Gandhi & Churchill (101 page)

On the morning of June 3, 1947, the leaders of the various parties, including Jinnah, gathered to put their signatures to the agreement. Nehru was alarmed by the growing violence across India—it was far more extensive than he anticipated. Partition was the price he had been willing to pay to be rid of Jinnah and the Muslims and to assume power himself; now for the first time he expressed doubts about the speed with which everything was happening. Mountbatten alone remained confident, almost cheerful. His reputation as the man who gave India its independence and got the British out was assured, whatever else might happen.
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That night Nehru, the Sikh leader Baldev Singh, and Jinnah made the announcement of partition to their respective followers over national radio. Jinnah was unable even to utter the words but only grimly nodded to the others when his assent was mentioned. Mountbatten then gave them the thirty-page document his staff had prepared,
Administrative Consequences of Partition.

“It was clear from the reactions at the meeting,” Mountbatten wrote afterward, “that none of the leaders present had even begun to think of the complications with which we are all going to be faced.”
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He saw a row of stunned faces as the reality sank in. India was no more. Ninety million Muslims, 250 million Hindus, 10 million Christians, and 5 million Sikhs were to be divided into two independent countries, both with a single governor-general.
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Mountbatten added his own final touch the next day. He calmly announced that independence would not come next June, as originally promised, but in little more than nine weeks, at midnight on August 14—the anniversary of the Japanese surrender.
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Even Attlee was caught off guard. After 250 years the British had less than seventy-four days to pack their bags and get out.

Mountbatten always claimed he sped up the timetable in order to enhance British prestige and to make sure India stuck to its promise to remain in the commonwealth. But in truth he sensed that he and the British were sitting on the edge of a volcano. They had to leave before it erupted. But when the British were finally quitting India, would there be anything left of India after they did?

The announcement of partition only increased the violence, including in Kashmir. When Gandhi learned of the riots there, he left Bihar for the capital, Srinagar. “You must not expect much of me,” he told the crowds when he arrived in the strife-torn city. He visited a women’s hospital in a refugee camp in Jammu and had to brush the flies away from festering knife wounds. “Repeat the name of Rama,” he told each victim. “That alone will help you.”
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He had tea with the beleaguered maharaja, a man very much in over his head. He spoke to delegations of Hindu workers who were worried about their future if Kashmir became part of Pakistan. He also stopped briefly in the Punjab and its capital, whose name was forever linked to Gandhi’s career and the history of India: Amritsar.

When his train drew up in the railway station, throngs of young Hindu men were standing on the platform. Gandhi moved to the window to greet them. Instead, with one angry voice they shouted out in English, “Go back, Gandhi!” They were furious about the partition, which they saw as Gandhi’s betrayal of the dream of Rama Raj. Gandhi had to stop his ears to keep out the deafening chants until the train could pull away.

The latent violence of his fellow Hindus, which the impending British pullout had unleashed, frightened him. Earlier, when he had tried to include a passage from the Koran in his Hindu prayer meeting, a man had exploded in anger and created such a commotion that Gandhi had had to stop. “I see nothing but evil in this partition plan,” he told his secretary Pyarelal.
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He began to speak of going to live in Pakistan, either in East Bengal or in perhaps the Northwest Frontier.
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In many ways India was becoming a country he no longer recognized.

Gandhi was in a hurry to return to Noakhali by August 15, the day independence would become official. He refused to participate in any of the independence events or celebrations. “India has accepted partition at the point of a bayonet,” he said on the train to Kashmir.
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August 15 should be a day of fasting and spinning and praying as India faced its supreme trial, he argued, not a day of parades or celebrations.

He never reached Noakhali. When the train stopped in Calcutta, members of the city council were waiting for him on the platform. Their drawn anxious faces told the story. Calcutta had seen almost continuous riots since the Day of Action a year ago. Now the city fathers feared that the splitting of Bengal into Hindu and Muslim halves would make them even worse. A former mayor, Muhammad Usman, said he feared the fifteenth might trigger a general massacre of the city’s Muslim minority.
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Gandhi agreed to stay, but only if Calcutta’s Muslim leaders would tell their followers in Noakhali to stop murdering Hindus. (They did as Gandhi asked, with no tangible effect.) Then he and Shaheed Suhrawardy, the Muslim League leader who had organized the original Direct Action Day but now feared Hindu retaliation, agreed to take a stand together. They found a looted house belonging to an elderly Muslim lady in the predominantly Hindu Beliaghata section. Not far away Hindu gangs armed with Sten guns and hand grenades had ethnically cleansed a Muslim working-class neighborhood, leaving no one alive.
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Together Gandhi and Suhrawardy took rooms in the house, its floors strewn with filth and broken glass, and awaited the coming storm.

On the morning of August 15, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru raised the Indian flag over Delhi’s Red Fort. “The free flag of India is the symbol of freedom and democracy not only for India, but for the whole world,” he told the cheering throngs. “If credit is due to any man today it is to Gandhiji.”
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But Gandhi was not present to receive the plaudits. He spent the days leading up to independence in Calcutta literally under siege from an angry Hindu mob. They had demanded to know why he came to Calcutta to defend Muslims but stayed away when Hindus were being killed.

“I have not come for the good of the Moslems alone,” he finally told the furious crowd. “If I am to be killed, it is you who can kill me.” Those words had a curious tonic effect, as did Suhrawardy’s public acceptance of responsibility for the murders during Direct Action. In fact, Independence Day in Calcutta passed better than Gandhi or anyone could have expected. On the fourteenth Hindus and Muslims marched together in a procession through the city, and at dawn cries of
“Hindu Muslim bhai bhai!”
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filled the streets. Gandhi found himself surrounded by cheering throngs who showered him with incense and rose petals, as the new national flag flew overhead.

Mountbatten wrote him a congratulatory letter, calling him “my one-man Boundary Force,” referring to the 23,000-man force that was supposed to keep order during the partition and was failing virtually everywhere. But Gandhi was deeply unhappy.

“Is there something wrong with me?” he wrote to his disciple Amrit Kaur, now Nehru’s health minister. “Or are things really going wrong?” Even the national flag was a disappointment. To his sorrow, Nehru and the Congress had removed his charkha as the national symbol and substituted the wheel of Emperor Ashoka. In effect, the symbol of Swadeshi and Swaraj had been replaced by a symbol of Indian imperial grandeur.

Gandhi felt like a prisoner in Calcutta, terrified that if he left, the killings would start again. In fact, Calcutta had become an oasis of peace in a subcontinent awash in turmoil and bloodshed. Virtually everywhere else hundreds of thousands of panicked people were fleeing their homes and businesses to escape from the neighbors with whom they had lived for centuries, Hindus fleeing east and Muslims west. At one point the line of refugees fleeing West Punjab stretched fifty-seven miles. Meanwhile gangs of thugs dogged their heels, killing and raping as many refugees as they could.

An Indian journalist, D. F. Karaka, was taken to inspect a train that had been carrying Muslims out of the Punjab; it had been ambushed by Sikhs at Amritsar station. More than two thousand bodies were still on the train, ten to fifteen per compartment. Their clothes had been ripped off, and “many a head and hand lay dismembered from the rest of the body…Heads lay cracked as if with a huge nut-cracker. Stomachs were ripped open or pierced…The platform and the railway carriages dripped with blood.” Karaka bitterly realized there were more people killed on that single train than General Dyer had killed in his notorious massacre twenty-eight years before—ironically in the same city. “Their only crime was that they happened to belong to a different religion from those who butchered them.”
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Even Nehru realized things were falling apart. He wrote to Gandhi, “All this killing business has reached a stage of complete madness, and vast populations are deserting their habitations and trekking to the west or to the east.” He had sent his daughter Indira and her little son Rajiv to the hill station retreat of Mussoorie as soon as Independence Day celebrations ended, in order to escape the tide of violence. At the end of August he flew to the Punjab and was overwhelmed by what he saw. “I am sick with horror,” he told Mountbatten. “What we saw was bad, what we heard was worse…There was an odor of death, a smell of blood and burning human flesh…Hundreds of thousands…on the move.”
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Gandhi had also heard of the killings in the Punjab and was determined to go there. The communal peace in Calcutta had proved artificial. Roving gangs began killing again, and Hindu mobs roamed the streets. This time the object of their rage was Gandhi as much as it was terrified Muslims.

If Jinnah and Muslims distrusted Gandhi as a Hindu partisan, millions of Hindus, especially higher-caste Hindus, saw him as not partisan enough. They had welcomed Indian independence as signifying a resurgence of Hindu greatness. The creation of Pakistan seemed an insult, something contrary to history and nature. Many in ultranationalist groups like Mahasabha and the Vishva Hindu Parishad, and paramilitary militias associated with the RSS,
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blamed Gandhi, although he more than anyone else had tried to hold the country together.

A wounded Muslim was brought to Gandhi for shelter. A Hindu mob followed and tried to break into the house. They threatened the Mahatma’s life and shouted insults. Someone even tried to hit him with a lathi but missed. A brick aimed at his head struck a Muslim at his side. Two terrified girls who had traveled to Calcutta with him, his grandnieces Manubehn and Abhabehn, had to hold him back from rushing into the crowd as he screamed, “Kill me kill me, I say, why don’t you kill me?!” Later, Gandhi conducted a sad tour through the city’s smashed streets to view the carnage. He returned looking small and shriveled and in a state of shock. He wrote to Patel, “I feel totally lost.”
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Gandhi had one last nonviolent remedy to try. He announced he would hold a “fast unto death” unless the killings stopped. For four days he refused all food and drank only soda water, until Calcutta’s city fathers, terrified that they might be held responsible if the Mahatma died, agreed to try to stop the mayhem. The next day Gandhi left on the night train for Delhi.

Even from the train platform, he could see the smoke hovering over the city. The very day he ended his fast, September 4, the Indian capital had exploded in bloodshed. Martial law had been declared, the hospitals were full of wounded, and the streets full of dead bodies as crowds looted Muslim shops and set fire to cars and police stations. Nirad Chaudhuri witnessed the violence firsthand that Sunday and returned home in tears.

“I had seen the political riots of August 1942,” he wrote later, “but I had never before had the feeling of a breakdown in government,” as looting, arson, and murder continued unchecked in India’s capital. “I seemed to feel that, figuratively speaking, the ground was slipping from under my feet…I seemed to see the anarchy cooped up within the bowels of Indian society.”
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So did Nehru, and it drove him into a frenzy. He made repeated radio appeals to stop the pogroms; when they failed, he took up a lathi (ironically, the symbol of hated British rule) to try to disperse the rioters, but to no avail. He told R. Prasad that the violence had shaken “my faith in my people. I could not conceive of the gross brutality and sadistic cruelty that people have indulged in…Little children have been butchered in the streets. The houses in many parts of Delhi are still full of corpses…I am fairly thick skinned, but I find this kind of thing more than I can bear.”
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Only Gandhi remained calm and defiant. The massacres were precisely what he had feared would happen if his people turned away from nonviolence: he knew only too well that there was a fine line between soul force and brute force. Lord Mountbatten congratulated him on “the miracle of Calcutta,” but Gandhi was in no mood for congratulations.
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“I must apply the formula of ‘Do or Die’ to the capital of India,” he said. Despite the threats to his life, he visited the hospitals to offer prayers and consolation. When he was driven to visit a refugee center where some 75,000 Muslims were waiting to be evacuated to Pakistan, a mob of Muslim youths, half-demented by their ordeal, surrounded his car.

His driver panicked, but Gandhi calmly dismounted and spoke to them of the need for Hindu-Muslim unity, even though his terrified companions could hear mutterings of
“Gandhi mordabad!”
or “Death to Gandhi!” all around them. The crowd finally dispersed; Gandhi and the car drove on. It was perhaps as close as Gandhi came to being lynched that summer. Despite his calm demeanor and unrelenting steadfastness, inside he was spiritually dying. The senseless violence even spread into Viceroy House, where several of the viceroy’s own servants were murdered. Lady Mountbatten escorted the corpses to the mortuary. Gandhi told her, “Such a happening is unparalleled in the history of the world, and makes me hang my head in shame.”
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For him, that summer in Delhi marked the end of the dream of satyagraha.