The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  To extinguish the fire of communal passion, Nehru, accompanied by the communications minister, Abdur Rab Nishtar, a League nominee, flew to Patna, the capital of Bihar. Escorted by a contingent of the Frontier Force Regiment, he toured the riot-stricken areas in an open jeep. “Murder stalks the streets, and most amazing cruelties are indulged in by both the individual and the mob,” he wrote later. “It is extraordinary how our peaceful population has become militant and bloodthirsty. Riot is not the word for it—it is just a sadistic desire to kill.”26 He was so shocked that he threatened to “bomb the rioters.”

  The horrendous events in rural East Bengal and Bihar demolished the theory of Gandhi and Nehru that communal tensions existed only among the upper echelons of the two communities and that the village folks of different faiths led a peaceful coexistence.

  Predictably, contrary was the case with Jinnah. His warnings of persecution of Muslims by the Hindu majority government were being borne out. The League’s newspaper Dawn called on the surviving Bihari Muslims to “remain united and invincible in the face of Hindu aggression.”27 With the pogrom in Bihar, the slogan of “Islam in danger” in Hindu India gained enhanced credibility. And Jinnah would later tell the Bihari refugees in Karachi that Pakistan became imperative because of the sufferings of the Muslims of Bihar.28

  The Penultimate Step

  With the inauguration of the Constituent Assembly on December 9 nearing, Attlee summoned Nehru, Jinnah, Liaquat Ali Khan, Baldev Singh, and Wavell to 10 Downing Street in London on December 2. During four days of meetings, British constitutional experts backed the League’s interpretation of the May 16 constitutional statement about grouping. On December 6 Attlee announced that if the Constituent Assembly adopted a constitution without the cooperation of the Muslim League, “His Majesty’s Government could not, of course, contemplate . . . forcing such a constitution on any unwilling parts of the country.”29

  While in London, Jinnah said publicly that he expected India to be divided into a Hindu state and a Muslim state. He added that he shared Churchill’s apprehensions regarding “civil war and riots in India.30 Given this, the talks in Downing Street failed.

  In Delhi, when the Constituent Assembly convened on December 9, its League members stayed away. The Assembly adjourned to January 20, 1947, to await participation by the League and the quasi-independent princely states. Sporadic communal violence broke out in major cities. By Christmas Eve, for instance, it claimed more than 450 lives in Bombay.

  While resisting the constitutional plans of the Congress, League leaders consolidated or expanded their popular base in Muslim-majority provinces. Once the shaky Hidayatullah ministry fell in Sindh in December 1946, the League’s Parliamentary Board, headed by Jinnah, focused on winning all of the 35 Muslim legislative seats in the upcoming election. Jinnah put his friend Ghulam Ali Allana in charge of electioneering. He in turn invited contingents of students from Aligarh Muslim University who narrated the killings of Bihari Muslims in gory detail. Another tactic was to use the network of the caretakers of the Sufi shrines to garner votes. And by giving the League’s tickets to leading feudal lords, Allana strengthened the party’s electoral card. The League scored all the Muslim seats except 2. With a firm majority in the chamber, the new Hidayatullah government assumed office in mid-February 1947.31

  The year 1947 unrolled in India with an emergency session of the AICC in Bombay. On January 6 it adopted a resolution by a vote of 99 to 52 to accept the British interpretation of the May 16 statement “under protest,” and subject to the qualification that no province or part of it would be forced into a settlement.32

  On January 20 League members did not turn up for the Constituent Assembly. A week later the League’s Council said that since the Congress did not accept the May 16 statement unconditionally, the election to the Constituent Assembly and the Assembly itself had become invalid. In early February intracabinet tensions intensified when the nine non-League cabinet ministers asked the viceroy to demand the resignation of the five League ministers.

  In the pivotal province of Punjab, the League’s leaders decided to undertake “direct action” to topple the coalition cabinet headed by Sir Khizr, a Unionist luminary. It started on January 24, when the government outlawed the MNG as well as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS; Sanskrit: National Volunteer Association), a Hindu militia. League leader and central cabinet minister Ghazanfar Ali Khan contended that proscribing the MNG was tantamount to banning his party’s most important activity. Thus challenged, Sir Khizr lifted the ban on January 28. But when the League did not call off its civil disobedience as promised, he jailed its top officials.

  While jails filled with the Leaguers defying the ban on public gatherings, their slogans grew more menacing with each passing day. The most popular were Pakistan ka nara kiya? La illahahillillah (“What is the slogan of Pakistan? There is no God but Allah”) and Assay leingey Pakistan, jaisey liyatha Hindustan (“We will gain Pakistan the way we [Muslims] conquered India”). Abusive slogans were coined to insult the chief minister. Increasingly aggressive demonstrators started harassing Hindus and Sikhs and forcing them to fly the Muslim League’s green emblem on their stores and vehicles. These slogans and actions made Hindus and Sikhs fearful.

  Such activities by the League kept it and Jinnah in the limelight. By contrast, the undramatic reports of Gandhi’s intermittent walking tours—alternating between the strife-torn villages in Noakhali, East Bengal, and western Bihar—preaching Hindu-Muslim amity merited less space and attention in the press and All India Radio. Gandhi had an arduous task to perform. In East Bengal, Muslims viewed him as an epitome of the Ram Raj, whereas in West Bihar Hindus saw him as an appeaser of Muslims.

  To meet the challenge Gandhi dispersed his dozen-strong retinue to different settlements. He retained only his stenographer, R. P. Parasuram; his Bengali interpreter, Professor Nirmal Bose; and his eighteen-year-old grandniece, Mridula—popularly known as Manuben, Sister Manu—daughter of Jaisukhlal Gandhi, whom he had added to his staff earlier in the year.33 Gandhi used Mridula as part of his “experiments” in brahmacharya (Sanskrit: literally, to follow the Eternal; figuratively, self-imposed celibacy). He had grown up with a notion about the power of semen, originating in ancient Hindu scriptures and summarized in the sentence: “One who conserves his vital fluid acquires unfailing power.”34

  Gandhi’s regular sharing of his bed with Mridula had become an embarrassment at best and a scandal at worst. Among others, Patel, in his letter to Gandhi on January 25, 1947, urged him to suspend the experiment, which he called a “terrible blunder” on the Mahatma’s part that pained his followers “beyond measure.”35

  On February 1, 1947, in his prayer meeting speech in the village of Amishapara, Gandhi said, “I have my grandniece [Manuben] with me. She shares the same bed with me. The Prophet [Muhammad] . . . welcomed eunuchs made so through prayer by God. This is my aspiration. I know that my action has excited criticism among my friends. But a duty cannot be shirked.” His interpreter, Bose, skipped these sentences while translating his speech in Bangali. And the editors of the Harijan weekly, Kishorelal Mashruwala and Narhari Parikh, censored them from the published text. But Gandhi was stubborn. “If I don’t let Manu sleep with me, though I regard it as essential that she should, wouldn’t that be a sign of weakness in me?” he countered. Privately, he had told Manuben, “We both may be killed by the Muslims, and must put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked.”36

  It transpired that the critical significance Gandhi attached to this “experiment” to control his sexual impulses had a political motive, shorn of any spirituality. Bose once overheard him saying to an associate about brahmacharya, “If I can master this [sexual impulse], I can still beat Jinnah.”37 It appears that the Mahatma was secretly, and innovatively, priming himself to get the upper hand in his decades-old ri
valry with Jinnah around the time Prime Minister Attlee was drafting a historic statement on India.

  5: Born in Blood

  On February 20, 1947, British prime minister Clement Attlee announced that Britain would “transfer power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June 1948.”1 He added that the British government would have to “consider to whom the powers of British India should be handed over, on the due date, whether as a whole to some form of Central Government or in some areas to existing provincial governments or in such other way as may seem most reasonable.”2 The transition was to be implemented under the viceroyalty of a cousin of King George VI, Lord Louis Mountbatten, who would succeed Lord Wavell.

  The immediate and adverse impact of Atlee’s historic declaration was felt by the Unionist Party in Punjab, which had a long history of loyalty to the British emperor. Its prestige plummeted. The Muslim League, which had already been agitating in the province, took advantage of this change in status. Since the first letter of the envisioned Pakistan stood for Punjab, local League leaders redoubled their campaign against Chief Minister Sir Khizr Hayat Tiwana.

  Unable to bear the label of “traitor to Islam” that League partisans had vociferously pinned on him, he resigned on March 2. But when Governor Sir Evan Jenkins called on League leader Iftikhar Hussain Khan Mamdot to form a ministry, he failed to line up a majority. This was just as well. As chief minister, he would have found it an uphill task to maintain law and order in a province of over thirty-five million, where communal passions were escalating rapidly—with Hindus and Sikhs, forming 45 percent of the population, on one side, and Muslims, constituting 53 percent, on the other.

  Nearly six million Sikhs, half as numerous as Hindus, were vehemently opposed to Pakistan, which would have sliced the community into two parts, with one in the Muslim homeland. Their leader, seventy-two-year-old Master Tara Singh, a former Hindu, declared March 11 as Anti-Pakistan Day. To spur fellow Sikhs, he recycled the slogan of the last Sikh guru, Gobind Singh (died 1708), Raj karega Khalsa, aki rahe na koi (Punjabi: “The pure Sikhs will rule, no resister will live”).3 Sikhs’ animosity toward Muslims was grounded in the defeats that their warlord Maharaja Ranjit Singh (1780–1839) had inflicted on the Mughals, resulting in the rise of the Sikh kingdom, which covered most of northwestern India.

  Incendiary speeches stoked hatred between Sikhs and Muslims. The militant Muslim League National Guard and Muslim ex-servicemen attacked Sikhs. Within days communal violence spread to the villages of Rawalpindi and Multan districts. In the former, Sikhs were butchered. “In many villages they were herded into houses and burnt alive,” noted Governor Sir Evan Jenkins in his report of April 16. “Many Sikhs had their hair and beards cut, and there were cases of forcible circumcision. Many Sikh women who escaped slaughter were abducted.”4 Pillage and arson accompanied the murder of an estimated 3,500 Sikhs. More than 40,000 displaced Sikhs were sheltered in hastily established refugee camps.

  In polar contrast to the condoning of this mass violence by the League’s leaders, General Sir Frank Messervy, then posted in the province, was horrified. “Having served for 34 years, mostly in the Punjab and with Punjab troops, I would never have believed that agitation could have aroused the normally chivalrous and decent Punjabi Muslim peasant to such frenzied savagery as was widely prevalent,” he wrote. Besides the major communal factor, he mentioned two minor causes.

  The first is the economic element. Scarcity of cloth and some items of food, such as sugar, have been exploited by the Hindu-Sikh bania [shopkeeper] community to profiteer and indulge in black-market operations. The government controls were also mostly in the hands of Sikh or Hindu agents and clerks. The Muslim peasant and laborers were only too ready to get some of their own back when they got the chance. The second is the “goonda” [goon] element in every community, which is always ready to take full advantage of such disturbances to practice arson, loot and dacoity [armed robbery].5

  In retrospect this carnage would prove to be the rumbling of a volcano that would erupt with searing ferocity five months later.

  Partition Becoming Inevitable

  It was this Cyclopean convulsion in Punjab that awaited Lord Louis Mountbatten—tall and handsome in his naval white uniform, embellished with an impressive array of decorations and orders—along with his slim, gangling wife, Edwina, when they arrived in Delhi on March 22.

  The next day, the seventh anniversary of the Muslim League’s Lahore resolution, Jinnah warned that “terrific disasters” awaited India if there were no Pakistan. On March 27, Finance Minister Liaquat Ali Khan presented his first budget, proposing a business profit tax, a capital gains tax, and a higher duty on tea. In their criticism, instead of describing his budget as antibusiness or socialistic, and likely to be seen as progressive, opponents accused him of grinding his communalist axe.

  Khan was indignant. “If I present a budget which according to me is the budget which consists of principles which I believe India should follow, they [critics] say now here is Pakistan.” He regretted that the budget was seen as an attempt by him to “ruin the economic life of the country and then go away to Pakistan.”6

  On March 31, Viceroy Mountbatten had the first of six meetings with Gandhi that stretched over the next twelve days. He had an equal number of face-to-face conversations with Jinnah. On April 12, he deliberately allowed his meeting with Gandhi to overrun because his next interviewee was Jinnah. He hoped that if these two estranged political titans could be induced to speak to each other, progress might be made. Arriving on time, Jinnah occupied a large leather armchair as distant from Gandhi as possible. Both of them lowered their voices as they spoke to the viceroy. He acted as the common interlocutor. He suggested they meet separately. They agreed.

  Since Gandhi was staying in the insalubrious quarters of the Untouchables, their meeting could only take place at Jinnah’s spacious bungalow surrounded by a neatly maintained garden on Aurangzeb Road in New Delhi. At the end of a three-hour-long “friendly” talk on April 15,they disagreed on partitioning India. But they issued a joint communiqué, deploring “the recent acts of lawlessness and violence that have brought the utmost disgrace to the fair name of India” and denouncing “the use of force to achieve political aims.”7 Characteristically, Gandhi signed the statement in Hindi, Urdu, and English, whereas Jinnah did so only in English. Their appeal received no response.

  Relations between Congress and League members of the interim cabinet were so fraught that Congress ministers could not fill a post or transfer an official with the consent of their League colleagues. There was a food shortage in the country, but polarization in the government and bureaucracy blocked remedial action. Frustrated by the internecine war within his cabinet, Jawaharlal Nehru declared on April 21: “The Muslim League can have Pakistan if they wish to have it, but on condition that they do not take other parts of India which do not wish to join Pakistan.”8

  Gandhi saw the writing on the wall. “The Congress has accepted Pakistan and demanded the division of the Punjab and Bengal,” he said during his prayer meeting on May 7. “I am opposed to any division of India now as I always have been. . . . The only thing I can do is to disassociate myself from such a scheme.”9

  Menon’s Astute Plan

  Now the practicalities of the transfer of power had to be worked out. Here a senior Indian civil servant bearing the title of reforms commissioner, Vapal Pangunni Menon, proved innovative. He proposed that power be transferred to two central governments, one each in India and Pakistan, which should simultaneously be accorded the status of Dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations (British Commonwealth, for short). The provincial assemblies in Punjab and Bengal should decide partition or continued unity. Instead of waiting for a new constitution to be framed by the present Constituent Assembly, Britain should pass on power immediately to the new central governments, which would operate under the Government of India Act 1935 until the declaration of their ow
n constitutions.

  Mountbatten had a meeting with Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan on May 17 as he prepared to fly to London for urgent meetings there, starting with Attlee. They concurred with the Menon Plan. Nehru had earlier accorded it an informal nod.

  By the time Mountbatten was summoned by Attlee on May 18, he could claim a provisional acceptance of the Menon Plan by the two Indian principals. He took Menon with him. In London, he lobbied the Menon Plan successfully first with Attlee, then his cabinet, and lastly Sir Winston Churchill, leader of the opposition Conservative Party. This kept him busy for ten days.

  On May 25 in Delhi, keenly aware that the final die was being cast in London, Nehru urged Gandhi, then preaching Hindu-Muslim amity in East Bengal, to rush to Delhi to join him at the center-stage of history. But instead of boarding the special aircraft offered to him, Gandhi stuck to traveling by train.

  Mountbatten and his party returned to Delhi on May 31. Two days later, in the pale gray office at the viceroy’s house, he chaired a meeting of seven Indian leaders. On his left sat Jinnah, flanked by Liaquat Ali Khan, next to Abdur Rab Nishtar with his jet black walrus mustache and a white turban with upright, pleated top, and on his right was Nehru, next to the bald-headed, leathery-faced home minister Vallabhbhai Patel; Jiwatram Bhagwandas Kripalani, the mustached, skeletal Congress president; and defense minister Baldev Singh, a robust, turbaned Sikh. Mountbatten briefed the august assembly on the details of the transfer of power. He let the assorted leaders consider the details overnight and give their opinion the next day.

  Soon after the end of this meeting and the departure of the leaders, Gandhi was ushered into his office. Being Monday, it was the Mahatma’s weekly day of silence. After sitting down without uttering a word, he informed the viceroy of his vow of silence in his scrawling handwriting. He did not comment on the Menon Plan. Instead, he referred to the cabinet mission’s May 16 statement, which had rejected partition.10