The Longest August (20 page)

Jinnah reiterated this message in his speech to the Fifth Heavy and Sixth Light Ack Ack Regiments based at Malir, a suburb of Karachi, on February 21, a fortnight after the early resignation of General Messervy:
“You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.”
38
It is worth noting that it was the first time in modern history that the term “Islamic democracy” was used by a leading Muslim politician.

Jinnah's Terminal Illness

Once General Messervy was succeeded by General David Gracey, and the remaining four thousand British troops in India had sailed away on February 28, Jinnah felt freer to commit regular troops in Kashmir. As it was, on October 31 the Gilgit Scouts, led by British officers who had all opted for Pakistan, arrested the maharaja-appointed governor and set up a provisional administration that affiliated with the Azad Kashmir government. Three days later the ruler of Chitral signed the Instrument of Accession with Pakistan. This amounted to Pakistan controlling directly or indirectly, through the Azad Kashmir government, most of the sparsely populated areas of Kashmir except Ladakh. But the coveted prize of the Vale of Kashmir—measuring 6,160 square miles at an average altitude of 6,000 feet—had escaped Jinnah. “The turn of events in Kashmir had an adverse effect on the Quaidi Azam's health,” wrote Chaudhri Muhammad Ali. “His earlier optimism gave way to a deep disappointment. ‘We have been put on the wrong bus,' he remarked.”
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After a lull in the fighting in Kashmir caused by winter snows, the Indians geared up to recapture the lost area, particularly in the populous Kashmir region, which was partly controlled by Azad Kashmir forces. Fearing a breach of Pakistan's border in the course of India's offensives, Jinnah ordered the deployment of Pakistani troops in early April. By so doing he risked Delhi's refusal to deliver the bulk of the 18.75 percent share of the 165,000 tons of ordnance stores, which had been allocated to Pakistan by the Partition Council.
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At the United Nations, having listened to both sides, the Security Council passed Resolution 47 on April 21, 1948. It stated that to ensure the impartiality of the plebiscite on the state's future, Pakistan must withdraw all tribesmen and nationals who entered the region to fight, and India should leave just enough troops to maintain civil order. Since it was passed under Chapter VI of the UN Charter, it was nonbinding and lacked mandatory implementation.
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Only resolutions passed under
Chapter VII (“Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression”) require mandatory enforcement.

Jinnah demanded that both sides withdraw their forces simultaneously. Delhi rejected this. So the state of war between the two neighbors continued, both of them deciding to ignore the Security Council's call for an immediate cease-fire.

For administrative purposes, Jinnah established the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs in Karachi. Across the border, pressured by Delhi, the maharaja had replaced his Hindu prime minister, Mahajan, in March with Shaikh Abdullah, the erstwhile chief administrator, thus making his government appear more representative of the Muslim majority.

In Karachi, Jinnah by now was too ill to use his desk in the Government House office as his workplace. He could perform his job only while lying down on a sofa, surrounded by documents, newspapers, and endless news-bearing telex tape. In June he and his sister-carer Fatima moved to cooler Quetta. Black dispatch boxes, stamped with the initials “M.A.J.,” were airlifted daily from Karachi for his attention and action. He still managed to muster enough energy to address the cadets at the local Command and Staff College. “You, along with the other forces of Pakistan, are the custodians of the life, property and honor of the people of Pakistan,” he told them.
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He would have hardly predicted that a decade later the military leaders would prove more than mere custodians and that they would seize total power and send all politicians packing.

Jinnah flew to Karachi on July 1 to inaugurate the State Bank of Pakistan. On his return to Quetta some days later, he was advised to move to the hill town of Ziarat seventy miles away. He did so, and he continued to work ceaselessly. Toward the end of the month, Colonel Dr. Illahi Bux, who had been invited to Ziarat by Fatima Jinnah, told his patient and Fatima that Jinnah's lungs were afflicted with tuberculosis and cancer. The news was withheld even from Prime Minister Ali Khan when he arrived in Ziarat.

Invited by Bux and Fatima Jinnah, the British nursing superintendent of Quetta's civil hospital, Sister Phyllis Dunham, arrived in Ziarat on July 29 to give Jinnah professional nursing care. Despite the strict secrecy, the public knew vaguely that their Quaid-i-Azam—Great Leader—was ill and resting in Ziarat in the hills of Baluchistan. On Eid al Fitr, which fell on August 7, public prayers were offered in mosques for his recovery. Two days later Jinnah, now reduced to 79 pounds from an earlier 120 pounds,
his face shrunken to hollow cheeks and blank stare, was moved back to Quetta. To maintain a semblance of official normality, on the eve of Independence Day, August 14, the government broadcast a ghostwritten message from him.

Belying a slight improvement in his health, on August 29 a tearful Jinnah said to Bux, “You know, when you first came to Ziarat, I wanted to live. Now, however, it does not matter whether I live or die.”
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It was imperative for political stability that he should return to Karachi while he was still alive. Being vain, Jinnah did not want to be seen arriving in the capital on a stretcher. When he developed pneumonia on September 9, however, he had no option but to fly to Karachi to receive better medical treatment.

On Saturday morning, September 11, Jinnah's Viking touched down at Quetta's airport. Ali Khan was informed but told not to come to the Mauripur Airport located ten miles from the Government House in Karachi. At four fifteen
pm
, Jinnah's plane was met by his state-owned Cadillac, an army ambulance, and a truck for luggage and servants. Jinnah, lying on a stretcher, was placed in the ambulance, which moved slowly. Almost halfway to his destination, it broke down. When the driver failed to get it moving again, Jinnah's military secretary was sent off to fetch another ambulance.

Jinnah could not be transferred to the Cadillac as he was too weak to sit up in the backseat, and the stretcher could not be fitted into the automobile. Since the ambulance was not carrying the governor-general's flag, nobody in Jinnah's party could stop any of the buses or trucks passing by. It was hot and close inside the ambulance. Jinnah was perspiring even when Sister Dunham fanned him vigorously with a piece of cardboard. In gratitude, the speechless Jinnah touched her arm with his hand and smiled weakly. It was an excruciatingly long hour before the next ambulance arrived. The party reached the Government House at 6:10
pm
.
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Jinnah was put to bed. He died at 10:25
pm
.

The government announced three days of mourning. On September 12 almost a million people gathered for the funeral service of Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah, who was succeeded by Khwaja Nazimuddin, the Bengali president of the Pakistan Muslim League. The state of mourning was announced in Delhi on that day, and flags flew at half-mast on all official buildings.

Nehru said:

Jinnah did mold history in India in the wrong way, it is true, and let loose forces which have done so much evil. How shall we judge him? I have been very angry with him often during these past years. But now there is no bitterness in my thought of him, only a great sadness for all that has been. . . . Outwardly he succeeded in his quest and gained his objective, but at what a cost and with what a difference from what he had imagined. What must he have thought of all this, did he feel sorry or regret for any past action? Probably not, for he had wrapped himself in a cloak of hatred and every evil seemed to flow from those whom he hated. Hatred is poor nourishment for any person.
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In his evaluation of Jinnah, Nehru showed no sign of self-examination. Nor did he attempt to apportion blame for the tragic partitioning of the subcontinent. It was all the fault of malevolent Jinnah. Self-righteousness remained a salient feature of Nehru's character until his death while prime minister sixteen years later.

With the exit of Jinnah and Gandhi, the giants of subcontinental politics for three decades, an era came to an end. Jinnah's death just a year after the birth of a new nation he had conceived deprived it of strong moorings at a critical moment. And top policymakers in independent India, focusing on rapid economic development with a stress on industrialization, found Gandhi's utopian ideas of self-sufficient village communities outdated.

Whereas a Hollywood biopic on Gandhi was produced in 1982 and proved a critical and box office success, a movie on Jinnah, carrying his name, materialized only in 1998. The Hindi version of
Gandhi
helped enormously to establish him as an iconic figure, particularly among the younger generations.
Jinnah
, produced and directed by the London-based Jamil Dehlavi, cast the British horror movie actor Christopher Lee in the lead role. Its Urdu version did well in Pakistan; its impact elsewhere was negligible.

Truce in Kashmir

Following Jinnah's death, Ali Khan bore the full burden of shepherding the fledgling Pakistan. His aristocratic background, formalized in his title of Nawabzad (Urdu: Son of Nabob) from Punjab, his profession as an
Oxford-trained attorney, and many years in politics made him feel at ease with Nehru, a Cambridge-educated lawyer.

On Kashmir, he opted for the “harder diplomatic” track by downgrading the military option that his government was finding too expensive to continue—a policy he had failed to sell to Jinnah earlier. Nehru's administration was also feeling the adverse effect of the drain caused by the war in Kashmir. With winter snows freezing the battle lines, the two neighbors decided to silence their guns by agreeing to a truce brokered by the UN Commission for India and Pakistan. Despite unpublicized disapproval by the top military brass at the general headquarters in Rawalpindi, the cease-fire went into effect on January 1, 1949. It was decided that a free and impartial plebiscite would be held under UN supervision.

Pakistan controlled 37 percent of Jammu and Kashmir, later divided into Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir, with its capital in Muzaffarabad. To monitor the cease-fire line, the Security Council appointed the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan. Crucially, India retained control of the eighty-five-mile-long and twenty-mile-wide Vale of Kashmir, which lies between the Pir Panjal and Karakoram mountain ranges of the Himalayas. Guarded by snow-capped peaks, carpeted with verdant forests of fir and pine trees along with wildflowers of riotous colors in the spring, and irrigated by the Jhelum River and its tributaries, it has been described by poets and people alike as “Paradise on Earth.”

On the eve of their independence the two Dominions had decided to allow free movement of goods, persons, and capital for one year. But because of the rapid deterioration in relations after the Kashmir conflict, this agreement broke down. In November, Pakistan levied export duties on jute, which was processed in the mills of Calcutta. India retaliated with export duties of its own. The trade war escalated to a crisis on September 19, 1949, when Britain devalued the pound against the US dollar by 30.5 percent, to $2.80. Both the Indian rupee and the Pakistani rupee were pegged to the British pound. India followed Britain's lead, but Pakistan did not. That made Pakistani exports almost a third more expensive. Delhi terminated its trade relations with Karachi.

7: Growing Apart

The rupture in Indo-Pakistan trade links ended the export of Hindi movies to Pakistan. These films often starred Punjabi actors endowed with good looks and fluency in Hindustani—an amalgam of Urdu and Hindi. West Pakistanis thus found themselves deprived of their staple in mass entertainment. The studios in Lahore produced only nine movies a year, compared to Bombay's output of seventy-five.

Whereas most Muslim businessmen and professionals in the Muslim-minority provinces of British India migrated to Pakistan to escape competition from their more advantaged Hindu counterparts, this was not the case with the socially liberal and politically progressive Muslims in Bombay's thriving movie industry. As scriptwriters, lyricists, directors, and producers, they stayed in Bombay—all except Sadat Hassan Manto.

Sadat Hassan Manto

A bespectacled, oval-faced native of Samrala near Ludhiana in East Punjab, Manto was a prolific short story writer in Urdu who made a comfortable living penning screenplays. He made his debut as a writer with “Tamasha” (Urdu: Show), a short story based on the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar.

After partition, the thirty-five-year-old Manto migrated to Lahore. Faced with a lack of demand for movie scripts, he had to rely exclusively on publishing short stories in literary magazines or newspaper supplements for paltry sums. His sexually explicit tales fell afoul of the socially
conservative readership of Urdu publications. Because he wrote freely about social and sexual issues considered taboo in Indo-Pakistan society, he was charged with obscenity six times, three times in India and three times in Pakistan. Though he was not convicted, he switched to writing a regular newspaper column. It provided him with an outlet for drawing pen-portraits of leading Indian actors and writers as well as Muhammad Ali Jinnah. (His eye-opening essays on working in the Hindi movie industry—at turns nostalgic, acerbic, poetic, and gossipy—are collected in a remarkable collection
Stars from Another Sky
.) The constant struggle to support his wife, Safiya, and their three daughters drove him to cheap, illicitly brewed alcohol—and an early death in 1955 from cirrhosis.

He left behind twenty-two collections of short stories, a novel, and five collections of radio plays as well as three of essays. Yet it was only on January 18, 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, that he was commemorated on a Pakistani postage stamp and awarded the Nishan-e Imtiaz (Urdu: Order of Excellence), the highest official honor.

Some months before his demise he published a satirical tale, “Toba Tek Singh.” Set in 1950, when India and Pakistan exchanged the inmates of their lunatic asylums, “Toba Tek Singh” has become a classic because it captures the demented logic of the partition. The story is based on the premise that the inmates of these asylums were largely unaware of the dramatic events in the subcontinent.

Bishan Singh, an old Sikh lunatic in Pakistan, had owned land in his hometown, Toba Tek Singh (the name of an actual town, which remains unchanged), before going mad and was known as Toba Tek Singh among his fellow lunatics. On the day of the exchange of mad men, when Bishan Singh's turn comes to give his personal details for the records before being transferred to India, he asks the official, “Where's Toba Tek Singh? In India or Pakistan?” The official laughs and answers, “In Pakistan, of course.” Hearing this, Bishan Singh turns and runs back to join his companions in Pakistan. The Pakistani guards catch hold of him and try to push him across the line to India. Bishan Singh refuses to budge. “This is Toba Tek Singh,” he announces. In order to persuade him to cross the border into India, he is told falsely, repeatedly, that Toba Tek Singh is in India, or very soon will be. But he remains unconvinced. When they try to drag him to the Indian side, he resists. Since he is a harmless old man, the officials leave him alone for the time being and proceed with the rest of the exchange. Engrossed in the demanding task of accomplishing the exchange, the guards forget about him. At dawn they hear a heart-rending
scream. They find Bishan Singh's corpse, face down and sprawled between two barbed pens—one of Indian lunatics and the other of their Pakistani counterparts—on a land without name.
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As it was, in real life, a no-man's land had come into existence along some sections of the Indo-Pakistan cease-fire line in Kashmir—an issue that continued to exercise the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) as well as the military representatives of India and Pakistan during 1949.

Nehru's Nonalignment Irritates Washington

That year witnessed the twin dominions drifting apart in such vital areas as foreign affairs. In pursuit of his policy of nonalignment with either power blocks—led respectively by the Soviet Union and the United States—Jawaharlal Nehru transferred his sister Vijay Lakshmi Pandit from Moscow to Washington as India's ambassador in August. She set the scene for her brother's visit to America two months later.

Nehru started his four days of official visits and conferences in Washington with a meeting with President Harry Truman on October 13. He then addressed the US House of Representatives. “I have come here on a voyage of discovery of the mind and heart of America and to place before you our own heart,” he said. “Thus we may promote that understanding and cooperation which, I feel sure, both our countries earnestly desire.” He assured his audience that “where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.” Then he rushed to the Senate, temporarily meeting in the old Supreme Court Chamber, to deliver the same speech.
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As the leader of a newly independent nation of 360 million people with a legacy of ancient civilization, Nehru was treated as a political superstar. “Washington's hopes for a democratic rallying point in Asia have been pinned on India, the second biggest Asiatic nation, and the man who determines India's policy—J L Nehru,” said the
New York Times
in its editorial on October 14, 1949.
Time
chimed in by featuring a flattering portrait of Nehru on the cover of its October 17 edition. He then undertook a three-week tour of the United States, visiting cities on the East and West Coasts and the Midwest.

In June 1950, as one of the six nonpermanent members of the UN Security Council, India backed its Resolution 82, calling on North Korea
to withdraw immediately to its border with South Korea. A few days later it supplied a medical unit to the UN Command charged with reversing North Korea's aggression.

But later, as the United States embarked on a policy of encircling the Soviet Union with a string of regional defense treaties, Nehru parted company with Washington in defense matters. In early October 1949, Truman signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Act to complement the Economic Cooperation Act (the Marshall Plan) of April 1948, both aimed at Europe. In 1951 these two acts were merged into the Mutual Security Act under the Mutual Security Administration, charged with overseeing all foreign aid programs, military and nonmilitary, to bolster the defense capability of Washington's allies. This step integrated the mutual security pacts and the concept of security assistance with the US-led Western world's global strategy of containing the Soviet Union.

However, Washington's modest economic aid to India, which started after Nehru's sojourn to America, continued. In January 1952 India and the United States inked a five-year Technical Cooperation Agreement, with Washington providing funds for specific technical projects.

The outbreak of war between North Korea and South Korea in June 1950 drew America's attention toward Asia and heralded globalization of its security policy. Six months earlier India had recognized the People's Republic of China (PRC), which came into existence on October 1, 1949, with the military defeat of the Republic of China. India thus became the first noncommunist country to recognize the PRC. (Its ambassador K. M. Pannikar arrived in Beijing in April 1950.)

In October 1950 the PRC stepped into the Korean War to ensure that the US-led UN forces did not reach its frontier. At the UN India disagreed with America in February 1951 and refused to censure Communist China as an aggressor in the ongoing war. Washington considered Delhi's stance an example of communist appeasement. India's refusal to join the US-sponsored 1951 Treaty of Peace with Japan—a pact designed among other things to recruit Japan as an ally against communist successes in Asia—signaled further divergence between the two nations.

With India refusing to ally with America, the Truman administration focused on Pakistan, which had been courting the United States since its inception under Jinnah, who was paranoid about the Kremlin's ambitions in South Asia. Little wonder that it was fifteen months after his death that, following the establishment of Pakistan's diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, the first Pakistani ambassador arrived in Moscow.

President Truman laid out the red carpet for Ali Khan at the airport in Washington on May 3, 1950. After their meeting the next day, the Pakistani leader addressed the two chambers of Congress separately. He reemphasized the importance of his country's geostrategic location adjacent to Afghanistan, which shared a long border with the Soviet Union. He lined up with America to meet the Soviet menace.
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To achieve this common aim, he asked for military aid, which Truman promised to consider. Then, emulating Nehru, he toured the United States for more than three weeks.

Soon after, he backed the UN use of force to reverse North Korea's invasion and occupation of part of South Korea. And, unlike Nehru, he supported Washington's peace treaty with Tokyo.

Once the Mutual Security Act came into force in 1951, it became comparatively easy for Washington to combine its military and nonmilitary aid to Pakistan. But Truman was cautious about granting Ali Khan's request for arms, fearing that he would use US weapons against India in Pakistan's ongoing dispute in Kashmir. On his part, frustrated by Truman's prevarication, Ali Khan established diplomatic relations with the PRC on May 21, 1951.

The divergence of the two neighbors in foreign policy was reflected in their bilateral commerce. Following India's virtual suspension of trade with it in early 1950, Pakistan tried to forge trade links with America. The outbreak of war in the Korean peninsula in June 1950 helped. The subsequent hike in the prices of such raw materials as jute, leather, and cotton benefited Pakistan, being a supplier of raw materials. The trade rupture with India also accelerated the building of cotton and jute mills in Pakistan by newly arrived Indian Muslim businessmen, whose backing of the Muslim League prepartition was premised on the hope that one day, in a Muslim state, they would no longer face competition from Hindu industrialists. These new factories reduced Pakistan's dependence on India for finished goods. And an increased demand for raw materials enabled it to diversify its foreign commerce.

Nehru-Ali Khan Interlude

At home the Liaquat Ali Khan government resolved to crush the Communist Party in East Pakistan, where it had substantial support among Untouchable Hindus. During a police raid to arrest communists in the
Untouchables' settlement of Kalshira in mid-December 1949, a policeman was killed. In retribution, a contingent of armed policemen and troops raided Kalshira on December 20, beat up the villagers, and let neighboring Muslims loot their properties, kill some men, and abduct women. All except three homesteads were razed. The nearby Hindu villages suffered a similar fate. Some of the refugees from Kalshira arrived in Calcutta. Their tales of woe were publicized in the West Bengal press, inflaming the feelings of local Hindus. The result was communal rioting in Calcutta. The exaggerated reports of these events in East Pakistan's newspapers strained fragile Hindu-Muslim relations.

In early February the Speaker of the East Pakistan Assembly dis­allowed discussion of the incidents in Kalshira, which had been demanded by the Congress Party members, all of them Hindu. The simmering communal tensions escalated into violence in the capital, Dacca (later Dhaka), following a February 10 rally in which speakers delivered anti-Hindu tirades.

The dispersed crowd of Muslims went on a spree of looting Hindu shops and housing, setting some of them alight. An estimated 50,000 Hindus out of 80,000 among the city's 417,000 residents became homeless during seven hours of murder, pillage, and arson. “What I saw and learnt from firsthand information was simply staggering and heart-rending,” wrote Jogendra Nath Mandal, the (Untouchable) law minister of Pakistan.
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The weak government of Chief Minister Nurul Amin proved unequal to the task of curbing the rioting. It also failed to instruct the authorities in district capitals to take precautionary measures. As a consequence, communal violence spread to several district capitals and rural areas. It included looting, murder, rape and abduction of women, and forcible conversions to Islam. By collating detailed information, Mandal concluded that the total Hindu deaths in Dacca and elsewhere were “in the neighborhood of 10,000,” with the district of Barisal accounting for a quarter of the figure.
5
Large-scale exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan started in the second half of March.

Reprisals followed in West Bengal with attacks on Muslims. In one instance more than one hundred Muslim workers of a jute mill were murdered in Howrah in late March. Nearly two hundred thousand Muslims from the bordering villages of West Bengal were driven into East Pakistan.
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Both Nehru and Ali Khan realized that if they failed to act urgently in unison to stem the tide of communal violence, there would be a
nightmarish reprise of divided Punjab at the time of the partition. Nehru invited his Pakistani counterpart to Delhi. Ali Khan arrived with a large delegation. After six days of intensive negotiations, on April 8 the prime ministers signed major documents on minorities' rights, resolving disputes through peaceful means, and trade, with commercial links to be restored in February 1951.
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