Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  The Shahalmi Gate fires raged for days. The flames “signalled a Muslim victory,” writes historian Ian Talbot. “Hindus and Sikhs would henceforth live in [Lahore] on Muslim terms”—and they knew it.36 The trickle of minorities fleeing the Punjab capital for Delhi and other cities in India became a torrent. By the beginning of July, half of Lahore’s Hindu population had abandoned the city. Since non-Muslims dominated the worlds of finance and commerce, the flight of capital was even more striking: some 3 billion rupees, or $912,547,528.51 in 1947 dollars, had been transferred out of the Punjab by 8 July.37 Hindu-controlled banks and insurance companies shifted their offices to Delhi. Trains and planes to the Indian capital were reportedly filled with gold bullion, jewelry, and banknotes. Houses went on the market for a third of the price they would have commanded six months earlier.

  Jenkins saw no way for police—or even army troops—to prevent every single arson attack or stabbing. Traditional intelligence networks had broken down as informants switched their loyalties from the departing British to the communal militias. In desperation, the Punjab Criminal Investigation Department (CID) set up a secret interrogation facility in an unused wing of the Lahore Mental Hospital to try and develop leads. Although Jenkins vehemently denied that police tortured suspects there, the CID officer in charge of the facility admitted to a colleague, “I have been hitting out pretty hard.”38

  In spite of that, progress was agonizingly slow. “What is needed is direct and private pressure on the party underworld and a stoppage of funds,” Jenkins implored the viceroy.39 Rapprochement, however, was no longer much of a priority for local politicians. On 23 June, with Shahalmi Gate still burning, the two halves of the Punjab legislature convened behind barbed-wire barricades and formally voted to go their separate ways.

  Nehru wished he could do the same in Delhi. The long summer weeks were for him a frustrating limbo, filled with rambling committee meetings, negotiations over assets, constitutional drafts, and endless memos. After a referendum in the NWFP, the province was lost to Pakistan. Tiny Assam was partitioned, with its Muslim-majority Sylhet district added to eastern Bengal. Bengalis, like Punjabis, voted to divide their province.

  Nehru was running through relays of shorthand typists every night, drawing up long-range economic plans that Liaquat, as finance minister, reliably blocked.40 The ungodly heat—the rains were late that year—made tempers short. “Nehru is over-working himself to such a degree that he practically is not sleeping at night and is having real difficulty in controlling himself at meetings,” a worried Mountbatten wrote.41 One of the viceroy’s aides thought the Congress leader might well be “heading for a nervous breakdown.”42 After the Shahalmi Gate fires, Nehru again told Mountbatten that he would quit if Jinnah’s men were not kicked out of the interim government and the Congress Party allowed a free hand in its own territory.

  This was hardly Nehru’s first threat to resign, nor would it be his last. With just over six weeks left before the handover, however, it may have been the most alarming. The Indian Independence Bill was still slowly wending its way through Parliament in England, where many Tories had not yet resigned themselves to losing Britain’s Indian empire. The proc­ess of dividing up the Raj had barely begun. India’s surveyor general recalled being asked to draw up a list of his department’s assets by the end of June. On the 21st—a Saturday—he had been told to draft a plan immediately to divide everything. Two days after that, his entire staff was given twenty-four hours to decide whether they wanted to work for India or Pakistan.43 It would not take much to drive the whole improbable process off the rails.

  Mountbatten tried to reason with both Nehru and the more even-keeled Patel, to no avail. “Both agreed that all Congress leaders are firmly united in their complete refusal to be dictated to by Jinnah any longer,” the viceroy cabled London. Even allowing for his typical hyperbole, Mountbatten wasn’t far off when he warned, “Situation here incredibly explosive and more dangerous than any I have seen to date.”44

  The viceroy suggested a compromise. He could assign all the cabinet ministries to the Congress nominees as Nehru was demanding, but allow the Leaguers to hold on to shadow portfolios in order to watch over Pakistan’s financial and other interests. Jinnah found the proposal intensely demeaning. “This was now only a matter of 40 odd days,” he complained. “He would appeal to the Congress to rise to the occasion and not to put forward a proposal . . . humiliating to either side.” The Quaid also feared that once in control of all ministries, the Congressmen would cheat Pakistan out of its rightful share of the Raj’s assets. He insisted that the British government be asked to rule on the legality of the move. Patel sarcastically urged Jinnah “to look after his own area and to leave them to look after theirs. What was the good of going into the legal side of the question?”45

  Jinnah certainly bore his share of blame for embittering politics on the subcontinent over the past decade. Still, as the clearly weaker party, he had every incentive now to work for a friendly, stable relationship with the future leaders of India. The fighting in Lahore had disturbed him no less than Nehru: “I don’t care whether you shoot Muslims or not, it has got to be stopped,” the Quaid had told Mountbatten the day after the Shahalmi Gate blaze broke out.46

  Yet everywhere Jinnah turned he seemed to face a wall of Congress hostility. Patel refused to let Pakistan have even one of the six printing presses that belonged to the British Raj, all of which sat in Indian territory. “No one asked Pakistan to secede,” the Sardar growled when Mountbatten pressed him to show more generosity. The Congress leaders “all absolutely blew up” when Jinnah proposed inviting League representatives to Delhi in mid-July to begin writing a constitution for their new nation. Mountbatten favored the idea, which would have allowed Pakistanis and Indians to mingle together informally at evening soirees. “In no circumstances,” Nehru and the others told the viceroy flatly, “would they agree to allowing the Pakistan Constituent Assembly anywhere near Delhi.”47

  It was in this mood that Jinnah approached perhaps the most critical decision of the summer: whether Pakistan would initially share a governor-general with India. The position—the constitutional link between a dominion and the British Crown—was largely ceremonial. But it was crucial to the “superstructure” that London had envisioned for the subcontinent. With a single, impartial governor-general uniting the two new dominions, the Indian Army could remain whole for the time being. Alliances and foreign policy could be coordinated. Internal disputes could be adjudicated peaceably. Nehru and the Congress had already nominated Mountbatten for the role.

  Jinnah had been stalling for weeks. On 2 July, “astounded” at the Quaid’s dilatoriness, Mountbatten demanded an answer.48 By this point, Jinnah had reason to wonder about the viceroy’s impartiality—or at least his willingness to stand up to Nehru’s petulant threats. When he arrived at Viceroy’s House that evening, the League leader adopted a sorrowful mien. Many times in his career he had had to pass over those nearest and dearest to him, he told Mountbatten. He would have to do the same now: his followers were insisting that the Quaid himself become Pakistan’s first governor-general.

  Mountbatten desperately wanted the glory of both ending the Raj and leading the world’s newest nations. Not surprisingly, he scoffed at the explanation. “The only adviser that Jinnah listens to is Jinnah,” Mountbatten wrote in his next report to the king.49 The next day, the viceroy spent four hours trying to shake Jinnah’s resolve. “Do you realise what this will cost you?” Mountbatten warned. Unperturbed, the League leader acknowledged that Pakistan might lose out on tens of millions of rupees in assets in the ongoing division. “It may well cost you the whole of your assets and the future of Pakistan,” Mountbatten barked before storming out of the room.50

  Jinnah urged Mountbatten to stay on as India’s governor-general at least, to provide a restraining influence over the Congress leaders. Still, the fact remained that there would henceforth be no single figure or institution uniting the ne
w dominions. Partition would be total, and Pakistan would have to be ready to govern itself on 15 August. In the halls of Delhi ministries, those Muslim civil servants who had opted to serve in Pakistan now looked to some of their colleagues like foreigners and potential fifth columnists. Indeed, the second-in-command in Patel’s Intelligence Bureau, a Muslim, became Pakistan’s first spy chief.51

  By the time Parliament approved the Independence Bill on 18 July, the Quaid had forfeited any sympathy he might have expected from Mountbatten. The next morning, the viceroy told Jinnah his time was up: the Congress would be given charge of all central government ministries as Nehru had asked. Muslim League appointees could only interfere in matters directly affecting Pakistan.

  It was a Saturday, the first day of Ramadan. When Muslim officials showed up to work on Monday, they found their former offices closed to them. Weak from fasting, they had to drag desks and chairs out onto the lawns of ministry buildings, sweating under the flat, harsh glare of the sun. Furious and embarrassed, Liaquat told Mountbatten that he had originally questioned the rush to get Pakistan established by 15 August. Now, though, he wished “to God you could get Partition through by the 1st August!”52

  For now, Jinnah could only retaliate with symbolic gestures. He rejected the flag Mountbatten himself had designed for Pakistan, which bore the Union Jack’s cross next to the crescent of Islam. He scotched the suggestion that the king should continue signing “George R.I.” (Rex Imperator) even after he was no longer “Emperor of India.” Jinnah refused to commit to flying the traditional, deep-blue governor-general’s flag over his house.53 Tradition-obsessed, Mountbatten was “almost in despair” over the Quaid’s behavior, Ismay told Jinnah on 24 July. The League leader feigned dismay. “I beg to assure the Viceroy that I am his friend and yours for now and always,” he said with transparent insincerity.54

  What Jinnah and Pakistan needed most was allies. On the same day he saw Ismay, the Quaid met with a delegation from the kingdom of Hyderabad in southern India. The state’s ruler, His Exalted Highness Nizam Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan Siddiqi Asaf Jah VII, was reputed to be the richest man in the world, with storehouses piled high with rubies, emeralds, and gold. He was also an ill-tempered, eccentric gnome who shuffled about his grand palace in threadbare slippers and a yellowing kurta, and reputedly used the Jacob Diamond—a 280-carat monster—as a paperweight. Heir to a centuries-old Muslim dynasty, the nizam ruled over a state nearly the size of France through a predominantly Muslim court elite, even though 86 percent of the state’s population was Hindu.

  Indian territory surrounded Hyderabad on all sides. Like every one of the 565 “independent” monarchs in India, the nizam had surrendered control over defense, foreign affairs, and communications to the British. On the advice of his constitutional adviser, Sir Walter Monckton—an eminent Tory lawyer and friend of the Mountbattens—he now proposed to sign a treaty transferring those same powers to Nehru’s government after 15 August.

  The Quaid had a long history with India’s colorful monarchs, whose support he had pursued in the quest for Pakistan, and some of whom he had represented in legal proceedings. Jinnah strongly urged the nizam to reconsider. If Hyderabad instead declared itself fully independent after 15 August, it could “give a lead to other States.”55 Kingdoms like Mysore and Travancore—which was rich in thorium and possessed a long, strategic coastline—had more enviable resources than some members of the fledgling United Nations. Jinnah had already promised Travancore’s erudite diwan, or prime minister, Sir C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, that his Hindu maharajah could count on food aid from Pakistan if the state decided to hold out against India.56 If the Congress leaders threatened the nizam, Jinnah promised, “he and Pakistan would come to the help of Hyderabad in every way possible. There should be no doubt on that point.”57 Jinnah’s intervention worked. As of 15 August, the nizam still had not acceded to India.

  If this sort of thing continued, India faced a potential nightmare. Hundreds of kingdoms were tiny, some no bigger than a farmer’s fields. But together they accounted for nearly half of the landmass of British India. A few like Hyderabad were big enough to indulge fantasies of striking out on their own, with small but well-trained and well-equipped militaries. If enough chose to do so, India would be gutted internally, cut up by pockets of potentially hostile territory. Rebels and smugglers would find a plenitude of safe havens. Trade within the country would forever be vulnerable to disruption. U.S. strategists feared a return to the pre-Mughal days, when warring states pockmarked the subcontinent. Washington pressed Attlee to reject any overtures from the nizam or any other independence-minded rulers.

  Although a royal himself and close to several Indian monarchs, Mountbatten had no intention of letting his playboy compatriots undermine the dominion he was about to lead. Patel, who had taken charge of India’s relations with the various princes, was willing to offer them the same terms as the British, asking only for powers over defense, foreign affairs, and communications as part of their accession to India. The rulers could keep their palaces and baubles and seventeen-gun salutes—as long as they signed up before independence.

  On 25 July, Mountbatten donned his “Number Tens”—his ivory-white admiral’s uniform with its rows upon rows of medals—and gravely presented this offer to a packed Chamber of Princes in Delhi. His loyal hagiographer Alan Campbell-Johnson later put forward the accepted account of the proceedings, in which Mountbatten masterfully charmed the glittering assemblage. Deploying humor and his immense charisma, speaking without notes yet “never at a loss for word or phrase,” Mountbatten emphasized the generosity of the Congress offer and the bright future the princes would share as part of a resurgent India. He dissolved the room in laughter, once pretending to look into a crystal ball and divining that an absent ruler wanted his prime minister to agree to join India. “His fluency was matched only by his extraordinary frankness,” Campbell-Johnson gushed. “Mountbatten can regard the whole occasion as yet another personal tour de force.”58

  In fact, immediately after the meeting, Campbell-Johnson huddled with V. P. Menon for four hours, scrubbing much of that “frankness” out of the official transcript of the proceedings. According to a different viceregal aide, Mountbatten had actually delivered a blistering, unprintable message to the rulers, most of whom he found “very stupid”: “He threatened sanctions—such as withholding arms, ammunition, and other supplies—against States not agreeing to accede.” He let “Sir C.P.” in particular “have it” for making overtures to Britain and the United States, and pledged to “do everything in his power” to make life difficult for Travancore if its leaders continued to resist joining ­India.59

  In the end, the government itself did not need to lift a finger to sway the rulers. Hindu industrialist Seth Dalmia had already donated 500,000 rupees to the underground Congress organization in Travancore to foment protests. After Aiyar returned home, he was stabbed in the neck with a bill-hook and nearly died.60 Travancore signed.

  While his aides were busy sanitizing the record, Mountbatten changed into evening wear and sat down to dinner with the Quaid and his sister Fatima. The conversation stumbled along awkwardly. Jinnah spent much of the meal interrupting Mountbatten and “cracking a series of very lengthy and generally unfunny jokes.”61 When the discussion turned to the states, Jinnah chided Mountbatten “not to be in such a mortal hurry” to pin down their rulers: “after all, one could not make the world as one wanted it to be in a week.”62 “In that affectionate tone which he has recently begun to use with me,” as Mountbatten put it, the League leader instead urged “a period of suspense and delay,” while the new dominions got established and the states adjusted themselves to a post-British reality.63

  The two men touched only briefly on the one big state that bordered both Pakistan and India—Kashmir. The Himalayan kingdom’s situation was almost exactly the reverse of Hyderabad’s: a Hindu maharajah ruled over a population that was more than three-quarters Muslim. Jinnah swore he did not in
tend to pressure the state one way or the other. Whether Kashmir wanted to sign a treaty with Pakistan and use Karachi as an outlet to the sea, or preferred India and the port of Bombay, the Quaid promised not to stand in the way.

  Nehru, for one, did not believe him. According to rumors reaching Delhi, Kashmir’s Hindu prime minister, Pandit Ram Chandra Kak, was encouraging the maharajah to throw in his lot with Pakistan—presumably under Jinnah’s baleful influence. Two days after Mountbatten’s dinner with the Quaid, Nehru sent the viceroy a curt note, declaring that Kashmir had become his foremost priority. He intended to fly to Srinagar to confront the maharajah himself.

  Nehru had long felt an almost mystical kinship with his ancestral land, with its spiky, snowcapped peaks and meadows aflame with wildflowers. Just as importantly, he loathed its ruler, Sir Hari Singh, who typified everything Nehru despised about the decadent, feudal princes. In 1924, Singh had gotten caught up in a sensational sex-and-blackmail scandal in Paris and had had to flee the continent, paying 150,000 pounds to hush up the matter.64 While his state produced the finest, most delicate shawls in the world, most of his subjects lived in rags. Kashmir’s timber and tourism, its walnuts and apples and saffron, earned millions of rupees—a great number of which the monarch spent at the racetrack in Bombay, as well as on his stables and extensive harem.

  The maharajah had thoroughly repressed any hint of democratic opposition to his rule. Most of the leading members of the National Conference—the Congress-affiliated people’s party in the state—had been in jail for the past year. Nehru had personally taken under his wing the party’s populist leader, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, the towering son of a Muslim shawlmaker from Srinagar. Miraculous legends had grown up around Abdullah. After one of his eight arrests, the people said, when Hari Singh had tried to boil him in oil, Abdullah had casually scooped up the bubbling liquid “as you would lift up curds or cool cream.” Peasants insisted that they had found leaves on trees engraved with Abdullah’s nickname, “Sher-i-Kashmir”—Lion of Kashmir.65 In July 1945, shortly after being released from prison, Nehru had spent several days trekking through the mountains with Abdullah. Village women had serenaded the men as they walked past: