Freedom at Midnight (63 page)

Its owner, G. D. Birla, was the patriarchal head of one of India's two great industrial families, a financier whose interests included textile factories, insurance, banks, rubber, and manufacturing. Despite the fact that Gandhi had organized Indian labor's first strike in one of his mills, Birla was one of Gandhi's earliest followers. He was one of the principal financial supporters of the Congress Party, and now he offered the Mahatma four rooms in one of the two wings of his palatial estate. It would be the most elegant site in which Gandhi had lived since his return to India. It would also be the last.

The capital of India beyond Gandhi's new abode continued to reel with violence. There were so many uncollected corpses littering the city that one policeman remarked that it was "no longer possible to distinguish between a dead man, a horse or a buffalo." At the morgue, the exasperated coroner protested the police's insistence that he continue to fill out proper bureaucratic forms for each of the bodies pouring into his establishment. "Why do the police make me examine each of them for 'cause of death'?" he protested. "Anybody can see what happened to them."

Finding people to handle the corpses littering the streets was difficult, because of India's caste and religious taboos. One day Edwina Mountbatten and her husband's Naval A.D.C., Lieutenant Commander Peter Howes, passed a bloated corpse in the center of New Delhi. She told Howes to stop, and she waved a passing truck to a halt. Its Hindu driver looked at the corpse, and disdainfully announced

his caste prohibited him from touching it. Unperturbed, India's last vicereine picked it up herself with Howes's help and loaded it into the truck.

"Now," she ordered the astonished driver, "take him to the morgue."

Delhi's Moslems, most of whom now wanted to flee to Pakistan, were assembled in a series of refugee camps, where they could wait in relative safety for transportation to Mr. Jinnah's Promised Land. Cruel irony, those Moslems were herded into two magnificent monuments of that brief era when their Mogul forebears had made Delhi the most splendid city in the world, Humayun's Tomb and the Purana Qila ("Old Fort"). Between 150,000 and 200,-000 people were going to live in those relics of Islam's ancient grandeur in conditions of indescribable filth, without shelter from the sun or the monsoon's cataracts. So terrified were those wretches by the thought of leaving their protective walls that they refused to venture out even to bury their dead. Instead, they threw them from the ramparts to the jackals. Initially, the Purana Qila had two water taps for 25,000 people. One visitor noted its inmates defecating and vomiting in the same pool of water in which women were washing their cooking pots.

_ Sanitation was by open latrine and the constraints of India's society remained in vigor. Despite the growing filth, the refugees in Purana Qila refused to clean their latrines. At the height of Delhi's troubles, the Emergency Committee had to send a hundred Hindu sweepers under armed guard into the fort to perform the chores its Moslem inmates refused to carry out.*

Another of Delhi's curses, its bureaucracy, remained unmoved by the catastrophe. When the refugees in Humayun's Tomb began to dig additional latrines, a rep-

* There were other, similar incidents elsewhere. In Pakistan, the Hindus and Sikhs in a refugee camp complained bitterly to their Moslem guards that they were being forced to live in filth because there were no Untouchables to clean out their latrines. In Karachi, Jinnah's capital, the city's sanitation and street-cleaning services began to collapse because of the panicked flight of Hindu Untouchables. To check the hemorrhage the city's Moslem administrators proclaimed the Untouchables what they always had been in Hindu society, a people apart. Instead of making them pariahs, however, they made them a privileged sect. They were allowed to distinguish themselves by wearing green-and-white armbands similar to those of the Moslem National Guard. The police were given rigorous instructions to protect anyone wearing that armband

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resentative of the New Delhi High Commissioner's office promptly protested that "they were spoiling the beauty of the lawns." Inevitably, cholera broke out. Sixty people died of the dread disease in forty-eight hours at Purana Qila. The Health Department chose to give the cause of their deaths as "gastroenteritis" to cover their failure to provide serum in time. When the Department's representative finally arrived with it, he brought 327 batches of serum and no needles or syringes.

Despite those problems, the efforts of the Emergency Committee set up by Mountbatten, Nehru and Patel began to be felt. With troop reinforcements in the city, a twenty-four-hour curfew was proclaimed and a series of arms searches were carried out. Gradually, the tide of violence in the capital began to ebb.

The ordeal of those days brought Mountbatten and Nehru even closer together. Nehru met with the former viceroy two or three times a day, often, as Mountbatten noted at the time, "simply and solely for company, to unburden his soul and obtain what comfort I can give him." Sometimes Nehru would write to him beginning: "I don't know why I am writing this letter except that I feel I must write to someone to get my troubles off my chest."

The Indian leader drove himself without pity during that period. In a few months he went, one of his female admirers noted, "from looking like a thirty-three-year-old Tyrone Power to a man who had spent three years in Ber-gen-Belsen." His secretary, H. V. R. Iyengar, caught him one day, his head on his chest, catching five minutes' sleep.

"I'm exhausted," Nehru said, "I sleep only five hours a night. God, I wish I could sleep six. How many do you sleep?" he asked.

"Seven or eight," was his secretary's reply.

Nehru looked at him with a grimace. "At times like this," he said, "six hours is essential. Seven is a luxury. Eight is a positive vice."

For Gandhi, in Birla House, the dimensions of Delhi's violence were a surprise and a shock. With his "miracle of Calcutta," the Mahatma had begun to appear as something of a savior to India's Moslems. The man who had so opposed Pakistan would now replace Jinnah as the idol of the Moslems who were left behind in India. As soon as Gandhi arrived in Delhi, a stream of Moslem delegations

flooded Birla House, their leaders cataloguing the ills they had suffered at Sikh and Hindu hands, begging Gandhi to remain in the capital, blindly certain that his presence would guarantee their safety. Stunned, the Mahatma agreed not "to leave Delhi for the Punjab until it has once again become its former peaceful self."

Gandhi was never more faithful to the ideals by which he had lived, never more wholly consistent to the message he had preached, than he was in that sad twilight of his life. Confronted with the cataclysm he had predicted, he clung to the principles that had sustained him since South Africa: love, nonviolence, truth, a belief in the God of all mankind. Their relevance to Gandhi had not changed, his faith in them remained intact. What had changed was India.

To preach love and nonviolence to India's masses as a means of opposing her British rulers had been one thing; to preach love and forgiveness to men who had witnessed the massacre of their children and the rape of their wives, to women who had seen their relatives' throats cut, was something else. Gandhi desperately believed in the validity of his message as the only escape from the cycle of hatred. But now it was a message for saints, and there were few saints in the refugee camps of India that fall.

Despite his uncertain health, Gandhi went each day to those camps trying somehow to reach their embittered inmates crying for vengeance. "Tell us, O Apostle of nonviolence," screamed the inhabitants of one, "how are we to exist? You tell us to give up our arms, but in the Punjab the Moslems kill Hindus at sight. Do you want us to be butchered like sheep?"

"If all the Punjabis were to die to the last man without killing," Gandhi replied, "the Punjab would become immortal." As he had counseled the Ethiopians, the Jews, the Czechs and the British, so he now counseled his enraged Hindu countrymen: "Offer yourselves as nonviolent, willing sacrifices."

His answer was a chorus of outraged jeers and "Go to the Punjab and see for yourself." His reception in the Moslem camps was often no better, despite his achievements in Calcutta. At one, a man thrust an orphaned two-month-old baby at him. Tears in his eyes, Gandhi could only console the Moslems looking on by saying, "Die with God's name on your lips if necessary, but do not lose

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heart." Astonished, the Moslems answered with a chorus of jeers.

When he drove unescorted into Purana Qila camp, a mob of Moslem refugees swirled around his car cursing him. Someone yanked open its door. Unperturbed, he stepped out of the car into their midst. His voice was so weak from the fast he had made for other Moslems that someone had to repeat his words to the angry crowd.

There was no difference as far as he was concerned, he said, "between Hindu, Moslem, Christian and Sikh. All are one to me." The recompense of that fraternal message was a roar of protest from the Moslems around him.

Gandhi was not a man to compromise with the emotions stirred by his fidelity to his own beliefs. He had always mixed Christian and Hindu hymns, readings from the Koran and the New and the Old Testament with those of the Gita at his prayer meetings, and despite the tension he went right on reading from the Koran at his meetings in Delhi.

Suddenly one afternoon, a furious voice in his assembly called out: "Our mothers and sisters were raped, our people killed to those verses." "Gandhi Murdabad" ("Death to Gandhi"), another voice shrieked. The rest of the audience joined in the uproar. There was pandemonium. Stunned, Gandhi was unable to go on. He was shouted down. What the British, and the Boers of South Africa had never been able to achieve, Gandhi's own countrymen succeeded in doing. For the first time in his life, Gandhi was unable to complete a public prayer meeting.

For Madanlal Pahwa, the young man whose name would one day be known throughout all India, the road to revenge began in a doctor's office. The office was located in the city of Gwalior, 194 miles southeast of Delhi, the capital of the state whose maharaja had been addicted to electric trains. With his bald, high-domed head and toothless smile, the homeopath who occupied that office bore an eerie resemblance to Gandhi. Dr. Dattatraya Parchure was famous throughout Gwalior for his sita phaladi, a nature cure of cardamom seeds, onions, bamboo sprouts, sugar and honey, with which he treated bronchitis and pneumonia.

He was famous for something else as well, and it was not a chest complaint that had brought Madanlal to his office. Parchure's real passion was politics. He was the leader of the Hindu extremist organization the R.S.S.S. in Gwalior.

An anti-Moslem fanatic, Parchure maintained a private army of one thousand followers, with whom—as he would later boast—he would drive sixty thousand Moslems from India. Most of the six-anna fees that he collected from his patients, most of the political funds he raised, went to purchasing clubs, knives, tiger claws and firearms for his little army. He was always on the lookout for new recruits, and this stocky refugee with his hatred for the Moslems and his experience in the R.S.S.S. seemed an ideal candidate. Parchure promised Madanlal a chance to savor the vengeance he sought. In return for allegiance, the homeopath offered Madanlal food, lodging and all the Moslems he could kill.

Madanlal accepted. For the next month he operated in one of Parchure's "commandos," slaughtering helpless Moslems fleeing from Bhopal to Delhi, exactly as Moslems had tried to slaughter his father in Pakistan. "We waited at the station," Madanlal would recall. "We stopped the train. We got on board. We murdered them."

Their activities became so blatant that they incurred Delhi's wrath. Gandhi himself denounced them at a prayer meeting. Gwalior's Hindu maharaja finally counseled Parchure to rein in his men.

Frustrated, Madanlal left for Bombay. He was beginning to enjoy the life of a professional refugee. This time, however, he had decided that it was his turn to play the leader's role. He registered in a refugee camp and organized a band of fifty young followers. Then he moved into action.

"We would go every day to Bombay to the Moslem quarter. We would enter a hotel, the best, order a big meal, things like I'd never eaten before. Then, when they asked for money we would say we had none, we were refugees. If they didn't like it, we would beat them and break things.

"Other times we would beat Moslems in the street and take their money. Or we would take the trays of Moslem vendors and sell the things on them ourselves. Every night at the camp my boys would report to me and give me

what they had taken. I would divide it. It was a good life. Slowly, I was getting wealthy."

Soon Madanlal was forced to justify his right to leadership by actions more substantial than petty thievery. At the Moslem festival of Bairam he took two followers and three hand grenades and set out for the city of Ahmed-nagar, 132 miles away. There, they threw their grenades into a passing Moslem procession. As they exploded, Madanlal dashed down the city's unfamiliar alleyways looking for a place to hide for a few hours. Suddenly, he saw a familiar object, the swastika-stamped orange pennant of the R.S.S.S., floating from a balcony on the second floor of a dilapidated hotel called the Deccan Guest House. He ran inside.

"Hide me," he said, bursting into the hotelkeeper's office. "I've just thrown a bomb at a Moslem procession!"

Seated at his desk in the office was the local leader of the R.S.S.S., the pudgy thirty-seven-year-old owner of the Deccan Guest House, Vishnu Karkare. Karkare leaped up and threw his arms into the air in a gesture of thanksgiving. Then, opening them wide, he gathered up the young bomb thrower in a fraternal embrace. For Madanlal, the road to revenge would no longer be a solitary one.

On October 2 an independent India, and the world along with it, celebrated the seventy-eighth birthday of the greatest Indian alive. By the thousands, telegrams, letters and messages flooded Gandhi's Birla House suite in New Delhi, bringing the Mahatma the affectionate homage of his people and his friends around the world. A procession of refugees and Hindu, Sikh and Moslem leaders flowed through his room placing at his feet their offerings of flowers, fruits and sweets. Nehru, Patel, ministers, newsmen, diplomats, Lady Mountbatten gave the day with their presence the stamp of a national holiday.