The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition

The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition
Narendra Singh Sarila
Harper Collins, 2005
Pages 436,
Rs. 500 ISBN 81-7223-569-0

The Partition of India ranks as one of the 10 greatest tragedies in human history. Numerous scholars have attempted to focus on the political processes that led to the vivisection of India, the creation of Pakistan. Hardly are there literatures that concentrate on the link between India’s partition and British intentions. Notable among them is Narendra Singh Sarila’s ‘The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s partition’, which traces the influence of British strategic concern culminating in India’s Partition in 1947. In the light of certain rare documents, he ebulliently analyses a host of factors and forces that expressed British fears about USSR gaining control in the Middle East. This, he argues, compelled Britain to play what was called as ‘Great Game’ – a term coined by Arthur Connolly in 1840 and later popularized by Rudyard Kipling – against Russia.

Sarila has quoted chapter and verse to prove his point that Britain had deliberately planned the partition of India to protect its strategic and economic interests from the damaging consequences of its withdrawal from its vast empire in India. On June 3, 1947 the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, while addressing the British Labour Party’s annual conference said that the division of India “would help consolidate Britain in the Middle East”. The whole approach of Britain then was to retain at least some part of India, hopefully in the North-West “for defensive and offensive action against the USSR in any future dispensation in the sub-continent”. What is clear is that even if there was no Jinnah, Britain would still have sought to vivisect India. A free India, Britain knew, would not care to play second fiddle to London; but a Muslim-dominated Pakistan, was as Jinnah its vilest proponent frequently made clear, only too willing to do so. The British then trimmed their sails to follow the directions of the Muslim League’s winds. Every time there was talk of delegating authority, London insisted on consulting the League along with the Congress. It is interesting to note that the formation of the League was itself at the instance of British. When it was first established on December 30, 1906, in Dacca, the League acknowledged the debt in its first resolution by saying that it would “foster a sense of loyalty to the British Government among the Muslims of India”.

Britain tried very hard to influence the United States in its strategic scheming in favor of India’s partition. But the US President Roosevelt wanted to see a free and independent India—and not a partitioned India. American pressure exerted on Britain in favor of India’s independence from 1942 onwards is clearly revealed. The Americans also advised Britain to keep India united. They feared that India’s Balkanization would help the communists. However by playing the Pakistan card, Churchill portrayed that the problem lay in Hindu-Muslim differences and not in Britain’s unwillingness to accept self-determination for India. Such a move brought Jinnah’s 1940 scheme for Partition and his two-nation theory centre stage.

The conversations with, and written communications to, the Viceroys were meticulously recorded by the British which do not fully emerge from the Indian records. Scholarly attention has been riveted on those complex negotiations, and their minutiae, leading to partition as well as on the personalities of Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, and others, and a substantial body of literature also exists on the manner in which the boundaries were drawn between India and Pakistan, on the western and eastern fronts alike. The book also dwells on portraying the personalities of the British Viceroys in India - Lord Linlithgow, Lord Wavell and Lord Mountbatten – and how they were responsible for the events that ultimately led to the partition of India.

The book also reveals how novice was the Indian Nationalists’ miscalculations, their ideals divorced from realities and their inexperience in the field of international politics emerges in their own words in the records. Firstly, the resignation of Congress ministries when they were in power in 1939 enabled Jinnah and his Muslim League to come to the fore. Secondly Congress was reluctant towards supporting the war effort further alienated Britain from the Congress party. Thirdly, before the Muslim League had entered the Constituent Assembly, Nehru agreed to include League ministers in the Interim Government in 1946. Fourthly, glaring mistakes were made in handling the Kashmir imbroglio.

The author cautiously drives home the fact that though Britain was responsible for India’s Partition, it did not support the partition plan to weaken India. In fact the British forced the Princes into the arms of India, except for Jammu and Kashmir. This step helped unify the fragmented parts into a cohesive one. Partition, according to the author, was thus a politico-strategic act to consolidate their power in the region.

Fifty-eight years after Partition, it is worth re-examining whether the British fears of Russia marching into the subcontinent were valid. With the end of Cold War communist Russia did invade Afghanistan and take control of the country. This is where Pakistan played the role the British envisaged. It provided the launch pad for American forces to beat back the Russians by arming the Afghan resistance, precipitating the collapse of the USSR and altering the world balance of power.

It is a most welcome addition to books dealing with the partition of India even while making one wonder how many more secrets still remain to be unveiled!