Midnight's Furies

by Nisid Hajari

  Fareed Zakaria has been my most unfailing champion and greatest professional inspiration; this project would never have come to fruition were it not for his backing and years of friendship. Daniel Klaidman helped me to fulfill a lifelong ambition with his generous counsel and example. Scott Malcomson, Jeffrey Bartholet, and Joel Simon read early chapters and, most importantly, kept me going past early stumbles.

  In the three years it took to research and write this volume, many people in many parts of the world extended bountiful assistance, guidance, meals, and hospitality. In India, Parrita Engineer and Viral Mehta provided not just wonderful companionship but a home, while the rest of the Engineer clan offered irrepressible cheer and motivation. I am indebted to Nandan Nilekani and Ramachandra Guha for their thoughts on Partition and on writing, and to Sudip Mazumdar for helping me to navigate the Delhi bureaucracy.

  In London, Alison Green, Robert Maxwell, Alex von Tunzelmann, Patrick French, and Meru Gokhale shared friendship, research tips, and welcome, always penetrating insights. In the middle of a Maine winter, Sis Hoy-Tuholski conjured up a miraculous writing retreat washed by Atlantic waves. My talented former Newsweek colleagues Leah Purcell, Jamie Wellford, and Amy Pereira-Frears helped immensely in putting together artwork for the book. I am grateful to David Shipley for his understanding and moral support through the last months of this project, and to William Schwalbe and William Dobson for their early encouragement.

  I have been fortunate in many things, not least in having bighearted families on both coasts of the United States. The Pages—Lee, Paula, and Jennifer—gave up their homes and their time to make this project logistically possible, and did so with great cheer. Lopa, Arun, Kiran, and Leela Jacob buoyed me with transcontinental video chats and words of encouragement. My parents, Jagdish and Sarla Hajari, have supported my desire to write since childhood, and their pride, boundless affection, and brave example have both humbled and inspired me for a lifetime. I wrote this book for them most of all, though it can hardly compare to the gifts they have always been to me.

  When I embarked on this project, I had no idea the journey would transplant my wife, Melinda, and me from Brooklyn to the Seychelles, New Delhi, London, York Harbor, Maine, and eventually, Singapore. Neither did she, of course. Yet with her endless adaptability and resourcefulness, her perceptive comments on equally endless drafts, her unfathomably deep reservoir of love and faith, she more than anyone in the world willed this volume into being. I am unaccountably blessed and inexpressibly grateful to have her by my side.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE: A TRAIN TO PAKISTAN

  1. Details of this scene were pieced together from various after-action reports, including “Report of D. W. McDonald, Additional Deputy Commissioner, Ferozepore, on the Derailment of Pakistan Special near Giddarbaha on the Night of 9th August 1947,” Sir Francis Mudie Papers, India Office Records and Private Papers, British Library (hereafter IOR): MSS Eur F164/47; George Abell to Saiyid Hashim Raza, 10 August 1947, Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers,18 vols. to date, ed. Z. H. Zaidi et al. (Islamabad: Quaid-i-Azam Papers Project, 1993–), 4:426 (hereafter QMJP); and Swarna Aiyar, “‘August Anarchy’: The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947,” in Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence, ed. D. A. Low and Howard Brasted (New Delhi: Sage, 1998), 18–19.

  2. Phillips Talbot, An American Witness to India’s Partition (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), 330.

  3. Lionel Carter, ed., Partition Observed: British Official Reports from South Asia, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Manohar, 2011), 1:102.

  4. Speech in New Delhi, 9 August 1947, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2nd ser., 55 vols. to date, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal et al. (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1985–), 3:134 (hereafter SWJN, 2nd ser.).

  5. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 293.

  6. 3 June Broadcast, SWJN, 2nd ser., 3:98–99.

  1. FURY

  1. Archibald Wavell to Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, 6 August 1946, Transfer of Power 1942–47, 12 vols., ed. Nicholas Mansergh et al. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1970–1983), 8:194.

  2. Pamela Mountbatten, India Remembered (London: Pavilion, 2008), 54.

  3. Jawaharlal Nehru, Toward Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (New York: John Day, 1941), 26.

  4. Durga Das, From Curzon to Nehru and After (London: Collins, 1969), 202.

  5. Edgar Snow, People on Our Side (New York: Random House, 1944), 45, 48.

  6. Nehru to Padmaja Naidu, 8 August 1946, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 1st ser., 15 vols., ed. Sarvepalli Gopal et al. (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1972–1982), 15:602 (hereafter SWJN, 1st ser.).

  7. Ibid.

  8. “Mr. Gandhi in Touch with Viceroy,” Times of India, 9 August 1946, 1.

  9. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, Attlee: A Life in Politics (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 270.

  10. Jawaharlal Nehru, Before Freedom: Nehru’s Letters to His Sister, 1909–1947, ed. Nayantara Sahgal (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 395.

  11. Bernard Fergusson, Wavell: Portrait of a Soldier (London: Collins, 1961), 47.

  12. A British Tale of Indian and Foreign Service: The Memoirs of Sir Ian Scott, ed. Denis Judd (London: Radcliffe Press, 1999), 143.

  13. Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), 549.

  14. Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Birth of the Pax Americana (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 313, 399.

  15. Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, ed. Penderel Moon (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 330–332.

  16. L. C. Hollis to Sir David Taylor Monteath, 13 March 1946, Transfer of Power, 6:1166.

  17. Memo by Ernest Bevin, 14 June 1946, ibid., 7:930.

  18. Wavell, 98.

  19. Sarojini Naidu: Selected Letters, 1890s to 1940s, ed. Makarand Paranjape (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1996), 194–195.

  20. Beverley Nichols to Jinnah, 11 January 1944, QMJP, 10:119–124.

  21. Statement to Press, 19 January 1937, SWJN, 1st ser., 8:119–122.

  22. Prison Diary 1943, 28 December 1943, ibid., 13:323–324.

  23. Some Recent Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah, vol. 2, ed. Jamil-ud-din Ahmad (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1947), 364.

  24. Press Release by India Office, n.d., Transfer of Power, 8:238–239.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Wavell, 334.

  28. SWJN, 1st ser., 15:298n2.

  29. Interview to Press in Bombay, 16 August 1946, ibid., 15:289.

  30. Wavell, 334.

  31. Some Recent Speeches, 419.

  32. Talbot, An American Witness, 188–189.

  33. Ibid., 189.

  34. Pyarelal, Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase, 2 vols. (Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1956), 1:241.

  35. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Penguin, 2008), 245.

  36. Leonard Mosley, The Last Days of the British Raj (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961), 32, 31.

  37. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 244.

  38. Margaret Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), 16–17.

  39. Richard D. Lambert, Hindu-Muslim Riots (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 180.

  40. Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence (London: Pimlico, 1998), 394.

  41. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 246.

  42. See especially “Report on the Disturbances in Calcutta Commencing on August 16th, 1946,” Roy Bucher Papers, National Army Museum (hereafter NAM): 7901–87/2.

  43. “Report of the Muslim-Hindu Conflict in Calcutta Following ‘Direct Action Day’ 16th August 1946,” Bucher Papers, 7901–87/2. Bucher quotes Suhrawardy as saying, “I have made the necessary arrangements with the police and the military not to interfere.”

  44. “Report on t
he Disturbances in Calcutta,” Bucher Papers, 7901–87/2.

  45. Frederick Burrows to Wavell, 22 August 1946, enclosure, Transfer of Power, 8:293–303.

  46. Mosley, The Last Days of the British Raj, 35.

  47. Arthur Dash Diary, vol. 6, 1942–1947, IOR: MSS Eur C188/6.

  48. Taya Zinkin, Reporting India (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), 17.

  49. “Report on the Disturbances in Calcutta,” Bucher Papers, 7901–87/2.

  50. Ibid. See also Lambert, Hindu-Muslim Riots, 189.

  51. “Report of the Muslim-Hindu Conflict,” Bucher Papers, 7901–87.

  52. Ibid.

  53. M. A. H. Ispahani, Qaid-e-Azam as I Knew Him (Karachi: Forward Publications Trust, 1967), 234.

  54. “Mr. Nehru on Riots,” Times of India, 19 August 1946, 7.

  55. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Wars, 248. Gurkhas were Nepalese soldiers employed by the British, renowned for their fighting abilities.

  56. Talbot, An American Witness, 190–191.

  57. Ian Stephens, Pakistan (London: Ernest Benn, 1963), 105.

  58. Talbot, An American Witness, 192. Richard Lambert estimates the number of injured at more than 25,000. Lambert, Hindu-Muslim Riots, 183.

  59. Lambert, who conducted interviews shortly after the riots with local Leaguers, concludes that Suhrawardy had planned for small outbreaks of violence to be controlled quickly by the police, but that a radical wing of the League spurred more widespread attacks. Ibid., 181.

  60. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, 19.

  61. Mosley, The Last Days of the British Raj, 38.

  62. Talbot, An American Witness, 185.

  63. Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom, 20.

  64. Wavell, 341n1.

  2. JINNAH AND JAWAHARLAL

  1. Sarojini Naidu: Selected Letters, 305.

  2. Saadat Hasan Manto, Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, trans. Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Penguin, 1997), 119.

  3. Wavell, 349.

  4. Fatima Jinnah, My Brother, ed. Sharif al Mujahid (Karachi: Quaid-e-Azam Academy, 1987), 80; Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, 2 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975–1979), 1:27.

  5. In Quest of Jinnah: Diary, Notes and Correspondence of Hector Bolitho, ed. Sharif al Mujahid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 27.

  6. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 25.

  7. The Collected Works of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, 3 vols., comp. Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (Karachi: East and West Publishing, 1984–1986), 1:252.

  8. Iris Butler, The Viceroy’s Wife: Letters of Alice, Countess of Reading, from India, 1921–1925 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), 133.

  9. K. H. Khurshid, Memories of Jinnah, ed. Khalid Hasan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 68.

  10. Ruttie Jinnah to Padmaja Naidu, 4 July 1916, Naidu Papers, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter NMML).

  11. M. C. Chagla, “Politics,” in Islam in South Asia, vol. 6, Soundings on Partition and Its Aftermath, ed. Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Manohar, 2010), 84.

  12. Kanji Dwarkadas, Ruttie Jinnah: The Story of a Great Friendship (Bombay: Kanji Dwarkadas, n.d.), 11.

  13. Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence (New Delhi: Rupa, 2009), 103.

  14. Some of the key negotiating sessions took place at Anand Bhavan, Nehru’s home, although young Jawaharlal does not seem to have attended them.

  15. Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, 51.

  16. Louis Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 117.

  17. Collected Works of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, 1:396.

  18. M. R. A. Baig, “Jinnah and Pakistan,” in Hasan, ed., Islam in South Asia, 6:92–93.

  19. Patrick French, Liberty or Death (London: Flamingo, 1998), 39.

  20. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, Great Anarch! India 1921–1952 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 19.

  21. Joseph Lelyveld, Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (New York: Knopf, 2011), 157.

  22. Singh, Jinnah, 125.

  23. Collected Works of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, 1:404.

  24. Interview with James Cameron, Oral History Archive, NMML.

  25. Plain Mr. Jinnah: Selections from Shamsul Hasan Collection, Volume 1, ed. Syed Shamsul Hasan (Karachi: Royal Book Company, 1976), 49.

  26. Interview with Durga Das, Oral History Archive, NMML.

  27. See Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan.

  28. In Quest of Jinnah, 213.

  29. Dwarkadas, Ruttie Jinnah, 54.

  30. In Quest of Jinnah, 89.

  31. Krishna Nehru Hutheesing, with Alden Hatch, We Nehrus (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 175.

  32. Dwarkadas, Ruttie Jinnah, 58, 59–60.

  33. Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents, 1906–1947, 2 vols., ed. Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada (Karachi: National Publishing House, 1969–1970), 1:xxi; Khalid bin Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase, 1857–1948 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1968), 176.

  34. Das, From Curzon to Nehru, 154–155.

  35. Jawaharlal Nehru, Eighteen Months in India: 1936–1937: Being Further Essays and Writings (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1938), 97–98.

  36. Nehru to Naidu, 5 June 1936, SWJN, 1st ser., 13:645.

  37. Nehru to Naidu, 9 October 1936, ibid., 13:652.

  38. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 39.

  39. B. R. Nanda, The Nehrus: Motilal and Jawaharlal (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), 90.

  40. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 44, 30.

  41. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 1:66.

  42. Hutheesing, We Nehrus, 57.

  43. Nehru, Toward Freedom, 69.

  44. Hutheesing, We Nehrus, 83.

  45. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 44.

  46. Nehru to Naidu, 10 November 1936, SWJN, 1st ser., 13:655.

  47. Nehru to Naidu, 12 February 1937, ibid., 13:669.

  48. Nehru to Naidu, 22 January 1937, ibid., 13:666.

  49. Nehru to Naidu, 1 April 1937, ibid., 13:678.

  50. Speech at Public Meeting, 5 November 1936, ibid., 7:538.

  51. Speech on Palestine Day at Allahabad, 27 September 1936, ibid., 7:586.

  52. Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore: Longman, Green, 1961), 157.

  53. Read and Fisher, The Proudest Day, 273.

  54. Akbar S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin (London: Routledge, 1997), 16.

  55. Das, From Curzon to Nehru, 180–181.

  56. Read and Fisher, The Proudest Day, 275.

  57. Sayeed, Pakistan, 201.

  58. Pirzada, ed., Foundations of Pakistan, 2:265–273.

  59. Nehru to Naidu, 8 November 1937, SWJN, 1st ser., 13:692.

  60. Nehru to Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, 1 July 1937, ibid., 8:143.

  61. Singh, Jinnah, 249.

  62. Walter Henry John Christie Diary, 3 September 1939, Christie Papers, IOR: MSS Eur D718/2.

  63. Frank Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 293.

  64. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru, 1:252.

  65. Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi: The Man, His People and the Empire (London: Haus, 2007), 255.

  66. War Cabinet Paper: India and the War, 31 January 1940, IOR: L/PO/6/101.

  67. K. K. Aziz, Rahmat Ali: A Biography (Lahore: Vanguard, 1987), 380.

  68. V. P. Menon, The Transfer of Power in India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), 82.

  69. Read and Fisher, The Proudest Day, 295.

  70. Moon, Divide and Quit, 21

  71. “Congress and the Muslim League: A Study in Conflict,” IOR: L/PJ/12/644.

  72. Hutheesing, We Nehrus, 159.

  73. William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 130.

  74. Menon, Transfer of Power, 93.

&nbs
p; 75. Snow, People on Our Side, 47.

  76. Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959), 257.

  77. Fischer, Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 375.

  78. Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau (hereafter DIB), 13 June 1942, IOR: L/ PJ/12/484.

  79. Victor Hope, 2nd Marquess of Linlithgow, to Leopold Amery, 15 June 1942, Transfer of Power, 2:204–205.

  80. Weekly Report of the DIB, 1 August 1942, IOR: L/PJ/12/484.

  81. Auriol Weigold, Churchill, Roosevelt and India: Propaganda During World War II (New York: Routledge, 2008), 134.

  82. William Phillips, Ventures in Diplomacy (Portland, Maine: Anthoensen Press, 1952), 390.

  83. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Enigma, 2008), 420.

  84. Francis Wylie to Wavell, 19 February 1946, Transfer of Power, 6:1019.

  85. R. W. Sorensen, My Impression of India (London: Meridian, 1946), 96, 93.

  86. Snow, People on Our Side, 261–262.

  87. Linlithgow to Amery, 10 June 1943, Transfer of Power, 3:1052.

  88. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, The Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 118.

  89. Pirzada, ed., Foundations of Pakistan, 2:428.

  90. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 104–105.

  91. Aziz Beg, Jinnah and His Times (Islamabad: Babur and Amer, 1986), 628–629.

  92. Office of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Branch, Report No. 112, “Pakistan: A Muslim Project for a Separate State in India, 5 February 1943,” IOR: L / PJ/12/652.

  93. Speech at Muslim University Union, Aligarh, 2 November 1941, Speeches and Statements by Jinnah 1941–1942, https://sites.google.com/site/cabinetmissionplan/speeches-and-statements-by-jinnah-1941---1942.

  94. “Pakistan: A Muslim Project for a Separate State in India, 5 February 1943,” IOR: L/ PJ/12/652.

  95. Phillips, Ventures in Diplomacy, 230.