Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  An American diplomat who met with League leaders in the Punjab capital of Lahore reported that they did not seem to have the foggiest idea of what an independent Muslim nation would entail: their demand was “clearly emotional rather than rational.”95 That was the point. At bottom, Jinnah was promising his followers the same vague but powerfully attractive thing as Nehru—a future in which they controlled their own destiny. As an airy vision, Pakistan would prove to be dramatically effective: the League grew from 112,078 members in 1941 to an estimated 2 million in 1944.96 Jinnah’s personal stature swelled along with the party’s membership rolls.

  Watching all this from his prison cell, Nehru grew more and more outraged. He and the other Congress leaders—except for Gandhi, who was confined in one of the Aga Khan’s palaces in Poona—spent the war imprisoned in the imposing fort at Ahmednagar, 160 miles west of Bombay. The barracks had been converted into makeshift cells, separated by 7-foot-high wooden partitions. The rooms lacked ventilation, electric lights, or fans. Windows had been bricked up. “Very cheerless and uncomfortable-looking,” Nehru judged in one of his first diary entries from the prison.97

  This spell in prison was his longest yet—1,040 days, almost a full three years—and in many ways, the most frustrating. Outside the walls of Ahmednagar, a new world was being born; inside, Nehru had to content himself with tending a prison-yard garden, his pebble collection, and a stray cat he nicknamed Chando. Banalities and day-to-day details pepper his diary:

  11 January 1943

  Felt unwell

  30 January 1943

  Sowed carnation seeds in box. New canvas shoes

  12 April 1943

  New canvas shoes

  13 April 1943

  Rain—rain—continuous rain! The monsoon

  5 May 1944

  The cat tragedy! Poor Chando hit inadvertently over head by cook—concussion of the brain. Hovering between life and death

  14 May 1944

  Cat Chando died in hospital

  20 June 1944

  New canvas shoes98

  The journals also betray a mounting sense of anger at Jinnah. In Nehru’s mind, the Quaid had replaced the British as the figure most responsible for India’s continued thralldom. Jinnah’s Pakistan was “mad and foolish and fantastic and criminal and . . . a huge barrier to all progress,” Nehru fumed. He found Jinnah’s speech at the Delhi League meeting, which had lasted for three hours, “blatant, vulgar, offensive, egoistical, vague. . . . What a man! And what a misfortune for India and for the Muslims that he should have so much influence!” The Quaid’s rising profile Nehru attributed purely to “opportunism raised to the nth degree, pomposity and filthy language, abuse . . . a capacity for what is considered ‘clever’ politics, vulgarity . . . total incomprehension of the events & forces that are shaping the world, &c, &c.”99

  Much worse was that Jinnah had, to Nehru’s mind, transformed the once-glorious freedom struggle into a squalid sectarian feud between Hindus and Muslims. “What a lot Jinnah & his Muslim League have to answer for!” Nehru wrote in September 1943. “They have lowered the whole tone of our public life, embittered it, increased mutual dislikes and hatreds, and made us contemptible before the outside world.” By the end of 1943, almost four full years before Partition, Nehru was already tempted to give the Quaid his Pakistan. Allowing Jinnah to run his own little country might at least “keep [him] far away and [prevent] his muddled and arrogant head from interfering continually in India’s progress.”100 Like the irksome “Hindu-Muslim divide,” Nehru just wanted his rival to go away.

  The Quaid drummed his long, bony fingers on the table and watched the hands on the clock tick toward nine. A black telephone sat on the desk before him like a silent reproach. The clock hands kept moving, as did the Quaid’s fingers. The phone did not ring.

  Jinnah called for his secretary and furiously dictated a note, addressed to the premier of the mighty Punjab province, Sir Malik Khizar Hayat Khan Tiwana. Khizar was a slim, forty-four-year-old landowner, given to wearing enormous white turbans crowned by a single peacock feather; his family had roots in the Punjab going back to the fifteenth century. Like the leaders of the other “Pakistan” provinces, he supported the Quaid and the Muslim League in theory. But the Punjab was a special case. Although Muslims formed a slight majority of the population, they could not have governed the province without the cooperation of its powerful Hindu and Sikh communities. Factions representing all three groups ruled together in a so-called Unionist coalition, with Khizar at its head.

  To maintain harmony, the Unionists focused on practical matters—taxes, grain prices, pensions—and avoided the political arguments that divided Hindus and Muslims elsewhere in the country. Khizar did not spend much time talking about Pakistan, which his Muslim predecessor as premier had privately mocked as “Jinnistan.”101

  Despite his newfound clout, Jinnah remained paranoid about any challengers to his authority. Already Leaguers elsewhere were murmuring about how the Punjab’s Muslims were flouting the Quaid’s authority. Jinnah spent the last week of April 1944 in the Punjab capital, Lahore, arguing with Khizar over his divided loyalties and demanding that he pledge unconditional fealty to the League. Khizar had ignored Jinnah’s 27 April deadline for a response; when the Quaid’s note arrived later that evening, Khizar refused to accept it. Jinnah tried to deliver it twice more, even sending the letter back to Khizar’s bungalow in the hands of two top aides.102 After midnight, the League leader called in a rage. “You are heading for disaster,” he told Khizar before slamming down the receiver. “I wish you Godspeed.”103

  Much more was at stake in the Punjab than Jinnah’s slighted pride. Without the province, Pakistan would be a shell. A vast network of British-designed canals had transformed the Punjab’s scrub desert into some of the most fertile land on the subcontinent. Its recruiting grounds were the mainstay of the Indian Army: of the more than 2.5 million Indians who served during World War II, nearly a million were Punjabis.104 In the Rawalpindi district, one out of every two adult males took up arms for the empire.105 Sind, Baluchistan, and the Northwest Frontier—the other three provinces slated for the western half of Pakistan—together boasted only about 8 million people. The Punjab housed more than 28 million.106

  Jinnah’s Congress rivals appreciated the Punjab’s importance as well as he did. When they were released after the fall of Hitler, Nehru and his compatriots quickly took stock of the changed political landscape. Jinnah could no longer be dismissed as a nonentity. If they wanted to prevent Pakistan, they would have to expose its inherent flaws.

  In September 1945, with a new Labour government in power in London talking about granting India her freedom, Nehru laid out the official Congress position on Pakistan. No Muslim areas would be forced to remain part of India if they were determined to secede. Congress leaders could not “think of compelling people in any territorial unit to remain in the Indian Union against their declared and established will.”107

  At the same time, however, Nehru seized on a demographic reality that had always undermined Jinnah’s case for Pakistan. In the Punjab and Bengal—by far the biggest and richest of the Pakistan provinces—non-Muslims nearly equaled Muslims in numbers. Muslims were a clear majority only in the western half of the Punjab and the eastern half of Bengal, which did not include Calcutta. The Quaid, Nehru argued, could hardly expect to include the predominantly non-Muslim halves of either province in his Pakistan if they did not wish to join.

  Such a truncated Pakistan, Jinnah believed, would hardly be viable economically; he dismissed it as “a shadow and a husk, a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten” state.108 And that’s just what Nehru wanted it to be—an unattractive prospect that might lead Muslims back to the idea of a united India. Some Congress members urged Nehru to sit down with Jinnah and work out a more amicable compromise. “Never!” Nehru snapped at a tempestuous party meeting in Bombay. “We shall face the Muslim League and fight it.”109

  He would get his ch
ance. The British insisted that Indians first sort out their competing claims democratically before negotiating independence. Elections were called for the provincial legislatures and Central Assembly in India during the winter months of 1945–1946.

  The Punjab’s British governor, Sir Bertrand Glancy, feared that League electioneers would deliberately inflame passions in his province: “The uninformed Muslim will be told that the question he is called on to answer at the polls is—‘Are you a true believer or an infidel and a traitor?’”110 Indeed, one Punjabi mullah warned that any Muslims who did not vote for the League and Pakistan would be “fuel for the fires of Hell.”111

  League volunteers in the Punjab were told to parade the Koran and hold rallies in mosques and shrines, even to lead prayers “like Holy Warriors.”112 Many Sufi saints, or pirs, issued fatwas saying that the “Muslim League is the only Islamic community and . . . all the rest are Kafirs [unbelievers].”113 Their followers listened. In some districts, the League won three-quarters of the Muslim vote.

  Even the whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking Jinnah emerged as a messianic figure. Near the end of the campaign, a League worker named Habib proudly described to Jinnah’s secretary how Islam had become inseparable from the idea of Pakistan in the minds of Punjabi villagers. “They think that the League wants to establish a Muslim State,” Habib wrote, “and about Quaid-i-Azam they think that he is some big moulvi who has a long beard and is very religious.” At one village, an old man proudly claimed he had resisted pressure to support the Unionists because he knew “if he voted against the League his eiman [faith] would be in danger.”114

  Across the province, fired-up League supporters began asking “when jihad would be declared,” and warning the Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs that “Pakistan would soon be a reality, that the only laws that would prevail in a short time would be the Muslim laws of the Shariat, and [that] non-Muslims would have to bring their complaints to the mosques for settlement.”115 Yet the vote was close. While the League emerged as the largest single party, it fell just short of a majority in the Punjab legislature—and unsurprisingly could find no Hindu or Sikh allies to help form a government. In Lahore, Khizar survived as the head of a shrunken and fragile Unionist coalition.

  Publicly Jinnah touted the “knockout blow” that his party had delivered to Nehru’s Congress. The League had thoroughly dominated the Muslim vote nationally, winning all but one of the Muslim seats in the Central Assembly and taking control of Sind and giant Bengal. Still, the Quaid knew it wasn’t enough. At the end of March 1946, he met with Lt.-Gen. Sir Arthur Smith, the deputy commander in chief of the Indian Army, to discuss Pakistan’s defense needs. Tensions were rising around the postwar world. That same month, Churchill first warned of an “iron curtain” descending across Europe. Newspapers ran alarmist maps with great swooping arrows indicating a possible Red Army thrust toward Tehran.

  Smith was categorical in his opinion. Unless Pakistan included all of the Punjab and Bengal—especially Calcutta, which accounted for 85 percent of India’s engineering capacity and half of its sea trade—Jinnah’s state was unlikely to survive.116 Even with those areas, Smith did not believe Pakistan could defend itself against a Soviet invasion alone. If he was right, he concluded in a confidential analysis written at Jinnah’s request, “the case for Pakistan falls to the ground.”117

  At this moment, barely a year before independence, Jinnah essentially gave up the demand for Pakistan—a fact not stressed in Pakistani textbooks. In the spring of 1946, Clement Attlee’s British government proposed a complex compromise. India would remain a sovereign whole but with a weak central government controlling only defense, foreign affairs, and communications like the telegraph and rails. Individual provinces would hold the vast majority of powers.

  At the same time, the populations of Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan, and the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), and in the northeast those of Bengal and Assam, would get to vote on whether they wanted to band together and create semiautonomous administrations overseeing their two regions. Jinnah would get a sort of “Pakistan Lite.” India—and most importantly for British defense planners, the Indian Army—would remain united. So would the Punjab and Bengal.

  The only alternative, the British insisted, was the truncated, half-sized, dangerously vulnerable Pakistan Jinnah had already considered and rejected. Emotions were still running high after the hard-fought elections, and the Quaid had not prepared his followers for compromise. But he knew he had to take the deal. One British official who met with Jinnah found him “nervous and edgy, less in command of himself than I had seen him before. . . . For the first time he was fearful of meeting the Muslim League [leadership].”118 At a raucous, closed-door session in Delhi on 5 June, speaker after speaker rose to challenge Jinnah and ask how they could possibly accept an ersatz Pakistan given all that the Quaid had promised them.

  This was just a “first step,” Jinnah protested. Once the Pakistan regional groups were established in the northwest and northeast, nothing would stop them from seceding later. He compared the fragile plan to a ship. “We can work on the two decks, provincial and group,” he urged, “and blow up the topmast” at any time.119

  He won the vote, but at a cost. Given the extensive network of Congress spies, some version of the Quaid’s remarks most likely filtered back to Nehru. Like Jinnah, he was being pressed by supporters not to accept the British compromise. Congress Socialists—a rising faction within the party—had taken Nehru’s bombastic speeches literally. They had expected to win a strong state unfettered by ties to the empire, and certainly not hobbled by Jinnah’s shadow Pakistan. Nehru tried to defend his own reluctant acceptance of the British plan. “When India is free, India will do just what it likes,” he insisted at a Congress meeting in Bombay on 7 July. “We are not bound by a single thing.”120 He repeated his faux pas at a press conference a few days later.

  Jinnah immediately cried foul. Perhaps he should have ignored Nehru’s logorrhea, which another Congress leader attributed to “emotional insanity.”121 But the Quaid’s leadership had always been based partly on bluff, partly on his image as an inveterate defender of Muslim rights. He could not afford to have that reputation challenged so publicly.

  On 26 July, Jinnah called reporters to his stately Malabar Hill mansion. Nearing his seventh decade, he remained a legendarily natty dresser. Margaret Bourke-White remembered him wearing a perfectly tailored gray suit. His tie and socks matched his silver hair.122

  Jinnah spoke in a curiously hushed smoker’s rasp. Nehru and the Congress Party were not the only ones who could credibly threaten a rebellion, the Quaid told the assembled journalists. Muslims, too, could take their cause to the streets. “Why do you expect me alone to sit with folded hands? I also am going to make trouble,” he declared.123 The next day, in a hall lined with green bunting and beneath a heroic, enlarged portrait of himself, Jinnah told the League leadership that he was rejecting the British compromise and calling for “direct action” to win a fully sovereign Pakistan. The campaign would kick off three weeks later, on 16 August. This time the Muslim dignitaries roared in approval—one “with such vehemence,” an observer recalled, “that his dentures parted from his gums and found a resting place in the palm of his right hand.”124

  3

  Madhouse

  AS HIS PLANE CIRCLED over the airport in Peshawar, capital of the Northwest Frontier Province, Nehru could see a churning mob lining the edges of the runway. The protesters were waving spears and steel-tipped lances, as well as black Muslim League flags. Bullets whistled past as the aircraft came in for a landing. Nehru had to sneak into town using side roads to avoid the scrum. It was an ignoble entrance for India’s de facto prime minister.1

  Exactly two months had passed since the Great Calcutta Killing. Until this point, Nehru had rarely if ever met with an Indian crowd that was not delirious in its love for him. The Islamic warriors of the NWFP—the forebears of the Taliban—proved a rude shock. On his five-day Oct
ober visit to the tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, the Congressman met with hostility nearly everywhere he went. At his first tribal jirga, four hundred long-bearded elders stood up from the hard, rocky ground and stalked off before Nehru had a chance to speak. At the second, he tried to explain that he had come to the frontier with “love” in his heart. “We will talk to Mr. Jinnah if we want to discuss Indian politics,” a Wazir tribesman snarled back.2

  Just days before, the League had at last agreed to join Nehru’s interim government. The marriage was forced and uneasy. Wavell had had to expend a great deal of energy nudging the two sides together. “It is weary work negotiating with these people,” the viceroy wrote in his journal. “It takes weeks or months to make any progress on a point which ordinary reasonable men would settle in an hour or so.”3 Among other things, Jinnah had demanded an equal stature to Nehru’s in the cabinet, an even split of the most powerful portfolios, and a veto over future cabinet appointments. The Congressmen had rejected all his conditions. The League finally joined the government anyway to prevent their rivals from cementing their grip on the levers of power. The move was blatantly cynical. Jinnah nominated mostly nonentities for cabinet posts, still unwilling to serve under Nehru himself.

  When they met to finalize the arrangements, Wavell had pleaded with the Quaid to approach the new coalition in a friendlier spirit. The whole point was to set aside the larger acrimony over Pakistan and concentrate—as the Unionists in the Punjab had for years—on more prosaic matters of administration. Wavell specifically urged Jinnah, in the interests of harmony, not to do anything to disrupt Nehru’s frontier trip. Jinnah had worded his reply carefully: “No instructions to stage demonstrations have been issued in this connection to our organization.”4