Freedom at Midnight (65 page)

Abdurahaman Ali, a Moslem sharecropper, had stopped for the night with hundreds of fellow villagers by the banks of the dried-out river bed of the Beas. A special air of joy and relief had animated their camp site; Pakistan and the safety of its frontiers was only fifty miles away. For most, those frontiers would remain a dream. Barely a score among them survived the frenzied rush of the Beas that night.

Ali, his bullock cart planted on a lip of high ground at the outer ridge of the camp, was awakened by screams and the thunder of the onrushing water. He scrambled onto his cart with his family. The water leaped up to the hubs of its wheels, to its platforms, to their knees, finally to their chests before its rush abated. For two days Ali's family clung to their cart, without nourishment, trembling with cold, watching the waters carry past them in an indiscriminate tide the splintered bullock carts, bloated animals and the corpses of their friends and neighbors.

Bridges that had held fast for decades were submerged or ripped from their pilings by the water's terrifying force. Colonel Ashwini Dubey, of the Indian Army, saw the waters of the Beas inundate the railroad bridge over the river outside Amritsar. Bullock carts, their bullocks, their owners were being swept along by the river, then smashed

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on to the girders with a force that "snapped the carts like match boxes and killed the humans and animals."

Life magazine's Margaret Bourke-White had to flee the banks of the Ravi in water up to her waist, her life saved by the frantic warning of an Indian officer. When the waters finally receded, she went back to the site, a meadow between a railroad ramp and the river, where four thousand Moslems had halted for the night Fewer than a thousand had survived. The meadow "was like a battlefield: carts overturned, household goods and farm tools pressed into a mash of mud and wreckage."

For Gurucharan Singh, a Sikh police officer from Jul-lundur, one nauseous image would always remain as a symbol of that final agony visited on his province in the fall of 1947. He saw it in the sublime sunlight of early morning the day the waters began to go down. Festooned to the branches of a pipal tree, above the remains of the refugees whom he had been assigned to protect, was the cadaver of a Gurkha soldier, his remains being methodically devoured by vultures.

No one would ever know how many people lost their lives during those terrible weeks in the Punjab in the autumn of 1947. So chaotic were the circumstances surrounding them, so complete was the province's brief administrative collapse, that it was impossible to make any accurate canvass of deaths. The number of those left to die by the roadside, thrown into wells, cremated in the flames of their homes or villages, was simply beyond reckoning. The most extravagant estimates would talk of one or two million deaths. The foremost Indian student of the massacres, Judge G. D. Khosla,* set the figure at 500,000. Britain's two leading historians of the period—Penderel Moon,t who was serving in Pakistan at the time, and H. V. Hodson,t would place the deaths at between 200,000 and 250,000. Sir Chandulal Trivedi, India's first governor of the Punjab and the official most connected with events in the province, estimated the toll at 225,000.

The number of refugees, at least, would be known. All fall and well into the winter they would continue to flow

*Stern Reckoning. Gopal Das Khosla. t Divide and Quit. Penderel Moon. t The Great Divide. H. V. Hodson.

through Waga, across Suleimanki and Balloki Heads, 500,-000 this week, 750,000 the next, until the full complement of ten and a half million had been reached. Still another million would be exchanged in more peaceful circumstances in Bengal. Inevitably, the horrors of the Punjab cast a wave of criticism on the last viceroy and India's political leaders. From London, Winston Churchill, so long a foe of Indian freedom, commented with ill-concealed satisfaction on the spectacle of people who had dwelt in peace for generations under the "broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown," throwing themselves on each other "with the ferocity of cannibals."

Prime Minister Clement Attlee asked Lord Ismay in early October if Britain "had not taken the wrong course and rushed things too much." His was, of course, an impossible query to answer. What had happened, had happened. What might have happened had not the conviction that speed was essential governed the last viceroy's actions had not. One thing was certain: India's leaders not only had endorsed Mountbatten's policy to move as quickly as possible, but they had, without exception, urged that course upon him. Speed, Jinnah never ceased repeating, was the essence of the contract. Speed was the element Vallabhbhai Patel had bargained for by making it clear that Congress would accept membership in the Commonwealth only if power was transferred immediately. Nehru constantly warned the Viceroy that delay in reaching a decision would confront India with the risk of civil war. Even Gandhi, despite his opposition to partition, still urged one course on Mountbatten: get out of India immediately. Mountbatten's predecessor, Lord Wavell, was equally convinced of the need for speed, even at the price of the province-by-province evacuation he had urged in his Operation Madhouse.

Lord Mountbatten himself would always remain persuaded that, given the circumstances he found on his arrival in India in 1947, any course other than that of the partition agreement would have plunged India into civil strife on an unprecedented scale, strife that Britain would have had neither the resources nor the will to control.

The violence that the partition agreement produced in the Punjab was far worse than anything Mountbatten or the experts counseling him had envisaged. The 55,000 men of the Punjab Boundary Force were overwhelmed by the

dimensions of a cataclysm without precedent. Yet, however terrible the consequences of that upheaval were, they were still confined to one Indian province and one tenth of India's population. The risk of any other course was exposing all India to the horror that partition visited on the Punjab.

For the millions of victims of partition, the long and painful months of resettlement and reintegration still loomed ahead. They had paid the price for the freedom of one fifth of humanity and that price would leave its bitter imprint for years to come. That fall, it found its extravagant expression in a cry of rage and frustration, a cry shrieked to a British officer by an embittered group of refugees starving in a Punjab camp: "Bring back the raj!"

"KASHMIR—ONLY KASHMIR!

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Srinagar, Kashmir, October 1947

The ceremony in the brilliantly illuminated Durbar Hall of the palace of the Maharaja of Kashmir in Srinagar ended one of the most ancient feasts in the Hindu calendar. Every year, at the rising of the October moon, Hindus marked the legendary nine-day struggle of the goddess Durga, the wife of Lord Shiva, with the mino-taur Mahishasura, by a nine-day festival, Dasahra. As his ancestors had done for a century, Hari Singh, Maharaja of Kashmir, closed the 1947 festival on the evening of October 24 by receiving a ritual pledge of allegiance from the nobles of his state. One by one they advanced to the foot of his throne and pressed into his princely palm a symbolic offering of a piece of gold wrapped in a silk handkerchief.

The maharaja was a fortunate man. He was one of three rulers left from that extravagant caste of princes and nawabs who had held a third of the subcontinent's surface under their sway and still sat on their thrones. The two others were the Nawab of Junagadh (in whose state it was better to have been born a dog than to have been born a man) and the Nizam of Hyderabad. Against every argument of geography and logic, the Nawab of Junagadh had tried to take his little state, locked in the heart of India, into Pakistan. His days were numbered; in barely a fortnight's time, the Indian Army would walk into his state and give the ruler just enough time to fill a plane with his

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wives and his favorite pets and flee to Pakistan. The Nizam's days were numbered as well. Despite a long, last-ditch struggle to force Britain and India to recognize his independence, the Nizam too would see his state forcibly integrated into an independent India not long after the last viceroy's departure.

Hari Singh had long recovered from the diplomatic stomachache that had spared him the decision that his old friend Louis Mountbatten had wanted him to make, whether to join either India or Pakistan before August 15. Seated under his golden umbrella, its folds shaped in the form of a lotus blossom, a diamond-encrusted turban on his head, his neck encircled by a dozen strands of pearls setting off the emerald that was the proudest possession of his dynasty, Hari Singh still clung to the dream that he had told his old friend by the banks of the Trika river. He wanted to stay on the throne, to secure the independence of the enchanted vale which the East India Company had sold to his forebears a century before for six million rupees and an annual tribute of six shawls spun from the gossamer-thin pashmina wool that grew on the necks of the goats pastured in Kashmir's mountain ranges.

While the nobles of Kashmir were performing their ritual act of obeisance to their ruler in Hari Singh's brilliantly illuminated Durbar Hall, another group of men were forcing their way into a machinery-packed room fifty miles east of Srinagar, on the banks of the Jhelum river. One of them strapped a clump of dynamite sticks to a panel cluttered with levers and dials. Shouting a warning, he fired it with a match and ran out of the building. Ten seconds later, an ear-splitting roar shook the power station of Mahura. As it did, from the borders of Pakistan to Ladakh and the mountain walls of China, the lights went out.

In one terrifying stroke, the hundreds of bulbs glittering in Hari Singh's crystal chandeliers blinked out, plunging his palace into darkness. At that same instant, the power disappeared throughout his lovely capital. On their flower-bedecked houseboats moored in the glimmering waters of Lake Dal, scores of English men and women pondered the meaning of the mystifying darkness. Those retired colonels and civil servants could not realize it yet, but the failing lights were an omen announcing the end of their untroubled existence in a paradise of sunshine and flowers,

where a man could live the dream of the Emperor Jehan-gir on thirty pounds sterling a month.

In his bedroom in his father's palace, where an operation on his legs had confined him, Karan Singh, the Maharaja's eldest son, listened to the moaning of the wind driving down the Vale of Kashmir from the glaciers of the Himalayas. Then, like his father, his guests and thousands of other Kashmiris, the young Karan Singh heard another sound drifting along the wind's bitter currents. His blood ran cold as, lying in the darkness, he listened to it. It was the distant cry of jackals descending on the city.

A horde of jackals of another sort was also sweeping toward Srinagar and the Vale of Kashmir on that night of October 24, 1947. For the past forty-eight hours hundreds of Pathan tribesmen had been spilling into Hari Singh's state to put an end to his dream of independence. The private army he had counted on to defend him had, for the most part, either deserted to the invaders or disappeared into the hills.

The origins of that brutal and unannounced assault almost certainly lay in an innocent request made two months earlier, on August 24, by Mohammed Ali Jinnah to his British Military Secretary. Exhausted by his weeks of difficult negotiation, weakened by the unrelenting disease in his lungs, Jinnah had decided that he needed a vacation. He instructed the secretary, Colonel William Birnie, to go to Kashmir and arrange for him to spend two weeks resting and relaxing there in mid-September.

The choice of Kashmir for his holiday was entirely natural. To Jinnah, as to most of his countrymen,. it seemed inconceivable that August afternoon that Kashmir with a population more than three-fourths Moslem could become anything but a part of Pakistan.

The British officer, nonetheless, returned five days later with an answer that stunned Jinnah. Hari Singh didn't want him to set foot on his soil, even as a tourist. The reply gave Pakistan's leaders a first, brutal indication that the situation in Kashmir was not evolving as they had complacently assumed it would. Forty-eight hours later, Jinnah's government infiltrated a secret agent into Kashmir to evaluate the situation and ascertain the Maharaja's real intentions.

The report he brought back was shocking: Hari Singh had no intention of joining his state to Pakistan. That was something the founders of Pakistan could not tolerate. In mid-September, Liaquat Ali Khan convened a secret meeting of a select group of collaborators in Lahore to decide how to force the Maharaja's hand.

The conspirators dismissed immediately the idea of an outright invasion. The Pakistani Army was not ready for an adventure that could lead to war with India. Two other possibilities presented themselves. The first had been outlined by Colonel Akbar Khan, a Sandhurst graduate with a taste for conspiracy. He proposed that Pakistan supply the arms and money to foment an uprising of Kashmir's dissident Moslem population. It would require several months, but the end, Khan promised, would see "forty or fifty thousand Kashmiris descending on Srinagar to force the Maharaja to accede to Pakistan."

The second alternative was even more intriguing. Sponsored by the Chief Minister of the Frontier Province, it involved the most troublesome and feared population on the subcontinent, the Pathan tribesmen of the Northwest Frontier. Pakistan had inherited the problem of keeping the peace in their turbulent tribal preserves from Britain, and the tribe's loyalty to the government of their Moslem brothers in Karachi was not to be taken for granted. As Britain's last governor of the Province, Sir Olaf Caroe, had predicted, the agents of the king of Afghanistan were already arousing the tribes, seeking their support for the expansion of his kingdom to Peshawar and the banks of the Indus. Sending those dangerous hordes to Srinagar had considerable appeal. It would force the swift fall of the maharaja and the annexation of his state to Pakistan. And by offering the tribesmen the opportunity to loot the bazaars of Kashmir, their covetous eyes could be kept off the bazaars of Peshawar.