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By Root 4401 0

of the country’. The forces newspaper, Fauj Akhbar, reported on the fine job that Indians were doing overseas. Indian troops from a variety of regiments were guarding the Japanese royal palace, for instance.20 But the experience of war stoked the tension in many indirect but malign ways. The Radcliffe Commission, which was responsible for drawing up the boundaries between the two new dominions, divided the homeland of India’s Sikh community in two. This led to what was effectively a murderous armed migration by the large Sikh community living in the Montgomery district of west Punjab to eastern parts of the province that were on the point of becoming India. The adjutant-general of the Indian army, Sir Reginald Savory, reported that this migration and concomitant Sikh violence was ‘well planned, well directed and well carried out’. The Sikh connection with the army had served them excellently, he believed.21

Partition put the departing British into absurdly difficult situations. In theory at least, Sir Frank Messervy, who had led an Indian division at Imphal and was now commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s forces, could be pitted against his old commander, Sir Claude Auchinleck, who remained head of the rest of the Indian army. With a heavy heart, Messervy set to work policing the borders of the emerging dominion of Pakistan.22 He foresaw that old comrades from the Burma front would be trying to kill each other within a few months, as conflicts erupted over the line of the India–Pakistan border. He doubted whether martial law would be of any use in case of a serious breakdown of order. There were simply too few officers, especially British officers, to administer it. Yet Machiavellian diplomacy did not cease simply because the vivisection of the subcontinent was underway. As independence neared, defence strategists in London grasped that it might be possible to secure an agreement with Pakistan even if India were to withdraw from imperial defence arrangements. The Americans too were beginning to see a future for Pakistan as ‘an Islamic buffer’ against Soviet communism in the Hindu Kush. It was Western realpolitik as much as the Muslims’ fear of Hindu domination that determined that Pakistan would survive its traumatic birth.

The fury and hatred created by partition did not completely overwhelm regret and nostalgia among British officers, or indeed even some Indian officers. As the army was split on religious grounds and Hindus and Muslims massacred each other in the streets and on the railways, Lieutenant Colonel Mahomed Siddiq MC, of the 7th Sikh Regiment, wrote: ‘I am a most disappointed person today… a fine machine is being disintegrated to satisfy some of the so-called politicians.’ He added a cry from the heart: ‘I love my Sikhs, Sir!’23 The recipient of this letter, General Savory, was already disillusioned, suffering from what he referred to as ‘Quit India malaise’. ‘What a country… I want to forget India’, he wrote gloomily. Other British officers registered a profound sense of loss. W. L. Alston wrote one of his little poems:

Oh land of fascination!

Deep that calls to Deep!

Responsive to our longing,

May you ever keep

A corner of your heart for us,

Who counted not the cost,

To serve our mistress, India,

That we have wo’ed and lost.24

As India’s and Pakistan’s ‘tryst with destiny’ approached the British busied themselves with their usual rituals. There was to be no ceremonial lowering of the Union Flag in Delhi. At Lucknow, however, where the memory of 1857, when Indian rebels besieged the British garrison, was evergreen, a curious ceremony was played out. Every corps present at the siege was judged to be entitled to receive a flag flown from the flagstaff of the ruined Residency. As time was limited and demand high, all the flags in the Cawnpore arsenal were run up the pole, sometimes in batches of three or four at a time.

However pervasive the surrounding tension, for Indians in Delhi the emotion at the moment of independence was simply unbridled joy. Mountbatten and his staff had choreographed a ceremony