Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  Even when they weren’t biased, many Raj officials were burned-out and cynical, and they had no interest in refereeing a civil war. “The British civil servants neither want to deal with the present situation effectively nor are they capable of it,” Nehru wrote in frustration to a friend. “They feel that they have to go anyhow pretty soon, so why should they bother. There is often also a secret satisfaction that India is going to pieces.”4 The longer men like Brendon remained in their posts, Nehru believed, the more Indians would die.

  Mystery and misinformation still cloud the most pivotal decision in the Partition process—to rush forward the date of the British departure by ten months to 15 August 1947. Mountbatten is typically blamed for accelerating the handover so the British would not be held responsible for the bloodbath to come. He was legendarily heedless: “I’ve never met anyone more in need of front-wheel brakes,” even Pug Ismay wrote.5 Mountbatten did himself no favors by boasting in later years that he had plucked the date out of thin air at a press conference, choosing the anniversary of the Japanese surrender simply because it sprung to mind. If that were true, hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of displaced Pakistanis and Indians would indeed have been victim to one man’s whimsical diktat.

  But Nehru and the Congress leaders also wanted the British out as soon as possible. Nehru had made clear he was accepting dominion status only as a means to gain power faster; the longer the transition dragged on, the greater the chances he might change his mind. Before leaving for England, Mountbatten had already begun talking about transferring power to Congress in 1947 rather than June 1948. When he returned from London on the last day of May, the viceroy cabled Sir Evan Jenkins and the other provincial governors to say that His Majesty’s Government was now contemplating a handover “not later than October 1st this year.”6

  What is little understood is that the British do not seem to have intended this date to be a hard-and-fast deadline for both India and Pakistan. With a military and administrative structure already in place—including everything from ration cards to currency—a new Indian government could take power almost immediately, perhaps even “sometime in August,” as Clement Attlee told U.S. ambassador Lewis W. Douglas in London on 2 June. On the other hand, “Pakistan being without administrative machinery, power transfer to it might be delayed until this is available.”7 Another British official estimated that this might not happen until the end of the year, “but this was just a guess—it might take longer.” In the meantime, some sort of joint body or “superstructure” could be set up to oversee defense and foreign affairs for both dominions, while they gradually and amicably worked out the terms of their separation. “Thinking in this connection,” Douglas reported skeptically, “has not gone very far.”8

  When Mountbatten gathered the Indian leaders around a cramped conference table at Viceroy’s House on 2 June, he emphasized this point: the transfer of power did not mean an abrupt end to the British connection. Far from trying to abandon their obligations, he declared, the British “would stay at the disposal of the Indians as long as the latter wished.”9

  To the viceroy’s right, Nehru looked drawn and tense. To his left, Jinnah sat sphinxlike, precisely attired in a pale, double-breasted suit with matching pocket square. For now Mountbatten asked only that the Indian leaders accept the plan in its entirety—and that they signal their assent in writing by that evening.

  Jinnah chose this moment to grandstand. He piously insisted he could not accept on behalf of the League, which was “a democratic organisation.”10 The question would have to be put to a vote of the party’s leadership, which would take a few days to organize.

  This was precisely the sort of negotiating tactic that so infuriated Nehru. “During the past few years it has been our repeated experience that Mr. Jinnah does not commit himself to anything,” the Congressman had written to one of Mountbatten’s aides just a few days earlier. “He accepts what he gets and goes on asking for more.” The Congress leaders had had enough: “We have arrived at a stage where this kind of thing will do good to nobody.”11 Without a clear-cut acceptance from the League, the Congress would reject Partition, too, and go back to demanding power over all of India.

  Jinnah’s caginess is puzzling. Five days earlier he had boasted to George Merrell, “I tell you we are going to have Pakistan—there is no question about it.”12 The Quaid’s Malabar Hill mansion was on the market for 2 million rupees, and he was negotiating to buy a vacation houseboat (the Mayflower) on fabled Dal Lake in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar.13 (Although ruled by a Hindu maharajah, Kashmir was nearly 80 percent Muslim. Jinnah fully expected the state—the “K” in “PAKSTAN”—to join his Muslim dominion.) Privately at least, Jinnah seemed to have resigned himself to winning only a moth-eaten Pakistan.

  Yet when Dickie summoned him back to Viceroy’s House near midnight, the Quaid continued to equivocate. While in England, Mountbatten had taken the precaution of seeing Churchill, and had delighted him with the news that Nehru had agreed to keep India within the Commonwealth. The Tory leader had given Mountbatten a message to pass along if Jinnah proved troublesome: “This is a matter of life and death for Pakistan, if you do not accept this offer with both hands.”14 The Quaid merely shrugged. The next morning, he gave only the briefest of nods when Mountbatten told the reassembled Indian leaders that he trusted the League would ultimately approve the Partition plan.

  Whatever well-meaning timetables had been imagined in London would clearly not survive the partisan furnace in Delhi. At his staff meeting the previous afternoon, Mountbatten had suggested moving up the handover date to 31 July, less than sixty days away. Horrified aides had persuaded the viceroy that “this would be impracticable, if not absurd,” according to a source at the meeting.15 Yet now Mountbatten presented the Indian leaders with a sobering, thirty-three-page paper laying out the “Administrative Consequences of Partition”—all the complex and divisive tasks involved with dismantling the century-old Raj. On his instructions, the document’s preamble stated “that the work should be sufficiently advanced to allow transfer of power by August 15th.”16

  Mountbatten was pleased to see that the Indian leaders “were dumbfounded and displayed some alarm” at the tight schedule.17 Naively, he hoped that they would be too busy over the next two and a half months to quarrel much.

  Instead, Nehru “reacted very badly” after studying the paper, one of Mountbatten’s aides reported, not because of the August deadline but because the plan did not involve immediately booting Jinnah’s five obstructionist Leaguers out of the government.18 At a cabinet meeting just days later, Nehru exploded when Liaquat tried to stop him from appointing an ambassador to Moscow; the Quaid’s deputy claimed that Pakistan had no wish to establish an embassy in the Soviet Union. “The ensuing scene was babel, with everyone talking furiously at once,” Alan Campbell-Johnson recorded in his memoir. “Nehru asserted . . . that if the Government was to be turned over to the League he would immediately resign.”19 It did not help that the envoy Nehru intended to nominate was his eldest sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, nicknamed Nan.

  With goodwill between the parties, a speeded-up Partition might have worked. The most important issues—whether Pakistan would continue to use the Indian rupee, for instance—could have been dealt with over the course of several more months, if not years. But after all the tension and distrust and death of the preceding months, every decision, no matter how petty—from how many fighter jets each country would be allocated to who would get the subcontinent’s single tide predictor—was fraught. Each became one more opportunity to add to the store of suspicions and resentments dividing the League from the Congress, Muslims from non-Muslims. Mountbatten famously had wall calendars made up for Raj officials, each page announcing in bold numerals exactly how many days remained until the transfer of power. The numbers dwindled all too quickly—yet not nearly fast enough.

  Would there be one India or two? Although press leaks and the lengthy negotiations had d
rained some suspense from the question, Indians from Calicut to Chittagong still gathered around their radio sets on the evening of 3 June to hear the verdict. At the offices of All-India Radio, employees crammed balconies and leaned out of windows as the vice­regal motorcade rolled up outside. Nehru, Jinnah, and Baldev Singh followed Mountbatten into the building, harangued by a group of saffron-robed sadhus—Hindu ascetics—shouting anti-Pakistan slogans.20 The viceroy had asked each of the Indian leaders to speak to the nation after him—to convince their followers to accept Partition and move forward.

  Mountbatten had begun working on his own address within weeks of arriving in India, and he delivered it smoothly and with assurance. Baldev Singh signaled Sikh assent glumly but without quibbling; he still hoped that there would be a way to draw the border to keep the Sikh community intact.

  Jinnah, by contrast, was disappointing. Like many others, Ismay found his address to be “egotistical and much below the level of events.”21 The Quaid noted that “the plan does not meet in some important respects our point of view.”22 He even refused to say whether the League would accept the scheme as a final settlement or only as a compromise that could later be adjusted.

  Nehru’s short address was bittersweet but firm in its resolve to draw a line under the madness of the last year. There would at last be an independent India but one shorn of its northwestern and northeastern wings and tens of millions of its citizens:

  It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals to you, though I have no doubt in my mind that this is the right course. . . . We stand on a watershed dividing the past from the future. Let us bury that past in so far as it is dead and forget all bitterness and recrimination. Let there be moderation in speech and writing. . . . There has been violence—shameful, degrading and revolting violence—in various parts of the country. This must end. We are determined to end it. We must make it clear that political ends are not to be achieved by methods of violence now or in the future.23

  Almost everywhere, the news had an initial calming effect. Over the next fortnight, provinces reported a palpable easing of tensions across most of the subcontinent. Rather than exploding into riots, cities like Bombay and Calcutta seemed to exhale in relief—their citizens glad finally to have clarity and a break from the ceaseless fear of preceding weeks. “A new feeling of hope and expectancy [is] abroad,” Mountbatten wrote to the king on 5 June.24 For a moment the viceroy could allow himself to believe that he had pulled off, as an excited Ismay put it, “a far bigger thing than the destruction of Hitler.”25

  One province, however, remained deeply unsettled: the Punjab. There, the Partition plan only delayed a reckoning. According to Mountbatten’s scheme, the seventeen Muslim-majority districts in the western Punjab and twelve non-Muslim districts in the east were to vote separately on whether to join India or Pakistan; then, a Boundary Commission would determine exactly where the final border would run. While Tara Singh and other Sikh leaders seemed willing to await the commission’s verdict, they also vowed to resist any dividing line that did not ultimately extend India to the banks of the Chenab River in the west, leaving only a sliver of the province to Pakistan. “I am not a magician,” Mountbatten sighed when asked at a press conference how he planned to reconcile the Sikh and Muslim claims. “I believe that it is the Indians who have got to find out a solution. You cannot expect the British to solve all your problems.”26

  The militias that had been gathering in the Punjab for the past few weeks filled the resulting political vacuum. They met little resistance. “All governments, without exception, are stable only insofar as they can effectively reward and punish. In the Punjab we began to lose this power in February 1947,” Governor Sir Evan Jenkins recalled many years later. “In June 1947 when it was made clear that we were to leave on 15th August of the same year, we became politically impotent.”27 Both Muslim and non-Muslim militants could count on sympathizers in the administration to pass them intelligence. Police and magistrates of the same religion reliably looked the other way. If arrested, fighters could be confident they would be freed after independence if not before.

  Local League, Congress, and Akali politicians were strongly suspected of encouraging, if not actually paying, the militants. Newspapers funded by Hindu tycoons spewed “insidious incitement to future violence,” according to the Punjab’s fortnightly report for the first half of June. Editorialists assured Sikhs of the Congress’s backing for their impossible demands. If the commission did not concede them, Lahore’s Tribune exhorted, the Punjab’s turbaned warriors could always fall back on a final appeal—the “appeal to cold steel.”28

  Day by day through the first half of June, the flickering war of shadows on the streets of Lahore and Amritsar began to burn brighter. There were no riots, no great, unruly mobs as there had been back in March. Instead, each night, those few foolish enough to venture outside their Hindu or Sikh or Muslim bastions simply ended up dead. Police would find limp corpses scattered about the next day, blood pooling around their bony limbs. After dark, arsonists skittered across rooftops in Lahore’s walled city, flinging kerosene-soaked balls of rags and shooting flaming arrows into Hindu homes or shops. (Although a minority in the city, Hindus owned more than three-quarters of the property; they provided the most tempting targets.)

  Muslims conducted the vast majority of arson attacks. Jenkins had “no doubt whatever that the Muslim League approved, and in some degree directed, the burning,” he reported to Mountbatten.29 Firefighters wearing ancient tin helmets struggled to control the blazes in temperatures that rarely dropped below 100 degrees, even at night. Lahore had only two fire engines in all, and they proved next to useless in the spiderweb of tiny lanes that ran through the walled city. Hindus and Sikhs quickly lost faith in the authorities’ ability or willingness to protect them. They reinforced the metal gates and barricades blocking off their neighborhoods and began stockpiling barrels of water to put out fires. Armed spotters took up positions on rooftops.

  They also looked for ways to retaliate. By the middle of June, RSSS bombmakers had finally started to master their craft. Beginning on 10 June, crude bombs began exploding in crowds of Muslims—in a mosque, a cinema, a hospital. The devices were not particularly deadly, killing only fourteen people over ten days. But they injured over a hundred, and they terrified many more. With each outrage, the terrorists appeared to be getting more skilled. Just two bomb attacks on 20 June accounted for more than a third of the casualties.30

  The bombings enraged men like Billa Jatt—a Lahore Muslim goonda well-known to police for his brawling past. As his son recounted sixty years later to researcher Ishtiaq Ahmed, Jatt and his family had been driven out of the Hindu-dominated Shahalmi Gate neighborhood during the March riots.31 The area had since become an RSSS stronghold. According to rumor, Hindus and Sikhs were stockpiling guns, bombs, and ammunition behind its walls.

  After the latest RSSS bomb attack, a local Muslim magistrate came to Jatt with a plan to teach Shahalmi Gate’s Hindus a lesson. The goonda readily agreed to help. Just after midnight on 21 June, a Saturday night, members of Jatt’s gang snuck past sentries posted at the Shahalmi Gate with two pippas, or drums, of a flammable solution used in shoemaking. They splashed the liquid across wooden shop fronts and homes, even on the barrels of water kept to fight fires. As the big clock at Lahore’s Government College struck 1:00 a.m., they lit torches. Wooden homes—dry from the monsoon-less summer—went up in a roar of flames. “Huge tongues of fire” were visible from miles away.32 Jatt’s son, who was watching next to his father, sneezed from the smell of chilies burning in local spice shops. Half a century later, the agonized screams of victims still chilled him.

  A fire crew showed up, drawing water for their hoses from a nearby canal. But the Muslim magistrate who had masterminded the attack ordered the crew to turn their hoses around. “The result was that while it sounded as if the fire brigade was working full throttle, the water was flowing back into the canal,” Jatt’s son
recalled.33 Over 250 homes burned to the ground over the next twelve hours. Ironically, the firefighters engaged in this charade while standing next to a small Hindu temple built years earlier by Nehru’s father, Motilal, whose wife had grown up in Lahore.

  In Delhi, word of the fires reached Nehru just after he returned from a dispiriting visit to a refugee camp in Hardwar in the Himalayan foothills. Thousands of Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs displaced by the earlier riots in Rawalpindi had pressed in on him and Gandhi, “forming a solid wall of smelling, perspiring flesh which made one gasp for breath,” the Mahatma’s secretary recalled.34 Their misery weighed heavily on Nehru and blended in his mind with the piteous plight of Shahalmi Gate’s residents. Wild stories claimed that as Lahore’s Hindus rushed out of their burning homes, they were being gunned down by the police—who were predominantly Muslim—for breaking curfew.

  Nehru held Jenkins’s administration responsible for failing to quell the League’s arson campaign, and he felt his own powerlessness keenly. Late on Sunday night, he penned a distraught, almost inconsolable note to Mountbatten. He had tried to stop himself, “but the thought of Lahore burning away obsessed me and I could not restrain myself,” Jawaharlal explained:

  At this rate the city of Lahore will be just a heap of ashes in a few days’ time. The human aspect of this is appalling to contemplate. . . . I do not know if it can be said that what is happening in Lahore is beyond human control. It is certainly beyond the control of those who ought to control it. I do not know who is to blame and I do not want to blame anybody for it. But the fact remains that horror succeeds horror and we cannot put a stop to it. . . . Are we to be passive spectators while a great city ceases to exist and hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants are reduced to becoming homeless wanderers, or else to die in their narrow lanes?35