As if such ordeals were not horrific enough, the media and public officials publicly glorified a distinctly feminine martyrdom. It was constantly suggested that the high point of female heroism was to commit suicide rather than face the ‘dishonour’ of rape, as if the shame and guilt for the crime would fall on the victim rather than on the perpetrator. The desperate actions of such women were admired as an example of feminine virtue rather than deplored as an example of female subjection. India might have had the most visible female politicians of any nation, but the notion that a woman’s chastity was worth more than her life abounded, even among the political class. Jawahar’s cousin, Rameshwari Nehru, visited Thoa Khalsa, where ninety Sikh women had committed collective suicide by jumping into a well rather than face a Muslim attack. ‘It was eighteen days after the incident that we arrived at this sacred spot’, she wrote. ‘The bodies of those beautiful women had become swollen and floated up to the surface of the water. Their colourful clothes and long, black hair could be seen clearly. Two or three women still had [the bodies of] infants clinging to their breasts.’ She was with a large group of observers come to gawp at this gruesome spectacle. ‘We thought of it as our great good fortune that we had been able to visit this site and worship these satis’.56
The violence in the Punjab was getting worse, rather than better. On the night of 25 August, the small town of Sheikhupura, near Lahore – with a population of 10,000 Muslims, and 10,000 Hindus and Sikhs – exploded into a massive pitched battle, for no reason anyone could ascertain. It had previously been known as one of the quietest spots in the West Punjab. Twenty-four hours later, several thousand people, mostly Sikh and Hindu, had been murdered in a frenzy of stabbing, shooting, beating and burning, and parts of the town were ablaze. No effort had been made to quell the violence. The Muslim police actually aided it. A journalist who visited Sheikhupura the next day found a civil hospital in a disgusting state, with flies teeming thickly over the blood-soaked rags that substituted for bandages, and the stench of death in the muggy monsoon air. Most Sikhs were too scared to go to hospital, and were sheltering in their gurdwara without even basic facilities. ‘Here there were more appalling sights’, he wrote; ‘men and women whose hands had been cut off and whose forearms were black putrescent fly-covered stumps, and children, even babies, who had been cut and slashed. Perhaps the most heart-rending spectacle of all was the young mothers who had lost their children.’57 Visiting days later, Nehru described himself as ‘sick with horror’; still the stink of blood and burnt human flesh was inescapable.58 His car was stopped by Muslims, shouting at him to stop the war. ‘Are you not ashamed of yourselves?’ Nehru shouted back. ‘Have you no conscience left? What do these houses and these dead bodies show? Who is conducting this war?’59
Nehru wrote to Mountbatten in deep depression. ‘I suppose I am not directly responsible for what is taking place in the Punjab’, he wrote. ‘I do not quite know who is responsible. But in any event I cannot and do not wish to shed my responsibility for my people. If I cannot discharge the responsibility effectively, then I begin to doubt whether I have any business to be where I am.’60 Only the courageous spirit of Edwina Mountbatten could lift him from this gloom. Indira Gandhi remembered one evening in her father’s house when a telephone call came through from Patel. A train had just arrived in Delhi from the Punjab, filled with dead bodies. Edwina turned up at Jawahar’s door, and changed her high heels for sensible shoes. ‘I am just going to the station,’ she announced. ‘And of course there was no security, no arrangements,’ said Indira. ‘She just went.’61
The violence kept spreading. By 26 August, the great industrial city of Ludhiana was aflame. At the end of August, Lahore was described as a ‘city of the dead’ by the Times of India. Its mall was deserted, its shops shuttered, its roads empty except for military vehicles. No Hindus or Sikhs were visible outside the refugee camps. Those refugees brought stories of thousands shot by police and the army in the nearby towns; 16,000 languished in the camps, with hardly any food; 8,000 or 9,000 were supposed to be in one camp at Jullundur, and most of them had had just one meal in the five days up to 24 August.62 At some of the camps, food was not free; unsurprisingly, few among the refugees had brought supplies of cash. Local banks closed down under threat of looting, and it was not long before even the wealthy went hungry. Driving to the town of Hasilpur, Penderel Moon noticed great heaps of what he thought was manure piled up along the roadside. When he got closer, the horrible truth became clear, and he exclaimed, ‘They’re corpses!’ Three hundred and fifty Hindu and Sikh men, women and children were piled up in heaps, arms and legs sticking out at odd angles, bodies hideously contorted. They were the victims of a Pathan mob that had passed through that morning. In the town he found a weeping group of women and children desperately fanning the flies away from two or three blood-drenched survivors. ‘It was hard to endure,’ Moon remembered. ‘We could do nothing to help.’63 It was announced that every available plane of the British long-haul carrier BOAC would be sent to India and Pakistan to evacuate Europeans. Paradoxically, the Europeans were those in the least danger.64
On 29 August, in the middle of the Punjabi holocaust, the Punjab Boundary Force was actually disbanded at the order of a Joint Defence Council meeting in Lahore. Mountbatten, Auchinleck and General Rees were profoundly opposed to this action, but their hands were forced by the other members, including Nehru, Baldev, Liaquat and Jinnah, and by public opinion. Indian and Pakistani representatives alike argued that the force needed to be reformed under the command of each national government. Each government wanted direct military control over its new borders; rumours circulated in the press that the force was hoarding the best officers. On the ground, the force was accused of having communal sympathies. Rees admitted that the internal atmosphere of the force had become impossible to maintain by the end of August, though he noted that there were many examples of courage and lack of prejudice among the troops. One Sikh major, guarding a train full of Muslim refugees, took three bullets and six spear wounds while fearlessly fighting off a mob of his co-religionists.65 There were much more credible allegations of partiality against the police, but the visibility of the force made it a focus for resentment. Edwina had returned from the Punjab the day before, and repeated to Dickie that such allegations were now widespread. Reluctantly, he gave in. The one effort he had been able to make towards protecting the Punjabis had fallen flat.66
On the last day of August, Calcutta, too, finally succumbed to the communal fury, and there was a furious demonstration against Gandhi’s mission. A mob broke into the Belliaghatta mansion in which he was staying, bearing a wounded Hindu who they alleged had been stabbed by a Muslim, and demanded he call for revenge. He refused to do any such thing: without a tremor he stood to face them, quietly, with arms folded. Someone threw a brick. Another hit at him with a lathi, and narrowly missed him. The eighteen days of peace in Calcutta between the Mahatma’s arrival and the end of August had been the longest and most notable interlude of calm in that city for a year, and were a direct result of Gandhi’s awe-inspiring presence in the popular imagination. But the peace could not hold, and the dozens rioting that night had to be dispersed by police armed with tear gas.67
That same evening, the film at Government House in Delhi was Men of Two Worlds, a thoughtful drama about colonialism in Africa. A young musician from Tanganyika is sent to London, and returns fifteen years later as a health worker. He finds himself caught in a bitter conflict with his village’s witch doctor. His Western sophistications offend his tribe’s traditions – and the British workers in the village cannot agree about whether or not their civilization is worth emulating, either. It is not known who was choosing the films at Government House, but he or she must have been a perceptive critic. One of the biggest questions facing the war-ravaged subcontinent was whether Nehru’s Western ideals, or Gandhi’s traditional medicine, would heal India. As it turned out, neither would work fast enough. Within a week of the film
’s screening, the situation right in the heart of India’s capital was to get much, much worse.
CHAPTER 16
THE BATTLE FOR DELHI
‘ONE MILLION DEAD’: THIS IS THE MOST CONVENIENT NUMBER to have come out of the wildly varying estimates of how many people may have been killed following partition. Mountbatten preferred the lowest available estimate, which was 200,000, and has been widely condemned for it: the denial of holocausts is always a sticky business, and yet more so when one may be implicated personally.1 Indian estimates have ranged as high as 2 million. Many historians have settled for a figure of somewhere between half a million and 1 million. The figure of 1 million dead has now been repeated so often that it is accepted as historical fact. ‘What is the basis for this acceptance?’ asked the historian Gyanendra Pandey. ‘That it appears like something of a median?’2 Unfortunately so, for the truth is that no one knows how many people were killed, nor how many were raped, mutilated or traumatized. The numbers anyone chooses say more about their political inclination than about the facts. Fewer than 400,000 suggests an apologia for British rule; 400,000 to 1 million moderation; 1 million or more usually indicates that the person intends to blame the deaths on a specific party, the most usual culprits being one or more of Mountbatten, Patel, Jinnah or the Sikhs.
Beyond the dead, there were more numbers, too, plucked from the extrapolations and imaginations of regional officials, army, police and historians. Refugees on the move by the beginning of September: 500,000, or perhaps 1 million. Women abducted and raped: 75,000, or perhaps 125,000. Total who would migrate from one dominion to the other between 1947 and 1948: 10 million, or perhaps 12 million, or perhaps 15 million. The Indian National Archives contain sheaves of charts scribbled by British and Indian officials, recording 87 killed in Bengal here, 43 injured in Madras there. ‘The figures make no pretence to accuracy,’ admitted the Home Department. The Punjab government reported that its casualty estimates were ‘increasing daily as investigation uncovers further tragedies’; the North-West Frontier Province government referred to ‘stray murders’, which were not counted.3 Usually it was impossible to count the number of victims amid the ‘confused heap of rubble & corpses’ that was left behind after riots.4 Sir Francis Mudie, Governor of the West Punjab, remembered that he had to ‘ignore any report of a riot unless it alleged that there were at least a thousand dead. If there were, I asked for a further report, but I cannot remember any case in which I was able to do anything.’5
In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.
Amid these dark tales came one remarkable sign of hope. In Bengal, Gandhi had been faced with the collapse of his hard-won peace. Once again, packs of armed goondas (gangsters) ruled the streets of Calcutta. The years had not been kind to Gandhi. The Salt March had been the apogee of his power and influence; the 1930s a struggle, bitter and increasingly opposed, culminating in a private breakdown; the early 1940s a calamity, with the ill-judged Quit India campaign and mass departure of Muslims from Congress; the later 1940s a wilderness, with his presence treated as an irritation. And yet, despite intense personal disaffection and marginalization by his colleagues, the Mahatma would rally for a final, spectacular swansong. With Calcutta detonating around him, he decided to fast.
Used against the British raj during the war, Gandhi’s fasts had become useless as a political weapon. The British government had decided to let Gandhi die, concluding that the short-term consequences of Gandhi’s death might be easier to manage than the long-term consequences of Gandhi’s life. But as a moral weapon the fasts had power, and now a moral weapon was required. Against the goondas of Calcutta, Gandhi’s fast would prove astonishingly successful.
On 2 September, the Mahatma renounced all food and sustenance except sips of water, and reclined on a cot in a public room at the house in Belliaghatta. The effect was unprecedented. Over the course of little more than a day, the city calmed, and the processions to his house changed their temper from angry mob to penitent pilgrimage. From all parties and all faiths, leaders came to beg with him to give up his fast and save his life. He replied that it was not a question of saving his life. The fast was ‘intended to stir the conscience and remove mental sluggishness’; if the people’s consciences were stirred, there might be the side-effect that he would live. The hours passed, with burly goondas turning up to weep contritely by the Mahatma’s bedside. Finally, on the evening of 4 September, when all the city leaders had signed a pledge that there would be no further trouble in Calcutta, Gandhi broke his fast with a drink of fruit juice.6 ‘In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands’, an awestruck Mountbatten wrote to him. ‘In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.’7 To the wonder of all observers, Gandhi’s achievement would endure beyond his presence in the city. Aside from a few isolated incidents – no more than in normal times of peace – Calcutta remained orderly for months.
Recovering quickly, the seventy-seven-year-old Mahatma left Calcutta and headed for the place where the need for his moral power was greatest: the Punjab. On the way, he planned to break his journey briefly at Delhi. But, by the time he got there, the capital itself would become the new focus of communal fury.
At the end of August the Mountbattens had gone back up to Simla. The day after they arrived, they had held a farewell party for an aide-de-camp who was returning to England. His train was hijacked, and all 100 Muslims on board murdered – except his own bearer, who hid under a seat. The day after that, the Mountbattens heard that their treasurer and his wife had been killed in another train massacre.8 In Delhi, panic began. From the city centre, smoke could be seen unfurling from nearby villages and the town of Gurgaon. Three hundred Muslims fled to Palam airfield, where they had to be protected by Indian Army troops.9
Appalled, Edwina told Dickie she was going back to the capital.10 On 4 September, he was summoned back, too. The Mountbattens arrived the following day, along with Lord Ismay, recalled from his holiday in Kashmir.11 By that time, Delhi was in turmoil. Blood-chilling reports landed hourly on the desks of government officials. A bomb exploded in the Fatehpuri Masjid, a seventeenth-century mosque at the western end of Chandni Chowk. The police arrived to find a mob throwing bricks at it while troops fired on them. Two Hindus were shot dead.12 In Karol Bagh, between New and Old Delhi, children of all faiths were sitting their matriculation examinations in a local high school, when goondas stormed in and demanded that the Muslim boys be separated from the rest. The boys were taken into another room and slaughtered like animals.13
Mountbatten set up an emergency committee, which met for the first time that afternoon. Patel was full of rage, while Nehru sat at the table with an expression of all-co
nsuming sorrow on his face.14 ‘If we go down in Delhi,’ Mountbatten told them firmly, ‘we are finished.’15 He immediately set up a large and splendid map room in Government House, fitted out with lots of charts, graphs and telephones. His staff stayed up for two nights getting all the little flags into the correct places to represent the Punjab boundary. So exhausted was the lieutenant colonel in charge of this effort that he fainted while showing the committee around the room on 8 September.16 Mountbatten devoted much of his own time to concerns such as whether visitors ought to come through a special entrance and be given a special pass.17
At the suggestion of Nehru, Edwina Mountbatten was put in charge of the emergency committee’s refugee group. While Dickie was still fiddling with his map room, Edwina established and chaired the United Council for Relief and Welfare. It was a swift, effective and hands-on attempt to deal with the reality of the situation. Edwina coordinated fifteen separate relief organizations, two government ministries and one Mahatma into a single targeted team with clear instructions and purpose.18 She began touring the worst areas of trouble, mobilizing volunteers and personally directing the Red Cross effort to improve water, sanitation and medical supplies. Through the United Council, she suggested initiatives ranging from the establishment of a sister organization in Pakistan, all the way down to the setting up of Girl Guide knitting circles to provide pullovers for refugees.19 A sure sign of her effectiveness was that the Governor General’s aides-de-camp began to try to avoid being on her staff. Anyone required to serve with Edwina would have to help with a variety of gruesome tasks in unpleasant locations. She stopped her car when she saw injured or dead people, got out, dodged bullets, and retrieved their bodies to take them to hospitals or morgues. She also ordered her husband’s personal bodyguards to forget about him and patrol the hospitals, following a number of unspeakable attacks on helpless patients as they lay in the wards.20 In Edwina’s wake, the main Emergency Committee also got into its swing, cancelling all holidays – including Sundays – to keep the economy going, punishing errant officials, and arranging a volunteer police force.
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