Freedom at Midnight (37 page)

A handful of rulers continued to resist the blandishments of Mountbatten, V. P. Menon and Patel. The pressures to herd those last reluctant holdouts into agreement became intense as August 15 drew near. Where he had local Congress organizations, Patel ordered demonstrations and street agitation to force their hands. The Maharaja of Orissa was trapped in his palace by a mob, which refused to let him leave until he had signed. Tra-vancore's forceful prime minister was stabbed in the face by a Congress demonstrator. Shaken, the Maharaja cabled Delhi his accession.

None of the accessions was quite as tempestuous as that of the young Maharaja of Jodhpur. The Maharaja had just ascended the throne on his father's death. He was given to a number of eccentricities like flying, dancing girls and magic tricks—none of them, he realized, apt to stir the sympathy of Congress's Socialists. Together with his colleague the Maharaja of Jaisalmer, he arranged a secret meeting in Delhi with Jinnah to inquire of the Moslem leader what sort of reception they might expect if they took their primarily Hindu states into his dominion.

Delighted at the thought of ripping two key princes away from his Congress rivals, Jinnah took a blank sheet of paper from his desk drawer and passed it to Jodhpur.

"Just write your conditions on this paper," he said, "and I'll sign it."

The two men asked time to withdraw to their hotel to ponder them. There they found V. P, Menon waiting for them. He had been tipped off by one of his mysterious sources as to their stratagem, which eventually could have drawn other states into Pakistan. Menon told the Maharaja of Jodhpur the Viceroy wanted to see him urgently at Viceroy's House.

Seating the prince in a viceregal waiting room, Menon

set off on a frantic search for Mountbatten. Finally, locating the Viceroy, who was unaware of what he had done, in his bathtub, Menon begged him to come down and reason with the stubborn prince.

The Viceroy told the young ruler that his recently deceased father would have been outraged by his behavior. It was folly to try to take the subjects of his Hindu state into Pakistan for purely selfish reasons. He promised the prince that he and Menon would convince Patel to adopt as tolerant a view as possible toward his personal quirks.

Mountbatten left Menon to get the impetuous young ruler's signature on a provisional agreement. When he had gone, Jodhpur pulled a fountain pen made in his magic' workshop out of his pocket. After signing the text, he unscrewed its cap and revealed a miniature .22 pistol, which he pointed at Menon's head.

"I'm not giving in to your threats!" he shouted. Mountbatten, hearing the noise, returned and confiscated the pistol.*

Three days later Menon delivered a final Instrument of Accession to the prince's palace. Glumly the prince signed. Then he decided to bury his past in a celebration, with Menon as his unwilling guest. All afternoon he poured whiskey down the poor civil servant's throat. After that, Menon was forced to gulp drafts of champagne while the prince ordered up a full-scale banquet of roasts and game, an orchestra and a selection of dancing girls. For Menon, a prudish vegetarian, the evening was a nightmare. The worst, however, was still to come. Hurling his turban on the floor in a fit of rage because he thought the music was too loud, the drunken Maharaja dismissed the girls and the band and announced that he would fly Menon to Delhi in his private plane. He rocketed off the field, then twisted his violently ill passenger through every acrobatic stunt he could perform before landing him at Delhi Airport. Green and retching, Menon half crawled from the plane but in his shaking fingers was the document that would deliver one more apple into Patel's waiting basket.

By August 15, the Viceroy would be able to honor his contract with Patel. The basket of apples he would present

* Years later, Mountbatten, himself fascinated by magic, performed the required conjuring trick to win election to the Magic Circle. He lent the Maharaja's pen-pistol to the group to be displayed in the Magic Circle Museum, where it still rests.

him to honor the independence of India would be overflowing. Five princes whose states would be inside Pakistan rallied to Jinnah. Mountbatten and Menon had secured all the rest, with just three exceptions.

But the exceptions were major ones. Driven by a cabal of Moslem fanatics terrified at the idea of losing their privileges in Hindu India, the ruler of the largest and most populous state in India had rejected all of Mountbatten's counsels. Ignoring every effort to bring him into an agreement with India, the Nizam of Hyderabad strove in vain to force Great Britain to recognize him as an. independent dominion. From his palace stuffed with jewels and banknotes wrapped in old newspapers, the miserly ruler had not ceased a bitter plaint at being "abandoned by his oldest ally," and seeing "the bonds of long devotion" linking him to the King-Emperor severed. The Maharaja of Kashmir too continued in his refusal to align himself with either dominion.

The reasons keeping the third and last ruler from acceding to India were of a somewhat different order. Convinced by an agent of the Moslem League that the first act of an independent India would be to poison his beloved dogs, the Nawab of Junagadh had decided to join Pakistan, despite the fact his tiny Hindu state would share no borders with the Moslem nation, rather than permit such an abominable act

"Gentlemen, this is Mr. Savage of the Punjab C.I.D.," Louis Mountbatten told the two startled Indian politicians in his study August 5. "He has a story you should hear."

Whatever that story was, it was certain to get the close attention of Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Kahn, because the body that Savage represented was known as the best British intelligence organization in India. Indeed, its.operatives had penetrated their own political movements to the highest levels.

The nervous Savage cleared his throat and began. The information he was about to reveal had been wrung from prisoners in an interrogation center that the C.I.D. had set up in an unused wing of the Lahore insane asylum. So secret was it considered that Savage had been obliged to memorize it the evening before in Lahore rather than bring it to Delhi on paper.

A group of Sikh extremists, Savage reported, had linked hands with the most fanatical political group in India, the R.S.S.S. At their head stood Master Tara Singh, the third-grade schoolteacher who had called on his followers to drench India in blood at the Sikhs' secret convocation in Lahore. The two groups had agreed to pool their resources and energies in a pair of terrorist actions.

The Sikhs, with their better organization, training and knowledge of explosives, would destroy the heavily guarded "Pakistan Specials," the trains destined to convoy from Delhi to Karachi the key men and stores assigned to the new state. Tara Singh had already installed a wireless set and an operator to flash information on the train's departure and its route to the Sikh armed bands that were to attack them.

The responsibility for the second action, Savage said, had been assigned to the R.S.S.S., whose Hindu members, unlike the Sikhs, could easily pass themselves off as Moslems. The organization was in the process of infiltrating an unidentified number of their most fanatic supporters into the city of Karachi. Each had been given a British Army Mills hand grenade. None of them was aware of the others' existence, so the arrest of one man would not compromise the plan

On August 14, those men were to station themselves along the route that would carry Mohammed Ali Jinnah in triumphant procession through the streets of Karachi from Pakistan's Constituent Assembly to his official residence. As a fanatic young Serbian had plunged Europe into the horror of World War I, so one of those zealots was to assassinate the founder of Pakistan at the height of his glory by hurling a grenade into his open carriage. The furor provoked by that grisly murder, the R.S.S.S. hoped, would launch the entire subcontinent into a savage civil war, from which the numerically superior Hindus were bound to emerge as its undisputed rulers.

The face of the man they wanted to murder whitened at Savage's words. Beside him, Liaquat Ali Khan excitedly demanded that Mountbatten arrest the entire Sikh leadership. Stunned, the Viceroy wondered what to do. Rounding up the Sikh chieftains, he feared, might well start the civil war that the R.S.S.S. wanted.

Turning to the young C.I.D. officer, he said, "Suppose I ask the governor to arrest the Sikh leaders?" Savage

thought, I'll be bloody scared if you do. They were, he knew, isolated in Amritsar's Golden Temple. No Sikh or Hindu police would accept an order to go in after them, and to send in Moslem police was unthinkable.

"Sir," he replied, "I am sorry to have to say there are not enough reliable police left in the Punjab to accomplish an action of that sort. I hate to say it, but I can see no way to carry out such an order."

Mountbatten pondered a moment. Then he announced that he would ask for a joint recommendation on what to do from the Punjab's Governor Sir Evan Jenkins and the two men designated to govern its Indian and Pakistan halves after August 15. Liaquat Ali Khan half rose from his chair at Mountbatten's words. "You want to murder the Quaid-e-Azam!" he protested.

"If that's really the way you feel about it, I'll go along in the same car and get murdered with him," Mountbatten replied, "but I'm not going to throw the leaders of six million Sikhs into jail without the agreement of those gov-

ernors."

That night, the security-conscious Savage returned to Lahore, his briefcase stuffed with toilet paper as a decoy for the letter from Mountbatten to Jenkins he carried tucked into his underpants. He found Jenkins at a reception on the lawn of Falletti's Hotel. As the man who knew more about the Punjab than any Westerner alive read Mountbatten's letter, his shoulders sagged in despair.

"Whatever can we do?" sighed Sir Evan Jenkins. "How can we stop them?"

Five days later, during the night of August 11 to 12, the Sikhs of Tara Singh successfully executed the first phase of the program they had agreed to with the R.S.S.S. Two charges of gelignite buried along its right of way destroyed the first Pakistan Special five miles east of the Giddarbaha railroad station in the Ferozepore District of the Punjab.

Sequestered in a green-shuttered, stucco bungalow on the edge of Delhi's viceregal estate, sweltering in the oppressive summer heat, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the barrister who had never been to India, began to trace out on a Royal Engineers map the boundary lines that would divide eighty-eight million Indians.

The remorseless demand for speed had given him no alternative but to work in the solitude of his bungalow. Cut off from any human contact with the great entities he was dividing, he was forced to visualize the impact of his work on areas that seethed with life, with only the abstractions of maps, population tables and statistics to guide him.

Daily, he was compelled to slice away at an irrigation system imbedded into the surface of the Punjab like the veins in a man's hand without being able to see on the ground the effect his line would have on it. Radcliffe knew that water was life in the Punjab, yet he was unable to survey the meanderings of his line down even one of those vital concrete spillways, sluice gates and reservoirs.

Never would he walk a rice paddy or study a jute field that his pencil was going to mutilate. He would not be able to visit a single one of the hundreds of villages through which his line would run, to contemplate its effect on the hapless peasants it might isolate from their fields, their wells or their roads. Not once would he be able to soften the human tragedies that his boundary was certain to produce by following its trace upon the surface of the land he was dividing. Communities would be severed from the lands they tilled, factories from their freight depots, power plants from their grids, all because of the terrible haste that the Indian leadership had imposed on Radcliffe, compelling him to demarcate, on an average, 30 miles of frontier every day ef this land that he had not had time to see, and about whose economy, agriculture and, above all, people he was almost wholly ignorant.

Even the meager tools that he possessed turned out to be hopelessly inadequate. It proved almost impossible to find an ordinance map large enough to serve as his master map. The details on the maps he did find were often inexact. The Punjab's vital five rivers, he noted, had a curious tendency to stray as much as a dozen miles from the beds assigned them by the Punjab's vaunted engineering services. The population tables which were supposed to be his primary guide were inadequate and constantly being distorted by either side to support their conflicting claims.

Bengal proved the easier task. Radcliffe hesitated for a long time over Calcutta's fate. There was, he thought, much logic in Jinnah's claim to it, so there might be a unitary flow of jute from field to mill to port. In the end, however, he felt that its Hindu majority population had to

overrule economic considerations. Once he had resolved that question, the rest of his work in Bengal was easier. His boundary, however, was "just a pencil line drawn on a map," with all the heartbreak that implied. Almost nowhere in that tangle of swamps, marshes and low-lying fields could he find the points of reference a boundary maker seeks, rivers or a crest line.

The Punjab was infinitely more difficult. Lahore's almost equally balanced populations shrieked their rivaling claims to the city. For the Sikhs, Amritsar with its Golden Temple could only be in India; yet it was wedged between Moslem areas.

Beyond them was the province's mosaic of communal pockets set haphazardly amongst one another. Either, Rad-cliffe thought, he followed population as his sole guide, creating a host of unmanageable little enclaves to which access could never be assured, or he followed the dictates of geography and a more manageable boundary, and lopped the pockets off, with all the tragedy that that might imply for those he was condemning to live as minorities inside a hostile majority.

Above all, as the weeks of that terrible summer passed, Radcliffe suffered from the cruel, enervating heat. The three rooms of his residence were littered with maps, documents and reports, all typed out on thin, Indian rice paper. As he hunched over his desk, sleeves rolled up, those sheets of paper would stick to his sweating forearms, leaving on their damp skin when he had peeled them off a peculiar stigmata: the smudged gray imprint of a few typed words, each representing, perhaps, the hopes, the desperate pleas of thousands of human beings.