Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  On 19 March, when Jinnah landed in the capital, Dacca, for a previously scheduled visit, feelings across East Bengal were still raw. Two days later, he addressed a mammoth crowd outdoors at the racecourse, estimated at more than 300,000 people. His speech, like his mood, was uncompromising:

  Let me make it very clear to you that the state language of Pakistan is going to be Urdu and no other language. Anyone who tries to mislead you is really the enemy of Pakistan. . . . Unfortunately, you have fifth-columnists—and I am sorry to say they are Muslims—who are financed by outsiders. But they are making a great mistake. We are not going to tolerate sabotage any more; we are not going to tolerate the enemies of Pakistan; we are not going to tolerate quislings and fifth-columnists in our State.50

  At Dacca University on 24 March, students jeered when Jinnah repeated the same hard-line message in a convocation address. They leaped onto their seats and shouted, “No, no!” as he spoke. The Quaid seemed taken aback, and paused for a moment before resuming his speech. He held no other public meetings before returning to Karachi at the end of the month. It was his first and last visit to East Bengal.

  Upon his return, Jinnah made two fateful decisions. First, though there remains no firm proof, he appears to have sanctioned the gun-running operation in Hyderabad. According to Cotton’s memoir, in the latter half of March, Laik Ali and El-Edroos “sent a representative to see Mr. Jinnah . . . to seek his approval of the action they were taking.” When Cotton passed through Karachi again in early April, Iskander Mirza told him that the Pakistan Cabinet had signed off on the smuggling operation.51 They would almost certainly not have dared to do so without consulting Jinnah. By 15 April, Mirza and several other officials from Pakistan’s Defense Ministry had joined Cotton in London, ready to start buying arms.

  Jinnah’s second decision concerned Kashmir, where the snows had begun to melt. Indian forces were on the move, looking to reoccupy rebel-held territory. As the insurgents fell back, lurid reports emerged from the battlefield. On 16 April, Pakistani newspapers claimed that after retaking the town of Rajauri, Indian troops deliberately blinded four thousand Kashmiri Muslim men. No evidence of such an atrocity ever emerged, of course. But the damage was done. “Great panic and confusion prevails in the area,” reported Gen. Douglas Gracey, who had replaced Messervy as Pakistan’s commander in chief at the beginning of the year.52 Fears revived that a wave of refugees might flee before the Indian advance, inundating West Punjab.

  By Gracey’s count, the Indians had eight brigade groups in Kashmir, with supporting artillery, tanks, and aircraft. On 20 April, he warned that with its vast superiority in air and armor, India would soon very likely be able to break through the insurgent lines and march all the way to the Pakistan border. This would put Indian troops on high ground overlooking the road-and-rail artery that connected Lahore to Peshawar—the key communications lifeline of western Pakistan. That prospect, Gracey argued, was untenable:

  If PAKISTAN is NOT to face another serious refugee problem of about 2¾ million people uprooted from their homes; if INDIA is NOT to be allowed to sit on the Doorsteps of PAKISTAN to the rear and on the flank at liberty to enter at her will and pleasure; if the civilian and military morale is NOT to be effected [sic] to a dangerous extent; and if subversive political forces are NOT to be encouraged and let loose within Pakistan itself, it is imperative that the Indian army is not allowed to advance.

  Gracey now formally recommended that in order to give Pakistan a proper defensive buffer, “regular units of PAK ARMY must be employed to hold this line at all costs.”53

  At the outset, Jinnah and Liaquat had only intended to support the tribesmen long enough to win Pakistan’s case diplomatically. They had set December as an end point, then March 1948.54 The debate in the Security Council had turned against them, however. Pressured heavily by Mountbatten, the British Cabinet had reined in its New York delegation, which was judged to have leaned too heavily in Pakistan’s favor.55 A new resolution put forward by the Chinese essentially accepted India’s position. It called on all “foreign” fighters to withdraw from Kashmir first, then for India to reduce but not eliminate its troop presence there. Abdullah would hold power in Srinagar until a plebiscite could be organized.

  Accepting Gracey’s recommendation, Jinnah now ordered the Pakistan Army to enter the fray. There would no longer be any doubt; the subcontinent’s two nations were at war. A month earlier, British diplomat C. B. Duke had picked up rumors that three Pakistani battalions had begun operating inside Kashmir. Grafftey-Smith had relayed these suspicions to London but dismissed them as “unconfirmed”: the units in question were “almost certainly still on Pakistan side of border.” By the end of April, though, Duke had proof. An officer recently returned from the Poonch front had made “clear that there are formed units of the Pakistan Army involved in the Kashmir fighting.”56

  After checking with General Gracey directly, Grafftey-Smith confirmed his deputy’s report on 4 May. While preventing a refugee crisis remained the troops’ primary mission, the ambassador wrote, a “secondary consideration seems to be that, having been accused of official intervention in the Kashmir dispute, Pakistan might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.”57 Cables burned between London and Washington, although neither the British nor the Americans chose to alert India or the United Nations to the Pakistani intervention.

  Back in October, Jinnah had been convinced that India lacked the appetite or the capacity for an all-out war. He was about to find out whether that still held true.

  By April, Hyderabad’s Mir Laik Ali had become a semiregular fixture in Delhi. Every few weeks, he could be found in the Indian capital, holding another round of talks to sort out the kingdom’s long-term relationship with India. The premier spent most of his evenings negotiating with V. P. Menon, who “continuously moisten[ed] his throat with large doses of sherry,” in Laik Ali’s envious description.58 Menon propounded various formulae and “Heads of Agreement” to nudge Hyderabad toward a more democratic government and eventual accession to India. Officially Mountbatten led the talks, while behind the scenes, Sardar Patel, who was recovering from a serious heart attack on 5 March, kept a watchful eye on the proceedings.

  Although they met regularly, Nehru seemed to Laik Ali only tangentially involved—or interested—in the negotiations. Their conversations rambled aimlessly. “Every one of our talks was preceded by a comprehensive survey by Nehru of the world situation on a highly philosophic level,” Laik Ali recalled in his memoir. The discussion would then proceed to touch upon several predictable themes—the advent of atomic energy and its impact on human civilization; “the theory of human emotions, individual and collective, and the shape they take when checked or allowed to run in certain channels”; the shrinking of the world in the jet age.59 Most of the time the Hyderabad premier found himself thoroughly bored.

  When Laik Ali trekked back to the Indian capital on 15 April, however, a great change seemed to have come over Nehru. That night when the two men met, “Panditji appeared to be carried away by emotion,” Laik Ali recalled in his memoir. The Hyderabadi made the mistake of complaining yet again about India’s unofficial blockade of his state. Nehru instantly “burst out in fury”: “[He] said if Hyderabad persisted in its refusal to accede, he would still more tighten the ring of blockade and make it impossible even for a blade of grass to enter Hyderabad. He then worked himself up to a high pitch of excitement and snapping his fingers in my face added, ‘I shall reduce Hyderabad to smithereens.’ I had never before been so abjectly conscious of the physical weakness of Hyderabad against the military might of India.”60 The very next day, Nehru instructed Defense Minister Baldev Singh to move a full armored brigade—“quietly, without any precipitateness”—into position along the Hyderabad border.61

  Nehru was fed up with the long-winded Hyderabad talks. While negotiations in Delhi dragged on, the situation on the ground appeared to be deteriorating badly. India’s representative in the state, K. M.
Munshi, was a devout Hindu who shared Patel’s impatience with the nizam; upon arrival he had set up a network of informants of varying reliability. Their highly colored reports described a widespread campaign of “murder, arson and loot” being waged by Razvi’s thugs out in the Hyderabad countryside. Between October and April, Munshi counted “no less than 260 incidents in which the Razakars acted with savage brutality.”62 The militants were supposedly harassing Indian passengers on buses and trains in transit through the state, even raiding villages across the border in India itself.

  Indeed, the reports made it sound as though the Razakars were growing into a formidable guerrilla force. Munshi claimed that Laik Ali’s government was funneling crude, locally made guns to the militants. Indian Army officers in the region warned that the irregulars were receiving training from British ex-commandos.63 According to rumor, the Razakars were even secretly negotiating an alliance with the well-armed Communists—a theory that gained credence in early May when the nizam abruptly lifted the ban on Communist activity in the state.

  One of Munshi’s spies claimed to have overheard Razvi deliver an especially inflammatory speech to Razakar commanders at the end of March, attacking Nehru’s government directly. “A Hindu who is a Kafir [unbeliever], a worshipper of stone and monkey, who drinks cow’s urine and eats cow dung in the name of religion, and who is a barbarian, in every sense of the word, wants to rule us! What an ambition and what a daydream!” Razvi had allegedly thundered. “Koran is in one hand, and the sword is in the other, let us march forward; cut our enemies to pieces; establish our Islamic supremacy.”64 He supposedly promised that Muslims in other parts of India would “be our fifth-columnists” in the coming conflict. While Laik Ali hotly denied that any such speech had been made, Razvi’s more public utterances were nearly as bad. At one gathering, he boastfully assured his audience that the nizam’s flag would soon fly, like the Mughals’, over the Red Fort in Delhi.

  Accounts from more reliable figures within Hyderabad make clear that this was all mostly bluster. (Munshi’s informants also claimed that the nizam had hidden a fleet of bombers in the Middle East, and possessed a cache of atomic weapons.)65 To Nehru’s eyes, though, Hyderabad must have looked more and more like another metastasizing cancer in the heart of India. While Razvi fulminated, Laik Ali and the nizam appeared to have adopted Jinnah’s negotiating tactics—reaching agreements, then reversing themselves shortly thereafter and raising new demands. The latest draft deal that Laik Ali took back with him—which would have involved establishing a representative government in Hyderabad with a Hindu majority—was renounced by the nizam within a week.

  Nehru began to echo the more hard-line Patel, who had long thought a military solution might be necessary in Hyderabad. At a closed-door party meeting on 24 April, the prime minister told Congress leaders that he saw only two choices left for the nizam: accession or “the path of war.”66 Army commanders were told to be ready to move against Hyderabad on ten days’ notice if need be.67

  News from Kashmir only increased the urgency to act. With the insertion of Pakistani troops, the Indian advance bogged down by the middle of May. On the 19th, Bogey Sen’s men took heavy fire from 4.2-inch mortars, which they were certain the tribesmen and Kashmiri rebels did not possess. At first army headquarters in Delhi was disbelieving, telling Sen “to cease making wild statements.”68 But after being presented with tail fins from the mortar shells and, a few days later, a live prisoner of war, Indian commanders could no longer deny the obvious. Ironically, the Pakistani brigadier shelling Sen was none other than Akbar Khan, now back in uniform rather than masquerading as “General Tariq.”69

  Sen wanted reinforcements. But with troops tied up in the south, there were none to be had. “The situation is not so good as we had hoped and hard fighting is going on [in Kashmir],” Nehru wrote to Patel on 27 May, after receiving a long, depressing briefing from General Bucher. “Our air resources have been severely tried and we have practically no reserves left. The demand is for more and more troops. Undoubtedly with more troops we could clear up this place this summer. But we just cannot spare them so long as there is danger of warlike developments in Hyderabad with other consequences in other parts of the country.”70

  Mountbatten had just a few weeks left in his term as governor-general. He had hoped to crown his tenure by peacefully winning over Hyderabad before he left India on 21 June. Now he had to worry about his ministers launching an unprovoked invasion on his watch. When Laik Ali returned to Delhi yet again at the end of May, Mountbatten sought to shock him out of his “mulishness” much as he had tried with the Sikhs before Partition.71 According to Laik Ali, the governor-general sat him down and immediately started describing how if India invaded, “the numerous tanks left over by the British would start over-running the territory of Hyderabad and how helplessly the Hyderabad army with their rifles would stand before the march of tanks and get mowed down by their heavy gunfire and by incessant bombing and machine-gunning.”72

  The message got through, but not exactly as Mountbatten had intended. As soon as Laik Ali returned home, one of his first calls was to Karachi. By this point, Sidney Cotton had assembled his own little air force in the Pakistani capital. He had bought and flown over three big Lancaster transports from England, using flight crews hired away from Aer Lingus.73 On 25 May, he had signed a contract for 400,000 pounds to fly “freight of any description weighing approximately 500 tons” into Hyderabad before the end of July.74

  Some Pakistani officials were rushing Cotton to begin the airlift immediately, while others—afraid of being found out by the Indians, he suspected—appeared to be putting roadblocks in his way. Instead of letting him fly out of Karachi’s civil airport as a regular cargo flight, they had shunted him off to the military airfield at Drigh Road, and forced him to lease a hotel and two villas out of his own pocket to house his men. A 2 June note signed by Cotton seems to indicate Jinnah was aware of the interference and disapproved. A complaint from Hyderabad’s agent-general in Karachi, Cotton wrote, “upset J very much. He asked the AG who specifically was not giving help. The answer of course is that everybody is promising everything, but nothing happens.”75

  The next day, a message from Hyderabad informed Cotton “that negotiations with India looked like breaking down and that they wanted the airlift to start immediately.”76 The first Lancaster, loaded with Swiss anti-tank guns and ammunition, lifted off at eight o’clock on 4 June with Cotton himself at the controls. He flew through clouds most of the way, encountering no Indian planes. An ecstatic El-Edroos greeted him on the runway in Hyderabad.

  Laik Ali now thought that 500 tons of arms would be nowhere near enough; he suggested expanding the airlift to 3,000 tons. Cotton readily agreed. Over the next fortnight, the Australian wrote in his memoir, his men flew in another sixteen planeloads of weapons, mostly small arms and ammunition.77

  Although the fast, high-flying Lancasters managed to avoid detection, such a large operation could not remain secret for long. By the middle of June, Nehru had received reports of planes shuttling between Karachi and Hyderabad “full of war materiel.” Combined with the evidence of Pakistani troops fighting in Kashmir, Cotton’s flights seemed to confirm fears that Jinnah was trying to tie down Indian forces in the south as well as the north. “Hyderabad has been hand in glove with Pakistan and it is Pakistan that has prevented them from coming into line with us,” Nehru wrote to Sri Prakasa, the Indian high commissioner in Karachi, on 16 June.78 The next day, the nizam rejected India’s latest offer—to hold a plebiscite in the state—balking over the demand that he first disband the Razakars and arrest Qasim Razvi.

  Nehru was done negotiating. At a press conference that afternoon, he left no doubt that the Indian leaders did not intend to be as energetic as Mountbatten had been in seeking a peaceful compromise. “We are not going to discuss anything with the representatives of Hyderabad anymore,” Nehru told reporters. At best India would leave the current offer on the table, unchang
ed. “If they wish to sign on the dotted line, they are welcome to do so.”79 Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten left Delhi four days later.

  Nehru instructed the Defence Department to find a way to track and ground Cotton’s planes, but he did not order immediate action against Hyderabad.80 In a few weeks’ time, the Security Council would be sending a fact-finding commission to the subcontinent to try to mediate the Kashmir conflict. Nehru did not want to antagonize the international community with an invasion now. “I would rather allow matters to remain where they are for another two months or so,” he wrote to Patel.81 By that point, the monsoons and the UN observers would have passed through, and India could take care of the threat from Hyderabad once and for all.

  On 1 July, the Quaid rode in full panoply through the streets of Karachi. He sat, ramrod-straight, alongside his sister Fatima in the old viceregal carriage, surrounded by mounted outriders in crimson livery. Crowds lined the streets and gathered on the low rooftops for a rare glimpse of Pakistan’s leader, six weeks before the nation’s first anniversary. Jinnah had come to inaugurate the new State Bank of Pakistan—an important symbol of his infant nation’s viability. The building’s imposing stone facade exuded strength and permanence. In a scratchy radio recording of his speech, Jinnah’s voice soars with theatrical élan.

  Watching from the side of the dais, though, Lt. Ahmed Mazhar could see the lines of exhaustion on the Quaid’s face. On doctor’s orders, Jinnah had spent the past several weeks resting in the cool, dry hills of Baluchistan. Karachi’s seaside heat was humid and wilting. When they returned to Government House, Jinnah abruptly dismissed Mazhar, his naval aide-de-camp, at the top of the stairs. Looking back as he walked away, Mazhar saw the Quaid’s frail form “staggering towards his door,” wracked by a fit of coughing.82 Pakistan’s founder collapsed into bed still wearing his sherwani and shiny pump shoes.83