Freedom at Midnight (67 page)

Srinagar, Kashmir, October 26,1947

Shortly before midnight, Saturday, October 25, 1947, yet another refugee joined the greatest exodus in history. To the ten and a half million Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems who had fled their homes that autumn was added one more figure, Hari Singh, the Maharaja of Kashmir. His bullock cart was a comfortable American station wagon leading a caravan of trucks and cars into which his most precious belongings had been packed. No marauding bands were going to menace his flight: his well-armed bodyguard would watch over his voyage. And the destination of the downcast Maharaja was not a cholera-infested refugee camp, but a pleasurable exile in yet another palace, his winter palace in Jammu, where he had once welcomed the Prince of Wales and his young A.D.C., Lord Louis Mountbatten. There, where his subjects were predominantly Hindu, he could hope to dwell in safety.

Mr. A and his futile hopes of independence had been engulfed by the precipitous rush of events. All Hari Singh's maneuvers had won him barely three months outside the apple basket that Louis Mountbatten had tendered

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him. On the advice of V. P. Menon, he was leaving his menaced capital, while Menon returned to Delhi to inform his colleagues that the Maharaja was ready to accept any terms they proposed in return for their aid.

He would never again set foot in the palace he was fleeing this night. In a few years, when the palace had been converted into a luxury hotel, the corridors and bedrooms in which he had frolicked with the officers of the army whose loyalty had proved so fragile would welcome wealthy American tourists. While his servants swept his strongboxes of their pearls, emeralds and diamonds, Hari Singh himself sought out the two objects he treasured most, his matched Purdey shotguns, with whose blue-black barrels he had blasted his way to the world's duck-shooting record. A glum, sad expression fixed on his face, he caressed their well-oiled stocks. Then carefully locking them into their leather case, he carried them to his waiting car himself.

After a difficult seventeen-hour trip, the Maharaja's caravan reached Jammu. The exhausted Hari Singh went immediately to his private quarters to retire. Before going to sleep, he called an A.D.C. and issued his last order as a ruling maharaja. "Wake me up only if V. P. Menon returns from Delhi," he said, "because that will mean India has decided to come to my rescue. If he doesn't come before dawn, shoot me in my sleep with my service revolver, because if he hasn't arrived, it will mean all is lost"

As soon as they had returned to Delhi, V. P. Menon and the two officers who had accompanied him to Srinagar made their report to another meeting of the Cabinet's defense committee. Their words made for somber listening. The Maharaja was ready at last to present Kashmir to India, but the Pathan raiders were only thirty-five miles from Srinagar and could at any moment seize the only airport in Kashmir in which India could land her troops.

The British commanders of India's Army and Air Force both raised objections to military intervention. It would be a distant, dangerous operation in the midst of a population that could very well prove hostile. Sensing the intensity of Indian emotion in the issue, Mountbatten overruled them.

He ordered an airlift to start flying troops to Srinagar at dawn the following morning. Every available transport in

the country, civil and military, was to be used in the effort. The troops would have to cling at all costs to the airport and Srinagar until reinforcements in armor and artillery could reach them by land. Those reinforcements were ordered to leave immediately by the only land link joining India to Kashmir, the inadequate road that Cyril Radcliffe's pencil had providentially delivered to India when he had assigned New Delhi the town of Gurdaspur with its predominantly Moslem population.

While the frenzied preparations for the operation were under way, Mountbatten ordered V. P. Menon to fly to Jammu. Hari Singh would not die of a bullet in the brain on the first night of his flight. V. P. Menon reached his bedside before the expiration of the ultimatum the Maharaja had given his A.D.C. With Menon, and awaiting only Hari Singh's signature, was the Act of Accession, which would provide a legal framework for India's action.

V. P. Menon was back in his Delhi residence late on the evening of that same Sunday, October 26, where Alexander Symon, Britain's Deputy High Commissioner, joined him for a drink a few minutes after his return. The jubilant Menon poured them each a stiff drink. As they sat down, an enormous smile spread across his face. He raised his glass to Symon. Then, he pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and waved it gaily toward the Englishman.

"Here it is," he said. "We have Kashmir. The bastard signed the Act of Accession. And now that we've got it, we'll never let it go."

India would be true to V. P. Menon's promise. The 329 Sikhs of the First Sikh Regiment and eight tons of materiel landed by nine DC-3's on a miraculously empty Srinagar airfield at dawn, Monday, October 27, were the first installment in an uninterrupted flow of men and materiel that India would pour into Kashmir. Eventually 100,000 Indian soldiers would fight in the snowy highlands that had been paradise for so many trout fishermen and hunters of the elusive ibex.

Curiously, it was not so much to military genius that the Indians would owe their initial success in Kashmir, as it was to fourteen French, Scottish, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese nuns of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary.

By pausing to sack their convent in the little city of Baramullah only thirty miles from Srinagar, when they should have been driving on the capital of Kashmir and its vital airfield, the Pathan raiders would end Jinnah's dream of joining Jehangir's beloved vale to his nation. All day, Monday, October 27, while the First Sikhs secured their fragile hold on Kashmir's only airport, the Pathans in Baramullah were giving vent to their ancient appetites for rape, loot and pillage. They violated the nuns, massacred the patients in their little clinic, looted the convent chapel down to its last brass doorknob.

That evening, clutching her crucifix and praying for "the conversion of Kashmir," the convent's Belgian Mother Superior, Sister Mary Adeltrude, died of her wounds. Her sacrifice and that of her sister nuns and patients would not shake the hold of Islam on its ancient Kashmiri stronghold at the foot of the Himalayas. But they had given the soldiers of Jawaharlal Nehru the critical hours they needed to install themselves in the Vale of Kashmir.

They would not leave thereafter. By the time the Pathans resumed their attack it was too late. The Indians halted their advance. Then, when the first Indian armored cars arrived over Radcliffe's road they routed the raiders in a pitched battle outside Srinagar. Gradually, they drove in disorder back up the Vale of Kashmir, along the valley through which they had descended on Srinagar, toward the bridges they had seized on a bitter October night believing all Kashmir might be theirs without firing a shot. Seething with anger, Jinnah defied the British commanders of his army by sending Pakistani units disguised as irregulars to Kashmir to stiffen the demoralized raiders. More tribal levies were raised, and for months, in the hostile cold of winter, the war would rage on.

Ultimately the dispute would reach the United Nations. The lovely vale whose name had been the last words to pass the lips of a dying Mogul would take its place alongside Berlin, Palestine and Korea in the gallery of the world's unsolved problems. The plebiscite to which Mount-batten had with such difficulty obtained Nehru's agreement would be relegated to that vast file of forgotten good intentions. The state would remain divided along the battle lines of 1948, the Vale of Kashmir in Indian hands, the northern territories around Gilgit in Pakistan's. A quarter

of a century later, Kashmir's disputed possession would remain the principal subject of discord between India and Pakistan, the one seemingly insurmountable barrier to their reconciliation.

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16

TWO BRAHMANS FROM POONA

Poona, November 1, 1947

The young Hindu militant who had led his followers on August 15 in their salute to the swastika-stamped banner of the R.S.S.S. contemplated with wondering eyes the whitewashed shed that was about to become, on this evening of November 1, 1947, the new home of his newspaper the Hindu Rashtra (Hindu Nation). The shed sheltered a flatbed press and a teletype machine of the Press Trust of India. Next to it, a lean-to stretched over the few upturned packing cases and trestle tables that constituted the paper's editorial offices.

That was hardly an installation to inspire a Luce or a Hearst, yet no Anglo-Saxon press lord ever exulted over his glass-and-steel headquarters with a purer joy than that radiating from the face of Nathuram Godse that November evening in Poona. He was dressed in the Spartan wardrobe that was his uniform: a baggy white shirt, a vest of raw cotton and a sarong-like dhoti carefully arranged in the traditional Maharatta style, its left end hooked under his leg and the bulk of its folds gathered on his right hip. His usually dour mien was enlivened by a wide, if somewhat tense, smile as he moved from guest to guest solemnly assuring each of his determination to rededicate his journal to the Hindu cause.

At the center of the parking lot was a small table, whose contents Godse had arranged himself with the fus-siness of a hostess setting out tea for the visit of the local

dowager. As this was an auspicious occasion, it was laden with artfully displayed piles of sweets: rich mounds of barfi, coils of halva, gelatinous squares of amber and emerald candies dusted with sugar. Behind them, percolating gently, was an enormous pot of coffee. Godse was r )ted throughout his native Poona for three things: his politics, his monk-like life style, and his positive addiction to coffee. Godse would literally walk miles to drink a cup of coffee in a cafe whose brew particularly pleased him.

As he passed out his coffee cups, another figure slipped among the guests accepting their congratulations. There was nothing Spartan about the wardrobe of Narayan Apte. He wore his favorite hound's-tooth tweed jacket, gray flannel slacks and a soft sports shirt whose open collar was pressed neatly over the lapels of his jacket. If Godse had passed through the crowd with abrupt, almost brusque movements, Apte glided from guest to guest, his progress governed by a hint of furtiveness, a kind of understated stealth. His smile was never full, but always quick. He was Godse's partner and alter ego, the businessman manager and administrator of the Hindu Rashtra. His dry, black hair had already begun to retreat back across his scalp. At the back of his head, however, its coils protruded out and up from the underside of his skull, so that in profile, Apte, with his sloping forehead and long fine nose, resembled a masculine Nefertiti. Apte's dominant facial feature was his eyes. They were soft and black, and their gaze never left his interlocutor's face. Apte, one of his friends said, "spoke with his eyes, and when those eyes spoke, people listened."

Thirty-four years old, Apte was three years younger than his partner. He was as immersed in the world as Godse was detached from it. He was a doer and a mover, an organizer and a planner. Now that the guests were served, he stepped to the center of the parking lot and clapped his hands for attention.

For a few moments, the chairman of the board delivering his annual report to his stockholders, he reviewed the history of the Hindu Rashtra. Then he presented his first attraction of the evening, a speech by his partner. Tense as a tenor waiting for the first bars of his aria, Godse stepped to the center of the parking lot and waited for silence.

As he did, imperceptible to the crowd below, a window slowly opened on the fourth floor of the building over-

looking the parking lot. The silhouette surreptitiously sliding into its frame belonged to a policeman, a plain-clothesman of the Poona C.I.D. Intently, he leaned forward to listen to Godse's speech. Since August 15, the Poona police had been keeping a discreet watch on Apte and Godse, as well as the city's other Hindu extremists. Weekly reports on their activities had been forwarded to Bombay and Delhi. Each man was identified by name, profession and political persuasion in the secret files of the Poona C.I.D. Apte's entry bore an additional notation, which Godse's did not have: "Potentially dangerous."

Carefully orchestrating the rising virulence and passion of his discourse, Godse worked through the subjects that had preoccupied him since Louis Mountbatten had published his partition plan: Gandhi, Congress and India's division. "Gandhi said India would be divided over his dead body," he intoned. "India is divided, but Gandhi lives."

"Gandhi's nonviolence has left the Hindus defenseless before their enemies. Now, while Hindu refugees are starving, Gandhi defends their Moslem oppressors. Hindu women are throwing themselves into wells to save themselves from being raped," he cried, "and Gandhi tells them 'Victory is in the victim.' One of those victims could be my mother!

"The motherland has been vivisected," he said, his voice now a strident shriek. "The vultures are tearing her flesh, the chastity of Hindu women is being violated on the open streets while the Congress eunuchs watch this rape committed. How long," he roared, "oh, how long can one bear this?"

As the echoes of his last words died, Godse was taut and trembling. Then, almost as though he had experienced a sexual climax, he seemed to deflate from the ranting orator back down to the almost meek journalist.

A roar of applause followed his conclusion. For three and a half centuries, the vocation of the city of Poona, 119 miles inland from Bombay, had been extreme Hindu nationalism. It was in the hills beyond Poona that Hinduism's greatest hero, the warrior Shivaji, had been born and had opened his guerrilla campaign against the Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb. His heirs, the peshwas, a tight clique of Chit paw an ("purified by fire") Brahmans, had resisted India's British rulers until 1817. From Poona's streets had

come a stream of men like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the militant chieftain of Indian nationalism before Gandhi had turned the movement to nonviolence.