Freedom at Midnight (32 page)

They had not solved the affairs of the world, those young officers of the Indian Army. But, with their rifles trained with equal aplomb on the tigers of Bengal or the rebellious tribes of India's tumultuous frontiers, with their barrack-room ballads, their burra pegs of whiskey, their puggree sun helmets and their polo sticks, they had been the proud and distant guardians of history's greatest empire.

The First World War began the Army's second great transformation. From 1918 on, ten places a year at Sand-

hurst were reserved for Indian cadets. In 1932, an Indian Military Academy patterned on Sandhurst was established at Dehra Dun. The young Indians produced by those institutions were indistinguishable from the British officers on whom they were patterned. Above all, the British succeeded in effacing among them the communal divisions afflicting their subcontinent and infusing them with a common loyalty to army and regiment.

Run up to 2.5 million men by 1945, the Indian Army fought with distinction in World War II, in Italy, the Western Desert and Burma. Now, one more inevitable byproduct of the decision to partition India, the force whose greatest pride through so many decades of adventure and conflict had been its immunity to communalism would have to be broken up on those very lines.*

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A mimeographed form submitted to each Indian officer of the Army early in July was the vehicle of its destruction. It requested each man to specify whether he wished to serve in the Indian or the Pakistan Army. The choice raised no problem for the Army's Hindu and Sikh officers; Jinnah did not want them in his army, and without exception they chose to serve India.

For those Moslems whose family homes would still be located in India after partition, however, that simple sheet of paper posed an awful dilemma. Should they walk away from their lands, their ancestral homes, often their families, to serve the army of a state that claimed their allegiance simply because they were Moslem? Or should

* The fraternal spirit inspired by common service in the Indian Army would endure, however, through all the troubled years to come. One day, a quarter of a century later, after India and Pakistan had faced each other on the battlefield for the third time, a group of Pakistan Armored Corps officers sought out a comparable Indian unit to whom to surrender at the end of the Bangladesh war. They finally located an Indian cavalry officer at the bar of a newly conquered club. Before accepting their surrender, the Indian insisted first on standing them a round of drinks.

Then, when they brought in their unit, to lay down their arms, the Indians and Pakistanis who had just finished killing one another in the rice paddies of Bengal organized a round of hockey and football matches.

The scandalized irregulars of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman sent a vigorous protest to New Delhi. From the office of Indira Gandhi came a taut message to the Indian commander. He was engaged, it reminded him, "in war, not cricket."

they remain behind in the land to which so many ties bound them, accepting the risk that anti-Moslem sentiment would stifle their careers?

One of those who agonized over his decision was Lieutenant Colonel Enaith Habibullah, a veteran of El Ala-mein. Habibullah finally took a weekend leave and went to his family home in Lucknow, where his father was vice-chancellor of the university and his mother a fanatic supporter of Pakistan.

After lunch, he borrowed his father's car and drove around the streets of Lucknow. He contemplated the homes of his ancestors, medieval barons in the kingdom of Oudh, the famous residence still scarred by the shells of the 1857 mutiny. For this my ancestors gave their lives, he thought; this is the India I dreamed of in school in England and under the shells of the Germans on the Western Desert. This is my home, this is where I belong. I shall stay.*

For Major Yacoub Khan, a young Moslem officer in the Viceroy's Bodyguard, the decision was the most important in his life. He too went to ponder his decision at his family home in the princely state of Rampur, where his father was prime minister to his uncle, the Nawab.

Tense with emotion, he rediscovered his family mansion next door to his uncle's sumptuous palace. He had so many happy memories of that house—a hundred guests dining off his family's gold service at Christmas; their shoots; the guns heading into the jungle on the rolling backs of twenty or thirty elephants; the fabulous balls that followed them, a full orchestra playing in his uncle's palace, the long lines of Rolls-Royces drawing up to its doors, the champagne flowing. He remembered the tents lined with silk and satin cushions and exquisite Oriental carpets pitched in the midst of the jungle, crammed with delicacies for their picnics. He wandered through his uncle's palace savoring its heated swimming pool, its great banquet hall with oils of Victoria and George V. It was another life, he thought, one destined to disappear in the socialist India that would emerge from partition. What place

* Both of Habibullah's brothers, his sister and brother-in-law went to Pakistan. His mother, the fanatic Jinnahite, however, remained in India. She was not, he noted, prepared to lose her property for anything, "not even Mr. Jinnah's Pakistan."

would that India have for someone like him, a Moslem offspring of a princely family?

That evening he tried to explain his decision to his mother; he was going to leave all that behind and go to Pakistan.

"You have lived your life," he told his mother; "mine lies ahead of me. I do not think there will be a future for Moslems in India after partition."

The old woman looked at him half angry, half in disbelief. "I do not understand all this," she said. "We have lived here for two centuries. Ham hawa-ke bankon davara dye'' she declared in Urdu. "We descended on the plains of India on the wings of the wind. We have seen the sacking of Delhi. We've lived through the Mutiny. Your forefathers fought the British for this land. Your greatgrandfather was executed in the Mutiny. We fought, fought and fought. And now we have found a home here. Our graves are here," she sadly noted.

"I'm old," she concluded; "my days are numbered. I don't understand politics, but as a mother my desires are selfish. I am afraid this will separate us."

No, her son protested. It would be as simple as if he were stationed in Karachi instead of Delhi.

He left the next morning. It was a beautiful summer day. His mother wore a white sari, the Moslem color of mourning, and it outlined her like a bright stain against the somber sandstone of the house behind her. She made her son pass under the Koran she held over his head, then take the Holy Book in his hands and kiss it. Together they recited a few of its verses as a parting prayer. When her last words had been uttered, his mother puffed her cheeks and gently blew her breath toward her son to make sure her prayer would follow him.

As he opened the door of the family Packard waiting to take him to the station, Yacoub Khan turned to wave goodbye. Erect, dignified in her sadness, the elderly woman could only nod in reply. Behind her from the windows of the mansions, a score of turbaned servants gestured their last salaams. One of those windows gave onto the room Yacoub Khan used as a young man. It was still packed with his cricket pads and photo albums, the cups he had won at polo, all the memorabilia of his youth. There was no hurry, he thought. Once he had settled in Pakistan he would come back to pick it all up.

Yacoub Khan was wrong. He would never return to his family home nor would he see his mother again. In a few months' time, he would be leading a battalion of the Pakistan Army up a snow-covered slope in Kashmir, assaulting a position held by men who had been his brother officers in the Indian Army. Among the units seeking to stem his advance would be a company of the Garhwal Regiment. By the vagaries of war its commander would be, like Yacoub Khan, a Moslem. Unlike Yacoub Khan, however, he made the other decision in July 1947. He elected to remain in the land of his birth. He too was from Rampur. His name, too, was Khan, Younis Khan, Ya-coub's younger brother.

The burden of carrying out the most complex task involved in India's partition was to fall upon one lonely man laboring in June 1947 in the Dickensian gloom of his law chambers at 3 New Square, Lincoln's Inn, London. Since he had come down from Oxford with a first in Greats and an All Souls Fellowship, an aura of brilliance had hung over Sir Cyril Radcliffe as some men are surrounded by an aura of saintliness or roguish intrigue. The son of a wealthy sportsman, Radcliffe had followed the law with a passion comparable to that with which his father had spent his life pursuing pheasant and grouse. A slightly stout man with a deceptively benign expression, Radcliffe, it was generally acknowledged in the summer of 1947, was the most brilliant barrister in England.

Despite his encyclopedic knowledge of a vast array of subjects, however, Radcliffe knew virtually nothing about India. He had never written about it or become involved in any of its complex legal problems. Indeed, Radcliffe had never even set foot on the subcontinent. Paradoxically, it was for that very reason that Radcliffe was summoned from his chambers to the office of the Lord Chancellor of England on the afternoon of June 27, 1947.

The central problem left unresolved by Mountbatten's June 3 partition plan was where the boundary lines dividing the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab were to fall. Aware that they themselves could never agree on a line, Nehru and Jinnah, the Lord Chancellor explained to Radcliffe, had decided to place the task in the hands of a boundary commission whose chairman would be a dis-

tinguished English barrister. The man needed for that job was someone without Indian experience, who had never written or spoken a word on its problems. Anyone who had was certain to be disqualified as prejudiced by one side or the other. Radcliffe's admirable legal reputation and his equally admirable ignorance of India made him, the Lord Chancellor pointed out, the idea candidate.

Radcliffe sat back aghast. He barely knew that June afternoon where the Punjab and Bengal were. Trying to divide them was the last job in the world he wanted. If he was ignorant of India, he knew enough of judicial proceedings to realize that it would be a thankless task. Like many Englishmen of his age and background, however, Radcliffe was a man with a deep-set sense of duty. England's relationship to India had been unique, and if at this critical juncture the two Indian leaders who were able to agree on virtually nothing else had been able to agree on the appointment of an Englishman to this appalling task, then he felt that he had no choice but to accept.

An hour later, for Radcliffe's benefit, the permanent Under Secretary of the India Office unfolded an ordinary map of the subcontinent on his desk. As his finger traced the course of the Ganges and the Indus, the green stain representing the Punjab plain, the white crest lines of the Himalayas, Radcliffe discovered for the first time the outlines of the enormous provinces he had agreed to divide—eighty-eight million people, their homes and hovels, their rice paddies, jute fields, orchards and pastures, railways and factories, more than 175,000 square miles of the earth's surface all reduced to a piece of colored paper on a bureaucrat's desk in London.

And now, on a similar piece of paper, he was going to have to draw the lines that would divide a subcontinent.

Radcliffe's last meeting before his departure for New Delhi took place in the garden of 10 Downing Street. Clement Attlee contemplated with a certain pride the man whose work would, in a few weeks, affect more directly the lives of more Indians than that of any Englishman in three centuries of Anglo-Indian history.

The Indian scene was heavy with menace, but one thing at least gave Attlee great satisfaction. How gratifying it

was, he noted, that an old Hafleybury School boy like himself was being sent out to take on the task of drawing a line through the homelands of eighty-eight million human beings.

Mountbatten had barely had time to savor his triumph in wringing an agreement from India's warring politicians before another, even more complex problem was thrust upon him. This time his New Delhi interlocutors were not going to be a handful of lawyers trained at the Inns of Court but the 565 members of His Highness Yadavindra Singh's flock of gilded peacocks, the maharajas and na-wabs of India.

The unpredictable, volatile, occasionally irresponsible rulers assembled in the Maharaja of Patiala's Chamber of Princes forced the Viceroy to contemplate the nightmare that had haunted India for centuries. If India's politicians could divide her, her princes could destroy her. They menaced the subcontinent, not with partition but with a fatal fragmentation into a score of states. They threatened to unleash all the fissiparous tendencies of race, religion, region and language lurking just below the fragile surface of Indian unity. Those princes had private armies and air forces, the capacity to disrupt India's railroads, postal communications, telephones, telegraphs, even to alter the flight patterns of her commercial airlines. To respond to their pressures for independence would be to start a fatal process, the disintegration of the subcontinent. The remains of the Indian Empire would become a collection of mutually hostile territories certain to stir the envy of India's great neighbor, China.

Sir Conrad Corfield's secret trip to London had produced at least a limited success. The Cabinet had acknowledged that in theory he was right in arguing that all those ancient prerogatives the princes had once surrendered to the King-Emperor should now return to them. He had opened an escape hatch for his princes, and now he had no hesitation in urging the most important among them to use it.

"No one," Mountbatten noted with a certain bitterness in a report to London, "had given me the slightest indication that the problem of the princes was going to be as

difficult as, if not more difficult than, that of British India."

Fortunately no one was better suited to deal with India's rulers than Mountbatten. He was, after all, one of their own. He had what was to those rulers the most impeccable of references, blood ties to half the royal houses of Europe and above all, to the Crown that had so long sheltered them. Indeed, Mountbatten had first discovered the fabled Indian Empire in the company of many of the princes whose thrones he now proposed to liquidate. They had been his hosts all along his extraordinary odyssey with his cousin the Prince of Wales. Mountbatten had ridden through their jungles on the backs of their royal elephants in pursuit of tigers. He had drunk champagne from their silver goblets, eaten the delicacies of the Orient from their gold services, danced under the crystal chandeliers of their ballrooms with the girl who would become his wife. On their green and princely playgrounds he had had his first exhilarating brush with the sport of which he would become a recognized expert, polo. Among the handful of men in India, Indian or English, close enough to the Viceroy to call him in private by his familiar nickname, "Dickie," were several princely friends acquired on that trip.