‘Failures for having dreamed of a united India': Diplomat KM Panikkar anticipated Partition in 1941

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07-07-2025

In the spring of 1942, Panikkar received a shock.
He had known for some time that the maharaja was ill, but he hadn't known the extent of it. Now, Ganga Singh informed him soberly that he had, for a long time, been living with throat cancer. His doctors had told him that he had mere months to live.
It was a moment Panikkar would never forget. This was the second maharaja he had served with for such a long time. Of Sadul Singh, Bikaner's mercurial son and heir, he knew little, but it was clear that this was yet another turning point in his career.
In fact, turning points were everywhere.
In February 1942, Linlithgow's muttered imprecations about the direction of the guns of Singapore came true. Long held to be an impregnable citadel, the island fell to the Japanese that month. They were here now, at India's door from the south and from the northeast, holding over 62,000 Commonwealth and British troops captive. It was a stunning blow to Britain's prestige in Asia, and it led inevitably to the popular feeling that the British were not, after all, as invincible as they seemed.
The authorities in New Delhi were nervous that Hindus had a 'brotherly feeling' for the Japanese. This wasn't helped by the fact that, just the previous year, in 1940, Subhas Chandra Bose had escaped house arrest in Calcutta. With the help of the Abwehr – German intelligence – he was spirited across Peshawar and Afghanistan to the Soviet Union, where he assumed a new identity as an Italian nobleman, Count Orlando Mazzotta. The 'count' was then taken to Berlin where, once safely inside the Third Reich, Bose began recruiting his fellow Indians to fight against Britain. In 1941, he founded the Free India Centre, set up a transnational radio station broadcasting pro-Axis propaganda to India and formed the Free India Legion, also known as the Tiger Legion, an all-Indian infantry force of volunteers made up of expatriates and prisoners of war, recruited from labour camps like Colditz. Its soldiers swore an oath of allegiance to Subhas Chandra Bose – and Adolf Hitler. By 1942, the Tiger Legion was a thousand men strong.
To British eyes, there were threats everywhere they turned.
In India, for instance, the situation seemed to be spiralling out of control. Constitutionally speaking, the reforms commissioner HV Hodson was of the opinion that 'time is not on the side of constitutional sanity'. Indian political leaders were on the same page as Hodson. In December 1941, the Bardoli session of the Congress Working Committee expressed support for the 'peoples who are the subject of aggression and are fighting for their freedom', while contending that 'only a free and independent India can be in a position to undertake the defence of the country on a national basis'.
On 1 January 1942, Sapru appealed to Churchill to break the constitutional deadlock in India by some 'bold stroke' of 'farsighted statesmanship'. What the Congress wanted, he said, was simple: to view India not as a colony but on a constitutional position equal to other dominions of the commonwealth. He called for the Indianisation of the Viceroy's Executive Council to form an interim national government. Churchill, even though his back was to the wall, refused to consider this. He cabled his colleagues at the India Office, warning them of the danger of raising key constitutional questions when the enemy was at its doorstep.
On 24 January 1942, Clement Attlee wrote to Leo Amery, wondering whether it was worth considering if 'someone should not be charged with a mission to try and bring the political leaders together'. In Attlee's opinion, one of the better alternatives favouring Whitehall was to send out an official of high standing to negotiate some kind of settlement. This was what Lord Durham had done in Canada. The only question was: who would this official be? While the Raj and Whitehall debated, it had to contend with the undoubted fact that the United States was a very much interested participant at this time.
In early 1942 then, Churchill was an unhappy man. His government was rapidly becoming unpopular, with constant blackouts, heavy rationing and incessant news of defeats in the Far East. He knew he would have to give way to Roosevelt on something at least, but the US president was being peculiarly adamant about concessions in India. In February 1942, FDR told Harriman to deliver a 'highly sensitive' personal message to Churchill, asking when and what kind of action was being taken. It was a squeeze and Churchill knew it, but he was in no position to revolt. Britain was currently extremely weak. In March, Malaya and Burma had fallen to the Japanese. There was no way that he could push back against Roosevelt, especially not when the United States was itself in the war. As a result, when he had word that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, the vivacious Madame Soong, intended to visit India that February, he was thrilled. He wrote immediately to the Chinese leader in the fond hope that he would adhere to British policy over India. But this was a gross underestimation of who the generalissimo was and why he was coming to India in the first place.
Chiang Kai-shek was born in a hilly town called Xikou, in the province of Zhejiang near Shanghai in 1887. His father, a small-town salt merchant, had died when he was eight and his widowed mother had struggled to bring up her two children, Chiang and his sister. Chiang was not a particularly prepossessing character, with a penchant for brothels and hard liquor. His neighbours avoided him and his relatives were ashamed of him. Stung by their visible revulsion, Chiang determined to make a success of himself and chose a military career. It was the perfect path to have chosen, for China in the 1920s was a mix of scheming politics and brutish strongarm tactics. By allying himself with Sun Yat-sen, and via Sun's wife, marrying May-ling Soong, one of the most beautiful, independent women in China, he was at the peak of his powers in the 1940s.
Visiting India was not quite as outlandish as it might have seemed. Nationalist China and India had been in touch since the end of the First World War, a relationship driven by cooperation in the anti-imperialist struggle. The British were aware of the dangers of this bonhomie and through the 1920s, bilateral visits were often blocked diplomatically. That hadn't stopped China from closely tracking the course of the Indian nationalist movement over the years. Now, as the war reached new heights, it was hoped that a common strategy could be found, one that would continue in the post-war period.
How this would play out in reality is another story, but when Japan attacked China in the summer of 1937, the Congress had not only expressed public support for the latter but had also sent a medical mission of five doctors post-haste. Nehru himself went to China in August 1939, only to rush back when war was officially declared. But he returned convinced of the need for deeper political cooperation between India and China. In the early years of the 1940s, Chiang and Nehru kept in touch. When Nehru was in jail in 1940, Madame Soong asked Sir Stafford Cripps, then the British ambassador to Moscow, when he would be released from prison.
So this visit by the generalissimo in February 1942 was at least superficially no big surprise. Sir Maurice Hallett, then the governor of the United Provinces, wrote disgustedly that Chiang Kai-shek was here to 'meander through India, with Nehru sticking to him like a burr'. Still, the Raj rolled out the red carpet for him. He was taken to review Indian troops in a Rolls-Royce from which a Union Jack 'fluttered from the radiator cap, like a raccoon tail on a college boy's Ford'. The generalissimo and his wife were given palatial villas for their stay and waited on by liveried servants. He was even made an Honorary Knight of the Bath, Military Division.
While he partook of these delights, Chiang was here because, as he told the viceroy during the formal banquet thrown in his honour, 'To have one look at things is a hundred times more satisfactory than hearsay.' So, he was here to see how the munition factories, from which arms were moving to China across the Burma Road, were functioning and how they were being defended. He was here to talk of the new road being built from Assam into China, and he was here to assess India's general readiness for war. Politically, there was also no harm in taking the temperature of relations between the Congress and the Raj. With the Japanese reaching Malacca, Borneo and the doorstep of Burma (it would fall in a matter of weeks), Chiang was understandably worried.
He was also reporting to Roosevelt. The American involvement in the war, post Pearl Harbour, was considerable, especially in the realms of backchannel diplomacy. Through FDR, the generalissimo's main aim was to put pressure on the empire to accept the Congress Party's demands for Indian self-determination. They were at a quid pro quo: Chiang needed Roosevelt's help for arms and money. FDR, who was in favour of British talks with India, was influenced by Chiang's suggestion that the United States and China could cooperate in putting pressure on Britain to resolve 'the Indian Question'. The US president liked the sound of this, though it must be noted that FDR had never been to the subcontinent. His India policy was at best inconsistent and at worst weak and ineffective. In both cases, it was driven largely by the generalissimo and his own resistance to European colonialism. Still, Roosevelt thought about Chiang's suggestion and wrote to Madame Soong that one possible solution could be the dividing of India into two parts.
While the US president pondered the fate of India, Whitehall was depressed. The recent lethal combination of political and military reversals had forced Churchill to agree despondently to the dispatch of a political mission to India. Here, he found unexpected resistance from his viceroy. His nerves frayed by the fall of Singapore and Burma, Linlithgow insisted that any such visit 'in existing circumstances could be disastrous'. But his pleas fell on deaf ears. On 9 February 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps was announced as the man who would lead Britain's next mission to India.
In the face of this torrent of events, each occurring within days of the other, Panikkar had to think fast. In 1941, he had written a note for the ailing Ganga Singh that compared the policy proposals of the Congress and the Muslim League and concluded that the League posed a far more serious threat to the princely states.13 This note was written in the aftermath of the Lahore Resolution. In it, Panikkar took the view that, with the League in favour of the creation of Muslim-majority states, the situation was worse than before. It would be possible, for instance, for the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to ally itself with Afghanistan to attack Kashmir. This was only a hypothesis, of course, but its consequences would be catastrophic, fracturing the transport and communications system and rendering the rupee valueless. Jinnah might not have fully endorsed Pakistan, Panikkar wrote forthrightly, but the omens were dire. Therefore, he believed the princes had no choice but to embrace the necessity of a central government.
Panikkar's political thoughts in the early 1940s are interesting, if deeply fatalistic. The archival correspondence of the national movement suggests that, in general, nobody was in favour of Partition before 1946. Even then, it was always seen as a decision born from having been left with no choice. Yet, as early as 1941, Panikkar appears to have not only accepted that Pakistan would be a reality but also that it was the only reality worth considering.
In a letter to his old friend Syed Mahmud from his Aligarh days, Panikkar wrote, 'I have for a long time now, been a Pakistanist. Without the separation of Pakistan, a central government will not be possible in India. The fear of Hindu majority at the centre, whatever safeguards you may create and wherever pacts you may work out, will drive the Muslims to unreasonable madness.' He continued, 'I have no terrors about even the exchange of population. But the 'two eyes theory' and a central government cannot work together. So let us, dear Mahmud, foreswear our past. Consider ourselves failures for having dreamed of a united India.'
This was clearly not a point of view to which he had come easily. Panikkar was by now on the cusp of fifty. He had spent most of his life working for the princes to unite them with provincial India, for a federal cause that was now lost, for a dream of India that to him at least had now shattered. There was no room any more for emotion. From where he stood, joining hands with the Congress was the only practical way forward for the Chamber of Princes. At least the Congress would offer a strong central government along with greater administrative efficiency, strong political institutions and a more modern legal system. Smaller states with no resources for such reforms would have to join with each other or larger states. VP Menon and Sardar Patel would call the process 'integration'. Panikkar called it 'cooperative groups'.
As he watched India move towards a transfer of power, his clear-eyed nationalism was evolving. Tradition was important, but so was the development that could originate from modernising traditions, such as the industrial policy of Mysore or the abolition of untouchability from Travancore. Syed Mahmud, who was then a senior Congress leader, read Panikkar's note and passed it on to Rajaji for his perusal.
Soon Panikkar received a note from Rajaji himself, congratulating him on the depth and foresight of his views, and asking him to take those views to their natural conclusion. Should democratic regimes also be introduced in the states? Wouldn't they guarantee the same rights and duties enjoyed elsewhere across the country? These were the questions with which Panikkar was wrestling when Ganga Singh's health worsened considerably. The cancer was moving fast through his body, and though there was only a dim chance of a full recovery, the maharaja's health was hampered by his love affair with his personal physician, Dr Sivakamu. 'This lady,' Panikkar said spitefully in his memoir, 'was as skilled in surgery as she was in the … intricate art of serving a king.'
To the king's detriment and Panikkar's despair, Bikaner chose to ignore the ministrations of his brilliant German physician Richard Jizchak Weingarten, then the head of the Bikaner State Hospital. This resulted in what Panikkar described as a 'medical crossfire', a messy mix of sorcery, ayurveda, allopathy and priestly incantations. This despite the fact that, as Weingarten himself wrote later, Bikaner led the way when it came to modern medical innovation, favouring Western medical approaches over practices of indigenous medicine. As Ganga Singh's health declined even further, the Cripps Mission landed in New Delhi.
Stafford Cripps had just returned from an unsuccessful mission to Moscow. A patrician vegetarian with a penchant for nudism and knitting, he was at the time 'a prominent public figure without a public role', But he was a popular choice as the leader of this new mission to India. The viceroy disagreed emphatically, calling him Stafford 'Crapps' behind his back and rather childishly keeping him in Karachi on enforced quarantine before allowing him passage to New Delhi.
Cripps was no fool. He was aware that his political standing hinged on the success of these negotiations. The Hindustan Times had already warned ominously, 'Everything depends on how quickly Sir Stafford Cripps gets through his task in this country.'
He already had the reputation of being pro-Congress, but as he told Churchill anxiously, 'The outlook so far as the internal situation goes is exceedingly bad.'
It didn't help matters that he picked a fight with the reforms commissioner straightaway over everything from the communal problem to the princely states. Hodson was wary of Cripps and his agenda from the start, a fact not helped by Cripps's tactless statement that the cabinet was ready to give India whatever it wanted except defence, a fact that neither the British nor the Indians enjoyed hearing. Cripps also wanted to 'redraw' the federal units first. To Hodson's horrified mind, there was 'the germ of the historic conflict' that was to come in 1946–1947. More importantly, a key figure on the scene who was complicating matters still further was FDR's latest emissary – Colonel Louis Johnson. The colonel was an unhappy choice, for there was literally nobody in India who liked him. His own brethren thought he was 'coarse, bombastic and ignorant.' Amery thought he was a 'real mischief maker' and Hodson thought he was an 'indiscreet, ill-informed busybody'.
Despite Johnson's irritating presence, Cripps kept up a public relations barrage. His manner was informal and cheery, a striking contrast to the more aloof viceregal style. He met over forty individuals and delegations, using a mix of consultations, negotiations and midnight meetings. He undoubtedly worked very hard, but he was up against a war that was advancing steadily toward India and communal rifts that were too deep to bridge. Cripps knew that if the Congress was to wait until the war was over, the balance of power might shift in their favour even further than it could already claim. But the Congress was in no mood for conditional promises. They didn't want a 'post-dated cheque on a failing bank.' There had been too many of those in the last two decades. They rejected his offer outright. Nehru, with whom Cripps had been friendly in the 1930s, was coldly suspicious. 'He was a lawyer who stated his case powerfully and expected it to prevail … He … left no room for manoeuvre.'
Yet Cripps, to be fair to him, negotiated well beyond his mandate. His final offer to the Congress was one of Indian-staffed administration, with only home affairs and defence remaining in British hands. Such a concession had never been authorised by London.
But fatally, what Cripps did promise was the likelihood of Pakistan. At a press conference in Delhi on 29 March 1942, in answer to a question as to whether there was anything to stop two provinces from different parts of India from clubbing together 'to form separate union', Cripps replied, 'That would be impractical. Two contiguous provinces may form a separate union.' In the same breath, he also said that it would not be impossible to have a 'rearrangement of boundaries between the two unions and an exchange of populations to get the larger majority of each'.
It was the first time that the prospect of autonomous provinces outside India had been publicly mentioned by the British in an official capacity. Cripps affirmed to the press that, as a dominion, India would be equal in every respect to the United Kingdom and other dominions of the Crown and would be free to remain in or separate itself from the equal partnership of the British Commonwealth. There would be a post-war Constituent Assembly, subject to the right of any province not to accede. This provision entrenched the right of predominantly Muslim provinces to not be coerced into an Indian union. Simply put, it meant that the door to Pakistan was now open.
Hodson was appalled and Linlithgow was furious. 'Having gone so far, why boggle at the word independence with all its appeal to India?' he snarled at Amery. And so, by the time Cripps left India, his mission had failed on a grand scale, marking a fatal split between the viceroy and the Congress, and between the Congress and the League. 'The less interested we appear now to be in Indian politics the better,' Linlithgow wrote bitterly. It was, as the historian Patrick French has written, a moment of great political and mental alienation.
What of the princely states in this entire imbroglio?
Their position was also left unresolved. They would be free to stand out but encouraged to stay in. But technically, the central question being debated was the issue of sovereignty. The Cripps proposals envisioned several different political successors to the British Raj, including the princely states and some provinces, all of which would continue to exist as relatively autonomous entities. Even though the mission had failed, the princes favoured Cripps's plan precisely because Cripps allowed them to stay aloof from any constitutional structure. At a meeting with the Chamber of Princes on 28 March 1942, Cripps told them, 'So far as the paramountcy treaties are concerned, these would remain unaltered unless any state desired to get rid of the paramountcy in order to be able to accommodate itself the better to new conditions … We should stand by our treaties with the states unless they asked us to revoke them.' He patiently went over his draft, point by point, with the Jam Sahib and with Bikaner, assuring them that they had the right to opt out of the constitution-making body 'if the constitution did not suit them'. It was precisely the kind of assurance that Patel and Menon would be firm in not making when the time came.
When the War Cabinet and the viceroy heard that Cripps had promised this to the princes, they were collectively furious. The political secretary, Kenneth Fitze, was instructed firmly to inform the chamber that there would be no 'unilateral denunciation of the treaties'. Deeply worried now, the princes decided that it might not harm them to conduct a little public relations at this stage. At Bikaner's behest, Panikkar was deployed for this new mission due to his persuasiveness and his intelligence. His first move was to publish a quick but crucial essay in the influential American journal Foreign Affairs.
'The Princes and India's Future' is both smartly written and smartly positioned. It makes no real point beyond the need to protect princely autonomy based on their treaty rights with the British Empire and their independent existence before the empire was established. In modern terms, it would qualify as a puff piece, plugging the importance of princely states in negotiations for a free India. Panikkar's choice of publication was shrewd. It was a good way to reestablish the image of the princes, away from their eccentric, cartoonish portrayals and towards a perception of them as socially progressive, intelligent forces. But what followed from this was an invitation that would keep Panikkar away from India for the rest of that year.
He was asked to participate as a delegate in the eighth annual conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) at Mont Tremblant, Canada.