The Men Who Killed Gandhi Read online

  Mountbatten’s success lay in persuading the Congress leaders to accept the inevitability of a truncated India to accommodate the intransigence of a minority group who wanted to secede, for something like this same offer had been made earlier by the British and had been flatly rejected by the Congress. It was as though the Congress now realized that, if Mountbatten could not make Jinnah give up his insistence on secession, no one else could, and that it was futile to hold out for an undivided India. So this time they consented, as Nehru expressed it, ‘to the cutting off of the head to get rid of the headache’.

  What was more, even though they had every right to feel dissatisfied with the verdict, they were so convinced about the uprightness of the judge that they continued to look upon him as a friend and well-wisher. As the talks progressed, a close friendship sprang up between Mountbatten and Nehru which continued to rile Jinnah even after he had got what he wanted, and provoked him to maintain towards Mountbatten a stance that varied between icy formality and insufferable waspishness. He seldom passed up an opportunity to demonstrate a cavalier disregard for Government House protocol, and once sent Mountbatten a letter so offensively worded that, upon reading it, Mountbatten’s Chief of Staff, Lord Ismay, remarked to Campbell-Johnson: ‘It was a letter which I would not take from my King, or send to a coolie.’

  Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, on the other hand, even though they were on terms of easy familiarity with Mountbatten; were scrupulous about observing the proprieties. They would meticulously cede precedence to him on all official occasions and never went to see him without making an appointment in advance.

  Having, perhaps to his own surprise, got the Congress leaders to swallow his plan, Mountbatten had proceeded to administer a further shock: he announced that he had advanced the expected date of transferring power into Indian (and Pakistani) hands from some time in June 1948 to 15 August 1947; from a whole year, to seventy-five days.

  It was a shrewd move, calculated to throw the Congress leaders off balance and, at the same time, to bring home to those who so far had been no more than agitators for freedom the hard realities of the consequences of that freedom. They could no longer sit back and criticize whatever was done or not done by the British, but had to prepare for taking over the running of the government into their own hands.

  Unlike Mahatma Gandhi, Jinnah was not a man of the masses. Though formerly a member of the Congress, Jinnah resigned in 1919 and turned his focus to Muslim interest and joined the Muslim League. His differences with Gandhi and the ideology of Congress deepened after Gandhi’s stand on non-cooperation.

  A very controversial arrangement between the leaders and political parties lead to the complete breakdown of law and order. Riots and mass exodus of people resulted in millions of people losing their homes, their identity. Children and women were the worst sufferers in these dark days before a new beginning. A child looks poignantly (on the facing page) at his surroundings – an abandoned ammunition dump – where the family took shelter after the communal riots broke out in Delhi.

  Partition forced Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan and Muslims from India to leave their homes over night. Innocent people took with them in this ‘exchange of population’, tales of unimaginable horrors – things that had happened to them or they had seen or heard. Reportedly around 14.5 million people crossed the border from either side.

  Some of those who had been clamouring for years for the British to ‘quit India’ were now not so sure that the quitting should be got over quite so precipitately, particularly when they could see that freedom now not only meant that they would have to take over the business of the government which had, for the past century and a half, been run for them by others, but also meant facing the aftermath of their decision to accept Partition. One of the startled members of the Constituent Assembly asked His Excellency whether this desperate hurry to dismantle the framework that had held the country together, even if in subjugation, might not weaken the government’s power to control the spreading violence in the country. This fear was altogether real for, while the proposal of dividing India between Muslims and the rest of the population was being discussed with the country’s leaders, the northern and eastern parts of the country were experiencing a spate of race riots such as the Raj had never been called upon to tackle.

  Mountbatten had grandly waved away such qualms. He told his questioner that, on this particular point, he could give him complete assurance: there would be no bloodshed. ‘I speak as a soldier, and not a civilian,’ His Excellency pointedly added.

  How futile this pledge proved to be is a matter of history. There was bloodshed; carnage on a scale that even primitive conquerors had seldom indulged in. The Partition displaced vast populations, causing a two-way tide of migration that involved twelve million people. Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan and Muslims from India poured out to become parts of refugee columns that resembled great rivers of humanity. They took with them tales of unimaginable horrors; things that had happened to themselves or they had seen and heard. Their sufferings generated a wave of hatred that left few among the subcontinent’s millions untouched. Everyone talked of retaliation, of getting their own back.

  In India, there were nearly forty million Muslims who had decided to stay on. In the towns and villages in which they lived, they became the natural, almost legitimate targets for the mob fury of the Hindus and the Sikhs.

  And yet, at the time that Mountbatten gave his assurance that there would be no bloodshed, it was the one thing that the Congress leaders must have longed to hear. Brought up on a diet of non-violence, and unused to wielding authority, they were altogether overwhelmed by what was happening all around them. Clearly, this was a job for a professional; and if Mountbatten, speaking ‘as a soldier’, was telling them that there would be no bloodshed, why, they had nothing whatsoever to fear.

  Provided, of course, that Mountbatten was on hand to make good his promise.

  To ensure that he would remain, they had ‘unconditionally’ requested him to stay on in India even after the country became independent, ‘to see the interim phase through’.

  So Mountbatten had stayed on. He was now designated the Governor-General, but he was still what he had been as the Viceroy, the Supreme Commander, and, what was more, still regarded himself as a sort of umpire (or at least a balancing influence) between the two dominions; an outsider who would ensure fair play even though, to be sure, he no longer possessed any authority over Pakistan, since Jinnah had refused to have a British head of state even for the interim phase and had decided to make himself the Governor-General of Pakistan.

  With Mountbatten had stayed on his personal friend and confidant, Alan Campbell-Johnson, who had been his Press Secretary since his South-East Asia Command days.

  Working tirelessly to a specially printed calendar which, along with the date, also showed how many days were still left to the transfer of power, Mountbatten managed to wind up the Raj in the seventy-five days that he had allotted himself for the task. It was an altogether amazing performance, but the process could hardly have been messier, or more painful to those at the receiving end. Not that anyone can hold Mountbatten responsible for what happened, or accuse him of not having done everything in his power to prevent it. His miscalculation was that he had banked on the formidable Indian Army and the Air Force being at his disposal to put down communal disturbances. ‘I shall adopt the severest methods,’ he had declared. ‘I will use tanks and aeroplanes to suppress anybody who wants to create trouble.’ He had evidently lost sight of the fact that, with the partition of the country on a communal basis, it was inevitable that the armed forces of the country too would be shared between the two new nations on the same basis.

  And this was what happened. Immediately upon Partition, the Muslim regiments of the army had gone over to Pakistan and so had all but a handful of the Muslim officers and other ranks in the remaining regiments and in the ancillary services; the Navy and Air Force followed much the same pattern. The Indian arm
ed forces no longer comprised the efficient, integrated, well-disciplined fighting machine that the Supreme Allied Commander had been familiar with during the war. To be sure, there were in India a good many all-Hindu and all-Sikh regiments, and these were largely intact, but the communal hatred that Partition had unleashed had soon become so wide-ranging that military personnel too had become affected by it, or at least so it was generally believed. Hindu and Sikh soldiers could no longer be relied upon not to look the other way when the mobs on the rampage were their own brethren and the victims the Muslims, for had they not been fed on a daily diet of atrocities of the Pakistani soldiers against Hindu and Sikh refugees?

  Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that, in the hands of a seasoned overall commander such as Mountbatten, even this eviscerated and supposedly partisan military force would have been perfectly adequate for the task of policing the country’s main refugee routes and ensuring that any violent uprisings by the mobs were immediately put down.

  Unfortunately, even this force was not long available to Mountbatten. Within two months of Britain’s quitting, the two newly independent nations had embarked upon their first military conflict; most of the troops available to India had suddenly to be diverted to prevent Kashmir from being overrun by Pakistan. Virtually none could be spared for taking care of the communal violence that now raged like a prairie fire over most of northern and eastern India.

  Under the Raj, Kashmir or, to give it its full name, Jammu and Kashmir was India’s largest princely state, and it was ruled by a Maharaja. A landlocked principality of 84,000 square miles stretching from the parched plains of the Punjab to the icebound watershed of the Himalayas, it was as large as Great Britain. Because of its mountainous terrain, Kashmir had no railway line, and its principal outlets joining it with the outside world were three roads.

  Whatever its geographical boundaries, the Kashmir the tourists know is confined to the Srinagar valley, which lies roughly in the centre of what, in British days, was the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. This valley is all but inaccessible from three sides because of the formidable chains of mountains that guard it, and its open side faced the part of India that was to go to Pakistan. Both the major roads that joined the Srinagar valley with the outside world came from this side. The third road, which had begun life as a road privately owned by the maharaja to enable him to travel between his summer and winter capitals of Srinagar and Jammu without having to go through what was British territory, now gave the Srinagar valley direct access to India; but this was more like a makeshift mountain track than a proper road, and categorized in Ordnance Survey maps as being ‘jeepable’. It had a treacherously crumbly surface; it was subjected to frequent landslides; it had dozens of terrifying blind bends with no room for oncoming vehicles and, in any case, for five months of the year, from December to April, it was completely cut off by a deep fall of snow. Admittedly, in 1947, work had already begun to transform this track into an all-weather road, but it was not till 1955 and after the Bannihal Tunnel which lies at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet above sea-level was opened that it was completed.

  Of Kashmir’s population of 4.5 million, all but a million, or fully 77 per cent, were Muslims, the remainder being Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists. The Maharaja was a Hindu.

  In virtually all books written about the partition, the Maharaja of Kashmir, Lieutenant-General His Highness Sir Hari Singh, Indar Mahindar, Sipar-i-Saltanat, GCSI, GCIE and ADC to the King Emperor, is shown up as the man responsible for creating what has come to be known as ‘The Kashmir problem’, the principal culprit, the villain of the piece; in particular, the Indian press and political leaders have tended to outdo all others in maligning him. But, while from the point of view of Pakistan such criticism would be entirely justified it was difficult to see how India could have been served better by the maharaja. If anything, instead of denouncing Sir Hari Singh as a sinner, India has every reason to acclaim him as a benefactor.

  Being a border state, Kashmir was, in theory, free to choose either dominion to merge itself in, and Mountbatten, the inflexibly-just outsider, had advised the maharaja to ascertain the will of the people and to act accordingly. This, since the population was overwhelmingly Muslim, was as good as telling him to join Pakistan. For a time the maharaja toyed with the idea of holding back from either dominion and continuing as an independent kingdom, an Asian Switzerland; but he was sternly warned by the Indian Government that it was ‘not prepared to entertain the prospect of an independent Kashmir’. In the light of subsequent events, it seems difficult to believe that the Indian leaders were actually prepared to let Kashmir go over to Pakistan rather than remain as an independent state; but such, to all appearances, was the wisdom of the times.

  Maharaja Sir Hari Singh, who was fifty-two years old and had spent most of those years in the pursuit of pleasure, looked what he was, a bumbling and ineffectual feudal lord – plump, soft, portly, indolent. Being a Hindu, his inclinations were heavily on the side of joining India, but he was shrewd enough to realize that the slightest hint on his part that he was about to do so would have provoked Pakistan into blocking off both of Kashmir’s supply routes at a time when the road linking the Srinagar valley with India was altogether undependable. So Hari Singh did what he had habitually done when confronted with a crisis; he pretended that the crisis did not exist and carried on.

  Jinnah fumed, and with good reason, but Nehru and the Indian leaders had no cause for complaint. They had as good as written off Kashmir and, indeed, had informed the maharaja that, if he were to accede to Pakistan they would not take it amiss, Now it looked as though Kashmir, or a large part of it, was likely to fall into their laps. Neither Nehru nor Patel, nor even Savarkar, the firebrand chief of the Hindu Mahasabha, which was the one political organization in India which had stood firmly against the division of the country and had denounced the Congress for agreeing to it, could have written a neater scenario for manoeuvring Kashmir’s accession to India.

  If Jinnah had emulated Maharaja Hari Singh and done nothing, it is difficult to see how he could have lost Kashmir. But of late he had become a firm believer in what he called ‘direct action’. If Gandhi’s satyagraha was mass civil disobedience, Jinnah’s direct action should be defined as mass violence, it had brought him results in the past and, indeed, had won him Pakistan. Jinnah now decided to employ these strong-arm methods against the Maharaja of Kashmir.

  This time direct action turned out to be a costly blunder, for it provided India with valid grounds to send troops into Kashmir.

  What Jinnah did was to seal off both the roads that led into Kashmir through Pakistani territory, and at the same time to unleash what were originally sought to be passed off as ‘tribal raiders’ to invade it. This barefaced aggression against his domain prompted the Maharaja to cry ‘Foul!’ and to run to India for military help to save his state from being plundered by tribal raiders.

  Now it was India’s turn to dither. For two whole days, Nehru and his cabinet colleagues dutifully sat and listened to Mountbatten who, true to his role of a moderator between the two dominions, harangued them about why it would be wrong to send troops into Kashmir. Incredible as it may seem, even the British Commander-in-Chief of India’s Army, Sir Rob Lockhart, who, after all, was a servant of the Indian Government and thus could not give himself a supra-national role, supported Mountbatten’s arguments on the grounds that such a step would be a grave military risk. But Nehru and Patel held firm and, finding them adamant, Mountbatten gave in, only stipulating that military help by India should be made conditional on the maharaja’s formally acceding to India and on the clear understanding that the question of whether Kashmir belonged to India or to Pakistan should be ultimately decided by the will of the people of Kashmir, which would be ascertained as soon as law and order were restored.

  While, in New Delhi, Nehru and his colleagues were resolutely fending off the arguments of their own Governor-General and Army Chief, the raiders were advancing rapidly o
ver the main highway that led from Abbottabad, in Pakistan, into Kashmir. Within three days, they had captured Muzaffarabad and Domel and looted and burned the township of Uri. On 26 October they had reached Baramula, thirty-five miles from Srinagar.

  Baramula was the sort of place where British colonels and their wives dreamed of settling down, because as likely as not that was where they had spent their honeymoons; a riverside town known for its mahseer fishing and houseboat living, for its strawberries and roses and dark shady walks, quiet, picturesque, unspoilt, it would have made the ideal setting for a period novel about the great days of the Raj.

  On the morning of 26 October Baramula was all that. By the next evening, it was a smouldering ruin. Out of a population of 14,000, all but 3,000 had been massacred; the church, the convent, the mission hospital were burned down, the nuns publicly dishonoured, the patients in the hospital butchered where they lay. A British officer on leave was forced to witness his wife being raped before he too was hacked to pieces, and another man, a Muslim youth, was nailed to a cross in the town’s main square.

  On 26 October too, Sir Hari Singh announced that he had acceded to India, and there can be no doubt that, if only someone had explained to His Highness that India’s response to his desperate call for help depended on this technicality, he would have done so much sooner.

  The very next morning, Indian troops were airlifted into the Srinagar valley, and by the evening were in action against the raiders. It now turned out that the raiders were equipped with the latest in conventional infantry weapons, that they had been ferried right up to the borders of Kashmir in Pakistani military lorries, and that their mysterious leader, ‘Jebel Tariq’, was none other than one of the most highly rated Pakistani generals, Akbar Khan.1If the Indian leaders had not allowed themselves to be held back by their own Governor-General and their Army Chief, their troops would have been in action two days earlier, and the invaders stopped somewhere beyond Uri. The rape of Baramula would certainly have been prevented.