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The Congress tried its best to back-track on Nehru’s statement, and issued statements reassuring its commitment on ‘May 16 Plan’. But, the deed was done. Jinnah had got the excuse and the opportunity he wanted.
Jinnah and the AIML exploited Nehru’s faux pas to the hilt. Jinnah contended with the British that Nehru’s remarks amounted to “a complete repudiation” of ‘May 16 Plan’, and therefore he expected the British government to invite him, rather than the Congress, to form a government.
the Muslim League Council met at Bombay during 27–30 July 1946. Jinnah took the extreme step: he got the Muslim League to revoke its acceptance of the ‘May 16 Plan’, and gave a sinister call for the launch of “direct action to achieve Pakistan”. Asking the qaum to observe 16 August 1946 as Direct Action Day, Jinnah said on 30 July 1946: “Today we bid goodbye to constitutional methods. Throughout, the British and the Congress held a pistol in their hand, the one of authority and arms and the other of mass struggle and non-cooperation. Today we have also forged a pistol and are in a position to
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This is from a pamphlet written by the Calcutta Mayor SM Usman: “…By the grace of God, we are crores in India but through bad luck we have become slaves of Hindus and the British. We are
starting a Jehad in your name in this very month of Ramzan… Give your helping hand in all our actions—make us victorious over the Kaffirs—enable us to establish the kingdom of Islam in India… by the grace of god may we build up in India the greatest Islamic kingdom in the world…”{Mak/110}
HS Suhrawardy, the then Premier of Bengal, also held the portfolio of Law & Order. He transferred Hindu police officers from all key posts prior to 16 August, and ensured that while 22 of the 24 police stations had Muslims as in-charge, the remaining 2 had Anglo-Indians. Further, to mobilise large Muslim crowds, he declared 16 August as a public holiday. Goondas and bad characters were mobilised by the AIML from within the city and outside to create trouble. While Muslim leaders gave provocative speeches on 16 August, Suhrawardy crossed all norms for a Premier and told the gathered mammoth
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The cumulative result of all the above was the Calcutta Carnage, the Great Calcutta Killings, the worst communal riot instigated by the Muslim League, that left 5,000 to 10,000 dead, 15,000 injured, and about one lakh homeless! Like Dyer, the butcher of Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919, Suhrawardy came to be known as ‘the butcher of Bengal’ and ‘the butcher of Calcutta’.{Swa1}
Nehru’s indiscretion put paid to the scheme of united India, precipitated Jinnah’s call for Pakistan, and resulted in the ghastly Direct Action described above.
Aryan-Dravidian divide was also a deliberate myth floated by the colonists to serve their divide-and-rule and proselytization strategy.
Looking to sub-regional Hindu-Muslim ratio of Sindh, the Congress could have tried to have part of Sindh carved out for the Hindus. Considering that the Muslim League had secured only 46% of the votes in Sindh, and the nationalist Muslims had polled three votes for every four polled by the League, the Congress could have insisted for a plebiscite in regions with Hindu dominance. However, the Congress seemed to have abandoned Sindh as ‘a far off place’, like Chamberlain had abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler in 1938 on the pretext that it was ‘a far off country about which we know little’.
Khairpur was a Princely State adjoining India on the east, and surrounded on the other three sides by Sindh. Its Mir had offered to Nehru its merger with India. But, the offer was declined by Nehru, and India sent their accession papers back to them! Had the offer been accepted, Khairpur plus the adjoining Hindu-majority area could have been Hindu or Indian Sindh.
Notwithstanding the above, nothing was done for the Hindu Sindhis. They were deprived of their homeland of thousands of years. They became the new Jews, although their history and homeland was several thousand years older than those of the Jews and Israel. Why that injustice? Why Gandhi, Nehru, and other Indian leaders did little for them?
When the Muslim League proposed Sindh as one of the components of their future Pakistan in the 1930s and later, or when the Groupings (Group-A, B, C) were proposed, Indian leaders and Hindu Sindhis should have objected to the inclusion of whole of Sindh as a Muslim-majority area in Pakistan. They didn’t.
Hindus of Sindh were generally not aggressive or bellicose like the minority non-Muslims in Punjab. The world at large is too cruel and indifferent to the plight of any given section of people unless they themselves fight and sacrifice for their rights. Jews suffered for centuries till they asserted themselves with the creation of Israel. Tibetans, with their non-violent Buddhism, have been deprived of their nation. Yezidis and Kurds, who have been at the receiving end for centuries, are now fighting back.
Yet, something was expected from the India leadership of Gandhi-Nehru & Co, in whom the Sindhis had reposed their faith. All one can say is that perhaps the nature of our freedom movement, and the quality and competence of our national leaders left a lot to be desired. Sadly, Gandhi–Nehru & Co suffered from an inherently defective world-view, thinking and vision, and were too poor as strategists, tacticians and implementers on the ground to be able to outsmart the British or the Muslim League, or stand up to their designs—not just with regard to Sindh, but in all other matters too! Sardar
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By June 1948, about a million Hindu Sindhis had left Pakistan for India. Migrations continued thereafter, and tapered off in 1951.
Although Hindu Sindhis were deprived of their homeland, cultural identity, businesses, land, shops, properties, residential quarters—making beggars out of prosperous families—no one batted an eyelid, not the UN, or a Human Rights Organisation, or the US, or the UK, or the Pakistanis with whom they had stayed for centuries, or even the Indians! They became like the Jews of the past (before Israel was created in 1948), or the Tibetans of the 1950s, or the Kashmiri Pandits of 1990s, or the Kurds and the Yezidis of the current times.
India was a poor country, and thanks to Nehruvian economic policies, it r...
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They were condemned to their miserable fate, and dumped in outer areas of several cities and towns, without any worthwhile help or facilities. Yet, one has to salute the spirit and hard work of the Hindu Sindhi community which without any governmental help gradually stood on its own feet, and became prosperous.
India and Pakistan had agreed in November 1947 that Rupees 55 crores remained to be transferred to Pakistan, as its share of the assets of undivided India. However, at the insistence of Sardar Patel, India informed Pakistan, within two hours of the agreement, that the actual implementation of the agreement would hinge on a settlement on Kashmir. Said Sardar Patel: “In the division of assets we treated Pakistan generously. But we cannot tolerate even a pie being spent for making bullets to be shot at us. The settlement of assets is like a consent decree. The decree will be executed when all the
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In the Cabinet meeting in January 1948 Sardar Patel stated that the money if given would surely be used by Pakistan to arm itself for use in Kashmir, hence the payment should be delayed.
Gandhi and Nehru, rather than being prudent about what was in the best interest of the nation, went by what the British colonial representative Mountbatten, having his own axe to grind, had to say, and the Cabinet decision was reversed to let Pakistan have the money, and trouble India further in J&K!
Gandhi wanted to look good in the eyes of the Muslims in Pakistan and India. Ignore national interest for the sake of appeasement, and your own image! And for Nehru, kowtowing to Mountbatten and Gandhi was a priority, rather than standing up for the Cabinet decision, of which he was a part. People like Sardar Patel were out of place in such a scenario. Gandhi went on a fast to force the issue in his favour (it was one of the several issues that led him to fast). Patel yielded, Gandhi won, and India lost.
All those leaders, including Mountbatten and Nehru, who encouraged or prompted Gandhi into that unreasonable position [of going on fast] were indirectly guilty of his untimely death.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s dynastic tendencies, inherited from his father Motilal, were apparent in the 1930s itself, much before he became the prime minister.
The last (and only!) Gandhian movement for full independence was the Quit India Movement of 1942. Mind you the previous movements like the Rowlatt Satyagraha, etc., or the two major once-in-a-decade Gandhian movements—the ‘Khilafat & Non-cooperation Movement’ (KNCM) of 1920-22, and the ‘Salt Satyagraha’ of 1930 plus the Civil Disobedience Movement of
1931-32 that followed it—did NOT have complete independence in their agenda at all! Yes, the Congress and the Congress leaders did talk of swaraj or dominion status or independence in their meeting, resolutions, speeches, and writings, and did officially promulgate the ‘Purna Swaraj Declaration’, or the ‘Declaration of the Independence of India’ at Lahore (as late as) on 29 December 1929, followed by its pledge on 26 January 1930; BUT in none of their major movements until the Quit India 1942 did the Congress include ‘Purna Swaraj’ or full independence as an item of agenda or as a demand on
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“The claim that Quit India led to freedom is a state sanctioned hoax.”{AD1}
Britain hinted at independence in 1946, and announced it formally in 1947, even though there was hardly any pressure from the Congress on Britain to do so. Many of the rulers of the Princely States in fact wondered and questioned the Raj as to why they wanted to leave (they didn’t want them to—it was a question of their power and perks, which were safe under the British) when there was no movement against them, and no demand or pressure on them to leave.
Gandhi had envisaged the British troops remaining in India after independence for some time to train Indians. That is, Gandhi never considered driving out the British as an option, in which case the British would certainly not have obliged by remaining in India to train their adversaries.
is generally believed that Gandhi’s greatest achievement was the liberation of India from colonial rule. But historical evidence does not support this view.”{Gill/24}
“From late 1930s onwards, Gandhi was a liability to the freedom movement, pursuing an eccentric agenda that created as many problems as it solved. V.S. Naipaul has put it more bluntly, ‘Gandhi lived too long.’”{PF/105}
“Not everyone approved of Gandhi’s methods. Many were dismayed by the apparently arbitrary dictates of his 'inner voice'. And in the political stalemate of the 1930s—for which some Indians still blame him: Gandhi’s unpredictable politics, they say, his inability to manage the forces he had released, needlessly lengthened out the Independence struggle, delayed self-government by twenty-five years, and wasted the lives and talents of many good men…”{Na1}
“The way of Subhas Bose was the way of a straight patriot. And he stuck to that way to the bitter end. He did not change his way when
he was thrown out of the Congress by a curious combination of Rightists and Leftists. He did not change his way when he was completely isolated in the country. It was while walking on that way that he went out of the country, organized the Azad Hind Fauj, forged national unity on a bloody battlefield, and, wrecked the morale of the British Indian Army which (and not the resolutions and jail journeys of the Khaddar-clad crowd, as we are now officially asked to believe) forced the British to quit India.”{SRG2/144}
“As regards independence, it came because the War reduced Britain to a bankrupt power, because the morale of the British Indian Army was broken by Subhas Bose's Azad Hind Fauj, and because the British Labour Party, in spite of Pandit Nehru's malicious insinuations against it in all his books, really believed in the slogans it had raised. It is quite another matter that the Congress inherited the power which the British were in a hurry to part with. That does
not prove that power came to the Congress as a result of its own efforts, or that the Congress was qualified to use that power in terms of its inner cohesion or intrinsic character. The only thing it proves is that the departing British had retained a sufficient measure of confidence in the Congress organisation. The British believed that the Congress would be able to prolong the life of that political system which they had imposed on India...”{SRG2/146}
By the end of the WW-II territorial colonisation had ceased to be a viable enterprise, and decolonisation began. In fact, around the time India got its independence, many other colonies (like Sri Lanka, Burma–Myanmar, etc.) also got their independence, although there was not much of an independence movement in those colonies that would have forced the colonisers to leave. During 1947 Britain also pushed plans through the UN that would enable it to leave Palestine; and finally Israel was created on 14 May 1948.
Militarily, administratively, financially, and above all, mentally the British were too exhausted after the Second World War to continue with their colonies.
The Viceroy was shocked to learn of thousands of soldiers of the British-Indian army switching over to INA (to support the enemy nation Japan) after the fall of Singapore in 1942. It meant the Indian soldiers in the British-Indian army could no longer be relied upon. What was more—there was a huge support for Netaji Bose and the INA among the common public in India.
The INA Red Fort trials of 1945-46 mobilised public opinion against the British on an unprecedented scale, so much so that the Congress leaders like Nehru (who had till then, and later too, opposed Netaji and INA) had to demonstratively pretend their support to the INA under-trials to get votes in the 1946 general elections.
The Indian Naval Mutiny of 1946 and the Jabalpur Army Mutiny of 1946, both provoked partially by the INA trials, convinced
the British that they could no longer trust the Indian Army to suppress Indians, and continue to rule over them.
Attlee and others probably realized that Indian soldiers may no longer be available to hunt Indians. This may have prompted them to leave with dignity and self-respect.”{MKN}
Basically, the British decided to leave because they were fast losing control on account of the various factors detailed above; and lacked the financial resources, the military clout (thanks to Bose, the INA, the Mutinies, and the anti-British atmosphere they created), and, above all, the will to regain that control.
The Cripps Mission of March-April 1942, the first one in the direction of freedom for India, was under the pressure from the US. The US felt that the best way to secure India from Japan was to grant it freedom, and obtain its support in the war.
Shimla Conference was called on 25 June 1945 by Viceroy Wavell for Indian self-government again under pressure from Americans to get full Indian support to dislodge Japan from its occupied territories of Burma, Singapore and Indonesia.
The fact of American help and pressure in getting independence for India is not adequately acknowledged by India.
Gandhi and the Congress were among the minor reasons and non-decisive factors the British left. Strangely, and quite unjustifiably, the focus is on Gandhi, Nehru and the Congress on each anniversary of the Independence Day of India.
It may sound ironic but by 1946–47 it was actually Britain which sought freedom from India!
Check out this quote.
