Decolonisation and dominionisation

The foundation of New Delhi was meant to be one of the great moments in the history of Britain's imperial mission. The architectural audacity of Lutyens's and Baker's imperial metropolis was consciously planned to inspire paternalistic awe over the inhabitants and demonstrate the permanence of Britain's Indian Empire. This colossal imperial project had its foundation stone laid by George V during his 1911 Durbar visit. However, for all its magnificence and palatial self-importance it had nonetheless for many a sense of imperial ambiguity when inaugurated in 1931. As Morris observed, the new capital of British India

Georges Clemenceau observing the construction of the viceroy's residence in 1920, a palace once complete would be larger than his own country's Versailles, exclaimed that New Delhi ‘will be the finest ruin of them all’.Footnote ⁵ One of the ambitions of building New Delhi was for the Indians to feel more part of the imperial family and increase its resemblance in convention and status to the other Realms. Less noticed today are four tall columns between Baker's huge secretariats each showing respectively the emblems of Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, which were opened by representatives of each country in February 1931. Their presence and construction was meant to demonstrate that India would be a brother Dominion – though the enormous inscription on the walls of the secretariats facing the columns was unlikely to inspire fraternal feeling from the Indian people – ‘Liberty Does Not Descend To A People. A People Must Raise Themselves To Liberty. It Is A Blessing That Must Be Earned Before It Can Be Enjoyed.’ The Indian subcontinentFootnote ⁶ had always occupied pride of place in the British Empire. Well before independence, India, though not one of the ‘kith and kin’ Dominions, had achieved certain prerogatives that demonstrated limited equivalence with the settler cases. Due to its contribution to the war effort, India was represented at the Paris Peace Conference and in the imperial war cabinet (the first non-white members) by the maharajah of Bikaner (who was India's signatory of the Treaty of Versailles) and Sir S. P. Sinha (who in 1919 became the first Indian to be raised to the British peerage and was a member of judicial committee of the privy council).Footnote ⁷

What dominionhood actually is and was is still debated, but at the very least it meant politically de facto indigenous rule within the Commonwealth and a readiness to accept common linkages with Britain and the other Dominions including, above all, the Crown. For the settler Dominions the monarchy was the sacred centre of the imperial family and they saw themselves as the close and loyal family elders.Footnote ⁸ The abstract and nebulous conception of being a Realm and Dominion suited the chaotic situation that Britain and its South Asian possessions found themselves in the 1940s when actions and decisions were needed rapidly, with little time or ability to deliberate on the merits of such an approach. For the South Asian states, being Dominions had very different meanings from their settler cousins in Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. In many ways, the South Asian cases illustrate even more Darwin's assessment on how the settler Dominions worked prior to the Second World War – ‘Like “responsible government”, Dominionhood was unsystematic and “conventional”, fashioned as much by the local requirements of Dominion politicians as by policy-makers in London.’Footnote ⁹ Darwin in his latest work on the British Empire ascribes three further forms of British connection that bound the Dominions. First having a sense of ‘Britannic identity among Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and the English in South Africa’ where the Empire was a ‘shared enterprise’ run by a ‘white ethnic commonwealth’. Secondly was a sense of ‘mutual dependence’ in financial, commercial and geopolitical matters that made ‘separation unattractive, even dangerous’. Finally was the ‘mystic allegiance to the faraway British Crown’, which ultimately legitimised their connection, and any thought of breaking this imperial link would ‘unravel the fabric of political unity’.Footnote ¹⁰ The ‘Tropical Dominions’ would either have issues with or could not satisfy all three of these British connections.

For many in Britain (and in the Dominions themselves) being a Dominion did not mean independence. The ambiguity of what a Dominion meant was in many ways intentional. This meant the concept could contain both the openly rebellious case of Ireland and the openly loyal case of New Zealand. Ireland barely concealed its disdain for any British connections and saw the British king as no more important to Irish affairs than the ‘Mikado of Japan’. New Zealand on the other hand was ultra loyal and their prime minister, William Ferguson Massey, assured his people that though their country had been admitted to the Paris Peace Conference the ‘dangerous’ theory circulating that New Zealand was an independent nation separate of Britain was completely wrong and New Zealand's devotion to the king-emperor irrevocable.Footnote ¹¹ Lloyd George himself told the House of Commons in 1921 that it was ‘difficult and dangerous to give a definition’ as to what Dominion status meant.Footnote ¹² The moderate constitutionalist elites in South Asia sought Dominion status for their region as the logical way to gain political autonomy without overly antagonising the imperial power. The Imperial Conference of 1926 (where once again India joined Britain and the Dominions and was represented by the maharaja of Burdwan) formulated the Balfour Declaration, which resulted in the Statute of Westminster Act 1931. The Statute of Westminster described the Dominions. ‘They are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.’ Though it explicitly did not apply to India, it naturally captured the attention of moderate local leaders who wished to retain British connections, but operate in the higher status of a Dominion within the Empire. As Marshall argues, the ‘presence of representatives of India would have been a daily inescapable reminder that there was no hard and fast distinction between the self-governing fraternity and the other elements in the Empire’.Footnote ¹³ While from the Indian perspective their presence amongst the self-governing Dominions gave hope that they would soon join the ranks of this small influential group within the Empire. For the traditional elites of Congress, whose political aspirations were ‘overwhelmingly legalistic’, the full status of being a Dominion alongside Canada and Australia appealed greatly.Footnote ¹⁴ They themselves through the 1925 Commonwealth of India Bill (which the British Labour party helped draft) and the 1928 Nehru Report all basically advocated the Dominion model for India. They accepted continuation of the Crown in India, but sought internal autonomy. However, the possibility of an Indian Dominion in the 1930s was hamstrung by a combination of British reluctance to accept Indian constitutional parity with the settler Dominions and the feeling among younger Indian nationalists that Dominion status was not enough and degrading.Footnote ¹⁵ The intensity of opposition to even the restrictive devolution of power to Indians that the Government of India Act 1935 produced from ‘Die-hards’ like Winston Churchill showed the limitations of hoping the Dominion model would be applied to the subcontinent.Footnote ¹⁶ Ironically, by the time British governments did come around to offering Dominion status for all of India in the 1940s it was too late to entice the Congress leadership. Congress had become by then less a club of anglophile moderates content to confine their strategy for greater autonomy within the Empire to legal arguments to a mass organisation fired by the genius of Gandhi for a revival of Indian civilisation through civil disobedience and disavowal of gradualist passivity to British overlordship. Nehru in an article written for a French periodical in 1936 spoke of the impossibility of India becoming a Dominion and even predicted the disintegration of inter-Dominion cooperation. Nehru reasoned that ‘racial ill-treatment and a policy of exclusion of Indians’ meant an Indian Dominion unconscionable. Interestingly, rather than stressing India's reluctance to be a Dominion he stressed that the most important reason was that Britain and the Dominions themselves would not tolerate India's economic independence.

It was in this context that the most liberal approaches to India from British cabinet ministers like the 1942 Cripps Mission offer of Dominion status after the completion of war in exchange for Indian cooperation in the war effort was too late – as Gandhi himself famously said it was like receiving a ‘post-dated cheque’ from a failing bank. The Indians could also see that with Churchill still prime minister nothing was likely to be achieved in their direction.Footnote ¹⁸ Labour's assumption of office in 1945 signalled more positive reactions from Downing Street, but from India there was still suspicion at British intentions while the new cabinet were worried not just whether India would accept Dominion status, but more so if they could hold India for much longer without the whole region disintegrating into violent anarchy. With disorder and increasingly depressive and resigned reports from the viceroys about the dire situation, the cabinet saw the futility of further imposition of British rule. On the other hand, the cabinet did not want ‘an inglorious end to our long association with India’ and believed that public opinion, parliament, the king, the Empire–Commonwealth and the world would view any withdrawal that did not salvage a constitutional settlement as ‘a policy of scuttle unworthy of a great power’.Footnote ¹⁹

There was also the temptation across party lines that the Dominions and Commonwealth in the post-war world would give and promote British power on the international scene since they envisaged that British leadership would still carry across the former Empire. As Hopkins argues, the British gambled on the ‘possibility of a bonus if the readvertised Commonwealth could be transformed into a multiracial organisation that would march in step, yet still be led by white officers’.Footnote ²⁰ Mazower demonstrates that Field Marshal Smuts and other theorists of the British Empire thought that the Commonwealth, though ‘respectful of sovereignty’, would not only ‘acknowledge the primacy of great powers’, which in Smuts's thinking meant the settler states, but also potentially preserve colonialism by arguing the morality of Western civilizational values after the defeat of fascism. The Commonwealth was seen as an opportunity to justify and legitimise British power in the new world order.Footnote ²¹ Though the extent of Smuts's views had restricted reach, the idea was widely held that the Commonwealth would accentuate British stature in the world after the war had diminished its economic and military strength. Rather than die as a concept after 1945, it ‘was expected that the dominions would continue to function as satellites, even without direct political control’ and help in ‘reviving the old empire’.Footnote ²² What Smuts and other imperial ideologues were less confident about was whether non-settler possessions could rise to such expectations and even more pertinent was whether they would be willing to play such a role. Even without ruling them South Asia was still the most prominent part of the strategy to preserve British standing. Senior members of the Attlee administration held the view that making Dominions in South Asia could hold the region for Britain and disguise any loss of prestige, which outright secession implied. Ernest Bevin while foreign secretary, for instance, pleaded with the colonial secretary to avoid the word ‘independence’ if at all possible in a letter as late as May 1947 to the Ceylonese leader D. S. Senanayake: ‘I do not like the repetition of the word ‘independence’ the whole time. There is quite a different meaning attached to this by the Eastern people from ours.’Footnote ²³ In the end, the letter excluded any mention of independence and instead allowed ‘fully responsible status within the British Commonwealth’ to obfuscate the Ceylonese.Footnote ²⁴

Before South Asian decolonisation in 1947–8 the term Dominion generally applied to the traditional cases of Canada (the Dominion of Newfoundland joined the Canadian Federation in 1949), Australia, New Zealand and to an extent South Africa. Together under the imperial Crown they shared common British subjecthood and nationality – an issue of heated discussion after independence of whether this extended to the conspicuously non-British South Asian Dominions.Footnote ²⁵ The settler cases were seen to be especially bound by the ‘British Embrace’ and formed the ‘British World’ in terms of complementary cultural and political identities until well into the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote ²⁶ This formed the distinction between the ‘empire of settlement and the tropical empire’. The ‘lordly’ word Dominion meant these settler partners had higher status and though distinct from each other were collectively ‘keyed into imperial Britain by ties of kinship, trade, defence and cultural aspirations’ that made them ‘dominionative’ – a sensation that lingered well into the post-war era.Footnote ²⁷ Outside of the Dominion elect was Ireland, which due to its historically strained relationship with Britain has been described as the ‘Captive Dominion’Footnote ²⁸ – a term that shows the ambivalence the Dominion label had west of the Irish Sea. In the pre-1947 period, Belich has recently used the term ‘Adopted Dominions’ to describe the close relationships and influence Britain had in parts of Latin America, especially Argentina in the nineteenth century, where though there was not formal political control there was little doubt as to their place in the ‘Anglo-World’ orbit.Footnote ²⁹ Dominionism could have been also applied to parts of Africa in the more traditional meaning, such as in Rhodesia.Footnote ³⁰ However, the South Asian cases stood apart and were internally distinctive. They achieved independence and sovereignty before any other non-white case, but nonetheless chose to accept Dominion status and with it formal allegiance to the Crown for a variety of reasons, which will be discussed below. D. S. Senanayake used the term ‘Tropical Dominions’ to describe the Asian candidates for independence.Footnote ³¹ ‘Tropical Dominions’ gives a flavour to their difference and the occasionally inclement conditions in South Asia for this vague British conception. The Australian-born Oxford-based constitutional scholar K. C. Wheare contemplated in a February 1948 BBC broadcast how the new Asian Dominions would operate. Wheare candidly admitted that he never thought any of them would become Dominions believing they would prefer the republican path. Unlike the settler countries where the people ‘are almost a hundred per cent of British stock’ most other states in the Empire–Commonwealth did not have such demographics and should instead see Britain not as the ‘mother-country’, but the ‘mother-in-law’ country. The Asian cases were more unique again since on independence they immediately in terms of population outnumbered all the other Dominions put together.

Indeed, it would not be as simple as that and the experiment of Asian daughters left their settler cousins anxious and their ‘mother-in-law’ (perhaps step-mother would be more accurate) wondering whether the new additions would keep together or break up the family.

India – the expedient dominion

Months before independence, the Constituent Assembly passed a resolution on 22 January 1947 with the objective that India must become an ‘Independent Sovereign Republic’.Footnote ³³ The resolution put the Indian leaders symbolically against the concept of the Crown's continuance that Dominion status held axiomatic. The resolution seemed to have quelled any thought that India would be anything other than a republic. The Crown appeared an insuperable barrier to inclusion in the Commonwealth. Nehru and the Congress elite instead looked to the French Revolution with its symbolic humiliation of the Crown and the forging of a fraternal republic. Nehru told Indian parliamentarians in 1946 that he looked ‘back to that mighty revolution which took place over 150 years ago and that ‘Constituent Assembly’ that had met in comparable radical circumstances’.Footnote ³⁴ Austin in his seminal account of the foundations of the Indian constitution compared it to the context of Philadelphia in 1787 where the American colonialists purposively rejected the British monarchy and Westminster system in drawing up the institutions of their republic.Footnote ³⁵ Nehru wished to be the Indian Washington not its Walpole – or so it seemed. The settler Dominions were not as romantic in their symbolism or precedence for the Indian nationalists. As argued above, theirs was a path of gradualism with conspicuous cultural and political links to Britain, which was unlikely to stir the blood of Gandhian followers aiming for indigenous swaraj. Though the Dominions operated with political independence, the nominal but emblematic retention of the Crown as enshrined in Dominion status could only seem unpalatable to India's leaders in-waiting. The Crown had no place in the ‘national philosophy of India’ and the thought that it could has been described as ‘absurd’ and ‘beneath contempt’.Footnote ³⁶ However, for all the rhetorical remonstrance against the Crown, pragmatic considerations reopened the issue almost as soon as they were thought settled and the mixed messages began.Footnote ³⁷ The arrival of Lord Mountbatten, just weeks after the resolution, as the new viceroy with specific instructions from Attlee to deliver independence, but maintain British influence in India,Footnote ³⁸ was to have considerable effect on Indian political opinion – particularly on Nehru. The Indian leaders realised that in order to achieve independence quickly they would need to cooperate. The British also knew that only with compromise could they simultaneously save face and save their influence in the subcontinent. Aside from getting independence quickly, the Congress leadership realised that even with the withdrawal of the Muslim League and acknowledgement of partition there were still many parts of British India that were reluctant to accept Congress leadership. Nehru and Mountbatten discussed what seemed a constitutional impasse on one of their first meetings in March 1947. Mountbatten noted the following from his interview:

For the Indians and the British, a critical point was what being a Dominion meant. Unlike the traditional settler states, India was not willing to shroud its independence under the carapace of the Crown, but they did see that Dominionism offered a ‘fast-track’ for political freedom. Attlee, who had been Dominions secretary in the war cabinet, faced the predicament of appeasing the Indian nationalists who wanted their freedom unfettered by Dominion status and his critics at home who argued that Dominion status did not mean independence, but self-government within the Commonwealth. Winston Churchill, now leader of the opposition, debated with Attlee the meaning of independence and Dominionism when they wrote to each other over the title of the Indian Independence Bill in July 1947.

Attlee did not change the title, though he considered it, and refuted Churchill's interpretation

Despite Attlee's explanation, the Labour government hoped, like Churchill, that Dominion status would in fact cement interdependence and British use of India's vast military and physical potential, especially in the Cold War climate when resources were stretched. Lord Wavell, as viceroy, and the cabinet acknowledged in July 1946 that India had ‘an almost inexhaustible supply of manpower’ and could produce ‘almost as many soldiers as the Commonwealth could maintain’. As Inder Singh argues, defence was critical to both Conservative and Labour in their motives in keeping in India in the Commonwealth.Footnote ⁴¹

From the Indian perspective, defence and the Commonwealth relationship was also a serious topic. In New Delhi, the new viceroy was busy at work to convince the Indian leaders that Dominion status did mean independence and furthermore India would earn advantages from ignoring the symbolic temptation of ditching the king and erecting a republic. Why would the Indians do this after their freedom struggle and quest to rid all vestiges of imperialism, which the king and Dominion status represented? The Congress leadership wanted power and it wanted it quickly. It also wanted the armoury of British rule, both militarily and politically, to be transferred to the new independent state. Mountbatten quite craftily was able to paint a convincing portrait to the Congress hierarchy on why they should become a Dominion. Krishna Menon, who claimed authorship of the famous January 1947 resolution for an ‘Independent Sovereign Republic’, had an interview with Mountbatten in April 1947. Menon inadvertently brought up the issue by asking the viceroy whether British officers could stay on after the transfer of power. Mountbatten replied that ‘no British officer worth his salt would willingly resign his commission to become an adventurer in the Indian Services’ since by India becoming a republic all officers would no longer hold the ‘King's Commission’ and would not tolerate working for a ‘Foreign Power’. Field Marshal Auchinleck as commander-in-chief of the Indian Army had already indicated to the viceroy days earlier that ‘British officers could not serve in any India that was neither under the Crown nor a British Dominion, since the oath of allegiance taken by the officers was to the King.’Footnote ⁴² Menon, seeing the point, stated that the term ‘Independent Sovereign Republic’ was a mistake and he ‘regretted choosing such drastic terminology’ as its author. The viceroy then proceeded to provide Nehru's confidante with three pieces of advice on how things could be amended so that British officers and other benefits could remain while Indian nationalism assuaged. First, the Constituent Assembly should delay implementation of the republican resolution for five years and then put it to a plebiscite. This would allow the Indian leaders to ‘openly give the reason that this was to enable British officers to remain to assist in the gradual hand-over throughout the Army’. Secondly, that India should ‘avoid the expression “Dominion Status” and use terms like “Free Nation of the Commonwealth” or “Free India” or, as he himself [Menon] put it, “Union of India”’. Finally, on ‘no account must they renounce the link with the Crown’ if they wanted British officers and British goodwill. Menon considered this very sensible advice, but indicated the difficulty of keeping the Crown since for ‘purely political warfare motives Congress had been attacking the Crown as a symbol of oppression’. The impresario in Mountbatten, when asked for his opinion, stated that he ‘was one of those sentimental fools’ in favour of the link before starkly reminding Menon that in regard to keeping the Crown and the Congress happy was ‘his headache’ and that Menon ‘could not have his cake and eat it’. Mountbatten also ventured that everyone in India bar the Congress were in favour of Dominion status. Menon, at least viewed from the official record, then made the collusive suggestion that unless the viceroy himself should ‘take the first step and approach us [Congress] nothing will be done’. Mountbatten testily retorted to this offer

Menon, seeing how the conversation was turning, dangled the prospect that if the ‘British were voluntarily to give us now Dominion Status, well ahead of June 1948, we should be so grateful that not a voice would be heard’ against keeping the Crown and Commonwealth connection. Mountbatten indicated his assent to the idea, which he had very clearly planted.Footnote ⁴³ The viceroy even thought that Nehru and Congress's adamant position that no foreign power should have defence facilities on Indian territory did not extend to Commonwealth powers, but meant the United States, a view which the cabinet concurred with.Footnote ⁴⁴ Nehru and Menon were able to use the advantages of Dominion status to mitigate the natural protestations of Congress republicans. Dominion status would be an expedient step and the royal link disguised to bring independence closer and with it the promised republic.

Rivalry between these successor states also played a critical role in both Pakistan and India becoming Dominions. The British had appealed to both sides’ vanity by saying if one became a Dominion the other would face at least some disadvantage. Mountbatten had originally envisaged at least three Dominions coming from British India: Hindustan, Pakistan and the States. India was warned that it could be ‘a separate foreign State’ surrounded by Commonwealth Realms, which aside from Pakistan could have included Bengal and the princely states of Hyderabad, Kashmir, Travancore and Mysore as all these states had indicated this preference to the viceroy.Footnote ⁴⁵ The idea that British India would be further divided after partition and on top of that these areas having continued links with the Crown naturally troubled Congress. Agreeing to be a Dominion not only appeased any thought India would be negatively effected, but also in regard to the other presumptive Dominions meant New Delhi could claim to have inherited the British Raj's powers of paramountcy over the princely states and hold them within the union – though the princely states themselves disputed this interpretation, believing that their treaty obligations to the centre ended with British rule.Footnote ⁴⁶ Dominion status offered independent India a convenient ruse to maintain the colonial status quo of suzerainty of these semi-autonomous states, especially after Mountbatten promised that their princely prerogatives would be retained.Footnote ⁴⁷ Dominion status offered the Congress leaders a method whereby they would be bequeathed almost the full powers of the Raj over the states and the compromise of keeping the Crown and Commonwealth appeared worth the charge of hypocrisy. The issue of Dominion status perhaps exemplifies Chatterjee's assessment that many Indian scholars, at least in an earlier period, tried to avoid ‘the problematical and contradictory aspect's of Nehru's personality’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The independent Dominion of India showed the gap between emotion and expedience, but arguably this was natural in the tumultuous context.

For figures like Mountbatten and senior Indian bureaucrats, who had been admitted into the hallowed sanctum of the Indian Civil Service, like V. P. Menon and Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Dominion status offered an opportunity to maintain the traditions of the laws and conventions of Britain they so admired, but the same status could also be sold as an idea to the Congress leadership as a transitional period that gave political independence before the republic could be formed. The anglophile civil servants hoped the Dominion would last much longer than Congress envisaged. The ever-present V. P. Menon even hoped ‘a Ruling Prince will be selected as Governor-General’ of the Indian Dominion when Mountbatten left.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nehru, on the other hand, saw the substantial power and flexibility traditional Dominion prime ministers wielded and saw how he could use them for the untraditional context of India to create the ‘Indian Version of First Among Equals’ that could mould Indian democracy.Footnote ⁵⁰ Nehru therefore was swift to demand, once Dominion status had been agreed, that he should be treated as a Dominion prime minister even before the formal hand over of power. Nehru told the viceroy in May 1947 ‘very vehemently’ that the Indian interim government ‘should be treated by Convention as a Dominion Government’ since it would have ‘a great psychological effect’ and said if this was not granted he would resign. To sweeten acceptance of Nehru's view, he told the viceroy he was ‘prepared to give the Governor-General over-riding powers’ in certain areas such as dealing with Pakistan and the protection of minorities once the Dominion of India was inaugurated.Footnote ⁵¹ However, though Nehru did become a de facto Dominion prime minister before August 1947 Mountbatten's plan to be a ‘super-Governor-General’ of both Dominions was scuppered by the wishes of the other Dominion.

Pakistan – the siege dominion

If independent India's decision to become a Dominion was partly to do with securing British officers and securing control over demanded territories, these reasons were even more pronounced in the Dominion of Pakistan. Jinnah was swift, when he knew Pakistan was to be more than an idea, that he had to persuade British personnel in India to stay to ensure continuity in the military and civil service. The Muslim League leader understood that India, or Hindustan as he stubbornly referred to it since he believed that the state ruled from Delhi had no exclusivity to that evocative name, would most probably take the lion's share of British India's assets. Critically, the renowned Indian Army of almost half a million soldiers and commanded by an overwhelmingly British officer corps would need to be ‘cut and pasted into new national formations’, even though only seven of the twenty-three infantry regiments in the pre-partition era were exclusively based on sectarian lines.Footnote ⁵² Congress and the Muslim League predicted rightly that over the division of the subcontinent they would become ‘Dominions in Dispute’. A view that was shared by the British chiefs of staff ‘who displayed little faith in the idea of a new Commonwealth as their civilian counterparts. They referred to the new Dominions as “temporary”, as questionable allies on the basis of the unwritten rules of Commonwealth co-operation for defence’ at least.Footnote ⁵³ Despite the British defence chiefs’ doubts and prognosis, Pakistan saw merit in Dominion status precisely because it offered the military support from the Commonwealth Realms, which as a state born into conflict and depravation was greatly desired.Footnote ⁵⁴

Though the Empire–Commonwealth had usually avoided statuary or treaty requirements in terms of military obligations to each other, the convention was that they would support each member's defence needs in times of crisis. The Dominions Office during this time and after argued that officials and ministers should stress that one of the justifications that should attract Commonwealth members was ‘co-operation, to the extent desired and approved by each Government, in the military defence of common interests’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Commonwealth diplomats in all three states were the core representatives in the region. They enjoyed easy access to ministers and officials and, especially British diplomats, had considerable influence on local politics that other foreign diplomats lacked in the region.Footnote ⁵⁶ Though beyond the remit of this article, it was understandable that Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan sought Commonwealth arbitration over Kashmir and appealed in 1950–1 for peace-keeping troops from the other Dominions to solve this ever-present dispute ‘within the family’ of the Commonwealth where no Dominion had ever gone to war with another. Though this convention would soon be broken in South Asia, the prime ministers of India and Pakistan did establish a month after independence the Military Evacuation Organisation to try and manage the logistical and social chaos that revolved around the massive refugee crisis and created protocols so the ‘troops of the other dominion could enter its territory to rescue and protect its “own” refugees’.Footnote ⁵⁷

For Pakistan, this was a massive appeal and reflected the predominant focus on military over democratic infrastructure.Footnote ⁵⁸ As Liaquat candidly told the viceroy in April 1947, ‘there is no doubt that Pakistan wants to remain a dominion, we want to have your officers’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The Muslim League leaders during this tense time before the handover were buoyed, and the Congress leaders simultaneously apprehensive, by Mountbatten's prediction that with British, Commonwealth and American help ‘places like Karachi would become big naval and air bases within the British Commonwealth’ and Pakistan would ‘in no while have armed forces superior to those of Hindustan’.Footnote ⁶⁰ Mountbatten's ploy of encouraging Dominion status through a combination of fear and necessity was working even though his entreaties to both parties were factually dubious and lacked firm commitments from the British government. However, his promotion of the idea that if both sides took Dominion status then independence could be brought closer was real. This strategy, also known as the ‘V.P. Menon Plan’ after the Indian mandarin, offered the transfer of power as an ‘interim measure on Dominion status basis’ meant that the sting could be drawn from the pan-Indian nationalists and instead inspire goodwill between the United Kingdom and the new Dominions. Predicting that the division of India would take ‘not less that 4 or 5 years to frame their Constitutions’, the latent status of being a Dominion would recede into the background as urgent problems of administration and development took centre stage so allowing the link with the Crown to endure in the background. Menon speculated that ‘having realised the importance and usefulness of the presence of a Governor-General appointed by His Majesty, both the parts of India may see the benefit of retaining that link with Great Britain’.Footnote ⁶¹

Unlike India, Mountbatten's tactics with Pakistan was to tell them that it was by no means certain that they would be accepted as a Dominion to try and wrest further agreements from Jinnah. However, as Attlee disclosed to the prime ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, Jinnah had ‘threatened to appeal over the Viceroy's head to the “people of the Commonwealth” and argued that no part of the Commonwealth could be forcibly extruded against its will’.Footnote ⁶² The Commonwealth Dominions were seen to have some precedents, which the rival Indian Dominions could draw upon. The constitutional advisor to the Constituent Assembly, B. N. Rau, suggested in June 1947 that India and Pakistan should emulate the 1944 Canberra Pact between the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand, which established protocols and procedures regarding defence, trade and other areas of cooperation. Rau believed it ‘might be a good thing if the two dominions contemplated in India could be induced, from the start, to enter into a similar agreement and set up machinery for collaboration in matters of joint concern’.Footnote ⁶³ This idealistic plan did not eventuate and though both Dominions sought and received considerable cooperation from their Australasian counterparts Pakistan broke tradition by not commemorating ANZAC Day ‘because of the Muslim connection with Turkey’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Aside from the military aspects, Pakistan was in dire need for further support in almost every sense. Talbot argues convincingly that ‘[f]ew states have sprung into existence with as many material disadvantages, institutional weaknesses and uncertain national loyalty’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jinnah relied not only on the British for senior defence personnel, all three heads of the Pakistan Defence Services were British, but also for the Civil Service and key leadership roles. Jinnah for example purposefully had Britons as governors with wide prerogative powers in four of the five provinces – the exception being Sindh where the Quiad-i-Azam (Father of the Nation) intended to control himself effectively. The proposed territories that would form the Dominion of Pakistan ostensibly linked by religion gave the state a famously ‘moth-eaten’ look with the Bengali province separated from the designated capital Karachi by over a 1,000 miles of Hindustan. Jinnah knew that the context and circumstances demanded strong leadership to keep this divided and fragile state together and restore order after the bloody legacies of partition – his was a Dominion under siege. This unquestioned leader of the Muslim League took an unexpected route to achieve these tall aims.

Unlike India, which had ideologically committed to a republican model and tolerated the Dominion transition for pragmatic purposes the Pakistani leadership, though not overt monarchists, decided to utilise the provisions of vice-regal rule for their own intentions. Mountbatten had hoped, as did many in British India and Britain itself, that he would become governor-general of both Dominions. Jinnah punctured Mountbatten's vanity by denying him the further accolade of presiding over two Dominions by taking the job in Karachi himself. Jinnah decided to take on the position as the king's representative and was to be one the most unique governors-general in the history of the Commonwealth. What made Jinnah different from his Dominion colleagues is that he existed unquestionably as the supreme political authority in Pakistan and not as a ceremonial figurehead. Jinnah candidly told the crestfallen Mountbatten that the only way ‘he could sell the idea of all these British high officials to the inhabitants of Pakistan would be if he himself became the Governor-General’. Mountbatten in disbelief recorded of Jinnah;

The Muslim League leader resisted the fear that if Mountbatten did not become governor-general of both Dominions ‘Pakistan would be likely to get less than their fair share of all-India assets.’ Mountbatten's staff in turn alarmingly considered Jinnah as the king's representative ‘could be a “Hitler” and take no notice’ of the conventions of his vice-regal office.Footnote ⁶⁷ Jinnah believed he would have more influence vis-à-vis Mountbatten if he too were his equal as a governor-general. Jinnah would prove his comment above correct and completely redefined the ideals of what a Dominion governor-general would be. As a Dawn editorial noted in July 1947, whatever the

The governor-general designate of Pakistan then showed how he intended to rule by taking his active position as the inaugural president of the Constituent Assembly, which was also the parliament of Pakistan, and held this critical role concurrently with his vice-regal office until his death in September 1948. Jinnah had seen the powers available to successive viceroys and intended to exercise all the powers formally vested in the king's representative and to project the full prestige of the office over not only his future country men and women, but also over the British themselves. Jinnah's enthusiasm for British links went only so far. To Mountbatten's hope that the Dominion of Pakistan would include the Union Jack in the upper canton of the new flag, the governor-general designate replied ‘he had been unable to find one single supporter’ for the idea.Footnote ⁶⁹

Ceylon – the imitation Dominion

The Ceylonese inter-communal elite purposively projected themselves as being different from British India and articulated a message at odds with the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. Ceylon, of course, had always been governed separately from British India as a Crown Colony and revelled in its status as a ‘model colony’ that was envied across the Empire for its peace and prosperity.Footnote ⁷⁰ Repudiating the non-cooperation methods of Gandhi and the steely brinkmanship of Jinnah, the Ceylonese preferred to advocate their cause through the gradualist and non-violent strategy of showing that unlike their northern neighbours they openly wanted to be a Dominion in the traditional mould of the settler cases. The Soulbury Commission's 1945 report, which advocated the British Westminster parliamentary model for the island, explained some of the reasons behind its decision:

The key members of the Ceylonese political elite would not have disagreed with a word of the above. Whereas the Pakistanis and especially the Indians needed to be convinced by the British of the virtues of Dominionhood, the Ceylonese had to convince the British they were ready for Dominion status and self-government. The Ceylonese strategy was therefore to demonstrate their loyalty to Britain and the Commonwealth and to contrast its constitutionalist non-violent methods with the unruly ways of their larger Asian neighbours.Footnote ⁷² Sir Oliver Goonetilleke, a leading member of the local elite, without irony publicly pronounced that the world should ‘think of Ceylon as a little bit of England’ and enthused that ‘Ceylon will rival Australia as the first Dominion to rally to the side of the Mother Country.’Footnote ⁷³ During the independence negotiations in July 1947, when the Indian leaders were accepting Bagehot'sFootnote ⁷⁴ ‘efficient’ parts of the British constitution, but discarding or hiding the ‘dignified’ ceremonial aspects of Dominion status the Ceylonese delegation in London was requesting that their new Dominion be labelled the ‘Kingdom of Ceylon’, which even those who wanted Asian Dominions at Whitehall thought ‘quite inappropriate’.Footnote ⁷⁵

In further contrast to the 1942 ‘Quit India’ campaign the Ceylonese leadership under D. S. Senanayake openly sided with the British and its allies during the Second World War and in a clever gambit offered the continued use of its strategically valuable bases in Trincomalee, Colombo and Katunayake to the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force after independence, pointing out the added value of the bases in the wake of British withdrawal from the Indian mainland.Footnote ⁷⁶ The war had sharpened British assessments of the Empire's defensive strategy and Ceylon had been a key territory in this world conflict.Footnote ⁷⁷ Senanayake was arguing for traditional Dominion status as the best tactic for securing independence, which some in the Colonial Office and cabinet thought premature. The anglophile indigenous elite could point to many marketing ploys: the island had a long history of responsible government including being the first colony to achieve universal suffrage in 1931, it had high living and education standards, a productive economy, no public disturbances and, as yet, no communal discord that threatened the unity of the future state. These factors added with the post-war geopolitical situation, Ceylonese eagerness to join the Dominion club and the riotous context in British India forced the British to reconsider their reluctance. Senanayake wrote to the colonial secretary, George Hall, in August 1945 explaining as he saw it the desirability and worthiness of giving Ceylon Dominion status it deserved despite not being able to offer ‘a rebel general – the experience of South Africa and Burma seems to suggest that it would be easier if we could’.

Senanayake then continued by astutely showing the advantages Britain would gain from giving Ceylon the status it craved. He was ‘ready to pledge’ to London that any independence deal would have ‘defence as an integral part of an agreement for Dominion status’. The Ceylonese leader boldly promised the secretary of state

It is hard to imagine Nehru or Jinnah writing such a letter, but Senanayake was no less successful in his aim than they were. Senanayake's enthusiasm was by no means shared by all the Ceylonese politicians, but this made his appeal for Dominion status that much more persuasive. Lord Soulbury, head of the commission that was sent to Ceylon, wrote to the colonial secretary, with Senanayake's knowledge, that there were younger, more radical and socialist Ceylonese nationalists that not only thought Dominion status was a ‘sham independence’, but also would align their republican agenda with the expulsion of British personnel from the island's bases. Soulbury and Senanayake shrewdly calculated that the risk of waiting for communal and political questions to be answered was outweighed by the risk of a handover to uncooperative leaders on the island where the Communists were by far the best-organised political force and offered a credible alternative.Footnote ⁷⁹ If, Soulbury continued, the elderly Senanayake, despite similar undertakings in India, was unable to get Dominion status due to the ‘non possumus of H.M.G.’ he could well lose control of the legislature and Ceylon could transform from a loyal friend of Britain and the Crown to being more akin to Ireland. Soulbury, a former minister in the Chamberlain Cabinet thought, surprisingly as events later proved, that many ‘of the Ceylonese resemble the Irish in temperament and intelligence and like the Irish they have long memories. It would be a tragedy to repeat in Ceylon any of the colossal mistakes we have made in Ireland.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Patrick Gordon Walker as a minister in the Commonwealth Relations Office echoed this view in early 1948 when Britain did agree that Dominion status was warranted and reasoned that since ‘Senanayake is in the genuine tradition of Dominion Prime Ministers’ they had made the right choice. ‘It is hardly too much to say that if we treat then strictly as a Dominion, they will behave very like a loyal colony: whereas if we treat them as a Colony we many end in driving them out of the Commonwealth.’Footnote ⁸¹ The Ceylonese ploy of imitation had worked, but whether it would last was another matter.