Jeremy Raisman is not a name many recognize in India or Britain. But while a few British Jews might take pride in his achievements in the Indian Civil Service, the few Indians who know he presented five wartime budgets as finance member of the viceroy’s council may not remember him with affection.

He comes to mind because the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea library has mounted a display of Indian books to commemorate what the British now call “Partition”. A leading Queen’s Counsel who wonders if India’s judiciary maintains the same high standard as when Soli Sorabjee was attorney-general asks what I think of Partition. So does a benign peer who campaigns against caste discrimination among subcontinental immigrants in Britain. Also a revered academic who has authored erudite tomes on India and Pakistan. I stress the commemoration is of Independence, but Partition is what the avalanche of television talks and discussions calls it. TV imposes its thinking and terminology even on the learned and discerning. It prefers Partition. Why?

A journalist I first encountered during the staged drama of “Mujibnagar” offered a typically English explanation. “‘Partition’ makes us feel guilty,” he said. “We love that!” He finds the endless televised interviews with Hindus and Muslims who had lost all, especially their closest relatives, in the great upheavals of 1947 tiresome. “The one question they never ask is ‘So many of your relatives were killed but did you kill anyone?'” He says Saudi Arabia promised the infant Bangladesh a billion dollars or more to call itself an “Islamic republic”. Mujib refused. Now he fears India is on the brink of betraying the dream of its founding fathers and turning into a rabid Hindusthan.

The books displayed – Nehru’s letters, Gandhi’s thoughts, Mountbatten, Jinnah and even a tattered biography of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad – celebrate the empire’s guilty conscience. It would have been too much to expect The Undark Sky, subtitled “A Story of Four Poor Brothers”, by Jeremy’s nephew, Geoffrey Raisman, among them. India isn’t its main theme. Geoffrey was – I have just discovered he died in January – a distinguished neuroscientist who made it his mission to find a cure for paralysis caused by spinal chord injury. We met many years ago at a formal dinner at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He was then working on The Undark Sky and later sent me a copy. He told me how his grandparents had fled Lithuania and settled down in a Leeds slum called Leylands. They were tailors with 11 children. Jeremy, born in 1892, was the third and most successful. John came fifth. Harry, Geoffrey’s father, was the sixth.

The family had never seen chocolate biscuits or butter and jam on bread until Jeremy won a scholarship to Oxford. Visiting Blenheim, the Duke of Marlborough’s grand palace that was Churchill’s ancestral home, Harry Raisman echoed another more famous Jew. “The history of England,” he declared, “the history of any country, is nothing more than an account of the bitter, continuous struggle of the common people against their rulers, the kings and queens, the dukes, barons, earls…” It isn’t for that radical explosion that The Undark Sky came to mind at the Kensington library’s exhibition but because of Jeremy Raisman’s Indian career. The boy who had once pointed to an elegant country house in Yorkshire and said “One day I’ll have a house like that” lived in Peterhoff, a Simla mansion burned down in 1981, whose ballroom could take two hundred dancing couples. It’s a house I went to see once for my mother had spent holidays there as a child when her uncle, S.R. Das, lived in it as law member.

J.R.D. Tata visited Peterhoff and beat everyone at ping-pong. Raisman backed Tata’s steel production. He also helped to conserve India’s sterling reserves. They amounted to a handsome £1,300 million or Rs 1,733 crore at the prevailing exchange rate, being mostly money an impoverished Britain, which had “to spend vast sums buying equipment from America… to sustain the war”, owed India. Churchill’s government expected India to pay even more for the war effort than the Indo-British agreement on sharing expenses stipulated. Some in London, including Maynard Keynes, wanted Britain’s debt reduced or cancelled. As India’s effective finance minister, Raisman objected to both. He wanted the agreement adhered to, and told the war cabinet in London on August 6, 1942 that being a belligerent “had already caused a heavy increase in India’s own expenditure”. It could not accept a larger defence liability. But his testimony was kept secret because it might set a precedent. Churchill didn’t want any Indian who succeeded Raisman “to claim the right to attend the war cabinet”.

Perhaps not so surprisingly in that pre-Islamist age when the Jew in question had cast himself in an imperial English mould, Sir Jeremy’s sympathies, personal and political, were with Muslim potentates like the Nizam, and the Nawabs of Bhopal and Chhatari. He didn’t like Gandhi. When he offered not to jail Gandhi in return for tacit cooperation and Gandhi replied he had to stick to his principles, Raisman grunted “Principles! With the bodyguards we provide to protect him, it costs the government of India millions to keep one man in poverty.” The Aga Khan’s palace wasn’t much of a prison!

Gandhi cropped up many years later when Mountbatten told Jeremy at a lunch in London, “In my opinion you were responsible for the death of Gandhi.” Asked why he thought that, Mountbatten replied Nehru had told him so. Raisman explained to Geoffrey, Harry and John, “After independence and the partition of the country, there was a financial crisis. The Reserve Bank of India was holding all the gold and currency reserves. The new Reserve Bank of Pakistan appealed to the British Government to intercede for them. I was asked to go out and advise. I refused, but in the end they insisted, and I agreed to go out, but only on the condition that I would give advice, but I would not enter into any discussion. I would give my opinion and that was that.” He advised that the gold reserves should be shared between India and Pakistan. “It was only fair. Both countries had paid taxes. They were entitled to it. Without reserves, the national banks couldn’t function. It was only common justice.”

According to Mountbatten, Nehru refused. “What!” he exclaimed “Give them the money! They’ll only use it to buy arms to murder our people with.” Hence the appeal to Gandhi. “Gandhi’s influence was tremendous. People worshiped him like a god. Well, Gandhi at once backed my decision. He agreed it was only natural justice, and with that, of course, it was agreed to transfer the gold and currency reserves. They included the sterling balances I had fought so hard for at the war cabinet…”

Jeremy had called on Nehru on the morning of Gandhi’s assassination. Nehru told him, “You know the old man’s being very difficult and causing me a lot of worry because there’s a lot of opposition building up to him.” Raisman went on, “That very afternoon, Gandhi went out as usual, to pray in public… One of his fanatical followers just walked right up to him with a revolver and shot him dead at point blank range.”

Sir Jeremy sat back. John, fumbling with his pipe, remained silent. “Let’s have tea,” said Harry, playing the host. The Jewish refugees from Lithuania had become almost English. Almost but not quite. Unlike the English, they rejected any share of the blame. “Of course I told Mountbatten that I didn’t agree I was responsible” was Sir Jeremy Raisman’s disclaimer. He probably remembered 1947 as the year of Partition more than Independence, but with none of the English sense of guilt for the bloodshed.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph,Calcutta,India / Front Page> Opinion> Story / by Sunanda K Datta-Ray / Saturday, October 07th, 2017