The Longest August (16 page)

On August 13 Lord Mountbatten and Edwina flew to Karachi. As a secondary school student in Karachi at the time, I had witnessed the building of barracks-like structures on the vast empty plots of the city to serve as Pakistan's sprawling secretariat, posthaste, with construction workers laboring around the clock. On August 14, along with many thousands of other spectators, I saw the skeletal Jinnah, in
salwar
and long coat topped with a black karakul hat, and Viceroy Mountbatten, dressed as an admiral, standing side by side in an open-roofed Rolls Royce as their vehicle traveled slowly from the provincial governor's residence to the Constituent Assembly.

In stark contrast to Punjab, the small province of Sindh, with a little over five million inhabitants—a quarter of them Hindus—was peaceful. The half million residents of its capital, Karachi, were divided almost
equally between Hindus and Muslims. On the birthday of Pakistan, there was a carnival atmosphere in the capital. This atmosphere was heightened by the authorities' decision to make travel by buses and trams free. The pleasant sea breeze of the port city was filled with hope and exuberance. The milling crowds inhaling it were in high spirits—unmindful of the human blood flowing into the soil of Punjab, or the fact that the coming influx of Urdu-speaking Muslims from adjoining Gujarat and Rajasthan, as well as distant United Provinces (UP) and Bihar, into the city would turn the local Sindhi- and Baluchi-speaking Muslims into a minority.

After addressing the Pakistani Constituent Assembly, Mountbatten boarded his Dakota at noon. As his plane flew over the plains of Punjab on its way to the Indian capital, the viceroy saw many of the province's seventeen thousand villages in flames. Mindful of the dreadful violence ravaging neighboring Punjab, the authorities in Delhi cancelled formal, colorful ceremonies. Instead, they settled for speeches from the ramparts of the seventeenth-century Red Fort. The walls of the streets were repainted and banners hung, with fences and trees wired with countless orange, green, and white lights—the colors of the national flag—while horse carriage drivers painted the legs of their animals in the national colors, and cloth merchants did a roaring trade, selling tricolored saris.

At eleven
pm
Nehru started addressing the mammoth crowd outside the Red Fort. “At the stroke of the midnight hour,” he said, “India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” But the loudest applause that stirred the air on that momentous day came when Viceroy Mountbatten declared, “At this historic moment let us not forget all that India owes to Mahatma Gandhi—the architect of her freedom through nonviolence. We miss his presence here today and would have him know how he is in our thoughts.”
28
That remark earned Mountbatten popular goodwill on the eve of becoming the governor-general of the Dominion of India.

Unreconciled to the partition of the subcontinent, which he called “a spiritual tragedy,” Gandhi had stayed away from the official ceremonies in Delhi. A week earlier, arriving in Calcutta, he had lodged himself in the mansion of a Muslim widow in the suburb of Belliaghatta along with Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, praying and fasting to bring about Hindu-Muslim amity.
29

Upsurge in Cathartic Bloodletting

Just as Indians were celebrating their first day of independence, a Pakistan Special train heading for Lahore was derailed near Amritsar by Sikh extremists. There were two similar derailments over the next couple of days. In retaliation, enraged Muslim mobs ambushed three overcrowded India-bound trains in the Wazirabad-Sialkot area and massacred the passengers.
30
The frenzied crowds vented their primeval religious hatred and animosities, bottled up during the past many generations, in an orgy of cathartic bloodletting.

Though the fatalities caused by the wholesale murder of packed trains were a fraction of the grand total, the novelty of this sort of mind-numbing carnage left a lingering mark on the popular psyche. This was brought home by Khushwant Singh (1915–2014), the author of the classic novel
Train to Pakistan
. One sunny summer day in 1947, when this thirty-two-year-old, turbaned and spectacled Sikh lawyer was being chauffeured from his home in Lahore to his family's summer residence in Kasauli at the foothills of the Himalayas, he encountered a jeep carrying Sikhs, armed with rifles and blood-covered spears, on an unusually empty road. The Sikhs stopped his car and triumphantly described in grisly detail how they had butchered in cold blood all the inhabitants of the nearby Muslim village. The attackers' gratification in indulging their blood lust left a deep mark on Khushwant Singh's secular psyche. It became the seed out of which grew his novel, published in 1956.
31

The story is set in an imagined Indian village of Mano Majra near a railway bridge on the Indo-Pakistan border, a settlement mainly of Sikhs and Muslims, coexisting peacefully in their separate quarters. When the local Hindu moneylender is killed, suspicion falls on Juggat Singh, a brawny Sikh convict on parole, who holds a secret rendezvous with Nooran, the nubile daughter of the near-blind mullah. When a train arrives at the village railroad station carrying the corpses of Sikhs from Pakistan, tension escalates rapidly. The police are unable to cope with spiraling communal violence. The government orders all Muslims to leave by a special train at night. A Sikh gang plans to ambush it and kill its passengers. Aware that the train is carrying Nooran, pregnant with his child, Juggut Singh foils the marauding scheme and in the process gets killed by the Sikh band. The novel admirably captures the gritty reality and spine-chilling horror of the partition memorably.

Factual accounts of the time describe Nehru, deeply shaken by the horrifying events, flying to Lahore, where the Hindu-Sikh population had shrunk from three hundred thousand to ten thousand, on August 17 to meet his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan. They appealed for peace in their broadcasts—but to no avail.

During the rest of August, Nehru made forays into East Punjab three times, talking to people on both sides of the newly created border, to take stock of the rapidly worsening situation. Sadly, he concluded, “Both sides have been incredibly inhuman and barbarous.”
32

As Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab started pouring into Delhi, to be herded into makeshift refugee camps, anti-Muslim sentiment rose steeply, reaching fever pitch by late August. Soon the Indian capital would become the crucible for the murderous passions consuming the adjoining Punjab.

On August 31 the eighteen-day peace in Calcutta, mediated by Gandhi, broke down when one thousand Hindu youths brought a wounded Hindu to his house in Belliaghata, claiming that he had been stabbed by Muslims. Gandhi faced the angry, screaming mob with folded arms. A stick thrown at him failed to strike. That ended the showdown. But the Mahatma was troubled. On September 2 he started to fast. Within a day leaders of all faiths and parties came to plead with him to end it while Hindu and Muslim goons turned up to apologize with tearful eyes. Calm returned to the city. On September 4 he ended his hunger strike.

In Delhi, the unending stream of Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring into the capital energized the cycle of reprisals and revenge. Their narratives, often exaggerated and embellished, fed the anti-Muslim mania already on the upswing. On September 4 serious rioting erupted in Delhi, with Muslims bearing the brunt. Two days later, a bomb thrown into New Delhi's railway station, packed with Muslims departing for Pakistan, killed many.

On September 7, looters descended on the Connaught Circus, the huge plaza in the capital's heart. “The dead [Muslims] lay rotting in the streets, because there was no one to collect and bury them,” noted General Hastings Ismay, the viceroy's chief of staff. “The hospitals were choked with [the] dying and wounded, and in imminent danger of attack because of the presence of Muslim staff and Muslim patients. Arson and looting were widespread. . . . The Muslim members of the Delhi police
had either deserted or were disarmed: the Hindu members had either been suborned or were afraid to do their duty.”
33

The government imposed a curfew, called the army, and issued a shoot-to-kill order. In his September 9 radio broadcast, Nehru said, “We are dealing with a situation that is analogous to war, and we are going to deal with it on a war basis in every sense of the word.”
34
By the time law and order was restored, 10,000 Muslims were dead, and 330,000, forming a third of the city's total population, had fled their homes out of fear.
35

Nehru rose to the occasion with exemplary courage and conviction. He turned the vast garden of his official residence into a campsite of tents for Muslim refugees. He walked into the streets fearlessly and conversed with common folk. He single-handedly challenged the rioters and looters. His spontaneous forays into the street to confront violent hooligans were sufficiently dramatic to warrant a moving sequence in Richard Attenborough's
Gandhi
.

Behind closed doors, Patel and Prasad—both members of the Partition Council—advocated the dismissal of all Muslim officials and argued that there was little point in deploying Indian soldiers to protect Muslim citizens. By contrast, Nehru personally rushed to Connaught Circus and Old Delhi to stop murder and pillage, and to assure Muslim families that they could rely on the protection of his government. To him—in the words of Sunil Khilnani, an Indian chronicler—“partition was above all, however, a test of the Indian state's sovereignty, its capacity to protect its citizens, keep order, and justify its territorial ownership.”
36

Shocked by the tales of violence against the Hindus and Sikhs of Punjab, almost half of Nehru's cabinet, led by Patel, seemed inclined to opt for a “Hindu Pakistan.” Nehru put his foot down. “As long as I am at the helm of affairs, India will not become a Hindu state,” he declared. “The whole idea of a theocratic state is not only medieval but also stupid.”
37
He was not prepared to remain the prime minister for a single day if that was the price he had to pay for Hindu India.
38

Nehru, a staunch secularist, thus proved his mettle in the face of a gargantuan challenge at a most crucial moment in India's history. In the acute crisis of explosive proportions, he remained clear-eyed, resolute, and perceptive. He described the situation in India as “a ship on fire in mid-ocean with ammunition in hold.”
39
He ignored the argument that Prasad advanced in his letter of September 17: the use of the army to save Muslims was making the government unpopular. Disagreeing with Patel,
Nehru said that he did not want to exact a price from Muslims for having supported the Pakistan movement in the past. If for that reason he was to be dubbed “Maulana Nehru,” so be it.

He was helped by the timely arrival of Gandhi from Calcutta on September 10. The Mahatma had intended to proceed to Punjab to break the murderous cycle of revenge and counterrevenge, but Patel dissuaded him: the situation there was far too explosive. So instead of setting up his modest office in the Untouchables' colony, as he had done before, he chose the safe address of the Birla House, the spacious mansion of the textile millionaire Ghanshyam Das Birla, his long-time patron and financier. Gandhi argued that besides looking after the Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan, the Indian government should take care of the internally displaced Muslims in the capital's assorted refugee camps, including such historic sites as the dilapidated Old Fort.

With population exchange across the newly created Indo-Pakistan increasing in speed by the day, the number of refugees swelled. The ad hoc refugee colonies burst at the seams. The only way to register the size of this unparalleled exodus was to survey the scene from the air. So that was what Mountbatten did, together with the most senior cabinet ministers.

Caravans of Despair

On September 21 Mountbatten took Patel and Nehru along with a few aides on a round trip in his Dakota to “view the Punjab migration.” Near Ferozepur in the vicinity of the Indo-Pakistan border, they noticed the first caravan of non-Muslim refugees—and continued to see it for fifty miles without finding its source.
40

Earlier, on September 2, a press report from Lahore headlined, “Gigantic Exchange of Two Million People Begins in the Punjab,” referred to a sixty-mile-long caravan of non-Muslims. Consisting mainly of those possessing bullock carts or pack animals, it took thirty-six hours to cross the Sulaimanki Barrage Bridge over the Sutlej River in West Punjab.
41
These groups were part of the biggest mass migration in history.

An insight into the creation of such seemingly endless caravans—which dwarfed the biblical exodus of the Israelites from Egypt—was provided later by the father of Dalvinder Singh Grewal, a retired colonel born in the village of Rattan in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) district, West Punjab. As part of a caravan, the senior Singh had kept a diary.

On September 4, 1947, a train from India arrived at Gojra, thirty miles from Rattan, stacked with corpses and hideously injured Muslims. Local Muslims were enraged and vowed to avenge the massacre. The inhabitants of the almost exclusively Hindu-Sikh village of Rattan began to seriously consider migrating to the Indian Punjab. They resolved to leave when they heard of the appearance of another train, drenched with Muslim blood, at the nearby Pakka Anna station.

On September 10 the Hindu and Sikh households in Rattan started loading their essential possessions, including food and clothing, on bullock carts. They let loose their cattle. The next afternoon all non-Muslim families quit their ancestral settlement, reducing it to three Muslim households. While the carts carried children, the elderly, and the infirm, adult men and women walked. In the evening they reached Dhaipai, where they became part of a bigger caravan, which included the non-Muslim residents of six other villages.