British must take responsibility for Partition
SIR – Jawaharlal Nehru did want a centralised Indian state, as Zareer Masani points out (Comment, August 15), but he had good reasons.
History shows that whenever India had a weak central authority, its fragmentation and subjugation followed. For most Indians, it is heartening to know that Nehru could foresee that an Indian confederation, with pockets of sovereign states, as the Cabinet Mission to India was proposing, would spell disaster for the unity of India. The present state of modern India just goes to show how right he was.
Was Nehru responsible for India’s Partition? The Right-wing Hindu nationalists, who still dream of Akhand Bharat (greater India), and the Muslim liberals in Pakistan, who feel too embarrassed to hold the creation of Pakistan responsible for the mass killings of innocent people, think that he was. But Nehru never supported Partition.
Moreover, neither Nehru nor Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had any real power to enforce Partition. Such power rested with the British government.
Amrik Singh Dhillon
Ilford, Essex
SIR – As I understood it from my father, who by the time of Partition was an interested observer safely back in England, the massacres can be attributed to the unholy triumvirate: Clement Attlee, Lord Mountbatten and Nehru.
Nehru was adamant that he didn’t want British troops involved and Attlee wanted them back in England. Mountbatten had been advised what would happen. Steven Slaughter
Henfield, West Sussex
SIR – I read the Rev Dr John Cameron’s letter (August 12) about Partition with interest.
The British Army in India was indeed confined to barracks. However, my father and a dozen other British officers serving with their Indian Army regiments in the Punjab Boundary Force were the only people with any authority left to try to minimise the cruelty and slaughter on both sides of the border, the law courts having been closed and many of the police themselves being involved in looting and murder.
On one occasion he came across a line of refugees being held up with a machine gun by local police, who were making them hand over all their money and valuables. He and his troops, who consisted of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh soldiers, forced the police to stop and let the people take their possessions back.
This, and far worse, was going on daily and they witnessed some dreadful sights.
Nehru may have been prepared to see his own countrymen’s villages put to the flame, but there were British and Indian officers and soldiers in the Indian Army who were prepared to risk their own lives to save those of Muslims and Hindus.
Anne Smales
Henstridge, Somerset