Midnight's Descendants Read online

To share a common Governor-General with Hindustan [i.e. the new India] would have given Congress an excuse to use this joint office to make terms separately with the Muslim areas [i.e. Pakistan] in the event that the Pakistan constituent assembly fell to pieces. It was to avoid this disaster, that Jinnah had to exercise the powers of a Governor-General himself and in the process consolidate the [Muslim] League’s authority over the Muslim [majority] areas.5

  Mountbatten blamed himself for not having secured a prior understanding. As he told his daughter at the time, ‘Your poor Daddy has finally and irretrievably “boobed” … made a mess of things through overconfidence and overtiredness.’6 He ought to have foreseen Jinnah’s move and, but for the pressure of his own deadline, he thought he would have. But much later he seems to have had second thoughts not about the governor-generalship but about the deadline itself. In retrospect it was this more than anything that had ‘fucked it up’.

  Bringing forward Attlee’s cut-off date of June 1948 to his own of August 1947 has often been supposed Mountbatten’s masterstroke. Yet at the time it had appalled his staff and confounded those who had habitually complained of Britain’s procrastination. Nehru had thought the new timetable ‘too much of a rush’, the princes needed all the time – and more – that they could possibly get, and the Muslim League doubted whether such a schedule, however agreeable to the prospects of Pakistan, was actually feasible.7 Announcing his plan on 3 June 1947, Mountbatten had allowed just over ten weeks for its implementation. There was to be no time for second thoughts, and precious little for negotiation. That was the point. As he advised London, speed – one might almost say panic – was of the essence.

  For Mountbatten this urgency was tactical: it would concentrate minds, demonstrate good faith, and narrow the options. It was not a sine qua non of the terms of transfer. It was not even an immediate imperative. The threat of civil war had in fact receded. Calcutta still simmered, but since April the communal outbreaks in the Punjab had subsided and, but for the plight of the Meos in and around the princely states south of Delhi, there had been nothing on a comparable scale elsewhere. Those, therefore, who professed to hold the unity of India so dear, like Nehru, might reasonably have challenged a deadline which, while making Partition virtually inevitable, allowed almost no time to prepare for it. That they did not object was significant. Gandhi had famously declared, ‘You shall have to divide my body before you divide India.’ But Gandhi, now seventy-seven and sidelined by Congress, was devoting his remaining energies to dousing the embers of communal violence wherever they smouldered. Jinnah continued adamant for a Pakistan of some sort; and Nehru did nothing. Persuaded by the realisation that India would be stronger without Pakistan, and mindful of that viceregal promise to stampede the princely states into accession, he let it stand. Thus the responsibility for Partition may be said to have itself been partitioned – not perhaps ‘equally or in full measure but very substantially’.

  *

  Dividing the assets of an empire between two deeply suspicious heritors called for wisdom and an ongoing spirit of compromise. Neither was much in evidence. Nehru had brains and breadth of vision, Jinnah tenacity and stature, and Mountbatten bravado plus breeding. But none had the time, the inclination or the skills needed to apportion sundry budgets, deconstruct entire ministries, allocate all manner of weaponry and aircraft, number-crunch everything from pipe bands to pencil sharpeners, manage the logistics of cross-border transfer, and delineate the actual frontier. Carving up the turkey was down to the attributes of their lieutenants – the hard-nosed pragmatism of the burly Sardar Patel plus the mandarin-mind of V.P. Menon (for India), and the resourcefulness of the dependable Liaquat Ali Khan (for Pakistan).

  In this exercise India had a head start. Not least, this was because it was still ‘India’. The new Union of India, which was celebrating its independence in 1947, would become the Republic of India after the adoption of the Constituent Assembly’s new Constitution in 1950; but either way, India stayed ‘India’. The term ‘Hindustan’ (‘Hindu-land’), as hitherto applied to an India minus the Muslim-majority provinces, and as preferred by many Pakistanis to this day, was allowed to lapse. ‘It is nevertheless significant that until the bitter end the [Muslim] League continued to protest against Hindustan adopting the title “Union of India”,’ reports Ayesha Jalal.8 Jinnah objected to both the ‘Union’ and the ‘India’, and is said to have seen the rebuff of his protest as further evidence of collusion between Mountbatten and the Congress leadership.

  Etymologically, the ‘India’ word might actually have suited Pakistan better: it derives from ‘Indus’, and originally indicated just those lands beside the Indus river that today constitute Pakistan. But ‘Pakistan’ had been preferred by the Muslim League ever since the 1930s, when the term had been coined in Cambridge as an undergraduate acronym for the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west: thus ‘P’ for the Punjab, ‘A’ for Afghania (a contentious name for the North-West Frontier), ‘K’ for Kashmir, ‘S’ for Sind, and an unconvincing ‘TAN’ for Balochistan. (There was no ‘B’ for Bengal, a telling omission at the time and one fraught with the potential for further partition, notably in 1971.) By a happy coincidence, another reading of ‘Pak-istan’ had it to mean the ‘Land of the Pure’. Either reading would do. Jinnah relished it, and had no designs on the ‘India’ word himself. But he had sound reasons for objecting to New Delhi’s coopting it. On the strength of it, the new India would claim the old India’s seat at the United Nations. It also arrogated to the new India what Jinnah regarded as a spurious continuity and a provocative precedence.

  Others objected on the grounds that the ‘India’ word did not convey enough continuity and precedence – indeed, that it was tainted as being of foreign origin. Ceylon, a British colony but never a part of British India, would gain its independence in 1948 and redesignate itself as Sri Lanka in 1972, so reviving an ancient indigenous name, shedding a Graeco-Roman and colonial one, and appeasing nationalist sentiment. India nearly did the same. The term ‘Bharata-varsha’, or simply ‘Bharat’, figured in the Sanskrit epics and was strongly urged by those who thought a primordial name hallowed by Hindu tradition more appropriate. Although Nehru, the arch secularist, would have none of it, ‘Bharat’ still features in the writings of Sanskrit-minded apologists for Hindu nationalism. It appears on numerous maps, occasionally resurfaces in national debate and could yet be officially preferred.

  If antiquity was ambivalent about India’s identity, recent history offered ample compensation. New Delhi’s Congress government had the advantage of stepping into the capacious shoes of the British Raj. The ruddy imperial edifices that reared above the capital’s leafy canopy needed only to be renamed. The rotunda that had been the Legislative Assembly building became the Parliament building, and the monumental Government House (the residence of the Viceroys) became Rashtrapati Bhawan (the residence of the Presidents). Kingsway was renamed Rajpath (Government’s Way), and Queensway Janpath (People’s Way). Within the colonnades of the central government’s sandstone secretariat buildings the peons and the pigeons were joined by flocks of khadi-clad freedom fighters, now with ministerial portfolios. What with inheriting the lion’s share of the erstwhile Indian Civil Service (soon renamed the Indian Administrative Service) along with the archives, the high court, various other national institutions and surveys, and an abundance of both state offices and office stationery – including the pins used as paperclips – India’s new government took possession of a capital already equipped with all the paraphernalia of power.

  Pakistan came off less well. Entire ministries had to be improvised in tin sheds, and quite senior clerks took up residence in a railway station. Packing cases were converted into desks, meals were often served in alfresco canteens, and long thorns were gathered from the roadside shrubbery because the supply of paper pins had failed to arrive. Lahore, the Mughal city that had been the capital of the undivided Punjab province, would have been the obvious choice as the hom
e of the new government, but it was ruled out on the grounds that it was too close for strategic comfort to the new border with India. A safer haven might have been afforded by Dhaka (then spelled ‘Dacca’) in East Bengal. As the one-time capital of Bengal’s Nawabs it had some fine buildings and lay at the heart of what was now Pakistan’s most populous province. Yet such was the bias – social, linguistic, cultural, military and strategic – in favour of Pakistan’s western provinces that Dhaka’s claims were barely entertained. Instead Karachi, a foetid port-city near the mouth of the Indus that doubled as the administrative headquarters of the lately formed province of Sind, had been chosen.

  Karachi was declared merely the interim capital. Like much else in Pakistan, it was a makeshift arrangement. For while the new India inherited a functioning state, plus its majestic capital, the new Pakistan was having to improvise everything from scratch – and to do so under the direst national emergency imaginable. Already thousands, rising to millions, were on the move. Already the chain reaction of atrocities had resumed. Ahead loomed a crescendo of killing unlike anything ever witnessed elsewhere in so-called peacetime. Pakistan, which was itself in Jinnah’s words the product of an ‘unprecedented cyclonic revolution’, was about to occasion a second ‘titanic’ convulsion ‘with no parallel in the history of the world’.

  *

  War, even civil war, might have been more manageable than the internecine strife that engulfed large parts of both India and Pakistan in the latter half of 1947. It had begun in early August in the Amritsar district of east Punjab, when gangs of armed Sikhs started exacting revenge for the atrocities of the previous March in west Punjab. Muslims were massacred and their villages set on fire. The pogrom then spread to Lahore, as Muslims retaliated against both Hindus and Sikhs. Gurdwaras (Sikh temples) were trashed, Hindu temples desecrated, infidels butchered. And the mayhem continued, fiercer than ever, even as, far away in Delhi and Karachi, the high-flown rhetoric poured forth and the two nations deliriously hailed their independence. ‘Rejoicings; Happy Augury for the Future’ read a headline in the Times of India on 18 August. ‘The Jeremiahs who foresaw trouble’ had been utterly confounded, it reported. In doing so, the newspaper not only belied the idea that ‘trouble’ of some sort was wholly unexpected, but lulled its readership into a dangerously blinkered complacency about the conflagration in the neighbouring Punjab.

  There, dawn on 15 August – Independence Day in Delhi, but the day after in Pakistan – found a memorably named British official, one Penderel Moon, being driven into Lahore from his post as Minister and adviser to the Nawab of Bahawalpur. A Muslim princely state contiguous to Muslim west Punjab, Bahawalpur was about to join Pakistan. Confident that the transition would be peaceful, the Nawab was sojourning comfortably in Surrey, and Moon was heading for the hills and a fortnight’s holiday. Bahawalpur itself was quiet. The Punjab, give or take a few roadblocks, seemed much as usual. Not until Moon reached Lahore itself did he notice anything untoward.

  As we approached the built-up area, we overtook a military lorry in the back of which there was a soldier with a rifle and two or three bloodstained corpses bouncing about on the floor. A little farther on five or six men were lined up along the side of the road with their hands up and a soldier covering them with his rifle. Two hundred yards beyond there was a corpse lying on a charpoy … and to the left, from the city proper, numerous dense columns of smoke were rising into the air.9

  Lahore, in short, was not celebrating. It was burning. Over lunch at Faletti’s Hotel, Moon learned that the city’s largely Muslim police, in a pattern that would be emulated by both sides, were siding with the killers and even affording them covering fire. Under the circumstances he was strongly discouraged from proceeding to Simla by car. Instead he sallied forth for the railway station and a non-existent train.

  At exactly the same time, Nehru and the Mountbattens were forcing their way through the flag-waving crowds along Delhi’s Rajpath. They had just attended the Independence Day ceremonies at India Gate. King George VI had assured India that freedom-loving people everywhere would want to share in their celebrations, but such was the press of freedom-savouring Indians that the formalities had had to be curtailed. Mountbatten could barely salute the Indian tricolour from the safety of his carriage. His daughter had managed to reach the podium only after removing her high heels and clambering over the densely packed masses, helped by, among others, Nehru. ‘An enormous picnic of almost a million people, all of them having more fun than they’d ever had in their lives’ was how Mountbatten described the gathering.10 It was fun all round. The bandsmen couldn’t reach their bandstand, and the gun salutes were drowned out by the cheering. Nehru found himself thrust into the viceregal carriage by well-wishers, there to be joined by some sari-ed matrons scooped up by Lady Edwina Mountbatten lest they be trampled underfoot. ‘The rest of the day was taken up with parties, speeches and almost impossible progressions through the undiminishing throngs in the streets.’11

  Lahore, on the other hand, was silent. Even the railway station, reportedly ‘a veritable death trap’ at the time, indeed ‘a scene of wholesale carnage … under a continuous rain of bullets’, was in fact almost deserted.12 Penderel Moon found only twenty Sikh policemen, all cowering behind a barbed-wire barricade for their own protection, plus a displaced and distraught stationmaster. The stationmaster had just arrived, having escaped from his charge at the nearby Mughalpura depot by requisitioning a locomotive. Two days previously forty-three non-Muslims, many of them Sikhs, had been massacred there; now their brethren were retaliating. ‘We were attacked by 8,000 Sikhs,’ he reported. ‘They have killed several hundred. I have been telephoning for help for thirteen hours.’13

  Moon, a goggle-eyed administrator with progressive views, supposed this estimate of the carnage an exaggeration, but he admitted that cross-border trains were already being targeted. A week earlier one carrying Muslim clerks to staff the new Pakistan government in Karachi had been scheduled to pass through Bahawalpur en route from Delhi. It never arrived; a bomb had derailed it near Ferozepur, leaving three dead and numerous wounded. ‘This was one of the first train outrages and the first incident to make any noticeable impression on the Muslims of Bahawalpur.’ In the same week several hundred terrified refugees had detrained in the state unannounced. They claimed to have been driven out of their homes in the Indian princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur (near Delhi). Lucky to be escaping imminent genocide, they were in fact the first of a mass migration of Meos. But as refugees they were no more welcome in Bahawalpur than in Bharatpur. The authorities ‘told them that if they were seeking the promised land of Pakistan they had come to the wrong place and better go on to Punjab or Sind. Gradually they drifted away.’14 Educated Muslims were badly needed in Pakistan; threadbare peasants with lax ideas about Islam it could do without.

  Giving up on the trains, Moon travelled on to Simla in a military convoy that was escorting members of the British administration in the Punjab on the first leg of their long journey home. They were leaving the province, he noted, in much the same state as they had found it a hundred years earlier, blood-soaked and in chaos. Yet this was only the beginning. Within hours the situation would dramatically worsen. Partition, in principle so reasonable, was in practice anything but.

  At the time, much of the precise border between the two new nations was still uncertain. While the flags of the successor states were being saluted all over the subcontinent, in the vicinity of the expected border it was unclear which flag should be flying. The broad terms of one partition, that of India and Pakistan, had been agreed, but the precise alignment of the subsidiary partitions in Bengal and the Punjab had been entrusted to a third party and then kept under wraps. Several millions thus greeted Independence, if they greeted it at all, not knowing for sure to which country they belonged. Only when the boundary award was announced and published would they discover their fate, make plans accordingly, and so open the floodgates to the twentieth century’
s greatest transfer of population.

  In the hectic last days of British rule, boundary commissions for both Bengal and the Punjab had been set up. Maps had been hastily consulted, opinions sought and red lines drawn. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British judge who had never before visited the subcontinent, had been entrusted with this heavy responsibility and assured of complete independence. He had also been told to finish his work ahead of the transfer of power. This he did, but without the luxury of being able to inspect the actual terrain, acquaint himself with its peculiarities (like those errant rivers in Bengal) or derive much support from his commissioners: two Muslim League and two Congress nominees, these commissioners invariably upheld the interests of their political patrons and divided accordingly. It was Radcliffe’s casting vote that was decisive.

  ‘Nobody in India will love me for my award,’ he wrote. They would not. The sealed documents were delivered to Mountbatten two days before Independence, but were only made public two days after. By then Radcliffe had emplaned for London, never to set foot in South Asia again. All parties had agreed to respect his findings, and it was accepted that implementation would be the responsibility of the successor governments. Mountbatten, heading for the hills like Moon, considered his work done. British hands, already washed and ready for congratulatory shaking, were not to be soiled by any last-minute bloodletting.

  The only exception was a British-commanded Boundary Force, supposedly 50,000 strong, that was to keep the peace in the Punjab and oversee its partition. Though active enough, it failed to do either. No more than about 25,000 troops materialised; ‘this meant there were fewer than two men to a square mile’.15 And instead of operating under a unified command, the Force was itself quickly partitioned. Suspicious of its impartiality, on 29 August, at the height of the massacres, the successor governments opted to exercise distinct commands, disband the Force and deploy the troops intended for peacekeeping to protect and succour their co-religionists.