Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [173]
The Indian armed forces, to the despair of Auchinleck and his brother officers, had to be divided. The interim government’s Armed Forces Nationalisation Committee had already been wrangling for months over the phasing out of British officers. Now, just before it produced its report in May, the committee had to address the frighteningly complicated issue of dividing the army between two sovereign states. The Indian members anticipated a ‘loss of efficiency’ when the British officers left, but simply wanted to ‘get on with the job’. Naively, several members predicted that there would be no major war for ten years, only internal security operations. In fact, India and Pakistan were to be at each other’s throats the moment the Union Flags came down, posing immense difficulties for the residual British element in both successor armies.9 India got most of British India’s financial assets and the new Indian army commandeered most of the military stores: Pakistan would have to beg on the international arms market. The division gave India twice as many army units, warships and aircraft as Pakistan.10 All the same, the importance of Muslims in the old army meant that Pakistan emerged as a formidable military power. In other respects Pakistan was not so fortunate. Its territorial boundaries were a geographical absurdity with East Pakistan separated from West by 2,000 miles. This was a recipe for trouble, particularly as the commission appointed to determine the borders was working at a frantic pace and the status and options of the princely states were as yet unclear. Conflict simmered on in Bengal, where hatred had reached a peak in the massacres of the previous autumn. In the Punjab, Hindu–Muslim and Muslim–Sikh tensions escalated, even among those who had fought together as comrades through the war. Gandhi regretfully concluded that the division was ultimately not the fault of the British. Indians simply could not agree among themselves. Burmese politicians, ever watching over their shoulders, took the hint. If complete freedom, rather than ‘mere’ dominion status, was to be achieved, then the Burmese must stay unified.
Yet there was something else afoot in that sweltering Asian summer. Fears for the future were mixed with pride in the coming of independence. The Indian nation was about to be reborn as a free, modern people. Sri Krishna, a journalist, reported from the ‘perpetual Turkish bath’ that Delhi had become:
Watching the crowded dance floors in New Delhi’s clubs or hotels one wonders whether the Swadeshi [independent] Government would bring down the inflated values in the social market. Gandhi cap and Jawahar waist [coat] have become fashionable pieces of manly wear. Our women look really chic in sarees, even the Continental or American brand. No one minds the sleeveless and ever shortening blouses. Indian men and women, having achieved the freedom to dance with anybody but their wedded partners, are not likely to abandon it even for Purna Swaraj [full independence].11
Evidently the new India would be neither the paradise of socialist equality anticipated by Pandit Nehru nor the republic of village virtues dreamed of by Mahatma Gandhi. The future of Pakistan was, however, even more clouded. Mahomed Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League had managed to block Congress and British attempts to forge independent India in their own interests. Yet Jinnah was unable to secure anything more than a ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan. The alternative, the Muslim League’s submergence into a federal structure dominated by the Congress, might have been acceptable if he could have been sure of controlling his Muslim lieutenants in the Punjab and Bengal. But he could not. As a result, thousands of Muslim civil servants began to make their way on intermittent railway services to the distant western seaport of Karachi, Pakistan’s capital designate. Mount-batten, who had opposed partition until the last, derisively