Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day. John Keay
was also made for an all-India constitution-making body, or Constituent Assembly, to give effect to the whole plan. The Constituent Assembly’s members would be selected by the provincial legislatures on a religious basis: Muslims would choose Muslim members, Sikhs Sikh members, and the great majority would choose ‘general members’, a term designed to avoid identifying the supporters of the determinedly secular Congress as overwhelmingly Hindus.
All the recommendations contained in this 16 May statement had been pre-agreed with London and anticipated by some of the earlier proposals. It was a longish document, and a particularly taxing one, with more than the odd devil in its considerable detail. In fact the detail was so complicated that it required weeks of clarification by the Mission, then exhaustive debate within the two main parties. Yet, not without grave misgivings and reservations, on 6 June Jinnah and the Muslim League accepted it; and so too, though anxious over the interpretation of some clauses and in the face of disapproval of the confessionally based groups from Mahatma Gandhi himself, did Congress on 25 June.
For the moment Partition was ruled out, as was a sovereign Pakistan; from Afghanistan to Burma an independent India would have the same dimensions as British India. On this happy note the members of the Cabinet Mission began packing their bags. Exhausted, they flew back to London on 29 June.
We ask the Indian people to give this statement calm and careful consideration [Cripps had pleaded at a press conference]. I believe that the happiness of their future depends on what they do now … But if the plan is not accepted, no one can say how great will be the disturbance, or how acute and long the suffering that will be self-inflicted by the Indian people.4
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The disturbance and suffering began within a matter of weeks. For the Cabinet Mission, despite its apparent success on the constitutional front, had inadvertently made things worse. A constitutional framework had been agreed, but an actual constitution would have to wait on the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly. These could take months – as indeed they would (or, as in the eventual case of Pakistan, decades). In the meantime, Congress insisted that an interim government composed of Indian nationals should take over the reins of power. In Nehru’s view and in that of Gandhi, a constitution must be the product of an independent nation; freedom, if it meant anything, must include the freedom to formulate one’s own institutions; de facto independence must therefore precede the constitution-making process. The League took the opposite view: as Jinnah saw it, an interim government that inherited the paramount powers and patronage of the British Raj would be at liberty to influence the Constituent Assembly’s interpretation of the 16 May statement, even overrule it. If there had to be an interim government, therefore, Jinnah demanded a safeguard: half the interim government’s members must be Muslims nominated by his Muslim League, so negating any hostile intervention by the other half consisting mainly of Congress ‘general members’.
‘Now happened one of those unfortunate events which change the course of history,’ noted Maulana Azad, a scholarly and emollient Muslim who, unlike Jinnah, rejected the idea of Pakistan and was at the time President of the Congress Party. At a press conference Nehru was asked whether Congress accepted the 16 May plan in toto. Off the cuff Nehru replied that Congress would indeed enter the Constituent Assembly, but then added that it would do so ‘completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise’. In effect, concluded Maulana Azad, Nehru was claiming for Congress the right to ‘change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan as it thought best’. This ‘astonishing statement’ called into question the good faith of one of the main signatories and so undermined the whole agreement. Maulana Azad, as a Congress Muslim from a Muslim minority province that was never likely to be part of any Pakistan, had a vested interest in an undivided India; he was horrified. Jinnah was perhaps less so; in Nehru’s casual admission that he did not consider the agreement binding, Jinnah saw his often-aired fears confirmed. If the other signatory reserved the right to change or modify the agreement ‘as it thought best’, the League wanted nothing to do with it. It therefore withdrew its earlier acceptance.5
Meanwhile Congress had decided to withhold support for the proposed interim government. This time it was not Nehru who was responsible but Gandhi; for if Nehru had put his foot in it over the Constituent Assembly, Gandhi put his foot down over the interim government. No longer a Congress office-holder but still very much the party’s conscience, the seventy-six-year-old Mahatma baulked at that parity between Muslims (comprising roughly 30 per cent of India’s population) and non-Muslims (comprising 70 per cent) implied by the proposed make-up of the interim government, and he took particular exception to Jinnah’s insistence that only the Muslim League was entitled to nominate Muslim members.
Thus, within days of the Cabinet Mission emplaning for London, the Constituent Assembly was being boycotted by the League while the interim government was being boycotted by the Congress. Of the two representative institutions set up under the Mission’s plan to expedite the handover of power, neither was left with more than a single rickety leg to stand on.
Landed with this tottering structure, Wavell, the Viceroy, would do his best. Nehru would revise his position and Jinnah would be credited, wrongly, with second thoughts; a Constituent Assembly would indeed assemble and an interim government would be formed. Though the transactions of neither would induce a spirit of collaboration, well into 1947 all the interested parties remained engaged in a constitution-making process based on the Cabinet Mission’s recommendations – including its insistence that the territories comprising British India should continue as a single sovereign state.
It was events rather than debates that poisoned this uncertain process, then rendered it redundant. Back in 1942 Congress had severely embarrassed the British with a mass movement designed to sabotage their war effort and persuade them to ‘Quit India’ immediately. The movement had been suppressed, but only with great violence and thanks to some draconian wartime regulations. Now, according to the League, in the dog days of 1946, the British were fearful of a new wave of Congress non-cooperation that would be impossible to contain without the troop levels that had pertained in war and must therefore lead to the ignominy of forced eviction. It was this consideration that had led the Cabinet Mission to overlook Nehru’s ambivalence about constitution-making and to indulge Gandhi’s intransigence over Muslim representation in the interim government. In other words, the Muslim community was being ‘betrayed’, as Jinnah put it, by a British government reluctant to risk Congress retaliation. A record of mass menace was evidently more persuasive than one of reasoned argument; and taking this lesson to heart, on 29 July Jinnah announced that ‘this day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods’.6 In the first all-India protest it had ever organised, the Muslim League called on its supporters to stage their own brand of ‘direct action’. It also named the day – Friday (the Muslim day of prayer), 16 August.
The League’s protest was to be framed as a demand for ‘Pakistan’, a term that was already understood to mean an independent homeland for the League’s Muslim constituency – or what Jinnah called the ‘Muslim nation’. But what this ‘Pakistan’ would actually mean in respect of territory, population transfers and relations with the rest of India was far from clear. Jinnah preferred it that way: the vaguer the term, the more elastic its scope and the more electric its appeal. Yet despite the ‘Pakistan’ banners and posters (there was as yet no Pakistan flag or anthem), and despite the vast crowds of demonstrators and the usual scuffles, ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August occasioned no major confrontations in the great north-western centres of Muslim India – Delhi, Lahore, the Punjab – that would witness the worst atrocities of an eventual Partition. Instead it was Calcutta, then India’s largest conurbation and business capital, that exploded.
As in Dhaka, where lesser disturbances had been ongoing for weeks, the explosion was triggered by a minor local issue which, magnified in a prism of economic grievances, industrial disputes and confrontational party politics, assumed the black-and-white, them-or-us terms of the city’s already endemic Hindu–Muslim animosity. In the gory press reports of ‘the Great Calcutta Killing’ that ensued, the word ‘Pakistan’ received scarcely a mention; nor was it prominent among the declared demands and anxieties of the combatants. Partition, and its implications for Calcutta, a city with a Hindu majority but which was the capital of a province (Bengal)