Freedom at Midnight (69 page)

Their passage through the town en route to refugee camps had provoked a number of alarming situations, but none to compare with that confronting Panipat's terrified Hindu stationmaster, Devi Dutta, one afternoon in late November. Victims of a savage Moslem attack in Pakistan, the Sikh refugees aboard a train arriving in his station that day stormed onto the platform shrieking for revenge. The first Moslem in their path was Dutta's assistant. A score of enraged Sikhs, brandishing their kir-pans, grabbed the helpless man. Terrified, the Hindu stationmaster screamed out the only words that came into his head, a phrase that reflected the instincts he had absorbed in his lifetime as a good bureaucrat.

"Please, please," he cried, "no massacres on the station platform!"

The Sikhs obliged him. They carried his colleague to the rear of the station and beheaded him. Then they set out for Panipat's Moslem quarters.

Ninety minutes later, a station wagon raced up to the entrance of the station. From it descended the only force that would come to the aid of Panipat's Moslems that afternoon, Mahatma Gandhi. Panipat had had an important Moslem population since the days when its strategic loca-

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tion on the banks of the Jumna had made it the key to Delhi, and that population had a particular importance to the Savior of Calcutta.

He walked unprotected into the mob of refugees milling around the station. "Go embrace the Moslems of this community and ask them to remain," he said. "Stop them from leaving for Pakistan."

A stupefied, angry roar greeted his words. "Is it your wife they raped?" "Is it your child they cut to pieces?" voices cried at him.

"Yes," replied Gandhi, "it was my wife they raped, it was my son they killed, because your women are my women, your sons are my sons." As he spoke, a garland of swords, knives and spears glittered in the sunlight around him. "Those tools of violence, those tools of hatred will solve no problems," he sighed.

Word of his presence sped through Panipat. In the station square Panipat's municipal authorities hastily erected a loudspeaker for an improvised prayer meeting. Moslems from their barricaded quarters arrived. Hindus and Sikhs followed until, like the Maidan of Calcutta, two and a half months earlier at the feast of Id el Kebir, the central square of Panipat was filled with a multitude, their attention riveted on an elderly man from whom they expected a new miracle. Constantly obliged to clear his throat as though his inner turmoil would not allow his voice its freedom, Gandhi turned on the crowd the only weapon in his armory that afternoon: his words. Again, he reiterated the essence of his political belief, "that ideal which makes us all, Hindus, Sikhs, Moslems, Christians, the sons and daughters of a common Mother India." He offered all the compassion of his soul to the sullen refugees on the station platform of Panipat. But he begged them not to allow a spirit of cruelty and vengeance to dehumanize their hearts. "Find in your sufferings," he pleaded, "the seeds of a more noble victory."

A timid current began to stir the crowd. Here and there, an armed Sikh extended a hand to a Moslem. A Moslem offered a coat or vest to a Sikh refugee trembling in the winter wind. Other Moslems began to bring food and water from their homes for the refugees.

Welcomed by curses, Gandhi was able to leave two hours later to a tumultuous ovation, carried to his car in triumph. To his intense chagrin, however, his victory

would prove to be ephemeral. His action that afternoon had saved many lives, but it had not been able to eradicate the fear in the hearts of Panipat's Moslems. Less than a month after the Mahatma's visit, the 20,000 heirs to what had been one of the oldest Moslem communities in India decided to leave their birthplace for Pakistan. "Islam," Gandhi sadly noted the day they left, "has lost the fourth battle of Panipat." So, too, had Gandhi.

The sadhu in a soiled orange dhoti and unkempt black beard to whom Narayan Apte, the administrator of the Hindu Rashtra newspaper, addressed an intensity of regard usually reserved for his female students was not a sadhu at all. It was for his police record rather than his piety that Digamber Badge was best known in Bombay province. The orange robe and spiritual air happened to be his favorite cover for carrying out his activities as a petty arms trafficker.

In seventeen years, Badge had been arrested a record thirty-seven times on charges from bank robbery to murder, aggravated assault and a dozen arms violations. Out of all those charges, the police had been able to make only one stick: cutting down trees in a protected forest in 1930 during one of Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns. It had earned Badge a one-month jail sentence.

Behind the innocent facade of a bookstore, he ran a Shastra Bhandar, a petty arms shop, in Poona. The back room of his store was a jumble of homemade bombs, ammunition, daggers, axes, tiger claws, brass knuckles, pen knives, all the crude instruments of slaughter popularized in the Punjab. Between customers, Badge and his aging father knitted up the garment for which they were known to thugs, bootleggers and union busters around Poona, a kind of chain mail, bulletproof vest bearing a startling resemblance to the armor of a medieval knight.

Apte was one of his best clients. The administrator of the Hindu Rashtra had purchased 3,000 rupees' worth of arms from him since June. Apte, as Badge knew, was forever scheming. Once it had been to throw hand grenades at a Delhi meeting of the Moslem League, hoping to kill Jinnah in the process. Later, Apte had determined to lead a team of assassins to Switzerland to kill Jinnah during a visit to Geneva. To Apte's distress, however, the ailing Jin-

nah had never left Pakistan. Most recently, he had been organizing guerrilla actions in Hyderabad, canvassing the possibility of an attempt on the Nizam's life.

"I'm on to something," he now whispered to Badge, "something very big. I'm going to need hand grenades, gun cotton slabs, some pistols."

Badge pondered a moment. He had none of those items at the moment in his stores, and pistols were hard to find. Badge, however, was not a man to let a deal pass him by. "Penny-catching meanness of mind," a close observer would later remark, was "his most important trait." Wait, he counseled, he would have the stuff by late December.

New Delhi, Decerfiber 1947

To Pyarelal Nayar, the faithful secretary who had served him for years, Mahatama Gandhi appeared in the first days of December 1947 "the saddest man one could picture." Gandhi sensed a psychological barrier arising: between him and the colleagues he had led in the independence struggle, now that they had settled into the corridors of power to which they had so long aspired. Increasingly Gandhi wondered if he was not becoming an anachronism in the land whose independence he had done so much to obtain, an embarrassment to his colleagues.

"If India has no further use for nonviolence," he noted, "can she have any for me?" He would not be surprised, he remarked, if India's leaders said one day, "We have had enough of this old man. Why doesn't he leave us alone?"

Until that day, however, he had no intention of giving them any respite. He bombarded Nehru and Patel with illustrations of India's growing corruption, of lavish banquets offered by their ministers while refugees starved. He accused them of being "hypnotized by the glamour of the scientific progress and 'expanding economies' of the West." He assailed Nehru's dream of a Welfare State, because of the centralization of power it implied. That always led, he said, to the people "becoming a herd of sheep, always relying on a shepherd to drive them to good pastures. The shepherd's staff," he noted, "soon turns to iron, and the shepherds turn to wolves."

India's urban intellectuals, he warned, were forming a new elite, drawing up their schemes for the nation's indus-

trialization without regard for the interests of his beloved villagers. With a touch of Mao Tse-tung, he proposed that the elite "with their town-bred bodies" be sent to the villages. Let them "drink the water from the pools in which the villagers bathe, and in which their cattle wash and roll; let them bend their backs under the hot sun as they do." Then, he said, they might begin to understand the villagers' concerns.

If India's leaders were ignoring him, Gandhi could ignore them, too. One day in December he called to Birla House the Bombay cotton broker in whose beachside hut he had recuperated in 1944 after his release from a British prison. To him he confided a secret mission he instructed him not to reveal to anyone in India, not even Nehru and Patel. It was the realization of a dream Gandhi had cherished for weeks. Go to Karachi, he ordered, and make plans for a visit by Gandhi to Pakistan.

The broker gasped. The idea was madness, he told Gandhi, he was certain to be assassinated if he tried to carry it out.

"No one can shorten my life by a minute," Gandhi replied. "It belongs to God."

Before setting out for Pakistan, however, Gandhi felt he had first to make another effort to get India's house in order. "What face can I turn to the Pakistanis," he asked, "if the conflagration still rages here?"

Nowhere did its ramifications disturb him as much as they did in Delhi. The city's Moslem leaders continued to insist that their only insurance of safety lay in his presence in the capital. The police, their ranks swollen by refugee Hindus and Sikhs from the Punjab, were violently anti-Moslem. Hindu and Sikh refugees were seizing for their personal use mosques and Moslem homes, some abandoned, some not.

What distressed him most was the fact that only a large contingent of troops kept the city from exploding into another orgy of violence similar to the one it had lived through in September. That the peace of an independent India's capital reposed solely on the force of arms and not his cherished "soul force" haunted Gandhi. How could he hope to exercise a moral authority in Pakistan if he had not been able to exercise a similar authority in India's capital? Increasingly he lapsed into those contemplative silences which always preceded a major decision on his

part. As the year wound to a close, his moodiness seemed to grow.

"Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterward had been the way of the world through the ages," he told a group of Englishmen one night. "Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified."

In any event, he said, as far as he was concerned, he intended to be guided by the ancient saying of Confucius: "To know what is right, and not to do it, is cowardice."

Karachi, Pakistan, December 1947

The dark circles the size of ping-pong balls discovered by a physician's X-ray continued inexorably to spread their deadly stain across the lungs of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. The prognosis of his friend and doctor in Bombay was not to be denied. For a while, the intensity of Jinnah's will had seemed to impose a kind of remission on the disease's progress. Now that the realization of his long dream had eased his spirit, the disease had once again begun its advance.

On Sunday, October 26, Jinnah had left Karachi for a brief visit to Lahore. Watching him go, his English Military Secretary, Colonel William Birnie, thought he looked sixty years old. When he returned five weeks later, he thought he looked eighty. Jinnah had spent those five weeks in bed with a cough and a fever that had left him weakened and exhausted.

As he felt his strength ebbing away, a strange melancholia gripped the Moslem leader. He became more remote than ever from his retinue and his followers. It was almost as though in the closing months of his life he could not bear to entrust his realized dream to hands other than his own. He gathered into his frail fingers almost all the strings of power in Pakistan and refused to share them. He would not delegate authority, and as he lay ill dossiers waiting his decision piled up unread and unacted on in his office. He became hypersensitive to criticism. He was, Birnie noted in his diary, "like a child who by some miracle had been given the moon and he won't lend it to anyone even for a moment."

A perplexing meanness of spirit overtook the man who

had ordered his A.D.C. to get his croquet set back. His personal aircraft sat unused for weeks on end, its crew standing by, yet he refused to lend it to anyone, not even to his own people to help evacuate refugees, because he didn't want to "create a precedent." He plunged his household staff into despair by picking at every detail of their administration, saving pennies and yet insisting that the best Bordeaux and cuisine be set upon his table nightly.

Above all, Jinnah was haunted by the idea that his old Hindu foes in Congress were determined to prevent his state from taking root, to sow the seeds that would destroy it after his death. On all sides, Junagadh, Kashmir, the Punjab, he read indications of a vast Indian design to undo the achievement of partition. The crowning blow came in mid-December. After weeks of arduous negotiation, India and Pakistan finally reached agreement on the division of the last financial and material assets remaining to them. At independence, India's cash reserves had totaled four billion rupees. Pakistan had been given an immediate advance of 200 million rupees. Under the agreement she was to receive as the balance of her share an additional 550 million rupees (166 million United States dollars). Arguing that the money would be used to purchase arms to kill Indian soldiers, India refused to pay the sum until the Kashmir problem was solved.

The decision confronted Jinnah with a desperate situation. His new nation was almost bankrupt. Only twenty of the original 200 million rupees remained. Civil servants' salaries had to be cut. Finally, the proud Jinnah had to accept a crushing humiliation. A check issued by his government to the British Overseas Airways Corporation for aircraft chartered to carry refugees was returned— because of "insufficient funds."

View Delhi, January 12,1948

So much had changed since their crucial meetings in this same viceregal study in the spring of 1947. Then Louis Mountbatten and Mahatma Gandhi had seemed to hold the destiny of 400 million people in their hands. Now, on this evening of January 12, 1948 events appeared to have passed both men by. The Emergency Committee with which Mountbatten had given India her