The Great Partition (11 page)

This ambiguity was convenient. Jinnah was facing the problem of welding together diverse constituents, many of whom read into the Pakistan demands their own local interpretations or seized upon the League as a vehicle for their own regional campaigns. The issue of territory was repeatedly fudged. The town of Aligarh could never have been included in the Pakistani state and today is still a university town in India – many miles from the border with Pakistan. Maps painted on pro-Pakistani propaganda reflect the lack of clarity concerning territory in Pakistani nationalism. In one, the black silhouette of the whole of the Indian subcontinent is marked uncompromisingly with the words ‘Pakistani Empire’ – the bold typeface in a diagonal line branding the whole of India and Afghanistan, from the Himalayas to its southern tip at Cape Comorin, as part of this Pakistani realm. Another map, in contrast, shows a fragmented patchwork subcontinent with different provinces marked off as regional ‘nations’, including Dravidstan, Usmanistan, Rajistan, Pakistan, Balochistan and Bangsamistan. A third map, created around the same time, shows a more easily recognisable outline of Pakistan as we know it today but with the southern Indian princely state of Hyderabad included as part of the Muslim state's natural limits.
⁸
Pakistan was an imaginary, nationalistic dream as well as a cold territorial reality.

Even Muslim Leaguers who believed Pakistan could be a territorial state – distinct from India – had different ideas about where this land would be and what its relationship would be with India. The final shape of the country came as a shock to some of its most fervent supporters. Strolling through Delhi on a sunny afternoon with her family after the elections, the Muslim League leader Begum Ikramullah looked up at the domes of Humayan's tomb, the sixteenth-century red sandstone and white marble masterpiece of Mughal architecture. Her husband reassured her that Delhi would definitely be in Pakistan when the country came into being. ‘The frontiers of Pakistan had not been defined and it never entered our heads that Delhi would not be within it.’
⁹
There were a small handful of far-sighted individuals who saw the dangers of a two-state solution to the constitutional problem. Two Congress workers from North India suggested that the weakness in the League's strategy, and its failure to outline Pakistan's proposed territory, should be exposed. They wrote asking the Congress to paste up posters and flyers around the streets with a suggested map of Pakistan under the caption ‘Are you ready to leave your house, land, property and everything and go to Pakistan?’
¹⁰
But this was a rare appeal. Nobody knew what this map was – and nobody was contemplating migrating in 1946, let alone the mass movement of twelve million people only one year later.

On 28 March 1946, the provincial governors formally returned the election results from their provinces. Ministry-making could begin in earnest. Congress ministries started governing in Bombay, Madras, UP, Bihar, Central Provinces, Orissa, Assam and North West Frontier Province, while a League government ran Sind and, propped up by third parties, started to govern Bengal. There was only one real coalition: in Punjab. Here, the League was kept in abeyance, waiting at the door of power, and the Unionists, led by Khizr Tiwana, joined up with Congress and the Panthic Sikhs. Soon the corridors of power in the regional capital cities buzzed with politicians and their supporters. ‘The change which came over the Secretariat was almost unbelievable,’ wrote an Oxford-educated civil servant of the old guard, Rajeshwar Dayal, who was rather perturbed by the new order and by the change in his secretariat. ‘The orderly and silent corridors with officers and staff moving silently about their business were transformed into babels of noise.’
¹¹
For others, this was the beginning of the transition to democracy and marked the start of real popular participation in political institutions.

As Indian politicians and their staff took over the offices of British officials, moving in crates of papers and sometimes surreptitiously taking down pictures of the King-Emperor and the Union Jack, the power of the imperial state broke down. All eyes were naturally fixed on Delhi. Talk on the streets and in the press was about the main negotiations, and focused on when and how power would be passed at the centre. Yet the drawn-out, painful process of decolonisation in South Asia was already well under way. Provincial governments were already setting the agenda. Their coming to power in early 1946 drew the sting out of anti-British sentiment in India. Politicians made the difficult transition from opposition to government. ‘The new government came in a rather belligerent mood determined to stretch the constitution to the limit and beyond, and to show the remaining British officials their place in the new order of things,’ remembered Rajeshwar Dayal.
¹²
Struggles still endured in Delhi's political heartland over central powers, yet in the provinces the imperial endgame was over. The problem was that Leaguers and Congressmen remained fundamentally unreconciled and nobody could see how their differences might be patched up. While some blithely wished these differences away, others hardened their opposition.

The new ministries were inaugurated with a fanfare. The ministers had to swear their allegiance to the King-Emperor but many whispered hoarsely as they did so. People clambered up to see the first day of the new assemblies, packed viewing galleries, and press and photographers were out in force. For those who were on the losing side, however, the feeling grew that these politicians in power could act with impunity and that they were not representative of
all
Indians. Dress became important. Congressmen sat on the benches in white homespun dhotis, worn with sandals and Gandhi caps – the same outfit still worn by many Indian politicians today. Jinnah's fur cap was becoming a style icon and Muslims wore kurta pyjamas with a cap or fez while Sikhs retained their distinctive turbans. This exuberant new order alienated those who felt on the wrong side of it or left out from its culture and symbolism. Mohammad Mujeeb later remembered the hubbub when he had watched the United Provinces assembly from a viewing gallery for the first time a decade earlier:

It was, I believe, the inaugural session. There were crowds of people in the visitors' galleries and the hall, but hardly a face that was known to me. I was simple-minded enough to ask a man standing next to me where the chief minister was, and I got in reply a reproachful look and the remark, ‘Can't you see he is sitting there?’ I felt extremely uncomfortable. I could not spot anyone dressed like me, the language spoken around me was not the Urdu which I thought was the language of Lucknow … I left the assembly building with a feeling of mingled panic and disgust.
¹³

Now League and Congress politicians roamed freely, devised and imposed laws, spread propaganda and built up their political assets as never before. ‘We are inaugurating this regime of popular government after nearly six and a half years of administration under section 93 of the Government of India Act. Naturally people will expect all the hardships and evils they have been suffering from to be removed immediately,’ declared the new Prime Minister of Bombay, B.G. Kher, at his inauguration, urging patience while announcing a radical programme of alcohol prohibition and the unconditional release of hundreds of political prisoners.
¹⁴
Party workers had established networks of supporters but had rarely been able to deliver much in the way of meaningful favours in the past. The moment ministries were sworn in, these party workers and the politicians they worked for were plugged into the main power source. The whole balance of power was reconfigured. In provinces where Congress or Muslim League ministries were in power, these networks were skewed in favour of those who were well connected to the provincial ruling party.

After years in limbo, local power was suddenly palpable. Ideological commitments to the improved governance of India were muddled together with personal profiteering and local rivalries. Provincial governments assumed responsibility for policing, public health, road-building, irrigation, education and food-licensing. In Madras, it was the local Congressman who could now help his supporter to obtain a liquor permit, if he wished to establish a small kiosk. In Sind it was the local Leaguers who might help someone who wanted to escape the attention of the police because of a petty theft. In the North West Frontier Province, where a Congress ministry had come to power, ‘all with an axe to grind turn to the Ministers where in the old days they would have gone to the Deputy Commissioner and, if necessary, waited hours to see him’. When one Muslim revenue official was asked whether the people minded this sea change in the nature of the administration on the frontier he pithily replied, ‘Whose the stick, his the buffalo.’
¹⁵

Acquiring a permit to sell food or other essential goods was a difficult business, complicated by red tape, and competition for these permits became ferocious. The black market was thriving. Accusations of foul play chimed with the grievances of small traders and stallholders. District food and supply committees – which had the right to distribute permits and supplies – often divided along party-political, religious and caste lines, and competition for seats became intense. Casually used phrases like ‘Hindu Raj’ or stories of Muslim oppression could start to resonate even when the material evidence was patchy or scant. Now that Congress and League provincial ministries had come to power, if people could not get hold of resources, it was all too easy to attribute blame to the party in power. A culture of complaint emerged in Congress provinces that ‘It is the followers of Congress who get the wheat and the sugar, the paraffin and the matches’ whereas in League-run provinces it was the reverse story.
¹⁶
The smallest things could become decisive. ‘Look at this,’ said a Pathan interviewed by Malcolm Darling during his tour, drawing a box of matches out of the folds of his garment, ‘yesterday I had to pay four
annas
for this, and the controlled price is two
pice
.’ So many people were complaining about the cost of matches to Malcolm Darling that he concluded: ‘Matches have, indeed, become almost a battle-cry between the two parties.’
¹⁷
Where Congressmen presided over the system, the Muslim League made hay with the idea that the Muslim public were being discriminated against and, as one Congress supporter recalled, ‘accused us of theft, saying that we were misusing our full access to the government machinery. They incited people saying that we were depriving people of cloth for
kafans
[funeral shrouds].’
¹⁸
Even in New Delhi this vital question became sharply politicised and Wavell's efforts to set up some form of food advisory committee buckled under the pressure of party politics. Access to rations was not a marginal issue and dominated hungry people's waking thoughts.

In effect, a great deal of power had already been transferred from the bottom up; culturally, economically and politically, the provincial governments set the tone. Those enjoying access to power, often for the first time, wanted to push forward as much legislation as possible before it was stripped back by a new constitution, and rushed to pass bills enforcing new school curricula or official state languages. Wrongs committed by the imperialists were promptly righted; political prisoners emerged from prison, bans on proscribed literature were lifted and journalists wrote with a new sense of freedom. More problematically, the new ministries naturally started to try and influence the – highly uncertain – vision of a future independent India.

The Indian politicians now controlled access to information, ministers authored and edited reports from the provinces, the local presses wrote with vitriol about the remnants of the British administration still
in situ
, and attempts by British provincial governors to direct or shape policy (which was constitutionally still their technical right) had lost all moral sanction. In regions where support for the wartime Quit India movement had been deep-seated, blatant friction between the British governors and their ministries now occurred. There was little support from London for British administrators still dealing with the intricacies of routine local politics, as Wavell tried to steer an uncertain course between a British ‘scuttle’ and ‘repression’. As he wrote to the King-Emperor in July, ‘We are in fact conducting a retreat, and in very difficult circumstances.’
¹⁹
British control at the provincial level was both blunted by the South Asian leaders-in-waiting and wilfully withdrawn by an imperilled British administration.

The British cut their losses. It was a classic imperial response. By mid-1946, the British government was reluctant to invest a penny more in India's administrative infrastructure. Intelligence units were run down and reports reaching district officers, magistrates, policemen and Criminal Investigation Departments suffered in quality. This would become deadly in time. ‘Police intelligence in Bombay City is said to be poor,’ the Governor reported, ‘with the result that the Government are not in full possession of information as regards the leaders of miscreants.’
²⁰
In 1946, the government disbanded Information Films of India, which produced black and white newsreels and propaganda films shown in cinema halls. The ailing colonial machinery could not even produce a figure when asked to say how many Europeans were living in India. The figure of 97,000 was settled upon somewhat arbitrarily when an initial educated guess of 44,000 was considered to be too low. At exactly the time when clear information was most in demand it became a scarce commodity. The last British census in India was a slender volume compared to its decennial predecessors and much of the information collected for the census still had not been collated by the end of British rule. As W.H. Auden accurately pointed out in his poem ‘Partition’, the census returns were ‘almost certainly incorrect’ and the calculations of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ Muslim populations, which were so indispensable to the political debates, were based on out-of-date information.