Shameful, yes; flight, no

"I f****d it up."
That is how Lord Mountbatten described his handling of the transfer of power here to John Osman, a former BBC correspondent who, at a Life Guards mess dinner in 1965, sat next to him. Osman asked Mountbatten about his handling of India, and reported the above reply in an email sent to The Spectator (4 September 2004 ). This reply is also cited by Wolpert, an early American scholar to specialise on South Asia, and author of several books on it.

This is a very different interpretation from the "official" one, provided by Lionel Carter, who edited the 12-volume official Transfer of Power documents along with Nicholas Mansergh. This version can be found in the Conclusion to Mountbatten's Weekly Reports (again edited by Carter and published in India in 2003) to the British government during his viceroyalty. There it is made out that there was no alternative to speeding things up and Mountbatten did quite the right thing.

Wolpert suggests otherwise. He thinks that for various reasons Mountbatten was "obsessed with the idea of speed". He also says "what I had not realised, and only recently appreciated... was the monumental importance of Mountbatten's negativity towards Jinnah..." When he went to interview good old Dickie in 1979 for his book on Jinnah, Mountbatten asked him why he was writing about Jinnah and not about him. Then he screwed up his face in detestation, presumably at the very thought of Jinnah.

But this still doesn't answer the million dollar question, which no one has been to answer, at least to my knowledge: why did Mountbatten really bring forward the date of British withdrawal by 10 months, from June 1948 to August 1947, that too within three months of his arrival in India in March 1947, and in the face of massive opposition from everyone in India and England? On June 4, a mere 74 days after landing in India, Mountbatten announced August 15 as the date. The Congress and Jinnah had agreed the day before.

The Congress had accepted partition as the price of independence but here Wolpert tells us something that is not very well known: Jinnah, who would be dead within the year but probably didn't know it, didn't want to hurry things up. Indeed, he wanted the original date of June 1948 to be observed. But Mountbatten was not deterred and the Congress went along.

Why? None of the reasons given in his Reports is very convincing, not least the one about not being able to ensure peace, law and order. The cost may have been a factor but hardly a major one. Ditto for the argument about the sterling balances and war debt to India, which the ever-perfidious British anyway solved by devaluing the pound.

I am not a historian. But being fairly familiar with the subject I would like to offer an alternative explanation which historians with their obsession with Congress-League politics of the period have not, I think, examined sufficiently. This explanation, which professional historians should dig into""if only to breathe new life into a dead horse""pertains to British strategic interests in the region east of Turkey. It suggests that these interests had something to do with its accelerated departure from the sub-continent. As a soldier, Mountbatten understood strategic interests.

The issue exercising the British was of keeping military bases in India, for keeping an eye on West Asian oil and keeping Russia off it. But this was unlikely. In contrast, Pakistan would be happy to cooperate""if it would be allowed into the British Commonwealth.

The matter was discussed at a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff in May 1947. There A V Alexander, the British defence minister, said if Britain let Pakistan into the Commonwealth, as Jinnah was demanding, the Indians would accuse Britain of having partitioned India for its security interests. Eventually, this is what the Chiefs concluded: "From the strategic point of view, there were overwhelming arguments in favour of Pakistan... that we should obtain important strategic facilities...ensure the integrity of Afghanistan..." Lord Ismay, Mountbatten's Chief of Staff in India, told the meeting that the Indians would bleat for a while but that was about all.

All this can be found in a wonderful monograph called War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, 1947-48 by another non-historian, Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a retired diplomat. Wolpert, as is to be expected from professional historians, has not referred to it. To be fair, though, Dasgupta has also not suggested the link between the accelerated departure and strategic interests...

I could be wrong. Nevertheless it would be useful to have historians examine the defence-related evidence now, instead of""as Wolpert has done""go over the same ground again and again.

---

Shameful Flight
The Last Years of the British Empire in India

Stanley Wolpert
Oxford University Press
Price: Rs 495; Pages: 238