Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division by French Patrick

Author:French, Patrick [French, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241950418
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

A Large Piece of Green Baize

While Wavell’s document about the potential borders of Pakistan was being pondered, Clement Attlee decided to exhume Sir Stafford Cripps and send a new mission to New Delhi. This idea had first been proposed by the rather unlikely figure of Major John McLaughlin ‘Billy’ Short, formerly of the 5/11th Sikhs, and now a liaison officer at the Ministry of Information. He was one of a crop of ‘experts’ whose views were sometimes sought and pondered by the India Office. Billy Short’s notion was that a trio of ministers should be despatched to India with the ‘ostensible purpose’ of considering ‘the terms of a treaty between Britain and India’; but that its secret purpose would be ‘a missionary journey round India to create the right atmosphere’. 1

It was late in the day to try a strategy of this kind, but Pethick-Lawrence liked the idea, and on 22 January 1946 it was minuted that the Cabinet agreed that ‘a Mission of three Ministers of Cabinet rank should be sent to India, to arrive in the middle of March, to conduct the forthcoming negotiations on the constitutional problem’. 2 In mid-March the trio, consisting of Stafford Cripps, Freddie Pethick-Lawrence and the First Lord of the Admiralty, ‘A.V.’ Alexander, flew to India. It was now almost a year and a half since Wavell’s original, urgent letter to Winston Churchill, telling him that His Majesty’s Government had ‘no longer the power to take effective action’ and should ‘move without delay’. During the interval India had been lurching out of control without any serious action being taken.

Accompanying this Cabinet Delegation, which was sometimes known as the Cabinet Mission, were eleven civil servants and hangers-on. They included a baffled Deputy Under-Secretary of State from the India Office, Sir William Croft, and the India Office’s ‘adviser on publicity questions’, Alec Joyce. Joyce had worked as an ‘officer on special duty’ for IPI for two years during the 1930s, being awarded an OBE for his pains, so he may have had other activities to attend to apart from giving briefings to the press. There were also Majors Woodrow Wyatt and Billy Short, as personal assistants to Cripps.

The mission’s aim was ‘the setting up of machinery whereby the forms under which India can realize her full independent status can be determined by Indians … with the minimum of disturbance and the maximum of speed.’ 3 Its deliberations were assisted by a new-fangled innovation known as a ‘Conference Facility’: a secure teleprinter, rather like a primitive telex, which could be used for the immediate exchange of messages with London.

The gimlet-eyed Sir Stafford Cripps stepped into the white heat of the Indian summer with an absolute determination to find a resolution to the ‘India Question’, which was fast becoming an issue of such intense and tangled complexity that most British politicians preferred to steer well clear of it. It was like the Schleswig-Holstein Question, which Lord Palmerston claimed was only ever understood by three people – but the first was dead, the second was mad, and the third had forgotten.

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