by Nisid Hajari
Jinnah had assumed from his conversations with Churchill and other Tories that Britain would welcome Pakistan as a dominion—and would hence want it to be as strong as possible. Mountbatten poured cold water on those hopes, too. He had developed a close enough rapport with Nehru to think that he could persuade India—a far bigger prize—to remain within the Commonwealth. In their first meeting, Nehru had mused vaguely about some form of “common citizenship” that would bind Indians and Britons together. The Congressmen were “groping for a formula,” Mountbatten thought, one that would allow them to feel fully independent yet still gain the benefits of the imperial connection, including, most importantly, the continued services of British officers in the Indian Army.71 Meanwhile, he told Jinnah that Britain would not consider including Pakistan alone in the Commonwealth. The news, Mountbatten noted proudly, came as a “very rude shock” to the Quaid.72
Indeed, the drift of events now visibly distressed Jinnah. During an interview on 18 April, Telegraph correspondent Colin Reid, who had a good relationship with the League leader, found him in a “most disturbed state of mind.”73 When New York Times bureau chief George Jones arrived at Jinnah’s Aurangzeb Road mansion in Delhi the next day, he too was stunned by the Quaid’s sickly appearance.74
A map of the subcontinent made of beaten silver hung on the wall of Jinnah’s study: Pakistan, including all of the Punjab and Bengal, was marked out in green. Sitting beneath it, Jinnah answered Jones’s questions uncertainly and appeared to suffer from a tic. “His conversation did not make sense,” Jones flatly warned a U.S. diplomat afterward. The Quaid rambled in his answers, interrupting himself more than once. “‘[I can’t tell] you anything about that now,’” he said “in a distraught manner” when the reporter asked for his assessment of the ongoing talks.75 The Telegraph’s Reid thought that perhaps Jinnah “was susceptible to ‘squeeze’” if he could be presented with a face-saving way to back down.76
Mountbatten was quietly pleased. In conversation with Liaquat, he got the clear impression that Jinnah’s deputies, too, were worried about where the Quaid’s inflexibility was leading. The viceroy’s staff advised Mountbatten that “this process should be allowed to take its course; there would be a psychological moment at which to take advantage of it.”77 He had only to wait a bit longer.
Jinnah left behind few clues as to his thinking, unlike Nehru. The Congress leader wrote lucid, eloquent letters; articles for international magazines; long aide-mémoire; carefully preserved diaries; and more than one autobiography. The Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers—eighteen volumes (and counting) compiled by admirers in an attempt to match the voluminous collected works of Nehru and Gandhi—include only a few revealing speeches and letters. The bulk of Jinnah’s correspondence is numbingly pedestrian: one typical exchange from the spring of 1945 carefully preserves for posterity the extended back-and-forth between the leader of India’s 100 million Muslims and the Matheran Electric Supply Company over what he insisted was an extortionate bill of 10 rupees for replacing a lightbulb.78
Scholars still debate whether Jinnah’s equally adamant insistence on a full Pakistan was a bluff. An influential school of thought holds that the Quaid always intended to settle for a united India, after he had extracted as much power and autonomy as he could for himself and the five “Muslim” provinces. The League leader was perfectly rational, Liaquat told Mountbatten: he understood, or could at least be persuaded to understand, how fragile and unworkable a shrunken Pakistan would be.79
Yet now, with the viceroy’s draft plan for partitioning India nearly finished and Ismay preparing to return to London to seek the British Cabinet’s approval, Jinnah doubled down. When he next met with Mountbatten on 23 April, he reiterated the League’s maximalist demands: full provinces, full sovereignty for Pakistan. To cut up the Punjab and Bengal, he warned, would “loose terrible forces.” It was “suicidal.”80
Some mix of paranoia, gamesmanship, and bravado seemed to be driving the Quaid. He claimed that Hindu generals—who along with Britons filled the top ranks of the army—were planning a coup after the British left.81 If he agreed to a united India, Muslims would always be at the mercy of such men. (Jinnah’s fears were not idle: the highest-ranking Indian officer, Brig.-Gen. K. M. “Kipper” Cariappa, had indeed begun approaching several colleagues with the idea of a military takeover.)82 At the same time, Churchill, perhaps through their secret backchannel, had reassured Jinnah that Pakistan could count on British support and troops: “You have only to stand firm and demand your rights not to be expelled from the British Commonwealth,” the Tory leader had advised. Britons “would never stand for the expulsion of loyal members of the Empire.”83 For good measure, Jinnah made a bid for American support, assuring a visiting State Department dignitary that Pakistan would usefully block “Hindu imperialism” from spreading its tentacles into the vital Middle East.84
The Quaid’s brinkmanship hardened feelings on all sides. Nehru’s deputy, Sardar Patel, was convinced that the League was delaying a settlement in order to weaken India as much as possible. In Calcutta that spring, goondas flung fuming bottles of nitric acid at one another in ongoing street battles. Up in the Northwest Frontier Province, Khurshid Anwar’s rallies had led to open attacks on the tiny local communities of Hindus and Sikhs. Reports claimed that various maharajahs and Muslim nawabs were scouring the international arms market, preparing to hold out for independence after the British left.85
For months Patel had been seeking a way for Congress to assume control of the country sooner rather than later. One of the holdovers from Wavell’s regime was a remarkable South Indian civil servant named V. P. Menon. Born in Malabar, he had dropped out of school at age fifteen after contracting typhoid. He worked in the Mysore goldfields and at a Bangalore tobacco company before landing a job as a clerk in the Home Department in Delhi.86 Brilliant and driven, he studied law in night school and transformed himself into the foremost expert on Indian constitutional affairs and a trusted adviser to the viceroy.
Most importantly, “VP,” as he was universally known, had won Patel’s ear. As early as January, Menon had argued to the Sardar that the fastest way to gain power was to lop off the recalcitrant Pakistan areas and accept dominion status for the rest of India: constitutionally at least, nothing would then prevent the British from handing over control to the Congress Party almost immediately.
Nehru had always been the obstacle. The idea of acknowledging the sovereignty of the British Crown—as empty as it seems now—struck him as humiliating and intolerable. “Any attempt to remain in the Commonwealth will sweep away those who propose it,” he had written to Defense Minister Baldev Singh as recently as 14 April.87 Mountbatten’s entreaties had yet to produce a change in heart.
The weeks of tension and delay, however, were taking a toll on Nehru, too. He had grown emotional in meetings—“to an alarming degree,” Ismay wrote to his wife—and combustible.88 In frustrated speeches he cursed Jinnah’s intransigence: “I want that those who stand as an obstacle in our way should go their own way,” Nehru told a crowd in Delhi in mid-April.89
Mountbatten knew, as he admitted during a 1 May staff meeting, that “if he fell foul of Congress it would be impossible to continue to run the country.”90 (He later had the lines discreetly redacted from the official minutes.) With temperatures in the capital soaring above 114 degrees in the shade, the viceroy moved to break the logjam. The next day, Ismay flew back to England with the draft plan—unchanged despite Jinnah’s threats—in hand. Individual provinces would decide whether to join India or Pakistan. The two halves of the Punjab and Bengal would vote independently, so they could go their separate ways if they wished. The following weekend, Mountbatten invited Nehru up to cool Simla, the Himalayan summer capital of the Raj, while they awaited the cabinet’s sign-off. VP and a few other aides accompanied them.
While Mountbatten still hoped to bring Nehru around on the question of dominion status, the Congressman’s mood was not pro
mising. Nehru loathed the Viceregal Lodge, an alien monstrosity with monogrammed soaps and a mock-Tudor facade. At a tea party on Friday afternoon, 9 May, he made stiff small talk about the ongoing sugar shortage and the state of Burma’s roads, relaxing only when the party went for a hike through the surrounding orchards.91
After dinner the following evening, the viceroy pulled Nehru aside. Ismay had just cabled back a revised version of the Partition plan, now approved by the British Cabinet. Mountbatten gave Nehru a copy to take back to his room to read. He would be, Dickie emphasized, the first Indian leader to see it.
The favor did not have the intended effect. This “final” version of the plan made clear that any province or kingdom could choose to join India or Pakistan—or to declare independence after the British left. Already Suhrawardy was leading a campaign for a united Bengal to break away on its own. If rulers of the larger states like Kashmir and Hyderabad followed suit, India would end up even more “moth-eaten” than Jinnah’s Pakistan.
The plan as written, Nehru raged in a note he scribbled before dawn, “would invite the Balkanization of India.”92 His colleagues would never accept it. Suddenly the speed offered by VP’s proposal looked vitally important. Under Menon’s plan, Congress would be able to take power almost immediately. Provinces would be given a choice of joining India or Pakistan only, while states would face heavy pressure to do the same. In a phone call to Simla, Patel pressed Nehru to accept this alternate scheme. With India secured as a dominion, the Sardar knew, Mountbatten would have even less reason to tolerate Jinnah’s stonewalling.
One problem remained: the Sikhs. In the Punjab, the spring crop had been harvested, and Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims had all reached “an advanced stage of preparedness for a renewal of the conflict,” according to an intelligence officer in Lahore.93 Two different Sikh militias—later merged into one—were recruiting members in villages across the province. More ambitious RSSS cells had begun to experiment with homemade bombs, occasionally blowing themselves up in the process.
Sikh leaders had grown deeply paranoid. Master Tara Singh refused to talk to Jinnah or any other League officials: “I shall not lick the hand besmeared with the blood of my innocent children, sisters and brothers,” he wrote to Jenkins’s private secretary on 13 May.94 The Akali leader had taken to hiding his movements, convinced that Muslims were tapping his calls and looking for a chance to assassinate him. Jenkins thought the impulsive Faridkot was lamentably “enjoying the political intrigues in which he is involved.”95 The rajah’s army appeared to be supplying the Akali militias with grenades and guns. The parking lot at Faridkot House in Lahore filled with mysterious station wagons bearing the state insignia; dozens of beefy men bedded down on the mansion’s marble floors.96
Upon his return from Simla, Mountbatten made one last attempt to bring Jinnah and the Sikhs together to find a compromise that would not split the Sikh community in half. Over dinner on 14 May, the maharajah of Patiala recalled, “offers were made by Mr. Jinnah for practically everything under the sun if I would agree to his plan” for including both halves of the Punjab in Pakistan. The talks continued over tea two days later but with no result. Jinnah still refused to provide any guarantees other than his word, and as Patiala wrote to Mountbatten afterward, “any assurance of generous terms to [Sikhs] under a Muslim-dominated state does not cut much ice.”97
Publicly, Jinnah declined to make any concessions whatsoever. “The Muslim League cannot agree to the partition of Bengal and the Punjab,” he wrote to Mountbatten on 17 May after studying VP’s new Partition scheme. “It cannot be justified historically, economically, geographically, politically or morally. . . . It will be sowing the seeds of future serious trouble and the results will be disastrous for the life of these two provinces and all the communities concerned.”98 The next morning, Mountbatten boarded his York on his way back to England to brief the cabinet personally on the change in plans. He had to hope the Quaid was bluffing.
Four days later, Mountbatten opened the London papers to read an interview with Jinnah. In it the League leader not only refused to accept a truncated Pakistan. Now he demanded an 800-mile-long land corridor across the top of India to link the two halves of his new state. The story had been carefully planted to influence Tory opinion in England. As soon as Mountbatten had taken off, Jinnah had called around and offered the interview to several British correspondents in Delhi.99 Furious, Nehru dismissed the ultimatum as “fantastic and absurd.”100
Politicians and negotiators often proceed with bluffs, brinkmanship, and over-the-top rhetoric. But they are usually not doing so against a backdrop of life and death. The negotiations over Partition are especially painful to ponder given the body counts that had already amassed, and that now threatened to grow exponentially. In the Punjab, killings were starting to pick up again. Unknown assailants swarmed a settlement of Muslim pastoralists, firing revolvers and hurling homemade bombs. Seven were killed and twenty injured. The next morning, the parking lot at Faridkot House was empty of cars and swept clean.101 Rumors of an impending Sikh offensive poured in. An “ungraded” intelligence report from the Punjab arrived in Delhi on 22 May, warning of planned Sikh attacks on Muslim villages, as well as on trains and telegraph lines. Sikh fighters were “being encouraged to expect something big” in about ten days, as soon as Mountbatten returned from England.102
Before leaving Delhi, the viceroy had ordered the 4th Indian Division to take up position in the Punjab to forestall just such an outbreak of violence. In private meetings, he had bluntly threatened Tara Singh and the other Sikh leaders: “I said I particularly wished to have tanks, armoured cars, and aircraft used so that the poorly armed insurgent armies would feel that their resistance was futile since they were being mown down without even a chance of killing any of the regular armed forces.”103 Jenkins knew better: the troops wouldn’t be in position in time, and wouldn’t be sufficient anyway. He had asked for at least another brigade’s worth just to pacify Lahore.104
One thing was certain: the deal Mountbatten had taken with him to London pleased no one entirely—not Congress, who stood to lose a united India; not the League, whose Pakistan would be stripped of its most economically vibrant areas; and especially not the Sikhs, who faced what they imagined to be the dissolution of their community.
Writing to a U.S. diplomat, Ismay noted that it was commonly assumed that once Mountbatten returned and made the plan official, “a general massacre would at once ensue.” A lady friend of Pug’s even told him that the YWCA had decided to reschedule its next committee meeting, originally set for the first week of June. The Indian members had pointed out that “by that time the rioting and bloodshed [would] be in full swing,” and they would all no doubt be confined to their homes—“if our houses still exist!”105
5
Indian Summer
GURGAON, ONCE THE easternmost district of the Punjab, is today a suburb of Delhi—a shapeless sprawl of mirrored-glass corporate towers and condo developments stretching to a purplish, smog-choked horizon. In 1947, it was still rough countryside, populated mostly by Hindus but also by a sizable minority of hardy Muslim peasants known as Meos. At the end of March 1947, shortly after Mountbatten’s arrival in India, a Meo had tried to intervene in a fight between two Hindus. The altercation somehow ended with the slaughter of ten Muslims. In the current climate, even minor confrontations escalated with terrifying speed. The two communities had proceeded to trade attacks, setting ablaze one another’s crude villages, until a detachment of British soldiers showed up to enforce an uneasy peace.
Hindus broke the truce on 25 May, when a mob descended without warning on the village of Naurangpur and killed twenty Muslims. Two days later, Patrick Brendon, the British official in charge of the district, was out patrolling when “to my horror I saw first one, then a second and then a third village go up in smoke.” Organized Meo mobs were retaliating, attacking Hindu villages at four points along a 50-mile front. “It was a day of wild confusio
n,” Brendon later wrote in an unpublished memoir. He estimated that troops fired over one thousand rounds of live ammunition trying vainly to restore order.1
Within days, as Hindus also took up arms, a local civil war had broken out on the capital’s doorstep. Delhi politicians clamored for the army to restore order—by which they usually meant to suppress the opposite community. Yet troops could only traverse the district’s rocky hills and ravines by jeep, and then only at a few miles per hour. They struggled to intercept huge mobs, largely Hindu, who roamed cross-country armed with axes, spears, muzzle-loading guns, and even homemade mortars. One young British officer with only a half-dozen men faced off against a horde of five thousand.2
Brendon’s handling of the riots reinforced what Nehru had long believed: British officials could no longer be trusted to maintain law and order. The Briton made little secret of his League sympathies. A year earlier, after some Congress activists had been injured in protests in nearby Pataudi state, he had dismissively suggested they use their leftover election flags as bandages. (It was a “bad joke,” he admitted in hindsight.) Now Brendon took steps to even the odds for the outgunned Meos. When a Muslim ex-soldier admitted that he had organized a thousand local fighters to defend Meo villages, “I quickly told him that as far as I was concerned they could have as many unlicensed weapons as they could get,” Brendon later wrote. “A happy smile then came over his strained face.”3