by Nisid Hajari
Jinnah’s smoke-charred lungs had betrayed him at last. A few days later, he and his small entourage returned to Baluchistan, to the old British Residency at Ziarat. Once again government business had to be conducted long-distance. A succession of black dispatch boxes, monogrammed with the gold letters “M.A.J.,” slowly made their way to him from Karachi. “There is nothing wrong with me,” he protested to anyone who would listen, including the London-trained physician sent to examine him.84 The Quaid’s gray, ashen complexion and shrunken frame—one biographer claims he had wasted away to only 70 pounds—told the doctor otherwise. X-rays confirmed the diagnosis of tuberculosis. Two-thirds of one lung seemed to be gone already, and a quarter of the other.85
Jinnah forbade his doctors to reveal anything about his condition. “I . . . will tell the nation about the nature and gravity of my illness when I think it proper,” he intoned.86 Even when Liaquat came to see him a few weeks later, the Quaid refused to admit he was dying.
Jinnah’s fading condition cast an air of unreality over the events of that summer. Members of the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan landed in Karachi just days after the Quaid had departed. They knew that all major decisions continued to be referred to him in Ziarat. Yet in weeks of shuttle diplomacy in the region, they never once saw or spoke with Pakistan’s leader.87
In Kashmir, the undeclared war between two armies, no longer hidden behind Pakistan’s tribal proxies, continued on autopilot. Since May, the two sides had pummeled each other with echoing artillery barrages. “The way they waste their ammunition is amazing,” Nehru wrote to Mountbatten in London. “It is not pleasant to think that we are one of the main suppliers.”88 Indian and Pakistani troops battled fiercely for hilltops and ridges, and the front bulged and contracted. Insurgents captured a swathe of territory in the desolate north, cutting off the Ladakh capital of Leh for months. But neither side could land a decisive blow. By the end of July, monsoon rains again made fighting difficult.
The UN diplomats were shocked to learn that Pakistani troops were now engaged in the battle; the admission dramatically undercut Pakistan’s claim to be the aggrieved party. In Delhi, Nehru failed to see what else there was to discuss: “Their whole case in regard to Kashmir . . . has been based on deceit and falsehood throughout,” he argued to Czech delegate Josef Korbel. As far as India’s prime minister was concerned, the United Nations’ job was to compel Pakistan to withdraw. He grew livid when Korbel suggested that India, as the stronger party, make some gesture of concession as well: “Pandit Nehru reacted vehemently. In a flash of bitterness he leaped onto a chair, shouting, ‘You do not seem to understand our position and our rights. We are a secular state which is not based on religion. . . . Pakistan is a mediaeval state with an impossible theocratic concept. It should never have been created, and it would never have happened had the British not stood behind this foolish idea of Jinnah.’”89
The commission largely came down in Nehru’s favor, suggesting in mid-August that both sides cease hostilities, and Pakistan withdraw its troops and the tribesmen. Then India was to draw down its own forces to a token presence before a UN-sponsored plebiscite was held. Nehru accepted the deal on 20 August.
Without Jinnah’s sanction, however, the Pakistanis seemed unable to commit themselves. Foreign Minister Zafarullah Khan harassed commission members for “hours on end and touched upon almost every word [in the resolution] and its exact meaning,” Korbel recalled. “What would happen . . . ? What would the Commission do if . . . ? Did you bear in mind the possibility of . . . ?” Pakistan did not issue its official reply for weeks, and then “attached so many reservations, qualifications, and assumptions” that the commission judged the answer “tantamount to rejection.”90
Hyderabad’s Mir Laik Ali couldn’t get any clear answers out of Pakistan either. In August, he secretly flew to Karachi aboard one of Cotton’s Lancasters. India’s stranglehold on Hyderabad had tightened. Delhi had re-routed trains to bypass the state and banned local Deccan Airways from Indian airspace, effectively cutting off Hyderabad’s citizens from the rest of the subcontinent. Indian armored units were stationed along the state’s borders. Laik Ali needed to know what help he could expect from Pakistan if India invaded. He heard impassioned declarations in Karachi—one minister boasted that Pakistani troops would overrun Delhi before the Indians ever reached the nizam’s capital—but no concrete assurances.91 Only the Quaid could provide those.
In desperation, Laik Ali flew up to Baluchistan. Jinnah’s doctors had moved him to Quetta, the region’s capital, a few days before. The Quaid’s absence from view on the first anniversary of independence had fueled rumors of his imminent demise. “It is a question of weeks,” Nehru wrote to Mountbatten on 23 August.92 When Laik Ali arrived a little before eleven o’clock, the Hyderabadi later recalled, he “could see anxiety on everyone’s face.”93 Doctors huddled in consultation. Jinnah had reacted badly to an injection and was in a great deal of pain and only semiconscious. Laik Ali waited all morning and into the afternoon. A worried Fatima kept emerging from the Quaid’s bedroom, shaking her head. At last, she said that Jinnah had waved his hand in agony and indicated he could not see the visitor. Laik Ali flew home empty-handed.
In his memoirs, Laik Ali claims that he informed the nizam that the mission had been unsuccessful. Other Hyderabad officials, however, recall the premier feigning confidence on his return from Karachi. “He told me that Pakistan had assured air support in case Indian Union troops entered Hyderabad,” El-Edroos wrote in his own memoir.94 With others Laik Ali was less specific, but his implication was clear. Mohammed Hyder met with the premier on 28 August. If India attacked, Laik Ali assured the district official, “‘Do you really think we would find ourselves isolated? Do you think we have no friends? If it came to a fight after all, Hyderabad will not find itself alone.’”95 He told Hyder that he did not expect an Indian invasion until late November at the earliest, after the one-year standstill agreement had expired.
Perhaps Laik Ali really believed that Pakistan would come to Hyderabad’s rescue in the end, or that the United Nations might. A delegation appointed by the nizam snuck away on one of Cotton’s planes to try and put Hyderabad’s case before the Security Council. Laik Ali thought if troops and Razakars could hold out against any attack for a month at least, world powers would intervene.96 Given the tens of thousands of .303 rifles and Sten guns smuggled in by Cotton’s operation—“by now we had begun receiving arms in relatively large quantities,” Hyder wrote at the end of August—that seemed eminently possible.97
But time had run out, for Hyderabad no less than for Jinnah. Left unchecked all summer long, Qasim Razvi’s threats had reached a hysterical pitch. Now he talked of turning Hyderabad into a smoking wasteland if India invaded, littered with the bones of millions of Hindus. Razakar gangs had reportedly started marauding through Hindu villages, dragging out suspected Congress sympathizers and executing them. The thugs beheaded one defiant village headman and paraded his skull on a pike. A Muslim newspaper editor who had criticized the Razakars had his hands chopped off.98 At one border crossing Razakars sparked an hours-long gun battle with Indian troops.
The provocations gave Indian leaders the excuse they needed. The only way to deal with the nizam, V. P. Menon told an American diplomat, was “to hit him over the head with a hammer.”99 Patel threatened to resign if Nehru didn’t order Indian tanks to roll.100
On 7 September, Delhi laid down an ultimatum. The nizam had to ban the Razakars and allow Indian troops to take up positions in the old British cantonment at Secunderabad. Three days later, a grimly determined Nehru met with reporters. Asked what India intended to do if the nizam’s troops resisted, he said simply, “With great regret we shall still occupy Secunderabad.” And if Hyderabad tried to drag things out by involving the United Nations? “We march.”101
Laik Ali still thought Nehru was bluffing. Later that day, in his official reply, the premier called India’s ultimatum “extraor
dinary” and warned that any infringement of Hyderabad’s territorial sovereignty would have “very serious consequences.”102 He defiantly ordered Hyderabad’s armed forces to mobilize.
The following morning, three planes landed at Quetta’s airport in far-off Baluchistan. The Quaid, dressed in a new suit and wearing freshly shined shoes, was carried to his sleek new Viking on a stretcher, weakly saluting the plane’s British crew.103 He had developed a bad case of pneumonia; doctors urgently needed to get him back to the capital for treatment.
The trip was kept secret. In Karachi, the Viking was met by an army ambulance but no officials. On the drive into town, the truck broke down near a camp full of rag-clad Punjabi refugees. For an hour, Jinnah lay in the sweltering ambulance, a nurse fanning the flies away, before another vehicle arrived. By the time the convoy reached Government House, whatever strength he had left had ebbed away. Doctors propped him up and tried to give him an injection, but his veins had collapsed. “God willing, you are going to live,” a doctor told him at 9:50 p.m. “No, I am not,” Jinnah murmured. A half-hour later he was dead.104
News of the Quaid’s demise was broadcast late that evening. It came as a shock to Pakistanis, in spite of the long rumors about his illness. No preparations had been made for his funeral. When a mob swarmed Government House the next morning, 12 September, “the pandemonium and the crush were indescribable,” one British diplomat recorded. Jinnah’s body lay on a simple bier in the center of the grand Durbar Hall, surrounded by shoving, wailing mourners. The Briton “saw one man, in no way disrespectfully, jump across the body to get a better view from the other side.”105
Jinnah was to be buried on the site of a planned mosque—a stony hill outside of town that had never been used as a cemetery before. Gravediggers could make no headway with picks and shovels; they hastily sent back to town for a pair of pneumatic drills.106 That afternoon, when the long column of mourners—perhaps a half-million in all—started to wend its way up the hillside, the workers were still hammering away at the hard, unforgiving mountain.
There is little question that Jinnah was the most polarizing figure in the Partition drama. He is easy to blame. His forbidding personality made compromise difficult, if not impossible, and he was criminally negligent about thinking through the consequences of the demand for Pakistan. A vindictive streak ensured that he was surrounded mostly by sycophants, rather than independent-minded subordinates who might have moderated his views.
Yet from the moment in 1937 when the Congress Party rejected any partnership with the Muslim League, Nehru—suave, sensitive, handsome Nehru—contributed very nearly as much as Jinnah to the poisoning of the political atmosphere on the subcontinent. His attitude toward the Quaid—and by implication, toward Jinnah’s millions of Muslim followers—was all too often arrogant and dismissive, rather than understanding. “The more Nehru spoke contemptuously and violently about the League and Jinnah, the more I disliked the Congress,” wrote one Muslim leader who had once been extremely close to the Nehru family. “This feeling was shared by a large number of the Muslims I knew who, but for this, would have shown less antipathy to the Congress.”107
Nehru misread the battle over Pakistan much as he later did the fight for Kashmir—as an ideological contest in which he and India were morally unimpeachable. For three decades before Partition, he had seen himself thus—as one of Gandhi’s nonviolent warriors, leading the assault on the British Empire. He did not seem to understand that he was no longer battling a foreign power, and that he needed to accommodate his countryman Jinnah as a statesman would: with pragmatism, generosity, and an appreciation for the gray areas of diplomacy.
Even now, with Jinnah dead, Nehru would deliver one final blow in their decades-long rivalry. As Pakistan’s founder was being laid to rest, Nehru gave his commanders the green light to advance into Hyderabad.108 India’s leaders were unsentimental about the passing of their old adversary. (When Bengal’s governor asked if he should lower flags to half-mast in Jinnah’s honor, Sardar Patel retorted, “Why, was he your relative?”)109 Before dawn the next morning, Indian forces pierced Hyderabad’s borders at five different points. Columns of Sherman and Stuart tanks clanked through dusty border villages. Indian fighter planes roared low overhead.
In Pakistan, the radio was still broadcasting recitations from the Koran in mourning for Jinnah when announcers broke in with frantic updates of the invasion. India seemed to be taunting its grief-stricken sister dominion, almost daring Pakistan to respond. “You cowards!” a crowd shouted in front of the Indian High Commission in Karachi. “You have attacked us just when our Father has died.”110 Demonstrators clamored for the Pakistan Army to rush to Hyderabad’s aid.
It had always all been talk, though. Jinnah’s vows of Muslim solidarity, the threats of a pan-Islamic jihad to defend the nizam’s throne—it was never serious. No Pakistani planes took to the skies to provide the “air support” that Mir Laik Ali had promised. No Pathan tribesmen charged down from the hills to march on Delhi. The nizam produced no atom bombs nor hidden fleets of fighters. In fact, El-Edroos had built wooden replicas of planes and camouflaged them, to fool the Indians into thinking that Hyderabad actually possessed an air force.111 Laik Ali talked crazily of fresh shipments of Swiss-made arms that were about to be delivered at any moment, but Cotton’s airlift had effectively ended.112 His last Lancaster barely made it out of Hyderabad before the Indians bombed the airfield where he had parked it.
The nizam’s forces held out for little more than a hundred hours. India’s victory was too fast for the United Nations even to debate the matter, and it was total. “This is a surrender. This is not a tea party,” Patel raged when India’s agent-general, K. M. Munshi, suggested that Indian and Hyderabadi generals meet to arrange a face-saving end to hostilities.113 Instead, the commander of Indian ground forces, Maj.-Gen. J. N. Chaudhuri, accepted Hyderabad’s sword of surrender at 5:00 p.m. on 17 September. He assumed full control over the state as military governor. “That wretched fox,” as Patel called the nizam, was allowed to remain on his throne but sidelined. Indian troops detained Laik Ali and Qasim Razvi.
Hyderabad’s quick collapse deeply rattled Pakistan. There were real fears that as soon as India’s armored forces could be redeployed, they would sweep westward next. “Easy conquest Hyderabad has completely changed former conviction that India would not undertake destruction Pakistan by invasion,” a U.S. diplomat in Karachi reported tersely.114 The papers were filled with such headlines as AFTER HYDERABAD, WHAT?115
Angry crowds besieged Liaquat’s house to condemn his government’s fecklessness. However emotionally devastating it had been to Nehru and Patel personally, the Mahatma’s assassination had not disrupted India’s political leadership. By contrast, Jinnah had cultivated weak lieutenants; his death now left Pakistan confused and rudderless. The day after Hyderabad’s surrender, Nehru appealed to Pakistanis “to cast aside their fear and suspicion and to join us in the work of peace.”116 Instead, Liaquat’s cabinet responded by launching a high-profile witch hunt to root out Indian “spies”—“partly, doubtless, with the object of diverting public activity from more dangerous channels,” a British diplomat reported.117 Police arrested two dozen “enemy agents” in Karachi, more than half of them Hindu.
The Pakistanis made a show of looking to their defenses as well. British diplomats reported talk in Rawalpindi of expanding the army to four divisions and the air force to six fighter-bomber squadrons, and of buying another destroyer for the navy.118 The military halted all releases from service, and veterans were encouraged to reenlist. Rifle training was offered to ordinary citizens. Liaquat hinted to Cotton that Pakistan might want to buy his Lancasters and hire his Irish crews for its own use. Addressing the army brass at the end of September, Pakistan’s prime minister vowed that, if necessary, the 70 percent share of the budget devoted to defense would be raised to 100 percent.119 “Pakistan, too, wants peace,” U.S. chargé d’affaires Charles W. Lewis cabled sardonical
ly to Washington.120
It had been just over two years since Lord Wavell’s letter had thrust Nehru into power over India. Jinnah was gone. But the anxieties that the Quaid had so skillfully exploited had not disappeared. Now Pakistanis feared domination by a militarily superior India, rather than by Gandhi’s Congress Party or Hindus more broadly. As he had in the 1930s, Nehru still failed to appreciate how deep such suspicions ran—and how little difference his own good intentions made.
In the middle of October, at a Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference in London, Nehru again proposed that India and Pakistan make a fresh start. He was willing to partition Kashmir more or less along the current front lines, with Poonch and parts of the remote northern territories going to Pakistan. Liaquat rejected the offer. In their current, besieged mood, Pakistanis could hardly have accepted such a bargain, which would have left the Vale to India, with Pakistan’s borders vulnerable. Frustrated, Nehru belittled Liaquat’s stance as “a frightened man’s approach and not a strong, confident man’s approach.”121 In private, Nehru was even more cutting. “Evidently [Pakistani leaders] are terribly jittery and are in a peculiar mental state which requires careful medical treatment,” he wrote to Dickie Mountbatten at the end of November.122
As the Kashmir war ground on, Washington and London worried that the combination of Indian arrogance and Pakistani insecurity would lead one side or the other to risk a broader conflict. “It seems to me hardly less important that public opinion here should believe that India’s intentions are immediately hostile than that they should in fact be so,” British ambassador Grafftey-Smith warned. “The result is a mood of complete desperation in which anything is possible.”123
Indian forces finally relieved their besieged garrison in the town of Poonch at the end of November. They secured Ladakh—somehow getting tanks up and over the 12,000-foot Zoji La Pass—and were firmly entrenched in the Vale. In spite of India’s military advantage, though, Nehru knew that India could not progress much further in Kashmir without provoking a full-scale war. “If there isn’t going to be a ceasefire, then it seems to me that we may be faced with an advance into Pakistan,” he told General Bucher, who was nearing the end of his one-year term as India’s commander in chief.124