ON THE
MOVE: Millions took to the road the day the country was divided
Aug. 15, 1947
Freedom and Calamity
By Howard Chua-Eoan
"At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake
to life and freedom." So declared Jawaharlal Nehru in his speech on the
eve of his nation's independence from Britain. In New Delhi the next
day, the celebrating crowd was so huge that Nehru, the new Prime
Minister, had to fight his way to the grandstand, at one point knocking
off the turban of a man who had gotten in his way. He was worried for
the safety of his friends, the last British viceroy Lord Mountbatten,
who was a cousin of England's monarch, and his wife Edwina, with whom
Nehru was secretly enamored. But Mountbatten knew of another secret that
would cause great grief.
Muslims and Hindus were inheriting a divided
subcontinent from Britain, made up of Pakistan and India. Already the
legalistic partition had led to deadly rioting. But one important
division had yet to be announced, that of Punjab, a rich province with a
volatile mix of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. A decision had been made on
Aug. 12, but Mountbatten had ordered its details unpublished until two
days after India's independence.
He foresaw chaos and wanted British responsibility for it to be moot by
the time the screaming started over the new borders. No preparations
were therefore made to control the inevitable havoc. The result was a
bloody birthday gift to newborn India and Pakistan as millions of people
were uprooted amid massacres and murder. "I am sick with horror," Nehru
would write his friend Mountbatten after visiting one affected area.
More horror was to come: refugee camps everywhere and, eventually, war
with Pakistan over Kashmir, an enmity, potent as nuclear bombs, that
lasts to this day. Five months after independence, the idealism of the
struggle for freedom was shattered when a Hindu fanatic assassinated the
movement's secular saint, Mohandas Gandhi.
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