Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  Meanwhile, a different kind of civil war was unfolding on Delhi’s swank York Road. Tensions between Nehru and Patel had continued to build over the past fortnight, pitting their respective camps against one another in the cabinet. By now the rift “had reached dangerous proportions,” according to Railways Minister John Matthai.90 Foreign embassies reported almost daily rumors that the Sardar was maneuvering to oust the prime minister and take over the government.91

  The partnership between the two Congress leaders had always been an awkward one, held together primarily by their mutual loyalty to the Mahatma. Patel found Nehru to be weak, too tortured and impulsive to grip and wield power effectively. Nehru, who felt like a “misfit” amid the jostling factions within the Congress, mistrusted Patel’s greater hold over the party machine.92 If Gandhi hadn’t personally intervened a year earlier, in fact, Congress cadres would have made the Sardar their president—and likely India’s first prime minister.

  For years Patel had devotedly followed the Mahatma and his principles, with more conviction than Nehru even. Yet since the outbreak of rioting in Delhi, the Sardar “had gone completely communal,” Mountbatten said.93 The fact that so many of Delhi’s Muslims now wanted to move to Pakistan only confirmed Patel’s suspicions about them. Better to expel them as quickly as possible, to eliminate both a provocation to the Punjabi refugees in Delhi and, he imagined, a security threat. At one point, Patel even suggested sending a battalion of troops into the Purana Qila to search for the weapons he believed Muslims had stockpiled there.94

  Nehru, on the other hand, found the idea of losing Delhi’s Muslim population—the source of so much of the capital’s greatest art, architecture, music, and poetry—tragic and abhorrent. Internally, he had been arguing that the nearly 200,000 Muslims trapped in the city’s squalid refugee camps needed to be reassured and returned to their homes, not shipped off to Pakistan. The government had a choice, he wrote in a memo to the cabinet: to pursue policies that would “lead to the progressive elimination of the Muslim population from India,” or to “consolidate, make secure and absorb as full citizens” those same Muslims.95 Nehru fully realized that he was “out of tune” with prevailing sentiment. But he was convinced, as he wrote to a fellow Congressman, that if its leaders adopted the former course, India would be “doomed as a nation.”96

  Even as the Sikhs remained bottled up at Balloki Head, Nehru began going out every day to remonstrate with Hindu and Sikh crowds in Delhi. He warned them that they were emulating the “evil ways of the Muslim League.” To continue to do so would be to admit that the League had been “victorious in the battle against virtue.”97 Nehru now painted the unrest in Delhi as a plot that had been organized by Akali and RSSS cells—“fascists,” he called them, no different than Jinnah’s thugs or Hitler’s. Privately, he pressed Patel to round up these “terrorists” and their sympathizers in the police and administration.98

  The Sardar was open in his disdain for Nehru’s theatrics. “I regret our leader has followed his lofty ideas into the skies and has no contact left with the earth or reality,” Patel scoffed to Mountbatten, who found the comments deeply disturbing.99 According to Matthai, Gandhi swore that “he would be finished with [Patel] forever” if his longtime acolyte moved against Nehru.100 Still, U.S. ambassador Henry Grady reported to Washington that if the Sardar were to attempt a cabinet coup, he would “undoubtedly succeed.”101

  Matters came to a head on 29 September. Dickie Mountbatten was upstairs in his chambers at the renamed Government House, dressing for dinner, when V. P. Menon burst in, shouting, “The worst has happened!”102 Patel was threatening to resign and bring down the government.

  What had spurred Patel’s ultimatum was neither the crisis in the Punjab nor the fate of Delhi’s Muslims but, in Pug Ismay’s apt description, “two ridiculous little principalities in Kathiawar, with a total annual revenue about large enough to keep a sparrow.”103 Barbariawad and Mangrol were obscure, insignificant feudal states, tucked away somewhere inside Junagadh territory. Even Indian Army commanders had trouble locating them on a map. After the rest of the state had joined Pakistan, Menon had enticed their rulers to break away and accede to India instead. On 22 September, the nawab’s troops had put an end to this brief rebellion by marching into Barbariawad and forcing the sheikh of Mangrol to rescind his accession. Menon and Patel were convinced these flyspecks were part of India. In Jinnah’s eyes, however, they belonged to Pakistan.

  Arriving at Government House after an urgent summons from Mountbatten, Patel adopted a belligerent stance. He wanted to send Indian troops to retake Barbariawad and Mangrol, “to show that the Dominion of India was not afraid of Pakistan or their machinations and did not intend to be bluffed by Mr. Jinnah.” Mountbatten argued that this was precisely what Jinnah wanted: Pakistan would be able to condemn India in the court of international opinion as a bully and aggressor. “The country that had lost its national position need not bother about her international position,” Patel retorted.104

  A day earlier, the cabinet had held a four-hour meeting on a Sunday to consider its military options. All of India’s service chiefs—General Lockhart and the heads of the Royal Indian Air Force and Navy—were British, as were their counterparts in Pakistan. Rather than an actionable war plan, they handed the Indian leaders a letter refusing to take part in any such operation. An invasion of tiny Barbariawad would be a declaration of war against Pakistan, the commanders argued. With most of its troops tied up with internal security duties, India could ill afford to wage such a conflict. More importantly, British generals could not “be the instrument of planning or conveying orders to others” if the operation in question would pit British officers in the Indian and Pakistani armies against one another.105 As supreme commander, Auchinleck had issued top secret orders that in the event of a conflict, British officers on both sides would have to stand down immediately. The chiefs’ insubordination enraged Patel. He vowed to quit within twenty-four hours if Nehru didn’t back him against the brass.

  Patel had taken Junagadh’s accession to Pakistan personally. A proud Gujarati, he loathed the thought that India should lose any part of his home region. As states minister, he had also issued firm pledges to defend the other Kathiawar kingdoms. If Delhi now allowed a pocket of Pakistan—one that might soon be filled with Jinnah’s troops—to exist on their borders, they would never feel safe. The Sardar had been absolutely “vitriolic against Pakistan” when Attlee revealed Jinnah’s appeal to the Commonwealth on 21 September, Mountbatten recorded.106 The journalist Durga Das, who was close to Patel, claimed that he had “ordered ordnance factories to work 24 hours a day to produce arms and ammunition” to meet the threat from across the border.107

  A deeper worry obsessed Patel as well, as V. P. Menon explained to a U.S. diplomat in Delhi. Spreading out a map of the subcontinent, ­Menon pointed meaningfully at the southeastern corner of Junagadh, then at the western tip of Hyderabad, to show how little distance separated them.108 Legally, there was nothing to stop the nizam of Hyderabad from acceding to Pakistan just as Junagadh had. A beachhead on the coast of Gujarat would provide Karachi with an immensely useful sea and air link to Hyderabad. Indeed, a young British pilot who spent a month ferrying Muslim refugees and supplies for Pakistan told the U.S. consul in Calcutta that “Pakistan’s interest in Junagadh was wholly as a base between Karachi and Hyderabad, especially for military planes.”109

  In hindsight such fears sound paranoid. But by late September, Patel’s spies were reporting ominous changes in the nizam’s court. For weeks, Sir Walter Monckton, Hyderabad’s constitutional adviser, had been working diligently to persuade the nizam to return to the idea of a treaty with India, one that did not involve the word “accession.” But members of the leading Muslim party in the state, the Majlis-e-­Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen, or Council for the Unity of Muslims, had visited Jinnah in Karachi at the beginning of the month. After they returned home, the nizam’s position had hardened, and he wrote to Attlee and
the British king to argue for Hyderabad’s independence.110 In August, the head of Hyderabad’s military, Maj.-Gen. Syed Ahmed “Peter” El-Edroos, had traveled to London looking to buy weapons on the open market.111 Indian intelligence reports claimed that he had discussed 3 million pounds’ worth of orders with Czech arms factories.112

  The mercurial nizam also suggested that Monckton’s services were no longer required. “I cannot put my finger on the influences which have moved him,” a bewildered Monckton wrote to Mountbatten on 24 September, “but it is plain that they must be Pakistan influences at the root.”113

  Patel and Menon would accept any risk to prevent Jinnah from destabilizing a huge swathe of southern India. Menon unsuccessfully tried, on his own authority, to order two Indian Navy sloops to deploy off the Gujarat coast. Rear-Adm. J. T. S. Hall, head of the Royal Indian Navy, had pushed back. As General Savory recorded in his diary, “Hall pointed out that the essence of a threat was the determination to carry it out if need be, and asked V.P.M. if he realised this. V.P.M.: ‘YES.’ Hall: ‘That means war.’ V.P.M.: ‘Why not?’!!”114

  Nehru took a less alarmed view of Junagadh’s accession, but he, too, had found the chiefs’ letter “extraordinary . . . an announcement that they should not carry out the Government’s policy in case they did not agree with it.”115 More to the point, he could not afford a showdown with Patel. That night, with Mountbatten mediating, the Indian leaders struck a temporary compromise. The brass would withdraw their letter, since it was indeed unconstitutional. The military would load troops and tanks onto landing craft and send them up the coastline from Bombay. But the Indian forces would only deploy in nearby Kathiawar states that had acceded to India, rather than in Junagadh itself. They would make no move to enter Barbariawad or Mangrol.116

  Nehru had always argued that the people, not their monarchs, should decide the fate of the princely states. He thought India could easily undermine Junagadh’s nawab through a ginned-up “internal” uprising, without any need for outside troops. Menon had already cobbled together a gimcrack “provisional government of Junagadh” from a group of Kathiawaris living in Bombay, led by one of the Mahatma’s nephews, Samaldas Gandhi. Earlier that day, they had rolled into the nearby administrative center of Rajkot on a special, beflagged train. It was “pointed out that funds, arms and volunteers were not likely to be lacking to help a rising in Junagadh,” Mountbatten recorded.117 Support could always be funneled through the Congress Party in Bombay—just as Mountbatten had threatened over the summer.

  Samaldas Gandhi’s “provisional government” struck its first blow the very next day. Rebels scaled the walls of a palace in Rajkot owned by the nawab of Junagadh and claimed the property for India.118 A couple dozen of the nawab’s mystified servants were taken into custody. An Indian flag soon flew from the rooftop.

  If Delhi believed its moves were restrained, they did not look that way across the border. Messervy sent a frantic message to Auchinleck’s Supreme Command on 1 October, complaining that the Royal Indian Navy ships steaming toward Kathiawar had been stripped of their British officers and packed with ammunition, as if preparing for an attack. Reports claimed that a squadron of Royal Indian Air Force fighters had deployed in nearby Nawanagar state. “CONSIDER THESE STEPS HIGHLY PROVOCATIVE. . . . I URGENTLY REQUEST YOUR INTERVENTION TO STOP THIS MADNESS,” Messervy cabled.119 A Pakistani sloop, the Godavari, had intended to dock at Junagadh but was now held off to avoid an incident at sea, “particularly as Captain is inclined to be impetuous,” British ambassador Grafftey-Smith informed London.120

  Jinnah’s mood had only grown more bleak since Ismay’s visit earlier in the month. Attlee had offered no encouragement to Pakistan’s hopes of getting the Commonwealth involved in the dispute. In the meantime, even as the massacres continued in the Punjab, Patel was shipping out trainloads of Muslim refugees daily, not just from East Punjab but from Delhi, the United Provinces, and surrounding princely states. The Sardar seemed intent on swamping Pakistan’s fragile economy with a wave of destitute migrants.121

  With their rhetoric, Indian leaders also appeared to be encouraging Hindus and Sikhs to leave places like Karachi, where Jinnah claimed they were perfectly safe. A devastating exodus was already well underway: Pakistan was rapidly losing its bankers, merchants, moneylenders, shopkeepers, clerks, and sweepers. Karachi banks, bereft of their Hindu managers and clerks, could now mostly handle only cash transactions.122 Cotton—a key export—was piling up in warehouses because all but ten of the brokers at the Karachi Cotton Exchange had fled.123 “Every effort is being made to put difficulties in our way by our enemies in order to paralyse or cripple our State and bring about its collapse,” Jinnah wrote to Attlee on 1 October, pleading again for intervention.124

  Ismay returned to Karachi on 3 October on his way home to England to brief the cabinet and the chiefs of staff personally on the deteriorating situation on the subcontinent. He described for Jinnah Nehru’s impassioned appeals for India to protect its Muslim minority, and pointed out that the prime minister was risking his life every time he went before one of the restless, hostile crowds in the Indian capital. The Quaid—who probably didn’t appreciate Nehru’s repeated comparisons of the League to the Nazis—was not impressed. “He said that Nehru himself was a figurehead, vain, loquacious, unbalanced, unpractical, and that the real and almost absolute power lay with Patel,” Ismay recorded.125 (Pug later admitted that to some extent, “he believed Mr. Jinnah to be right.”)126 India was “determined on the destruction of Pakistan,” Jinnah insisted to Ismay.127

  Britain was now actively worried about the prospect of war between the dominions. Military planners in London had begun laying out scenarios for a conflict.128 Grafftey-Smith and the British ambassador to India, Sir Terence Shone, started making plans to evacuate British and American civilians from the conflict zone.

  The same day he saw Ismay, Jinnah met with Sir Archibald Carter, the permanent undersecretary at the Commonwealth Relations Office, who was visiting Karachi. They talked money. India had not yet agreed to a fair distribution of the former Raj’s reserves; Pakistan had barely enough funds in its exchequer to keep the government running for two months. Carter had spoken to Jinnah’s Finance Ministry officials about the possibility of Britain extending to Pakistan a 100-million-pound loan to cover the dominion’s short-term spending gap.129

  The Quaid, Carter reported, “seemed not the least interested” in this immediate shortfall. Jinnah wanted to discuss long-term military assistance—both money and tanks, rifles, and aircraft—from Britain. He had asked Ismay to relay the same request to London. When it came to the tools to defend itself against India, Jinnah indicated, Pakistan wanted “as much as the U.K. could afford.”130

  Ironically, it was now, in late September, that the fever of hate finally started to recede in the Punjab. Days of whipping monsoon rains had flooded much of the province, widening the Beas River from half a mile to 10 miles across. Racing waters washed away makeshift refugee camps and whole sections of kafilas. Refugees clung to the tops of trees and begged for help as their livestock and few pathetic belongings tumbled along below. Near Jullundur, one army officer witnessed Sikh villagers going to the aid of the stranded Muslims; when asked why, they said the floods were an act of God—all were victims.131 Perhaps more importantly, the mobs could get around no better than their prey in the drenched landscape. Forced to pause in their depredations for several days, they seemed to lose some of their bloodlust.

  Patel visited the Punjab himself on 30 September and delivered a blunt message to Sikh leaders to call off their fighters. The unrest in the Punjab was threatening the stability and unity of India, and the government could ill afford the distraction. “Evil cannot be met by evil,” he told the gathered Akalis and Sikh princes. He advised them to conserve their energies. “When the right time and the right cause come, you can use your sword to your heart’s content. Now you have to sheathe your sword so that you can raise the moral tone of the pe
ople.”132

  The next day, Liaquat arrived in Delhi for a meeting of the Joint Defence Council. Mountbatten prevailed upon him to release the Sikh convoy blocked at the Balloki Headworks, so as not to undercut whatever good Patel’s speech had done. The Pakistani prime minister agreed reluctantly, on the condition that Muslim convoys be kept moving in the other direction, too. This at least was progress. If the riots had been their only concern, the two dominions might now have started to take steps toward real cooperation.

  There remained the question of how to defuse the Junagadh crisis, though. Liaquat bristled when Mountbatten informed him that India planned to land troops and tanks on the borders of the state. The Pakistani complained that the move savored of “pressure and the intent to commit a hostile act.”133 Nehru interrupted to insist that India’s disciplined troops would not be the ones to fire the first shot in Kathiawar.

  Then, as Mountbatten had been pushing him to do, Nehru suggested a way out: he pledged that India would accept the results of any free and fair plebiscite or referendum of Junagadh’s citizens, asking them which dominion they preferred to join. Mountbatten immediately pointed out that, as a statement of policy, Nehru’s offer would apply to any other state whose accession remained in doubt. A vote would obviously go India’s way in huge Hyderabad; both there and in Junagadh, Hindus outnumbered Muslims four to one. But there remained a last kingdom that had not yet allied itself with either dominion, one whose monarch also ruled over a population that adhered to a different faith. “Nehru nodded his head sadly; Liaquat Ali’s eyes sparkled,” Mountbatten wrote afterward, describing the scene for the king. “And there is no doubt that the same thought was in each of their minds: ‘Kashmir!’”134