Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  The line between the two groups virtually disappeared in Bihar, where a Congress ministry held power. Hindus outnumbered Muslims seven to one in the predominantly rural province, which had witnessed some of the bloodiest fighting during the 1942 Quit India riots. Several districts had successfully resisted government control for months. Now, at the end of October 1946, the province was again seething. Many Bihari Hindus had worked in Calcutta and brought home graphic tales of the killings there. Scattered stabbings of Muslims were being reported in the capital, Patna, and other towns.

  Without consulting party leaders in Delhi, the Bihar Congress ministry decided to designate 25 October as “Noakhali Day.” All around the province, mass rallies were staged to commemorate the “martyrs” of eastern Bengal. Speaker after speaker—including local politicians from both the Congress and the Mahasabha—accused Muslims of seeking to exterminate or drive out the Hindu population of Noakhali. Through hissing loudspeakers they cried for vengeance. Crowds took up the ugly chant “Blood for blood!”39 The next day, more stabbings were reported, and Muslim shops in the capital were set aflame. On 31 October, the attacks worsened dramatically, with forty Muslims killed at a train station south of the capital.

  At first Bihar officials tried to downplay the violence. After their one-day lightning visit to Calcutta, Nehru and the other cabinet ministers stopped off in Patna on 3 November to survey the situation. Authorities assured the delegation that the trouble was localized, spontaneous, and “certainly not organised.” They estimated the death toll at no more than 300 people, in a province with nearly 30 million inhabitants.40 Troops had been called out, although outside of the cities, the army’s jeeps were having trouble slogging through the muddy landscape.

  The next day, however, just before Nehru was due to return to Delhi, air patrols reported that Hindu mobs up to five thousand strong were roaming the Bihar countryside. Peasant armies had gathered across the monsoon-flooded fields, carrying axes, spears, and torches. They were embarked on exactly the sort of pogrom they imagined had taken place in Noakhali.

  Compared to the free-for-all in Calcutta, this was a one-sided fight. Whole villages of defenseless Bihari Muslims were wiped out, corpses spread over half a mile or more. Mosques were desecrated and burned to ashes. Mobs laid siege to some Muslim hamlets for days at a time, and even attacked the police and military when they tried to escort terrified refugees to safety. The killers—simple Hindu farmers—were methodical. Months later, one investigator found a few bloodstained planks nailed together amid the ruins of a Muslim village; it had been used as a butcher block to maim and behead victims, including children.41 Independent estimates would eventually put the death toll at close to seven thousand Muslims.

  Nehru was appalled. He put off his return to Delhi and threw himself into the effort to quell the violence. He raced from town to town, berating the crowds of Hindus who came out to see him. Why were they chanting useless slogans like “Jai Hind!” and “Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jai!” (Long Live Mahatma Gandhi!), he demanded to know, urging them instead to protect their Muslim neighbors. If any of them wanted to join the mobs, he declared, they would “have to murder Jawaharlal first and then, by trampling over his corpse . . . satisfy [their] lust for blood.”42 He threatened to have the police gun them down and the air force bomb them if they did not desist.

  Nehru urged Bucher—who had also arrived in Bihar—to use all necessary force to put down the mobs. It was no easy task. At one Muslim village, a platoon of Madrassi soldiers had to open fire to fend off several thousand frenzied Hindus. When he heard that one hundred of the attackers had been killed by the fusillade, Nehru wrote to Padmaja Naidu, “Would you believe it? I was greatly relieved to hear it!”43

  During these few days, Bucher developed a lasting respect for Nehru’s courage. Flying over the unsettled countryside together, they came across mobs that had grown to fifteen thousand people or more. Bucher tossed teargas canisters out of the plane, to little effect. “Time and again, Jawaharlal said, ‘Try to land,’” Bucher recalled years later. “Sometimes we did and, regardless of danger, [he] would jump out of the aircraft and rush towards any mobs in the vicinity.”44 Another companion described to the New York Times’s George Jones watching Nehru accost the defiant ringleader of one posse and wrestle him to the ground, choking him nearly into unconsciousness.45

  Not even Nehru could stem the mobs’ bloodlust, however. The mood of the crowds that came out to see him became uglier. Some shouted “Go back!” and even “Jawaharlal Murdabad!” (Death to Jawaharlal!).46 He did not care. Before he had arrived in Bihar, Nehru had dismissed the League’s claims that a massacre was underway in the province. Now he wrote privately to his Congress colleagues in Delhi, “The real picture that I now find is quite as bad, and something even worse than anything that they had suggested. . . . There has been a definite attempt on the part of Hindu mobs to exterminate the Muslims. They have killed, indiscriminately, men, women and children en masse.”47

  In a letter to Padmaja Naidu, he described the Hindu attacks as “the extreme of brutality and inhumanity.”48 Calcutta had shown that fear could drive Hindus and Muslims to take up arms against one another. Bihar revealed a darker truth: where one community held an overwhelming majority, the killing quickly gained an unstoppable momentum. In a letter to the secretary of state for India, marked SECRET, a shocked Wavell admitted that the riots were “on the scale of numbers and degree of brutality, far beyond anything that I think has yet happened in India since British rule began.”49

  Yet if he felt sick at the Biharis’ behavior, Nehru would not accept the Congress’s responsibility for it. He could “only explain all this by saying that a madness had seized the people,” he wrote to his colleagues in Delhi.50 Nehru felt certain that some outside force must have perverted the villagers’ essentially peaceful natures. He praised the Bihar ministry fulsomely for taking firm action to suppress the violence.

  Ultimately, and astonishingly, Nehru decided that the culprit was the “unpatriotic and highly objectionable attitude of the Muslim League.”51 Hindu peasants must have been upset that Muslims—many of whom were landlords in Bihar—were blocking independence with the demand for Pakistan, and hence posing a “barrier to their social and economic hopes.” By the time the situation quieted and Nehru returned to Delhi, he was praising the “simple, peaceful and likable peasantry of Bihar,” who although they had done “something dreadful,” at least had desisted when told to do so.52

  This kind of sophistry incensed Jinnah and other Leaguers. They sent their own “fact-finding missions” into Bihar to interview refugees and came up with a much higher death toll of thirty thousand. Even if that number was exaggerated, the mountains of Muslim corpses in Bihar clearly dwarfed the few hundred Hindu dead in Noakhali.

  Congress leaders, including Nehru, nevertheless continued to lump the two episodes together, as though one balanced out the other. (Some Congressmen unhelpfully pointed out that while the death toll may have been higher in Bihar, more rapes were alleged in Noakhali.)53 Muslims deeply resented the fact that Gandhi had traveled to eastern Bengal at the beginning of November—when the violence there had ebbed—instead of to Bihar, which was then still out of control. The Mahatma argued that he could influence the Hindus of Bihar from afar, using moral persuasion. Bihari Muslims were not reassured.

  To add insult to injury, the instigators of the Bihar riots appeared to roam free. Just days later, in early November, Hindus in the Meerut district of the United Provinces turned on the Muslims among them, massacring hundreds in the town of Garhmukteshwar. According to some reports, the RSSS had held rallies nearby to incite the killers.54

  Friends noticed a change in Jinnah after the Bihar riots. His anger and self-righteousness no longer seemed put on for negotiating purposes. One Briton who met the Quaid a few weeks later said he did not “ever remember seeing [Jinnah] before in a worse mood, from the point of view of reaching agreement with anyone over anything.”55 Any shr
ed of trust the Quaid once had in Congress had disintegrated. “They are fooling the world,” he complained to Wavell on 19 November.56 For all of Gandhi’s and Nehru’s talk of nonviolence, how could Muslims believe any promises the Congress leaders might make about protecting them and their rights?

  The League’s toughs now had Jinnah’s ear. Before the war, the sword-wielding National Guards who surrounded the Quaid at public meetings had numbered less than two thousand nationwide. In October 1946, Jinnah appointed two new deputy commanders for the Guards.57 The man made responsible for the “Pakistan” areas was a shadowy figure named Khurshid Anwar, a Pathan from the Northwest Frontier Province. Described as “a complete adventurer,” Anwar had reportedly served as a railway guard during the war.58 According to one story, he had been dismissed for misappropriating mess funds; another claimed he had amassed a fortune from black marketeering.59

  Whatever the truth, Anwar’s main task was to expand the ranks of the Guards and to reorganize them as a proper armed militia—with uniforms, badges of rank, daily parades, and training in everything from the wooden batons known as lathis to swords and spears. “Some reports state that instruction is being given in the art of knife and acid throwing, and in the use of fire-arms,” a British intelligence brief added. Bihar provided a tremendous boost to the League’s recruiting, just as Noakhali had for Hindu militants. By the end of 1946, the Guards’ ranks had grown from 1,500 to over 60,000 often fanatic members. At one meeting, an impressed British informant noted, “about 40 out of 100 applicants who signed enlistment forms with their own blood were accepted.”60

  The Guards deployed in force in Bihar, taking over the relief camps set up by the provincial government for Muslim refugees and demanding that all aid be funneled through them. They lost no opportunity to flaunt the suffering of Muslims. Visiting one camp, Bihar’s British governor found only a single League aid worker: “a youth whose activities seemed to be confined to drafting manifestoes of a political nature.” This boy quickly rallied the refugees. They staged a demonstration for the governor’s benefit and were “ghoulish enough to dig up the bones and skulls of buried victims and strew them in my path,” he noted with a shudder.61

  Now, each side had its uniformed fanatics. And each side had political leaders who fanned the flames with their rhetoric. League prop­agandists visited Muslim communities across northern India with photographs from Bihar of unburied skeletons and mutilated refugees, and with the charred pages of Korans they claimed had been burned by Hindu mobs.

  If they had been given no oxygen, the furies released by Calcutta might possibly have flickered out in distant Noakhali. Instead they now raced westward. In early December, tribesmen in the Hazara region of the NWFP descended on Sikh villages and slaughtered nearly two dozen of their inhabitants, prompting thousands of others to flee the area. If the trouble spread next door to the powder-keg Punjab, officials feared, it would be nearly impossible to stop. At the end of November, Jinnah’s old foe Khizar banned all demonstrations in his province—whether by Hindus, Sikhs, or Muslims.

  Such measures were too little, too late, Wavell knew. League officials in the Punjab had already begun stockpiling weapons and steel helmets, and recruiting Muslim university students for “underground and secret work.”62 By December the Guards’ ranks in the province had grown to nearly 23,000.63 Since August, the viceroy had been pressing Attlee’s cabinet to approve his “breakdown plan,” which envisioned that the British would concentrate their forces just on the most contentious provinces in northern India while turning over the rest of the subcontinent to the Congress. He saw no other way to maintain order. The plan, he wrote, “might, from its nature, be called ‘Operation Ebb-Tide’”—a scheme to withdraw gracefully from an untenable position.64 Some wits in the Army allegedly gave the idea a more expressive name: Operation Madhouse.65

  The roar of the York’s four engines made conversation nearly impossible. That suited its passengers just fine. Once the No Smoking light went off, Jinnah, sitting in the first row of the viceroy’s plane, lit up a State Express 555 cigarette and buried his hawklike nose in a new screed about Pakistan entitled A Nation Betrayed.66 Nehru was seated directly behind him, dressed in a suit and tie instead of his normal kurta; a recent back injury furrowed his brow in pain. To distract himself, he plowed through two novels on the long flight to Malta—Rosamond Lehmann’s The Ballad and the Source and one of Sinclair Lewis’s last works, Cass Timberlane, the story of a doomed marriage between a fortysomething man of means and a beauty half his age. If the book reminded Nehru of Jinnah and Ruttie’s tragic romance, he did not let on. On Malta, where the York landed on three engines and could not go any further, the two rivals muttered only a couple of sentences to one another:

  JINNAH: Well, what have you been doing all day?

  NEHRU: Partly reading, partly sleeping, partly walking.

  Eventually another plane was found to finish the journey to London, where Prime Minister Attlee had invited the Indian leaders for last-ditch peace talks in early December. Wavell’s hopes for the interim government had clearly failed. After less than six weeks of working together, relations between the Congress and the League were more acrimonious than ever. “Feelings of bitterness and animosity in Delhi are reaching a pitch possibly never experienced before,” the capital’s chief commissioner reported on 21 November.67 Talk of civil war was growing louder.

  The political stalemate in its largest colony now threatened Britain’s larger strategic interests. Wavell’s increasingly apocalyptic cables were warning of chaos and a humiliating, potentially bloody withdrawal for British troops and civilians. Some of Attlee’s ministers wanted to hand power to Nehru and the Congress immediately and leave. Others, including Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, thought any hint that Britain had been driven out of India would destroy its credibility as a great power.68 The prime minister himself failed to understand why Indian politicians, after clamoring so long for freedom, refused to take it when offered.

  It was a fair question. If civil war really was looming, none of the Indian leaders appeared especially eager to prevent it. A couple weeks earlier, the viceroy’s private secretary, George Abell, had had dinner with Liaquat Ali Khan, Jinnah’s longtime deputy, and had gotten “the very clear impression from what Liaquat said that the League could not afford to let the communal feeling in the country die down.” Abell and other British officials generally found Liaquat, a jovial, fifty-year-old landowner, to be less confrontational than Jinnah. But the fighting supported the League’s contention that Hindus and Muslims could not live together. It was further “proof of their case for Pakistan.”69

  Nehru’s own deputy, Vallabhbhai Patel—a tough, seventy-one-year-old Gujarati lawyer whom Gandhi had nicknamed “Sardar,” or “Chief”—was convinced that Muslims would only respond to strength. Patel was the real power in the Congress Party—the man who controlled the flow of cash from Hindu industrialists and who doled out rewards, and punishment, to local cadres. A widower like the rest of the top Indian leaders, he had reputedly learned of his wife’s death while arguing a murder case in court—and had continued with his cross-examination. His eyes were heavy-lidded, almost sleepy; his lips full and feminine. In his homespun robes he was often compared to a Roman senator.

  Patel was a ruthless, unsentimental pragmatist and sympathetic—unlike Nehru—to the Mahasabha and the khaki-clad cadres of the RSSS. After Bihar, he noted with satisfaction, he detected among Leaguers “some realisation that violence is a game at which both parties can play.” Patel believed that Jinnah recognized the weakness of the Muslim position and was “on the verge of settling” for something less than Pakistan.70

  The Sardar thought he knew the real reason Jinnah had agreed to travel to London—“to solicit Churchill’s help.”71 After the 1942 Quit India uprising, the Tory leader had developed a fixation about the treacherousness of Hindus—“a beastly people with a beastly religion,” he averred—and the steadfastness of Muslims. He w
as a fan of the 1944 book Verdict on India by Beverley Nichols, a toxic rant against Hindus and Congress: “I agree with the book and also with its conclusion—Pakistan,” Churchill had written to his wife, Clementine, after finishing the tome.72 The sight of a Nehru government ruling in Delhi had infuriated the Tory leader no less than Jinnah, and the rising death toll across India—now into five figures—seemed to confirm all of Churchill’s dire predictions of what would come from Britain giving up the Jewel in the Crown.

  After a humiliating defeat in the 1945 British elections, Churchill had spent some time licking his wounds, painting landscapes at Lake Como and inveighing against Communism while touring the United States. Now he was ready to reenter the political fray, and was looking for a stick with which to poke his Labour rivals. When they finally arrived in London, Wavell accompanied Jinnah and Liaquat to dinner with several senior Conservative politicians. One of Churchill’s lieutenants leaned over and cheerfully confided to the viceroy that “Winston was anxious to make [India] a party issue.”73

  At the dinner, Jinnah spun out an argument he knew would appeal to his audience: Britain should not leave India now. “His theme song,” one of the attendees noted, “is what he calls the deliberate butchery of Muslims by Hindus in Bihar.”74 The British had a moral obligation to stay on and hold the ring between the warring communities until tensions had genuinely eased, Jinnah argued. Otherwise such massacres would only be repeated. A full-scale civil war would invite Soviet intervention.

  Jinnah kept hammering at this theme during his entire stay in London. Opinions of his motivations varied. Some observers thought he was hoping to buy time so that the League could build up its armed capabilities. Others sensed an exhaustion in the nearly seventy-year-old Quaid. “He himself admitted to me: he really thinks that if he holds out, Churchill’s line will prevail, and we [will] take over India long enough to see him—J—out,” a young official who had served in India, Maj. John McLaughlin “Billy” Short, wrote after spending time with the League leader in London.75