The Men Who Killed Gandhi Read online

  Was it the fate of Baramula that shocked Mountbatten into the realization that what was at stake was not a fine point in political etiquette, but a bid for annexation by methods reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, ‘a trick’, as he angrily told Ian Stephens, the editor of The Statesman, to enable ‘Jinnah to rid in triumph into Kashmir’? From being an aloof observer, he now became, if not a protagonist, at least someone who took a more sympathetic view of whatever Nehru and Patel had done. He told Ian Stephens that it was India’s intervention that had saved Srinagar from the savagery of the raiders, including the massacre ‘of a couple of hundred British residents’.

  Lockhart’s warnings against sending troops into Kashmir soon proved to have been so grossly exaggerated that they gave rise to rumours that he might have been deliberatedly misleading his political superiors to give Jinnah a free hand in Kashmir, and even that he must have had advance knowledge of Pakistan’s plans to send raiders into Kashmir, which knowledge he had kept to himself. Be that as it may, the fact remains that, though Lockhart had barely completed four months of his four-year contract to serve India, the Indian Government found it expedient to terminate his services.

  So the Kashmir war began; the Kashmir problem was born. It was a lusty child, and still survives.

  If Sir Hari Singh had acted promptly on Mountbatten’s advice, certainly there would have been no Kashmir problem. But, as far as India was concerned, there would have been no Kashmir either. And there can be no doubt whatsoever about what the Indian public would rather have, no matter what Nehru and others have found it necessary to say in their public pronouncements. Kashmir, for better or worse, was Hari Singh’s gift to India.

  The Kashmir war placed Mountbatten in an invidious position. Being an outsider who was making a sincere effort to maintain an even-handed stance between the two dominions, he could not take on the direction of the war on India’s behalf, even though it is difficult to imagine anyone else being better fitted to do so. His principal contribution to resolving the ‘imbroglio’, as he called it, was to prevent it from developing into a full-scale war between India and Pakistan. In the prevailing atmosphere of racial hatred, this itself was an amazing feat; in the light of subsequent history, it can be seen only as a miracle.

  But Mountbatten’s immediate worry at the time was that the war had suddenly deprived him of the troops with which he had so confidently expected to put down the communal violence in the country. Accustomed to having at his beck and call a large number of crack combat units, he was now reduced to looking on helplessly at the charts and graphs of the refugee movements and the spread of riots in the ‘map room’ which he had set up in a wing of Government House. The picture they presented was grim and getting worse every day.

  Not that, in the capital itself, one needed artificial aids to get an idea of the dimensions of the problem. In the six months that had elapsed since the announcement of the ‘Mountbatten Plan’, the city’s population of a little under a million had more than doubled with the influx of refugees. But mere numbers don’t tell the full story, because the refugees were not ordinary people. They were angry, deeply embittered, even desperate people; men and women caught up like insects in a tide and who had been exposed to the most barbaric atrocities committed by man against man. Here is what one of them, a young man called Madanlal Pahwa, who was later sentenced to imprisonment for life for his part in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, stated on oath: ‘We walked night and day. There were men and women of all ages and all conditions. Many could not stand the strain. They – mostly women and children – were left on the road.’

  Madanlal reached a place called Fazilka, in Indian territory, and discovered that another refugee column in which his father and other relatives had set out had fared much worse. They had been attacked by Muslim mobs: ‘Only 40 or 50 had survived out of 400 or 500 and even these were in hospitals. My aunt had been killed, more than a hundred girls abducted, and my father rescued from a heap of the dead.’

  While in Fazilka, Madanlal saw other refugee columns coming in; one of them he says was ‘forty miles long’, and in another marched ‘five hundred women who had been stripped naked... I saw women with their breasts, noses, ears and cheeks cut... one of them told me how her child was roasted and she was asked to partake of the same... another was ravished in the presence of her husband who was kept tied to a tree.’

  These were the experiences of one man. There were, at a rough estimate, seven million refugees in India, and of these a million were concentrated in Delhi. Here they discovered that their miseries were far from over. They were herded like cattle in barbed-wire enclosures, and even these enclosures were so overcrowded that those who came after them had been ordered to move on to other parts of India. Above all, an incredible rumour was doing the rounds that there was some kind of a move afoot to compel them to go back to Pakistan to inhabit their old homes and to take up their vocations as though nothing had happened.

  The rumour had a basis in fact. It was Gandhi, they learned, who was trying to pressurize the government to send the refugees back, so that the Muslims who had left India could return and live in peace among the Hindus. Gandhi, the Mahatma, saviour, freedom fighter, saint, the man who could do no wrong; to the refugees he now stood revealed as a Hindu-hater, a Muslim-lover, an enemy.

  At first they merely cursed him and the other sheep-like leaders of India who listened to his crazy counsels. Then, as they began to wander the streets of Delhi in search of food and shelter, they were horrified to see that, in this ancient city that was their country’s proud capital, a large number of Muslims lived as though by right; there were influential Muslims in the government, in the services, in the professions, in trade; there were even compact, all-Muslim localities right in the heart of the city. And Gandhi himself had come to camp in the city for the avowed purpose of championing the cause of the Muslims. He was exhorting the Muslims to remain where they were, and he was prevailing upon Nehru and Patel to disarm the Hindus and Sikhs so that the Muslims might live without fear.

  Delhi received the highest number of refugees for a single city. Housed in various locations such as the Old Fort, Red Fort and military barracks in Kingsway, life in the city was difficult. Though the fire of discontent was spreading, the Muslim population in Delhi was quite safe, as Gandhi had also moved to Delhi during this period to champion the cause of the Muslims. Seen here is Gandhi in the refugee camp at the Old Fort pacifying the refugees.

  All this, to the refugees who had flocked into Delhi, represented a form of perversity, a manifestation of a total lack of guts on the part of their leaders. This was not how Pakistan had treated them!

  They fell upon the Muslims with a rage that knew no bounds, and it did not make any difference to them that the Muslims of India had done them no harm. In their eyes, they were all enemies, though their only crime was that they had been born Muslims. The Hindu and Sikh residents of Delhi now joined their brethren from Pakistan in this war of retaliation. They formed themselves into bands, collected whatever weapons that came into their hands and began to attack the Muslims. They drove them out and took over their houses; they then went and occupied the mosques and the numerous Muslim shrines dotted all over Delhi. This was one way of making sure of having a roof over their heads for the hard winter months.

  Delhi was thus, if anything, a nodal point of the communal violence rather than just a representative sample. There had been a massacre at Delhi’s Willingdon airport, barely a mile away from town; and right within the compound of Government House, in Mountbatten’s own backyard as it were, the Muslim servants had been attacked by an infuriated mob of Hindus and Sikhs.

  Mountbatten was alarmed. ‘If we go down in Delhi,’ he told one of his colleagues, ‘we are finished.’

  Gandhi, too, had said something on the same lines to one of his callers. ‘If Delhi goes, India goes, and with that goes the last hope of world peace.’

  Both had convinced themselves that they would win or lose the batt
le against violence in Delhi itself.

  With India’s Army and Air Force totally committed to the Kashmir war, Mountbatten could see that his government had little hope of suppressing the riots by force. He must have voiced these fears to Nehru; but did he also mention them to Gandhi and, in particular, did he suggest to Gandhi that he should try to do something on his own to stop the riots?

  According to Mr J.N. Sahni, a prominent New Delhi journalist who, in those days, kept himself fairly close to where the action was: ‘Mountbatten was creating pressure on both Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru that they should do something spectacular... [to make it safe]... for Mohammedans to stay in India... a great gesture for Pakistan to act in the same way.’

  If Mountbatten did ‘create pressure’ on Gandhi, he was only showing that he had, in the few months that he had spent in the country, acquired a better grasp of the ‘mind’ of India than any other British head of state before him. He had assessed the amazing power that Gandhi wielded over the masses. And, even if what he was asking Gandhi to do amounted to a miracle, he was being altogether practical, for Gandhi had done just that, in Calcutta as well as East Bengal – performed a miracle. He had halted a similar wave of communal violence by undertaking a moral crusade to bring about a change of heart in the embattled communities. There was no reason why he should not try out his methods in Delhi as well.

  Whether at Mountbatten’s urging or on his own,2 that evening in January when Gandhi had gone to see Mountbatten he had made his decision. At his daily prayer meeting which he had concluded only minutes earlier, he had announced his intention to go on an indefinite fast.

  In the course of a long and rambling address that was something between a fireside chat and a multi-religious sermon, interspersed with a public reading and answering some of his private mail, Gandhi had told his audience: There is a fast which a votary of non-violence sometimes feels impelled to undertake by way of protest against the wrongs done by society ... and this he does when he has no other remedy left... [My fast] will end when and if I am satisfied that there is a reunion of hearts of all communities.’

  To Gandhi, a fast was the last weapon in his armoury. Whether it would bring about results, remained to be seen. But one thing was certain. If Gandhi’s fast could not bring about ‘a reunion of hearts of all communities’, nothing else could.

  Gandhi belonged to the bania, or trader caste, a people known for their shrewd business sense; and to try to make one weapon, even a last weapon, do the work of two was sound business sense.

  One of the consequences of Partition was that the movable property left behind by the Raj had to be divided between the successor dominions in an agreed proportion. Everything from ships, aeroplanes, guns (and ammunition), railway engines and wagons, down to office furniture and even office files was to be shared out. And, of course, this included money too. The cash possessed by undivided India, which was held in the Reserve Bank of India, amounted to Rs 220 crores and it was agreed that a quarter of this amount or Rs 55 crores, should be paid to Pakistan.

  As with the division of other spoils, there had been a good deal of hard wrangling over the sharing of these ‘cash balances’ as they were called, and it was not till the end of November 1947, and thus more than two months after Pakistan had already come into existence, that agreement was finally reached.

  By this time the Kashmir war had been going for a full month, and it had become known to the Indian Government that the tribal raiders had been aided and abetted by Pakistan and were led by a Sandhurst-trained General of the Pakistani Army. And, even though Pakistan publicly disclaimed all responsibility for whatever the raiders were doing, in private conversation Jinnah had all but admitted to Mountbatten that the raiders were his own creatures. At one of their periodic meetings, Mountbatten had remarked to Jinnah that the Indian Army had so strengthened its position in the Kashmir valley that the raiders stood no chance of capturing Srinagar. Upon this Jinnah had coolly suggested that they should proceed to normalize the situation by both sides withdrawing simultaneously. And when Mountbatten had expressed doubts that the raiders could be pulled back by a mere order Jinnah had blandly assured him: ‘If you do this, I will call the whole thing off.’

  Knowing all this, Nehru felt that to hand over Rs 55 crores to Pakistan was to provide her with ‘sinews of war’, and his deputy premier, Patel, was in complete agreement with him. On 28 November, Patel had bluntly told the Pakistani representative that ‘India would never agree to any payment until the Kashmir affair was settled’.

  And no Indian would have quarrelled with this view. You did not hand out large sums of money to a country at war with you. But Mountbatten did not see it in that light. ‘A step both unwise and unstatesmanlike,’ he told Campbell-Johnson. He must have held forth about this to Gandhi who not only agreed with him but found the whole thing morally wrong. ‘Like an elder brother hanging on to the rightful share of the patrimony of the younger,’ was the way he saw it. How could the Indian Government, which had come into being amidst protestations of so many pious declaration stoop to such outright skullduggery?

  Gandhi had heard what he wanted to hear. He told Mountbatten that he would ‘take up the matter with Nehru and Patel’, and also reassured him that he would make it clear to them that it was he who had sought Mountbatten’s views. As Gandhi rose to go, Mountbatten told him that his decision to go on a fast was a ‘brave move’ and that he hoped it would create the new spirit that was so badly needed.

  And with that Gandhi left, ‘to give effect to his great decision’.

  It had worked before; there was a good chance that it might produce results this time too.

  In 1921, when the Prince of Wales (the future Duke of Windsor) had come on his official tour of India, Gandhi had called upon the public to observe hartals wherever he went. A hartal is a peaceful protest; it involves the closing of shops and the people remaining indoors so that the streets should present a deserted appearance, and indeed it is looked upon by everyone almost as a holiday. But in the very first place that the Prince had come to Bombay, the hartal had gone out of control. Mobs had gathered and waved black flags and shouted slogans, and the severity with which the police dispersed them had made them go berserk. In the ensuing firing, fifty people were killed and several hundreds injured, and there were signs that the disturbances would spread to other parts of India.

  Gandhi was shocked. To restore peace, he had gone on an indefinite fast. Within five days, the riots had subsided.

  One of the consequences of the Partition was the division of moveable property left behind by the Raj – from ships, aeroplanes, to office furniture and files, and even the cash from Reserve Bank – everything was to be shared. Seen here is a railway official meticulously checking the priority luggage carried on the special train to Pakistan.

  Three years later, he had undertaken a fast again. But this time it was what he called a ‘penitential’ fast, with no conditions attached; and it was for a fixed period, twenty-one days. He was punishing himself for the sins of his people. There had been bloody Hindu-Muslim conflict in a distant town called Kohat in the North-Western Frontier Province which had incensed both communities all over India, and it was feared that the riots would spread to other places. Gandhi’s fast had an instant sobering effect on both communities, and, at least for the time being, they were held in check.

  Since then there had been other fasts, for other purposes – one in 1932 to protest against the principle of separate electorates that the British had come out with, under which what were then known as the Depressed Classes or the Untouchables would elect their own representatives to the legislative bodies in the country. This, Gandhi was convinced, would only succeed in driving the Untouchables even further away from caste Hindus and nullify his lifelong struggle to unite the community. This one, too, was to be a fast unto death unless the principle of separate electorates was abandoned. Within five days – again that magic number – the leader of the Depressed Classes
, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar, had agreed to a compromise solution which Gandhi found satisfactory. Separate electorates were given up.

  And yet again in 1943, as a gesture of self-chastisement against the nationwide uprising that had followed the police and military excesses with which the Raj had put down his ‘Quit India’ movement. ‘The disturbances were crushed with all the weight of the Government,’ Mr Churchill had gloated. Gandhi’s answer was to go on a fast; but this time too, it was for a definite period, twenty-one days. Gandhi was then in his seventy-fifth year. Miraculously he survived the ordeal.

  The last occasion on which Gandhi had gone on a fast had been only three months earlier, on 1 September. He was in Calcutta then, where again the majority community – this time the Hindus – had gone berserk. Mr C. Rajagopalachari, the Governor of Bengal, had tried to talk him out of it, and when Gandhi had come out with one of his stock explanations about the promptings of his inner voice had snapped: ‘If you put yourself in God’s hands, why do you add lime juice to the water you allow yourself?’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ Gandhi had answered. ‘Lime juice is a weakness. I shall not even take lime juice.’

  That time, the fast had achieved its purpose within seventy-three hours.

  All in all, this ultimate weapon in his armoury had served Gandhi well. But would it work now, in the face of the seething anger of the refugees and their supporters? They had seen thousands of men and women die. What was Gandhi’s life to them? They wanted revenge, ‘Blood to wipe out blood with,’ as they yelled in the streets of Delhi. They did not want peace, and Gandhi himself was acutely aware of this. ‘We are bidding fair to say good-bye to non-violence,’ he told his secretary Pyarelal at about this time.