Shameful Flight Indeed

United States historian Stanley Wolpert says Lord Mountbatten erred in heeding Jawaharlal Nehru.

ISLAMABAD: American historian Stanley Wolpert has claimed that the division of Punjab and Bengal could have been avoided in 1947 had Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, listened to Mahatma Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

The scholar has courted controversy once again, finding fault with the advice rendered by Jawaharlal Nehru, Pakistan’s Daily Times newspaper said in a report from Washington, DC. In his latest book, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India, Wolpert says that when Mountbatten asked Jinnah in April 1947 what he thought of then Bengal chief minister HS Suhrawardy’s proposal to create a sovereign Bengal, he expected him to be shocked by his lieutenant’s “treachery”.

But Jinnah surprised him by saying, “I should be delighted. What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta? They had much better remain united and independent; I am sure they would be on friendly terms with us.” When Mountbatten said Suhrawardy would wish Bengal to remain within the British Commonwealth, Jinnah said: “Of course, just as I indicated to you that Pakistan would wish to remain within the Commonwealth.”

Months before this supposed conversation, Suhra-wardy ignited ‘Direct Action’ in Calcutta. Thousands died in a communal carnage and Some historians have recorded that this carnage paved the way for Partition.

But Wolpert has a different conclusion: “Had Mountbatten followed the advice of Gandhi, Jinnah, or Suhra-wardy, instead of listening only to Nehru, Punjab and Bengal might have been spared the deadly horrors, and a united Bengal, with its capital in Calcutta, would have emerged instead of the impoverished Bangladesh born from its eastern half a quarter of a century later,” he says in his book.

(source: DNAIndia.com)