Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  Jinnah played on those fears deftly. Muslims complained of petty indignities, many of them relating to their children’s education. In places pupils were required to salute Mahatma Gandhi’s picture each morning or to sing the Congress anthem, “Bande Mataram,” which many Muslims found objectionable for its likening of India to a Hindu goddess. Teachers in government schools allegedly favored Hindi over Urdu.56 Jinnah began loudly decrying these “atrocities.” He launched a newspaper, Dawn, whose editorials dispensed with any pretense to objectivity or moderation. The paper ran a thirty-two-part series on the supposed “holocaust” being perpetrated by Congress entitled “It Shall Never Happen Again.” Across India, “tragedy followed tragedy and blood flowed instead of the milk of human kindness,” the paper fulminated. “Terror stalked the countryside and rendered the helpless, outnumbered few despairing and desperate.”57

  Where Jinnah had once criticized Gandhi for exploiting religion, he now started holding forth on the “magic power” of the Muslim community.58 In by-elections, League flyers assured Muslim voters that God and the Prophet favored the party’s candidates. “Jinnah seems to have gone to pieces,” Nehru wrote in exasperation to Padmaja.59 In public, the League president exchanged his suits for the knee-length sherwani and leggings of a Mughal nobleman. He persuaded the local Muslim powerbrokers who had dominated elections in the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab to throw their weight behind him nationally. Within a year of losing 95 percent of the Muslim vote, Jinnah began describing the Muslim League as the “sole representative” of India’s Muslims.

  Nehru refused to take any of this seriously. “Am I to insult my intelligence by talking baby-talk of an age gone by?” he wrote to a Muslim colleague who had switched allegiance from Congress to the League.60 Nehru remained convinced that the supposed “Hindu-Muslim divide” was nothing but a nuisance, that both communities would soon realize they were being exploited equally by the British and Indian upper classes. After an abortive public exchange of letters with Jinnah—which the League leader concluded by sighing, “It is really difficult for me to make you understand the position any further”—Nehru gave up.61

  Jawaharlal had become Jinnah’s most useful foil, and he would play a critical role in the demand for Pakistan. The global cataclysm that would make so many things possible, even as it destroyed so much, had begun. War between Japan and China broke out in the summer of 1937. Germany seized Austria on 12 March 1938. By mid-1939, Europe, Asia, and Africa were aflame. For years now Nehru, like his leftist friends in Europe, had been warning of the looming Fascist threat. Yet when the viceroy—Wavell’s predecessor, the ponderous and inflexible Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow—declared on 3 September 1939 that India had joined the fight against Hitler, the only Indian he involved in the decision was the “very slow, old moulvi,” or Muslim scholar, who translated the announcement into Urdu just minutes before it was broadcast on All-India Radio.62 Only afterward did Linlithgow call in Indian political leaders to solicit their support for the war effort. Nehru was outraged.

  Most of the Congress leaders, including Gandhi, thought it was unseemly to haggle for concessions while the British were battling for their lives. But Nehru was the party’s foreign policy “expert,” and his official response to Linlithgow’s plea ran to several thousand words. Its rhetoric was soaring. “The crisis that has overtaken Europe,” Nehru wrote, “is not of Europe only but of humanity and will not pass like other crises and wars, leaving the essential structure of the present-day world intact.”63 At the same time, Indians could hardly be expected to lay down their lives for an empire that promised to keep them in chains. Nehru first wanted a declaration that India would be freed after the war and allowed to write its own constitution. In the meantime, he wanted Indian politicians to be brought into a war council under the viceroy, so that Indians themselves would take part in leading the war effort. Gandhi hailed the manifesto’s author as an “artist.”64

  To Jinnah, Nehru’s resolution looked more like blackmail. The British had beaten back all of Gandhi’s great satyagraha campaigns over the past twenty years. But as one rattled viceroy famously said, it had been a close-run thing: “Gandhi’s was the most colossal experiment in the world’s history, and it came within an inch of succeeding.”65 Britain could not risk another nationwide rebellion now: “American opinion of our policy in India is already sufficiently critical,” the War Cabinet in London warned. “What it would be if a non-cooperation movement led, as it did last time, to the arrest and detention without trial of as many as 25,000 persons . . . is easy to imagine.”66

  Nehru was making a play for independence, Jinnah feared. The League leader knew that if the British granted his rival’s demands, Congress would inevitably dominate any interim government, as well as any constitution-writing body set up after the war. The League—and Jinnah himself—would again be shut out of power.

  The idea of breaking off a separate Muslim homeland had been floating around League circles for some time. While in exile in England, Jinnah had met the thirty-five-year-old Cambridge student Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, who had invented an acronym for this erstwhile nation. The first letter, “P,” stood for his own province of Punjab; “A” for the rough tribal areas bordering Afghanistan; “K” for the lush, mountainous kingdom of Kashmir; “S” for the arid coastal province of Sind; and “TAN” for the great wasteland of Baluchistan: PAKSTAN. (The “I” was added later to make the name more mellifluous.)

  At the time Jinnah had been skeptical. “He seemed to regard Rahmat Ali’s concept . . . as some sort of Walt Disney dreamland, if not a Wellsian nightmare,” a friend said.67 But now, as a classified British intelligence report indicated, Jinnah was looking for a way “to show the League as the full-blooded ally of Great Britain against her two enemies, the Nazis and the Congress.” When he met the viceroy in mid-March 1940, Jinnah essentially offered Pakistan to the British as a permanent foothold in the subcontinent—“a Muslim area run by Muslims in collaboration with Great Britain.”68 Importantly, staunch Pakistan would encompass the vulnerable Northwest Frontier, where the Nazis and their then-allies the Russians were most likely to invade.

  Two weeks later at a meeting in Lahore, the League set the creation of Pakistan—defined as “geographically contiguous . . . areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North Western and Eastern Zones of India”—as its official goal.69 By adding vast, Muslim-majority Bengal, Pakistan would gain the wealth brought in by the great port and manufacturing hub of Calcutta, though this eastern wing would be cut off from the rest of the country by the crown of northern India. Privately Jinnah reassured skeptical colleagues that Partition was only a bargaining chip: the British could not hand over power to Nehru as long as Hindus and Muslims did not even agree on whether they were one nation or two.70

  More than a few Muslim figures nevertheless wondered whether the League leader was wise to set their community against other Indians. The Aga Khan, the fabulously wealthy leader of the Ismaili sect and a one-time ally of Jinnah’s, worried about the bad blood that Muslim obstructionism was stirring up. “The bitter enmity now raised by the League and its leaders,” he warned in a letter to a friend, “will have to be paid for a hundred percent.”71

  The gracious Deccan Queen passenger train normally covered the 150 miles between Bombay and the hill town of Poona in three hours. Bombay’s industrialists and socialites made the trip often, winding through the thickly forested flanks of the Western Ghats to escape the soggy heat along the coast. In racing season, their villas glittered with festival lights and resounded to the clink of champagne flutes.

  In early November 1942, Nehru’s sister Betty boarded the familiar train on a grimmer mission—to visit her husband, Raja, at Poona’s Yeravada Prison. The trip took her ten hours. Heavily armed soldiers repeatedly halted the train at checkpoints, and in spots passengers had to wait while the tracks were cleared of debris. “All along the line we saw dead cattle, overturned railway ca
rriages, and the wreckage of war,” Betty later recalled.72

  This was not the work of the Nazis, sweeping down through the subcontinent like the Aryan invaders after whom they modeled themselves. Nor had the Japanese wreaked upon India the same devastation Southeast Asia had suffered after Pearl Harbor. In British eyes, the field marshal responsible for this mayhem was none other than Betty’s older brother, Jawaharlal.

  The early years of the war had been especially trying for Nehru. Across the globe the Allies were battling desperately against Fascist hordes. Yet throughout it all he had sat on the sidelines, watching in disgust as colonial officials played tennis and put on black tie for dinner, while one by one their Asian territories fell to the enemy. Japan seized Hong Kong in December 1941. The Imperial Army would drive the British out of Malaya in January, and then conquer Singapore two weeks later. The Dutch East Indies fell in March, Burma in May.

  Nehru blamed Jinnah as much as the British for perpetuating this state of affairs. Shortly after the League passed its 1940 Pakistan resolution, Winston Churchill had come to power in London. The blustery Tory diehard had begun his career in India as a Kiplingesque subaltern, subduing the Pathan tribes along the Northwest Frontier. His mental picture of the subcontinent had not changed much since then; as far as he was concerned, the empire had reigned over India for centuries, and it would do so for several more. The Atlantic Charter he signed with his American counterpart, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which listed the restoration of “self-government” as one of the Allied war aims, did not, he imagined, apply to Britain’s colonies.73

  As Jinnah had intended, the Pakistan demand gave the prime minister an excuse to stall any further concessions to the Congress. In August 1940, Churchill authorized the viceroy to declare that the British “could not contemplate” handing over power to any “government the authority of which was directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life.”74 Nehru raged that Jinnah had won a “veto” over political progress.

  By the middle of 1942, with the Japanese on India’s eastern borders, Nehru’s frustration was peaking. “I have the strongest feeling . . . that the British mean to hang on here and we shall never get rid of them if we do not strike now,” he told the leftist American writer Edgar Snow in Wardha at the end of May.75

  Snow had traveled to the Mahatma’s ashram to interview Gandhi and Nehru, but also to deliver a message. The journalist had met with Roosevelt before leaving the States, and the president had told him to “ask Nehru to write me a letter and tell me exactly what he wants me to do for India.”76 The United States had developed a keen interest in the subcontinent since entering the war against Japan. The American planes resupplying Chiang Kai-shek’s beleaguered forces in China flew out of air bases in eastern India. If the Japanese overran the country, the vital Middle East would be squeezed in an Axis pincer movement. At this critical moment, Roosevelt did not want Indians sitting out the war.

  The Mahatma, on the other hand, had decided that the time had come to launch another satyagraha, an “all-out” struggle that would not end until the British had “quit India,” bag and baggage.77 Nehru was torn, fearing that a widespread disobedience movement might open the door to Japanese invasion. He spent weeks in a state of “pitiable perplexity,” according to the government’s Intelligence Bureau.78 But by the middle of June, two weeks after Snow’s visit, he was “reported to have given in to Gandhi,” Linlithgow cabled to London.79 According to one of his Congress colleagues, Nehru hoped that if nothing else, the Mahatma’s threat might encourage Roosevelt to intervene more forcefully.80 If anyone could force Churchill to bend, Nehru was betting, the powerful Americans could.

  It was a bad bet. “The political crisis in India had matured a year too early for the United States,” Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles later reflected.81 Roosevelt had clashed with Churchill over India before—once even prompting a drunken threat from the Briton to resign. “Take India if that is what you want! Take it, by all means!” Churchill spluttered to an American diplomat in Washington, red-faced and nearly incoherent. “But I warn you that if I open the door a crack there will be the greatest bloodbath in all history.”82 Roosevelt, who had just begun negotiating the Normandy invasion with his British allies, could not risk an outright break with London now.83

  The British, not the Americans, delivered the reply to Gandhi’s “Quit India” resolution, which the Congress approved on 9 August. That night police swept in after midnight and arrested the Mahatma and the rest of the Congress leadership. Unprepared, they had left their followers no instructions. Riots broke out spontaneously in several cities. Within a week, the violence had spread and become more organ­ized—and bloodier. Across wide stretches of northern India, crudely armed peasants killed and drove out police and government officials from several districts. Saboteurs blocked or blew up rail lines to prevent the movement of troops and supplies. The army struggled for weeks, sometimes months, to regain control over the monsoon-soaked countryside in the United Provinces, Bihar, and Bengal.

  Many Britons—even liberal ones—believed they were facing a well-planned, traitorous attempt by the Congress to overthrow the Raj. When authorities responded with brutal force—using tactics that one British governor later admitted “dragged out in the cold light of [day], nobody could defend”—many simply looked away.84 British troops opened fire on demonstrators repeatedly. In the Midnapore district of Bengal, police were accused of gang-raping seventy-three women to terrorize the rebels. Prisoners were forced to lie naked on blocks of ice until they passed out.85 The viceroy authorized the strafing of villagers from the air.

  Churchill saw no reason to treat the Congress as anything but war criminals, even though no plot to overthrow the Raj was ever discovered. Nehru and the rest of the party’s high command—along with thousands of their followers—were locked up for the rest of the war.

  Nehru’s failed gamble left the political field wide open for Jinnah. Until this point, Linlithgow had held the League leader at a wary remove, finding him useful in some cases, troublesome in others. Now, as one of the viceroy’s aides told Edgar Snow, Jinnah was “sitting on the finest velvet in the land.”86 The British were convinced that they needed to maintain the goodwill of Indian Muslims, given their high representation in the army, not to mention the importance of Britain’s Muslim allies in the Middle East. Linlithgow did not fret about the danger of inflating Jinnah’s stature: “He represents a minority, and a minority that can only effectively hold its own with our assistance,” the viceroy breezily reminded London.87

  In province after province, British governors began ousting Congress-friendly ministries and replacing them with what they saw as more malleable Leaguers. By the middle of 1943, the party and its allies controlled all of the provinces that Jinnah had envisioned as part of “Pakistan,” from Sind in the west to Assam in the east. The extent of Jinnah’s personal authority over these territories is questionable: regional Muslim leaders paid lip service to the League, as long as Jinnah did not meddle too much in their affairs.88 But that didn’t stop him from boasting of his sway. Almost 99 percent of the subcontinent’s 100 million Muslims were behind him, Jinnah confidently declared at the League’s annual session in Delhi in April 1943, “leaving aside some who are traitors, cranks, supermen or lunatics.”89

  A few years earlier, a Muslim newspaper editor had given Jinnah a new honorific to compete with the Mahatma’s: Quaid-i-Azam, or “Great Leader.” Jinnah now made a conscious effort to live up to the title. He staged a grand entrance to the Delhi meeting, parading 5 miles through the capital enthroned on the back of an open truck, his hand raised in a half-salute like Il Duce. Nehru and Gandhi were no longer the only ones who could draw a crowd. “On that day it was difficult to believe that the entire population of Delhi was not only Muslim but Muslim Leaguers,” one excited observer recalled.90 Supporters were packed tightly along Jinnah’s route, and from balconies above women flung rose petals down at the Quaid
. Fierce men in crisp, gray uniforms—members of the party’s private militia, the Muslim League National Guards—surrounded Jinnah with drawn swords. At the next League session, held in his seaside hometown of Karachi in December 1943, the Quaid arrived on a carriage decorated to resemble a sailing ship, drawn by thirty-one caparisoned camels.91

  While no doubt gratifying to his bruised ego, all this pageantry had a hard-nosed political purpose as well. Jinnah could not be sure that Nehru and the other Congress leaders would remain behind bars. Jinnah needed to establish himself and the League as an equal force as rapidly as possible. His most powerful weapon was Pakistan. “He . . . preaches Pakistan with an intensity not unlike Hitler’s advocacy of national socialism,” reads a February 1943 report by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.92 “As far as Muslim India is concerned, we have forged our own charter and that is Pakistan,” Jinnah repeatedly declared. “We are not going to budge an inch from the position we have taken. Nothing will make us swerve from our goal.”93

  Jinnah batted aside all attempts to get him to sketch out his vision in more detail. Pakistan’s magic was as a fantasy—“a kind of Muslim Never-Never Land, a fairy tale Utopia,” the OSS called it.94 If no one could say what it was, everyone could see what they wanted in it. Landlords envisioned rich fields being added to their holdings. Farmers imagined a life free of Hindu moneylenders. Bureaucrats saw themselves ascending to senior posts. Mullahs pictured a society lived according to the Koran.