Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  At dawn on 26 August, Brig.-Gen. K. S. “Timmy” Thimayya, one of Rees’s two Indian deputy commanders, drove up to the town of Sheikhupura, about 25 miles northwest of Lahore. The shrine of Nankana Sahib, birthplace of the founder of the Sikh religion, lay nearby, and the town had a sizable minority of Sikhs and Hindus. Thimayya could hear the rattle of machine-gun fire from 4 miles away.

  The town’s main street was “strewn with hundreds of bodies.” Smoke hung over the city from dozens of burning buildings. Thimayya entered a small gurdwara to find the corpses of three gutted children, a woman “wordlessly screaming,” and a jam-packed crowd of survivors “crazed with fear.”68 The British poet and BBC reporter Louis MacNeice later visited 80 badly injured Sikhs and Hindus in the local hospital, attended to by a single doctor with no equipment. Another 1,500 victims were crammed into a local schoolhouse, their white clothes stained rust-brown with blood, flies buzzing around the stumps where their hands had once been. “But hardly any [were] moaning,” MacNeice wrote in his diary, “just abstracted, even smiling in a horrible unreal way.”69 The first police officer Thimayya found—a Briton—told him the town had had “a spot of trouble” but that everything was under control now.70

  A couple of days earlier, a jeep full of Baluchi soldiers had roared through Sheikhupura. “Are you people asleep?” they had berated the Muslim locals. “Don’t you know what has happened to your brethren in East Punjab? Join us and we will avenge the wrong done to our co-religionists.”71 That night mobs had torched several Hindu and Sikh neighborhoods.

  The next day, according to multiple reports, terrified minorities either headed for the train station or gathered in the compound of a Sikh-owned rice mill for protection. Baluchi soldiers surrounded the mill and ordered the refugees to throw out their weapons, then all their gold and silver. What happened next is unclear: a Muslim soldier may have tried to drag off a young Sikh girl, or one of the jumpy refugees may have shot at the surrounding troops. The Baluchis opened up with their mounted machine guns. The fusillade “caused blood to flow like water,” one survivor told researcher Ishtiaq Ahmed.72 Hundreds, perhaps more, were gunned down.

  Thimayya and other commanders had long feared this scenario, with members of the armed forces joining the slaughter. On both sides of the Punjab border, Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim soldiers had been growing increasingly restive when asked to subdue rioters from their own communities. On 23 August, a clash between Baluchis and Dogras—Hindu troops originally from the Jammu region of Kashmir—had left ten dead and twenty wounded.73 The Boundary Force had been established to prevent exactly these sorts of clashes between heavily armed, professional soldiers. If discipline collapsed outright and troops began taking sides, death tolls would skyrocket.

  When he received the first reports of the Sheikhupura massacre, Nehru had just returned from a muddy, three-day tour through East Punjab. He now understood that his initial optimism had been premature. “This Punjab business becomes bigger and bigger the more one sees it,” he wrote to Mountbatten.74 The roadside speeches he had delivered to Punjabi peasants seemed to be having no impact. Police and petty officials—his own government—were openly encouraging mob rule. Foreign correspondents were painting his India, the ostensible light of Asia, as a land of unchecked savagery: The Sikhs “are clearing eastern Punjab of Muslims, butchering hundreds daily, forcing thousands to flee westward, burning Muslim villages and homesteads,” wrote Ian Morrison in the London Times, claiming the violence had been “organised from the highest levels of Sikh leadership.”75

  On 27 August, Nehru shared his frustrations with Mountbatten in a rambling note—for no reason, he said, other than to “unburden my mind a little.” He felt “peculiarly helpless,” he wrote, powerless to stem the wave of murderousness sweeping the Punjab. Indeed, Nehru had begun to doubt whether he was the right man to lead India through this crisis: “And even if I don’t doubt it myself, other people certainly will.”76

  After Sheikhupura, a new narrative started to form in Nehru’s mind. While to this point the worst violence had taken place in East Punjab, Indian diplomats now started to send back hysterical reports from Pakistan. “50 THOUSAND HINDUS AND SIKHS ARE DAILY BUTCHERED BY THE MILITARY AND POLICE HERE. NO HIGH COMMISSIONER CAN SAVE THEM. ALL HINDUS AND SIKHS IN WEST PUNJAB WILL BE FINISHED,” Sampuran Singh, India’s deputy high commissioner in Lahore, cabled Delhi on 27 August.77 Rumors reached Nehru that huge Muslim gangs were blocking Hindus and Sikhs from escaping to India, trapping their refugee convoys at river crossings and massacring thousands.

  Nehru knew such casualty figures were likely “incredible” and “exaggerated,” he admitted to Mountbatten. Still, he was all too ready to believe that Pakistan was deliberately downplaying the bloodshed on its side of the border. The West Punjab government had imposed a virtual news blackout, censoring all articles about the riots before publication. According to Hugh Stephenson, a British diplomat stationed in Lahore, it wasn’t until 26 September that Pakistan authorities finally adopted “a policy of telling the truth about casualties.”78 Even privately, Mudie maintained “a stony silence,” his counterpart Trivedi complained, refusing to reciprocate or even respond to the daily situation reports sent to him from the East Punjab.79 Indian newspapers talked of a Soviet-style “curtain” falling across the new border.

  When he faced reporters on 28 August, Nehru claimed—against all existing evidence—that matters in East Punjab were in fact now “more under control” than in West Punjab, where thousands were being slaughtered. He seemed more concerned with chastising correspondents for sensationalizing the extent of the chaos on India’s side of the border. Independent India was in no mood to be lectured by “virtuous” outsiders, he said peevishly, warning Western journalists against writing stories that might “embitter relations” in the future.80

  Nehru simultaneously sent a cable to V. K. Krishna Menon, a longtime friend and Labour activist whom he had appointed as India’s high commissioner in London. Nehru wanted him to remind the London press who exactly had launched the cycle of violence between Hindus and Muslims. The bloodbath, Nehru claimed, represented the “first fruit of Pakistan and ideology of hatred and violence which Muslim League has spread for years past.”81 If Jinnah had never launched his insane demand for Pakistan, if the League had not pushed its “ceaseless campaign of hatred and violence” since the spring, Nehru suggested, the Punjab massacres would not have happened at all.82

  In less than two weeks, the facade of amity maintained by the two dominions had quite plainly cracked. Jinnah flew up to Lahore to take charge of the refugee crisis personally. On 29 August, he and Nehru met at Government House, along with other top Indian and Pakistani leaders. It was the last time the two rivals would ever sit down together in the same room.

  Like the politicians, the soldiers of the Boundary Force no longer trusted one another, Pete Rees reported grimly at the meeting. The horrors they were witnessing daily had drained any sympathy they might have had for the opposite community. Punjabi troops feared for the fate of wives and daughters left at home. Rees’s own position as Boundary Force commander had “become impossible. He would be unable to guarantee the reliability and general impartiality of the troops under his command beyond the middle of September.”83 Auchinleck recommended that the force be disbanded by 1 September and its troops reassigned directly to the Indian and Pakistani armies. Nehru and Jinnah readily agreed.

  The two sides made a show of cooperativeness. They decided that soldiers would be allowed to cross the border to guard and escort refugees from their own communities. They made plans to air-drop leaflets imploring Punjabis to come to their senses. Before independence, Mountbatten had arranged for a Joint Defence Council led by himself and attended by the prime ministers and defense ministers of the two countries to meet monthly to head off any wider conflict.

  But essentially, the governments of India and Pakistan would now be responsible solely for their own territories and people. They would trust
only their own troops, under their own (still British) commanders in chief. Auchinleck’s Supreme Command would concern itself solely with dividing up men, weapons, and equipment between the two armies. Liaquat even told Nehru that there was no point any longer in the two prime ministers touring both Punjabs together, as they had planned to do over the next few days. The two men got into a “heated altercation” on the sidelines of the meeting, with Mountbatten “coming in hot and strong” on Nehru’s side until Liaquat reluctantly relented.84

  Although he still resisted the idea of making an exchange of populations official policy, Nehru’s rhetoric also subtly changed. Now he talked about Hindus being trapped on the other side of the border, in need of rescue by India. A 31 August visit to Sheikhupura left Nehru “sick with horror,” his nostrils filled with the lingering, coppery smell of blood and charred flesh.85 Along the road he was stunned to find an old acquaintance marching in a refugee column, “once a prosperous man but he had now only a shirt on.”86

  Nehru urged his friend not to give up hope. India would send help—“a thousand motor trucks, trains and aeroplanes would be employed to evacuate those who felt themselves in danger.”87 Perhaps these should have been Pakistan’s citizens, but they were now India’s people.

  Even Gandhi seemed impotent in the face of the Punjab’s furies. For two weeks, the peace that had settled over Calcutta after his arrival had blissfully persisted. The Mahatma had struck upon a particularly cinematic gesture to reinforce his message of communal harmony: he had agreed to live in the city, in a rundown villa owned by a Muslim woman on the edge of a Hindu slum, as long as the infamous ex-premier H. S. Suhrawardy stayed there with him. The pomaded Suhrawardy had agreed; he was at loose ends after Jinnah had chosen a rival to serve as governor of the new province of East Bengal. The erstwhile butcher of Calcutta and Gandhi had driven around town together in Suhrawardy’s convertible and shared the stage at gargantuan prayer meetings, preaching unity. Tens of thousands of Hindus and Muslims mingled in the audiences, a sight that would have been well-nigh unthinkable anytime in the past year.

  At the end of August, though, tales of the Sheikhupura massacre circulated throughout Calcutta—spread in part by Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, a Bengali and the one Hindu Mahasabha member of Nehru’s cabinet.88 Late on the night of 31 August, a crash of glass woke Gandhi. A Hindu mob had brought a wounded boy to the house where the Mahatma was staying. Scattered street fights had broken out that day; the boy claimed to have been stabbed by a Muslim in the bazaar. The crowd demanded vengeance.

  Gandhi tried fruitlessly to remonstrate with them. Another brick came whizzing past the Mahatma’s head, hitting a Muslim friend beside him. Police had to fire teargas to disperse the crowd. The next day, Hindu mobs, soaked by torrential monsoon rains, brought out their swords and Sten submachine guns and went after Muslims all over the city. Nearly three hundred people were injured and at least fifty killed.

  Gandhi was distraught. “What was regarded as a miracle has proved a short-lived, nine-day wonder,” he wrote to Sardar Patel the next day.89 The Mahatma had been pressing Nehru to allow him to “rush to the Punjab . . . and if necessary break myself in the attempt to stop the warring elements.”90 Now, though, he could hardly face Punjabis and ask them to live together again if he could not keep the peace in Calcutta. That evening, Gandhi announced that he would not leave the city, and would not eat or drink again until its citizens regained their sanity. Many Calcuttans doubted he would live to see that day.

  The idea that Churchill’s prophecy might come true, and that independent India might collapse into anarchy, no longer seemed unthinkable. To this point, the crisis had hammered Jinnah’s dominion harder than Nehru’s. Less than 5 percent of India’s population lived in East Punjab, whereas West Punjab represented the biggest, richest, most vital region in Pakistan’s western wing. But trouble in India now began to spread well beyond the border areas. Hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan had made their way to Delhi, the United Provinces, and points further east and south. They brought little with them except for their hate, and they found—in the 40 million Muslims who still lived in India—an all-too-rich environment of targets.

  Indeed, India’s size and variety made the country even more unstable than Pakistan in some ways. The RSSS had tens of thousands of well-drilled cadres distributed throughout the country, particularly in the United Provinces, next door to the Punjab. Big cities like Calcutta and Bombay—where riots also broke out on 1 September for the first time since independence—remained full of armed goondas. Refugee camps were time bombs: one, located 700 yards outside the military academy at Dehra Dun in the United Provinces, housed ten thousand Hindus and Sikhs from West Punjab, but also included “military deserters, bandits, criminals, and thugs of all sorts,” according to the academy’s commandant.91 The camp’s inmates boasted an arsenal that ranged from kirpans and country-made bombs to light machine guns.

  Nehru and Patel had little control over the princely states, which had yet to integrate themselves with the rest of the country except on paper. The Meo war that had begun in the late spring just outside Delhi had spread across their borders. According to persistent reports, state troops in the small kingdoms of Alwar and Bharatpur were now systematically massacring or driving out their Meo populations. The maharajah of Bharatpur’s own brother was later accused of leading some of the death squads, shotgun in hand.92 A Briton traveling through Alwar by rail in early September was horrified to find a barely alive Muslim girl atop a pile of corpses on a train platform. When he tried to give her some water, a bearded Hindu brushed him aside, saying, “‘Don’t do that, sahib!’ He then produced a bottle of petrol, forced some of it into the girl’s mouth and set her alight.”93

  Filled as it was with unhinged refugees, Delhi itself had become almost a far eastern extremity of the Punjab. (Jinnah had an advantage over India’s leaders in this way: his capital lay hundreds of miles from the Punjab’s mayhem.) Knots of Hindu and Sikh refugees gathered each morning outside Sardar Patel’s bungalow, filling his ears with “tales of woe and atrocities,” he wrote to Nehru on 2 September.94 Some demanded to know why Muslims—who made up around half the city’s population before Partition—were allowed to live unmolested in the Indian capital, even to work for the government, after the horrors their coreligionists had perpetrated in the Punjab.95 RSSS leaflets appeared on the streets of Delhi, urging Hindus and Sikhs to prepare “to attack all Muslims they could see, and to terrorise the city.”96

  Sketchy intelligence reports were warning of the opposite as well: a brewing Muslim uprising in the capital. An accidental explosion at the home of a Muslim science student was thought to have been caused by a bomb he was making. Most of the city’s ammunition dealers were Muslim, as were most of its blacksmiths.97 The latter had supposedly converted their workshops to churn out bombs, mortars, and bullets. Muslim agitators were reported to have collected country-made guns and other weapons in their homes, as well as wireless transmitters provided by sympathizers in the army. Patel had been worried enough about the threat to issue licenses to several new Hindu arms dealers in Delhi. He had “been giving arms liberally to non-Muslim applicants” for self-defense, he reassured a Congress colleague.98

  By this point, the tough Sardar seemed “very pessimistic in regard to the situation in the country,” reported Zahid Hussain, a former civil servant and finance minister in Hyderabad who had been named Pakistan’s first ambassador to India.99 India’s army was too thinly spread to cope with widespread disturbances. With the dissolution of the Boundary Force, commanders had to bring up troops from Madras province to reinforce the Punjab. Another sixteen battalions that were ultimately destined for India remained stationed on the Northwest Frontier to watch over the tribes.100 They now faced the ugly prospect of having to fight their way out. Twice in quick succession, Pathan raiders had swooped down on trains transporting troops to India, riddling the carriages with bullets.101 On the evening of
2 September, before flying to Lahore to meet with Nehru and several Pakistani leaders, Patel lamented to Gen. Sir Rob Lockhart, India’s new commander in chief, that “anarchy looked like [it was] spreading throughout India and . . . he was powerless to stop it.”102

  Another fear now crept into Nehru and Patel’s most private discussions. Less than two months earlier, assassins had gunned down Burma’s prime-minister-in-waiting, Aung San, and several members of his cabinet in Rangoon. A low-ranking British Army officer would later be implicated in the plot. There was open talk in Delhi of the “Rangoon precedent”—the possibility that the British-led military might stage a coup and overthrow the two-week-old Indian government.103

  The Indians already distrusted Auchinleck, whose aide-de-camp was a strongly pro-Pakistan Muslim. The Auk had had many run-ins with the Congress leaders over the summer regarding the share of troops and weapons that should have been allotted to Pakistan. He had accused Sikh defense minister Baldev Singh of an “insane desire to do down Pakistan at all costs” by crippling its fledgling military.104 Although commanders like Lockhart now worked for the Indian government, they remained personally loyal to Auchinleck. Indeed, later that same night, Lockhart asked Reginald Savory, with whom he shared a bungalow, “Do you think there is any chance of the Auk taking over complete control and running the show on his own?”105 (That kind of talk was sure to make it back to Patel, who had spies planted inside Auchinleck’s Supreme Command.)106 Although Nehru had asked for them to be withdrawn as soon as possible, thousands of British troops remained in the country, including a battalion just 40 miles away in Meerut.

  On the sidelines of the meeting in Lahore on 3 September, Nehru quietly admitted to Pete Rees that he and his government “were beginning to doubt the loyalty of the Indian Army to the present Congress Government, and that if the situation in the Army continued to develop along the anti-Congress lines which they claim it is developing toward them that they (Nehru and Company) could foresee the fall of their Government and anarchy in India.”107 Nehru insisted that all the new brigadiers stationed along the border with Pakistan had to be Indian, not British.108