The Great Partition (18 page)

By the end of the first week of March, within days of the collapse of the ministry, quarters of most of the major cities in Punjab were burning: Lahore, Amritsar, Jullundur, Rawalpindi, Multan and Sialkot all had sections gutted. Gangs roamed the streets, some wearing steel or tin helmets, setting shops and houses on fire (the government quickly restricted the sale of diesel and petrol), firing weapons and throwing heavy rocks and glass soda bottles. ‘I was living in an area that was predominantly Muslim but every night we were afraid that there'd be an attack on us; so we used to be on house tops all night, watching whether an attack was coming or not, that was a perpetual feeling … we thought an attack could come at any time,’ later recalled the journalist Amjad Husain who was a young man in Lahore at the time.
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On 20 March Standard General, a major Punjabi insurance company, placed a large advertisement cancelling all its new riot protection policies, of which it had been doing brisk sales. Throughout March and April markets and shops could only open for brief intervals and essential services fell into a state of decay. These riots went on for weeks. In April, H.K. Basu, the postmaster of Amritsar, dismayed at the mountains of undelivered mail at the central sorting office, personally went around the city in a van from house to house, trying to entice his postmen back to work. Some did go with him to the GPO to sort the mail but not one could be persuaded to deliver the letters on the streets of the city. It was simply too dangerous. Municipal revenues suffered too; in Amritsar the municipality claimed it had lost 70,000 rupees from tax receipts. No electricity or water rates had been paid for months, not least because it was impossible to send out the bills.
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Depressing features of Partition in other parts of the subcontinent were taken to new extremes in Punjab. In Bombay in March 1947, even during lulls between episodic stabbings, people were nervous about crossing into each other's ‘zones’. League National Guards escorted Muslims back from cinemas. Visitors to Calcutta reported that residential streets were being divided up along ‘communal’ lines.
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In Punjab, this was occurring on a new level. Barricades and gates were erected while protection racketeers and vigilantes stalked the streets, and in the worst affected areas the religion of all those entering the
mohalla
would be solemnly checked. It was easy to cloister off the dense overhanging
mohallas
in the old parts of cities such as Lahore but this practice spread to the more open and wide-avenued middle-class colonies. ‘May I bring to the notice of the Amritsar local authorities,’ wrote one anxious Punjabi, ‘that the people belonging to the various communities are losing confidence in each other because, among other things, of the big iron gates by which the people are blocking their streets.’
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As the evocative novel
Tamas
reflects, ‘Overnight dividing lines had been drawn among the residential colonies and at the entrance to the lanes and at road crossings, small groups of people sat hidden from view, their faces half-covered, holding lances, knives and
lathis
in their hands.’
¹⁰

Security was the paramount need of the hour. Anxious families acquired basic arms or barricaded in their allies but this had an escalating effect as it made other neighbouring communities feel more insecure. Crucially, local politicians, who often had far more authority in their own districts than Gandhi or Jinnah, made the call to arms. Master Tara Singh who had already warned that Sikhs must be prepared to die for their cause, called for the formation of an Akali Fauj, or Sikh army, and stood defiantly brandishing his unsheathed kirpan on 3 March 1947 on the steps of the Lahore legislative building, vowing, ‘We may be cut to pieces but we will never concede Pakistan.’ Extremist groups swelled as moderates who used to belong to the Congress, or Unionist parties, lost their political influence. As one former Punjabi Congressman says to his colleague in the novel,
Tamas
, ‘will you come to save my life when a riot breaks out? … The entire area on the other side of the ditch is inhabited by Muslims, and my house is on the edge of it. In the event of a riot, will you come to save my life? Will Bapu [Gandhi] come to save my life? In a situation like this I can only rely on the Hindus of the locality. The fellow who comes with a big knife to attack me will not ask me whether I was a member of the Congress or of the Hindu sabha …’
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Politicised elites stoked stereotypes and the delay during the implementation of the Partition plan gave armed brigades exactly the time they needed to circulate rumours, stockpile weapons and prepare ambush plans. Lulls in the episodic violence were frequently illusory as at these precise moments plans were being laid while defensive organisations honed their techniques.
¹²

As a desperate response to the disaster unfolding, Congressmen in the highest echelons started to use the vocabulary of ‘Partition’. Some Sikhs called loudly and provocatively for the division of the Punjab. Nehru himself started to imagine Partition as a possible way out. As Jinnah continually vetoed the vision of one strong united India, it emerged that the price of a strong central government was the division of the country. ‘The truth’, Nehru admitted in an interview in 1960, ‘is that we were tired men and we were getting on in years … The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.’
¹³
If these quarrels continued unabated in one bitterly divided Constituent Assembly, the whole economic future of the country could be undermined. Freedom was being painfully postponed. ‘It is better to pass onto freedom even through chaotic transition than to be under the foreign yoke. Even a parrot would prefer to live half-starved but free rather than to remain in a golden cage, getting all the time raisins and dry fruits,’ mused the quixotic industrialist Seth Ramkrishna Dalmia.
¹⁴
On paper, the division of the provinces of Bengal and Punjab looked like a solution, of sorts. The Congress Working Committee – the party's innermost circle – accepted the division of the Punjab as a possible solution on 8 March 1947. ‘These tragic events have demonstrated that there can be no settlement of the problem by violence and coercion, and that no arrangement based on coercion can last,’ the leaders regretfully acknowledged. ‘Therefore it is necessary to find a way out which involves the least amount of compulsion … This would necessitate a division of the two provinces so that the predominantly Muslim part may be separated from the predominantly non-Muslim part.’
¹⁵
The heinous crimes of the preceding year forced the politicians to rush forward the decision to partition. Few were thinking about the line as a real or permanent fixture and the precise meanings of a partition were still inconsistent and unclear. It seemed to offer a way of attaining freedom and a compromise.

For other politicians who dreamed of infusing national iconography and policies with a more ostentatiously explicit ‘Hindu’ flavour, and remained less convinced by Nehru's insistence on pluralism, Partition might also relieve them of accommodating Muslim opinion altogether. They rejected Partition in the loudest voices, yet, in private, could also see its benefits. In July 1947, within weeks of Partition's acceptance, the Education Minister of United Provinces, a former schoolteacher named Dr Sampurnanand met with the sectarian Hindu Mahasabha and was told that, ‘for the first time since the age of Prithwiraj [a twelfth century Rajput ruler], we had received the opportunity to develop the country according to what could broadly be called Hindu ideals. Whatever our choice of words, the culture of this part of India could not be otherwise than predominantly Hindu.’
¹⁶
Partition, for politicians of different ideological hues, was a painful blow to their original conceptions of freedom, but also had some practical utility. Partition would clear the decks for nation-building by the Congress, in whatever form that might take, and in the final analysis a Balkanised or fragmentary Indian state with extensive regional autonomy was of little value to the Congress Party.

The words on most of the Indian public's lips, though, remained
swaraj
and Pakistan. The word ‘Partition’ came a very poor third. What people most wanted was freedom and sovereignty over their own communities. The colonial leadership and its heirs were at a remove from the intensity of these patriotic and non-territorial demands. The idea of
partitioning
ancient homelands was barely contemplated or understood. As the power of the state to deliver law and order visibly collapsed, other regional aspirations came bubbling to the surface and all sorts of groups made violent bids for their own portion of land, their own community's sovereignty. There was still no inevitable or pre-ordained final shape to the subcontinental settlement and with the euphoria of an imperial ending surged the hope for self-rule and the will to power among princes, caste leaders, spiritual
pirs
and clusters of ethnic minorities. In short, the plan itself had far too little popular legitimacy and few had asked for it or even fully debated its consequences.

A few weeks later Mountbatten flew in with his own posse of hand-picked private staff to take up his post as the last Viceroy of India. The new viceroyalty, which started on 24 March 1947, two days after the Mountbattens landed in India, was strikingly different to any earlier regime in New Delhi. Mountbatten had visited India several times and had been the Supreme Allied Commander for South East Asia during the war. Mountbatten and his colleagues, though, had not loyally worked their way up through the pecking order of the British Raj, from district to imperial capital, and his enthusiastic band of advisers and press secretaries had little insight into the machinations of local Indian politics, or the implications of severe rioting. His predecessor, Wavell, who had spent his childhood in India and also served as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian army, appears to have been more hamstrung by sensitivity to the problematic political scene that was unfolding in India and aware of the interconnected difficulties that any kind of settlement could fuel, rather than ease. This left him struggling to take concrete steps whereas Mountbatten was less plagued by worries about regional, and bloody, repercussions. When a group of British provincial governors, exhausted and deeply anxious about the likelihood of violence in their provinces, arrived in Delhi for a meeting shortly after Mountbatten's arrival they were greeted by a buoyant and optimistic new regime.
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Once halving the contested provinces of Punjab and Bengal was accepted by the careworn Nehru and other Congress leaders as a viable option, as a pathway out of the interminable political morass, it was only a matter of time before the creation of two separate states took on momentum in the thinking of the Viceroy and his advisers. Mountbatten denied having arrived in India with any prepared plan, although he was rapidly reconciled to the idea of Partition once he was exposed to the political intransigence of the different parties. Within a month, and before he had even toured outside Delhi, he was starting to think that Pakistan was inevitable and that he had arrived on the scene too late to alter the course of events fundamentally. As K.M. Panikkar, the historian and diplomat who was advising the princely state of Bikaner, put it, ‘Hindustan is the elephant … and Pakistan the two ears. The elephant can live without the ears.’
¹⁸
Mountbatten liked to describe the Viceroy's vast house as a small town, in which he presided as mayor. From this highly insulated perspective he was perfectly suited to his remit, which was to chart the making of nation states and the settlement of a constitutional solution. He achieved a much-coveted agreement between the League and the Congress by refusing to dwell on the implications of his actions, instead emphasising the practical aspects and stressing the expediency of finding a constitutional settlement.

On 18 May, less than two months after being sworn in as Viceroy, Mountbatten departed for London clutching the papers which sketched the Partition plan, ready to persuade the Cabinet that it was a workable scheme and hopeful of finishing the job on his return to the subcontinent. Only the fine-tuning remained: Punjabi and Bengali legislators would have the opportunity to vote on a potential split of the provinces, and a plebiscite for or against joining Pakistan would be necessary in the NWFP, where a Congress ministry, territorially far detached from the rest of India but strongly in favour of a united India, posed a particularly delicate problem. The paper plan, however, based on territorial and statistical maps, was entirely dislocated from the regional nuances of political life in India, and a top-down conceptualisation of state-centred politics would be imposed directly from London on the subcontinent. Furthermore, the plan was tragically unconcerned with human safety and popular protection. It did not even begin to examine the fear and apprehension of Indians, or to build in suitable safeguards to assuage these fears of domination.

The elite bartering and the final decision to partition was in the hands of a small cabal of British and Indian politicians and was staged theatrically in the classical buildings of Lutyens's New Delhi. By the spring months of 1947 negotiations had left provincial politicians and their followers far behind. The final settlement outran popular will in these localities, and the diverse political struggles taking place nationwide were scarcely factored into the simplistic plan to cut the Raj in two. It is this dislocation between New Delhi and its vast hinterland which has made Partition seem such an unwanted, alien imposition. In some ways, the final settlement was a true compromise, splitting land, resources and people between two entities, yet it satisfied no one. The League was handed a scarcely viable, ‘moth-eaten’ state to run, the Punjab and Bengal (ironically perhaps the two Indian provinces with the most distinctive regional cultures and interwoven populations) would be wrenched apart, and even Jinnah, who had at least achieved his Pakistan, admitted to a journalist in a letter, ‘It is very difficult for me to understand what led His Majesty's Government to come to the conclusion of partitioning Punjab and Bengal. In my opinion it is a mistake and I quite agree with you. But now we have accepted the plan as a whole and I feel confident that we shall make a good job of it.’
¹⁹
His optimism, despite all the flaws in the plan, seemed justified. In the eyes of the politicians a conclusive settlement had finally been reached; freedom would arrive and almost one year earlier than anybody had ever expected. Perhaps this was the path to a peaceful settlement?