Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  That evening, Nehru returned with Patel to a capital on edge. For the past several nights, Sikh gangs had attacked trains coming into the city. One band of killers had boarded a train that Ismay’s daughter Sarah was riding down from Simla.109 Barely 20 miles from Delhi, they had pulled the brake cord, then swarmed the third-class compartment, dragging out Muslims and chopping them to death on the platform with axes and sharpened hoes. Bazaar rumors claimed that a wholesale massacre of the capital’s Muslims was about to begin. From Delhi, residents could see smoke from villages burning only 3 miles away.110

  The next morning, a small bomb went off in a Hindu neighborhood of Old Delhi. The explosion acted like a starter’s pistol. A wave of bombings, stabbings, shootings, and arson attacks swept across the city. Nehru told his cabinet that he feared the Punjab’s troubles were about to spread to the rest of the country and lead to “complete chaos.”111

  The Indian government looked to be teetering very close to the kind of breakdown that would invite army intervention. Patel’s aide V. P. Menon knew there was one figure India’s British commanders would unquestionably respect and obey: Dickie Mountbatten, the former Supremo. He had gone up to Simla after the independence celebrations for a much-needed rest. Apparently without informing Nehru or the Sardar, Menon called him that night and asked him to rush back to Delhi immediately. As Mountbatten wrote later to the king, Menon “felt that the matter was one of life or death for India.”112

  7

  “Stop This Madness”

  THROUGHOUT AUGUST, as the Punjab descended into mayhem, lights had continued to blaze from New Delhi’s ivory-white Imperial Hotel. On weekends, diners packed the tables in the Grill Room overlooking the lawns, while Indian socialites dripping with gold and jewels filled the dance floor well past midnight. To many of the capital’s well-to-do, the bloodshed felt unreal. The Indian women in particular seemed to be “on heat,” one British journalist noted hungrily. “The aphrodisiac was independence.”1

  No band played on Saturday, 6 September, however. A curfew had emptied the dining room. Anyone standing on the hotel’s veranda would have been bathed in a different light—a rose-colored glow that filled the horizon to the north. The Muslim neighborhoods of Old Delhi were on fire.

  Despite the curfew, along the broad, manicured avenues of the capital, small groups of Sikhs and khaki-clad RSSS cadres had been roving about openly armed for several days running.2 Some appeared to have been marking out the rooms in government dormitories occupied by Muslim clerks and peons, as well as the houses and bungalows where Muslims lived or worked as servants. A British diplomat later reported seeing a truck full of Sikhs pull up outside the home of the local chairman of British airline BOAC, whose planes were helping to ferry Pakistan officials from Delhi to Karachi. “That’s the place,” one of the Sikhs confirmed, carefully noting down the address.3

  Sword-wielding gangs now began working their way from target to target, dragging out and killing Muslims. The next morning, the furies erupted into plain view. Mobs took to the streets all over the city. One descended on the military airfield at Palam, from which the BOAC charters were taking off; another blocked the runways at the civilian Willingdon Airport as airline employees fled in terror.4 Muslims caught out in the open were stabbed and gutted, including five who were killed in front of New Delhi’s cathedral while worshippers celebrated Sunday Mass. Looters broke into Muslim shops in Connaught Place, the colonnaded arcade at the heart of the city. By ten o’clock that night, Delhi hospitals were reporting three times as many Muslim as non-Muslim casualties.5

  Rushing to Connaught Place, Nehru was appalled to see a contingent of police standing by idly as Hindu and Sikh rioters carried off ladies’ handbags, cosmetics, and wool scarves from Muslim shops; the looters even ransacked bottles of fountain-pen ink.6 The prime minister grabbed a lathi from one indifferent policeman and flailed away at the crowd himself. Nehru would learn later that Delhi police had picked up rumors that “two well-known Akali extremists from Amritsar” had been organizing Punjab refugees into killing squads in the capital.7 Supposedly the Sikh fighters were to mark themselves out by wearing white topknots, while Hindus donned the khaki shorts favored by the RSSS. Plot or no, Delhi’s police appeared more than content to let the rioters go about their business unmolested.8

  Although they later tried to play down the extent of the chaos, India’s leaders clearly lost control of their own capital for a time. Ministries sat empty because clerks and officials were too afraid to come to work. Buses, taxis, and tongas—usually driven by Muslims—stopped plying the roads. The phones went dead.9 Within forty-eight hours, hospital mortuaries had filled to capacity; dozens of bodies lay unclaimed on the streets for days. With food shipments rotting in abandoned trains, ration shops closed up. At one point, the city had only two days’ stock of wheat in reserve.10 “This is more hectic than at any time of the war,” Pug Ismay wrote to his wife on Monday—a potent statement from a man who had lived through the Blitz. He advised her to cancel her plans to come out and see him: “There is a possibility—and most keen a possibility—that orderly Government may collapse.”11

  The riots in Delhi arguably posed a greater threat to the new dominion than the Punjab massacres. Mountbatten, who had rushed back from Simla, quickly organized the Indian ministers into an Emergency Committee that met daily and issued a blizzard of orders and decrees. “If we go down in Delhi, we are finished,” he warned.12 To many foreign observers, India’s weeks-old government looked dangerously out of its depth. Western embassies had to become makeshift refugee camps as Muslim servants and their families all crowded into the grounds for safety.13 Watchful Sikhs lurked outside the gates, demanding that the asylum seekers be turned out. Inside, diplomats subsisted on tinned salmon and crackers, and asked the British about supplying troops for protection. The requests pained Nehru, who remained acutely sensitive to international opinion. The picture being drawn abroad was apocalyptic: one wire report ludicrously tried to claim that 500,000 Delhiites—half of the city’s population—were involved in running street battles.14

  Initially none of the Indian leaders had any doubt that Sikhs had spearheaded the attacks. Over 200,000 refugees from what was now Pakistan had squeezed into Delhi since the summer, and plenty of them thirsted for revenge. Patel called in Delhi’s Sikh leaders and threatened to toss their followers into concentration camps if the violence did not cease.15 He also gave the army a “free hand” to go after Sikh troublemakers.16 Commanders ordered their troops to shoot rioters on sight. Although the military could not admit openly to targeting any particular community, Mountbatten joked grimly, “The object would have been achieved if in 48 hours’ time the local graves and concentration camps were occupied more fully by men with long beards than those without.”17

  Very quickly, however, Patel’s assessment of the threat changed. The problem was not just the Sikhs. Some Delhi Muslims had indeed, as he had feared, been stockpiling firearms. They fought back against the police as well as the roving gangs; among reported gunshot victims on Sunday, non-Muslims actually outnumbered Muslims forty-five to twenty.18 All day long on Monday, staccato bursts of rifle and Sten-gun fire echoed through the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Sabzi Mandi in Old Delhi. Officials later claimed that troops had come under heavy fire from residents, and that huge caches of arms and ammunition had been stashed in Muslim homes.19

  Quite a few Delhiites seemed to believe that the city’s Muslims posed as great a threat as the death squads, if not greater. In addition to the Punjab refugees, thousands of Muslim Meo villagers had also fled for safety to the capital. The raging battles in Gurgaon and nearby states in recent weeks had contributed to the Meos’ warlike reputation. Among some Hindus and Sikhs, an idea took hold that Akali fighters had just barely saved the capital from a planned Muslim rebellion.

  Patel had police lay out the weapons they had seized from Muslim homes for cabinet ministers to examine. According to Education Minister Maulana A
zad, himself a Muslim, the arsenal consisted mostly of “dozens of rusty kitchen knives, pocket knives, iron spikes from fences of old houses, some cast iron pipes.” Mountbatten picked up one or two of the blades and said dryly that their owners “seemed to have a wonderful idea of military tactics if they thought the city of Delhi could be captured with them.” The Sardar refused to brook any criticism of Delhi’s police. When Nehru lamented at a meeting of top Congressmen that he felt “humiliated” by the slaughter and “helpless” to defend the city’s Muslims, Patel flared up.20 He insisted that outside of a few isolated incidents, security forces were doing everything possible to safeguard all of Delhi’s citizens.

  Azad recalled that “Jawaharlal remained speechless for some moments.” Gandhi, who had arrived in the capital on 9 September, sat cross-legged between Nehru and Patel. The Mahatma had ended his fast after seventy-three hours, once Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim leaders in Calcutta had sworn they would maintain harmony among their communities; now he hoped to pacify Delhi, too. Nehru “turned to Gandhiji in despair. He said that if these were Sardar Patel’s views, he had no comments to make.”21

  In recent weeks, as they struggled to cope with India’s postindependence crisis, a worrying rift had opened up between the prime minister and his deputy. Their differences were both practical and ideological. Patel saw little point to Nehru’s endless goodwill tours with Pakistani leaders. As far as the Sardar was concerned, the only way to restore stability to the Punjab was to transfer minorities from one side of the border to the other as quickly as possible. While the principle that Hindus and Muslims should be able to live together remained central to Nehru’s vision for his new nation, Patel was less sentimental. He did not trust that all of India’s Muslims, many of whom had so recently supported Jinnah, had switched loyalties.22 If they did not think of themselves as Indians, he believed, then they belonged in Pakistan.

  Patel was more in sync with the popular mood than Nehru. During the riots, officials trying to rescue Delhi’s Muslims often found the public less than eager to help. Owners of private cars and trucks removed key parts so that the authorities couldn’t requisition the vehicles. Volunteer drivers pretended to get lost or develop engine trouble when asked to deliver aid to Muslim areas. Eventually the government enlisted idealistic students to ride along and watch over them.23 Even four days into the rioting, the American military attaché witnessed army troops standing by as Muslim women and children were clubbed to death at Delhi’s railway station.24

  Nehru would almost certainly have lost an open fight with Patel. Horrified by the casualty reports, the prime minister tried to ban Sikhs from wearing kirpans across the city. Patel pushed back, saying the decree discriminated against the Sikh faith. “Murder is not to be justified in the name of religion,” Nehru protested. Yet after a “violent disagreement” between the two men, the Sardar triumphed. Sikhs regained the right to carry their daggers after a forty-eight-hour pause.25

  Nehru seemed to believe that he had a better chance of quelling the unrest single-handedly than by working through his own administration. He went “on the prowl whenever he could escape from the [cabinet] table, and took appalling personal risks,” Ismay recalled in a memoir.26 As he had during the Bihar riots, Nehru angrily faced down mobs himself, rushing from trouble spot to trouble spot. At night he drove around the city, unable to rest—once even picking up a terrified Muslim couple and bringing them to his own home for safety. A veritable tent city filled with Muslim refugees sprouted on the lawns of his York Road bungalow.27

  One night, a Muslim friend named Badruddin Tyabji showed up at Nehru’s door to alert him to an especially troubled area—the Minto Bridge, which Muslims fleeing their Old Delhi neighborhoods had to cross to reach the safety of refugee camps in New Delhi. Each night, Tyabji said, gangs of Sikhs and Hindus lurked nearby and sprung on the defenseless Muslims as they trudged past. Nehru immediately bolted from his seat and dashed upstairs. He returned a few minutes later holding a dusty, ungainly revolver. The gun had once belonged to his father, Motilal, and hadn’t been fired in years. He had a plan, he told Tyabji. They would don soiled and torn kurtas and drive up to the Minto Bridge themselves that night. Disguised as refugees, they would cross the bridge, and when the thugs tried to waylay them, “we would shoot them down!” The stunned Tyabji was able to persuade the leader of the world’s second-biggest nation “only with great difficulty” that “some less hazardous and more effective method for putting an end to this kind of crime should not be too difficult to devise.”28 Mountbatten feared Nehru’s impulsiveness would get him killed, and assigned soldiers to watch over him.

  Nehru’s individual heroics evoked great admiration in men like Ismay and Mountbatten (not to mention Edwina, who worked closely with Nehru to organize relief for the swelling ranks of refugees).29 But they did little for Delhi’s Muslims. After the initial wave of attacks, thousands had fled their homes. Authorities almost immediately started evacuating the rest, claiming that they could not guarantee the safety of Muslims who remained where they were. The evacuees were dumped in guarded sites by the truckload—places that it would be generous to describe as refugee camps. Within a week, over fifty thousand Muslims were crammed into the Purana Qila, where Nehru had held his grandiose Asian Relations Conference less than six months before.30 They huddled pitifully on the muddy ground with no lights, no latrines, and hardly any water or food. The Pakistan government flew in shipments of cooked rice and chapatis all the way from Lahore to feed them.31

  Ismay melodramatically compared the scene at the Purana Qila to “Belsen—without the gas chambers.”32 Dignified Muslim professors and lawyers were squashed next to cooks and mechanics, longtime Gandhians next to stranded, would-be Pakistan bureaucrats. The wounded and sick moaned without medical attention; babies were born in the open. Armed Sikhs patrolled the one choked entrance, taking down the license plate numbers of Europeans driving in to deliver food and supplies to their friends and former servants.33

  With the help of Gurkha and South Indian troops—who were less vulnerable to the sectarian passions roiling their northern counterparts—authorities managed to regain control of the capital within a week. Volunteers began to clean up the streets, and ration shops reopened. Nehru asked the governors of other Indian provinces to take in tens of thousands of Punjab refugees, to get them out of Delhi. He told reporters that a thousand victims had died in the rioting, though that estimate was generally considered “ridiculous,” according to U.S. ambassador Henry Grady.34 Grady figured the true toll to be at least five times higher; others said twenty times.35

  Many observers believed that the instigators of the riots had not been defeated; they had only moved on. On Friday, 12 September, Akali gangs rampaged through the picture-book town of Simla, breaking into the Grand Hotel and slaughtering a Muslim family in front of one of Nehru’s cousins.36 Even more dangerously, the bond of trust between Delhi’s Muslims and their government had been broken. When Gandhi visited the Purana Qila to promise that food was on its way, refugees angrily shouted that they preferred to eat chapatis from Lahore than anything provided by Nehru’s administration.37

  Many if not most of Delhi’s Muslims now believed that they had no future in India’s capital. “The atmosphere in Delhi today is such that a Muslim appears in public only at the risk of his life, and there is no assurance that either police or Indian Army troops will interfere if he is attacked,” a U.S. diplomat wrote in mid-September.38 By the end of the month, the cabinet minister in charge of refugees estimated that 90 percent of the Purana Qila’s miserable inmates wanted nothing more than a speedy removal to Pakistan.39

  When Jinnah gathered his ministers on Tuesday, 9 September, to address the burgeoning crisis in Delhi, one key figure was missing. Zahid Hussain, Pakistan’s high commissioner, was supposed to have flown in from the Indian capital to brief the cabinet personally. He never showed up. In the previous forty-eight hours, Hussain’s cables from Delhi had grown increasingly alarm
ing.40 Hundreds of Muslim refugees had carpeted the grounds of his house, he reported, and the embassy’s food supplies were running out. Hussain described the Indian government as either intent on eliminating the capital’s Muslim population or indifferent to its fate. Army troops were openly gunning down innocent Muslims. Tens of thousands of Sikh and Hindu villagers from the surrounding countryside were supposedly mobilizing to “fall upon Delhi to give a final blow.” In one of his last cables, Hussain had warned, “The entire Muslim population of India is facing total extermination.”41

  When he heard that the Pakistani ambassador was on his way to see Jinnah, Mountbatten sent an aide to the airport to yank the hysterical envoy off the plane. “Had he gone to Karachi in such a frame of mind the picture painted to the Governor-General of Pakistan would have sent Mr. Jinnah through the roof,” Ismay explained to the British ambassador in Delhi. In fact, when Hussain didn’t show up, the Pakistanis initially feared that he, too, had been killed.42

  Jinnah was ready to believe the worst. Dawn’s coverage of the Delhi riots had been incendiary: CITY FALLS TO THE FURY OF ARMED SIKH HORDES SPREADING MURDER, LOOT AND ARSON, read one typical headline.43 With evacuation flights disrupted, the thousands of Pakistan government bureaucrats and their families still in Delhi were trapped. Two nights earlier, four hundred furious civil servants had burst onto the grounds of Government House while the Quaid was throwing a pool party for the emir of Kuwait. They shouted down Liaquat—whose mood was one of “black depression,” according to one observer—and demanded that Jinnah somehow get their families out of Delhi. The next day, riots broke out in Karachi, too, as Muslims stabbed fourteen Hindus and killed eight others.44