The Shadow of the Great Game Read online

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  Copyright © Narendra Singh Sarila, 2005, 2006

  The right of Narendra Singh Sarila to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  ISBN: 978-1-47212-822-5

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  To

  My son Samar Singh Sarila

  and the younger generation of Indians

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  1 The Great Game

  2 The Anglo–Muslim League Alliance

  3 The Pakistan Scheme and Jinnah

  4 The Churchill–Roosevelt Clash over India

  5 The Mahatma’s Fury

  6 India, the UK and the USA

  7 Wavell Plays the Great Game

  8 Attlee’s ‘Smoke Screens’

  9 Nehru in the Saddle

  10 Mountbatten’s Counsellor

  11 The End Game of Empire

  12 The Kashmir Imbroglio I: Gilgit and Poonch

  13 The Kashmir Imbroglio II: At the UN

  14 Postscript

  Index

  Preface

  WHILE RESEARCHING IN THE ORIENTAL AND INDIAN COLLECTION OF the British Library, London, in 1997, on another matter, I came across certain documents which revealed that the partition of India in August 1947 may not have been totally unconnected with the British concern that the Great Game between them and the USSR for acquiring influence in the area lying between Turkey and India was likely to recommence with even greater gusto after the Second World War. And to find military bases and partners for the same.

  The USSR’s powerful victory over Germany in 1945 had increased Joseph Stalin’s ambitions to extend his country’s influence into territories on its periphery; indeed, he had already started to do so in Eastern Europe. To the Soviet Union’s southern border lay the region of the Persian Gulf with its oil fields – the wells of power – that were of vital interest to the West. Under the circumstances, Britain could ill afford to lose control over the entire Indian subcontinent that had served as its military base in dominating the Indian Ocean area and the countries around the Persian Gulf for more than half a century and which was also the main source of manpower for the Imperial Army.

  Once the British realized that the Indian nationalists who would rule India after its independence would deny them military cooperation under a British Commonwealth defence umbrella, they settled for those willing to do so by using religion for the purpose. Their problem could be solved if Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League Party, would succeed in his plan to detach the northwest of India abutting Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang and establish a separate state there – Pakistan. The proposition was a realizable one as a working relationship had been established between the British authorities in India and Jinnah during the Second World War and he was willing to cooperate with Britain on defence matters if Pakistan was created.

  Very little attention has been paid so far to the influence of British strategic concerns on India’s partition. Consequently, I thought I would use the recently unsealed documents to make the facts in them available to the public. For this, I researched not only in the Oriental and India Section of the British Library (where David Blake, the curator, was very generous with his time) but also in the Hartley Library in Southampton (where Lord Louis Mountbatten’s archives are kept); the Public Records Office in Kew (to which place most British ministers and Foreign Office officials consigned their papers); the archives of the State Department of the USA (covering the period 1942–48 and containing the correspondence of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with Prime Minister Winston Churchill and with his special envoys in India at that time); the National Archives in Washington; and the Library of the US Congress.

  In 1948, as an ADC to the governor-general, Lord Mountbatten, I became familiar with the main locations where the developments had unfolded in New Delhi and Simla and caught glimpses of some of the players. I also gained insights from my father’s numerous British friends who had played a role in formulating or implementing British policy towards India. Later on, in the 1960s, while dealing with Pakistan affairs as an Indian diplomat in New Delhi and New York, I came face to face with the attitude of the great powers towards India and Pakistan that had their roots in the events of pre-independence India.

  The subject is also fascinating because of the little known facts about the unobtrusive pressure the United States exerted on Britain in favour of India’s freedom – and unity – from 1942 onwards. Roosevelt’s object was to evolve a post-war order for Asia free from European colonialism. Churchill trumped this pressure by playing the Muslim, or the Pakistani, card, that the real problem lay in Hindu–Muslim differences about India’s future and not in Britain’s unwillingness to accept self-determination for India. American pressure contributed finally in no small measure in persuading Britain to accept the inevitable in India, though the Indians never really recognized this contribution.

  The archives are also engrossing because the Indian leaders’ conversations with, and written communications to, the viceroy were meticulously recorded by the British and give details of their views and tactics, which do not fully emerge from the Indian records. The Indian nationalists’ miscalculations, their upholding ideals divorced from realities and their inexperience in the field of international politics emerge in their own words in the records. It is therefore also a cautionary tale.

  The subject is surely also of topical interest. With the end of the Cold War, the retreat of Russia from its Central Asian territories and the deployment of the US forces in strength in the Persian Gulf, the importance of Pakistan as a strategic partner in the Great Game against Russia began to decrease. On the other hand, Al-Qaida’s attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington on 11 September 2001 brought into sharp focus the menace of Islamic terrorism and the use of Islam for political purposes, i.e., political Islam. The Taliban Government in Afghanistan was set up with the military and diplomatic support of Pakistan. It provided shelter to Al-Qaida and to Osama bin Laden. The Taliban and bin Laden were influenced by the tenets preached by Indian-born Abdul Al Mawdudi, the leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, Pakistan, who advocated a government strictly based on the Shariat, a clash of civilizations and jihad against non-believers. Many of the roots of Islamic terrorism sweeping the world today lie buried in the partition of India.

  The successful use of religion by the British to fulfil political and strategic objectives in India was replicated by the Americans in building up the Islamic jihadis in Afghanistan for the same purpose, of keeping the Soviets at bay. There is no gainsaying that nations will ever stop taking advantage of whoever or whatever comes in handy to achieve their immediate vital goals, not the least the US using the Pakistan military to counter the growing influence of the increasing jihadis in Pakistan. Or that the Great Game will not be played out again in
Central Asia with different issues at stake and with different sets of partners. However, the Western policies of exploiting political Islam to pressurize India have run their course. The improvement in Indo–US relations since the mid-1990s is the result of these changes in the strategic picture.

  Britain was bound to protect its strategic and economic interests from the damaging consequences of its withdrawal from its vast two-century-old Empire in India. How this was done by outmanoeuvring the Indian leaders and partitioning India is the theme of this untold story.

  March 2005

  Narendra Singh Sarila

  Acknowledgements

  I AM GRATEFUL TO THE BOARD OF THE BRITISH LIBRARY, LONDON, FOR allowing me to consult material in its custody and particularly the official files of the India Office Records.

  I am also grateful to the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton for allowing me to consult material in its custody and to the trustees of the Broadlands Archives for allowing me to quote from documents for which they hold the copyright.

  I consulted the United States Foreign Relations documents pertaining to the period covered in this book, for which I am indebted to the concerned agency of the US Government. I thank the staff of the National Archives in Washington D.C. who helped me dig out some documents referred to in this book.

  I also consulted the archives of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, for which I am indebted to the director. Some of the photographs that appear in this book do so courtesy the NMML and the Public Affairs Section of the US Embassy in India.

  Lastly, I am thankful to K.L. Sharma who typed the book from A to Z on the basis of my dictation and handwritten notes and who often acted as a thesaurus. When he showed frustration at my constant revisions, I would remind him of what Han Sui Yen, the well-known writer, once told me: she, on an average, revised her drafts forty times!

  Narendra Singh Sarila

  1

  The Great Game

  THE AGREEMENT TO PARTITION INDIA WAS ANNOUNCED IN DELHI ON 3 June 1947. The following week the British Labour Party’s Annual Conference was held in Margate in Britain. There, addressing the delegates, Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, stated that the division of India ‘would help to consolidate Britain in the Middle East.’1

  On the day Bevin spoke, Krishna Menon was staying with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru at 7, York Road in Delhi. Settled in London, Menon then headed the India League in the UK, was a member of the British Labour Party and the sole interlocutor on behalf of Nehru with the British socialist leaders. He was the first Indian whom Lord Louis Mountbatten sought out on being appointed the viceroy of India in March 1947. Menon’s ego had then not inflated to the extent that was to warp his thinking and judgement after Nehru made him defence minister. Referring to Bevin’s remark, Menon wrote to Lord Mountbatten at the Viceroy’s House on 14 June, in long hand, as follows (whether or not he did so after consulting Nehru is not clear from this letter):

  Is this frontier [the northwest of India abutting Afghanistan and Iran] still the hinterland of the Imperial strategy? Does Britain still think in terms of being able to use this territory and all that follows from it? There is considerable amount of talking in this way; and if Kashmir, for one reason or another, chooses to be in Pakistan, that is a further development in this direction. I do not know of British policy in this matter. I do not know whether you would know it either. But if this be the British intent, this is tragic.... As it becomes more evident, the attitude of India would be resentful and Britain’s hold on Pakistan would not improve it. I think I have said enough. Perhaps a bit too much.2

  Menon was raising two important questions. One, whether the British strategy was to use West Pakistan and the princely state of Kashmir as bases to contain the perceived Soviet ambitions towards the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, as the northwestern region of undivided India had been used for the same purpose for over a century. And two, whether British policy in this regard was so subterranean that even the viceroy of India was kept in the dark about it.

  After the czars had incorporated the Muslim sultanates of Khokand, Bokhara and Khiva, including the cities of Tashkand and Samarkand, into their empire in the 1860s and 1870s, that brought Russia’s frontier to within a few hundred miles of India (in Kashmir). The northwest frontier of India had become, for the British, the most sensitive of all the frontiers of their vast Empire. And it was here that the pick of the British Indian Army was quartered (and where, incidentally, Winston Churchill had served with the Malakand Field Force in 1898). The British had fought three wars in Afghanistan, incorporated in the 1880s parts of eastern Afghanistan into the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan (now in Pakistan), built a railway network to the Khyber and Bolan Passes leading to Afghanistan, helped the Dogra Rajput ruler of Jammu under their paramountcy to extend his rule into Kashmir right up to the Sinkiang border, constructed a road from Gilgit in Hunza in northern Kashmir through the 13,000-feet-high Mintaka Pass in the Karakoram mountains to Kashgar in Sinkiang, posted agents there to monitor Russian activities across the border in Uzbekistan and the Pamirs, and bribed and threatened the Shahs of Persia – all in order to keep the areas of India’s western approaches from slipping under Russian influence.

  The British conquest of India, from Bengal (in the east) to the west and north in the nineteenth century, had matched the Russian advance in Central Asia from their heartlands, to the south and east, towards the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Each of them raised the bogey of the other’s expansion to press on further and further, till they stopped on either side of Afghanistan, which, by the beginning of the twentieth century, became the buffer between the two empires. According to one source: ‘The Indian revolt or the Great Mutiny of 1857 had heightened British fears of rebellion, conspiracies, whole wars and possible foreign provocations. Amongst likely foreign culprits in the 1860s there was but a single important suspect, the Empire of Russia.’3 For strategists such as Sir Henry Rawlinson, president of the Royal Geographical and Asiatic Societies, Member of Parliament and holding a lifetime seat in the new five-member India Council: ‘If the Czar’s officers acquire a foothold in Kabul the disquieting effect will be prodigious. Every native ruler throughout northern India who either has, or fancies he has, a grievance, or is even cramped or incommoded by our orderly Government, will begin intriguing with the Russians; worse, Afghanistan possesses a machinery of agitation singularly adapted for acting on the seething, fermenting, festering, mass of Muslim hostility in India.’4 (The Muslim was then the British enemy in India, not the Hindu, as later. It was after all the Mughal Empire that the British had smashed while conquering India.)

  There was, however, another view, which, along with natural British caution, had kept those subscribing to the forward school in check. ‘The less the Afghans see us, less they will dislike us’,5 observed General Frederick Roberts, the conqueror of Kabul. ‘India’s security lay in the quality of British rule and the contentment of the Raj’s subjects and not in foreign adventures’,6 contended Sir John Lawrence, the future governor-general.

  In Russia too there was no dearth of believers in a forward policy. ‘The position of Russia in Central Asia’, declared Foreign Minister Prince Aleksandr Mikaylovich Gorchakov (in St. Petersburg), ‘is that of civilized States which are brought into contact with half savage, nomad populations, possessing no fixed organization, or border security and trade relations with whom impel the civilized States to exert a certain authority…they respect only “visible and palpable force”.’7 And Fyodor Dostoyevsky, writing in the Citizen, a Petersburg journal, in 1881, exulted: ‘Not only did Russia need markets and lands but she would bring science and railroads to a backward people. Asia was to Russia what undiscovered America was to Europe. In Europe we are Asiatics whereas in Asia we too are Europeans. Civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirits and drive us thither. It is only necessary that the movement should start. Build only two railro
ads: begin one in Siberia and then to Central Asia. And at once you will see the consequences...if one fears England then one should sit at home and move nowhere.’8 Russia had actually gone into Uzbekistan for its cotton, the supplies of which commodity from the southern states of America had been blocked due to the hostilities in the American Civil War.

  The intense rivalry between the two most powerful empires in Asia in the nineteenth century was termed by Count K. V. Nesselrode, the foreign minister of Russia, as the ‘tournament of shadows’, because there was no direct Anglo–Russian clash of arms. Rudyard Kipling used the phrase ‘the Great Game’ in his novel Kim, which passed into common usage.

  The first decade of the twentieth century saw the German eastward thrust, symbolized by the attempt to establish the Berlin–Baghdad railway. This move brought Britain and Russia together in the Entente of 1907 for a while. Even so, the British had to foil Russian attempts to annex northern Persia and to persuade the Persians not to let them build a railway line from Tabriz (now in Iran) to Baluchistan (now in Pakistan) or accept the Russian demand to secede territory 100 miles wide on either side.

  After taking over power in Russia in 1917, almost the first thing the communists did in the field of foreign policy was to call a ‘Congress of Eastern Peoples’ at Baku (situated on the Caspian Sea) in 1920. There they spread the message of fraternity to the non-European people of their neighbouring countries to the south: Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. Thereafter, the Soviet Union withdrew territorial claims against these countries; in fact, Moscow offered them economic cooperation and signed treaties of friendship and non-aggression with each of them. Only Afghanistan under King Amanullah was influenced by this policy. And a direct air link was established in 1927 between Tashkand and Kabul. Amanullah fell in 1929 after he tried to go too far in emulating Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey in modernizing Afghanistan’s Islamic society. This resulted in a backlash by conservative forces that helped the British.