Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day. John Keay
in western India, the rest were scattered fairly evenly about the subcontinent and were not often contiguous. Maps thus gave the impression of British India’s fabric being as perilously holed as a Meo’s outworn kurta. Yet this was only half the story. Their variety was as challenging as their distribution. Some were ruled by Muslim Nawabs (including Hyderabad’s Nizam and Swat’s Wali), others by Maharajahs, Rajahs or lesser variants of the same who might be either Hindu or Sikh; and whatever the ruler’s faith, it was not uncommon for the faith of the majority of his subjects to be different. Famously, the greatest princes commanded immense wealth and built ever more fanciful palaces; less famously, the least were hopelessly in debt and lived in shabby obscurity. And not even the mapmakers of the Survey of India had been able to do justice to the unconsolidated nature of princely holdings. Erratic boundaries and isolated enclaves and counter-enclaves abounded. Communications suffered accordingly. As Darling had discovered, road transport was stifled by innumerable state customs barriers where duties were levied, bribes extorted, and some goods could not pass at all. It was the same with the railways and the postal service. Fifty years later Indian Railways would still be grappling with the illogic of state-centred networks and the numerous different rail gauges bequeathed by princely whim.
All this rendered the states highly vulnerable. Making a case for hereditary monarchy in the mid-twentieth century was difficult enough, and it was not helped by the reluctance of many rulers to welcome reform. Inevitably it was the princes’ outrageous eccentricities and their lavish expenditure on foreign travel, luxury cars and well-stocked zenanas that made the headlines. All, great or small, recognised that their best chance of retaining their rights lay in presenting a united front, yet their wildly different circumstances seldom admitted of their sustaining it. The smaller states resisted federating with the larger; and the larger resented their claims to special treatment being muddied by the unrealistic expectations of the smaller.
Of course national sentiment, not to mention common sense, demanded that they throw in their lot with either Congress or the League. It would dispel the suspicion that they were British puppets, be welcomed by most of their subjects, and deserve a generous response from the political parties. For Congress and the League badly needed the states. Without them, an independent India would be denied the territorial uniformity expected of a modern nation state and be incapable of planning an integrated economy. And the same went for a possible Pakistan: without the states and some semi-autonomous tribal areas, its territory would be even more perforated than the ‘moth-eaten’ periphery for which Jinnah would eventually have to settle.
On the other hand, and much to British relief, individually the states were still less viable. All of them depended to some extent on the directly administered provinces not just for ‘oil, cloth, sugar and wheat’ but also coal, power and even water. Moreover, not one of them was readily defensible. A few had written treaties that obliged the British to afford them indefinite protection; but in the absence of British troops this would scarcely be practicable, and Westminster therefore had no intention of honouring the treaties. According to Cripps, ‘the efflux of time and change of circumstances’ had rendered the treaties no longer ‘appropriate to the conditions of the modern world’. With the departure of the paramount power, ‘paramountcy’ – one of those barely definable terms, like ‘suzerainty’ and ‘dependency’, with which empires disguise their dominion – would lapse. Although Congress demanded that all such obligations pass to the new paramount power as part of the ‘transfer of responsibility’, the Cabinet Mission had demurred. In a rare reference to the matter, it reiterated the British contention that ‘all rights surrendered … to the paramount power will return to the states’. At a press conference Cripps went even further, opining that the states would thus ‘become wholly independent’.
This was music to princely ears. Hyderabad and Travancore immediately gave serious thought to joining the world’s concourse of sovereign nations by despatching ambassadors and applying for UN membership. They and many other states expected to retain their links with the British Crown by negotiating their individual or collective entry into the British Commonwealth. And all recognised that the retraction of paramountcy did at least improve their bargaining position vis-à-vis the new political leadership represented by Congress and the League.
The League was generally supportive of the states; its desired Pakistan would contain comparatively few, of which only Kashmir was a possible contender for independence. But it was otherwise with Congress. As the voice of all India’s peoples it claimed to represent the subjects of the princely states as well as those of British India. In the Chamber of Princes (the princely forum), Congress was thus confronted by a second grouping of potential secessionists who, though less vociferous than the League, could be just as unaccommodating.
While insisting that paramountcy must lapse, the British government had urged the princes to negotiate their future status with the nationalist leadership. Indeed, the Cabinet Mission Plan had envisaged the princes participating in both the Constituent Assembly and the interim government. But, like the League, the Chamber of Princes had prevaricated. It too insisted on disproportionate representation in the Constituent Assembly, while demanding numerous concessions in respect of the legitimacy of monarchical government and a large measure of autonomy in the states’ internal affairs. In early 1947 Nehru, whose centrist, socialist and democratic sentiments were no secret, steeled himself to offer sufficient safeguards to split the princely Chamber into pro- and anti-accessionists. But there still remained the problem of how to win over the latter, and anyway the Constituent Assembly had been prorogued in the face of Jinnah’s refusal to participate. Meanwhile the British government’s February announcement of a deadline for independence had left the future status of the princes unchanged.
What did change was the Viceroy. In March 1947, just as Malcolm Darling was completing his long ride, Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived as Wavell’s replacement. Unlike Wavell, the new Viceroy enjoyed Whitehall’s utmost confidence plus the luxury of having drafted his own brief. With numerous other advantages – a royal connection, an open mind, an attractive wife and an infectious sense of urgency – Mountbatten would plunge straight into the constitutional impasse between Congress and the League. The princes would therefore have to wait.
In May 1947, a year after it had been tabled, the Cabinet Mission Plan was finally ditched along with the all-party Constituent Assembly. The demands of Congress and the League remained irreconcilable, but an uneasy lull in the massacres in the Punjab offered some hope. June brought the critical turnaround, when Mountbatten endorsed Partition and quickly followed this by announcing an earlier deadline for its enaction. Only in July, as the days ticked away and Congress agonised over the loss of Pakistan, did it dawn on Mountbatten that it was the princely states that ‘held the key to a negotiated settlement …’
V.P. Menon, Mountbatten’s ‘political reforms commissioner’ and the unofficial intermediary between Congress and the Viceroy, has been credited with coming up with the terms of the deal. These had something for everyone. Mountbatten would dragoon the states into signing Instruments of Accession to the new India (and in a few cases to Pakistan); Congress, in return, would accept Partition and the loss of Pakistan; and the princes would be mollified by having to hand over their powers only in respect of defence, foreign affairs and communications – in effect no more than they had surrendered under the system of paramountcy. Moreover, by way of further reassuring them with a residual British connection, India and Pakistan would join the British Commonwealth, so giving Mountbatten something to crow about and saving British blushes with a face-saving formula that was of some strategic value in an increasingly bipolar world.
Given the urgency of the situation, it was a persuasive package. But as with Partition itself, the self-imposed haste so concentrated ministerial minds that the wider issues of implementation received little attention. The princes would not all sign on the dotted line, Congress would honour the terms of their Instruments of Accession only for a matter of weeks, the Muslim League would do its utmost to render India as ‘moth-eaten’ as Pakistan by encouraging princely defections, and Mountbatten would wash his hands of the whole business as quickly as he could. In short, the power-brokers seemed oblivious to the anxious faces under the countless village pipal trees in the back of beyond. Chauffeur-driven negotiators sped down the Delhi boulevards without sparing a thought for the dark moustachioed drivers in undarned