Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  Nehru reeled. Racing to Birla House as soon as he heard the news, he fell to his knees at the sight of Gandhi’s lifeless body and sobbed like a child. A huge crowd had gathered outside, swelling and crashing into the walls and French doors of the mansion like a tidal wave. Nehru’s voice shook as he went outside to try and calm them. “The light has gone out of our lives,” he announced tearfully, perched atop the wall of the compound. “A glory has departed and the sun that warmed and brightened our lives has set and we are left to shiver in the cold and dark.”14 He broke down three times during his short speech.

  Partition’s furies had claimed their most prominent victim. The shock seemed to bring Hindus and Muslims back to their senses. Reports that RSSS cadres had greeted Gandhi’s death joyously, setting off firecrackers and distributing sweets, revolted most Indians. Five days later, the RSSS was formally banned, as were all other communal organ­izations. Patel’s police began raiding the group’s offices. That same day, the Sardar told Indian legislators that any suggestion of a split between him and Nehru at this fraught moment was “inconceivable”; privately, he assured Nehru of his unfeigned loyalty.15 Already dwindling, communal killings now largely ceased on both sides of the border.

  The morning after Gandhi’s death, the United Nations held its first-ever moment of silence. Afterward, delegates from nation after nation prayed that the tragedy might lead to reconciliation between India and Pakistan. Jinnah perhaps did not help that cause with his unsentimental condolence message, in which he praised Gandhi as merely “one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community.”16

  The real roadblock to better relations, however, remained Kashmir. The drift of debate at the United Nations had infuriated Nehru no less than it had Hindu extremists. He focused his ire on the Americans more than Noel-Baker and Britain, still convinced that Jinnah had offered Washington air bases and other concessions in Kashmir. “He particularly resented the way in which America belittled India and assumed an air of moral superiority,” recorded a visiting British official who met with Nehru the day after the assassination.17 To Mountbatten, Nehru condemned the UN as “an American racket.”18

  In recent weeks, Nehru had visited Gandhi almost daily, to relieve his mind and seek advice. The Mahatma, too, had viewed the struggle in Kashmir as a moral one. “Any injustice on our land, any encroachment on our land should . . . be defended by violence, if not by non-violence,” he had told Sardar Patel right after the first Indian troops landed in Srinagar. “Every airplane that goes [to Kashmir] with materials and arms and ammunition and requirements of the Army, I feel proud.”19 The British writer Kingsley Martin had interviewed Gandhi just three days before his assassination and found him “very stiff about Kashmir . . . and absolutely adamant about fighting it out [there].”20 Gandhi sharply rebuked Martin for even suggesting that India might share the state with Pakistan.

  Nehru now invoked the martyred Mahatma when he argued for continuing the fight in Kashmir. The first time he visited Jammu after Gandhi’s funeral, Nehru confidently assured one audience, “Whatever we have done in Kashmir has been based on the principle of truth and honesty. . . . At every step we have taken so far we have consulted Gandhiji and secured the approval of the saint of truth and nonviolence.”21

  On 6 February, a week after the assassination, Nehru received welcome news from the front. Tribesmen from Dir state in Pakistan had launched one last, desperate offensive before the winter snows deepened. Thousands of insurgents had attacked the Indian contingent holding the town of Naushera, in Jammu, from three sides, using mountain guns provided by the Dir state forces to pound Indian positions. The Indians were well-entrenched, though, and backed up by planes and artillery. Their big guns mowed through the waves of attackers: one medium machine gun reportedly fired nine thousand rounds at point-blank range into the charging tribesmen. Indian commanders counted 963 corpses, while press reports boasted that another thousand fighters had either been blown to bits or had their bodies carried away.22 While such figures were no doubt exaggerated, even Brig. Sher Khan—the Pakistan Army’s director of military operations, who had just taken over from Col. Akbar Khan as commander of the insurgency—admitted that the rout had resulted in the “complete disorganization and melting away of the lashkars.”23 From Nehru’s perspective, the best news of all was that the commander who led the Indian resistance was a Muslim—Brig. Mohammad Usman.

  The battlefield seemed to offer the possibility of a cleaner victory than the Security Council did. Two days after the Naushera victory, Nehru recalled India’s UN delegation to Delhi for indefinite “consultations.” Although fighting now paused for the winter, the Indian Army continued pouring troops and supplies into Kashmir. Pakistan military observers assumed they were building up for a major spring offensive to break the back of the insurgency. India now had the equivalent of three divisions in the state, with more on the way.24

  Pakistan faced the prospect of losing Kashmir for good before the slow-moving UN could act. Sher Khan warned that come spring, the scattered and undisciplined tribesmen would be little match for India’s bolstered forces. Sources at Pakistan General Headquarters in Rawalpindi also claimed to British diplomat C. B. Duke that Sikh jathas had infiltrated the state in large numbers, preparing “to treat the Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir in the same way as they did those in the East Punjab.” If unchecked, such pogroms could drive as many as 3 million Muslim refugees across the border into an already reeling Pakistan. “The results . . . would be as fatal for Pakistan as a defeat in war,” Duke reported on 27 February.25

  Although Pakistanis had won their freedom from the British, a “grimmer battle” was now underway to preserve that liberty, Jinnah told members of an anti-aircraft regiment in Karachi.26 The Pakistan Army began making a “psychological effort [to] show armed might to population and create confidence in Army,” a U.S. military attaché reported.27 Commanders conducted flag marches along the border and started flying combat air patrols from Peshawar to Lahore to Karachi and back. Some Pakistani officers began arguing for a more dangerous course of action as well—sending regular troops into Kashmir to reinforce the tribesmen. As Duke noted, “This would amount to war between the two Dominions.”28

  Even India’s top commanders appeared uneasy about the risks of escalation. At the end of February, Lieutenant-General Cariappa, who had just been assigned command over forces in Kashmir, and East Punjab’s Major-General Thimayya were invited by their former comrades in Pakistan to observe a military “week” of drills and parades in Rawalpindi. The sight released a burst of pent-up frustration from the Indians. In contrast to the spit-and-polish Pakistani troops, they lamented, the Indian Army had been almost constantly deployed since Partition, either in Kashmir or on internal security duties. Soldiers had had no time to train. Morale was low. Forces were burning through equipment as if engaged in a world war; Cariappa estimated that the army would run out of functioning motor transport in two months.29 On 28 February, NWFP governor Sir George Cunningham noted in his diary, “The Indian Army people at Delhi are said to be thoroughly tired of the Kashmir operations. But Nehru won’t give up.”30

  Sidney Cotton’s trim little Lockheed lifted off from Bombay on 18 February in brilliant sunshine. He and his Polish engineer kept a wary eye on the thunderclouds to either side of them as they guided the plane southeast. Spitting rain and long filaments of lightning, the storm closed in as they approached Hyderabad’s Hakimpet airfield, 400 miles from Bombay. Oddly, the nizam’s capital remained untouched. “A brilliant white shaft of sunlight [raised] it into bold relief from the surrounding gloom,” Cotton recalled in a memoir.31 He taxied his plane to a halt near the foot of one of three rainbows that arched over the city.

  A tall, charismatic Australian, the fifty-two-year-old Cotton boasted a colorful past. In his early twenties, he had flown English Channel patrols during World War I. He then spent several years as an itinerant adventurer, seal-spotting and searching for lost explorers in Newfoundlan
d and Greenland. He became a pioneer in the field of aerial reconnaissance: in the run-up to World War II, he photographed German military installations on covert missions for MI6. Churchill loved his derring-do, a feeling not universally shared by Cotton’s commanding officers. They eventually got him booted out of the Royal Air Force (according to one version of the story, for airlifting the head of the Dior empire out of occupied France for a tidy fee). Working various schemes after the war, he had come to Hyderabad looking to buy peanuts for export.

  Cotton would play a small but critical role in Nehru and Jinnah’s last battle. Tensions between India and Hyderabad were rising again. The loan to Pakistan—ostensibly negotiated before the signing of the November 1947 standstill agreement—had infuriated India’s leaders and revived fears that the nizam was plotting to ally himself with Jinnah’s dominion. The erratic monarch had compounded suspicions by banning the use of Indian currency within his state and restricting the export of precious metals. Hyderabad had posted a diplomatic representative in Karachi, and talked of dispatching others to Washington, D.C., and London. Patel and Nehru had intended the standstill agreement simply to offer a cooling-off period, during which His Exalted Highness could accommodate himself to the idea of merging with India. Instead, the nizam seemed intent on using the lull to establish Hyderabad’s bona fides as a sovereign power.

  In India, wild stories circulated about the activities of the fire-breathing Ittehad leader, Qasim Razvi. He was supposed to be building up an army of Muslim militants called Razakars (Volunteers) to terrorize ­Hyderabad’s Hindus. Reports put the number of Razakar cadres at as many as 100,000; some claimed they were receiving weapons as well as money from the nizam’s officials. BBC correspondent Robert Stimson, invited by Razvi to observe a Razakar parade, wasn’t terribly impressed by these supposed storm troopers. Only four hundred militants turned up to the “big show,” he said—a couple dozen of them children under ten, others graybeards, most youths in their late teens clad in ill-fitting khaki bush jackets and tin hats. “All in all, it was a sorry exhibition,” Stimson wrote. “When the parade was over three truckloads of volunteers . . . drove off, firing blanks in the air. Others marched off behind a drum-and-fife band.”32 Still, other independent observers acknowledged Razvi’s thugs were developing into an ugly new factor, roaming around demanding tribute from Hindu villagers and beating up those who refused to pay.33

  Razvi claimed his little army had sprung up to defend Hyderabad’s Muslims against attacks from armed Congress infiltrators based in camps across the border. Mohammed Hyder, the civilian official in charge of the Osmanabad district in northwestern Hyderabad, was no fan of the Ittehad leader, whom he described from personal experience as “both absurd and frightening.” But in his memoir, Hyder also complained of covert bases in India from which irregulars would launch raids on villages and customs posts inside Hyderabad; Indian officials at a minimum seemed to tolerate the camps. The attacks embittered feelings inside Hyderabad, where both Razakars and “even . . . little Muslim children” harassed Hindus in retaliation. When Hyder took up his post in January, he recalled, “there seemed to be a general loss of nerve in the district. The administrative structure was beginning to totter. . . . Communal feeling was rapidly reaching a flash point.”34 Meanwhile, the Communist rebels that infested southern portions of the state appeared also to enjoy safe haven inside India’s Madras province.

  After news of the Pakistan loan emerged, India quietly tightened an unofficial cordon around Hyderabad. Indian border officials intercepted any goods with possible military uses: arms and ammunition, trucks and jeeps and even “soft” vehicles, spare parts, machinery, technical equipment, radio transmitters, paint, gasoline.35 When Mountbatten demanded to know what was going on, Nehru pleaded ignorance—and, in fact, Patel and V. P. Menon may have kept the prime minister and the governor-general out of the loop on their activities in the south. Mountbatten learned only by accident that Indian military commanders had started to draw up plans for an armed takeover of Hyderabad, dubbed “Operation Polo.”36

  The officials whom Sidney Cotton met in Hyderabad, including the commander in chief, “Peter” El-Edroos, badly wanted weapons—to defend against the Communists and Congress raiders, they said; to fight for independence, India suspected. Despite the rumors about a huge order for Czech arms, El-Edroos had had no luck finding anyone in Europe willing to sell guns to a nonstate and to transport them across several hundred miles of Indian territory into Hyderabad.37

  With typical bravado, Cotton suggested that “it would be quite a simple operation” for him to smuggle in arms by air, and he volunteered to try as long as someone else could procure the weapons.38 His hosts responded eagerly. In November, the nizam had replaced his prime minister with Mir Laik Ali, a noted Hyderabad industrialist and close confidant of Jinnah’s; the Quaid had entrusted him with the mission of seeking a loan for Pakistan from the Americans. A civil engineer by training, the forty-five-year-old Laik Ali had no particular political or administrative experience. His chief recommendation seemed to be his negotiating ability, and his friendliness with both the Ittehad and Jinnah.39 Laik Ali drafted a letter of introduction for Cotton to Iskander Mirza, Pakistan’s defense secretary and one of the cabal involved with the Kashmir jihad.

  According to Cotton, when they met in Karachi in the middle of March, Mirza eagerly approved the plot and agreed to secure the necessary weapons in Pakistan’s name. Hyderabad transferred some 2 million pounds to an account in London for buying the arms and planes to transport them.40 A shopping list was drawn up. The plan envisioned a short, intense airlift—500 tons delivered in three days, too quick for Pakistan’s involvement to come to light. The goal was simply to supply Hyderabad the means to hold out against an Indian invasion long enough for some outside body like the United Nations to intervene. All that was needed now was the Quaid’s sign-off.

  Up to this point, Jinnah had not granted Hyderabad anything more than moral support. He had even objected when the nizam first proposed Laik Ali as his new premier, fearing the tycoon would look like a Pakistani puppet.41 At the beginning of March, to try and relieve tensions with India, Laik Ali had asked Jinnah to hold off on cashing the huge Hyderabad loan; the Quaid had readily agreed.42 (The decision was made easier by the fact that Pakistan’s finances were no longer so desperate by then.)

  Since Gandhi’s assassination, though, Jinnah’s moodiness and isolation had deepened. High walls now ringed Government House. On a visit to the Pakistani capital, India’s new commander in chief General Bucher found it “astonishing how everyone there mentioned Jinnah’s unapproachableness, and his uncompromising attitude. These days, he evidently considers he has always been right, is always infallible and will never be in the wrong.”43 While Bucher may not have been the most objective source, an American diplomat reported that even some of the Quaid’s own lieutenants had begun to complain that his “bitterness and bias” toward India was hobbling Pakistan.44 After dinner one night at Government House, Sir George Cunningham described Jinnah as “very rabid against Patel and Nehru, Miss Jinnah backing him up.” The Pakistani leader attributed virtually all of his dominion’s many troubles to Indian machinations. “I felt sometimes that he was talking in order to convince himself that he was not partially to blame for what has happened in recent months,” Cunningham mused in his diary.45

  Outside of its finances, Pakistan’s troubles were multiplying. The Kashmir jihad had deeply unsettled Cunningham’s Northwest Frontier Province. The tens of thousands of tribesmen—many of them Afghans—milling about on their way to or from the front were becoming a positive menace to law and order. Murders in the NWFP were up 50 percent.46 Robberies in December 1947 were double the previous year’s. Some Pakistani officials suspected that Afghanistan—which had never recognized the British-drawn Durand Line that served as its frontier with Pakistan—was deliberately stirring up trouble along the border in hopes of regaining lost territory. British ambassador Grafftey-Sm
ith relayed rumors that “Hindu gold” was being spread liberally around the tribal areas.47 Indian spies were supposedly trying to strike an alliance with the Faqir of Ipi, an infamous Pathan warlord who had led a long-running insurgency against the British.48

  Other provinces seemed to be challenging the Quaid’s vision for Pakistan with their own. In West Punjab, the pirs and mullahs who had helped win Pakistan had begun to demand that the nation live up to its Islamic principles; legislators voted to ban alcohol in the province and imposed new restrictions on women. A thousand miles away in Pakistan’s eastern wing, Bengalis were growing increasingly resentful of the Karachi government, which was dominated by migrants from India, or mohajirs, like Jinnah and Liaquat. In mid-March, Bengali students staged several days of strikes and protests to demand that their mother tongue be made one of two official languages along with Urdu.49 Hundreds of young Bengalis were beaten or imprisoned.