Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  Abell’s letter added: ‘The award itself is expected within the next 48 hours, and I will let you know later about the probable time of announcement. Perhaps you would ring me up if H.E. the Governor has any views on this point.’ In the map, the tehsils (sub-districts) of Ferozepur and Zira in India were shown as part of Pakistan. On 11 August, Jenkins received a cipher telegram from Mountbatten’s office reading: ‘Eliminate salient,’ which meant that these two areas had been transferred to India. This gave credibility to Pakistan’s allegation that Mountbatten had made Radcliffe change the award in favour of India.

  Some years later, a Pakistani diplomat at a party reminded Radcliffe of Abell’s letter and insinuated that he had acted in a partisan manner. Narrating the incident to me, Radcliffe said: ‘I told the Pakistani diplomat that Pakistan got more than what it should have had.’ Radcliffe went on to tell me that it was a ‘tragedy’ that Punjab had to be divided. He also said: ‘Patel was very unhappy about the Chittagong hill tracts going to Pakistan, but why, I do not know.’ He added that most of the population in Chittagong hill tracts was not Hindu, and the entire economy of the area depended upon East Bengal.

  Indeed, Patel was so concerned about the hill tracts that on 13 August he wrote to Mountbatten that any award in that area, ‘without any referendum to ascertain the will of the people concerned, must be construed as a collusive or partisan award and will therefore have to be repudiated by us.’

  Radcliffe was criticized by both sides, but this, as he said, was the best he could do in the time available to him. The real fault lay with Mountbatten who appointed the Boundary Commission very late. In fact, both the Hindu and Muslim members of the commission were frank enough to tell Radcliffe that they would not have agreed to any boundary even if they had felt that the award was fair. They admitted that their concurrence would annoy the new rulers they would be serving in the two countries after Partition.

  Radcliffe had a word of praise for Meherchand Mahajan, who served as a member on behalf of the Congress and for M.C. Setalvad, who presented India’s case before the Boundary Commission. He, however, had nothing to say about the League’s members. He related an anecdote to me: One Muslim member had met him separately and asked for ‘the inclusion of Darjeeling in East Pakistan’. When Radcliffe insisted on knowing the reason, this member said: ‘My family and myself have come to be rather fond of Darjeeling over the past years where we have been holidaying’ (Darjeeling ultimately went to India).

  Both the Congress and the Muslim League had agreed that there would be no migration of populations but the people on either side had no alternative but to move because violence had erupted. No one envisaged that the situation would deteriorate to such a degree that virtually the entire population of non-Muslims in Pakistan would be forced to seek shelter in India and lakhs of Muslims in Pakistan.

  Delhi and Karachi celebrated Independence in their own way. The refugees had no sense of triumph over the British. They faced a future of uncertainty in the new country. In a way, Gandhi shared their grief. He was in Calcutta on 15 August and fasted while the country was cut asunder.

  He had earlier gone to Noakhali in East Bengal (7 November 1946) to mitigate the sufferings and fears of Hindu families who had lost their bread-winners because Muslims had killed them. The attackers were fanatics but he could foresee the pattern of killings initiated by extremists of one community with the other retaliating. Noakhali was where Gandhi had tried his ‘experiment with brahmcharya’. When his grand-niece Manu came to Noakhali, Gandhi resolved on a brahmcharya test with her as his partner. Gandhi’s grandson said: ‘it was not an experiment but a yagna; a sacrificial offering of his sexuality to god’.

  If neither Gandhi nor Manu felt the sexual urge despite sharing the same bed, the yagna, Gandhi claimed, would purify him. When the news of his ‘experiment’ was made public, both the Hindu and Muslim communities were aghast with embarrassment. Nehru was dumbfounded. One of Gandhi’s biographers wrote: ‘The people in India were less interested in the problems of brahmcharya and ahimsa than in the knowledge of whether they would live or die’. Was Gandhi trying to escape facing the situation when he had failed to prevent the division of India and control Hindu–Muslim riots? Pyarelal reported that Gandhi muttered to himself: ‘There must be a serious flaw deep down in me.’

  Comparatively fewer people left the two sides of Bengal. There were killings in Bengal but nowhere near on the scale of the carnage seen in Punjab. The one-man boundary force, Gandhi, succeeded in Calcutta and the city quickly returned to normalcy. An incident there spoke volumes about Gandhi’s philosophy. In response to his appeal to surrender all arms, the killers queued up to lay down their weapons. One Punjabi, the last one, threw a big knife at Gandhi’s feet, complaining that Muslims had killed his 12-year-old son, his only child. Gandhi told him to adopt a Muslim orphan of the same age and bring him up as a Muslim to put the community to shame.

  Partition was the greatest tragedy humanity had ever witnessed. The entire cultural fabric that Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had shared for centuries was in tatters. Was this the dawn of freedom, as Faiz Ahmad Faiz, a famous Urdu poet, wrote: ‘Yeh dagh-dagh ujala, yeh shab-e-gujida sehar—woh intzar tha jiska yeh woh sehar to nahin [this stained light, this night-bitten dawn; this is not the dawn for which we yearned this is not the dawn for which we set out so eagerly]’. True, it was stained with the blood of the innocent.

  Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan was of a tolerant, progressive, and modern state. It is another matter that it has become a purely Islamic one. He believed that the creation of Pakistan was the best way of protecting the interests of Muslims. With Nehru, secularism was a matter of faith and he believed that pluralism was a sine qua non for democracy. Patel had no such commitment, although he believed in democracy. Both openly differed on how to check migration from East Pakistan. West Bengal Chief Minister B.C. Roy and Patel joined hands to request Nehru to tell Pakistan that India would turn out Muslims in proportion to the Hindus coming from East Bengal. Nehru stood firm and refused to compromise with the principle of secularism.

  The differences between Nehru and Patel were ideological. The former was a social democrat, seeking to move the country forward by giving the commanding heights of the economy to the public sector. Patel was a staunch rightist not only in terms of economic development but even in political matters, representing Hindu nationalism. The Congress party was under Patel’s control but no occasion ever arose when the two had to measure their respective strengths. I think Nehru’s popularity was so great that he would have supervened had he ever been challenged.

  Gandhi knew his country well. He said that if Indians were to take up guns to kill the British, given India’s great religious and ethic divisions, they would continue using the same guns to kill each other long after the British had left. He said he did not want India’s freedom if it meant Indians would be free to slaughter each other.

  When it came to the division of assets between India and Pakistan, both sides wanted the last penny to be accounted for. The worst fallout was on the armed forces. Even a pacifist like Dr Rajendra Prasad insisted on splitting the military to the last soldier. Almost all Hindu defence officers opted for India and Muslims for Pakistan.

  Bereft of officers of their own community, Muslims in India and Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan experienced the worst type of partisan administration. New Delhi realized the error and Nehru asked the states to recruit Muslims, particularly in the police. It was, however, too little too late and India is reaping the bitter harvest to this day. Muslims in India were disillusioned, but Azad had warned them.

  In 1945, I had once heard Azad in Lahore. I had never seen him before but had admired him for his sagacity and courage. He stood firm when the tides of communalism were sweeping leaders off their feet. He said:

  I am prepared to overlook all other aspects of the problem and judge it from the point of view of the Muslim interest alone. It seems that the scheme of Pakistan is a symb
ol of defeatism and has been built on the analogy of the Jewish demand for a national home. It is a confession that Indian Muslims cannot hold their own in a united India and would be forced to withdraw to a corner specially reserved for them.

  Azad’s words came true. Muslims of the subcontinent were the greatest losers. He had predicted the secession of East Pakistan from West Pakistan. Muslims are now spread over three countries: India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Imagine the influence their numbers and their votes would have commanded in an undivided subcontinent! They would have constituted over one-third of the total population. No democratic country could have ignored them.

  Sometime after Partition, my father was keen to return to Sialkot despite the killings. Fida Hussain, chief secretary of Pakistan’s Punjab, was visiting Delhi to discuss problems between the two countries. He was once deputy commissioner at Sialkot and knew my father, who had been his family physician at the time. I took my father to meet him. He was very frank and told him that Pakistan’s policy was not to have any non-Muslims back. That ended the matter. My father’s dream was shattered and he realized that there was no going back. However, neither he nor my mother were the same after having lost their home in Sialkot. They felt that their life had really ended when they left their home.

  3

  Early Pangs of Governance

  Kashmir, Gandhiji’s Assassination, and the Integration of the Indian States

  As the division of the country had been on the basis of religion the fallout was inevitable. Muslims in India did not escape the privations which they as Muslims had to suffer. I have often told Pakistanis that Indian Muslims paid the price for constituting the new country. Pakistanis do not deny the charge but rationalize that Indian Muslims knew they had to suffer for a Muslim country to be hewn from India.

  Helpless and abandoned, Muslims in India recalled Maulana Azad’s warnings that after Partition their importance would be reduced to nothing. They rallied around him but it was too late. Hindus maintained a streak of respect for him, no matter how angry they were with Muslims in general. This was clear when he died on 22 February 1958. A ceaseless queue of non-Muslims flowed into his house through the night to pay respects. I was one of them. Nehru himself selected the site for Azad’s burial near Jama Masjid. Azad had left behind piles and piles of books and papers which I tried to access in vain. I finally located the papers over forty years ago in a trunk in the custody of the family of Ajmal Khan, Azad’s private secretary. I wish someone would retrieve them because the papers belong to a significant period of our national struggle.

  There was no money in Azad’s bank, nor was there any at home. Significantly, another Muslim cabinet minister, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, too died penniless. The fact that these Muslim ministers had no assets spoke a great deal about the integrity of nationalist Muslims.

  I recalled how, prior to Partition, Muslim students from the Aligarh Muslim University had once spat on Azad’s face when the train stopped at Aligarh station. Was this a precursor of the hatred that Azad had predicted in Pakistan? He told Shorish Kashmiri, a leader from Lahore, in an interview a few weeks before Partition:

  An entity conceived in hatred will last only as long as that hatred lasts. This hatred will overwhelm the relations between India and Pakistan. In this situation it will not be possible for India and Pakistan to become friends and live amicably unless some catastrophic event takes place. It will not be possible for Pakistan to accommodate all the Muslims of India. It will not be possible for the Hindus to stay especially in West Pakistan.

  People were still migrating from one country to the other when I heard of tribesmen infiltrating into Kashmir within months of Independence. I recalled our family’s annual visit to Pahalgam, pitching a tent on an expansive, undulating terrain and watching a lazy stream flowing a few yards away. The sojourn at Pahalgam during the summer was common among Punjabi Hindu and Sikh families. It was taken for granted that Kashmir would be a part of India.

  When Maharaja Hari Singh of Jammu & Kashmir declared independence, New Delhi wanted him to come to terms with Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir’s popular leader, who was heading the Quit Kashmir Movement for a democratic dispensation to replace the monarchy.

  My impression is that had Pakistan been patient it would have got Kashmir automatically. India could not have conquered it, nor could a Hindu maharaja have ignored the composition of the population, which was predominantly Muslim. Instead, an impatient Pakistan sent tribesmen along with regular troops to Kashmir within days of Independence.

  While its true that Nehru was keen on Kashmir’s accession to India, Patel was opposed to it. Sheikh Abdullah told me in an interview later (21 February 1971) that Patel argued with him that as Kashmir was a Muslim-majority area it should go to Pakistan. Even when New Delhi received the maharaja’s request to accede to India, Patel said: ‘We should not get mixed up with Kashmir. We already have too much on our plate.’

  Nehru’s anxiety was clear from his letter to Patel (27 September 1947), three days before Kashmir’s accession to India: ‘things must be done in a way so as to bring about the accession of Kashmir to the Indian union as rapidly as possible with the cooperation of Sheikh Abdullah’. Nehru wanted Indian forces to fight against the Pakistan tribesmen and others advancing in the Valley. It was Mountbatten who asked Nehru to get the instrument of accession signed first before sending troops.

  From the very outset the maharaja’s preference was for independence. Failing that, he wanted a merger with India. His fear in relation to the second alternative was that with Nehru at the helm of affairs, he would be reduced to a mere figurehead, and Sheikh Abdullah would be the one with real power. When Patel, otherwise close to the maharaja, suggested that he should ‘make a substantial gesture to win Sheikh Abdullah’s support’, the maharaja knew his fate was sealed.

  On the other hand, Pakistan was anathema to the maharaja. First, as a Hindu, he was opposed to joining an Islamic country, and secondly, he was afraid that once he did that, his loyal supporters, the Hindus and Sikhs, would leave the state. Pakistan did offer him a Sikkim-like status, with defence and foreign affairs remaining with Karachi. The maharaja did not even consider the offer because he had no trust in the Pakistani leaders.

  As far as I am aware, there is nothing on record to prove that the maharaja had a secret agreement with India as is alleged by Pakistan. If there was one, Nehru, on hearing reports about Pakistan’s proposed invasion of Kashmir, would not have written to Patel before the maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession, that ‘once the State accedes to India it will become very difficult for Pakistan to invade it officially or unofficially without coming into conflict with the Indian Union’.

  Pakistan’s allegation of a secret agreement with India was on the basis of papers carried by one of Hari Singh’s cousins, Thakore Harnam Singh, whose plane had to land in Lahore because of engine trouble. The papers reportedly contained a promise that the Indian Union, in return for Kashmir’s accession, would build communications from Pathankot to Jammu and station troops at Gilgit in the north of Kashmir. This may well have been a temptation for the maharaja but does not constitute proof of a secret agreement. The accession would have automatically meant not only the building of lines of communications but also of stationing troops.

  Mountbatten later told me that Patel had agreed to let Kashmir go to Pakistan if the state so wished. ‘By sending its irregular troops into the state, Pakistan spoiled the whole thing,’ added Mountbatten. He was, however, worried that Nehru’s Kashmiri ancestry would lead him to unwise decisions. (Nehru is reported to have confessed to a British officer: ‘In the same way as Calais was written on Mary’s heart, Kashmir is written on mine.’)

  However, Pakistan could not wait. Kashmir had always been a part of the concept of Pakistan and the letter ‘K’ in its name stood for Kashmir. As the Pakistan minister for Kashmir affairs said in 1951, and this has been repeated by many ministers to this day, ‘Kashmir is an article of faith with Pakistan
and not merely a piece of land or a source of rivers’. Jinnah, too had tried to win over Sheikh Abdullah when the two met in Lahore. Recalling his meeting with Jinnah, Sheikh Abdullah said: ‘I told him that I was opposed to the idea of Pakistan and it would not help the situation. Muslims were scattered all over India and they would face greater difficulties if certain portions were taken away from the country and declared independent. If they (Muslims) were not safe in the entirety of India how would they be safe in a small enclave?’

  This was more or less what Azad had said when airing his opposition to the creation of Pakistan. Another remark attributed to Sheikh Abdullah for not going to Pakistan was that ‘There are too many Muslims there’.

  When Pakistan made no progress either through talks or pressure which it applied on the maharaja by slowing down the supply of necessities, it implemented a scheme in September 1947 which was prepared while Douglas David Gracey, Pakistan army’s second commander-in-chief, was away in London on leave. In brief, the plan was to send tribesmen followed by Pakistan’s regular forces into Kashmir.

  Shiv Saran Lal, who was at that time deputy commissioner, Dera Ismail Khan, NWFP, reported to New Delhi that Pakistan had sent ‘armed tribal people (half a million) to the Pakistan–Kashmir border and the Pakistan government provided transport in civilian and military lorries’.

  After the accession, the maharaja provided New Delhi with more evidence (plans bearing proper seals and names) to prove that ‘a conspiracy for the establishment of a new Muslim State by the Muslim League in Jammu and Kashmir’ was hatched as early as 1945.

  Tribals and regular troops from Pakistan invaded Kashmir while both Delhi and Srinagar were in the midst of negotiations relating to the accession. Jinnah gave his consent to the invasion. Alan Campbell told me that when Mountbatten met Jinnah at the latter’s invitation in Lahore, Pakistan tried to persuade him to agree to India withdrawing its forces fighting against tribals from Pakistan and regular Pakistan forces. In fact, Jinnah’s invitation was to Nehru who had purposely stayed back and had feigned illness. When Mountbatten asked for a guarantee that the tribal invaders would agree to withdraw, Jinnah said he would ‘call the whole thing off if Indian forces withdrew’. This was an admission of sorts. Mountbatten wrote to Patel quoting Rees as his source, that tribesmen were advancing towards Uri in the Baramulla district. Mountbatten informed him later that ex-INA officers were involved in the incursion.