by Nisid Hajari
You are the golden earring in our ears.
Where are you going far away from us?
The way is long and perilous,
Come back, come back to us soon.66
Although Muslim, Abdullah rejected the League’s call for Pakistan. He spoke Nehru’s language of democracy and people’s rights, of land reform and industrialization; he insisted that Hindus and Muslims were one people, and India one nation. After the sheikh’s latest arrest in June 1946, Nehru had rushed to his defense, only to be detained overnight himself when he tried to cross the Kashmir border.67
Nehru’s note horrified Mountbatten. He pictured Nehru being tossed into jail again and sternly told the prime-minister-to-be that with just over two weeks to go before he assumed responsibility for 300 million Indians, this was not the time “to leave the capital on what really amounted to almost private business.”68 Patel had assumed control of negotiations with the princes precisely to avoid this sort of half-cocked outburst. He, too, remonstrated with Nehru. The Congress leader broke down in tears, saying Kashmir meant more to him at that moment than anything else, even independence. “As between visiting Kashmir when my people need me there and being Prime Minister, I prefer the former,” he told Gandhi.69 Finally, Nehru agreed to let the Mahatma go to Kashmir in his stead.
The idea of losing the state to Jinnah gnawed at Nehru, though, and he was furious at Mountbatten’s intervention. “I hardly remember anything that has exasperated me quite so much as this affair,” Nehru grumbled to Gandhi.70 On 1 August, according to Time magazine correspondent Robert Neville, a group of ash-smeared sadhus protesting the division of the country lay down in Nehru’s driveway to block his car. The Congress leader leaped out in a rage and started kicking the Hindu holy men.71 His sister Nan quickly joined him, then his servants arrived armed with sticks. At least one of the sadhus was later hauled off to the hospital, beaten and bloody.
1 August. Mountbatten’s ominous wall calendars showed fourteen days left. The switchboard at Viceroy’s House lit up with an urgent call from the Punjab. Jenkins had disturbing news to report. In the countryside around Amritsar, roving Sikh death squads had begun targeting Muslim villages. Nearly two dozen Muslims had been killed and thirty wounded in just the last forty-eight hours, while four passenger trains had been attacked. Jenkins believed a bigger offensive was planned. “There is going to be trouble with the Sikhs. When, and how bad, the Governor cannot yet say,” one of his aides advised.72
The ranks of Sikh militants had swelled from a few thousand at the beginning of the summer to nearly twenty thousand by the end of July.73 Many of the fighters were ex-military—well-trained and battle-tested in the deserts of North Africa and jungles of Burma. Several had switched sides during the war and fought for a Japanese-sponsored rebel force, the Indian National Army, in Southeast Asia. Bankrolled by Hindu tycoons and Sikh maharajahs—Faridkot had allegedly converted a distillery in his state into an explosives factory—they also tended to be better armed than their rivals.74 Late that summer, British historian Michael Edwardes—then a young soldier—stumbled across nearly three hundred Akalis drilling with rifles and tommy guns in a village just a few miles from Amritsar. They eagerly put on a shooting contest for him “in which the targets were dummies of Muslim men, women and children.” The fighters vowed that “there would not be a Muslim throat or a Muslim maidenhead unripped in the Punjab” when their work was done.75
With so many amped-up, heavily armed young men roaming about the central Punjab, clashes were virtually inevitable. Thus far the Akali jathas seemed to be freelancing: “I have the impression that they have made certain preparations, some of which are now being disclosed prematurely,” Jenkins reported.76 Years later, Master Tara Singh confirmed the governor’s impression, saying that the murder of a Brahmin in the village of Nagoke had prompted the militants to retaliate on the night of 30 July. “In the fight which ensued,” Singh wrote in a private letter, “the Muslims were routed and the Sikhs continued their offensive.”77
For the past two months, a steady stream of Sikh dignitaries had begged Mountbatten and Jenkins to carve out a Sikh homeland. They wanted the borders of the Punjab redrawn, with its western edge given to Pakistan, an eastern sliver attached to India’s United Provinces, and the remainder left as home to at least 80 percent of the Sikh community, as well as most of Sikhism’s holiest shrines and the rich canal lands cultivated by Sikh farmers. If the remaining Sikhs in Pakistan—less than a million of them—were exchanged with Muslims in this “Sikhistan,” “then the Sikh problem is solved,” Giani Kartar Singh had assured the viceroy.78
If their demands were not met, on the other hand, Sikhs dolefully promised to fight—“murdering officials, cutting railway lines and telegraph lines, destroying canal headworks, and so on,” the Giani told Jenkins on 10 July. The Punjab governor had immediately alerted Mountbatten, warning, “This is the nearest thing to an ultimatum yet given on behalf of the Sikhs.”79 Jatha leader Mohan Singh, a former commander in the Indian National Army, had presented the Punjab governor with an even more chilling scenario the next day:
He said that the only solution was a very substantial exchange of population. If this did not occur, the Sikhs would be driven to facilitate it by a massacre of Muslims in the Eastern Punjab. The Muslims had already got rid of Sikhs in the Rawalpindi Division and much land and property there could be made available to Muslims from the East Punjab. Conversely the Sikhs could get rid of Muslims in the East in the same way and invite Sikhs from the West to take their places. He did not put his case quite as crudely as this, but his general ideas were clear.80
The Sikhs’ demands fell on deaf ears. In mid-July, some well-meaning British intermediaries, including former Punjab official Penderel Moon, had shuttled between Lahore and Delhi to promote a different option: granting autonomy to the Sikhs within Pakistan.81 Jinnah was no longer interested. The Sikhs who would end up on his side of the border would be useful to Pakistan as “hostages,” he told Pug Ismay; their presence would ensure that Muslims left behind in India were not ill-treated.82 “As far as Jinnah was concerned,” wrote Moon, now serving as revenue minister in the Muslim state of Bahawalpur, “the Sikhs could go to the devil in their own way. It was they who had demanded the partition of the Punjab. They could now take the consequences.”83 Jenkins blasted the Quaid’s attitude as “perilously unsound.”84
Nehru had hardly been more realistic. He disliked on principle Mountbatten’s suggestion of exchanging Sikh and Muslim populations before the transfer of power.85 Instead, Nehru advised Sikhs to trust in the Boundary Commission that would set the final border. Although the line was meant simply to divide populations of Muslims and non-Muslims, he had ensured that vague “other factors”—including presumably the location of Sikh shrines and property—would also be taken into consideration.
In short, the Sikhs were useful pawns to Nehru and India, no less than to Jinnah. It was not inconceivable that in order to avoid a civil war, the Boundary Commission would grant the Sikhs’ claims. Whatever extra territory they gained—including possibly the city of Lahore—would naturally accrue to India, not Pakistan.
The commission tasked with dividing the Punjab—two Muslim judges, a Hindu, and a Sikh—wrapped up their hearings in early August. They had sweltered for weeks in a shabby Lahore courtroom, as peons shuffled papers and circulated through the audience with brass stands carrying glasses of water. Lawyers for the League, the Congress, and the Sikhs had put forward elaborate cases for their communities, backed up by population statistics, maps of property ownership and irrigation canals, personal testimonies, historical texts, and legal precedents. Money may have changed hands as well: some Sikh figures gleefully claimed to have bribed the commission to accept rigged population numbers.86
As might have been expected, the commissioners deadlocked, each siding with his own community. That put the case in the hands of one man—Sir Cyril Radcliffe, chairman of the Boundary Commission. Radcliffe w
as a wealthy Inner Temple lawyer with an unfortunate schoolboy nickname (“Squit”).87 He had never been to India before. After finishing his task, he would never return. “I suspect they’d shoot me out of hand, both sides,” he candidly admitted to one interviewer.88 Radcliffe knew next to nothing about the lands he was tasked with dividing, nor did he have time to learn. He only arrived in Delhi on 8 July, with barely five weeks to finalize the border.
Radcliffe spent most of his time in a bungalow on the viceregal estate, dripping sweat onto ordnance maps and closely typed census tables. He described the brutal Indian summer as a foretaste of “the mouth of hell.”89 (Little did he know how literal that thought would prove.) Commissioners in Lahore and Calcutta sent him daily transcripts of their hearings to study. It would have taken years to settle on a proper boundary, Radcliffe later wrote, one that took into account not just demographics but natural features, canal headworks, communications, and culture. Yet to blame his ignorance, or the radically shortened timetable, for the massacres to come is too easy.
No conceivable border could have satisfied both Sikh and Muslim demands. Mountbatten had created the mechanism of a Boundary Commission less to square that circle than, as one senior British official in London put it, “to keep the Sikhs quiet until the transfer of power.”90 After that, when the Sikhs confronted the reality of their position, they would be the problem of the new dominions; the British would be gone. Radcliffe’s task was in that sense quite simple. “Jinnah, Nehru and Patel told me that they wanted a line before or on 15th August,” he recalled. “So I drew them a line.”91
Only now, after a month’s work, did the interrogators at the Lahore Mental Hospital begin to produce some usable intelligence. On the morning of 5 August, Jenkins dispatched a CID officer named Capt. Gerald Savage from Lahore to Delhi to see the viceroy. After hearing his report, Mountbatten held back Patel, Jinnah, and Liaquat following a midday meeting so that Savage could brief them as well.92 Two detainees, a Sikh and an RSSS Hindu, had separately implicated Master Tara Singh in the stockpiling and distribution of guns and explosives in the Punjab. One of the captured men claimed he had delivered railway timetables to the Sikh leader, who had indicated they were to be used to target the Pakistan Special trains that would transport Muslim government officials from Delhi to Karachi. In his presence, the Sikh leader had also mused aloud about assassinating Jinnah, possibly on Independence Day, as Pakistan’s leader paraded through the streets of Karachi.
The Sardar gruffly tried to downplay the confessions as extracted under pressure. According to Jinnah, Mountbatten “leapt on Patel” immediately, saying his reaction implied “you already know about this plot.”93 The Quaid wanted Tara Singh hauled in at once. Savage warned that an arrest now might set off a full-scale Sikh uprising. Ultimately the leaders agreed to Mountbatten’s suggestion that any arrests be postponed for a week, by which point Radcliffe’s border would be ready. Still unhappy, Jinnah left two days later for Karachi without fanfare. As his plane circled above Delhi one last time, the Quaid gazed down impassively. “Well, that’s the end of that,” he muttered.94
In the Punjab, reports of the spreading village massacres were provoking Muslims to retaliate with a spate of stabbings and bombings in the cities of Lahore and Amritsar. Casualty counts rose steadily, with the daily toll of killed and wounded running between fifty and one hundred. On 9 August, one hundred Hindus were reported killed by Muslims in a single village outside Amritsar, their bodies thrown into a nearby canal.95
Jenkins did not disagree with the decision to hold off on arresting the Sikh leaders. He followed up with Mountbatten on 9 August, after conferring with the two men slated to replace him—Sir Francis Mudie for Pakistan, a hard-drinking Brit with a particular dislike of the Congress leaders, and polished Sir Chandulal Trivedi, the former governor of Orissa, for India. There seemed little point in detaining the Sikh leaders at all, Jenkins wrote. If they were jailed in the Indian East Punjab, they would no doubt be freed after independence; if caught in the West, they would likely be killed.96 “Their followers were in any case unlikely to be deterred by their absence!” he noted years later.97
What the governor really needed were more troops and reconnaissance planes to hunt down the marauding jathas. “Rural raiding in areas in which communities are inextricably mixed cannot be checked except by display and use of force on massive scale,” Jenkins advised the viceroy.98 Troops, who were much better armed and trained, easily defeated the militants in open combat. One tank unit surprised and gunned down sixty mounted Sikhs in a battle outside the village of Majitha. But these early jatha raids were scattered and unpredictable. Soldiers usually didn’t arrive until well after the killers had finished their grisly work and fled.
Mountbatten and the Indian leaders believed they had prepared adequately for this contingency. As early as 11 July, Field Marshal Sir Claude “the Auk” Auchinleck, the longtime commander in chief of the Indian Army, had proposed forming a Boundary Force of mixed Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim units to patrol the dozen or so most disputed districts of the central Punjab. The Auk had gotten his start soldiering nearly a half-century earlier as a second lieutenant in a Punjab regiment; he spoke fluent Punjabi and knew the province and its peoples intimately. He argued that a show of force by neutral units under British officers would ease fears in the border areas and prevent a panicky exodus of refugees in either direction.
In theory this body—anchored by the 4th Indian Division under Maj.-Gen. T. W. “Pete” Rees, a tough little veteran of Monte Cassino—would eventually encompass fifty thousand soldiers. Alan Campbell-Johnson claimed it would be the largest peacekeeping force ever assembled.99 Whenever he met with Sikh leaders, Mountbatten repeated his threats from earlier in the spring: the Boundary Force would meet any violent uprising with tanks, airplanes, and artillery. It would be suicidal to resist.
The Auk’s beloved Indian Army, however, was in the throes of a wrenching transition. For nearly a century, the British-run military had knitted the subcontinent together. Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh battalions had fought and bled within the same regiments, purposely thrown together so that no one community could rise up in rebellion. Now, though, those units had to be dismantled and reconstituted, with Muslim units transferring to Pakistan and non-Muslims to India. Over “many weary hours” of discussions in the spring, Ismay had tried to convince Jinnah that the task would be an infinitely harder challenge than dividing the Punjab and Bengal. “An Army was a single entity with a single brain, a single heart, a single pair of lungs, a single set of organs. A peremptory partition thereof—a surgical operation without an anesthetic—would be fatal,” Ismay argued.100 Auchinleck estimated that the division, even if possible, would require at least three years to complete. Anything less and the army would disintegrate.
In the meantime, the reorganization “would virtually immobilise the units involved” for the next six months—just when their services would no doubt most be needed to prevent bloodshed. Worse, the process itself would only intensify the communal feelings that had been growing within the ranks since the end of the war. Whether Madrassi soldiers would obey orders to fire on Hindu rioters, or Baluchis on Muslims, was no longer a given. “I cannot state with any certainty that during this process of reconstitution, the Army will retain its cohesion or remain a reliable instrument for use to aid the civil power in the event of widespread disturbances,” the Auk formally advised Mountbatten.101 Jinnah didn’t care. Unless he had an army under his command on 15 August, he refused to take power.
The Boundary Force never came close to reaching its full strength. At this point, Jenkins had only about 7,500 effective rifles at his disposal. Those soldiers had to cover twelve border districts that together housed 14.5 million people.102 Amritsar district, currently the most disturbed, was patrolled by just one weak brigade.
Worried, Liaquat ordered that extra guards be assigned to the Pakistan Special trains, the first of which set out from Delhi on 9 August. In Faridkot s
tate, after darkness fell, the five Sikh saboteurs loaded their gelignite charges into a jeep and set out into the starlit countryside to intercept it.
Faridkot himself was in Delhi that evening, making nervous small talk at a cocktail party at the U.S. ambassador’s house. As deeply involved as he had been in Sikh plotting to this point, the young rajah must have worried about what he and the Akali leaders had unleashed. “Faridkot asked me if it would be possible for us to give him and his family asylum at the Embassy if things got very bad,” the new ambassador, Henry Grady, reported to Washington.103 In fact, the Sikh ruler was hoping to buy himself a ranch in California. The Punjab was clearly no place to be right now.
“A FURY”: Mobs ravaged Calcutta for four days in August 1946, leaving at least five thousand dead.
“A FURY”
“A FURY”
COURSE OF CHAOS: Refugees fleeing Calcutta spread hate like an oil slick.
COURSE OF CHAOS: Frontier tribesmen stoned Nehru’s car.
COURSE OF CHAOS: Gandhi exaggerated the carnage in the watery Noakhali district.