The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  That evening Mountbatten left a dinner party early for a one-on-one dialogue with Jinnah. He gave an account of this crucial meeting in his speech, titled “Transfer of Power in India,” to the Royal Empire Society in London, on October 6, 1948. “The Congress leaders agreed that they would accept partition to avoid civil war,” he told his audience. But they refused to let large non-Muslim areas go to Pakistan. “That automatically meant a partition of the great provinces of the Punjab and Bengal,” so their non-Muslim areas would not be incorporated into Muslim Pakistan.

  When I told Mr. Jinnah that I had their [Congress leaders’] provisional agreement to partition, he was overjoyed. When I said that it logically followed that this would involve partition of the Punjab and Bengal he was horrified. He produced the strongest arguments why these provinces should not be partitioned. He said that they had national characteristics and that partition would be disastrous. I agreed, but I said how much more must I now feel that the same considerations applied to the partitioning of the whole of India. He did not like that, and started explaining why India had to be partitioned. So we went round and round the mulberry bush until finally he realized that either he could have a United India with an un-partitioned Punjab and Bengal or divided India with a partitioned Punjab and Bengal. And he finally accepted the latter solution.11

  When the seven Indian leaders met again on June 3, they formally endorsed the Menon Plan, which meant the Congress giving up its demand for a transfer of power and the framing of a constitution before partition. It also meant a smaller Pakistan than the one envisaged by Jinnah. At the end, Mountbatten produced a communiqué to be signed by the attendees. Jinnah refused to do so, giving his assent only with a nod.12

  That evening, as the viceroy, accompanied by Nehru, Jinnah, and Baldev Singh, waited in the studios of All India Radio (AIR), Attlee announced the details of the handover to the House of Common. In his speech on AIR, Mountbatten said that “if” there is partition—implying that it depended on the vote in the Punjab and Bengal Assemblies.

  In his broadcast, Jinnah stated that the final decision on the British plan rested with the Muslim League Council, scheduled to meet on June 9. After paying tribute to the viceroy’s “fairness and impartiality,” he referred to the referendum to be held in the Congress-ruled North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) whether to join Pakistan or Hindustan. He called on the provincial League leaders to end the civil disobedience campaign they had launched there. He signed off with the slogan “Pakistan zindabad” (“Long live Pakistan”).13

  At the press conference on June 4, Mountbatten said, “I think the transfer [of power] could be about the 15th of August.” Soon after, under his chairmanship, he set up the four-member Partition Council, two each from the Congress (Patel and Rajendra Prasad) and the League (Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan). Their tasks were to supervise the division of civil servants and military personnel as well as governmental assets—from typewriters to locomotives, including the treasury of British India—into the two successor states.

  With the Congress-majority government in Delhi regarding the imminent partition as secession of some parts from the center, the (Muslim) officials opting for Pakistan found themselves ejected from their offices. Therefore the planning for Pakistan was carried out in tents. Later, with the population and the area of Pakistan estimated respectively at 17.5 percent and 20 percent of the India of the British Empire (British India and 562 princely states), it was to be allocated 18.75 percent of the assets of the existing political entity.

  Thus Jinnah got what he called a “maimed, moth eaten” Pakistan, with its eastern and western wings separated by one thousand miles of Indian soil, hanging like two lobes on either ear of the body of India. Of its seventy-seven million inhabitants, forty-one million were concentrated in the eastern wing, occupying only one-sixth of the national territory.

  The members of the League’s Council assembled in New Delhi’s Imperial Hotel on June 9. By a vote of 300 to 10 they adopted a resolution stating that though the Council could not agree to the partition of Bengal and Punjab, it considered the transfer-of-power plan as a whole and decided to give full authority to Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah to accept its basic principle as a compromise, and left it to him to work out the details.14 The Council’s meeting in the ballroom on the first floor was distracted by a band of fifty Khaksars, a militant Muslim group demanding the inclusion of Delhi in Pakistan. They were thrown out by uniformed Muslim League National Guard volunteers before they could reach the ballroom.15

  On June 15 the All India Congress Committee (AICC) passed a resolution by 153 to 29 votes to accept the June 3 plan. To sweeten the bitter partition pill, Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed Azad, the former longest serving Congress president, said: “The division is only of the map of the country and not in the hearts of the people, and I am sure it is going to be a short-lived partition.”16

  As expected, the legislative assemblies of Bengal and Punjab opted for division, with the latter doing so on June 23. With Hindus lacking majority in any district of Sindh, that provincial assembly decided to join the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. In Baluchistan the same decision was reached by the local tribal leaders, appointed by the British Raj, and the nominees of Quetta’s municipality.

  In the July 6–7 referendum in Sylhet, the Muslim-majority district of Assam, 239,600 favored joining East Bengal, while 184,000 voted to stay with the Hindu-majority Assam.17 Sylhet and East Bengal together formed East Pakistan. Three days later, it was announced that Jinnah would be the governor-general of Pakistan.

  In the highly strategic NWFP, the Congress Party called for a boycott of the referendum held between July 6 and 17 under the supervision of British officers of the Indian Army. Of the 572,800 eligible voters, 51 percent participated, and 99 percent opted for the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. With the total votes cast in the referendum being only 25 percent less than in the 1946 provincial assembly election, the call of the Congress for a boycott had proved virtually ineffective.18

  On July 18, King George VI signed the Indian Independence Act 1947. The government in Delhi informally split into two cabinets, with the one for Pakistan led by Liaquat Ali Khan.

  A week later Mountbatten addressed the issue of the future of the princely states (aka, native states), which had signed treaties with Britain accepting the paramountcy of the British crown. More than 560 such entities occupied a third of India under the British Empire, their sizes varying from a few square miles to eighty-thousand-plus square miles in the case of Hyderabad and that of Jammu and Kashmir.

  In his speech to the Chamber of Princes, the viceroy offered them the chance of signing an instrument of accession with India or Pakistan: it would ensure their continued autonomy and access to their “privy purses”—part of the taxes due to them for their royal upkeep—in lieu of letting the new dominion conduct their international relations and defense. Referring to his blood relationship with the British monarch, Mountbatten stated that the emperor of India would be offended if they did not accede to one or the other dominion under the British crown. The native rulers were also aware of Nehru’s warning that any independent state would be considered an enemy by the Indian Dominion—as well as the declaration by the Congress Working Committee in June that the end of the British paramountcy did not mean sovereign independence.

  Little wonder that signed instruments of accession to the “Indian Union”—which was yet to emerge—landed on Mountbatten’s desk thick and fast just as the Congress-dominated interim government set up a “States Department” under Patel assisted by Menon.19 But the Muslim Nizam of Hindu-majority Hyderabad and the Hindu Maharaja of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir sat on the fence.

  The decision of the Muslim ruler of the Hindu-majority Junagarh, measuring twenty-three square miles along the coast of north Gujarat, to accede to Pakistan could not be implemented. But this was a trivial matter compared to the complexities of Punjab.

/>   Blood-Soaked Division of the Land of Five Rivers

  In British India, the five tributaries of the Indus that gave the province its name Punjab (Urdu: Punj, five; aab, water) were, from east to west, Beas, Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum. In terms of religion, the western sector beyond the Chenab River was clearly meant to go to Pakistan and the sectors between Sutlej and Jamuna (later Yamuna) in the east to India. The populous central zone, rich and strategically important, was in dispute. Here the lives of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs were intricately integrated. There were also conflicting demands on holy shrines, railways, defensive frontiers, and irrigation facilities.

  Baldev Singh’s acceptance of the June 3 plan was challenged by militant Sikh leaders. In July they submitted a memorandum to the Boundary Commission, chaired by the eminent British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe, which proposed using the Chenab River to divide Punjab in order to keep 90 percent of its Sikhs in India. Since this would have further reduced the “maimed, moth-eaten” Pakistan Jinnah had reluctantly agreed to, the proposal was summarily rejected.

  The Sikhs grew apprehensive. Militancy rose steeply in a community that had once been classified by the British as one of the “martial races” of India. Agitated Sikh leaders convened political assemblies in their gurdwaras, or temples, to plan anti-Muslim strikes. They recruited ex-servicemen and armed them with private stockpiles of revolvers, rifles, shotguns, tommy guns (aka, Thompson submachine guns), and light machine guns as well as grenades, spears, and axes. They decided to avenge the earlier anti-Sikh carnage in northern Punjab with unremitting vengeance in the central Punjab districts of Lahore and Gurdaspur. Their savage assaults were conducted with military precision. Terrified Muslims struggled to defend themselves.

  When Muslims sighted an armed Sikh squad, they would rush to their roofs and beat gongs to alert neighboring Muslim settlements. The gun-toting Sikhs targeted their prey as other members of the attacking party threw grenades over compound walls to force the residents into the street, where the attackers, armed with tridents, spears, and sharp, small swords—called kirpans, carried as a religious obligation—slaughtered them. Finally, the older members of the Sikh squad set alight the village with outriders ready with spears and kirpans to hack the escapees.

  In his fortnightly report to the viceroy, Punjab governor Jenkins noted on August 4 that he was witnessing nothing less than a “communal war of succession” in the province as competing groups struggled “for the power we are shortly to abandon. . . . Moreover, there is very little doubt that the disturbances have in some degree been organized and paid for by persons or bodies directly or indirectly under the control of the Muslim League, the Congress, and the [Sikh] Akali Party.”20 His chief investigator of crimes, Gerald Savage, personally informed Mountbatten that his intelligence showed the militant Sikhs of the Akal Fauj (Punjabi: Eternal Army) planning bombings and train derailments.

  To cope with the expected surge in stomach-churning violence, Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander in chief of the British Indian Army, transformed the Fourth Indian Division into the Punjab Boundary Force under Major General Thomas Pete Rees on July 17. Rees was given four brigadiers (two Muslim, one Hindu, and one Sikh) as advisors. It started functioning on August 1.21

  But reports of an exponential rise in bloodletting and arson piled up by the time Jinnah flew from Delhi to Karachi, the temporary capital of Pakistan, on August 7. Before boarding Lord Mountbatten’s silver Dakota along with his sister Fatima, he rued: “I suppose this is the last time I’ll be looking at Delhi.”22 He was received in Karachi as the governor-general designate of Pakistan. Four days later the inaugural session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly gave emergency powers to Jinnah as well as electing him president of the Assembly.

  Officially, Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s decision on the demarcation of boundaries in Bengal-Assam and Punjab was to be announced on August 16. But leaks started much earlier.

  On August 8, the sketch map of the Radcliffe Line, showing the allotment to Pakistan of the tehsils (subdistricts) of Ferozepur and Zira forming the Ferozepur salient east of the Sutlej River, was leaked to Nehru and Patel by Radcliffe’s Indian assistant secretary.23

  Radcliffe informed the civil, military, and police officers of the central districts of Punjab to make advance police and troop deployments. In Delhi this news leaked through other sources, including Mountbatten’s Indian administrative staff. This demarcation was equivalent to pointing a dagger at the core of the Sikh heartland. It also meant Nankana Sahib, the birthplace of Guru Nanak Dev (1469–1539), the founder of Sikhism, going to West Punjab. Sikh militants were furious.

  On the night of August 9 they unleashed a war of attrition. A squad of Sikhs, using electronic devices, derailed the Pakistan Special No. 1 train carrying senior Muslim civil servants who had opted for Pakistan, along with their families, from Delhi to Lahore near the border of the princely state of Patiala in East Punjab. Several passengers were killed.

  “Feeling in Lahore city is now unbelievably bad and Inspector General [of Police] tells me that Muslim League National Guard appearing in uniform and that Police are most unsteady,” read Governor Jenkins’s wire to the viceroy on August 12. The next day he reported the murders of nearly four hundred people in Punjab, and flames ravaging Amritsar. “General situation deteriorating,” concluded his telegram.24 The cauldron that had been boiling since March now spilled over, with ghastly consequences.

  Among others, Jinnah was horrified by the heart-wrenching butchery being perpetrated in Punjab. This was the background against which he addressed the seventy-nine-member Pakistan Constituent Assembly on August 11. “I know there are people who do not quite agree with the division of India,” he said. “But in my judgment there was no other solution and I am sure future history will record its verdict in favor of it. . . . Maybe that view is correct; maybe it is not; that remains to be seen.” He added that his ambition was that Pakistan should become a nation in which there were no distinctions of “color, caste or creed”:

  You are free, you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. . . . We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed or another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. . . . Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.25

  Extracts of this speech were widely disseminated in the hope that these would dampen the bloodthirsty frenzy that had gripped Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs alike in Punjab and the NWFP. The tactic had little, if any, impact on the horrendous barbarity that was being perpetuated on the plains of Punjab.

  A Communal Holocaust

  As India and Pakistan gained, respectively, their independence on August 14 and 15, 1947, the communal holocaust, the likes of which had never been witnessed before, continued. By the time it was over toward the end of October, it had claimed the lives of two hundred thousand to one million people. More recent research has gravitated toward a consensus around a death toll of five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand, divided almost equally between Muslims and non-Muslims.26

  In economic terms, the losses of the comparatively better-off Hindus and Sikhs who moved to India far exceeded those of the Muslim migrants arriving in Pakistan. The 4.35 million Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from East Punjab left behind 4.7 million acres of land, whereas the 4.29 million Sikhs and Hindus who moved to India from West Punjab had to part with more fertile 6.7 million acres.27 Moreover, as majority resid
ents of urban areas in West Punjab, non-Muslims possessed assets that far exceeded those of Muslims in East Punjab. In Sindh, forming only a quarter of the population, Hindus owned almost three-quarters of the moveable and immovable property.

  The unbridled savagery consisted of attacks by marauding mobs on villages, railway stations, trains, long caravans of displaced persons on the move, and refugee camps. These assaults involved mass murder, castration, mutilation, rape, looting, arson, abduction, and derailing of trains followed by the slaughtering of passengers. The most commonly used weapons were axes, scythes, swords, spears, and clubs, with revolvers, rifles, and light machine guns playing a minor role. Throwing the hapless members of the local minority into wells, the sole source of potable water in the subcontinent’s villages, was a special feature of communal frenzy. Sexual assault of women became a dramatic means to highlight the victim community’s vulnerability and the humiliation of its men folk.

  On August 13 Lord Mountbatten and Edwina flew to Karachi. As a secondary school student in Karachi at the time, I had witnessed the building of barracks-like structures on the vast empty plots of the city to serve as Pakistan’s sprawling secretariat, posthaste, with construction workers laboring around the clock. On August 14, along with many thousands of other spectators, I saw the skeletal Jinnah, in salwar and long coat topped with a black karakul hat, and Viceroy Mountbatten, dressed as an admiral, standing side by side in an open-roofed Rolls Royce as their vehicle traveled slowly from the provincial governor’s residence to the Constituent Assembly.