One for Ritu

[liadnan]

Reading the Speccie on the loo just now I was struck by a letter from John Osman, a former BBC correspondent, who writes that at a dinner at the Life Guards mess to which Osman had been invited on his return from covering the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war Mountbatten sat next to him and talked frankly and at length about the subcontinent. Mountbatten's final verdict on his own work: "I fucked it up."

Very true, Louis.

Meanwhile, in linkage, Ken McLeod has interesting, if depressing, things to say about the Caucasus. Having said that, I rather thought Britain and the US were on Russia's side so far as Russia's internal problems were concerned, though less so when it comes to Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan and Russia's attempts to regain power there. Apropos of which, have they decided where this sodding pipeline is actually going to run yet?

Comments

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

I just hunted out that letter myself and read the entire description. 'Twas sad, the fact that he blamed himself so completely when nobody here has ever been inclined to do so. Now from a purely administrative view-point, and with the benefit of hindsight, I can point out at a few things which could have been done differently. And they would have made a difference in the body count of the Partition. But that is all that could have been changed, unless Mountbatten had thrown his lot in with Gandhi and followed the latter's idea of leaving India to God. And had that been done, the body count would have been as high as that of the partition, if not higher.

Y'see, India was a powder keg waiting to explode, and the partition acted as a pressure valve. Had there been no partition, there would have been a massive civil unrest [or a civil war, if I don't mince words]. I think we'd have survived it, but India would have burnt and bled for months at end. The British just didn't have sufficient troops to control the fanatics, Jinnah's death would have made things even worse because nobody else could have demobilised the muslims, and Nehru and Patel lacked the administrative experience [not to mention the ideological background] to control the explosion. Gandhi might have helped keep calm in some areas, but it would have been significantly harder as violence would have broken out all over the country, rather than just along the new borders.

It is hard to say which option would have been bloodier, but the latter would have been worse from the British point of view. Not only would they have left the subcontinent in flames, I am not even sure that Churchill would have supported the Indian Independence Act in the Parliament. Churchill's support seems to have been based on two factors - a let up in violence once the Partition was decided upon, and India and Pakistan's entry into the Commonwealth. I am not sure how much of a factor the former was, but if its absence meant a delay then India would have seen far, far more violence while still a member of the Raj. The situation would have been far worse than what is happening in Iraq today.

I think that Mountbatten was being too hard on himself - it wasn't he who fucked it up, it was us. :)
What he did still remains impressive in my view - he entered a complicated, explosive situation where the hatred of the British rule was the sole unifying factor for many different groups. He got them to agree on some sort of a plan to move the situation forward, and he managed to implement that plan, and extricate Britain from the mess *before* the situation blew up in his face. He was never given the task to find out the best solution for *us* - he merely had to find the best solution for the British govt., and he certainly did that. Not just before the independence, but even during the first Indo-Pak war. If there is anything I am ever inclined to blame him for, it is the latter - he had accepted the position of the Governor General of India, and he shouldn't have betrayed the trust the Indian cabinet had placed in him. But other than that, he did much better in an impossible situation than anyone else I can think of.