Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [174]
The British officers who contemplated the once unthinkable demise of the Raj were beset by mounting worries. Nehru’s emotional attachment to the princely state of Kashmir seemed the most likely cause of conflict between the two new dominions. The state had a Muslim majority but was ruled by a Hindu prince; at the time, no one knew whether it was going to join India or Pakistan. Mountbatten had difficulty in stopping the prime minister designate from personally visiting Kashmir, something that might well have sparked off bloodshed there.13 Meanwhile, the British commander of what was to become the Indian air force was stunned to learn that Nehru was contemplating sending planes to Southeast Asia to help the Indonesian nationalists against the Dutch.14 Nehru did in fact later send Indian planes to break the Dutch embargo of its former colony. The aim was to deliver food and medicines to the nationalist forces, though some said that arms had found their way there too. In the interim All-India Radio acted as the official news station of the Indonesian Republic.15 Nehru was also keeping a weather eye on events in Burma, where the Indian minority was vulnerable to political change. The departing British disapproved of this ‘meddling’ in international affairs, although it was frankly unavoidable. As India became an independent nation its rulers found it difficult to distance themselves from the geopolitical interests of their British predecessor, however much they might have wished to strike a neutral pose in international affairs.
The deepest foreboding affected the officers and men of Britain’s old Indian Army. They had fought together from Assam through to Rangoon, in North Africa and in Italy. They had watched comrades survive the horrors of the Second World War only to see them perish in the abortive occupation of Indonesia. Hindu and Muslim fighters from the Burma campaign watched with horror as their home villages were consumed by communal rioting. Darbar Notes, an army magazine, reported the efforts of Indian subalterns in the Punjab districts to form Hindu–Muslim peace committees.16 At first officers noted with pleasure that only 5 per cent of the people arrested for communal crimes had military training.17 But other men of arms – irregular troops raised during the war, princely states’ armies and bandits of various sorts – actually led the ruthless communal killing that spilled out across the country. Senior British officers later acknowledged that former soldiers had probably played a more significant role in the violence than initially thought. At his prayer meetings, the frail and now deeply disillusioned Gandhi said that he feared that there was every likelihood that the partitioned armies ‘would be used for making war on each other’.18 Mountbatten too was uneasy with the whole situation. He reported to the Partition Council that the Maharaja of Patiala, who had been a key figure in the war effort, had written to him asking him to receive a deputation of Sikh officers, many of whom had served under Mountbatten in South East Asia Command.19 Mountbatten was worried that receiving the men would compromise his supposedly impartial position and that they would use the occasion to raise the issue of the Punjab boundary, which threatened to strand their families on the wrong side of the India–Pakistan border. The Sikhs were also worried that their grants of land for wartime service would not be safe if their districts ended up in Pakistan. As the cities of the Punjab descended into a hell of communal murder, everyone feared that parts of the regular army would get involved in the fighting. In the event, the old Indian Army remained aloof from the mayhem that broke out between March and October 1947, but some former personnel took part in the violence. Officers begged their men to remain impartial as hatred grew. Every officer was sent a pamphlet, ‘The army is the anchor