by Nisid Hajari
The story features no easy villains—and few heroes. The very same men who led their peoples to independence—India’s dashing first leader, Nehru, and his irascible Pakistani counterpart, Jinnah—would play a central role in creating the rift between their nations. And it must be said, they did so for the worst reasons: inexperience and ineptness, vanity, intellectual arrogance, unspoken prejudice, and plain, petty dislike of one another.
As Nehru philosophically noted after Partition had been formally decided upon, great events were underway and some of that greatness fell on men like him and Jinnah.6 Yet they were only men, and, ultimately, it would be their all-too-human failings that helped to set their nations at odds. Only once those mistakes are properly understood and acknowledged, perhaps, will India and Pakistan begin to bridge the vast and dangerous gulf that still divides them.
1
Fury
THE LETTER HAD TO CHASE Jawaharlal Nehru across northern India. On 6 August 1946, a clerk in Delhi had typed out the message on thick sheets of cream-colored stationery, the words “Viceroy’s House” embossed on each page in a crisp sans-serif font.1 That “house”—a modern palace, really, with its 340 rooms and nearly 5,000 staff (including families)—had been designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to stand atop Delhi’s Raisina Hill as the fulcrum of power in British India.2 Its delicate sandstone screens and helmet-like Mughal chhatris, or elevated pavilions, recalled long centuries of rule by one set of foreign conquerors; its Greek columns and classical dome those of another. The letter had been dictated by the home’s current occupant, the Briton who stood in for the king-emperor as near-absolute ruler over the subcontinent’s 400 million souls. It was addressed to the man, the Indian, who would soon replace him.
From Delhi a courier bore the missive 400 miles south and east to the ancient town of Allahabad, nestled at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. Nehru had grown up here and a few days earlier had returned to visit. His childhood home, built by his father at the end of the previous century, was impressive in its own right. Lined with graceful white columns, it had been one of the first houses in India to receive electricity—and one of the first Indian homes in the neatly manicured European section of Allahabad. As a child, Jawaharlal had done cannonballs into its two swimming pools—indoor and outdoor—splashing the grave and eminent lawyers who worked with his father in the early years of the Indian independence movement.3
Unfortunately, by the time the courier reached the house—named Anand Bhavan, “Abode of Happiness”—Nehru had left. He was headed to meet the rest of the current nationalist leadership in the fly-bitten village of Wardha, another 400 miles further south, deep in the heat-blistered heart of the Indian plains. With a weary sigh, the courier followed.
The letter that the messenger was carrying was phrased in the careful bureaucratese that plagued all correspondence within the British Raj, but its message was dramatic. In essence, the viceroy was offering to replace the handpicked Executive Council through which he governed India with a new body selected and led by Nehru, president of the country’s biggest and best-established political organization, the Indian National Congress. If the viceroy would not quite become a figurehead, he would no longer be an autocrat like his predecessors stretching back to the days of the British East India Company. For the first time, representatives of the Indian people would govern India.
The urbane Nehru was well-cast for the role. His Kashmiri Brahmin ancestors had long served as ministers to the Mughal princes of northern India. He was famously handsome with high, aristocratic cheekbones and eyes that were deep pools—irresistible to his many female admirers. Daily yoga kept his body trim and skin smooth; with a simple cotton cap covering his bald spot, he could pass for a man much younger than his fifty-six years. Although disdainful of superficialities, he took great care with his appearance. Each day a fresh rose adorned his long, sleek doublet, or achkan.
Well into middle age now, Nehru retained the same coiled energy he had exuded as a firebrand in his twenties, not long out of Cambridge, when he had packed volumes of Proust on his frequent trips to His Majesty’s jails. He could still quote Shelley and Walter de la Mare by heart. Yet in his speeches he also spoke to the yearnings of millions of illiterate, grindingly poor Indian peasants. To them he represented all the possibilities they imagined for freedom.
For the past thirty years, Nehru had fought beside Mohandas K. Gandhi—the mystical, septuagenarian Mahatma, or “Great Soul,” of the Indian freedom movement—to liberate India from British control. When the two men first met in 1916, soon after Gandhi had returned to India from living in South Africa, construction had not yet begun on Viceroy’s House. British India remained a land of whiskey sodas and dak bungalows, of tiger hunts, pig-sticking, polo, and pantomimes. From its first established commercial links with India in 1608, Britain had built the subcontinent into the beating heart of a worldwide empire. Its power and presence looked eternal.
The great civil disobedience campaigns led by Gandhi and Nehru—his most beloved disciple and designated heir—had called the empire’s bluff. They had proven that unless the European imperialists were willing to resort to brute force, they could not rule without the consent of the governed (or at least, of the rapidly expanding Indian political class). Three times the Mahatma had called millions of Indians out into the streets in nonviolent protest. Each time British rule had survived but emerged with less authority, both moral and actual, than before. For the past decade, with the exception of the war years, the political debate had largely centered on how and when to transfer power to Indians—not whether Britain should.
Where Gandhi’s loincloth and incense-wreathed chanting sessions evoked India’s long past, Nehru symbolized its future. As a child, English tutors—handpicked by his doting father—had instilled in him a lifelong fascination with science. Studies at Harrow and Cambridge had nurtured an appreciation for Western philosophy, as well as political and economic theory. By far the most cosmopolitan of the Indian leaders, Nehru had during the interwar years become a fixture among the international left. He was nominally a pacifist, like his mentor Gandhi, but nationalism, not pacifism, was his lodestar. In essays and long-winded oratories he framed India’s struggle as part of a great awakening around the world, a progressive force sweeping aside the sickly empires of the West. He spoke of five-year plans and scientific farms, of building great dams and smoke-belching factories. Leaders of independence movements across Asia sought his counsel. A year after Hiroshima, he seemed poised to lead India to the forefront of the postwar world’s rising powers.
In June 1946, Gandhi had engineered a fourth term for Nehru as president of the Congress Party, the longtime vehicle of India’s freedom movement. The Mahatma had himself declined to hold any official position in the party for over a decade. With a new age dawning, he wanted “our Englishman,” as he affectionately dubbed the suave and worldly Nehru, to steer India’s final transition to independence.4 The viceroy’s letter would crown Nehru’s ascent.
After an exhausting overnight train journey, then a bumpy bus ride from the railhead at Nagpur, the courier finally reached Wardha on the morning of 8 August. Foreign correspondents visiting Gandhi’s ashram there for the first time could scarcely believe that the high command of the nationalist movement led their revolution from this snake-infested backwater. “Wardha had few charms,” wrote one American reporter. “The water was polluted and you had to drink it purpled with permanganate. . . . Malaria was widespread, and the sticky, oppressive heat killed many people annually. The soil was sandy, the landscape flat and uninteresting.” The collection of mud-and-thatch huts that made up Gandhi’s ashram—“a cross between a third-rate dude ranch and a refugee camp”—lay a few miles outside of town, reachable only by horse-drawn tonga.5 When they gathered in Wardha for meetings, as they had on this day, the Congress leaders conferred in a simple, two-story bungalow owned by a Hindu industrialist. That’s where the courier hoped to find Nehru.
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p; The Congress president, however, had still not shown up. His colleagues had expected him early that morning; they waited, sipping their chai and gossiping as the merciless sun rose higher and higher. One of them took charge of the viceroy’s letter and sent the exhausted messenger on his way. At noon they sat down for lunch in an interior courtyard, sitting cross-legged in the dust with their metal trays, just as Wardha’s humblest citizens would.
The illustrious Nehru was not among them because he was watching a young boy die. His train from Allahabad had been delayed that morning, and after he had finally disembarked, he urged the driver who had picked him up to speed down the country roads toward Wardha. Fields of puffy cotton whipped past on either side. Suddenly the chauffeur slammed on the brakes, hurling Nehru forward and raising a swirling cloud of red dust. He felt as well as heard “a sickening thud,” Nehru later wrote.6 Stumbling out of the car, he found a village boy, maybe five years old, groaning on the roadside, his stick-thin frame bloody and mangled. The child’s parents were stunned as much by the sudden appearance of a nationalist icon in their tiny hamlet as by the tragedy; Nehru had to argue desperately with them to take the boy to a hospital. The child died in the backseat as they raced to the nearest clinic.
Nehru did not pull into Wardha until two o’clock. He leaped out of the car, disheveled and distraught, and brushed past a sari-clad hostess waiting to drape a marigold garland around his neck. As his concerned colleagues gathered around, he recounted the morning’s tragedy, his eyes troubled and hollow.
After he had narrated his tale, one of the Congress leaders handed him the viceroy’s sealed letter. They were eager to know its contents. Talks over the formation of a new government had been going on for weeks now, and the Congressmen had a good idea what the missive might say. As Nehru reached for the invitation that would redeem the great struggle that had defined each of their lives, his comrades could see drops of the dead child’s blood on the sleeve of his white cotton kurta.7 The world for which they had fought was finally coming into view. But from this point on, as generations of Indians and Pakistanis were to discover, death would be its most constant companion.
Nehru did not celebrate—and not only because of the accident. He and the normally voluble Congress leaders ignored reporters’ queries and instead spent the evening monopolizing Wardha’s one telegraph machine, firing off cables to Delhi. They had been arguing for weeks over how and whether to join the administration. Would this new government be treated as a proper cabinet—what Nehru called a “provisional national government”—rather than a rubber-stamp council? Could the viceroy still veto his new Indian ministers? Who would control India’s foreign policy? What about the Indian Army?8
Having spent nine of the past twenty-five years in the Raj’s prisons, Nehru had good reason not to trust the British. He was friendly with several members of the Labour Cabinet in London, including colorless Prime Minister Clement Attlee (“a sheep in sheep’s clothing,” as his predecessor, Winston Churchill, was once thought to have sneered).9 All of them professed their eagerness to liberate India. But their actions had yet to match their words. Nehru thought the British leftists an especially “muddleheaded lot”—more infuriating in some ways than Churchill’s jingoistic Tories, who at least were straightforward adversaries.10 The Labourites approached the question of Indian independence like lawyers, deliberate in their actions and ever mindful of constitutional proprieties. The transitional government the viceroy was proposing in his letter seemed to Nehru a typically timid advance: India would be freer than before, but not quite free.
Named viceroy by Churchill in 1943, Viscount Archibald Percival Wavell of Winchester and Cyrenaica was a solemn, one-eyed field marshal renowned for his early victories over the Italians in the Libyan desert. In temperament he could not have posed a greater contrast to India’s heir apparent. Where Nehru’s rhetoric overflowed with melodramatic imagery and potted Marxist theory, Wavell had a disconcerting aversion to conversation.11 At his first meeting with the French general Charles de Gaulle, the two men stared silently at a map of North Africa for several minutes. Afterward Wavell allegedly grunted, “I like that man. He doesn’t talk.”12 The viceroy loathed politics and politicians, and saw himself more as a steady, benign regimental commander, responsible for the welfare of tens of millions of simple Indian peasants. The moody Nehru, on the other hand, burst into tirades at the slightest provocation, particularly at any reminder of Britain’s overlordship.
But Wavell was also a realist, as his official reports and thoughtful journal show. He clearly understood that the British Raj—that implausible, byzantine structure of British military officers, district commissioners, magistrates, tax collectors, irrigation engineers, police inspectors, tribal agents, and other officials who, alongside thousands of Indian colleagues, administered the vast subcontinent—was close to collapse. The war had halted the flow of British recruits into the once-legendary Indian Civil Service; incumbents had worked years without leave, and many were nearing retirement. The young British conscripts who had flooded into the country to fight the Japanese now wanted to go home. They weren’t interested in suppressing legions of Congress protesters; in fact, some British units had already mutinied at the slow pace of demobilization.13
Britain itself was broke. India, the Jewel in the Crown, was no longer the fabled storehouse of rubies and spices that had helped to bankroll England’s rise as a world power. During the war His Majesty’s Government had instead racked up huge debts to India—more than $6 billion (almost $80 billion in today’s dollars)—for the soldiers it had sent to the deserts of North Africa, the boots and parachutes produced in its factories, the care and feeding of British troops battling the Japanese in Burma. After the war the government had had to beg for a $3.75 billion loan from the United States; the money had been approved, after months of difficult negotiations, only in May 1946.14 Having just granted the Philippines its independence, the United States did not now intend for its dollars to be used to prop up a dying empire. Whether financially or politically, Britain could no longer afford to rule India.
After he had dispatched his letter to Nehru, Wavell had begun to put the finishing touches on a stark document he called his “breakdown plan.” The paper argued that unless Attlee’s government could come to a peaceful agreement with Indian leaders about how and when to transfer power, the British would be forced to evacuate the subcontinent, bit by bit. The current British-run government in India, Wavell declared, would not last more than another eighteen months.15
A lifelong officer, the viceroy also appreciated one further point that the distrustful Nehru had missed. Freeing India had become vital not just to Britain’s bottom line but to its global strategic position. The Red Army had begun menacing Turkey and northern Persia. That very week, cold warriors in Washington were preparing orders for a bristling naval taskforce, led by the new supercarrier USS Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to steam into the Mediterranean as a warning to Moscow to watch its step. Not even a year after the end of the Second World War, a third was looking like a very real possibility.
A draft report by the British chiefs of staff underscored the importance of having India as an ally in any such conflict. The subcontinent’s factories and recruiting grounds could churn out a nearly inexhaustible supply of men and materiel. From Indian shores, naval forces could dominate the entire Indian Ocean region.16 Already the Pentagon had begun asking the British about gaining access to air bases in northwest India, from which U.S. bombers could attack Soviet industrial centers in the Urals.17
By the same token, Washington and London were both keenly aware that if India joined the Soviet camp, the country would pose a major threat by cutting Britain off from its eastern possessions. If Russian warships could steam out of Bombay or Karachi, they could easily blockade the vital Persian Gulf. Communist agitators had not yet made much headway among the Indian masses. But strikes had lately been roiling India’s biggest cities, and millions of Indians had been thr
own out of work by the closing of war-related industries. The Congressmen dashing off cables from Wardha had been lucky: telegraph clerks had been back on the job less than twenty-four hours after a strike had snarled communications all over the country.
Held against its will, dominated from London, roiled by a fierce and well-organized liberation movement, India would likely become, as Wavell put it, “a running sore which [would] sap the strength of the British Empire.”18 If Britain could manage an amicable transition, on the other hand, the subcontinent could become an indispensable link in the emerging anti-Soviet cordon. British troops could come home, where they were desperately needed to rebuild the country. India, Wavell felt sure, held far more potential as a free and willing ally than as a resentful subject nation.
Although Nehru and Gandhi remained wary, the battle that had consumed them for the last three decades had been won. Their goal—what the Mahatma called purna swaraj, complete self-rule—was now Britain’s as well. The imperialists weren’t fighting them. Other Indians were.
On paper, Nehru had much in common with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the most powerful Muslim leader in India. Both men were Anglophiles, barristers trained at London’s Inns of Court. Both were more comfortable in their precisely accented English than in their native tongues. Although not a defiant unbeliever like Nehru, Jinnah enjoyed a nightly drink, which of course is forbidden in Islam. He showed up at mosque only to give speeches, not to pray. Both were proud, rigid men—and dangerously thin-skinned. Each was surrounded by admirers and sycophants, and yet each was, in his own way, painfully lonely.