuring that Muslims would be in a strong position in Bengal and the Punjab. But this raised fears in the Congress of the ‘Balkanization’ of the country and even of its total disintegration. No deal was possible. Cripps found himself baffled and disillusioned yet again, not only by what he took to be Jinnah’s perennial intransigence, but also by Gandhi’s unhelpful stance now that the transfer of power was clearly in sight. Among ordinary people hope and fear alternated day by day. The word ‘Pakistan’ was used as both threat and incentive. It had been in the air since 1940 when the Muslim League had officially endorsed
the vague idea of a ‘homeland’ for Indian Muslims. But almost to the very moment of independence neither Hindus nor Muslims really knew what the word meant. Would this Pakistan be part of an Indian union – a kind of Austria-Hungary – or part of a grouping of provinces of a more centralized state, or an independent entity? Certainly in 1946 no one would have predicted the emergence of the geopolitical absurdity that was to separate the two halves of a sovereign country by a thousand miles and cut off a large area of northeast India from the rest of the national territory.

Ultimately the Cabinet Mission returned to Britain in disarray and Wavell was left to make the best of a bad job. There was no hope of any end to the bitter ‘communal recriminations’ and it seemed unlikely that he could form any stable coalition government in Delhi.
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He was soon confessing to his diary: ‘For the first time in my life, I am beginning to feel the strain badly – not sleeping properly and letting these wretched people worry me.’
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The question of India’s future constitution was shelved while the results of the spring elections were put into effect. In September an Indian constituent assembly was convened and an interim government was formed. Congress dominated the cabinet; the two Muslim League ministers who participated for the time being did so in an atmosphere of mutual distrust. Congress ministers now took charge of all the major departments of state, including intelligence and police. Effectively, Congress became the government of India for internal purposes and Sardar Patel became its home minister. Significantly, he took over the intelligence department.
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In the meantime, a set of events occurred which made it clear that unless the Hindu–Muslim issue was quickly resolved at the constitutional level, there might be little power left to transfer to Indians, as one senior civil servant later put it. Wavell himself believed that a total breakdown of social order was in sight.
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In August, frustrated by the Cabinet Mission’s failure to reconcile Congress to sharing power with the Muslim League, Muslims in Calcutta staged mass political demonstrations against the British which spun out of control
and resulted in one of the worst bouts of communal killings in Indian history. As many as 6,000 people may have been murdered and 12,000 injured in the ‘Great Calcutta killings’ and associated atrocities during August, September and October 1946. And day after day, for the next two years, the tally of murders in the city rose steadily. The destitution caused in Bengal by war, famine and the flight of refugees from Burma provided the dry tinder of despair and hatred. In many respects events in Calcutta were simply a continuation of the Second World War by other means. But politicians lit the conflagration. H. S. Suhrawardy, the Bengal chief minister whose lethargy during the 1943 famine had earned him much criticism, was behind the attempt to assert Muslim political influence in the face of Congress’s refusal to compromise. Jinnah also bore a degree of responsibility for triggering what at times seemed more like a civil war than random riots; he called for the ‘Direct Action Day’ in Calcutta on 16 August that set off the killing. Officially, the purpose of this day of action was to ‘end British slavery’, but also, and more ominously, it was intended to ‘fight the contemplated caste-Hindu domination’.
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Political manipulators from on high found a ready audience among ordinary people stirred to hatred of their neighbours by the corrosive effects of repeated crises and unyielding poverty. Gradually during the spring and summer of 1946, agitations in Calcutta against the British and in favour of the Indian National Army had become flash-points of conflict between local bosses allied with the Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha (the main Hindu activist organization) and the Muslim League. The League blamed the Congress for stirring up trouble because it had done less well than the League in Bengal’s elections. The Congress, for its part, staged numerous strikes and attempted to close down bazaars, including Muslim bazaars. In these straitened times, this was deeply resented by Muslim shopkeepers. As the Cabinet Mission packed up and went home, the Muslim-dominated ministry and its local supporters decided to hold their own shutdown and declared a public holiday in the city to mark Jinnah’s Direct Action Day. This measure, with which the British governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, meekly complied, ensured that large numbers of people would be on the streets and that the issue of closing the bazaars and forcibly preventing people from trading would be particularly
fraught. It was already a period of heightened religious sensitivity, for Direct Action Day fell in the middle of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. The city was also going to be full of excitable students preparing for the annual Calcutta University examinations.

There was ample evidence of warlike preparation on both sides. In the weeks before 16 August, young members of Sarat Bose’s section of the Congress were constantly marching and drilling, ostensibly in training as crowd-control volunteers for Indian National Army Day, 18 August, when Congress intended to fête INA officers recently released from jail. Muslim youth groups, such as the Muhammadan Sporting Club, were similarly mobilizing. They, like other Muslim activists, were supposedly using Direct Action Day to make the British government think again about the constitution. But the word put around by the local Muslim League politicians spelled out something different. ‘We are in the midst of the rainy season,’ one handbill declared. ‘But this is a month of real Jehad, of God’s Grace and blessings, of spiritual armament and the moral and physical purge of the nation… It was in Ramzan that the permission of Jehad was granted by Allah.’
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Of course, in Islamic theology,
jihad
referred to the universal spiritual struggle against evil. Physical warfare against unbelievers was no more than ‘lesser
jihad
’ and could be resorted to only under special conditions. Yet when circulated among the poor and unlettered a document like this could mean only one thing: ‘prepare for war.’ Similarly sinister calls to the ‘anti-fascist forces’ to mobilize against their enemies were issued in mosques after Friday prayers on 15 August throughout Calcutta and also in Hooghly, just across the river. Some pamphlets did away with all pretence at subtlety: ‘Oh, Kafir [unbeliever], your doom is not far and the general massacre will come!’
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The suspicious and hostile Hindu press predictably denounced the prospective demonstration as ‘pro-Pakistan’ and ‘anti-Hindu’.

On the afternoon of Saturday 16 August some 100,000 Muslims converged on the Ochterlony monument in central Calcutta to hear speeches from members of the League and Bengal government ministers. The monument, which commemorated one of the East India Company’s great Kiplingesque empire-builders of the early nineteenth century, had long been the symbolic heart of British Calcutta. As the
crowds flocked to it, however, they passed through predominantly Hindu quarters of the city and several of the great bazaars. When local gang-leaders tried to force traders to close their shops, trouble broke out. The League later insisted that the Muslim processions had been ‘sober and disciplined’, led by college students and ‘Muslim girls in blue uniforms’.
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Be that as it may, the atmosphere rapidly became menacing. One observer was Major Sim of Vickers India Co. who managed a shop in the main thoroughfare, Chowringee. Sim saw something that resembled the march of a conquering army into the city, ‘with green hats and flags and every man with a lathi [heavy bamboo cane] – mostly so similar that they must have been bought especially for the occasion, and in bulk’.
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As he watched things suddenly turned vicious. Many observers ascribed this to Hindu thugs hurling bricks down onto the Muslim marchers from the great houses that dominated the city centre. The missiles were plainly intended to maim or kill; people had apparently been stockpiling the bricks for days as a mundane but effective weapon. Then Sim saw a Muslim smash a picture of the Hindu goddess Kali. ‘The crowd turned into wild beasts and tore up and looted and burned the row of little shops beneath us. We saw five people beaten to death with sticks in fifteen yards of road in the main street of the Empire’s second city.’ The police stood by and did nothing, probably, Sim surmised, because the chief minister, Suhrawardy, had told his subordinates not to intervene. Sim himself had a party political purpose in mind in recording these incidents. The recipient of his letter describing them was a Conservative MP, to whom Sim observed: ‘Our good friends in the Labour government are responsible for quite a few dead Indians.’
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