by Nisid Hajari
With the politicians deadlocked, zealots once again seized control of the narrative. The Indians had stationed a small garrison—only two companies—in the town of Jhangar in Jammu province, hoping to advance from there to relieve the battalion in Poonch. On the night of 23 December, an estimated six thousand guerrillas attacked the isolated detachment, outnumbering the Indians thirty to one. The troops were overrun; a relief column sent out to help had to turn back after losing four armored cars. The next day, along with news of the defeat, reports reached Delhi that an unbelievable thirteen thousand insurgents were massing to attack Uri. If the town fell, the road to Srinagar would once again lie nearly defenseless.
A school of thought had begun to develop among Indian leaders that Jinnah’s real aim was to tie down Indian forces in Kashmir and stir up trouble in Hyderabad so that Pakistani troops could then attack unimpeded across the Punjab border. Nehru had warned Liaquat that India could no longer tolerate the bases allegedly being provided to insurgents in Pakistan. With safe havens, Nehru had noted a few days earlier, the tribesmen could continue fighting “for months and months and years.” The drain on India’s resources was immense. “The burden on Pakistan is relatively little.”83 Six decades later, the United States would issue the same lament about Pakistan’s support for the Taliban.
India had committed more than a division’s worth of troops to Kashmir, and yet the conflict looked virtually stalemated. Only one course seemed effective to Nehru now: “to strike at these concentrations and lines of communications in Pakistan territory.”84
On Christmas Day, Nehru summoned Major-General Thimayya to an unannounced meeting in Delhi. Lieutenant-General Bucher was there as well, but the commander in chief, General Lockhart, who was departing at the beginning of the year, was not. Nehru did not tell Mountbatten about the conference either—one of the rare secrets he kept from the former viceroy.
If Uri fell to the tribesmen, Nehru wanted Indian forces to cross into Pakistan’s half of the Punjab to “obliterate” the insurgents’ “bases and nerve centres.” At the meeting it was decided not only to dispatch more regular troops to Kashmir but to raise a force of irregulars to bolster defenses in East Punjab, in case Pakistan tried to retaliate by sending tribesmen into India itself.85
This was a dangerous game to play, then as today, as Indian leaders threaten to respond to Pakistan-linked terrorist attacks with “limited strikes” across the border. While Nehru met with his generals, Mountbatten was writing the Indian prime minister a long, emotional letter, begging him to call in United Nations observers who would “stop the fighting.” Even a targeted cross-border strike, Mountbatten warned, would “mean war between India and Pakistan”—one that would not likely “be confined to the Subcontinent, or finished off quickly in favour of India without further complication.” Each time Nehru had recently suggested such an attack, Mountbatten had “been more and more appalled.”86
Nehru’s response the next day did not mention the plans that were being laid to strike into Pakistan. But he made clear he was done compromising with Jinnah. “I am convinced that the whole of this business has been very carefully planned on an extensive scale and that high authority in Pakistan has encouraged this,” he wrote. Any conciliatory gestures from India now would be misinterpreted as weakness: “Peace will only come if we have the strength to resist invasion and to make it clear that it will not pay. That is the only way Pakistan seems to understand. . . . Vast numbers of the enemy are entering Kashmir at many points. . . . There are large concentrations near the West Punjab border also, where the cry is ‘March to Delhi.’ There is imminent danger of an invasion of India proper. Can we afford to sit and look on? We would deserve to be sacked immediately.”87
Although he acknowledged Mountbatten’s arguments about the consequences of war, Nehru thought the alternative—an India supine before her rival—worse. “We have taken enough risks already” in an effort to avoid conflict, he declared in his letter. “We dare not take any more.”88
The next night, Sir Terence Shone was startled awake by two visitors, aides of Mountbatten’s. They had brought a copy of his letter to Nehru, as well as Nehru’s chilling reply. Mountbatten wanted both forwarded to Attlee, along with a personal plea for the British prime minister to fly out to the subcontinent immediately. “The previous drift in affairs has given way to an avalanche,” Mountbatten warned.89
Although not as obviously as in Pakistan, the fighting had begun to eat away at India, too. The rift between Patel and Nehru had ripped open once again. Nehru had begun to assume more control over the Kashmir campaign—usurping authority that the Sardar, as states minister, rightfully believed to be his. On 23 December, the night of the Jhangar attack, the two men had exchanged angry notes. Patel complained that Nehru had diverted money and trucks to Abdullah’s forces in Srinagar without informing him, and threatened to resign if the prime minister continued to interfere. “I can’t work like this,” Patel told Nehru the next day.90
Even as India geared up for a possible war with Pakistan, the tensions between the two Indian leaders began to spread through the bureaucracy. Guns allocated for Abdullah’s militia disappeared on their way to Srinagar—allegedly diverted to RSSS fighters in Jammu. Nehru was particularly incensed at intelligence that suggested Hindu militants were conducting propaganda against Abdullah and in favor of the dissolute Hari Singh.91 When challenged, Patel simply brushed off the reports as rumors.
Attlee declined to hop on a plane for the subcontinent. Instead, he chastised Nehru by letter, warning, “I am gravely disturbed by your assumption that India would be within her rights in international law if she were to move forces into Pakistan in self-defence. I doubt whether this is in fact correct juridically and I am positive that it would be fatal from every other point of view.”92
Meanwhile, sympathetic British officials quickly alerted Pakistan to India’s military buildup.93 By 30 December, Indian reconnaissance showed that the concentrations of thousands of guerrillas who had been poised to attack Uri had mysteriously vanished.94 Whether the tribesmen had been called off, had gone to ground because of the weather, or had never been there in the first place almost didn’t matter. That same day, Liaquat finally responded to Nehru’s earlier letter complaining of Pakistani support for the raiders. In a long screed of his own, Liaquat accused India of attempted genocide in the Punjab and of trying to destroy Pakistan as a viable state.95 Ignoring the particulars, Nehru filed India’s formal complaint to the United Nations on New Year’s Day. That, as Mountbatten had hoped, at least temporarily slowed the march to war. The Security Council postponed discussion of India’s complaint until mid-January.
The longer the conflict dragged on, though, the more jingoistic the atmosphere within India became. “Kashmir is increasingly regarded as a matter of prestige,” Phillips Talbot wrote in a letter home. “Indians’ nerves are raw. Every issue tends to produce a crisis. An oversensitive nationalistic spirit is visible.”96
Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in India remained bitter—and were made worse by tensions with Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of Hindu and Sikh refugees still crowded into Delhi. They had taken over the homes of Muslims who had fled to Pakistan, and even of some who had stayed, kicking their inhabitants out onto the streets. RSSS sympathies flourished: one estimate, surely exaggerated, put the militants’ numbers in the United Provinces at 4 million.97
Patel hardly bothered to disguise his own admiration for the Hindu nationalists. In a speech in Lucknow on 6 January, he obliquely criticized those—like Nehru—who talked of crushing the RSSS by force. “The danda”—the stick—“is meant for thieves and dacoits,” the Sardar declared, whereas RSSS cadres were only “patriots who love their country.”98
The ugly mood dismayed Gandhi. Since the Delhi riots had rendered his more humble accommodations unsafe, he had taken up residence at the luxurious compound of one of his richest supporters, industrialist G. D. Birla. Muslim petitioners came to the Ma
hatma’s prayer meetings on the lawn outside Birla House virtually every evening, begging for relief from Hindu and Sikh attacks. The growing split between his acolytes added to Gandhi’s pain. The Sardar’s speeches were growing “vicious,” according to Mountbatten. In Lucknow, Patel had a blunt warning for Indian Muslims who had not yet condemned Pakistan’s jihad in Kashmir: “I want to tell you very clearly that you cannot ride two horses. You select one horse, whichever you like better.”99 He did not specify what would happen to those who chose wrong.
The 12th of January 1948 was a Monday—Gandhi’s day of silence. At his prayer meeting that evening, a devotee read out a statement from the Mahatma. “Just contemplate the rot that has set in in beloved India,” the remarks read.100 Gandhi could look on passively no longer. He had decided to fast until “heart friendship” returned to Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in Delhi, or until his own heart gave out. Although he had seen both Nehru and Patel that afternoon, he had given them no hint of his plans lest they try to stop him.
The news angered the Sardar, who understandably believed that the fast was directed at him. The next day, he was “very bitter and resentful,” Mountbatten recorded, and felt Gandhi was “putting him in an impossible position.”101 Gandhi himself denied any such intention. But, encouraged by Mountbatten, the Mahatma did press Patel and the Indian Cabinet to stop blocking the funds owed to Pakistan. On the morning of 14 January, rapidly weakening, Gandhi summoned Nehru and Patel to his bedside. Tears ran down the Mahatma’s face as he pleaded with them. For India to try and starve her sister dominion into submission was, Gandhi declared, using a word Mountbatten had chosen to prick his conscience, “dishonorable.” The money should be paid immediately.
Patel responded with “extremely bitter words,” he later admitted. At a cabinet meeting later that day, he, too, shed tears as the others decided to heed Gandhi’s request. “This is my last [cabinet] meeting,” Patel vowed.102 The next day, he left for a tour of the Kathiawar states in his native Gujarat.
Before leaving, he drafted an emotional letter to Gandhi. “The sight of your anguish yesterday has made me disconsolate,” Patel wrote.
It has set me furiously thinking. The burden of work has become so heavy that I feel crushed under it. Jawaharlal is even more burdened than I. His heart is heavy with grief. Maybe I have deteriorated with age and am no good any more as a comrade to stand by him and lighten his burden. . . . It will perhaps be good for me and the country if you now let me go. I can only act in my way. And if thereby I become burdensome to my lifelong colleagues and a source of distress to you, and still I stick to office, it would mean that I allowed the lust for power to blind my eyes.103
By now Gandhi weighed only 107 pounds. He was too nauseous even to drink water. He spent most of the day curled in a fetal position in an enclosed porch at Birla House, swaddled in white khadi from head to toe like an infant. A long line of well-wishers, both Indians and foreigners, filed past to catch a glimpse of him, touching their hands in respect and weeping as they passed.104 Nehru visited daily, tired and strained. Congress Party figures struggled to commit leaders of Delhi’s various communities to a pledge promising to defend the rights of minorities to live and worship in the capital.
Even from his cot, Gandhi could hear the shriek of the furies that still roiled India. Small crowds of Hindus and Sikhs, many of them Punjab refugees, had gathered outside the gates of Birla House to wave black banners and denounce the Mahatma as a traitor for supporting Pakistan. “Let Gandhi die!” some chanted. Leaving the Mahatma’s side one evening, Nehru stopped his car and charged the demonstrators. “How dare you say those words?” he shouted angrily. “Come and kill me first!”105 No doubt some in the crowd would have gladly obliged.
10
The Last Battle
GANDHI’S FAST WOULD LAST three more days. After his doctors warned that the Mahatma’s kidneys were failing—and the patient himself suggested that those who wished to save his life might want to “hurry up”—Indians at last bestirred themselves to action.1 Across the country, Hindus and Muslims once again linked hands in “peace brigades” and marched together to affirm their brotherhood. Shops and universities closed in sympathy. Messages of support poured in from Pakistan. In Delhi, Hindu and Sikh refugees promised to welcome Muslims back to their former homes and mosques. On 18 January, Gandhi took a sip of orange juice—his first sustenance in nearly 122 hours.2
Newspapers around the world hailed the moment as a victory for tolerance and goodwill over hate. Yet in the interim, something twisted and ugly had taken root—India’s own “poisonous plant.” Just two days later, an emaciated Gandhi limped out to the dais overlooking the Birla House lawns and led a prayer meeting for the first time since embarking on his fast. As he concluded a disquisition on the “barbaric” practice of lynching in the United States, a slab of guncotton exploded in a corner of the courtyard, rattling the windows of the British High Commission across the street.3 No one was hurt, and in a barely audible voice, Gandhi tried to dismiss the ruckus as a military exercise taking place nearby. In fact, seven Hindu radicals had infiltrated the meeting. They meant to launch a gun-and-grenade assault after the explosion but hesitated at the critical moment. Plainclothes police nabbed the bomber; the other would-be assassins fled.
To Hindu and Sikh extremists, the only concrete result of Gandhi’s fast seemed to be that Pakistan was now 550 million rupees richer. The money had not bought peace in Kashmir, nor even a more conciliatory attitude from Jinnah. Quite the contrary: at the United Nations in New York, world powers seemed to be taking Pakistan’s side in the dispute. The country’s suave foreign minister, Sir Mohammad Zafarullah Khan, harangued the Security Council with a five-and-a-half-hour oration, tracing what he called a sinister pattern in Indian behavior—from the slaughter of Muslims in the Punjab and Delhi to the invasion of Junagadh to the intrigue with the maharajah of Kashmir. All added up, he argued, to a concerted, conscious attempt to grind Muslims and Pakistan into submission.
British diplomats in particular sympathized with Zafarullah’s plea that Pakistan could not persuade the tribesmen to withdraw from Kashmir until they were assured that the state’s Muslims would get to decide their own fate. Commonwealth Relations Minister Philip Noel-Baker, who had flown in from London to head up the U.K. delegation, flatly told U.S. officials that “Kashmir would probably go to Pakistan under a free plebiscite, except for those Hindu-majority districts in the extreme south.”4 He supported Pakistan’s demand that Sheikh Abdullah be replaced by a neutral administrator pending a vote, and that Pakistani troops jointly guarantee security in the state along with the Indians. Both suggestions were intolerable to Nehru.
On every front, India appeared to be losing ground to its rival. A report in the Hindustan Times revealed that Hyderabad had secretly extended a massive loan of 200 million rupees to Jinnah’s dominion, in the form of securities issued by the former Raj. If Pakistan chose to sell those stocks suddenly, Jinnah could plunge India’s financial markets into turmoil. The newspaper condemned the nizam’s move as a “hostile act”—one that if not reversed quickly, “would prove to the world that Hyderabad was nothing more than a pocket of Pakistan inside the Indian Union.”5
Hindu militants talked openly of assassinating Gandhi and Nehru, reviving fears of a right-wing coup. Anonymous posters and pamphlets incited readers “to murder Mahatma Gandhi, to cut him to pieces and throw his flesh to dogs and crows.”6 At a speech in Amritsar on 29 January, Nehru blasted the RSSS as “traitors” bent on overthrowing the government.7 Police arrested a young man in the audience hiding three grenades under his clothes.
Perhaps the Mahatma could sense that his fast had not softened all Indian hearts. On 30 January, he met with the photographer Margaret Bourke-White at Birla House. Gandhi spun cotton on his wooden charkha as they spoke, and joked that the American was taking too long to finish her intended book on India. Near the end of their conversation, though, as they discussed conditions in the post
war world, Gandhi’s words grew “toneless and low,” Bourke-White recalled. “The world is not at peace,” he murmured almost in a whisper. “It is still more dreadful.”8
Later that afternoon, Sardar Patel came to see Gandhi. Nehru’s deputy still wanted to be “released” from the government; he claimed at least four other ministers wanted to join him.9 The depressing conversation made Gandhi late for his five o’clock prayer meeting. His arms resting on his grandnieces Manu and Abha—“my walking sticks,” he called them—the unhappy Mahatma hurried toward the dais. A blaze of midwinter marigolds and nasturtiums, lit by the setting sun, spilled over the flower beds along his path.
The young man who bumped into Manu, knocking the Mahatma’s rosary and prayer book from her grasp, had his hands folded in respectful greeting.10 With one of them, he reached into his safari jacket, pulled out a Beretta pistol, and pumped two bullets into Gandhi’s chest and one into his abdomen. The Mahatma died on the spot. His killer was one of the earlier conspirators—Nathuram Godse, the fanatic editor of a Hindu nationalist newspaper in Poona—who had returned alone to finish the botched job.
Word of the shooting unleashed a torrent of grief, something close to national hysteria. “Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated,” “Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated,” “Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated,” an announcer on All-India Radio shrilly repeated.11 In Calcutta, newspapers quickly produced one-page editions—called “telegrams”—featuring just the Mahatma’s enlarged portrait and the barest details of his death. The flimsy sheets, pasted up in the windows of homes and shops, turned into impromptu shrines. Crowds gathered at each one, lighting candles and praying, while others huddled fearfully around radio loudspeakers. “There was everywhere an air of stunned silence,” recorded U.S. consul Charles Thompson, “broken only by the muted noises of traffic, by the occasional blaring of radio news broadcasts and by the unashamed weeping of countless men, women and children.”12 Until it was announced that the killer was a Hindu, panic prevailed across the border in Pakistan. “What does this mean? Will it be war?” officials and ordinary citizens cried, according to British ambassador Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith.13