Freedom at Midnight (19 page)

A brilliantly successful lawyer, Jinnah moved naturally to politics and for a decade worked to keep the Hindus and Moslems of Congress united in a common front against the British. His disenchantment with Congress dated from Gandhi's ascension to power. It was not the impeccably dressed Jinnah who was going to be bundled off to some squalid British jail half naked in a dhoti and

wearing a silly little white cap. Civil disobedience, he told Gandhi, was for "the ignorant and the illiterate."

The turning point in Jinnah's career came after the 1937 elections, when Congress refused to share with him and his Moslem League the spoils of office in those Indian provinces where there was a substantial Moslem minority. Jinnah, a man of towering vanity, took Congress's action as a personal insult. It convinced him that he and the Moslem League would never get a fair deal from a Congress-run India. The former apostle of Hindu-Moslem unity became the unyielding advocate of Pakistan, the project that he had labeled an "impossible dream" barely four years earlier.

A more improbable leader of India's Moslem masses could hardly be imagined. The only thing Moslem about Mohammed Ali Jinnah was the fact his parents happened to be Moslem. He drank, ate pork, religiously shaved his beard each morning, and just as religiously avoided the mosque each Friday. God and the Koran had no place in Jinnah's vision of the world. His political foe Gandhi knew more verses of the Moslem holy book than he did. He had been able to achieve the remarkable feat of securing the allegiance of the vast majority of India's ninety million Moslems without being able to articulate more than a few sentences in their traditional tongue, Urdu.

Jinnah despised India's masses. He detested the dirt, the heat, the crowds of India. Gandhi traveled India in filthy third-class railway cars to be with the people. Jinnah rode first-class to avoid them.

Where his rival made a fetish of simplicity, Jinnah reveled in pomp. He delighted in touring India's Moslem cities in princely processions, riding under victory arches on a kind of Rose-Bowl-style float, preceded by silver-harnessed elephants and a band booming out "God Save the King"—because, as Jinnah observed, it was the only tune the crowd knew.

His life was a model of order and discipline. Even the phlox and petunias of his gardens marched out from his mansion in straight, disciplined lines; and when the master of the house paused there, it was not to contemplate the beauty of his plants, but to verify the precision of their alignment. Law books and newspapers were his only reading. Indeed, newspapers seemed to be this strange man's

only passion. He had them mailed to him from all over the world. He cut them up, scrawled notes in their margins, meticulously pasted them into scrapbooks that grew in dusty piles in his office cupboards.

Jinnah had only scorn for his Hindu rivals. He labeled Nehru "a Peter Pan"; a "literary figure" who "should have been an English professor, not a politician"; "an arrogant Brahman who covers his Hindu trickiness under a veneer of Western education." Gandhi, to Jinnah, was "a cunning fox," "a Hindu revivalist."

The sight of the Mahatma, during an interval in a conversation in Jinnah's mansion, stretched out on one of his priceless Persian carpets, his mudpack on his belly, was something Jinnah had never forgotten or forgiven.

Among the Moslems, Jinnah had no friends, only followers. He had associates, not disciples; and, with the exception of his sister, he ignored his family. He lived alone with his dream of Pakistan. He was almost six feet tall but weighed barely 120 pounds. The skin on his face was stretched so fine that his high, prominent cheekbones seemed to emit a translucent glow. He had thick, silver-gray hair and—curiously enough for a man whose sister and sole companion for seventeen years had been a dentist—a mouthful of rotting yellow teeth. So stern, so rigorously composed was Jinnah's appearance that he gave off an aura of strength. It was an illusion. He was a frail, sick man who had been living for three years on "will power, whiskey and cigarettes," in the words of his physician.

It was the first of those that was the key to the character and achievements of Jinnah. His rivals accused him of many a sin, his friends of many a slight. But no one, friend or foe, would ever accuse Mohammed Ali Jinnah of a lack of will power.

Mountbatten and Jinnah held six critical meetings during the first fortnight of April 1947. They were the vital conversations—not quite ten hours in length—that ultimately determined the resolution of the Indian dilemma. Mountbatten went into them armed with "the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right thing, not because I am persuasive so much as

because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favorable light." As he would later recall, he "tried every trick I could play, used every appeal I could imagine," to shake Jinnah's determination to have partition: Nothing would. There was no trick, no argument that could move him from his consuming determination to realize the impossible dream of Pakistan.

Jinnah owed his commanding position to two things. He had made himself the absolute dictator of the Moslem League. There were men below him who might have been willing to negotiate a compromise, but as long as Mohammed Ali Jinnah was alive, they would hold their silence. Second, and more important, was the memory of the blood spilled in the streets of Calcutta a year before.

Mountbatten and Jinnah did agree on one point at the outset—the need for speed. India, Jinnah declared, had gone beyond the state at which a compromise solution was possible. There was only one solution, a speedy "surgical operation" on India. Otherwise, he warned, India would perish.

When Mountbatten expressed concern that partition might produce bloodshed and violence, Jinnah reassured him. Once his "surgical operation" had taken place, all troubles would cease and India's two halves would live in harmony and happiness. It was, Jinnah told Mountbatten, like a court case that he had handled, a dispute between two brothers embittered by the shares assigned them by their father's will. Yet, two years after the court had adjudicated their dispute, they were the greatest friends. That, he promised the Viceroy, would be the case in India.

The Moslems of India, Jinnah insisted, were a nation with "distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions. . . . India has never been a true nation," Jinnah asserted. "It only looks that way on the map. . . . The cows I want to eat, the Hindu stops me from killing. Every time a Hindu shakes hands with me he has to go wash his hands. The only thing the Moslem has in common with the Hindu is his slavery to the British."

Their arguments became, the Viceroy would later recall, an amusing and rather tragic game of "round and round the mulberry bush"—Jinnah never conceding a point,

Mountbatten driving at Jinnah from every angle, until he was afraid, as he noted at the time, "I drove the old gentleman quite mad."

For Jinnah, the division that he proposed was the natural course. However, it would have to produce a viable state, which meant that two of India's great provinces, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to be included in Pakistan, despite the fact that each contained enormous Hindu populations.

Mountbatten could not agree. The very basis of Jinnah's argument for Pakistan was that India's Moslem minority should not be ruled by its Hindu majority. How then to justify taking the Hindu minorities of Bengal and the Punjab into a Moslem state? If Jinnah insisted on dividing India to get his Islamic state, then the very logic he had used to get it would compel Mountbatten to divide the Punjab and Bengal.

Jinnah protested—that would give him an economically unviable, "motheaten Pakistan."

Mountbatten, who didn't want to give him any Pakistan at all, told the Moslem leader that if he felt the nation he was to receive was as "motheaten" as all that, he would do well to abandon his plan.

"Ah," Jinnah would counter, "Your Excellency doesn't understand. A man is a Punjabi or a Bengali before he is Hindu or Moslem. They share a common history, language, culture and economy. You must not divide them. You will cause endless bloodshed and trouble."

"Mr. Jinnah, I entirely agree."

"You do?"

"Of course," Mountbatten would continue. "A man is not only a Punjabi or Bengali before he is a Hindu or a Moslem, he is an Indian before all else. You have presented the unanswerable argument for Indian unity."

"But you don't understand at all," Jinnah countered— and the discussion would start again.

Mountbatten was stunned by the rigidity of Jinnah's position. "I never would have believed," he later recalled, "that an intelligent man, well educated, trained in the Inns of Court, was capable of simply closing his mind as Jinnah did. It wasn't that he didn't see the point. He did, but a kind of shutter came down. He was the evil genius in the whole thing. The others could be persuaded, but not Jinnah. While he was alive nothing could be done."

The climax to their talks came on April 10, less than three weeks after Mountbatten's arrival in India. For two hours he begged, cajoled, argued and pleaded with Jinnah to keep India united. With all the eloquence he could command, he painted a picture of the greatness that India could achieve, 400 million people of different races and creeds, all bound together by a central Union government, with all the economic strength that would accrue to them from increased industrialization, playing a great part in world affairs as the most progressive entity in the Far East. Surely, Mr. Jinnah did not want to destroy all that, to condemn the subcontinent to the existence of a third-rate power?

Jinnah remained unmoved. He was, Mountbatten sadly concluded, "a psychopathic case, hell-bent on his Pakistan."

Meditating alone in his study after Jinnah's departure, Mountbatten realized that he was probably going to have to give him Pakistan. His first obligation in New Delhi was to the nation that had sent him there, England. He longed to preserve India's unity, but not at the expense of his country's becoming hopelessly entrapped in an India collapsing in chaos and violence.

He had to have a solution, he had to have it fast, and he could not impose it by force. Military command had given Mountbatten a penchant for rapid, decisive actions, such as the one he now took. In future years, his critics would assail him for having reached it too quickly, for acting like an impetuous sailor and not a statesman, but Mountbatten was not going to waste any more time on what he was certain would be futile arguments with Jinnah.

He was prepared to acknowledge with blunt realism that Operation Seduction had failed to make an impact on the Moslem leader. Neither logic nor Mountbatten's power to charm and persuade had made any impact on him. The partition of India seemed the only solution. It now remained to Mountbatten to get Nehru and Patel to accept the principle, to find for it a plan that could get their support.

The following morning he reviewed his talk with Jinnah for his staff. Then, sadly, he turned to his chief of staff,

Lord Ismay. The time had come, he said, to begin drawing up a plan for the partition of India.

Inevitably, Mountbatten's decision would lead to one of the great dramas of modern history. Whatever the manner in which it was executed, it was bound to end in the mutilation of a great nation, whose unity was the most prestigious result of three and a half centuries of British colonization. To satisfy the exigent demands of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, two of India's most distinctive entities, the Punjab and Bengal, would have to be carved up. The result would make Pakistan a geographic aberration, a nation of two heads separated by 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) of Himalayan mountain peaks, all purely Indian territory. Twenty days, more time than was required to sail from Karachi to Marseilles, would be needed to make the sea trip around the subcontinent from one half of Pakistan to the other. A nonstop flight between its two parts would require four-engine aircraft, which would prove expensive luxuries for the new state.

If the geographical distance dividing the two halves of Pakistan would be great, however, the psychological distance between the two peoples inhabiting them would be staggering. Apart from a common faith in Allah the One, the Merciful, Punjabis and Bengalis shared nothing. They were as different as Finns and Greeks. The Bengalis were short, dark and agile, racially a part of the masses of Asia. The Punjabis, in whose veins flowed the blood of thirty centuries of conquerors, were scions of the steppes of Central Asia, and their Aryan features bore the traces of Turkestan, Russia, Persia, the deserts of Arabia. Neither history, nor language, nor culture offered a bridge by which those two peoples might communicate. Their marriage in the common state of Pakistan would be a union created against all the dictates of logic

The Punjab was the crown jewel of India. Half the size of France, it ran from the Indus river in the northwest all the way to the outskirts of Delhi. It was a land of sparkling rivers and golden stands of wheat, great rich fields rolling down to a distant blue horizon, an oasis blessed by the gods in the midst of India's arid face. Its name meant "Country of Five Rivers," after the five torrents to whose waters the Punjab owed its natural fertility. The most fa-

mous of them was one of the great rivers of the globe, the Indus, which had given its name to the Indian subcontinent. For centuries, the passage of its fast-moving waters had been a passage to India.

Five thousand years of tumultuous history had fashioned the Punjab's character and given it its identity. Its plains had resounded to the galloping hoofs of Asia's conquering hordes. It was in the Punjab that the celestial song of Hinduism's sacred book, the Bhagavad Gita, had been inspired by a mystic dialogue between Lord Krishna and the warrior King Arjuna. The Persian legions of Darius and Cyrus, the Macedonians of Alexander the Great had camped on its plains. Mauryas, Scythians, Parthians had occupied them before being dispersed by waves of Huns and the Caliphs of Islam bringing their monotheistic faith to India's polytheistic Hindu millions. Three centuries of Mogul domination brought India to the apogee of jts power. The Punjab's indigenous Sikhs, with their rolled beards and their uncut hair packed in their multicolored turbans, conquered the province in their turn, before succumbing to its latest occupants, the British.