BOOK REVIEW: Governors reports on pre-Partition Punjab by Khaled Ahmed
Punjab Politics: 1 January 1944-3 to March 1947, Last years of the Ministries, Governors Fortnightly Reports and Other Key Documents
Compiled and Edited by Lionel Carter
Manohar New Delhi 2006
Pp292; Price Rs 950 Indian
Available at bookstores in Pakistan
Punjab Politics: 3 March-31 May 1947, At the Abyss, Governors Fortnightly Reports and other Key Documents
Compiled and Edited by Lionel Carter
Manohar New Delhi 2006
Pp316: Price Rs 825 Indian
Available at bookstores in Pakistan
Punjab Politics: June 1947-August 1947, Tragedy, Governors Fortnightly Reports and Other Key Documents
Compiled and Edited by Lionel Carter
Manohar New Delhi 2006
Pp262; Price Rs 675 Indian
Available at bookstores in Pakistan
Jenkins, who went back to the UK, headed a bank, finally achieved the merger that created the Standard Chartered Bank, and always refused to discuss his days as governor of Punjab
Lionel Carter is a Cambridge librarian-scholar who was a part of the team of British editors that prepared and released Documents on the Transfer of Power to India 1942-7. These three volumes are a feast of firsthand evidence of events that took place just before Pakistan came into being. Punjab was to be the most important determinant of the nature of the new state, and it adds a new dimension to our consciousness to see what the British governors thought as they saw the province dividing and sliding out of the Indian state. Since these reports and their copies, sent by governor to viceroy in Delhi and secretary of state in London, were not retained in India, they are on display for the first time.
The book begins towards the end of the Second World War and the governor is Sir Bertrand Glancy who was having a hard time convincing the people that the hardship of the war would continue after its end. (He was more than right because ration cards lasted well into the third decade of independence in Pakistan and are still around in some parts of India.) His report makes clear why, after Sikandar Hyats Unionist ministry, his sons Shaukat Hyats ministry had to resign in 1944. Reason: Shaukat Hyat did not have his fathers conviction and talent to keep the cross-communal coalition together and leaned too openly in favour of the Muslim League.
Glancy then held the 1946 election in Punjab in the midst of furious accusations of all kinds of communal hanky-panky. Pushing religion, Muslim League got the largest number of seats in the assembly but when the Unionist Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs got together, they had more seats, which meant that Khizr Hyat got to run the government. Glancy says he met Mamdot in an effort to hand over to the Muslim League, only to find that Mamdots boast of plucking two Unionist members was incorrect.
Glancy having finished his tenure made way for the new governor Sir Evan Jenkins, an old Punjab hand. Jenkins was upset over the ministers taking off on long tours and never discussing problems cropping up under their noses. No one cared about the running down of the public services. Punjab was the most neatly serviced state in India before the local leaders took over in the wake of Sikandar Hyat. He asked Khizr to ban two private armies in the province, the RSS and the Muslim League National Guard, but Khizr didnt pay attention. Governor Glancy thought Shaukat Hyat weak in character and a bad administrator.
In Volume Two, Governor Jenkins has to deal with a general cavalier attitude towards the building up of the communal passion. In March 1947, there was bloodshed in Lahore and Rawalpindi taking toll of 3,600 dead mostly Hindus and Sikhs, the Muslim dead being 600. After Jenkins got to know that Viceroy Mountbatten was decided on dividing Punjab he had to tell him that such a division would be economically unnatural and will throw the province back a hundred years. (When under the PMLQ government in Punjab after 2002 an effort was made to bring East Punjab of India back into some kind of economic arrangement with Pakistans Punjab, the ISI on our side, and the Ministry of External Affairs on Indian side, stopped the two chief ministers in their tracks.)
Jenkins thought Mamdot a very stupid man. He thought Master Tara Singh, who led the Sikhs, was an eccentric old man whose eyes were closed to realities. Rural killings began in May 1947, starting with Gurgaon, followed by Amritsar, in which this time the Muslims were the main victims. Jenkins was shocked by the communal hysteria besieging a province where the religious communities had lived peacefully together under the secular tutelage of the Muslims.
Volume Three has Governor Jenkins, who had served in Punjab since 1920, in deep trouble over the handling of communal violence. In fact his tenure had become so controversial that he had to resign and leave. Viceroy Mountbatten wanted Punjab quickly divided and wanted Jenkins to set up the committees who would decide the modalities of partition, something that Jenkins was opposed to in the first place. He was also dealing with leaders he did not think highly of and simply could not believe that they could be so blinded by communal passions. In the event, all the brawling parties united against him.
He set up the Committee of Experts for the Partition but his low opinion of the communal members of the committee prompted him to appoint a Partition Commissioner in the person of MR Sachdev on his own initiative to speed up the work. (We know that Mamdot was particularly lax in his work on the boundary commission and Jinnah had to send in Zafrullah Khan to save the day at the last minute.) But Mamdot opposed Sachdev and was himself embarrassed in the governors Security Committee after Jenkins decided, wrongly, to mount an operation in Misri Shah in Lahore in search of weapons which were never found. Mamdot resigned.
Jenkins also got into trouble with the Muslims as well as the Congress over his support of action or inaction of deputy commissioner of Gurgaon Patrick Brendon when the communal killings happened. Nehru wanted martial law imposed and curfew enforced strictly and when that didnt happen he asked for Jenkins resignation. Meanwhile Jenkins was right when he said that Partition Committee was no good. No one in the committee agreed on anything and no one was prepared to work hard and not go off on visits anyway. Innocent people got killed like the Muslim boy aged nine on his way to school in Hoshiarpur, like the Hindu assistant foreman cycling to Lahores Railways Workshop, and the 10 Sikhs killed in front of the canteen of the same workshop.
Jenkins, who went back to the UK, headed a bank, finally achieved the merger that created the Standard Chartered Bank, and always refused to discuss his days as governor of Punjab. *
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