Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  The official talks focused on the “Pakistan Lite” compromise put forward the previous spring, and the question of how to form the Pakistan “groups” in the northwest and northeast. The Congress argued that each province should get a single vote on whether it wished to join up; that would allow Assam and the Northwest Frontier Province, both then ruled by Congress ministries, to opt out. Jinnah and the League thought that the votes should go by population, so the wishes of citizens in bigger provinces like the Punjab and Bengal would receive due weight.

  Over two days of talks, Attlee sided with Jinnah’s interpretation. The whole point of the plan was to create enough of a semblance of Pakistan to convince Muslims to abandon the claim to their own state; all five provinces and Baluchistan had to be included. Nehru immediately left London in a huff. “Compulsion destroys cooperation,” he declared angrily to Attlee in their last meeting.76 With all the transit delays, Nehru had spent more time getting to England—sixty hours—than he had in negotiations. (Somehow he did manage to find time to sit for the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was carving his bust, three times in four days.) The quick collapse of the talks reminded Wavell of a couplet from Browning:

  Now, enough of your chicane of prudent pauses,

  Sage provisos, sub-intents and saving clauses!

  The viceroy recalled, too, how the poem began: “Let them fight it out, friend! Things have gone too far.”77

  Jinnah himself did not seem terribly interested in his diplomatic victory. As Nehru winged his way back to the subcontinent, the Quaid drove down to Chartwell, Churchill’s country estate. “I greatly valued our talk the other day,” the Tory leader wrote to Jinnah afterward.78 The two men clearly agreed that Attlee’s government was too hastily rushing to withdraw—“scuttling,” in Churchill’s cutting phrase—from India.

  Churchill suggested they keep their discussions secret. “It would perhaps be wiser for us not to be associated publicly at this juncture,” he wrote.79 The two leaders established a covert channel of communication in order to keep in touch, with code names and alternate addresses. Churchill would sign his secret missives “GILLIATT,” he informed the Quaid, using his secretary Elizabeth’s last name. (The choice was about as sneaky as the moniker that Churchill, a former First Lord of the Admiralty, had used during wartime: “Former Naval Person.”) On 12 December, the Tory leader rose in Parliament and thunderingly denounced Labour’s plans to abandon the Raj: “In handing over the Government of India to these so-called political classes, we are handing over to men of straw of whom in a few years no trace will remain,” he declared. “Many have defended Britain against her foes; none can defend her against herself. But at least let us not add—by shameful flight, by a premature hurried scuttle—at least let us not add to the pangs of sorrow so many of us feel, the taint and smear of shame.”80 Delighted, Jinnah and Liaquat stayed on in England for another fortnight, giving speeches to build support for their cause.

  If they wanted to have any chance at presiding over a free and united India, the onus was once again on the Congress to compromise. As soon as Nehru returned to Delhi, the American chargé d’affaires, George Merrell, cornered him. Throughout 1946 the United States had been trying to prevent a civil war from breaking out in China between ­Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Zedong’s Communists. Washington feared a Hindu-Muslim conflict in India would “cause widespread chaos similar [to] China which would last for many years and . . . have worldwide repercussions.”81 By comparison, the feelings of the few million citizens of Assam and the NWFP were trivial.

  Merrell’s argument struck home. By the end of December, Nehru had more or less agreed that Congress should reverse itself. He wrote out a new resolution, grudgingly accepting the British position on how to establish the Pakistan “groups.”

  A decision this important needed Gandhi’s imprimatur, though. The Mahatma still had not returned from distant Noakhali. He had vowed to live as a mendicant in eastern Bengal, sheltering under the roofs of Hindus and Muslims alike, until Noakhali’s Hindus felt safe enough to return home and live at peace with their neighbors. If he could restore harmony to Noakhali, Gandhi believed, the moral force of the example would quiet the turmoil spreading elsewhere in India. His admirers have mythologized this “last crusade” as a valiant, single-handed effort to heal the subcontinent’s gaping wounds. Their accounts describe the Mahatma like Jesus—a lonely figure striding barefoot from village to village, along paths strewn with shards of glass and piles of human feces by those whose hearts remained full of hate.

  At the time, though, just as many observers thought Gandhi had gone “dotty,” as journalist Phillips Talbot noted.82 The Mahatma truly believed that “some grave defect in me somewhere” was to blame for the homicidal passions surging through India’s communities.83 Around this time, he began his most controversial “experiment,” an attempt to purify himself as a means of cleansing the nation’s soul. Each night, in whichever hut he happened to find himself, he would bed down, naked, with his eighteen-year-old grandniece Manu to reconfirm his vow of celibacy. “We both may be killed by the Muslims,” he told her, “and must put our purity to the ultimate test.”84 Even the ever-loyal Nehru was “greatly troubled” by the practice, he wrote to Gandhi.85

  Nehru spent two days at the end of December conferring with Gandhi in a Noakhali hut. The Mahatma approved Nehru’s resolution but edited it to emphasize one fundamental point: whatever was ultimately decided, it “must not involve any compulsion of a province.”86 Although he signed off on the language, Nehru privately dismissed the clause as nothing more than “a pious wish.”87 A relieved Washington hoped that the Congress acceptance, while muddled, would be good enough to revive the British compromise.

  Jinnah, however, had been emboldened by Churchill’s support. Through private channels, Tory leaders assured the League leader that they would support the establishment of a full and fully self-governing Pakistan if it remained part of the British Empire—as a dominion that pledged loyalty to the king, like Canada or Australia.88 The Quaid was “very pleased at the results” of his trip to London, one friend noted.89 There seemed little reason not to keep holding out.

  Gandhi’s obfuscating revisions to the Congress resolution gave Jinnah all the excuse he needed. The barnstorming in London had exhausted the League leader; he spent most of January 1947 in the village of Malir outside Karachi, resting and undergoing a Gandhi-style “nature cure.” At the end of the month, he roused himself from bed and summoned the League leadership to Karachi. They formally rejected the Congress resolution as insufficient and insincere. The stalemate would go on until the British and the Congress accepted reality, the Quaid declared. A united India was impossible: Pakistan—a real Pakistan—was the only answer.

  The American diplomat George Merrell was not alone in thinking that the Congress’s pettifogging represented a colossal political failure, a missed opportunity that might well have averted the genocide that would unfold six months later.90 At this point, the spreading violence had not yet spun out of control. A political deal might have restored harmony between India’s communities. But as the killings rolled westward, they were inching nearer and nearer to the province the India Office described as the “most dangerous field for communal disturbances” in all of India, the Punjab.91 Delhi’s politicians, who continued to hurl the same wordy barbs at each other as they had for years, were running out of time.

  On 24 January, Khizar, the Punjab premier, had issued a new ordinance, banning both the RSSS and the Muslim League National Guards in his province. The Hindu and Muslim militias had been growing at a terrifying pace; authorities feared they would soon be too powerful to stop. A police raid that same day turned up two thousand steel helmets hidden in a storeroom at the Guards’ headquarters in Lahore. Authorities arrested several of the local League leaders, who had tried to block the search.

  In Delhi, Liaquat was “almost jubilant” at the news, Merrell reported.92 Now the League, like the Congress
, had its own political martyrs to tout. Even though the arrested Leaguers were released after forty-eight hours, the party gleefully launched its own civil disobedience campaign against Khizar’s government. Day after day, processions of Muslims began marching through Lahore and other Punjab cities to challenge the official ban on demonstrations. The jails began to fill with Leaguers.

  There was something slightly comical about Jinnah’s first satyagraha. Punjab authorities knew they didn’t have enough prison cells to detain all of the Quaid’s followers. So at each protest, authorities agreed to arrest only “certain named aspirants to political martyrdom,” recalled Jack Morton, the senior superintendent of police in Lahore. “A great deal of orchestrated noise was then generated after which, honour having been satisfied, the crowds would be persuaded to go home.”93 Those detained would be treated to “discreet tea parties” in the police station and then eventually set free. Activists who proved more recalcitrant—including the ravishing, twenty-six-year-old Viennese wife of one senior Leaguer—were dropped off several miles outside of town and forced to walk home.

  Jinnah, however, was deadly serious. He saw a chance finally to seize political control of the Punjab—not to mention to avenge his 1944 humiliation at Khizar’s hands. One older Leaguer from the Punjab visited Jinnah in Malir and tried to convince him that the demonstrations were in danger of becoming violent. Jinnah “just looked straight into his eyes and asked him if he was ill,” a party activist later recalled. “The answer was, he was not. [Jinnah’s] next [question] was then, why [was] he not in jail with his Leaders?”94 The Quaid ordered the man to return to Lahore immediately and get himself arrested.

  Khizar’s government seemed powerless to quell the disobedience movement. Local League officials easily rallied their troops from jail. Servants brought the ringleaders cooked food every day, with bulletins hidden in the handles of saucepans. Organizers gave out orders through a hole in the prison walls meant to drain rainwater. Muslim sympathizers in the telephone department passed on directives secretly to Dawn, which printed them in the next day’s papers.95

  The longer this circus went on, the more apprehensive the Punjab’s Hindus and Sikhs grew. They resented the traffic-snarling League processions, and what the province’s new governor, Sir Evan Jenkins, agreed were “intensely provocative” slogans chanted by the protesters.96 “Even among the more liberal of [the Leaguers] the line seems to be that having established undiluted Muslim rule [in the Punjab] they will be generous to the minorities,” Jenkins wrote to Wavell.97 The sober and brilliant Jenkins, formerly the viceroy’s private secretary, was an old Punjab hand. He agreed with his predecessor, Sir Bertrand Glancy, who had warned as early as August 1945, “If Pakistan becomes an imminent reality, we shall be heading straight for bloodshed on a wide scale; non-Muslims . . . are not bluffing, they will not submit peacefully to a Government that is labelled ‘Muhammadan Raj.’”98

  In particular, Jinnah had not accounted for a minority that, until now, had been a third party to the Muslim-Hindu struggle: the Punjab’s proud, aggressive Sikhs. The most prominent Sikh leader was “Master” Tara Singh, a sixty-one-year-old demagogue and head of the Akali Dal Party. (His imposing title actually referred to his time as a school principal.) Singh had the long white beard of an Old Testament prophet and a fierce, almost unhinged devotion to the cause of Sikh rights. As his kirpan—the small, ceremonial dagger that every Sikh male is required to wear as part of his faith—Singh now strapped on a heavy, deadly-looking sword.

  On 10 February, a massive League procession marched through the center of Lahore. Demonstrators were in an ugly mood. The night before, a brick had come flying into another League protest and killed one man. The crowd’s hoarse jeers had a menacing edge to them.

  League leaders had ordered all shops and businesses in Lahore to close in mourning. When they reached the baroque High Court building and found it still operating, enraged protesters slammed against its gates, then pushed aside the few guards and charged in. The mob rampaged through offices and courtrooms. A group of Muslim students made it to the roof and ripped down the Union Jack, replacing it with a League flag. Police reinforcements rushed into the fray. On the churned-up lawns outside, bewigged, black-robed barristers and scruffily dressed marchers stumbled about, coughing in a haze of teargas.

  After the High Court raid, the tenor of the League’s demonstrations grew noticeably nastier. Protesters began targeting Hindu and Sikh policemen, beating to death one constable and injuring fifty others on a single day.99 On 12 February, Tara Singh exhorted Sikhs to revive under his leadership the small fighting units, or jathas, with which their community had once conquered the Punjab.

  History remained a potent force among Sikhs, who adhered to a martial faith. Many of their founding myths centered on the astoundingly nasty tortures suffered by their founding “gurus” at the hands of Muslims. In the seventeenth century, the Mughal emperor Jehangir had supposedly ordered burning sand poured over the fifth guru. Aurangzeb had the ninth guru beheaded. The nawab of Sirhind in the Punjab is alleged to have bricked up the tenth and last Sikh guru’s two youngest sons—alive.100 When Sikhs conquered the Punjab at the end of the eighteenth century, they wreaked a savage revenge. Among Muslims “the name of Sikhashahi—the Sikh Rule—is a synonym for misgovernment and oppression . . . to this day,” Sir Olaf Caroe, the NWFP governor, wrote in a scholarly text.101

  Jinnah should have known better than to stir up this hornet’s nest. As early as January 1939, a British intelligence report had predicted that the Punjab’s Sikhs would pose the biggest obstacle to an independent Muslim state. “History suggests that the Sikhs to a man would fight literally to death rather than submit to Muslim domination,” the report noted.102 Since then, tens of thousands of Sikhs had trained and fought in World War II. Many had held on to their weapons and uniforms when they had demobilized. If Tara Singh wanted an army, he would not have to go far to find one.

  4

  “Pakistan Murdabad!”

  KHIZAR HAD GROWN TIRED of his long battle with Jinnah. The weeks of League vitriol had transformed the Punjab’s slight, unimposing premier into a devil in the eyes of many Muslims. At demonstrations, angry street protesters mocked him as a traitor to his religion. They called him a pimp and much worse. Young demonstrators amused themselves by hanging a sign with his name on a donkey and kicking the poor, bawling beast down the street ahead of them.

  At a party thrown by a Muslim friend in the middle of February, the Unionist leader was introduced to his host’s eight-year-old son. “Oh, you are Uncle Khizar!” the boy blurted out. “You are the one all my friends say is coming in the way of the creation of Pakistan!” The remark cast Khizar into a funk. “I could go on fighting with the Muslim League,” he lamented to one of his Sikh colleagues, “but if our children feel we are the villains of the piece, let us disappear and whatever happens, happens.”1

  Khizar wasn’t the only one wearied by the fight over Pakistan. On the afternoon of 20 February, British prime minister Clement Attlee rose before Parliament in London and made an electrifying announcement. Britain would end its long rule in India no later than June 1948, just over sixteen months hence. Either Nehru and Jinnah would have reconciled by then and power would devolve to “some form of central Government for British India,” or individual provinces and royal kingdoms would be freed to make their own arrangements with one another and with London. If all else failed, the British government would hand over authority “in such other way as may seem most reasonable and in the best interests of the Indian people.”2 One way or another, Attlee emphasized, the British were leaving.

  Attlee had been contemplating such a deadline for two months now, ever since his London summit with the Indian leaders had failed. The stalemate on the subcontinent had become intolerable. At home, Britons were freezing amid one of the coldest winters in years, and a dire coal shortage had shuttered factories and power plants across the country. The multibillion-dollar postw
ar American loan had been virtually used up: Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton warned that Britain would “be on the rocks in two years’ time” if it didn’t cut back drastically on its overseas commitments.3 Simply put, the empire was broke and unsustainable. As for Nehru and Jinnah, Attlee was convinced that only a severe shock would force them out of their stubbornly held positions. On paper he may even have been right. A day later, Nehru described Attlee’s statement as a “courageous document, which would have far-reaching effects.” Wavell judged the Congress leader “quite impressed.”4

  But in the weeks during which the British Cabinet had debated the deadline—originally they had approved an even earlier withdrawal date of 31 March 1948—the League’s Punjab protests had irreversibly altered the landscape in India. Now Punjabi Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs could see that whichever party controlled the province in June 1948 would quite likely decide whether or not it would join Pakistan—which, in turn, would determine whether Pakistan would be anything more than a rump state clinging to the edges of the subcontinent. What had been a struggle for local power, even a personal feud between Jinnah and Khizar, had been transformed into an all-out war of succession.

  After reading Attlee’s statement, a shaken Khizar called it “the work of lunatics.”5 He believed that Jinnah was operating under a dangerous delusion. Leaguers had fixated so intently on demonizing Khizar, they seemed to imagine he was the only obstacle in their way. They completely underestimated how much fear and anger their protests had stirred up among the Punjab’s minorities. That’s what they really needed to confront, Khizar believed—not him.6