Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  MARCH MADNESS: Arsonists reduced parts of Lahore’s Old City to rubble.

  MARCH MADNESS: Sikhs vowed revenge after the Rawalpindi massacres.

  MARCH MADNESS: League demonstrators attacked non-Muslim police.

  ICE AND FIRE: Even old friends found Jinnah’s personality frigid.

  ICE AND FIRE: Gandhi’s evening prayer meetings seemed like mumbo-jumbo to many Muslims.

  “WE ARE LITTLE MEN”: Suave Nehru had legions of admirers abroad.

  “WE ARE LITTLE MEN”: Dickie Mountbatten looked like a Hollywood prince.

  “WE ARE LITTLE MEN”: Gruff Sardar Patel served as Congress enforcer.

  EXODUS: Sikh convoys were orderly and armed.

  EXODUS: Train attacks peaked in September 1947.

  EXODUS: Troops struggled to pacify Delhi.

  MOUTH OF HELL: Bereft Muslim refugees filled post-independence Lahore.

  MOUTH OF HELL: Corpses littered the Punjab countryside.

  KINGDOMS IN CRISIS: The Wāli of Swat contributed money and men to the Kashmir jihad.

  KINGDOMS IN CRISIS: Sidney Cotton’s airlift flooded Hyderabad with small arms.

  6

  Off the Rails

  THE EXPLODING GELIGNITE ripped seven feet of rail out of the ground and flipped the train’s carriage onto its side. A screech of rending metal cut through passengers’ screams. As the brakes on the Pakistan Special jammed, the next two cars overturned as well. Four more careened off the rails. The exultant Sikhs leaped from their hiding place along the canal bank.

  Stumbling out of the wreckage, the train’s escort guards took aim at the bombers and opened fire. The Sikhs tossed aside the last, unused slab of guncotton and let off several rounds with their revolvers to slow any pursuit. Making it back to their jeep, they roared north toward the borders of Faridkot. The troops returned to the wrecked train, relieved to discover that only one woman and her child had been killed. Another twenty passengers had been injured, two of whom died later.

  Despite the limited fatalities, the bombing’s shock waves reverberated throughout Jinnah’s soon-to-be Pakistan. This was not some jatha raid on a nameless Punjab village: Tara Singh’s men had quite deliberately struck at the heart of Pakistan’s still-nascent government. Crowds bearing flags and sweets had gathered along the train’s route to cheer it onward. In Bahawalpur, from which a relief train was quickly dispatched, news of the derailment “aroused a good deal of excitement and indignation,” Penderel Moon recalled with some understatement.1 Officials in Karachi, the train’s destination, feared for the fate of relatives and close friends onboard. Further Special services were suspended indefinitely, given the risk of further attacks. By September, some seven thousand Muslim officials remained stranded in Delhi—a good chunk of Jinnah’s new administration.2

  The 9 August attack came as a rude shock to the Quaid. He had made a triumphant entrance into Karachi two days earlier, and was beginning to enjoy the trappings of being a head of state. He had immediately claimed the grand marble pile that had been the British governor’s house for his own, striding through the halls imperiously, designating one wing for himself and his sister, another for “only very important people, like the Shah of Persia, or the King of England.”3 Copying the army of uniformed staff at Viceroy’s House in Delhi, his new servants donned armlets with the monogram “Q” for Quaid.4

  All around him Jinnah’s new capital bubbled in a state of giddy chaos. Karachi was no longer the dusty port town where he had spent his childhood. The city’s population had grown from 375,000 in 1941—two-thirds of them Hindu—to nearly 600,000.5 The newest arrivals, the enthusiastic partisans who had come to help build Pakistan, crowded into whatever housing they could find, from the bungalows of British officials to tenements in the brothel district along Napier Road. The wife of Pakistan’s first foreign secretary recalled arriving by sea to cries of “Allah-o-Akbar!” Her companion grew teary-eyed at the sight of a little navy sloop flying the Pakistan flag in the harbor. “It is very small,” he sniffed, “but it is ours.”6 Streets were strung with green lights in anticipation of the independence celebrations to come in a few days.

  Jinnah himself seemed to have abandoned the cheap sectarian rhetoric that had marked his decadelong struggle against Nehru and the Congress. “You are free,” he told Hindus and Sikhs at the opening session of Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly:

  You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State. . . . We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. . . . Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.7

  The message itself wasn’t new. At a press conference in Delhi a month earlier, Jinnah had berated reporters when asked if Pakistan would be an Islamic theocracy. “You are asking me a question that is absurd,” he had scoffed. “For goodness sake, get out of your head [such] nonsense.”8 Now, though, the words no longer sounded calculated. The Quaid didn’t need to pretend for the mullahs nor obfuscate to keep his flock united. He was describing the state he had always intended—a multifaith democracy, just as he had once championed for India itself.

  Jinnah had expected to get word of Radcliffe’s boundary award—and now, surely, Tara Singh’s arrest as well—on 12 August. Yet Delhi was silent on both. All that the papers carried that day was an interview with Sardar Patel, who unhelpfully predicted that Pakistan’s new citizens “would be disillusioned soon” with Jinnah’s rump state, and that “it would not be long before they began to return.”9 The lack of news was ominous. The Karachi rumor mill claimed that Radcliffe’s frontier was undergoing some “last-minute jiggery pokery” inside Viceroy’s House, as one pro-Pakistan Briton put it.10

  Jinnah’s suspicions were hardly alleviated by Mountbatten, who arrived in Karachi the next day to preside over the Pakistan handover. Before a formal dinner that night, the two men argued. Jinnah disagreed with the decision not to arrest the Sikh leaders. And he grew especially hot when Mountbatten revealed that the official border between India and Pakistan would now not be announced until 16 August—the day after independence.11 At birth, amazingly, the subcontinent’s new nations would not know their exact shape.

  The viceroy’s explanation sounded dubious. He claimed that Radcliffe had only just finished his work that morning, a couple of hours before Mountbatten had left for Karachi. Unable to study the maps carefully, Mountbatten had locked them in his safe, sight unseen. Now there was no time to have them printed until after the independence holidays in both dominions.

  In fact, the Punjab border had been mostly ready several days before. Mountbatten had sent a preliminary sketch map to Sir Evan Jenkins on 8 August so that he could alert officials in the affected districts, and details had promptly leaked. Jinnah had already heard, for instance—correctly, it turned out—that most of the northern Punjab’s Gurdaspur district had been given to India despite having a slight Muslim majority.12 This decision meant that Nehru would get the land access to Kashmir he would need if the kingdom were to join India.

  The real reason for the delay had nothing to do with Gurdaspur, though. That early sketch map also showed the Muslim-majority Ferozepore district—where the Pakistan Special bombing had just occurred—as part of Pakistan. The northeastern part of the district, however, formed a salient that crossed the Sutlej River. The spur would cut off Amritsar to the south, leaving the city surrounded on three sides by Pakistan territory. On 9 August, Nehru had warned Mountbatten that no slivers of Pakistan should pierce the Sutlej—an important line of defense.13 A couple of days later, the maharajah of Bikaner, one of Mountbatten’s
closest friends in India, sent representatives to Delhi to point out that the canal headworks in Ferozepore controlled irrigation to Bikaner, as well as to much of East Punjab. The maharajah threatened to accede to Pakistan if the territory ended up falling on Jinnah’s side of the border.14

  Mountbatten pretty clearly appears to have pressured Radcliffe to redraw the map to give Ferozepore to India. The two Englishmen had lunch together on 12 August, joined by Pug Ismay. A few hours later, Jenkins received a terse, coded phone message from Viceroy’s House: “Eliminate salient.”15 That evening, a pair of the viceroy’s aides visited Radcliffe and convinced him not to submit the revised awards until just before Mountbatten had lifted off for Karachi, at which point it would be too late to publish.16

  Mountbatten had more than one reason to delay releasing the award. He feared that the Congress leaders, too, would be incensed about the border: in Bengal, a Buddhist-majority tribal hill tract near Chittagong had been given to Pakistan. If Nehru and Patel found out, Mountbatten worried, they might boycott the grand independence celebrations he had planned for 15 August. In conjunction with his reluctance to arrest the Sikh leaders, however, the Gurdaspur and Ferozepore awards could only look to Muslims like a deliberate attempt to shrink and undermine Pakistan—a “parting kick” from the British and their Congress friends.17

  By the end of the evening, Jinnah’s mood had grown dark. At an after-dinner reception “attended by some 1,500 of the leading citizens of Pakistan, which included some very queer-looking ‘jungly’ men” from the tribal areas, as Mountbatten later reported to the king, the Quaid stood aloof from his guests, almost in a reverie.18 (One attendee likened him to a “walking, talking corpse.”)19 In another part of the lawn, Mountbatten yammered on to guest after guest, gracing them with the full force of his personality. Finally the Quaid called over a young aide-de-camp and asked him to tell Mountbatten to retire so that everyone could go to bed: “He had had enough of him.”20

  There were barely twenty-four hours left until the end of the British Raj. In the heart of the Punjab, the bloodbath Gandhi had once claimed as India’s right now began in earnest. At 10:40 p.m. that night, Jenkins cabled Mountbatten with a grim admission: “Lahore urban area and Amritsar district are out of control.”21

  Order had collapsed swiftly after the train bombing. The very next day, a new Hindu police commander had taken up his post in the city of Amritsar and ordered anyone who planned to serve in Pakistan after independence to turn in their weapons.22 Muslims accounted for nearly two-thirds of the city’s harried police force. Suspecting a trap, they quickly piled their families and belongings into trucks and made for Lahore. In the jatha-ridden countryside, Muslim constables took to their heels as well, abandoning isolated and vulnerable outposts. One detachment foolishly “decided to fight their way to the Lahore district,” according to Amritsar’s district magistrate, and fired on a military patrol while fleeing.23 A mortar unit wiped them out.

  The district of Jullundur alone would eventually lose 7,000 of its 8,500 police officers. Left defenseless, Muslim civilians followed the constables, abandoning their homes and farms and heading westward for safety. By Monday, 11 August, a motley cavalcade of furious police deserters and terrified refugees had begun rolling into Lahore.

  The Hindu writer Fikr Taunsvi was having lunch with a friend in a Muslim café that day. The morning’s newspapers had carried news of the bombing of the Pakistan Special train, and the talk in the restaurant was angry: “We’ll tear these Sikhs to pieces!” “We’ll drink the blood of these Hindus!” “We’ll not let any of their children go alive!” Suddenly, chairs scraped and shutters banged as the restaurant began to close up. A loudspeaker van raced past outside, announcing that a curfew had been reimposed. That night, Taunsvi, closeted like thousands of other Lahoris in his stifling, cramped flat, “felt a hammering on my brain . . . [as if] my head was about to burst.”24 Outside the crash of gongs and rat-a-tat of drums mixed with gunshots, the screams of victims, and the crackling of flames.

  With Lahore almost certain to go to Pakistan, there was no ­longer any need for killers to hide in the shadows. The League’s National Guards came out into the open in full uniform and took over the streets that night, directing attacks against Hindus and Sikhs who had not yet abandoned the city. The police, worked up by their brethren from Amritsar, allowed the militants a free hand. Some cops even helped in the looting of Hindu houses. A mob cut down fifteen Sikhs cowering in a temple; “police almost certainly connived at, if they did not actually carry out, this massacre,” their own commander reported. Nearly eighty people were stabbed overnight, almost all of them non-Muslim. “Feeling in Lahore City is now unbelievably bad,” Jenkins reported the next morning.25

  The Lahore attacks seemed intended partly as intimidation: Muslims, Jenkins noted skeptically, appeared to believe that “by reprisals they can bring the Sikhs to a less violent frame of mind.” Of course the killings had precisely the opposite effect. The jathas—now with almost no police and only a few army detachments to oppose them—began their own open slaughter in the fields around Amritsar. On 12 August, one Sikh raid wiped out an entire village of two hundred Muslims.26 Lahore’s Muslims were quick to respond: a reporter driving around the city before dawn the next morning counted at least 153 corpses on the streets.27 And so it continued. When Mountbatten flew over the central Punjab on his way back to Delhi on 14 August, he could see dark, angry trails of smoke curling skyward.

  Those clouds cast a shadow over what should have been Nehru’s moment of triumph. In these last couple of weeks before independence, he had struck many friendly observers as worn-out and dispirited. “He is deeply disappointed in the division and, I think, has a feeling of frustration,” the American ambassador, Henry Grady, reported confidentially to Washington. “I am not sure he knows where he is going.”28 On the evening of 14 August, just hours before he was to herald the end of the British Raj with one of the most moving and memorable speeches of the twentieth century, Nehru received a call at home from a friend in Lahore. The caller tearfully described the inferno the city had become, the animal-like fear that had seized its Hindu and Sikh citizens. Bodies littered the alleyways. Gurdwaras were aflame; in one, nearly two dozen Sikhs burned to death that night. Men with daggers prowled the train station, hunting Hindus and Sikhs who were trying to flee. When he put down the phone, Jawaharlal’s eyes, too, were wet with tears.29

  Once again, Nehru rose to the occasion. His speech at midnight fully captured the grandeur of the moment, which marked the beginning of Asia’s modern resurgence. “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny,” he famously declared, “and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”30

  In a message written for the next day’s newspapers, Nehru added two lines that appeared intended to reassure the terrified minorities in Lahore: “We think also of our brothers and sisters who have been cut off from us by political boundaries and who unhappily cannot share at present in the freedom that has come. They are of us and will remain of us, whatever may happen,” he vowed.31

  All summer long Nehru had blamed lax or vindictive British administrators for allowing Lahore to burn. Once in control of the country, he and Patel had constantly repeated, Congress would restore peace within days. Outside of the central Punjab, on their first day as free people, Indians seemed to vindicate their leaders’ confidence. In city after city, province after province, Hindus and Muslims happily celebrated independence together. Gandhi had chosen to spend the day in Calcutta, where the Muslim minority feared a massacre in retaliation for the killings a year earlier. His presence appeared to produce a miraculous change of heart, as Hindus and Muslims crossed into each othe
r’s neighborhoods for the first time in months, exchanging sweets and hugs. In scenes reminiscent of Andrew Jackson’s inauguration, a joyous mob overran Government House, lying on the beds, stealing dishes and portraits as souvenirs. The departing British governor and his wife had to sneak out the back.32 In Bombay, Hindu and Muslim mill workers cavorted through the streets in jammed trucks and climbed atop tramcars, whooping excitedly.

  After months of debilitating fear, Indians appeared to have rediscovered their better selves—exactly as Nehru had long predicted they would. Standing on a balcony as the new Indian tricolor was raised above the National Assembly building, he beamed happily while the masses below roared. By that afternoon, the crowds leading down the hill to the India Gate, where the flag was to be raised at dusk, had grown to a suffocating half-million people—most of them there to see “Raja Jawaharlal,” as one villager put it.33 Nehru and the other VIPs on the platform were stranded in a sea of shouting, clapping, cheering Indians; Mountbatten, trying to wend his way down Raisina Hill toward them by horse-drawn carriage, could barely make out the red turbans of his mounted bodyguard above the churning mass. The only look of unhappiness to cross Nehru’s face that day came when one of the bodyguards’ horses fell in the crush. His expression lifted with relief when the horse regained its footing and pranced forward with the others.34

  As it had during the Bihar riots, the prospect of action galvanized Nehru. The next morning, Sir Claude Auchinleck—who continued to oversee the Boundary Force—briefed the Indian leaders on how independence had been celebrated in the Punjab. Muslims had attacked several eastbound trains full of Hindu and Sikh refugees, hacking passengers to death. A mob had burned down the gurdwara of the sixth Sikh guru on Lahore’s Temple Road. Boundary Force commander Pete Rees had raced immediately to Amritsar, hoping to preempt any Sikh retaliation. He was too late. By then, dozens of Muslim women had been stripped naked and paraded through the city streets; several had been raped and killed before the others were given shelter in Amritsar’s Golden Temple, the holiest site in Sikhism. Even Tara Singh, Rees claimed, had wept when he learned of the outrage.35