by Nisid Hajari
A conviction was taking hold that India, in Liaquat’s phrase, had launched an “undeclared war” to destabilize the weaker Pakistan.45 The Indian leaders seemed unwilling to transfer Pakistan government servants to Karachi or to protect them in their Delhi homes. Cargo trains full of equipment and supplies meant for Pakistan were being derailed and torched in the Punjab. At least some members of the Indian Cabinet appeared to be winking at the Sikhs’ murderous activities. “It is obvious that their orders are not carried out,” one of Hussain’s cables said of the Indian leaders, “or at least different members of the government are following conflicting policies.”46 Pakistan’s communications minister, Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar, had been in Delhi when the riots had first broken out. His firsthand report would not have put any of his colleagues’ minds at ease.47
For two and a half hours, the cabinet debated how to respond. Jinnah thought Pakistan needed to enlist outside help. He had a letter to Clement Attlee drafted—under Liaquat’s signature rather than his own, to maintain constitutional propriety—charging that “the Government of India are apparently unwilling or powerless to restore order”:
Delhi has been the scene of carnage on a large scale. . . . While stern and ruthless action is called for, speeches and appeals to reason are being made instead without any effect on those who are determined to achieve their object of destroying the Muslims. . . . It is clear that the India Dominion as a member of the British Commonwealth has failed in the primary duty of protecting the life, property and honour of one section of its citizens—the Muslims who are marked out for death and destruction.
The letter asked that the Commonwealth “immediately consider effective ways and means of saving gravest situation in India which presents a serious threat not only to the peace of this great subcontinent but to that of the whole world.”48 Although vaguely phrased, the implication was clear: Pakistan wanted India condemned by the Commonwealth, if not kicked out entirely. Soon thereafter, noting that Pakistan’s stability was “of world concern” given its strategic location, Jinnah dispatched an envoy to Washington to try to secure a $2 billion loan from the Americans—the first of many such requests Pakistan would make over the ensuing decades.49
The cabinet also considered one other matter, which at the time seemed slight by comparison: a request by the princely kingdom of Junagadh to become part of Pakistan.50 Most of Jinnah’s ministers had probably never heard of the tiny state, which lay on the Kathiawar Peninsula, where both he and Gandhi had roots. Like many of its neighbors, the kingdom was a crazy jigsaw: obscure vassal states ruled patches of land within its boundaries, and some parts of Junagadh territory lay in other states. India surrounded Junagadh on three sides; its only link to Pakistan was by sea, through the port of Veraval, which was not even navigable during the monsoon months.
The state’s Muslim nawab was a vaguely ridiculous character, obsessed with dogs. His eight hundred canines supposedly each had their own apartment, complete with attendant and phone. A three-day “wedding” between two favorites cost the state exchequer 300,000 rupees.51 The “bride” was borne to the Durbar Hall on a silver palanquin, while 250 mutts attired in brocade and accompanied by a military band greeted the gold-bedecked “groom” at the train station.52 Certainly the nawab seemed to care more for his pets’ well-being than that of his roughly 800,000 citizens, more than 80 percent of whom were Hindu.
Before he left Delhi over the summer, Jinnah had made overtures to a whole slew of Hindu-majority kingdoms. Some, like Indore and Bhopal, whose Muslim ruler was an old friend, were completely enclosed by Indian territory and never had a chance of acceding to Pakistan. Others, like the Rajput states of Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, at least lay near the Pakistan border. Jinnah offered the maharajah of Jodhpur his own blank sheet of paper on which to write his terms for accession. But swift work by V. P. Menon and some arm-twisting by Mountbatten had persuaded the hot-tempered young prince that his best interests lay with not provoking India.53 Among them Mountbatten, Patel, and Menon had bagged virtually all the states that lay within India’s borders before 15 August.
During his charm campaign, Jinnah had also met with Junagadh’s newly appointed prime minister, Shah Nawaz Bhutto (father of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and grandfather of Benazir Bhutto, both future Pakistani prime ministers). The Quaid had reassured Bhutto that Junagadh need not fear Indian threats. “Veraval is not far from Karachi,” Jinnah had declared (rather extravagantly for a man without much of a navy). “Pakistan [would] not allow Junagadh to be stormed and tyrannised.”54 His pitch worked: on 15 August, Junagadh had offered to accede to Pakistan rather than India.55
In recent days, Bhutto had written to remind Jinnah of his promises. Although Nehru and Patel were distracted by more pressing matters, local Indian officials in Kathiawar were threatening to attack Junagadh “from both inside and outside” if the nawab did not reverse himself, Bhutto warned.56 He needed to know if Pakistan planned to ratify the state’s accession and come to its defense, or not.
Jinnah had no special interest in this particular speck of Gujarati coastline. According to Mountbatten, he later “freely admitted that there was no sense in having Junagadh in the Dominion of Pakistan and said that he had been most averse [to] accepting the State’s accession.” But the Indian threats now made the state useful. If India decided to invade Junagadh to try and thwart its accession, Pakistan would have an even better case to present to the world “as the small innocent nation and the victim of the aggressive designs of its large bullying neighbour,” as Mountbatten later put it.57 The cabinet voted to make the state part of Pakistan.
Jinnah must have known that both decisions would enrage India. He no longer cared. Pug Ismay arrived in Karachi two days later, dispatched by Mountbatten to give the Quaid a more evenhanded account of the troubles in Delhi. Jinnah “couldn’t have been a more charming host. He pressed me over and over again to regard his house as my home, and to come for as long as I liked and as often as I liked, bringing you with me,” Ismay wrote to his wife in England.58 But in eleven hours of talks spread over three days, the Pakistani leader did not mention either the letter to Attlee or Junagadh’s accession.59
For his part, Ismay did not try to deny that petty officials may have encouraged rioters in Delhi and East Punjab—as they had on the Pakistani side of the border, too—or even that leaders as powerful as Patel had displayed less sympathy for Muslims than for Hindus and Sikhs. Instead, the chief of staff built his case on Nehru. “Could anyone who knew Pandit Nehru doubt his humanitarian principles or his courage?” Ismay asked Jinnah, using Nehru’s Kashmiri honorific.60 “I had, with my own eyes,” Ismay noted, “seen [him] charge into a rioting Hindu mob and slap the faces of the ringleaders. He seemed to have no thought whatsoever for his personal safety.”61 The storm that had swept over Delhi would have disrupted any government in the world, let alone one that was only a few weeks old, Ismay insisted. At least Pakistanis could trust that India’s leader did not mean any harm to them or India’s own Muslims.
This was not an argument calculated to win Jinnah’s confidence. If nothing else, Muslims knew where they stood with a strongman like Patel. Nehru was almost worse—a dreamer incapable of forceful, effective action. By now the Quaid was convinced that the Punjab cataclysm had been planned for months. Although intelligence had fingered Sikh leaders over the summer, they had been allowed to walk free. India, with her vast resources and powerful military, could even now have suppressed the Sikhs if only Nehru had the necessary “will and guts.”62 Instead, he could not even guarantee the safety of Muslims in his own capital.
Ismay returned to Delhi profoundly depressed. In a secret codicil to his report, meant for Mountbatten’s eyes only, he warned that Jinnah had begun speaking in dangerously warlike tones. In the very first hour of their talks, the Quaid had struck Ismay “as a man who had given up all hope of further cooperation with the Government of India.” All that had happened in the month since independence just “went to prove th
at they were determined to strangle Pakistan at birth,” Jinnah had told Ismay grimly. “There is nothing for it but to fight it out.”63
As a discouraged Ismay flew back to Delhi on 14 September, Nehru was racing the other way, to attend an emergency summit with Liaquat in the Punjab. Jinnah was not the only one talking about a war.
Most accounts of the Partition riots tend to focus on the eruption of violence in mid-August, leaving the impression that the chaos steadily tailed off thereafter. In reality, the massacres grew wider and more intense for weeks. By mid-September, they were approaching their peak. The exodus from both halves of the broken province had assumed biblical proportions. An estimated 1.75 million Muslims had crossed into Pakistan from East Punjab, while a roughly equivalent number of Hindus and Sikhs had emigrated to India.64 Millions more were on the move. Organized refugee convoys—called kafilas—now stretched for 50 miles or more. The tramping of hundreds of thousands of cows, buffalo, and blistered human feet churned up the Punjab’s dirt roads. When these great masses of humanity paused for the night, Life magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White wrote, the flicker of thousands of campfires “rose into the dust-filled air until it seemed as if a pillar of fire hung over them.”65
One kafila, filled with more than a quarter-million Muslim refugees from East Punjab, had recently begun the long, dangerous march to Lahore. The most direct route would bring them through the Sikh bastion of Amritsar. The city had been emptied of its Muslim population and was now filled with tens of thousands of vengeful Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab. They refused to let the column pass. Crowds chanted “No Muslims out!” and swore that not a single Muslim would cross the border alive.66
Master Tara Singh could not—or would not—control his followers. Any remorse he might have felt at the start of the massacres had dissipated as refugees recounted the horrors they had suffered on Pakistan’s side of the border. Meeting with “Timmy” Thimayya, who had been promoted to major-general and was now in charge of Indian troops in East Punjab, Singh said he saw only one way to resolve the worsening conflict: war between India and Pakistan.67
The army did not relish the challenge of reining in the Sikhs. The jathas had grown bigger, bolder, and more organized. They vastly outnumbered the kafila escorts: already, in one assault, a ten-thousand-strong jatha had attacked a detachment of sixty soldiers, wounding their Sikh officer four times.68 Commanders feared their Sikh soldiers would begin to desert if they had to keep fighting their brethren.
Across the table from Liaquat in Lahore, Nehru was forced to admit his government’s impotence. He could not open Amritsar’s gates. The best alternative Thimayya could propose was to bulldoze a new road around the city for Muslim convoys to use.69 The project would take several days. In the meantime, the refugees—who suffered repeated attacks on their journey, and were refused food and water in the villages they passed—would have to wait.
Tara Singh’s idea of carving out a powerful Sikhistan in the Punjab sounded less crazy now. In the Sikh states, ongoing pogroms were denuding villages of Muslims. Kafilas that ran the gauntlet of Sikh kingdoms made fat, all-too-easy targets for royal troops. One Indian Army officer sent to investigate conditions in Patiala met a Sikh ex-soldier who had served in his unit during the war. He asked how the man was faring. “Fine,” the former sepoy said with satisfaction. “We are getting the most excellent shikar [hunting]. If we don’t kill 700 Muslims a day we think it is a poor bag.”70 Nehru himself told Pug Ismay that “he did not doubt that [the maharajah] of Patiala wished to get complete supremacy of Sikhistan” and had killed or expelled his kingdom’s Muslim population as a first step.71
To a disturbing extent, Sikh militants seemed to be dictating events in territory controlled by Nehru’s government, too. Visiting Pakistani officials claimed that “a complete Sikh raj” had taken over East Punjab; some of their Indian counterparts complained of having to take orders from an underground Akali high command rather than the Indian government.72 Trivedi, the provincial governor, appeared to have little sway over his Sikh ministers. In early September, he had pressed Home Minister Swaran Singh to take more forceful action against the jathas. For almost two weeks, Singh had not even deigned to respond, and when he did, he casually dismissed the massive raids as “sporadic and local outbursts of violence.”73 The urbane Trivedi finally lost his temper, blasting Singh’s police for taking part in rampant looting and slaughter. “I would not be sorry if the Army shot them [all], including their officers,” the governor raged.74
Suspicions were further inflamed by a sudden Sikh migration out of the verdant canal colonies of Montgomery and Lyallpur, which were now part of Pakistan. In early September, Akali leaders had ordered their followers to evacuate the canal lands en masse, even though they had not yet been targeted by mobs. Unlike the wretched Muslim kafilas—which “straggled sorrowfully along the road like a lot of tired ants,” in Ismay’s words—the Sikhs’ loaded bullock carts rolled out with “march discipline . . . worthy of the British Army at its best.”75 Armed and mounted scouts guarded the convoys’ flanks, while white-bearded former soldiers carrying shotguns and wearing their World War I medals led the way. The Sikhs looked like they were leaving with “their tails up,” said one British official.76 In his letter to Attlee, Jinnah described this “controlled exodus” as “part of the Sikh plan” to consolidate their community on lands that had been wiped clean of Muslims.77
These Sikhs were abandoning large plots of some of the most fertile land in the subcontinent, and they were not likely to be satisfied with the small, hardscrabble farms that awaited them in East Punjab. Worries now grew that once their ranks had been collected, Sikhs would launch an insurgency across the Punjab border to reclaim the whole province. In mid-September, Patel dispatched eight hundred rifles to Faridkot and told the prince he might soon be called upon to defend “territory other than that within the boundaries of his own State.”78 There was open talk of a Sikh invasion of Lahore. “THIS MAY SOUND ALARMIST,” West Punjab governor Mudie wrote to Jinnah, the passage marked out in boldface type, “BUT IF ANYONE SIX MONTHS AGO HAD PREDICTED WHAT THE SIKHS HAVE ACCOMPLISHED IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS, HE WOULD HAVE BEEN LAUGHED TO SCORN. WE CAN AFFORD TO TAKE NO RISKS.”79 Pakistan’s army was already stretched to the limit: by the middle of September, General Messervy, now Pakistan’s commander in chief, had “not a single battalion in reserve.”80
On 19 September, Tara Singh swore to Nehru that he had not the slightest ambition of creating a Sikhistan.81 Yet the very next day, the Akali leader told an Amritsar newspaper that Sikhs could never tolerate “the surrender of the canal colonies we built with our endless endeavour.” He called for all Sikhs along the border to be armed by the Indian government. “A state of war exists between India and Pakistan today,” he said matter-of-factly. “I wish India realised that it would be far better to fight it out with the aggressor openly . . . so that millions of more lives may [not] be lost in vain.”82
If Nehru wouldn’t start that war, the Akalis appeared intent on doing so. As part of the effort to evacuate Muslims who wanted to leave Delhi, India had resumed the Pakistan Special services for government officials. The trains carried armed escorts, followed undeclared routes, and kept their timings secret. Yet the jathas seemed to have no trouble tracking them, even broadcasting news of their arrival over loudspeakers at Amritsar’s station.83
While the image of the “corpse train” arriving full of dead and mutilated bodies remains perhaps the most enduring icon of Partition, most passenger services had actually been halted after the initial attacks. The worst massacres only came to pass now. Over the weekend of 20–21 September, four of the Pakistan Specials rolled across the border and into Lahore one after the other, their floors slick with blood. Some had been attacked multiple times. One train’s escort had driven off a jatha only after forty-five minutes of ferocious, hand-to-hand fighting. Another had lost several hundred passengers, including sixty-two children under the age of
eight.84
On 22 September, after a refugee train coming the other way arrived in Amritsar with dead and wounded, the Akali fighters went berserk. A mob estimated at ten thousand people swarmed a Pakistan-bound train full of Meo refugees, firing automatic rifles, tossing bombs, and slashing away with swords.85 Only 200 horribly wounded passengers survived; at least 1,500 people were killed, including the British commander of the train’s escort. Bourke-White arrived at the scene soon afterward. All along the platform, she later wrote, blue-turbaned Sikhs sat cross-legged, their curved kirpans across their knees, patiently waiting for the next arriving Special.86
Pakistan had few means of retaliating. Mudie suggested to Jinnah that if India could not bring the Sikhs to heel, Pakistan should make use of its “hostages.” A convoy of 400,000 Sikhs from Lyallpur was now approaching the Balloki Headworks, which bridged the Ravi River. On 23 September, Mudie informed Thimayya that he was closing off the headworks until the Indians could guarantee the safety of Muslim refugees coming the other way. “This is said to have made a considerable impression on him,” Mudie advised the Quaid.87
Thick jungle lined the road leading to the canal crossing. It was perfect cover for ambushes. The Lyallpur convoy had been on the road for nearly two weeks now, and if not allowed to pass, India’s deputy high commissioner Sampuran Singh wrote to Nehru, the refugees would “suffer untold privation, disease and misery.”88 Pakistani authorities had a different worry: “Situation in which vast and well-armed Sikh convoys might try to fight their way out is electric,” Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith, Britain’s ambassador to Pakistan, urgently cabled London. “Government are rushing troops into West Punjab.”89 That day, the rains finally broke, drenching the already miserable refugees on both sides of the border. The Punjab’s rivers swelled, ready to burst their banks.