Midnight’s Fury: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, by Nasid Hajari

RATING

2 stars

N/A = good but not on the scale

1 star = perspective supplementing

2 stars = perspective influencing

3 stars = perspective altering

SHORT SUMMARY (272 words or less)

This book was deeply, deeply personal to me.  All of my family’s stories are intertwined with the historical events of Partition.  It actually is quite amazing and sad that we don’t study this in school.  Literally billions of lives are a generation (or less) removed from Independence and Partition, and it has shaped policies and psychologies affecting at least one-fourth to one-third of the people on this planet.

It is a little exhausting to try and summarize the history here.  I don’t want to do this, but I’d rather just say “read the long summary.”  Especially if you want to understand the very nuanced history in a volatile part of the world.  A lot of current world issues, from military proliferation, to the economic future in the 21st century, to terrorism has its roots in what happened during Partition.  The main point that I can discern, though, that the politics and personalities of two men–Nehru and Jinnah–affected the entire history of Partition, for better and for worse, and for billions of people in subsequent generations.

Sometimes, I am in awe that some of the most seminal events in modern history–not modern 20th century history, but in the last 500 years–occurred a generation ago.  World War II.  Partition, the post-War world order, nuclear proliferation, etc..  Maybe it’s naive to think that these events will have long lasting historical consequences, but man, the period between 1920-1950 was an absolute crazy time in the history of humanity.  And people who are alive now were alive then.  Just really stop and think about that.

LONG SUMMARY

Started July 3, 2016:

-Starting towards the end of 1945, after WWII, the British Empire openly admitted that it could not financially afford to keep India in its empire. During the independence movement, two factions arose:  the Indian National Congress Party, represented by Jawaharlal Nehru and the Muslim League represented by Muhammad Ali Jinnah.  Jinnah and the League feared that a free India would mean perpetual power for the Congress Party, thus subjugating the Muslim minority to majority Hindu rule.

-On August 16, 1946, just shy of a year before independence, the Muslim League organized Direct Action Day in Calcutta.  On this day, a holiday was declared in Calcutta to allow people to protest and hold demonstrations supporting the League.  This ultimately devolved into terrible communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.  It is believed that a League representative insinuated that the police would not interfere with any actions that day, which was the spark for the massacre.  Hindu shop owners were killed en mass.  Hindus retaliated with equal horrifying magnitude, and at the end around 5,000 people were killed (though some estimates say up to 10,000).  This time was referred to as The Great Calcutta Killings.  It lasted for three days.

-Jinnah and Nehru’s life had an interesting contrast.  Jinnah came from little, Nehru a lot.  Jinnah was once seen as the rising star of the Congress Party, poised to lead India after Independence.  It all kind of changed when Gandhi came back to India and implemented the practice of Satyagraha (peaceful resistance to the British).  Jinnah saw this movement as taking a populist approach that appealed to the Hindu majority, with a decidedly religious tinge.  Nehru got on board quickly and thus Jinnah was marginalized whileNehru rose.

-At the start of WW2, the Congress Party launched the “Quit India” campaign, demanding independence from Britain.  Gandhi and Nehru were arrested shortly thereafter, leaving Congress in disarray.  Jinnah made his return to prominence by proclaiming to the British a demand on behalf of the Muslim League for a free promise land for Muslims in India.  Pakistan.  Pakistan is actually a derived acronym–P for Punjab, A for tribal regions bordering Afghanistan, K for Kashmir, S for Sind, TAN for Baluchistan.

-Jinnah’s demand for a separate country was initially seen as a way to veto Congress’s Quit India campaign.  Privately, he did not want to push for Pakistan, but was using it as a bargaining chip to prevent the British from granting independence to Indian and thus ceding control of newly independent India to Congress.

-Jinnah’s demand for a free Pakistan gained traction, especially as Nehru and Gandhi were jailed for their Quit India movement for three years. Ultimately the idea of Pakistan was no longer a bluff but rather a mechanism that provided Jinnah with a popular mandate from the Muslim population.

-Nehru and Congress stated that they would not object to a Muslim majority provinces succeeding but did indicate that the entirety of Punjab and Bengal could not, since only Western Punjab and East Bengal (without Calcutta) were majority Muslim. This would result in a weak and truncated Pakistan that in Nehru’s view would collapse.

-The British basically stipulated that they would hand over a united India since the issue couldn’t be resolved. At first Jinnah agreed but later after comments from Nehru that a free India could do whatever it wanted, Jinnah ratcheted up the Pakistan rhetoric and went back to his position for an independent Pakistan.

-Two instances of sectarian violence were critical in the lead up to independence:  first the violence against Hindus in Noakhali in Eastern Bengal in October 1946 (Wikipedia link).  Reports vary, but it’s said that some 5,000 people died.  Hindus in Bihar retaliated in December 1946 and massacred many Muslims, many more than those killed in Noakhali.  Mahatma Gandhi thought that he could calm the flames in Bihar with moral persuasion, but that did not placate Muslims there.  These terrible incidents were used by Nehru and Jinnah respectively to fan the flames of dissent within Congress and the League.

-Meanwhile, with WW2 having concluded over a year prior, Independence was becoming a matter of when, not if.  After the Bihar retaliation, Nehru and his men believed that “the violence is a game at which both parties can play” and that the League would settle for something less than Pakistan.  Jinnah, on the other hand, allied himself with the defeated Winston Churchill, who looked scornfully at the Hindu population and their ability to lead a free India.  Jinnah appealed Churchill to (1) Acknowledge a moral authority to stay in India after the riots and (2) To make the issue of Pakistan a matter of British politics (a point of differentiation between his Tory Party against the Labour Party ruling at the end of 1946).  Note that the British Labour Party came into power at the end of the war in 1945 in a landslide victory, and the Prime Minister Clement Attlee established much of the post-war consensus policy that governed British politics until Margaret Thatcher’s rise in the late 1970s.  Ultimately, the Labour Party and Attlee agreed to Independence for India.

-The Indian independence movement had an impact on the budding rivalry between the US and USSR.  Some thought that in the new world order after WW2, the chaos and civil war in the Indian subcontinent would have led to Soviet intervention and takeover.  This lead to a strong desire for the US and British to have a solution for withdrawal with minimal sectarian impact.  Easier said than done, though.

-The partition debate seemed to all boil down to Punjab.  Congress wanted Pakistan to have a very minimal claim to Punjab while the Muslim League wanted to carve out as much as possible.  A significant amount of communal violence took place in Punjab with a lot of hostilities occurring between Muslims and Sikhs.  It is a bit surprising that Jinnah and the League did not try and ally themselves more strongly with Sikh identification as a hedge against Congress’s claim to Punjab.

-I feel like the intrigue and personalities behind Independence and Partition are just mind boggling. I kind of feel like other freedom movements, in Colonial India, the personalities of so few people had such a big impact on so many millions of people. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Wavell, Attlee, Churchill, Mountbatten. It just seems to me that the issue of Partition hinged a lot on how these personalities intertwined and attracted or repelled one another.

-So, in early 1947, Admiral of the Fleet Louis Frances Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten First Earl Mountbatten of Burma KG GCB OM GCSI GCIE GCVO DSO PC FRS (aka “Lord Mountbatten”) became what would be the last viceroy/governor-general of India. First off, what a douchey long name. Glad the US constitution bans titles of nobility. Anyway, MB was supreme allied commander of SE Asia during WWII before his appointment to viceroy. A lot to tak about, but it boils down to a few things:  he liked Nehru, didn’t really like Jinnah, and saw a unified India as leading the new word order in Asia and the Middle East. On one level he believed that Jinnah’s plan for Partition was still just a bluff. It’s hard to tell whether Jinnah really wanted Pakistan or was always using it as a veto for more power/automony in a unified India.

-It was all about Punjab and Bengal. Both regions were massive and economically important. Jinnah insisted that both Punjab and Bengal remain entirely intact and be part of Pakistan. Nehru and Mountbatten agreed that based on population distribution, East Punjab and West Bengal should stay with India should there be a Partition.

-Turning point:  sectarian violence in Delhi caused MB to forge a plan to allow states to vote to join either India or Pakistan. Partition was now an inevitably. Side note: MB seemed to pick the August 15 date because it arbitrarily fell on the anniversary of the Japanese surrender during WWII. The author makes a point to say that if this how the date of handover and Partition was selected, MB in some regards arbitrarily accelerated the death of hundreds of thousands and displacement of millions that followed.

-For me personally (being half Punjabi, especially) I can totally understand how the legacy of Partition had a huge psychological trauma across subcultures and people of India and Pakistan and how those traumas can infuse themselves into the culture for generations. It makes me want to ponder this more, and think more about my family story through this perspective. Crazy to think that this happened just 70 years ago. Equally crazy to think that we don’t really learn about this stuff in the US. It had to have been one of the most impactful times in modern human history, especially with such close proximity to WWII and the Cold War. Much of the current world order for most of existing humanity was forged during this time.

-On June 3, 1947, Mountbatten announced to India and the world that there would be Partition.  Nehru, Jinnah and Baldev Singh (representing the Sikh cause) each gave speeches to calm their supporters. In most places in India the announcement provided calm; in Punjab it caused more unrest. Mountbatten decided that majority Muslim West Punjab and majority non Muslim East Punjab would vote separately on whether to join India or Pakistan. Sectarian violence drove almost all Hindus and Sikhs out of Lahore and lead to a big diaspora of Hindu and Sikhs, physically and economically.   Ultimately the Punjabi legislature voted for East and Wesr Punjab to go their separate ways. Similarly, Bengalis voted to divide their state with East Bengal going to India and West Bengal joining Pakistan.

-The biggest decision that Jinnah made during the summer of Partition was to refuse Mountbatten’s proposal that he (Mountbatten) be he first governor-general of India and Pakistan post partition. I’ll have to look up what that meant exactly but it seems to have been a quasi leadership role where both countries would be part of the Commonwealth and would gain the benefit of shared protection. It would be sort of a “superstructure” with a single, impartial governor-general uniting the two counties. The Indian Army would remain intact and disputes and alliances between the countries and other foreign dominions could be coordinated peacefully. Nehru and Congress had agreed to this but Jinnah refused. Thus, on Aug 15, Pakistan would have to be ready to govern itself as a completely sovereign and independent country.

-I’m reading now about the details of Partion and the resulting sectarian violence. It’s extremely horrific, to hear stories from that time. The book gives detailed accounts of some of the atrocities, which I appreciate for not sanitizing a terrible time in human history. A lot of stories and books could be written about the dates of Independence and the weeks following Partition, but I’ll summarize some key historical points. After Independence, Punjab was partioned in half, with West Punjab going to Pakistan and Eas Punjab staying in India. Muslim communities in East Punjab were persecuted by Sikh and Hindu communities, and vice versa. Persecution is a complete understatement. There were some true horrors that happened to thousands and thousands of people. I’d give a description, but it’d be too horrific. If you’re really interested, just google “corpse train” or read about the hundreds of mutilated bodies that lined the streets, shops, homes and religious houses on all sides of the border.

-What resulted was a mass refugee movement, primarily by Muslims from out of East Punjab and as the stories of their atrocities made it to Lahore, masses of Hindu and Sikh refugees fled West Pakistan (and retaliatory atrocities then conducted in the west). The situation became unsustainable, as the Border Control regiments were unable to control the violence. Estimates are that 3.5 million people migrated between East and West Punjab, numbers of biblical proportions.

-The communal violence in the new India started to spread to Delhi, which saw a lot of refugee communities settle there. Gandhi, who was in Bengal to quell sectarian violence there (and at least temporarily was able to) thought about going to Punjab to lend his moral weight, but more violence broke out in Bengal and he stayed there. Meanwhile, communications between the two new countries chilled, an iron curtain between the countries. There was also fear on the Indian side of a British coup of the government. This fear was borne from the assassination of the president of Burma, leading to conspiracies of Brotish involvement. Needless to say, paranoia, terror and miscommunication at an all time high.

-There is also a theory that Sikh violence against Muslims was a plot by Sikh leader Tara Singh to cause a war between India and Pakistan where by the Sikh communities in East Punjab could leverage the chaos to break off their own independent state. As the book mentions, there was a real threat of a Balkanization of the Indian subcontinent.

-The issue of Junagadh. Junagadh was a small state surrounded by Indian territory. It had a Muslim king but a majority Hindu population. During Independence the king (the “nawab” pledged his ascension to Pakistan, and the thought from Jinnah was that with it and the Hydrabad state, Pakistan could maintain economic strength and a counterbalance to Indian aggression. India after Independence, objected to Junagadh’s ascension and Nehru and Pate planned to land troops in the region. Nehru then offered Mountbatten a solution–that the decision to join India or Pakistan should be held by referendum, not by the nawab. Thus, Nehru was also confident that majority Hindu Hydrabad would stay with India. But this remained open the question of Kashmir. Side note: despite the internal violence both new countries were quite concerned with appearing as a non-aggressor, non-instigator of conflict in the eyes of the international world.

KASHMIR ISSUE:

-So here it is. The issue of Kashmir. An issue contentious from the date of Independence to present day, where the dispute lead to the birth of insurgency and Islamic radicalization in Pakistan and Afghanistan first manifested, where two nuclear armed countries could point at each other and hit the red buttons to start World War. I have to make a note here. No matter how hard you try, it is very difficult to find and maintain an unbiased view of the Kashmir issues. I gre up with my own biases, with both my parents being army officers in India and a bulk of my family living in Punjab and Jammu. The author of the book even admits that from the beginning, an impartial account of the issues are hard to come by. So what I’m going to do for all issues related to Kashmir: stipulate what appears to be fact and what appears to be a biased perspective. Here we go…

-Kashmir was the ancestral home of Nehru (fact). It was ruled by a maharaja named Hari Singh (fact), who was a Hindu (fact) that ruled over a majority Muslim province (fact). Based on Hindu/Muslim demographics alone, there is an argument that Kashmir naturally belonged in Pakistan (opinion), but this may not be the deciding inquiry (opinion). An analogy to Junagadh and Hydrabad is imperfect (opinion) because though Nehru did raise issue for popular determination for Ascension in both those regions (fact), both of those regions were already enveloped in decidedly Indian territories (fact). Kashmir on the other hand was on the border (fact).  On the other hand, given the sectarian violence in nearby Punjab, Kashmir’s majority Muslim population could have reason to fear persecution (opinion) and thus it also makes sense for Jinnah to make a claim in favor of Kashmir ascending to Pakistan (opinion).

-It’s not clear though that the Kashmir people would have voted to join Pakistan (opinion). Although it was a majority Muslim state, there were portions of Kashmir that were heavily Hindu, like Jammu, and Buddhist, like Ladakh (fact). The author points out that “if Kashmiris were asked their opinion in October 1947, they might have preferred to join India.”   The author also points out that “Pakistan had the plainer case to make, and by many measures, the stronger.”  It was more than 75% Muslim and in some places, like Vale, above 90%.

-Most everything else is speculation. A lot of the animosity between the two countries over Kashmir comes from deep paranoia and mistrust towards each other. A runaway Cold War straight out of Dr. Strangelove or something but here are some more details. Insurgents from West Punjab began crossing the border and launching attacks (fact and opinion). The insurgents were claiming to defend Kashmiri Muslims (fact).  Reports were also being sent to Pakistan of Hari Singh ordering attacks on Muslim villages (fact and opinion).

-Interestingly enough, the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) lay a few hundred miles from the Kashmir border, and obviously this would be a hot zone in the future and would birth the Taliban and have a major impact the current War in Afghanistan. The interesting part is that this area seemed to always be an area of cleric based radicalization. The British bribed clerics and mullahs during World War II to preach anti-Soviet and anti-Nazi sentiments (on account of their godlessness) to enlist a pro-British jihad. Now after the sectarian violence in East and West Punjab, a new holy war was brewing.

-A lashkar, or guerrila army, attacked territories into Kashmir (fact), and it seems to be fact that a lot of these fighters originated in Pakistan. Pakistan publicly main red a neutral, non interference policy on Kashmir (fact).

-As the lashkar approached the capital of Kashmir, Srinagar, Nehru and Congress convened an emergency meeting to decide on sending support (money and arms) to Hari Singh (fact). It’s important to note that Kashmir was still an independent state at this point, not declaring Ascension to either India or Pakistan (fact). Some in Congress believed to withhold aid until Kashmir ascending to India, others argued for immediate intervention as, in their eyes, even if Kashmir was independent, her leader was asking for India’s help (opinion and fact). The Congress ministers approved Indian military aid be sent to Kashmir and to provide other aid via an airlift (fact).

-This is where the Kashmir issue becomes really interesting. So, after the approval of military intervention by Congress, India instructed this guy V.P. Menon to draft the Ascension document for Hari Singh to sign and to go to Kashmir to get it (fact). But Menon finished the document late and missed his flight (despite heavy denials by India over the years, this is a fact). This seems silly, but it becomes very, very important. Because Menon missed his flight and took one the next day, Indian military supplies reached Kashmir before an ascension document was signed by Hari Singh (fact). India has argued that it did not matter, since Singh had asked for India’s help, ascension or not. Pakistan claims that it very much matters, that since Singh abandoned his palace, he abdicated his ability to rule Kashmir and to summon external military aid, and thus, India’s aid was a public and deliberate interference in Kashmir. Menon’s delay also had another big impact. Nehru was planning to inform Liaquat Ali Khan (Pakistan’s first PM) about the Indian aid after the ascension document had been signed, but he delayed due to Menon’s tardiness. By then, the airlift and military presence had began (fact). Talk about a shitty day to miss a flight (fact!).

-Pretty soon after, Indian troops seized control of Sri Nagar from the insurgency and Pakistan threatened to go to war. MB persuaded Nehru and Jinnah to sit down for a summit, but canceled due to internal pressure from Congress (fact). The reasoning of Congress was that India had an upper hand and had no need for a meeting given their position of strength (fact). Jinnah saw this all as a ploy for India to claim Kashmir as it always had. Indians thought the lashkar originated intentionally from Pakistan at the encouragement of Jinnah and Liaquat to seize control covertly and to sell lucrative construction contracts to the United States on a border close to the Soviet Union (fact and opinion). Regardless, Pakistan believed that if India was not going to have talks and invite a popular vote, why should it play by the rules (opinion). As the book says, “For the next six decades, a succession of Pakistani leaders would invoke that question to justify all manner of covert operations, from the country’s nuclear program to its sponsorship of the Taliban.”  Also the book notes that this moment was the turning point where Jinnah officially changed his stance from plausible deniability to open approval and funding for a proxy war in Kashmir. He and Pakistan would never accept the ascension provided by Hari Singh. Nehru’s position was that he would not mind if Kashmir became independent, but it could not go to Pakistan.

-The book makes a good point about Kashmir. Nehru sort of romanticized it throughout the Partion period. His ancestral land, he used the proxy war in Kashmir to try and prove that India was not about the Hindu/Muslim/Sikh rift seen during communal violence but about larger ideals.  And this romanticism, against its beautiful backdrop carries to this day. As the book mentions:  “Mich as Afghanistan would serve for the United States many decades later, Kashmir became the stage for a morality play. At stake was a particular idea of India. If the people of a predominantly Muslim kingdom chose willingly to join a predominantly Hindi nation, Jawaharlal would disprove not just Jinnah’s hateful ideology…but also Sardar Patel’s suspicion that India’s Muslims were disloyal….This was Nehru’s own holy war.”

-Attacks continued in Kashmir with both sides taking their share of blame. According to British reports, in Jammu reports of 20,000 Muslims were killed. In one terrible example, Muslims in Jammuwere loaded onto buses with the promise of being escorted to Pakistan, one for them to be butchered by Hindu and Sikh extremists.

-The problem of Kashmir remained/remains a quagmire. By 1949, the UN drew a formal ceasefire line in Kashmir. This eventually transitioned to the Line of Control boundary set after the 1972 war, and is now the de facto border between India and Pakistan in Kashmir.

-So much of the current war against the Taliban has its origins in what happened during Partition. In the years and decades after, Pakistan poured money into its military and embodies a fear that India could “swallow” it at a moments notice. The series of events are long to infer the rise of the Taliban as a partial byproduct of Partition, but it kind of plays out like this. Pakistan was eager to ally with the West, and particularly the US during the Cold War while India was keen on nonalignment. This, financially and military aid provided by the West was  siphoned and used by Pakistan to bolster its military against India, even though the West’s support was not for this purpose. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Western aid seemed very pertinent in the fight against the Soviets, and thus Pakistan almost had an implicit blessing to radicalize its army and to support what would become the mujahideen. For the West, this was useful vis a vis the Soviet invasion; for Pakistan it had a dual purpose of counterbalancing against India. None other than Osama bin Laden was inspired by the Afghan jihad that was supported and supplied by Pakistan. Many militants who seek to liberate Kashmir to this day come from that same bloodline. As aid continued from the US during the War on Terror, Pakistan continued to keep its eye on both India and also trying to cut ties with he Taliban, though unable to do so. This has come home to roost for Pakistan with their biggest existential threat, arguably more than India, now being the rise of the Pakistani Taliban.

-For India, an unstable, nuclear armed, Taliban threatened Pakistan is a curse, not a benefit. It diverts huge resources to contain that external threat and it prevents India from fully stepping to the mantle as a leader in India.

-The book ends on an optimistic note. That both sides have a strong interest, perhaps now more than ever to end the conflict and to create a free flowing border to be a zone of peace, much like the Saar region between France and Germany. However, make no mistake, “the rivalry is getting more, rather than less, dangerous….It is well past time that the heirs to Nehru and Jinnah put 1947’s furies to rest.”