Witness to the Birth of a Nation ….Vikram Doctor
A witness recalls the drama leading to the midnight hour when India woke up to life & freedom
A witness recalls the drama leading to the midnight hour when India woke up to life & freedom
My grandmother, Padma Padmanabhan, was lucky to be there. On July 31, 1947, president of the Constituent Assembly Rajendra Prasad announced that next month on the night of the 14th and 15th, just at midnight, we have a session of this House, and at that time, just as the clock strikes twelve… we take power under the New Act which has been passed. Prasad explained that the Assemblys first job that night would be to invite Lord Louis Mountbatten to be the new nations first governor-general.
His next remark was practical. Members must realise, said Prasad severely, that space was limited in the Central Hall of Parliament, where they were meeting. That night they would have to invite diplomats, senior civil and military officials and the Press. It will, therefore, be very difficult to accommodate all who desire to come and attend the function. With so many people wanting to be there, my grandmothers chances might have been slim, but she had one advantage. Her husband and my grandfather, KV Padmanabhan, was one of the secretaries to the Assembly in charge of the arrangements for the night. He made sure she was there, which must make her, at 93, one of the few surviving witnesses to that night. Her memory of it has faded a bit, but she still remembers details like how, unexpectedly for August in Delhi, it wasnt stifling hot inside. And, of course, she remembers Jawaharlal Nehrus speech. She could hardly forget it given how its phrases have been dinned into us, starting with the tryst with destiny (Patrick French notes we almost had a date with destiny, but Nehrus secretary MO Matthai pointed out the romantic overtones of this, so after toying with rendezvous, they settled for the assonance of tryst). And the phrases are indeed eloquent: the sad reference to Partition in the pledge redeemed not wholly or in full measure; the drama, if not actual accuracy, in at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps; the reference to the trackless centuries of Indias past; the reference to Mahatma Gandhi, pointedly not present, in recalling his mission to wipe every tear from every eye.
The mythology of this speech has been built, by writers as different as Dominique Lapierre and Salman Rushdie, to the point where we assume that Nehru spoke till midnight. In fact, he didnt, something my grandmother does recall, since she remembers the specific task facing S Radhakrishnan, who spoke after Nehru. It was a very fine speech, and a challenge since he had to speak till just before midnight, she says. Since it lacks the concision that Nehru could exercise, this speech is less remembered, though it is interesting. What is nearly forgotten is that between Nehru and Radhakrishnan was another speaker, symbolically chosen to second Nehru. His name was Chaudhuri Khaliquzzaman of the Muslim League, presumably chosen to represent the Muslim voice in the Constituent Assembly. That this role didnt go to a Muslim from the Congress like Maulana Azad may have been because an attempt was being made at that time to involve a wider spectrum of Indian political opinion in the nascent government. Khaliquzzaman, a leader of the Muslims from the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), must have seemed ideal because, despite being a League politician, he was on good terms with Nehru and many in the Congress. He had broken with the Congress years earlier, when after the party swept UP in elections it had not appointed Muslim politicians to office, which convinced Khaliquzzaman that they would never receive fair treatment from a Congress-dominated free India. Yet, when Pakistan became a reality, Khaliquzzaman chose to stay with India. For someone as rooted as he was in UP, part of a community of upper class North Indian Muslims who were deeply involved in the politics and Indian civil, legal and military services, the idea of leaving it all seemed unreal. By being elected to the Indian Constituent Assembly, Khaliquzzaman signalled his decision to stay, and he later recalled that when Muhammad Ali Jinnah learned of this he implored me to take up the Indian Muslim leadership after he had left for Pakistan.
Some evidence of how fluid things were is shown by how Jinnah, even after learning of his decision, requested Khaliquzzaman to preside over the election in Lahore on August 5 of the leader of the Muslim League in Pakistans new Assembly. This done, Khaliquzzaman went back to Lucknow and arrived in Delhi in time for the night time session. He recalled that as soon as he took his seat, speaker of the Assembly GV Mavlankar sent him word requesting him to speak after Nehru, to second the resolution he would move for all members of the Assembly to take an oath dedicating themselves in all humility to the service of India and her people. Despite this short notice, Khaliquzzaman spoke eloquently. In Hindustani, he warned that just as the struggle for Independence was ending, a new one was beginning that is not to be fought against any outsider, but is to be settled among our own selves. He noted that no communal considerations would be allowed to prevail in order to serve the people. Yet, in just days these hopes would be swept aside. It was tacitly accepted that problems were inevitable in areas like Punjab, directly affected by Partition, but on August 23 Muslims from Delhi came to Khaliquzzaman in deep fear because Sikhs had been passing through their neighbourhoods with swords. Khaliquzzaman spoke to Sardar Patel, who took action at once, but it was a sign that the turmoil would spread far. In an article on forgotten protagonists of Independence, Ramachandra Guha writes that no sooner was Pakistan created that this key player in its making realised that the partition of India (had) proved positively injurious to the Muslims of India, and on a long-term basis for Muslims everywhere. The trauma became personal for him when it reached Lucknow, and after a close relative, a distinguished lawyer, was directly threatened, the confidence of Khaliquzzamans family started crumbling. One by one they started moving to Pakistan, and by the end of the year Khaliquzzaman did too. Not everyone in his family left. His favourite daughter stayed in India. Her son, Ishaat Husain, a director at Tata Sons, recalls how Partition destroyed the family. It just blew us apart, he says. He was able to see his grandfather in the 50s, and superficially at least, Pakistan gave him status, making him governor of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and then ambassador to Indonesia. But he was marginalised, and never really got over Partition, says Husain. The increasing influence of the army horrified him. After 1963, Husain was unable to see him again. Khaliquzz-aman died in 1973, after the province of which he was once governor had split from Pakistan. Even so long after Independence, Husain recalls, Lucknow came to a standstill when news of his death reached the city. But on that August 14 night, all this was still far in the future. After Nehru, Khaliquzzaman and Radhakrishnan spoke, Prasad put the resolution on swearing an oath of service at midnight to vote. With barely a minute to go, the irrepressible HV Kamath, a former ICS man who combined being a Forward Bloc member with deep attachment to traditional values, jumped up and noted that he had moved some amendments, but since time was short, he would withdraw them. After that entirely gratuitous interruption, Prasad moved the resolution, which was accepted unanimously, and with half a minute to go to midnight, he asked the members of the Constituent Assembly to stand and swear themselves to the service of India. It is this moment that really marks Indian independence. The first action of the newly independent Assembly was to pass a resolution asking Lord Mountbatten to continue as governor-general. The next was to accept the National Flag, presented to the Assembly by Hansa Mehta, a nationalist leader from Bombay. After accepting the flag, Prasad, rather incongruously, also noted he was accepting a poem sent by the Chinese ambassador to mark the occasion, and then Sucheta Kripalani sang Saare Jahan Se Achcha and the first few lines of Jana Gana Mana, and brought Indias Independence rituals to an end.