by A. G. NOORANI
June 23, 1948: Lord (left) and Lady Mountbatten chatting with Prime Minister Clement Attlee after their arrival in London. An Indian representative is also present. PHOTO/The Hindu Archives
Lionel Carter was a member of the team that produced the 12 volumes of Documents on the Transfer of Power in India, which the British government published. He brought to bear the same exacting standards of selection and annotation in the 14 volumes on Mountbatten’s Report on the Last Viceroyalty, Reports by Governors of United Provinces and Punjab, Partition Observed (August-December 1947) and the two earlier volumes, companion to these, comprising Weakened States Seeking Renewal. All were published by Manohar with exquisite care. These volumes are sold in a box, as were the ones on Weakened States. One wishes Carter would do a similar work on Kashmir in the British archives for the period between 1946 and 1950—on papers of the British Resident in Srinagar, the High Commissioners in New Delhi and Karachi, and at the headquarters in London. He would render a service hard to estimate, for the discourse is saturated with partisanship all round. His objectivity and integrity are beyond question.
The volumes under review provide a fascinating portrayal of the times. Occasionally, they prod one to ask whether anything has changed fundamentally. The Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), the Congress, communists, secularists, India’s Muslims, Islam in Pakistan and Kashmir form the subjects of the despatches. India’s Governor General Lord Mountbatten was in close touch with the British High Commissioner Sir Terence Shone, and his Deputy, Alexander Symon. So were they with the High Commissioner in Pakistan, Sir Lawrence Grafftey Smith. Through Mountbatten, India’s former rulers knew what was afoot.
Maurice Zinkin, ICS, held that Jawaharlal Nehru was a bad Foreign Minister for India but would have been a good one for the West. He was wrong. Nehru’s ideas were woolly. Shone took a visiting Foreign Office official to Nehru on May 2, 1948.
“On the Japanese peace settlement Pandit Nehru was non-committal and full of doubt. He seemed concerned lest a conference to consider a Japanese treaty should lead to further estrangement between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. On the other hand he had no suggestions to offer as to what should be done if there was no peace conference.” Russia’s Nikita Khrushchev told him that the Soviet Union was wrong in not signing that treaty.
On the CPI
There is a detailed report by Shone to London, dated June 18, 1948, on the Communist Party of India’s (CPI) second party congress in Calcutta. “Immediately preceding it in Calcutta was the South East Asia Youth Conference (about which separate reports have already been sent) which was almost entirely Communist in character and was attended by a number of foreign Communist delegates. These later naturally formed the closest contacts with the leaders of the Communist Party of India and played their full share in the complete reversal of former party policy which was the dominating characteristic of the party congress itself. The party’s enthusiastic support for ‘Nehru’s National Government’ gave place overnight to an extremist programme aimed at their immediate overthrow as representing a ‘Government of national surrender and collaboration’ which was supporting the Anglo-American bloc. This volte-face in policy necessitated some scapegoat and it took the form of change in the party’s secretary. P.C. Joshi, a moderate Communist (if such a relative term can be applied to any Communist at all) who had held this office since the period of cooperation with the government during the latter part of the war, was replaced by a complete extremist in B.T. Ranadive. The estrangement between Russia and the Western democracies certainly seems to have been one of the causes of this major change in Communist tactics as was to be seen from the lengthy resolution explaining it.”
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