Hurrying Midnight

BY LARRY COLLINS AND DOMINIQUE LAPIERRE

In each passing century there are a few defining moments. One occurred just seconds after midnight on Aug. 14, 1947, when the Union Jack, emblazoned with the Star of India, began its final journey down the flagstaff of Viceroy's House in New Delhi. The last retreat of that banner proclaimed far more than the departure of the British Raj and the independence of 400 million people. It heralded the end of the Age of Imperialism and its precursor, the Age of Conquistadores, when the great explorers--from Columbus to Cortes, Magellan and Pizzaro--opened up the world by conquering boundless lands for God, gold and the monarchs of Spain, Portugal, France and England.

What a cast of characters stood center stage that historic night half a century ago. Admiral of the Fleet Lord Louis Mountbatten, Earl of Burma, sent out to Delhi to relinquish the finest component of an empire consolidated by his great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Jawaharlal Nehru, a man of impeccable taste, breeding and fastidious intelligence, destined to become the first leader of the tumultuous Third World. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, cool, austere, polite to a fault, determined to force on the departing British the formation of a new Islamic nation (while savoring nightly a whiskey and soda forbidden by that faith).

And, towering above all was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the proponent of nonviolence who hastened the end of empire by the simple expedient of turning the other cheek. In an age when television did not exist, radios were rare and most of his countrymen were illiterate, the "Mahatma," or Great Soul, proved a master of communication. He had a genius for the simple gesture that spoke to his countrymen's souls.

Two new nations, India and Pakistan, were born in an hour of glory and rejoicing, which transformed all too quickly into a cauldron of bloodshed and horror as millions of Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were uprooted from their homes. That appalling outburst of violence dwarfed anything we have witnessed recently in Bosnia or Rwanda. In three years of research for our book Freedom at Midnight, we interviewed the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, for 30 hours. He talked of 250,000 fatalities--an estimate undoubtedly tinged with wishful thinking. Most historians of the period place the figure at 500,000; some put it as high as 2 million.

Could it have been prevented? To find an answer to that question, we read every weekly report submitted to Mountbatten by the governors of India's provinces, officials who represented the best and wisest products of British rule in India, the mandarins of the Indian civil service. None foresaw a disaster even remotely close to the one that overwhelmed the subcontinent.

We talked at length to the Indian politicians who were close advisers to the leaders of the new nations. Without exception, they all urged Mountbatten to transfer power to their hands as swiftly as possible. These men had been agitating and preparing for the exercise of power for years. Nothing was going to delay them in getting that power. If violence were to follow the division of the subcontinent, well, they were confident they could handle it. What their innermost thoughts might have been cannot be said. But all of them, in their recorded conversations with Mountbatten, minimized the dangers that partition posed, and vastly overstated their abilities to deal with them. It was a classic--and tragic--example of political ambition taking precedence over reality. Only one person foresaw the dimension of the tragedy about to overwhelm the subcontinent. That was Gandhi. And in mid-summer 1947, no one was listening to the prophet of nonviolence.

There was one vital piece of information, however, that was denied to Mountbatten. We uncovered it during our research: the x-ray of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's lungs. This secret document revealed that the future leader of Pakistan was dying of tuberculosis. We met the doctors who had told Jinnah he had less than six months to live. Jinnah was the one unyielding obstacle in Mountbatten's desperate efforts to keep India united. Mountbatten acknowledged to us that had he known the Muslim leader was dying, he would have been strongly tempted to delay independence to await his death. Then, perhaps, an independent Pakistan would never have come into being.

Neither nation has successfully mastered many key problems: overpopulation, corruption, religious extremism. But for all their travails and conflicts, India and Pakistan can take pride in their accomplishments over the last half-century. "A moment comes," Nehru told his countrymen that midnight 50 years ago, "which comes but rarely in history ... when an age ends, when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance." How clearly do we now see that an age was ending that night, an age that had begun one soft summer day in Cadiz in 1492 when Christopher Columbus sailed off on the endless green seas in search of India and found America instead.

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre are the authors of Freedom at Midnight, the bestselling 1976 history of India and Pakistan's independence.
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A response from a Pakistani:

This is how we in Pakistan view this:

As evident from Manuel's statement, Congress back then, and Indians even today, like Manuel, consider that "Jinnah would never have been able to pull off a new nation". They did not take Jinnah and the Muslim league seriously.

Thus Nehru wrote in a letter to Jinnah in 1938:

"... Obviously, the Muslim League is an important communal organization and we deal with it as such. But we have to deal with all organizations... Inevitably, the more important the organization, the more attention paid to it, but this importance does not come from outside recognition but from inherent strength."

To which Jinnah Replied:

"Your tone and language again display the same arrogance and militant spirit, as if the Congress is sovereign power... I may add that, in my opinion, ... unless the Congress recognizes the Muslim League on a footing of complete equality and is prepared as such to negotiate for a Hindu-Muslim settlement, we shall have to wait and depend upon our 'inherent strength' which will'determine the measure of importance or distinction' it possesses..."

Jinnah SHOULD have been able to pull of a new country by dialogue and constitution measures to which he always relied upon. But he was forced to make the importance of Musim League felt through direct action only to be take seriously and heard. We in Pakistan believe Congress itself responsible for cornering, and forcing Jinnah with no other option to show his strength. Had Congress recognized it, the riots could have been prevented.

Thus, from our view point, it was for Congress to prevent the riots, not Jinnah.

The whole Congress mindest which forced Jinnah for direct action is beautifully illustrated in the dialogue between Gandhi and Wavell regarding the Cabinet Mission plan:

Gandhi:
"We (the Cabinet Mission) must either adopt entirely the Congress view if we think it just, or Jinnah's point of view if we thought it juster; But there was no half-way house."

(Actually this half-way house is what could have maintained a united India,
with only some sort of constitutional measures to safe gaurd muslim interests)

Wavell said regarding this:
(Gandhi) seems quite unmoved at the prospect of civial war. I think he has adopted Patel's thesis that if we are firm, the Muslims will not fight".

The spirit of Jinnah's direct action, can be seen in his letter to Atlee, just before his call for it:

"I therefore trust that the British Government will still avoid compelling the Muslims to shed their blood, for, your surrender to the Congress at the sacrifice of the muslims can only result in that direction. If politics are going to be the deciding factor in total disregard of fair play and justice, we shall have no other course open to us except to forge our sanction to meet the situation which, in that case, is bound to arise. Its consequences I need not say will be most disastrous and a possible settlement will then become impossible".

The bottomline: Jinnah did not create Pakistan. Congress forced him to do so, in the hope that it will eat its cake and have it.