Mountbatten's reports on the Sikhs, April to June 1947

Who: Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, and the Sikh leaders he met: Master Tara Singh, Giani Kartar Singh and Baldev Singh, with the Maharaja of Patiala. Gurmit Singh's History of Sikh Struggles, vol. I, reproduces extracts from Mountbatten's Viceroy's Personal Reports to London, with two letters from the India Office, in Appendix 25 (pp. 270-283). The extracts are British accounts of what the Sikh leaders said and did, not Sikh statements.

What: The extracts, in order:

• 3 April: the India Office's Pethick-Lawrence wrote that partition of the Punjab, in spite of its grave practical difficulties, looked unavoidable from the political point of view.
• 9 April (Report No. 2): Governor Jenkins thought a general election would give the Muslim League a bare majority, and that partition of the Punjab, which Congress recommended, could probably be imposed only by force. Mountbatten, anxious to avoid hot-headed action by the Sikhs, decided on Jenkins's recommendation to call their leaders to Delhi.
• 24 April (Report No. 4): he describes an interview in which Master Tara Singh, Giani Kartar Singh and Baldev Singh made it quite clear that they would fight to the last man if put under Muslim domination. They felt the Cabinet Mission had let them down and gave him a book called The Betrayal of the Sikhs. He had also seen a Sikh appeal for a "War Fund" of Rs 50 lakh, which he found ominous.
• 1 May (Report No. 5): he was "absolutely opposed" to the Sikh wish to take in the Sikh-owned but Muslim-majority lands between the Ravi and the Sutlej, and Lahore. The Sikh delegation asked him not to decide whether they would join Pakistan or Hindustan. Jinnah said an emissary had asked whether he would receive Kartar Singh to discuss "Sikhistan", and Liaquat Ali Khan hinted that it might join Pakistan on generous terms.
• 8 May (Report No. 6): he told the Maharaja of Patiala that no district had a Sikh majority and that Sikhs who started a war would be "bombed and machine-gunned from the air". Patiala, and the next day Baldev Singh, asked for a partition line based on Sikh landed property, shrines and interests. At Cabinet Baldev Singh answered "Most emphatically, yes" to Mountbatten's policy of putting down communal war with overwhelming force.
• 9 May: Lord Listowel wrote that the Sikhs had "an exaggerated idea of their proper status", and that no district gave them a majority.
• 5 June (Report No. 8): Giani Kartar Singh said that when the bitterness had died down he would see Jinnah and make the best terms he could for Sikhs coming into Pakistan, and that the Sikhs would not fight while the British were present.
• 28 June (Report No. 10): arson and stabbing in Lahore and Amritsar. Jinnah begged him to be utterly ruthless, and at Cabinet on 25 June Nehru demanded the sacking of officials and Baldev Singh chimed in with a "shoot everyone on sight" cry. A Security Committee of local Hindu, Muslim and Sikh leaders was agreed.

Where: Delhi, where Mountbatten received the Sikh leaders and wrote the reports, with the Punjab, above all Lahore and Amritsar, as the subject.

Why it mattered: The reports show what the last Viceroy and the India Office knew of Sikh demands in the weeks before partition: the Sikh leaders said they would fight rather than live under Muslim rule, asked for a boundary that reflected their land and shrines, and were told that no district had a Sikh majority and that force would meet any Sikh rising. The Governor's own account of the same months, dated 4 August 1947, is the Jenkins memorandum.