Freedom at Midnight (20 page)

The Punjab was a Hend as subtle and complex as the mosaics decorating the monuments of its glorious Mogul past. To divide it was unthinkable. Fifteen million Hindus, sixteen million Moslems and five million Sikhs shared the neighborhoods and alleyways of its 17,932 towns and villages. Although divided by religion, they shared a common language, joint traditions, and an equal pride in their distinctive Punjabi personality. Their economic coexistence was fashioned in an even more intricate manner. The area's prosperity rested upon a man-made miracle that by its very nature could not be divided, the immense network of irrigation canals which had been built by the British and had made the Punjab the granary of India. Running from east to west across the entire province, they had brought vast stretches of arid desert under cultivation and enriched the existence of millions of Punjabis. The province's net of railroads and highways, designed to deliver the Punjab's products to the rest of India, followed the same pattern. Wherever it went, the frontier of a partitioned Punjab would have to run from north to south, severing the province's irrigation and transport systems. Any frontier would also cut the proud and bellicose Sikh community in half, leaving at least two million Sikhs, with

the rich lands that they had reclaimed from the desert and some of their most sacred places, inside a Moslem state.

Wherever the boundary line went, the result was certain to be a nightmare for millions of human beings. Only an interchange of populations on a scale never affected before in history could sort out the havoc that it would create. From the Indus to the bridges of Delhi, for over 500 miles, there was not a single town, not a single village, cotton grove or wheat field that would not somehow be threatened if the partition plan that Lord Ismay had been ordered to prepare were to be carried out.

The division of Bengal at the other end of the subcontinent held out the possibilities of another tragedy. Harboring more people than Great Britain and Ireland combined, Bengal contained thirty-five million Moslems and thirty million Hindus spread over an expanse of land running from the jungles at the foot of the Himalayas to the steaming marshes through which the thousand tributaries of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers drained into the Bay of Bengal. Despite its division into two religious communities, Bengal, even more than the Punjab, was a distinct entity of its own. Whether Hindu or Moslem, Bengalis sprang from the same racial stock, spoke the same language, shared the same culture. They sat on the floor in a certain Bengali manner, ordered the sentences they spoke in a peculiar Bengali cadence, each rising to a find crescendo, celebrated their own Bengali New Year on April 15. Their poets like Tagore were regarded with pride by all Bengalis.

They were the descendants of a culture whose roots went back in time to the pre-Christian era, when a Buddhist civilization flourished in Bengal. Obliged to renounce their Buddhist faith by a Hindu dynasty in the first centuries after Christ, the Bengalis of the east greeted the arrival of Mohammed's warriors along their frontier as a release from Hindu oppression and eagerly embraced Islam. Since then, Bengal had been divided into religious halves, Moslems to the east, Hindus to the west.

If the Punjab seemed singled out for the blessings of the Divinity, Bengal appeared the object of its malediction. A land seared by droughts that alternated with frightening typhoon-whipped floods, Bengal was an immense, steaming swamp, in whose humid atmosphere flourished the two crops to which it owed a precarious prosperity, rice and

jute. The cultivation of those two crops followed the province's religious frontiers, rice to the Hindu west, jute to the Moslem east.

But the key to Bengal's existence did not lie in its crops. It was a city, the city that had been the springboard for Britain's conquest of India, the second city, after London, of the Empire, and first port of Asia—Calcutta, site of the terrible killings of August 1946.

Everything in Bengal—roads, railroads, communications, industry—funneled into Calcutta. If Bengal was split into its eastern and western halves, Calcutta, because of its physical location, seemed certain to be in the Hindu west, thus condemning the Moslem east to a slow but inexorable asphyxiation. If almost all of the world's jute grew in eastern Bengal, all the factories that transformed it into rope, sacks and cloth were clustered around Calcutta, in western Bengal. The Moslem east, which produced the jute, grew almost no food at all, and its millions survived on the rice grown in the Hindu west.

In April 1947, Bengal's last British governor, Sir Frederick Burrows, an ex-sergeant in the Grenadier Guards and railways trade-union leader, predicted that eastern Bengal, destined to become one day Bangladesh, was condemned, in the event of India's partition, to turn into "the greatest rural slum in history."

Yet, no aspect of partition was more illogical than the fact that Jinnah's Pakistan would deliver barely half of India's Moslems from the alleged inequities of Hindu majority rule which had justified the state in the first place. The remaining Moslems were scattered throughout the rest of India so widely that it was impossible to separate them. Islands in a Hindu sea, they would be the first victims of a conflict between the countries, India's Moslem hostages to Pakistan's good behavior. Indeed, even after the amputation, India would still harbor almost fifty million Moslems, a figure that would make her the third-largest Moslem nation in the world, after Indonesia and the new state drawn from her own womb.

If Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi had been aware in April 1947 of one extraordi-

nary secret, the division threatening India might have been avoided. That secret was sealed onto the gray surface of a piece of film, a film that could have upset the Indian political equation and would almost certainly have changed the course of Asian history. Yet so precious was the secret that that film harbored that even the British C.I.D., one of the most effective investigative agencies in the world, was ignorant of its existence.

The heart of the film was two dark circles no bigger than a pair of Ping-Pong balls. Each was surrounded by an irregular white border like the corona of the sun eclipsed by the moon. Above them, a galaxy of little white spots stretched up the film's gray surface toward the top of the thoracic cage. That film was an X ray, the X ray of a pair of human lungs. The black circles were pulmonary cavities, gaping holes in which the lungs' vital tissues no longer existed. The little chain of white dots indicated areas where more pulmonary or pleural tissue was already hardening and confirmed the diagnosis: tuberculosis was devouring the lungs pictured in the X ray. The damage was so extensive that the man whose lungs were on that film had barely two or three years to live. Sealed in an unmarked envelope, those X rays were locked in the office safe of Dr. J. A. L. Patel, a Bombay physician.

The lungs depicted on them belonged to the rigid and inflexible man who had frustrated Louis Mountbatten's efforts to preserve India's unity. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the one immovable obstacle between the Viceroy and Indian unity, was living under a sentence of death.

In June 1946, nine months before Mountbatten's arrival, Dr. Patel had lifted those X rays from their developing bath and discovered the terrible disease that threatened to put a rapid end to Jinnah's life. Tuberculosis, the cruel scourge that annually took the lives of millions of undernourished Indians, had invaded the lungs of the prophet of Pakistan at the age of seventy.

All his life, Jinnah had suffered from delicate health due to his weak pulmonary system. Long before the war, he had been treated in Berlin for complications arising out of an attack of pleurisy. Frequent bronchitis since then had diminished his strength and weakened his respiratory system to the point at which the effort demanded by a major speech would leave him panting for hours.

In Simla in late May 1946, bronchitis had struck the

Moslem League leader again. Jinnah's devoted sister Fa-tima got him on a train to Bombay, but his condition worsened en route. So alarming did his state become that she sent an urgent call to Dr. Patel. Patel boarded the train outside Bombay. His distinguished patient's condition, he quickly discovered, was "desperately bad." Warning Jinnah that he would collapse if he tried to get through the reception waiting for him at Bombay's Grand Railroad Station, Patel bundled him off the train at a suburban station and into a hospital. It was while he was there, slowly regaining his strength, that Patel discovered what would become the most closely guarded secret in India.

If Jinnah had been any other victim of tuberculosis, he would have been confined in a sanatorium for the rest of his life. But Jinnah was not a normal patient. When he was discharged from the hospital, Patel brought him to his office. Jinnah, he knew, was a man who lived on the intense consumption of his energy. For the past decade, he had been living, in Patel's opinion, on "will power, whiskey and cigarettes."

Sadly, Patel revealed to his friend and patient the fatal illness. He was, he told Jinnah, reaching the end of his physical resources. Unless he severely reduced his work load, rested much more frequently, gave up cigarettes and alcohol, and eased the pressures on his system, he did not have more than one or two years to live.

Jinnah received that harsh news impassively. Not the slightest expression crossed his pale face. There was no question, he told Dr. Patel, of abandoning his life's crusade for a sanatorium bed. Nothing except the grave was going to turn him from the task he had given himself, that of leading India's Moslems at this critical juncture in their history. He would follow the doctor's advice and reduce his work load only insofar as it was compatible with that great duty. Jinnah knew that if his Hindu enemies learned that he was dying, their whole political outlook could change. They might try to wait him into his grave, to unravel his dream with the more malleable men underneath him in the hierarchy of the Moslem League.*

* Mountbatten's predecessor, Lord Wavell, noted in his diary on January 10 and February 28, 1947, reports that Jinnah was "a sick man." The diary did not, however, indicate whether the Viceroy was aware of how grave the Moslem leader's illness really was. In any

Fortified every two weeks by injections given him in secret by Dr. Patel, Jinnah returned to work. He made no effort whatsoever to follow his doctor's advice. He was not going to let his rendezvous with death cheat him out of his other rendezvous with history. With extraordinary courage, with an intensity and a consuming zeal that sent his life's candle guttering out in a last harsh burst of flame, Jinnah lunged for his lifetime's goal. "Speed," Jinnah had told Mountbatten in their first discussions of India's future, was "the essence of the contract." And so, too, had it become the essence of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's own contract with destiny.

• • •

The eleven men seated around the oval table in the conference chamber solemnly waited for Lord Mountbatten to begin the proceedings. They were, in a sense, the descendants of the twenty-four founding fathers of the East India Company, the men whose mercantile appetites had sent Britain along the sea lanes to India three and a half centuries earlier. They were the pillars of the empire born of avarice, the governors of the eleven provinces of British India, men who stood at the very pinnacle of careers of service to the Indian Empire. Only two of them were Indians.

Capable and dedicated men, they offered India the responsible exercise of authority acquired by a life of work and service. India, in its turn, offered them an opportunity to live in a splendor almost regal in its dimension. The official residences in which they dwelled were palaces staffed by scores of retainers. Their writ ran over territories as vast and as populous as the largest nations of Europe. They crossed their territories in the comfort of their private railway cars, their cities in Rolls-Royces with tur-

event, Mountbatten himself was never given in any of his briefings any hint that Jinnah was a dying man, information which, if available, he noted a quarter of a century after Jinnah's death, would have had a vital bearing on his actions in India. There are indications that Jinnah's second in command, Liaquat Ali Khan, was aware of his illness in the last six months of his life. His daughter Wadia told the authors of this book in an interview in Bombay in December 1973 that she became aware her father had tuberculosis only after his death. She is personally persuaded that Jinnah confided his secret to his sister Fatima long before he died, but probably would not let her tell anyone else or seek help for him.

baned escorts, their jungles on elephant back. Their meeting was an awkward confrontation for Mountbatten. At forty-six, he was the youngest man at the table. He had brought to Delhi none of the usual qualifications for his office, a brilliant parliamentary career or a background of administrative achievement. He was a comparative stranger in the India to which most of the eleven governors had devoted an entire career, mastering its complex history, learning its dialects, becoming, as some of them had, world-renowned experts on phases of its existence. They were proud men, certain to be skeptical of any plan put before them by the neophyte in their midst.

Yet Mountbatten was personally convinced that his lack of expertise was not the disadvantage it seemed. They, the experts, had not found a solution because, he suspected, "they were too steeped in the old British-raj school and were always trying to find a solution which would do the least possible violence to the system as it existed." Mountbatten began by asking each governor to describe the situation in his province. Eight of them painted a picture of dangerous, troubled areas, but provinces in which the situation still remained under control. It was the portrait offered by the governors of the three critical provinces, the Punjab, Bengal, and the Northwest Frontier Province, that sobered the gathering.

His features drawn, his eyes heavy with fatigue, Sir Olaf Caroe spoke first. He had been kept awake all night by a stream of cables detailing fresh outbursts of trouble in his Northwest Frontier Province. Almost all Caroe's career had been spent on that edge of the Empire. No westerner alive could rival his knowledge of its unruly Pathan tribesmen, their culture and language. His capital of Peshawar still harbored one of the world's most picturesque bazaars, and once a week a camel caravan from Kabul came down the Khyber Pass to nourish it with skins, fruit, wool, crockery, watches, sugar, some of those goods smuggled out of the U.S.S.R. The labyrinth grottoes of his mountainous province sheltered scores of secret arms factories, from which flowed a profusion of ornate and deadly weapons to arm Mahsuds, Afridis, Wazirs, the legendary warrior tribes of the Pathans.