Nehru and Liaquat urge IndiaPakistan cooperation in newly revealed 1947 files
Files held by the British government for nearly 78 years and declassified just days ago include secret messages sent in September 1947 by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan.
The documents, studied by Middle East Eye in the National Archives in Kew on Thursday, provide an extraordinary snapshot of a period shortly after the partition of the subcontinent in which both Indian and Pakistani leaders were determined to maintain close ties.
The files show Nehru and Liaquat speaking about partition, the “two-nation theory” of Hindus and Muslims, the treatment of minorities and the need for cooperation between India and Pakistan.
They reveal reports by British officials in the subcontinent accusing India's home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, of supporting a "Hindu India" and aiming at "whistling all Hindus out of Pakistan whether they want to leave or not".
The files further show that the Pakistani government rejected Patel's calls for Pakistan to receive more Muslim evacuees, arguing that "partition was not planned and boundaries certainly not drawn up with single-community States in mind".
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This was shortly before the conflict over the princely state of Kashmir almost irreparably damaged relations between the two governments.
Some of the documents have been available elsewhere but were declassified by the British government for the first time on 24 April, as tensions escalated between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan over Kashmir, sparking global fears of a renewed conflict.
In September 1947, just weeks after British rule ended, mass violence was raging across much of the subcontinent. Tens of thousands of people had been killed as Hindus and Sikhs left Pakistan and Muslims left India.
On 19 and 20 September, as the violence continued, senior members of the Pakistani government arrived in Delhi for a private conference with their Indian counterparts. The most high-profile figures there were the prime ministers, Nehru and Liaquat.
Both men were lawyers and had known each other for years.
Nehru was educated at Cambridge, Liaquat at Oxford. Nehru had led the Indian National Congress party in the final years of British colonial rule; Liaquat was a senior figure in the All-India Muslim League and a close ally of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and its governor-general.
The main theme of the conference was that friendly and close relations were not just desirable but necessary to secure an end to violence on both sides. “The two Governments were in complete accord that they should co-operate in the establishment of peaceful conditions,” a press note read.
“Any conception of a conflict between India and Pakistan was repugnant not only on moral grounds but because any such conflict would result in disaster to both.”
Urging Commonwealth intervention
But just days later, the two countries were at each other’s throats: the Indian government discovered that Liaquat had secretly written to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee on 10 September, accusing India of having failed to protect its Muslims and calling for other Commonwealth nations to intervene as mediators.
“The Government of India are apparently unwilling or powerless to restore order,” Liaquat told Attlee, threatening that Pakistan could withdraw its representative in Delhi.
On 15 September, Attlee responded, saying: “The Indian Government are doing their utmost to restore order and to prevent violence spreading over still wider areas… I am reluctant to transmit your message to the Prime Ministers of other [Commonwealth] Dominions.”
The next day Liaquat hit back: “We desire and are most anxious to have nothing but the most friendly relations with our neighbour, but their failure to protect the Muslims in India presents so serious a threat to peace, that we feel we are fully justified in asking for a consideration of this question by Commonwealth in spite of possible adverse reactions of India.”
The newly released documents include a message to London from the British high commissioner in India, Terence Shone, on 22 September.
Shone reported that he had spoken to Lord Hastings Ismay, adviser to India's governor-general Lord Louis Mountbatten (formerly the last viceroy of British India).
Ismay said that Mountbatten worried “that Nehru will now have the very greatest difficulty in preventing his Cabinet from breaking off relations with Pakistan”.
Debating the 'two-nation theory'
One newly declassified telegram by Nehru to Attlee, marked as “top secret”, furiously attacked the Pakistani government.
The Indian leader wrote that “my colleagues and I have observed candour, forbearance and restraint… You must draw your own inferences from [the] secrecy observed by [the] Prime Minister of Pakistan regarding his correspondence with you”.
He added: “The Pakistan Prime Minister’s account of happenings is so one-sided that I feel compelled to take steps to point out that the murder, arson, looting and offences against women of which he complains were begun in the Punjab by Muslims last March.”
Nehru said the violence was “the result of two-nation theory and its concomitant doctrine of hate which the Muslim League has been sedulously preaching for years”.
The “two-nation theory” was a concept popularised by Jinnah in the late colonial period. He argued that the subcontinent’s tens of millions of Muslims were too numerous to be treated simply as a minority, particularly since they formed majorities in some regions.
Jinnah believed that Indian Muslims should be categorised as a nation alongside Hindus, so that they could negotiate to share power from a position of parity.
This idea was roundly rejected by the Congress, the main party of Indian independence, which argued that it represented all Indians regardless of religion.
In a newly declassified telegram to Attlee on 28 September, Liaquat threw scorn on Nehru’s claims, which had been sent to him and defended the “two-nation theory”.
“We cannot understand [the] India Government’s contention that [the] existence of two nations or division of [the] country into two which was agreed by [the] main political parties should lead to hatred expressing itself in organised violence and killing on a huge scale,” Liaquat said.
“There are many historical instances where division and adjustment of boundaries has taken place and maps have been re-drawn with minorities on both sides of [the] border unaccompanied by these mass massacres,” he said. “Nations do live amicably side by side with other nations.”
Jinnah and Patel
Liaquat further quoted from a report by Pakistan’s representative in Delhi: “The gulf between the pious pronouncements of the Government here and conduct of the people is much too wide and Hindu-cum-Sikh pugnacious elements feel certain that really effective action will not be taken against them.
“They are in their own hearts absolutely certain of impunity… Everything has been done in India for these savagely hostile hordes that are armed and receive actual encouragement from subordinate officials.”
Liaquat insisted that “what has not been achieved by many prolonged consultations between the Governments might possibly be achieved if the representatives of all the Dominion Governments meet in a conference forthwith to discuss the whole matter”.
'It is the policy of both the Governments to create and maintain conditions in which minorities could live in security'
- Press note from Delhi conference
Britain’s high commissioner in Pakistan, Laurence Grafftey-Smith, also related a meeting he had with the founder of Pakistan himself on 23 September: “Mr Jinnah informed me today that [the] reference of India Pakistan problem to [the] United Nations was… not contemplated at present” unless “every other approach failed”. He reiterated that Commonwealth representatives should visit both India and Pakistan.
British officials, the declassified documents establish, were concerned that India might decide to withdraw from the Commonwealth. Attlee ultimately agreed to pass Liaquat's message on to other Commonwealth governments, but they were told Britain was opposed to Pakistan’s proposal.
The documents also reveal that British officials were critical of Patel, often known respectfully as Sardar Patel (Sardar means leader), who was widely accused of pursuing anti-Muslim policies.
On 13 October, after Nehru gave a speech criticising Hindu nationalism, the British high commissioner in Pakistan noted that “Nehru's public condemnation of [the] concept of a 'Hindu India' [is] of course in direct contradiction with Sardar Patel’s attitude”.
He also said: “If Sardar Patel persists in whistling all Hindus out of Pakistan whether they want to leave or not [the] Pakistan Government will persist in doubting [the] good intentions of [the] Government of India.
“There are many reasons why individual non-Muslims prefer to leave Pakistan: to make departure a matter of general policy is quite a different thing.”
Partition’s consequences and protecting minorities
Particularly remarkable in the declassified documents is the agonising on all sides about the consequences of partition.
There were even suggestions that leaders were displeased with the countries and their borders as they ended up.
On the Pakistani side, there was an apparent concern that Pakistan might not provide a solution to the issue of the protection of the subcontinent’s Muslims, which had been Jinnah’s overriding motivation before the British left.
“What worries the Pakistan Government most of all is that attacks on Muslims [in India] in fact continue and seem likely to spread,” the high commissioner in Pakistan reported after a meeting with Jinnah, pointing to reports that Hindu railway workers in India had denied water to Muslim refugees and that children died of thirst.
“This sort of thing encourages despair [in the] mind of [the] Pakistan Government of India’s ability to protect Muslims… The [boundaries] of Pakistan were not drawn [to] meet such a contingency.”
On 13 October, the high commissioner then noted that the Indian home minister was calling for Pakistan to “receive Muslim evacuees from Delhi” and parts of the northern United Provinces.
Liaquat, he recorded, “refused to consider this unless [the] Government of India declared itself unable to protect these particular minorities.
“He contended that partition was not planned and boundaries certainly not drawn up with single-community States in mind but that each Dominion was expected to contain and to protect minorities of a different community.”
This establishes that the Pakistani government intended to retain and protect its Hindu, Sikh and Christian minorities, while also expecting India to protect its Muslim minority.
It was not possible, Liaquat believed, for all Indian Muslims - or even just those in northern India - to move to Pakistan.
‘Fullest co-operation at all levels’
Both governments believed that India and Pakistan needed to be closely allied. It was seen as the only way to protect the minorities on each side.
As the press note of the conference in Delhi in September reads: “It is the policy of both the Governments to create and maintain conditions in which minorities could live in security in order to maintain close contact between the Governments to facilitate joint consideration of the problems.”
Even after criticising Liaquat and the Muslim League in considerably strong terms, Nehru said in the newly declassified telegram that protecting minorities and refugees was a problem that “only the two Dominion Governments can solve by the fullest co-operation at all levels”.
There is evidence that many politicians in Pakistan and India alike thought partition was only temporary and hoped for an eventual reunion.
'[Liaquat] contended that partition was not planned and boundaries certainly not drawn up with single-community States in mind'
- Laurence Grafftey-Smith, Britain’s high commissioner in Pakistan
Jinnah himself assumed for a while that he would be able to keep his mansion in Bombay and move easily between the two countries.
He insisted that Pakistan was part of India, which he viewed as a landmass and civilisation that encompassed both the two new nation-states.
He argued that the new nation of India should instead be called “Hindustan” or “Bharat”. Until his death in September 1948, Jinnah insisted on reserving the name India for the entire subcontinent.
A legacy of conflict
After September 1947, relations between the two nations would only worsen. Pakistan’s Commonwealth proposal was rejected, and conflict escalated over which, if any, of the two countries would absorb the subcontinent’s major princely states, particularly Kashmir and Hyderabad.
One declassified document records that Mir Laiq Ali, a Pakistani delegate to the United Nations and a subject of Hyderabad, conveyed a message to the British government from the nizam, Hyderabad’s billionaire ruler.
He reported that the nizam, Mir Osman Ali Khan, “was willing to concede to Government of India all the rights in Defence, External Affairs and Communications which had been conceded by acceding [princely] states; but he was reluctant to surrender the independence of his state, and wanted to reserve his freedom of action if India withdrew from [the] British Commonwealth”.
Shortly afterwards, in November, Osman Ali would become Hyderabad’s prime minister. The following September, Patel would order Indian troops to invade Hyderabad; tens of thousands of people would be massacred.
Osman Ali was imprisoned but later escaped and made his way to Pakistan disguised as a woman.
The conflict over mountainous Kashmir, meanwhile, has caused three wars between India and Pakistan and has never been resolved.
India currently claims the region as "integral" to its sovereignty, and Pakistan calls for a plebiscite, including Pakistan-administered Kashmir, to give Kashmiris the right to self-determination.
Both countries accuse the other of occupying the region, and a deadly attack by suspected rebels on tourists on 22 April triggered the ongoing tensions.
India blames Pakistan for the attack, which Pakistan denies. Many fear a new armed conflict.
“All of us here feel”, the British high commissioner in Delhi worried back in September 1947, “that if the present close co-operation between the leaders ceases, the whole of this sub-continent may slide into chaos”.
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