CHAPTER 16

THE BATTLE FOR DELHI

‘ONE MILLION DEAD’: THIS IS THE MOST CONVENIENT NUMBER to have come out of the wildly varying estimates of how many people may have been killed following partition. Mountbatten preferred the lowest available estimate, which was 200,000, and has been widely condemned for it: the denial of holocausts is always a sticky business, and yet more so when one may be implicated personally.1 Indian estimates have ranged as high as 2 million. Many historians have settled for a figure of somewhere between half a million and 1 million. The figure of 1 million dead has now been repeated so often that it is accepted as historical fact. ‘What is the basis for this acceptance?’ asked the historian Gyanendra Pandey. ‘That it appears like something of a median?’2 Unfortunately so, for the truth is that no one knows how many people were killed, nor how many were raped, mutilated or traumatized. The numbers anyone chooses say more about their political inclination than about the facts. Fewer than 400,000 suggests an apologia for British rule; 400,000 to 1 million moderation; 1 million or more usually indicates that the person intends to blame the deaths on a specific party, the most usual culprits being one or more of Mountbatten, Patel, Jinnah or the Sikhs.

Beyond the dead, there were more numbers, too, plucked from the extrapolations and imaginations of regional officials, army, police and historians. Refugees on the move by the beginning of September: 500,000, or perhaps 1 million. Women abducted and raped: 75,000, or perhaps 125,000. Total who would migrate from one dominion to the other between 1947 and 1948: 10 million, or perhaps 12 million, or perhaps 15 million. The Indian National Archives contain sheaves of charts scribbled by British and Indian officials, recording 87 killed in Bengal here, 43 injured in Madras there. ‘The figures make no pretence to accuracy,’ admitted the Home Department. The Punjab government reported that its casualty estimates were ‘increasing daily as investigation uncovers further tragedies’; the North-West Frontier Province government referred to ‘stray murders’, which were not counted.3 Usually it was impossible to count the number of victims amid the ‘confused heap of rubble & corpses’ that was left behind after riots.4 Sir Francis Mudie, Governor of the West Punjab, remembered that he had to ‘ignore any report of a riot unless it alleged that there were at least a thousand dead. If there were, I asked for a further report, but I cannot remember any case in which I was able to do anything.’5

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or 1 million, or 2 million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at 1 million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burnt alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

Amid these dark tales came one remarkable sign of hope. In Bengal, Gandhi had been faced with the collapse of his hard-won peace. Once again, packs of armed goondas (gangsters) ruled the streets of Calcutta. The years had not been kind to Gandhi. The Salt March had been the apogee of his power and influence; the 1930s a struggle, bitter and increasingly opposed, culminating in a private breakdown; the early 1940s a calamity, with the ill-judged Quit India campaign and mass departure of Muslims from Congress; the later 1940s a wilderness, with his presence treated as an irritation. And yet, despite intense personal disaffection and marginalization by his colleagues, the Mahatma would rally for a final, spectacular swansong. With Calcutta detonating around him, he decided to fast.

Used against the British raj during the war, Gandhi’s fasts had become useless as a political weapon. The British government had decided to let Gandhi die, concluding that the short-term consequences of Gandhi’s death might be easier to manage than the long-term consequences of Gandhi’s life. But as a moral weapon the fasts had power, and now a moral weapon was required. Against the goondas of Calcutta, Gandhi’s fast would prove astonishingly successful.

On 2 September, the Mahatma renounced all food and sustenance except sips of water, and reclined on a cot in a public room at the house in Belliaghatta. The effect was unprecedented. Over the course of little more than a day, the city calmed, and the processions to his house changed their temper from angry mob to penitent pilgrimage. From all parties and all faiths, leaders came to beg with him to give up his fast and save his life. He replied that it was not a question of saving his life. The fast was ‘intended to stir the conscience and remove mental sluggishness’; if the people’s consciences were stirred, there might be the side-effect that he would live. The hours passed, with burly goondas turning up to weep contritely by the Mahatma’s bedside. Finally, on the evening of 4 September, when all the city leaders had signed a pledge that there would be no further trouble in Calcutta, Gandhi broke his fast with a drink of fruit juice.6 ‘In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands’, an awestruck Mountbatten wrote to him. ‘In Bengal our forces consist of one man, and there is no rioting.’7 To the wonder of all observers, Gandhi’s achievement would endure beyond his presence in the city. Aside from a few isolated incidents – no more than in normal times of peace – Calcutta remained orderly for months.

Recovering quickly, the seventy-seven-year-old Mahatma left Calcutta and headed for the place where the need for his moral power was greatest: the Punjab. On the way, he planned to break his journey briefly at Delhi. But, by the time he got there, the capital itself would become the new focus of communal fury.

At the end of August the Mountbattens had gone back up to Simla. The day after they arrived, they had held a farewell party for an aide-de-camp who was returning to England. His train was hijacked, and all 100 Muslims on board murdered – except his own bearer, who hid under a seat. The day after that, the Mountbattens heard that their treasurer and his wife had been killed in another train massacre.8 In Delhi, panic began. From the city centre, smoke could be seen unfurling from nearby villages and the town of Gurgaon. Three hundred Muslims fled to Palam airfield, where they had to be protected by Indian Army troops.9

Appalled, Edwina told Dickie she was going back to the capital.10 On 4 September, he was summoned back, too. The Mountbattens arrived the following day, along with Lord Ismay, recalled from his holiday in Kashmir.11 By that time, Delhi was in turmoil. Blood-chilling reports landed hourly on the desks of government officials. A bomb exploded in the Fatehpuri Masjid, a seventeenth-century mosque at the western end of Chandni Chowk. The police arrived to find a mob throwing bricks at it while troops fired on them. Two Hindus were shot dead.12 In Karol Bagh, between New and Old Delhi, children of all faiths were sitting their matriculation examinations in a local high school, when goondas stormed in and demanded that the Muslim boys be separated from the rest. The boys were taken into another room and slaughtered like animals.13

Mountbatten set up an emergency committee, which met for the first time that afternoon. Patel was full of rage, while Nehru sat at the table with an expression of all-consuming sorrow on his face.14 ‘If we go down in Delhi,’ Mountbatten told them firmly, ‘we are finished.’15 He immediately set up a large and splendid map room in Government House, fitted out with lots of charts, graphs and telephones. His staff stayed up for two nights getting all the little flags into the correct places to represent the Punjab boundary. So exhausted was the lieutenant colonel in charge of this effort that he fainted while showing the committee around the room on 8 September.16 Mountbatten devoted much of his own time to concerns such as whether visitors ought to come through a special entrance and be given a special pass.17

At the suggestion of Nehru, Edwina Mountbatten was put in charge of the emergency committee’s refugee group. While Dickie was still fiddling with his map room, Edwina established and chaired the United Council for Relief and Welfare. It was a swift, effective and hands-on attempt to deal with the reality of the situation. Edwina coordinated fifteen separate relief organizations, two government ministries and one Mahatma into a single targeted team with clear instructions and purpose.18 She began touring the worst areas of trouble, mobilizing volunteers and personally directing the Red Cross effort to improve water, sanitation and medical supplies. Through the United Council, she suggested initiatives ranging from the establishment of a sister organization in Pakistan, all the way down to the setting up of Girl Guide knitting circles to provide pullovers for refugees.19 A sure sign of her effectiveness was that the Governor General’s aides-de-camp began to try to avoid being on her staff. Anyone required to serve with Edwina would have to help with a variety of gruesome tasks in unpleasant locations. She stopped her car when she saw injured or dead people, got out, dodged bullets, and retrieved their bodies to take them to hospitals or morgues. She also ordered her husband’s personal bodyguards to forget about him and patrol the hospitals, following a number of unspeakable attacks on helpless patients as they lay in the wards.20In Edwina’s wake, the main Emergency Committee also got into its swing, cancelling all holidays – including Sundays – to keep the economy going, punishing errant officials, and arranging a volunteer police force.

The battle to bring Delhi back under control was prolonged and vicious. On 6 September, a bomb was thrown into New Delhi’s packed railway station, aimed at fleeing Muslims. The police arrived and fired into a massed Hindu crowd. By this point, 450 were reckoned to have been killed in the previous forty-eight hours of rioting alone. But the worst was still to come. The following day, outbursts of violence erupted all across Delhi, so simultaneously and so brutally that many thought it must have been planned. Looters descended on Connaught Circus, the huge central plaza of New Delhi, built by the proud British as concentric circles of graceful neoclassical arcades. This forum was filled with a baying mob, which began to smash up Muslim-owned shops. The army arrived, and attempted unsuccessfully to disperse the crowd with bullets and tear-gas. Nehru himself arrived a little later armed with a stick, plunged into the crowd and chased looters away from outside the Odeon Cinema. The orgy of destruction was not confined to goondas. Nirad Chaudhuri, who was present, described middle-class couples strolling away from the scene, loaded down with stolen handbags, cosmetics and bottles of scent. He also saw tongas, the light horse-drawn taxis mainly driven by Muslims, left burning by the sides of the road. Their drivers had been dragged from them and murdered. When he returned to his house, he looked back on a view of the city colonnaded with pillars of smoke from arson attacks, and soundtracked by the screams of fire engines and bursts of gunfire. That evening, 6000 Muslims fled from their homes in the middleclass Lodi Colony to the Pak Transfer Office in Connaught Place.21

The rest of 7 September was punctuated by repeated blasts of fire from Sten guns.22 Serious rioting was simultaneously underway in the princely state of Mysore in the south. In Bangalore shops were looted, apparently by police as well as civilians, and Congressmen arrested for lawbreaking.23 In Karachi that day, Jinnah was holding a garden party for the Emir of Kuwait, which was gatecrashed by 500 government workers demanding the rescue of their families from Delhi. Karachi itself had seen a slew of train attacks, bombings and assaults.24

By this point, thousands of Muslims had clustered in any part of Delhi that offered sanctuary: the Jama Masjid; the Purana Qila (Old Fort); Muslim graveyards and Mughal ruins; the Pakistani High Commission; the houses and gardens of well-known Muslims, including Nehru’s two Muslim cabinet ministers, Abul Kalam Azad and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai; and even Humayun’s Tomb, the same gorgeous marble mausoleum that had briefly sheltered the fleeing Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah II ninety years before. Outside the camps, things kept getting worse. On 8 September at Sabzimandi, north of Old Delhi, a confrontation between troops and rioters lasted for twelve hours, leaving the roads ‘littered with bodies’, and the town ‘burnt to ashes’, according to the British High Commissioner.25 Paharganj, just north of Connaught Circus, was reported to be ‘like a battle-field’, its streets filled with dead animals, its buildings ablaze, and the constant pattering of machine-gun fire in the air.26 All flights from Bombay and other cities into Delhi were cancelled. Reports suggested that 600,000 were involved in rioting in the city, and Muslim estimates put their death toll at 10,000. The telephone, telegraph and post systems shut down, as did all public transport.27 A shoot-to-kill order was issued to Delhi police and armed forces. Patel called the Sikh leaders to a meeting, and threatened to set up ‘concentration camps’ and put all Sikhs in them unless the leaders appealed for an end to the violence. They duly did.28 All weapons were banned except, to Jinnah’s fury, Sikh kirpans, which had to be sheathed.29 In conjunction with Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, Nehru organized an airdrop of more than 100,000 leaflets over the Punjab, saying that lawbreakers would be hunted down without mercy or hesitation. By the end of the day, the number of Muslims in the Pak Transfer Office in Connaught Place had doubled to 12,000.

The following day, the riot spread to Bara Hindu Rao, on the north side of Old Delhi. Insurgents had equipped themselves with hand grenades and firearms, and the police and troops had great difficulty in regaining order. More than 5000 residents had to be evacuated the following morning.30 The Pakistani High Commissioner, who had no means of communicating with his government and had long run out of food, absconded to the airfield with the intention of escaping to Karachi. Mountbatten heard in time, and sent a member of his staff to go and pull the man off the plane. The Governor General was acutely aware that the arrival of a hysterical diplomat ‘would have sent Mr. Jinnah through the roof’.31 Such was the confusion that the Pakistani government received the impression that its High Commissioner had been murdered, and a diplomatic incident was only narrowly avoided.32 The High Commissioner was persuaded to delay his departure for two days and allow Lord Ismay to accompany him but, once they got to Pakistan, Ismay was unable to force the terrified man to return to Delhi.33

Filled with aggrieved Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, the capital had become a crucible for the rages that had boiled up across the Punjab. Large-scale riots were no longer a daily, but an hourly threat. In terror, the citizens of Delhi began to mark themselves out with visible signs that they were not Muslim. Hindus shaved their hair to leave a traditional ‘shikha’ tuft on the crown, and left shirts unbuttoned to show the white sacred thread worn across the chest. Indian Christians began to sew large red crosses on to their shirts. All the shops in central Delhi displayed placards saying ‘Hindu Shop’, regardless of their ownership. These public displays of religious identity only made the conflict more tribal.34

‘We are dealing with a situation which is analogous to war,’ announced Nehru on All-India Radio, ‘and we are going to deal with it on a war basis in every sense of the word.’35 But his tough stance isolated him from many in Congress, who conspicuously refrained from condemning Hindu atrocities in fear that they would lose the support of the Hindu majority. Nehru reminded the party’s president, Rajendra Prasad, that under Gandhi’s leadership Congress had always condemned even minor acts of violence. Now its politicians refused to criticize murder, rape and communal hatred. ‘I have no stomach for this leadership’, Nehru wrote in disgust. ‘Unless we keep to some standards, freedom has little meaning’.36 All hopes were now pinned on the small, khadi-draped figure who arrived in the capital by train that day.

Gandhi arrived back to great acclaim and expectations. ‘Delhi will now be saved,’ Muslims told each other. ‘Muslims will now be saved.’37 It was not just Muslims that would be saved, but Nehru, too. Gandhi returned from his triumph in Calcutta with his reputation at a new high, and immediately made his support public for Nehru’s unpopular policies of protecting Muslims, maintaining full religious tolerance, and avoiding war with Pakistan. His arrival had come at a time of desperate need. For those who had survived the riots so far, conditions in Delhi were grim. Communal feeling was so ingrained that, despite Nehru’s efforts, Indian government aid had only found its way to Hindu and Sikh refugees. Muslim refugees had been left to the Pakistani High Commission and non-governmental peace committees. Gandhi insisted that the government take responsibility for all faiths.38 Finding that the Untouchable settlement at the Bhangi Colony was now a refugee camp, Gandhi roomed in the grand New Delhi mansion of his sponsor, G.D. Birla. He visited dangerous sites, though with difficulty. When he visited Hindu camps, so uncontrollable was the ‘rush for darshan’, according to the Times of India, that he did not get a chance to speak.39 One of the first people to visit him was Edwina Mountbatten. Through her efforts for the refugees she formed a working bond with Gandhi that was even closer than her friendship with him in the months before partition.

In response to the crises of September, Nehru flourished. One of his oldest friends, Sri Prakasa, remembered sitting in sickened silence at the thought of the crisis when Nehru came and sat by his side. ‘There are only two things left for us now, Prakasa,’ Nehru said with affection. ‘To go under or overcome our difficulties. And we are not going under.’40 He devoted himself to his constant work with courage and diligence. ‘Almost alone in the turmoil of communalism,’ noted Alan Campbell-Johnson, ‘he speaks with the voice of reason and charity.’41 He set up a city of tents in his garden and filled that and his house with refugees, including two Muslim children he had personally rescued from a roof in Old Delhi while a riot raged below.42 Every day, he walked in the streets and listened to people tell him their sorrows. ‘I know, I know, mere bhai [my brother], it is my sorrow too,’ he replied.43 The old Nehru temper flared up frequently. Jawahar was being driven in his official car when he noticed a Hindu passerby with a cart full of loot from a Muslim neighbourhood. Immediately, he leapt out and told the thief to take it back. ‘They have their Pakistan, we will have our Hindustan,’ replied the man, at which Jawahar flew into a rage, grabbed him by the throat and shook him. ‘If I must die it is an honour to do so at your hands, Panditji,’ gasped the man. Jawahar dropped him in disgust and returned to his car.44

During that first September fortnight, Jawahar’s friendship with Dickie Mountbatten strengthened. ‘He has come suddenly to see me alone on more than one occasion – simply and solely for company in his misery; to unburden his soul; and to obtain what comfort I have to give’, Dickie wrote to the King.45 But Jawahar’s relationship with Edwina Mountbatten became more important still. While Dickie chaired committees, both Jawahar and Edwina fearlessly went out into the streets of Delhi to deal with the rioters. Edwina was with her friend, the Health Minister Amrit Kaur, when they heard that Jawahar had gone out alone. They found him attempting to stop a crowd of armed men. ‘Brought him back!’ Edwina wrote.46 Another evening, Jawahar heard of an attack planned on the Jamia Millia Islamia, a Muslim college outside Delhi. The college was in the middle of riot-torn countryside. At night, the students, fearing for their lives, turned off their lamps and stood guard. They could hear splashes as Muslims from nearby villages were chased into the Jumna River, pursued by mobs intent on drowning them. Without waiting to organize a bodyguard for himself, Jawahar got into a taxi and drove alone through the treacherous countryside straight there – only to find Edwina already on the site, without guards, trying to pacify the would-be raiders.47 ‘Did we get our freedom so that you could kill each other?’ Jawahar shouted at the mob. ‘He was,’ noted one observer, ‘a man who had no fear.’48

Again and again, events brought the two together. Richard Symonds, a friend of Edwina’s who was working alongside her in Delhi and the Punjab, noted the value of her friendship with Jawahar for the relief effort. ‘If we had problems where the Prime Minister’s attention was needed,’ he remembered, ‘she’d got it.’49 At eleven o’clock one evening, Jawahar’s sister Betty was in her brother’s house at York Road, when a telephone call came through from Edwina. Jawahar was not in, so she took the call – noting with interest that the Governor General’s wife had telephoned her brother personally, rather than having an aide-de-camp ring up. ‘Haven’t you heard that there is fighting between a Hindu and a Muslim camp?’ Edwina asked. ‘The rumor [sic] is that a Muslim from his camp shot a Hindu woman in their camp. So now the Hindus are up in arms throwing stones at the Muslims who are unable to protect themselves; and there aren’t enough guards. So I am going down there and I called to see if your brother would like to come with me, but of course …’

Without hesitation, Betty offered to come in Jawahar’s place. Edwina at first demurred. ‘I can’t have you hurt or dead on my hands,’ she said; but eventually she agreed that Betty might be helpful. Shortly afterwards, she arrived in a jeep, escorted by another in front and one behind, with discreetly armed guards. Together, the women drove out of the city to the Muslim camp in question. It was surrounded by an enormous and agitated crowd of Hindus and Sikhs, who were attempting to set it on fire. The few guards present could do little and had been backed against the wall. The man whose wife had been shot was leading the arsonists, screaming, ‘Nehru is protecting the Muslims and this is what they do!’

Edwina climbed out of the jeep, pushed past her guards and positioned herself between the mob and the camp gate. She turned to face the crowd, bricks and stones whizzing over her head, ‘as calmly as though she were at a garden party in the Moghul Gardens’, remembered Betty. Edwina started to address the mob, but her command of Hindustani was not adequate. Betty took over, jumping on top of the jeep and shouting for the crowd to stand down. She told them that her brother was away, but would be back the next day and would be sure to find the murderer.

Some of the protesters calmed down at her words, but the widowed man still attempted to incite them further. ‘All right,’ Edwina said to Betty. ‘Now tell them that if they continue this way we will order the guards to shoot down the agitators, it doesn’t matter which side they are on.’

Betty realized immediately that calling the mob’s bluff was a risky strategy. Even with their guards, she and Edwina were massively outnumbered by the rioters. If it came to a fight, they would probably be torn to pieces. But, lacking other options, she shouted out the message. To her great relief, it worked. The shouting stopped, and the crowd dispersed.

When the panic had subsided, Edwina and Betty went into the camp to talk to the terrified Muslims, who pleaded their innocence and said they had no guns. Betty was inclined to believe them. Most were half-naked, and none had many possessions. An hour later, they headed back to York Road, to find Jawahar just returned. Edwina told him the story. ‘Poor Bhai was so tired and distressed that he flew into one of his fine rages, angry at both sides,’ Betty recalled. He started an investigation the very next morning. It found that the dead woman had long been ill with tuberculosis. Worn out by caring for her, her husband had shot her himself – and blamed it on a Muslim. Unlike most of those involved in the partition war, who escaped prosecution, he was later convicted of murder.50

At the beginning of September 1947, Edwina noted in her diary her surprise at how deeply fond of Jawahar she had become.51 The feeling was obviously mutual. In at least one photograph of the two of them visiting a refugee camp, Jawahar’s hand can be seen clasped protectively around Edwina’s. Jawahar’s niece, Nayantara Pandit, came to live with him in October, and observed the relationship first hand. ‘It was a very deep emotional attachment, there’s no doubt about that,’ she remembered. ‘I think it had all the poignance of the lateness of the hour … that terrible cut-off-ness from the world, and anxieties about India, where are we going, all the rest of it. And then to find this – and for her, apparently, also a great and unique love.’52

Dickie would subtly facilitate Edwina’s relationship with Jawahar, just as he had with her other lovers; more so, in fact, for he liked Jawahar. But stoicism comes at a cost, and there is a glimpse of it in a letter Dickie wrote to Noël Coward in October. The film at Government House had been Coward’s masterpiece Brief Encounter, released two years previously and recommended to Dickie by Noël at the time.53 In it, a woman married to a kind but undemonstrative man falls in love with a passionate doctor. She goes through a spectrum of feelings, from exhilaration to despair; her husband simply keeps doing the crossword. Dickie, too, was firmly entrenched in the role of the accepting husband, though he preferred genealogy to crosswords. The congruence between the film and his own situation can only have been enhanced by the fact that Coward had based scripts on the Mountbattens before; and that Celia Johnson, the Edwina-lookalike actress in the lead role, had appeared in Coward and Mountbatten’s In Which We Serve as the wife of the Mountbatten character.

‘I have just seen “Brief Encounter” in our private cinema, and cannot refrain from writing to tell you how deeply it moved me’, wrote Dickie to Noël.54 The two men had drifted apart somewhat in recent years, but something about Brief Encounter had affected Dickie on an intimate level. It is almost the only instance among all his papers in which he can be seen to respond emotionally to any piece of art.55

So great had been the drama inside Delhi that it would have been possible to forget that the Punjab had not yet calmed. Richard Symonds drove up the Grand Trunk Road in late September, and observed fresh Muslim corpses by the side of the road. At a railway station, he saw a band of 1000 Sikhs, armed with spears and kirpans, awaiting the arrival of the Pakistan Express train, with its consignment of Muslim refugees. When he arrived at the huge Kurukshetra refugee camp, it was to a scene of total disaster: cut off by monsoon rains and flooding, the camp had little food, no clothing, no blankets, no lighting, no medical supplies, and twice the number of people that it could accommodate in its tents.56

On 21 September, the Mountbattens took Nehru, Patel and a few others on a round trip in Dickie’s plane to view the Punjab migrations. Near Ferozepur, they found the first caravan – and followed it for over fifty miles against the stream of refugees without finding its source.57 The refugees moved slowly, in bullock carts or on foot, carrying children, the elderly and the infirm on their backs. Vultures followed the convoys, waiting for deaths which came frequently. Exhausted families would sometimes be forced to abandon their invalid relatives by the roadside rather than carry them further.58 Suffering pushed the communities further apart. Punjabi Hindu women entering Delhi openly rejoiced at the sight of streets filled with Muslim corpses. According to Nirad Chaudhuri, ‘the group of corpses which drew forth the strongest expression of delight from the ladies was that of a mother lying dead with her dead baby clasped in her arms.’59

That night, the party returned to Government House, where the Sunday film was A Matter of Life and Death, and the Sunday dinner was austere. The severe rations in Government House became severer still under Edwina’s watchful eye. When Lord Listowel, the former Secretary of State for India and now Secretary of State for Burma, came to visit, the Mountbattens threw a full ceremonial banquet with all the state pomp – and served a first course of cabbage-water, followed by a main course of one slice of Spam with a potato, and finished off with a solitary biscuit and a small piece of cheese.60 ‘The ADCs are mad with rage at me’, Edwina wrote with satisfaction, ‘as they think food can be spirited out of the skies’.61

Even after Delhi was subdued the situation outside Government House remained dire. The camps had not been prepared: there was no water, no food, no sanitation, no security. Anees Kidwai, the widow of a murdered government official and sister-in-law of Communications Minister Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, went to work in the camp at the Purana Qila. She described a shambolic mass of tents among which ‘naked children, unkempt women, girls without their heads covered and men overcome with anger wandered up and down endlessly’.62 Still no one kept count of how many Muslim refugees there were. By the middle of September, around 60 per cent of the Muslims of Old Delhi and 90 per cent of the Muslims of New Delhi were thought to have left their homes. There were thousands clustered into each of the biggest camps, at the Purana Qila and Humayun’s Tomb: perhaps 60,000 in each, perhaps 80,000, perhaps even 100,000. Thousands more had been killed – was it 20,000 now? 30,000? No one knew.63 Someone had counted 137 mosques damaged, a few of which had been forcibly converted into Hindu temples, looted for their libraries, and hung with flags of the fundamentalist Hindu Mahasabha. Gandhi mourned, and condemned the desecration as ‘a blot on Hinduism and Sikhism’.64

To the north and east, Pakistan fared ill. Like India, it suffered riots; trains full of dead bodies turned up in its stations; rich Hindu merchants streamed out of its cities, despite efforts by the Pakistani government to persuade them to stay.65 Grim conditions prevailed at West Pakistan’s refugee camps. Richard Symonds remembered gaunt women with half-starved babies throwing themselves at his feet, their ration in some camps just two ounces of flour a day – enough to make one single chapati.66 Unlike India, Pakistan had to deal with these problems on an empty treasury. The Punjab, its only profitable region, had collapsed. As a result of the migrations, Pakistan had lost 4 million people who had been settled, established and productive, and gained 5 million destitute refugees.67 British India had not been poor, but the dominions had not yet agreed on the details by which its assets would be divided between them. In the meantime, India held on to the lot, while Pakistan struggled to cope. Even at the most basic level, the logistics of setting up the new government had proven impossible. When Ghulam Mohammed, the Finance Minister, had turned up in his Karachi office on 15 August for his first day’s work, he had found it bare except for one table. Everything else had been sent on a train from Delhi, and looted en route.68

Jinnah was livid at what he saw as a deliberate sabotaging of Pakistan. In early September, Ismay had visited him in Karachi and, according to Alan Campbell-Johnson, found the Quaid-e-Azam seething on the brink of ‘precipitate action’.69 He wrote irate letters to Attlee, demanding the help of the Commonwealth; but Attlee had no intention of wading into a fight between two dominions.70 Jinnah appealed to all the other Commonwealth governments directly, and Ismay began to suspect his aim was to push India out of the Commonwealth altogether.71 At the beginning of October, Jinnah sent another long letter to Attlee. By then, the strain was making him ill. Jinnah’s writing was full of spelling mistakes and repetition. ‘I regret to say that every effort is being made to put difficulties in our way by our enemies in order to paralyse or cripple our State and bring about its collapse’, he began. ‘It is amazing that the top-most Hindu leaders repeatedly say that Pakistan will have to submit to the Union of India. Pakistan will never surrender’.72 At the bottom, the usually sharp ‘M.A. Jinnah’ was signed with a tremulous hand.

Under the circumstances, Jinnah saw that he would have to cultivate international allies. On 7 September, he had told a cabinet meeting that communism could ‘not flourish in the soil of Islam’, and that Pakistan’s interests would best be served by friendship with ‘the two great democratic countries, namely, the U.K. and the U.S.A., rather than with Russia’.73 Jinnah sought to present his new nation as a crucial strategic ally: a buffer zone between Communist Russia and dubious India, and a vantage point between China and the Middle East. For most of the nineteenth century, Britain and Russia had played the ‘Great Game’ for primacy in Central Asia. Now a new Great Game was beginning, and elements in the United States government were already beginning to realize that Pakistan – though they had opposed its creation – presented a more amenable prospect than India. From Jinnah’s point of view, this had one great advantage: money. The Pakistani Finance Minister had already brought up the question of possible financial aid with the American Embassy in Karachi. Pakistan now asked the United States for a massive $2 billion loan, for the purposes of development and defence. In December, to the great disappointment of the Pakistani government, the Americans would offer a more realistic $10 million. But the Cold War was only just beginning; Pakistan’s argument that it should be supported for being anti-Russian would be taken more seriously by the late 1950s, with happy results for its treasury.74

In the meantime, Jinnah was forced to go begging. He sent a letter to the Nizam of Hyderabad on 15 October, reminding him of the ‘special claim’ Pakistan had on his state, and that ‘the resources of the Dominion of India are very vast whereas Pakistan is starting from scratch’. He concluded: ‘Please do not think that I am trying to get more money. God is great, and we shall go through this dire calamity which has overtaken us.’75 Three months later, he would ask the Nizam directly for a large loan.76

The status of Hyderabad troubled India, too. To Patel’s embarrassment, Nehru put Mountbatten rather than him in charge of negotiation. Patel’s relationship with Nehru, never great, was rapidly souring. Patel made it clear that he thought Nehru was too soft on Muslims. Nehru made it clear that he disliked Patel’s Hinduchauvinist tone. With almost half of his cabinet tending towards the establishment of India as a Hindu nation, Nehru had to fight an increasingly hard battle against the swell of fundamentalist feeling.77 ‘As long as I am at the helm of affairs India will not become a Hindu state,’ Nehru announced in a public speech, with a deliberate dig at the orthodox members of his government. ‘The very idea of a theocratic state is not only medieval but also stupid.’78 Lord Addison visited Delhi and Karachi in October, and reported back to Attlee his fears about Patel. If Nehru’s government fell, he warned, Patel would probably take over and install ‘an iron-handed system’, openly hostile to Pakistan.79

While the bigger problem of Hyderabad fermented, the Indian and Pakistani governments had their opening skirmish over another princely state. Junagadh was a small state wedged firmly amid Indian territory in Kathiawar. The Nawab of Junagadh was a Muslim, ruling over a population that was over four-fifths Hindu. Accession to Pakistan, while tricky, was not impossible: Junagadh had a port on the Arabian Sea, within reach of Karachi.80 The Nawab wavered, before on 16 September his Muslim League government acceded to Pakistan.

Coming so soon after the great insurrection in Delhi had been quelled, the petty affair of Junagadh provoked a far more serious reaction than it warranted. Patel wanted to send troops in immediately. Nehru was more circumspect. Mountbatten suggested to Nehru and Liaquat that both India and Pakistan should abide by the results of a plebiscite, a procedure he hoped they would follow for any state. Nehru nodded dejectedly, but Liaquat’s eyes lit up. Mountbatten noted that ‘There is no doubt that the same thought was in each of their minds – “Kashmir!”‘81 Shortly afterwards, the Nawab packed up his beloved dogs – of which there were 800, each with its own keeper – and absconded to Pakistan, leaving his government and his subjects in some confusion.82 At the beginning of November, India sent troops in at the invitation of the Junagadh administration, to the fury of Pakistan. The promised plebiscite, held in February 1948, would count only 91 votes for Pakistan, against 190,779 for India.83

Lord Addison’s assessment of the situation between India and Pakistan made uncomfortable reading for those back in London. Jinnah was in such a weak position financially, militarily and administratively ‘that he would be quite unable to take any action against India even if he wanted.’ Rather, Addison believed, the Quaid-e-Azam was anxious to maintain, and possibly even increase, British involvement in Pakistan. ‘I think it cannot be doubted that the danger to the British connection, and to the eventual success of our policy for the establishment of a progressive Indian democracy, comes much more from India than from Pakistan,’ he concluded.84 As far as the government in London was concerned, Mountbatten might well be on the wrong side.

By October, there were thought to be around 400,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees from the Punjab in Delhi. Thousands could not even fit into the tent city that Nehru had set up outside the capital, a sad and grimy echo of the gorgeous campsite that had been pitched there for his wedding, thirty-one years before. Delhi’s own population had been devastated: 330,000 Muslims had left, representing around one third of the city’s population.85 Many refugees were obliged to sleep rough on Delhi streets, and courtyards, doorways and gutters were filled with their huddled bodies. The death toll continued to rise, not only from the epidemics of cholera, typhus and smallpox that issued forth from the unsanitary camps, but also from traffic accidents. Dozens of refugees who had collapsed, worn out, to sleep on the streets were run over each night.

‘At times I could not believe my eyes or ears,’ remembered Edwina a year later. ‘All I can tell you is that the people I was privileged to work with did a superhuman job and I would like to say that they were of all religions, of all nationalities, and of all beliefs. I worked with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsees, with people from India, Pakistan, Canada, China and America.’86 She and Amrit Kaur continued to coordinate the relief effort, ensuring that vaccines were flown in from Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, and organizing campaigns to inoculate the migrants before they reached Delhi. Edwina also kept Betty Hutheesing on call to visit hospitals, clinics and camps. ‘It was amazing to see her in those terrible places,’ remembered Betty, ‘neither patronizing, nor oversympathetic, but just talking naturally to the inmates. This is the hardest thing of all to do when people are destitute, hopeless or dying.’87

Edwina coped well, but the stress was exacting a terrible toll on Jawahar. ‘Ever since I assumed charge of my office, I have done nothing but tried to keep people from killing each other or visited refugee camps and hospitals,’ he said. ‘All the plans which I had drawn up for making India a prosperous and progressive country have had to be relegated to the background.’88 Speaking at the end of September, he did not yet know that arguably the greatest challenge of all was just about to begin.

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