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 Midnight s furies the deadly legacy of India s partition
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Contents
Title Page
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
A Train to Pakistan
Fury
Jinnah and Jawaharlal
Madhouse
“Pakistan Murdabad!”
Indian Summer
Photos
Off the Rails
“Stop This Madness”
Ad Hoc Jihad
Himalayan Quagmire
The Last Battle
Deadly Legacy
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Photo Credits
Index
About the Author
 First Mariner Books edition 2016

Copyright © 2015 by Nisid Hajari

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this

book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions,
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th
Floor, New York, New York 10016.

www.hmhco.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hajari, Nisid, author.
Midnight’s furies : the deadly legacy of India’s partition / Nisid Hajari.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-547-66921-2 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-547-66924-3
(ebook)—ISBN 978-0-544-70549-5 (pbk.)
1. India—History—Partition, 1947. 2. India-Pakistan Conflict, 1947–
1949. 3. Pakistan—History—20th century. 4. Jinnah, Mahomed Ali,
1876–1948. 5. Nehru, Jawaharlal, 1889–1964. I. Title.
DS480.842.H35 2015
954.04'2—dc23
2014034426

Maps by Glen Pawelski/Mapmaking Specialists, Ltd.

Cover design by Martha Kennedy

Cover photograph: Police disperse riots in Calcutta, 1946, ©
Universal Images Group/SuperStock

v2.0616
For my parents
India Before Partition
Pakistan After Independence
Post-Partition: The Zone of Conflict
 PROLOGUE

A Train to Pakistan

AHEAD, THE JEEP’S HEADLIGHTS picked out a lonely stretch of railroad

track. The driver slowed, then, when still about a third of a mile
away, pulled over and waited. All around wan stalks of wheat,
shriveled by drought and rust, trembled in the hint of breeze. Two
turbaned figures emerged from the gloom, borne by an ungainly,
knock-kneed camel.
At a signal the five broad-shouldered men in the jeep piled out.
They carried a strange assortment of objects—a brand-new
Eveready car battery, rolls of wire, a pair of metal hooks with cables
attached, and three lumpy, unidentifiable packages. Moving quickly,
they joined the now-dismounted riders and headed for the copse of
trees that lined both sides of the permanent way. When they
reached an irrigation canal that ran along the tracks, several of the
men slid down its banks and hid.
Two others dashed forward. Each tucked one of the mysterious
parcels against a rail, then carefully attached a wire to the soft
gelignite inside and trailed the cable back to where the others
crouched. A third man brought the pair of hooks over to a nearby
telephone pole and used them to tap into the phone line. As he
listened, waiting for word of the Karachi-bound train, his compatriots
grimly checked their revolvers.1
The men were Sikhs, recognizable by their long beards and the
turbans enclosing their coils of uncut hair. They had the bearing and
burly physique of soldiers—not surprising given that their tiny
community had long sent disproportionate numbers of young men to
fight in the Indian Army’s storied regiments. In the world war that
had just ended two years earlier, Sikhs had made up more than 10
percent of the army even though they represented less than 2
percent of the population.
 The eavesdropper motioned to his comrades: the train was
coming. This was no regularly scheduled Lahore Express or Bombay
Mail. Onboard every passenger was Muslim. The men, and some of
the women, were clerks and officials who had been laboring in the
British-run government of India in New Delhi. With them were their
families and their ribbon-tied files; their photo albums, toys, china,
and prayer rugs; the gold jewelry that represented much of their
savings and the equally prized bottles of illicit whiskey many drank
despite the strictures of their religion. On 9 August 1947 they were
moving en masse to Karachi, 800 miles away, to take part in a great
experiment. In six days the sweltering city on the shores of the
Arabian Sea would become the capital of the world’s first modern
Muslim nation and its fifth largest overall—Pakistan.
The country would be one of the strangest-looking on the postwar
map of the world. One half would encompass the fierce
northwestern marches of the Indian subcontinent, from the Khyber
Pass down to the desert that fringed Karachi; the other half would
include the swampy, typhoon-tossed Bengal delta in the far
northeast. In between would lie nearly a thousand miles of
independent India, which would, like Pakistan, win its freedom from
the British Empire at the stroke of midnight on 15 August.
The Karachi-bound émigrés were in a celebratory mood. As they
pulled out of Delhi, cheers of “Pakistan Zindabad!” (Long live
Pakistan!) had drowned out the train’s whistle. Rather than laboring
under a political order dominated by the Hindus who made up three-
quarters of the subcontinent’s population, they would soon be
masters of their own domain. Their new capital, Karachi, had been a
sleepy backwater until the war; American GIs stationed there raced
wonderingly past colorful camel caravans in their jeeps.2 Now a
boomtown fervor had overtaken the city. The streets were a roaring
tangle of cranes and scaffolding, and the dust from scores of
building projects mixed with drifts of desert sand. If the city could
hardly handle the influx of new residents—“the difficulty of putting
several hundred quarts into a pint pot is extreme,” Britain’s first
ambassador to the new Pakistan remarked—a good-humored
camaraderie had so far smoothed over most tensions.3 Ministers
perched on packing crates to work as they waited for their furniture
to arrive. Their clerks used acacia thorns for lack of paper clips.
To the Sikhs leaning against the cool earth of the canal bank, this
Pakistan seemed a curse. The new frontier would pass by less than
50 miles from this spot, running right down the center of the fertile
Punjab—the subcontinent’s breadbasket and home to 5 million of
India’s 6 million Sikhs. Nearly half of them would end up on the
Muslim side of the line.
In theory, that should not have mattered. At birth India and
Pakistan would have more in common with each other—politically,
culturally, economically, and strategically—than with any other nation
on the planet. Pakistan sat astride the only land invasion routes into
India. Their economies were bound in a thousand ways. Pakistan’s
eastern wing controlled three-quarters of the world’s supply of jute,
then still in wide use as a fiber; almost all of the jute-processing
mills lay on the Indian side of the border. During famine times parts
of India had turned hungrily to the surplus grain produced in what
was now Pakistan’s western wing.
The Indian Army, which was to be divided up between the two
countries, had trained and fought as one for a century. Top officers—
still largely British—refused to look on one another as potential
enemies. Just a few nights earlier both Hindu and Muslim soldiers
had linked arms and drunkenly belted out the verses of “Auld Lang
Syne” at a farewell party in Delhi, swearing undying brotherhood to
one another. Cold War strategists imagined Indian and Pakistani
battalions standing shoulder to shoulder to defend the subcontinent
against Soviet invasion.
Many of the politicians in Delhi and Karachi, too, had once fought
together against the British; they had social and family ties going
back decades. They did not intend to militarize the border between
them with pillboxes and rolls of barbed wire. They laughed at the
suggestion that Punjabi farmers might one day need visas to cross
from one end of the province to the other.
 Pakistan would be a secular, not an Islamic, state, its founder,
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, promised: Hindus and Sikhs would be free to
practice their faiths and would be treated equally under the law.
India would be better off without two disgruntled corners of the
subcontinent, its people were told, less charitably. “Division,” as
India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, put it, “is better than a
union of unwilling parts.”4 The fight to establish Pakistan had been
bitter but astoundingly short—occupying less than ten of the nearly
two hundred years of British suzerainty over India. Surely in another
decade the wounds inflicted by the struggle would heal.
The Sikhs tensed as a long, low whistle from the train floated
toward them. In the distance, they could see the engine’s headlamp
rocking gently through the fields. Their eyes followed its progress
until the train rounded a last bend and the spotlight blazed up
before them like a miniature sun, bright and blinding. They rose,
surging with adrenaline. Seconds later the Pakistan Special’s heavy
black engine thudded over the spot where the gelignite charges lay,
then its first bogie.
The Sikh holding the battery gripped the detonator switch he had
rigged up to it. When the second passenger car was directly over the
improvised mine, he firmly pressed down.

Nearly seventy years later, Partition has become a byword for horror.
Instead of joining hands at their twinned births, India and Pakistan
would be engulfed by some of the worst sectarian massacres the
modern world has ever seen. Non-Muslims on one side of the new
border in the Punjab and Muslims on the other descended with
sword and spear and torch on the minorities who lived among them.
An appalling slaughter ensued.
Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men
and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be
raped. British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi
death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant
women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their
bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits. Foot caravans of
destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and
more. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas
charged out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like
sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out,
suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they
crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under
their carriage doors.
Across the Punjab, the limbs of thousands of corpses poked from
shallow graves like twigs, gnawed on by wild dogs. Estimates of the
dead range widely yet are universally shocking. Not long afterward,
one British official, working off casualty reports and his own
inquiries, put the number at 200,000.5 Others, claiming to factor in
those who had died of disease and hunger and exposure, insist that
more than a million perished. At least 14 million refugees were
uprooted in what remains the biggest forced migration in history.
Western Pakistan was virtually emptied of Hindus and Sikhs; the
Indian half of the Punjab lost almost all of its Muslims. The
conflagration stands as one of the deadliest and most brutal civil
conflicts of the twentieth century, unrivaled in scale until the 1994
massacres in Rwanda.
Yet like Rwanda, the riots were relatively confined in time and
space. The worst killings lasted only about six weeks. While the
chaos spread throughout most of western Pakistan and great
swathes of northern India, much of the rest of the subcontinent was
not directly affected. Today Partition is a horrific memory for millions
—but it is just that, a memory.
What truly continues to haunt today’s world are the furies that
were unloosed in 1947—the fears and suspicions and hatreds forged
in Partition’s searing crucible. In those few weeks, and the few
months that followed, a dangerous psychological chasm would open
up between India and Pakistan. Leaders on both sides would suspect
their counterparts of winking at genocide. Their mutual mistrust and
scheming for advantage quickly brought their infant nations to the
brink of war, and then ignited shadow contests for control over the
kingdoms of Hyderabad in the south and Kashmir in the north. In
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