Flight to Nowhere?

In the four-engined York monoplane, London-bound, the "No Smoking" sign stayed on for an hour out of Karachi. When it went out, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, in a front-row seat, chain-smoked State Express 555 cigarets, buried his hawk's head in a book pointedly titled A Nation Betrayed. Behind him sat Pandit Jawar-halal Nehru, chain-smoking Chesterfields, wearing Western-style clothes for the first time in eight years. Between Karachi and Malta, Nehru breezed through Rosamond Lehmann's The Ballad and the Source and Sinclair Lewis' Cass Timberlane, chatted with his good friend, Sikh leader

Sardar Balder Singh. In the plane's third row sat Viscount Wavell, Viceroy of India. For three years he had been trying to bring Nehru and Jinnah into agreement, now, with the peace of India hanging by a thread, they were a yard apart in space, politically as remote as ever.

At Malta, where they had to wait for another plane, the rival leaders spoke for the first time. Their conversation, in toto:

Jinnah: "Well, what have you been doing all day?"

Nehru: "Partly reading, partly sleeping, partly walking."

Who Gets Pushed? At the London Airport, where they were greeted by Britain's aging, able Lord Pethick-Lawrence, local Indians were out before dawn in coal trucks, bicycles and buses. A policeman grumbled: "You can't tell by looking at these Indians who are the VIPs and who are the riffraff. One day you're arresting a fellow and the next he turns up as an important bloke. . . . You never can tell who to push around."

Nehru moved about at receptions with high good humor and grace. At India House, he shook hands with the Dowager Marchioness of Willingdon, whose husband had jailed him; at Buckingham Palace, he ate from His Majesty's gold plate, a delightful change from the tin service he had known as a nine-year guest in H. M.'s prisons. Jinnah was socially crusty, giving the impression of a man deeply aggrieved. When the travelers got down to cases, however, it was the smiling Nehru who proved most stubborn.

The point at issue was one of those legal technicalities on which the fate of whole nations sometimes depends. The British Cabinet Mission had divided India's provinces, for purposes of writing the provincial constitutions, into three groups. In Group A, which comprised the bulk of British India, the Hindus would have a huge majority. Group B was the predominantly Moslem Northwest. The trouble narrowed down to Group C in the East, consisting of Bengal and Assam. Nehru said that the vote in the Assembly should be cast by provinces, which would let him take advantage of the 7-to-3 Hindu majority in Assam. Jinnah said that the vote should be cast for Group C as a whole. In this way his 33to-27 majority in Bengal would wipe out the Hindu margin in Assam and give the Moslems a 36-to-34 edge (in effect, a limited Pakistan) in Group C. The British agreed with Jinnah.

On this interpretation of the rules, Nehru would not play. Jinnah said that unless he got his way, the 75 Moslem League seats would be vacant when the Constituent Assembly met in New Delhi to draft free India's constitution.

Silly? Finally Clement Attlee tired of this variation of musical chairs, in which one seat was always empty. He warned the Indians that if "a large section of the Indian population" (i.e., the 92,000,000 Moslems) were not represented in the framing of a constitution, His Majesty's Government would not turn over power to a Congress Party government. It looked like a win on points for Jinnah. Said Nehru: "It was silly to expect to solve in three days problems which have been under discussion for many months."

Off he flew to New Delhi, where he found Congress Hindus in a belligerent mood: fierce-eyed Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel thought Nehru had been "tricked" into going to London. Cried Patel: "So long as the Moslems insist on their demand of Pakistan, there shall never be peace in India. We will resist the sword with the sword."

The Assembly that was to make India a nation quietly convened in New Delhi's Central Assembly Library. Pictures of former British Viceroys had been removed from their gilded frames. Special police were standing by with tear gas.

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