Britain was not responsible for partition, it was down to Nehru

It is fashionable to blame British divide-and-rule for millions of lost lives, but it is time to share the blame

Today, India and Pakistan both celebrate 70 years of independence. Britain’s role, however, will be less celebrated. These days it’s fashionable to blame British divide-and-rule policy for India’s partition and the millions of lives lost and disrupted – a lie echoed recently by the absurdly unhistorical film, Viceroy’s House. The time has come to correct this falsehood.

The man who did most to shape the future of the subcontinent is conspicuous by his absence from the official rhetoric of today’s celebrations. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Harrow and Cambridge-educated founding father of the Indian republic, is the bête noire of India’s present Hindu nationalist government – reviled as much for his discredited socialist economic baggage as for his anglicised background and secular attitudes. But it was Nehru, more than any other, who was responsible for the partition of the subcontinent on sectarian, Hindu-muslim lines.

I know this because my father was a close colleague of Nehru and was there in 1937 when the seeds of partition were sown. Then he witnessed Nehru sending off an arrogant telegram rejecting a coalition deal between his Congress Party and the Muslim League. That was the moment when the Muslim leader, MA Jinnah, concluded that Congress would never share power in a united India and moved rapidly to the idea of a separate Islamic homeland called Pakistan.

Jinnah was never wholly serious about his Pakistan demand, but saw it as a bargaining weapon to force concessions from Congress. Although Muslims were less than a third of the population of undivided India, he wanted safeguards against majority Hindu rule, with parity for Muslims in a federal government and autonomy for Muslim-majority provinces such as Punjab and Bengal. Nehru was equally determined to be master in his own house, with a strong central government that could impose his state-led socialism.

British governments under both Churchill and Attlee did their best to square this circle and retain the unified subcontinent that the Raj had so painstakingly built. Far from pursuing a policy of divide and rule, the truth is that Lord Wavell, the conscientious soldierstatesman appointed viceroy in 1943, laboured for three years to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power to a Congress-muslim League coalition. The situation rapidly deteriorated when Attlee’s Labour government replaced him with its own soldier-statesman, Earl Mountbatten, who was sent out with a “cut-and-run” deadline to pull out of India.

Mountbatten found a powerful ally in Nehru, who shared his aristocratic background, his vanity and his impatience for a quick Indian exit, whatever the cost. Their friendship, strangely enough, was cemented by Nehru’s love affair with the Viceroy’s wife. Jinnah understandably felt excluded from such intimacies.

Still, the Raj had attempted to broker a united Indian confederation, only for its so-called Cabinet Mission Plan to be torpedoed by Nehru, because it would have made Muslim-majority provinces a virtual state within the state. Instead, Jinnah ended up with what he called “a moth-eaten Pakistan”, with most of the Muslim intelligentsia left behind in India and the two Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab torn apart on sectarian lines. Nehru boasted that this malformed creature was doomed to failure and would return to the Indian motherland, tail between its legs.

Such arrogance would bedevil future relations between India and Pakistan, especially over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. A principality with a Muslim majority, it logically belonged with Pakistan, based on the principle underlying partition. But its Hindu maharaja decided to join India, and Nehru agreed, while solemnly promising at the United Nations to hold a plebiscite allowing Kashmiris to decide. His pledge was soon abandoned, and the result has been two wars between India and Pakistan, continuing border skirmishes in Kashmir itself and even the threat of mutually assured destruction between these two nuclear powers.

The gulf between India and Pakistan was also widened by the Cold War. While Pakistan joined Western-led, anti-communist military alliances, Nehru’s non-alignment tilted towards the Soviet bloc. Pakistan followed free market policies, while India under Nehru and his daughter followed state-controlled socialist planning, which resulted in economic stagnation, increased poverty and what critics labelled the Permitlicence Raj.

My father led opposition to Nehru in 1959 as founder of the Swatantra (or Freedom) Party, with a pro-western, free-market programme that was Thatcherite before Thatcher. It soon became the largest opposition party in Parliament and a thorn in Nehru’s side. Father visited Pakistan, met its benign military ruler, President Ayub Khan, and returned convinced of his peaceful intentions, if only Nehru would compromise on Kashmir. Pakistan’s goodwill was demonstrated by its decision not to open a second front during Nehru’s disastrous war with China. Nehru never reciprocated.

Certainly, Nehru’s good-natured tolerance of opposition at home was in stark contrast to contemporary Third World dictators, including Pakistan’s military regimes. As a schoolboy, I looked down from the visitors’ gallery in the Lok Sabha (India’s House of Commons) while he and my father locked horns. Despite Father’s blistering attacks in Parliament, when Nehru met us outside he warmly embraced my mother and amiably patted me on the head.

Happily for India, Nehru was committed to parliamentary democracy, with its conventions imported lock, stock and barrel from Westminster. But while we remember that, we should not forget his role in the creation of that “moth-eaten Pakistan”, which he so rightly predicted was doomed to be a failed state, torn apart by its internal contradictions. That is his legacy, far more than Britain’s.

Zareer Masani’s documentary, ‘Throwing Out Nehru’, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 tonight