The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  While many community leaders were urging Gandhi to end his fast, militant Hindu demonstrators marched past Birla House, his base, shouting “Let Gandhi die!” They mocked him as “Muhammad Gandhi.” Their hatred of Gandhi intensified on January 15, when, heeding his appeal, the Indian government announced that it was transferring Rs 550 million (worth $1.6 billion today) due to Pakistan forthwith.31

  At his prayer assembly on January 19, held in the garden of Birla House, Gandhi told his audience that an official of the communalist Hindu Mahasabha had repudiated his endorsement of the earlier Hindu-Muslim amity pledge. Hindu Mahasabha was a counterforce, albeit a weak one, to the League’s communalism. It was allied with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu militia.

  The next day, as he spoke at the prayer meeting, a handmade bomb, placed on the wall about seventy-five feet behind Gandhi’s podium, exploded. It was ignited by Madan Lal Pahwa, a refugee from West Punjab, who had learned to make grenades as an employee of a fireworks factory in Bombay. A strong woman in the audience grappled with Pahwa until others rushed forward. He was part of a plot to create panic during which Gandhi was to be shot by two of the seven-strong assassination team that had traveled from Poona and Bombay to Delhi. By the time Pahwa led the police to the two hotels where the rest of the gang were staying, they had fled in a hurry. In a room at the Marina Hotel, they found a few clothes carrying the initials “NVG.” Gandhi, who had remained calm during the episode, refused to restrict access to his daily prayer assembly as advised by the police.

  Once the police heat was off, NVG—Nathuram Vinayak Godse—a sturdy man of medium height with owlish eyes and a jowly face, carried out repeated reconnaissance of the Birla House and its environs.

  Meanwhile, Gandhi was troubled by reports of increased tensions between Nehru and Patel, who among other things had disapproved of Nehru’s complaint about Kashmir to the UN Security Council, which in turn had led to Pakistan filing an unwieldy countercomplaint. Gandhi decided to mediate. On January 30 he addressed a letter to Nehru to bridge his differences with Patel. That day at four pm Gandhi had a meeting with Patel on the same subject. Their talk went on beyond the scheduled hour.

  Among those who had gathered in the front row of the congregation for the prayers was Godse. Gandhi emerged from the building. He passed through the garden, leaning, as usual, on the shoulders of Abha Gandhi, his granddaughter-in-law, and Manu Gandhi, his grandniece. As he ascended the four steps leading to the prayer marquee, Godse, wearing a loose jacket over his cotton shirt and pajamas, approached him. Standing about six feet from Gandhi, he pressed his palms together in reverence. Gandhi returned his salutation. “You are late today for the prayer,” remarked Godse as he bowed to touch the Mahatma’s feet as a further sign of respect. “Yes, I am,” Gandhi replied. Godse pulled out his six-chamber Beretta M 1934 semiautomatic pistol from his jacket pocket. He fired three shots near Gandhi’s heart. It was 5:12 pm. Gandhi collapsed, but his consorts held him up. He was taken to his room, where he died fifteen minutes later.32

  Godse was seized by those around him and beaten. When the police arrested him, he described himself as editor of the Poona-based Hindu Rashtra (Marathi: Hindu Nation), a weekly journal of the Hindu Mahasabha. He was a former member of the RSS, spawned by the Mahasabha, which believed in Hindu supremacy.33 At his trial he would say that he killed Gandhi for “weakening India” by insisting on payments to Pakistan.

  Heartbroken, Nehru wept openly; he had established a son-father relationship with Gandhi. Patel felt guilty for having failed to provide adequate security to the Mahatma and for the ineptitude of the Intelligence Bureau in unearthing the assassination plan in the making. He banned the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS, whose members he had described three weeks earlier as “patriots who love their country.”34 The searing tragedy brought the leading Congress officials together and strengthened the Nehru-led secular wing in the party.

  An emotional tide washed over the Indian nation while condolences poured in from around the globe. Among them was one from Jinnah, who ordered the closure of all government offices in Pakistan the following day. Describing him as “one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community, and a leader who commanded their universal confidence and respect,” he sincerely sympathized with “the great Hindu community and his family in their bereavement at this momentous, historical and critical juncture.” (This was payback for Gandhi’s remark in 1915 of finding a Muslim like Jinnah as head of the multi-religious Gurjar Sabha in Bombay.35) It was only the last sentence—“The loss to the Dominion of India is irreparable”—that did not tie Gandhi to the Hindu community.36

  Reversing his earlier rejection of the advice of his military aide-de-camp, General Muhammad Akbar Khan, Jinnah quietly ordered that the low compound wall of the Government House, his base in Karachi, be raised, ostensibly to make him and his office safe from a bomb thrower.

  A far more important reversal from Jinnah was his stance on the future constitution of Pakistan, which he had expressed publicly almost a week earlier. His change of position was caused by recent developments in the subcontinent and elsewhere. In Delhi Patel had resorted to demanding that India’s Muslim leaders should vociferously support the government’s military intervention in Kashmir, thereby raising communal tension. And the Indian move in Kashmir had weakened the position of the Hindus in Pakistan, with the Muslim majority there viewing them as unpatriotic. Lastly, Washington’s decision in December to award $10 million in financial assistance to Pakistan gave Jinnah a badly needed economic boost, which, in turn, encouraged him to harden his ideological position.

  “I cannot understand the logic of those who have been deliberately and mischievously propagating that the Constitution of Pakistan will not be based on Islamic Sharia.” Jinnah said in his address to the Sindh Bar Association in Karachi on January 25. “Islamic principles today are as much applicable to life as they were 1300 years ago.” He added that Pakistan’s constitution would be based on the Sharia canon to make it “a truly great Islamic state.”37

  Jinnah reiterated this message in his speech to the Fifth Heavy and Sixth Light Ack Ack Regiments based at Malir, a suburb of Karachi, on February 21, a fortnight after the early resignation of General Messervy: “You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.”38 It is worth noting that it was the first time in modern history that the term “Islamic democracy” was used by a leading Muslim politician.

  Jinnah’s Terminal Illness

  Once General Messervy was succeeded by General David Gracey, and the remaining four thousand British troops in India had sailed away on February 28, Jinnah felt freer to commit regular troops in Kashmir. As it was, on October 31 the Gilgit Scouts, led by British officers who had all opted for Pakistan, arrested the maharaja-appointed governor and set up a provisional administration that affiliated with the Azad Kashmir government. Three days later the ruler of Chitral signed the Instrument of Accession with Pakistan. This amounted to Pakistan controlling directly or indirectly, through the Azad Kashmir government, most of the sparsely populated areas of Kashmir except Ladakh. But the coveted prize of the Vale of Kashmir—measuring 6,160 square miles at an average altitude of 6,000 feet—had escaped Jinnah. “The turn of events in Kashmir had an adverse effect on the Quaidi Azam’s health,” wrote Chaudhri Muhammad Ali. “His earlier optimism gave way to a deep disappointment. ‘We have been put on the wrong bus,’ he remarked.”39

  After a lull in the fighting in Kashmir caused by winter snows, the Indians geared up to recapture the lost area, particularly in the populous Kashmir region, which was partly controlled by Azad Kashmir forces. Fearing a breach of Pakistan’s border in the course of India’s offensives, Jinnah ordered the deployment of Pakistani troops in early April. By so doing he risked Delhi’s refusal to deliver the bulk of the 18.75 percent share of the 165,000 tons
of ordnance stores, which had been allocated to Pakistan by the Partition Council.40

  At the United Nations, having listened to both sides, the Security Council passed Resolution 47 on April 21, 1948. It stated that to ensure the impartiality of the plebiscite on the state’s future, Pakistan must withdraw all tribesmen and nationals who entered the region to fight, and India should leave just enough troops to maintain civil order. Since it was passed under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, it was nonbinding and lacked mandatory implementation.41 Only resolutions passed under Chapter VII (“Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression”) require mandatory enforcement.

  Jinnah demanded that both sides withdraw their forces simultaneously. Delhi rejected this. So the state of war between the two neighbors continued, both of them deciding to ignore the Security Council’s call for an immediate cease-fire.

  For administrative purposes, Jinnah established the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs in Karachi. Across the border, pressured by Delhi, the maharaja had replaced his Hindu prime minister, Mahajan, in March with Shaikh Abdullah, the erstwhile chief administrator, thus making his government appear more representative of the Muslim majority.

  In Karachi, Jinnah by now was too ill to use his desk in the Government House office as his workplace. He could perform his job only while lying down on a sofa, surrounded by documents, newspapers, and endless news-bearing telex tape. In June he and his sister-carer Fatima moved to cooler Quetta. Black dispatch boxes, stamped with the initials “M.A.J.,” were airlifted daily from Karachi for his attention and action. He still managed to muster enough energy to address the cadets at the local Command and Staff College. “You, along with the other forces of Pakistan, are the custodians of the life, property and honor of the people of Pakistan,” he told them.42 He would have hardly predicted that a decade later the military leaders would prove more than mere custodians and that they would seize total power and send all politicians packing.

  Jinnah flew to Karachi on July 1 to inaugurate the State Bank of Pakistan. On his return to Quetta some days later, he was advised to move to the hill town of Ziarat seventy miles away. He did so, and he continued to work ceaselessly. Toward the end of the month, Colonel Dr. Illahi Bux, who had been invited to Ziarat by Fatima Jinnah, told his patient and Fatima that Jinnah’s lungs were afflicted with tuberculosis and cancer. The news was withheld even from Prime Minister Ali Khan when he arrived in Ziarat.

  Invited by Bux and Fatima Jinnah, the British nursing superintendent of Quetta’s civil hospital, Sister Phyllis Dunham, arrived in Ziarat on July 29 to give Jinnah professional nursing care. Despite the strict secrecy, the public knew vaguely that their Quaid-i-Azam—Great Leader—was ill and resting in Ziarat in the hills of Baluchistan. On Eid al Fitr, which fell on August 7, public prayers were offered in mosques for his recovery. Two days later Jinnah, now reduced to 79 pounds from an earlier 120 pounds, his face shrunken to hollow cheeks and blank stare, was moved back to Quetta. To maintain a semblance of official normality, on the eve of Independence Day, August 14, the government broadcast a ghostwritten message from him.

  Belying a slight improvement in his health, on August 29 a tearful Jinnah said to Bux, “You know, when you first came to Ziarat, I wanted to live. Now, however, it does not matter whether I live or die.”43 It was imperative for political stability that he should return to Karachi while he was still alive. Being vain, Jinnah did not want to be seen arriving in the capital on a stretcher. When he developed pneumonia on September 9, however, he had no option but to fly to Karachi to receive better medical treatment.

  On Saturday morning, September 11, Jinnah’s Viking touched down at Quetta’s airport. Ali Khan was informed but told not to come to the Mauripur Airport located ten miles from the Government House in Karachi. At four fifteen pm, Jinnah’s plane was met by his state-owned Cadillac, an army ambulance, and a truck for luggage and servants. Jinnah, lying on a stretcher, was placed in the ambulance, which moved slowly. Almost halfway to his destination, it broke down. When the driver failed to get it moving again, Jinnah’s military secretary was sent off to fetch another ambulance.

  Jinnah could not be transferred to the Cadillac as he was too weak to sit up in the backseat, and the stretcher could not be fitted into the automobile. Since the ambulance was not carrying the governor-general’s flag, nobody in Jinnah’s party could stop any of the buses or trucks passing by. It was hot and close inside the ambulance. Jinnah was perspiring even when Sister Dunham fanned him vigorously with a piece of cardboard. In gratitude, the speechless Jinnah touched her arm with his hand and smiled weakly. It was an excruciatingly long hour before the next ambulance arrived. The party reached the Government House at 6:10 pm.44 Jinnah was put to bed. He died at 10:25 pm.

  The government announced three days of mourning. On September 12 almost a million people gathered for the funeral service of Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah, who was succeeded by Khwaja Nazimuddin, the Bengali president of the Pakistan Muslim League. The state of mourning was announced in Delhi on that day, and flags flew at half-mast on all official buildings.

  Nehru said:

  Jinnah did mold history in India in the wrong way, it is true, and let loose forces which have done so much evil. How shall we judge him? I have been very angry with him often during these past years. But now there is no bitterness in my thought of him, only a great sadness for all that has been. . . . Outwardly he succeeded in his quest and gained his objective, but at what a cost and with what a difference from what he had imagined. What must he have thought of all this, did he feel sorry or regret for any past action? Probably not, for he had wrapped himself in a cloak of hatred and every evil seemed to flow from those whom he hated. Hatred is poor nourishment for any person.45

  In his evaluation of Jinnah, Nehru showed no sign of self-examination. Nor did he attempt to apportion blame for the tragic partitioning of the subcontinent. It was all the fault of malevolent Jinnah. Self-righteousness remained a salient feature of Nehru’s character until his death while prime minister sixteen years later.

  With the exit of Jinnah and Gandhi, the giants of subcontinental politics for three decades, an era came to an end. Jinnah’s death just a year after the birth of a new nation he had conceived deprived it of strong moorings at a critical moment. And top policymakers in independent India, focusing on rapid economic development with a stress on industrialization, found Gandhi’s utopian ideas of self-sufficient village communities outdated.

  Whereas a Hollywood biopic on Gandhi was produced in 1982 and proved a critical and box office success, a movie on Jinnah, carrying his name, materialized only in 1998. The Hindi version of Gandhi helped enormously to establish him as an iconic figure, particularly among the younger generations. Jinnah, produced and directed by the London-based Jamil Dehlavi, cast the British horror movie actor Christopher Lee in the lead role. Its Urdu version did well in Pakistan; its impact elsewhere was negligible.

  Truce in Kashmir

  Following Jinnah’s death, Ali Khan bore the full burden of shepherding the fledgling Pakistan. His aristocratic background, formalized in his title of Nawabzad (Urdu: Son of Nabob) from Punjab, his profession as an Oxford-trained attorney, and many years in politics made him feel at ease with Nehru, a Cambridge-educated lawyer.

  On Kashmir, he opted for the “harder diplomatic” track by downgrading the military option that his government was finding too expensive to continue—a policy he had failed to sell to Jinnah earlier. Nehru’s administration was also feeling the adverse effect of the drain caused by the war in Kashmir. With winter snows freezing the battle lines, the two neighbors decided to silence their guns by agreeing to a truce brokered by the UN Commission for India and Pakistan. Despite unpublicized disapproval by the top military brass at the general headquarters in Rawalpindi, the cease-fire went into effect on January 1, 1949. It was decided that a free and impartial plebiscite would be held under UN supervision.


  Pakistan controlled 37 percent of Jammu and Kashmir, later divided into Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir, with its capital in Muzaffarabad. To monitor the cease-fire line, the Security Council appointed the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan. Crucially, India retained control of the eighty-five-mile-long and twenty-mile-wide Vale of Kashmir, which lies between the Pir Panjal and Karakoram mountain ranges of the Himalayas. Guarded by snow-capped peaks, carpeted with verdant forests of fir and pine trees along with wildflowers of riotous colors in the spring, and irrigated by the Jhelum River and its tributaries, it has been described by poets and people alike as “Paradise on Earth.”

  On the eve of their independence the two Dominions had decided to allow free movement of goods, persons, and capital for one year. But because of the rapid deterioration in relations after the Kashmir conflict, this agreement broke down. In November, Pakistan levied export duties on jute, which was processed in the mills of Calcutta. India retaliated with export duties of its own. The trade war escalated to a crisis on September 19, 1949, when Britain devalued the pound against the US dollar by 30.5 percent, to $2.80. Both the Indian rupee and the Pakistani rupee were pegged to the British pound. India followed Britain’s lead, but Pakistan did not. That made Pakistani exports almost a third more expensive. Delhi terminated its trade relations with Karachi.

  7: Growing Apart

  The rupture in Indo-Pakistan trade links ended the export of Hindi movies to Pakistan. These films often starred Punjabi actors endowed with good looks and fluency in Hindustani—an amalgam of Urdu and Hindi. West Pakistanis thus found themselves deprived of their staple in mass entertainment. The studios in Lahore produced only nine movies a year, compared to Bombay’s output of seventy-five.