The Great Partition (19 page)

On 3 June, the plan was broadcast to a nervous and expectant population. In the lush green hills of Assam, in the north-eastern corner of India, the local Congress politicians heard of the plan to divide up the country in the British Governor's own living room, where there was, at least, a working radio. The paper copies of the 3 June plan did not arrive, as the post had been hampered by strikes and heavy sheets of monsoon rain. The Governor himself, Andrew Clow, was emotional at the momentousness of the occasion and the announcement that power was now going to be transferred. ‘Leaving India is a big wrench,’ he wrote to Mountbatten, ‘particularly as I shall, in my own country, be rather a stranger in a strange land.’ For many of empire's repatriated administrators, returning to the British ‘homeland’ would not be straightforward and Clow had been in India since 1914. For all his experience of the Raj, though, Clow's reading of the 3 June plan was that it was not permanent. ‘I am very sorry that … the unity of India has
at least for some time to come
been broken,’ he wrote. Like very many others his impression was of an expedient settlement rather than a permanent border. Imagining the transition from empire to free nations was complex and uncertain even for those in the imperial inner circle.

The Muslim League had won its Pakistan. But there was no firm line between winners and losers. Endemic confusion and disorientation followed the announcement, which sliced horizontally through all communities. One does not have to look far to find signs of the utter confusion which greeted the 3 June plan. The plan, which was such a relief to the British government, was foisted on a population entirely uninformed about its details and implications. Local understandings of ‘freedom’ and ‘Pakistan’, inspired by millenarianism, fear and heightened anticipation of revolutionary change, suddenly had to be squared with the creation of full-blown modern nation states. The country was to be divided – that much was clear – but would populations be expected to move? Where would the boundaries lie? What would be incorporated in Pakistan and what would not? None of these questions were satisfactorily answered by either the British or Indian political leadership. In the Indian army, on Mountbatten's own admission, ‘Many of the troops had not, ten days after the announcement, yet realised the full implications of the plan.’
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On the question of the princely states, a day after the announcement of the plan a government source suggested the British would ‘begin to think’ about entering into new relationships with over five hundred Indian states, home to 24 per cent of undivided India's population.
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Some Pakistan supporters ecstatically celebrated the victory that they had longed for and, for those in the vanguard of promoting a modern territorial state for Muslims, the news was an irreproachable triumph. ‘When a few years ago, some of us, students at Cambridge, began to dream of an independent Muslim State in India and called it “Pakistan”,’ wrote I.H. Qureshi, a well-known historian at Delhi University in an emotional letter to Jinnah, ‘even in our wildest dreams we were not so hopeful as to think that our cherished goal was so near at hand.’
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For those who had consciously fought for a Pakistani territorial nation state it was a day of jubilation: sweets were distributed, songs sung, flags paraded. Leaguers celebrated the achievement of bringing a new country into being as a homeland for Indian Muslims; one thousand Muslim women gathered at Jinnah's house in Bombay to give him a standing ovation; and after saying their prayers in Agra's central mosque, Muslims celebrated the creation of Pakistan and collected donations for the new state.
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Jinnah made an appeal for funds in mid-June with which to build up the nascent Pakistan. He was inundated with donations and letters which came, in the main, from Delhi, Lahore and the North Indian urban areas where the League had always gained most vocal backing. The receipts for donations offer a fleeting insight into the enthusiastic support for Pakistan, especially from landlords, small businessmen and officials. The Railway Board Employees' Association in Delhi collected 250 rupees, and the Muslim employees of the Press Information Bureau in Delhi proffered a cheque for 80. ‘Decent Leather Works’ in Kanpur gave 25 rupees and twenty-three divisional sepoys from Madras offered 337 rupees from their wages. Women gave as well as men, and supposedly ‘neutral’ civil servants and officials dug into their pockets. The wealthy tenants of Razia Begum, who lived in her
haveli
, or traditional whitewashed house around an open courtyard in Delhi, gave the princely sum of 500 rupees in their landlady's name. ‘I venture to send a very petty amount I have saved out of my monthly pocket money received from my parents and pray you, respected Sir, to very kindly accept this humble offer,’ implored Athar Shafi Alavi, a young student living in the old quarter of the railway junction town of Bareilly in the United Provinces, who wrote directly to the League leader. Pakistan was still managing, as an ideal, to capture the imagination of a segment of South Asian Muslim society.

The Partition plan, however, was a ‘bitter pill’ for Jinnah. For his supporters who now found themselves marooned, sometimes hundreds of miles from the real Pakistan, it was even tougher medicine.
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In the midst of the celebrations nagging doubts emerged about the nature of the prize. As Begum Ikramullah put it, ‘even though we may have wished for it and I, in a small way had worked for it, it was a bit frightening now that it was actually going to take place’.
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What would happen to the leadership of the Muslims left in India? Should they migrate to the new country? In the provinces where Muslims were in a minority, the shock was for those who had constructed Pakistan as a fictive, imaginary counter-nationalism to the Congress, or had dreamed of a more capacious Pakistan, who were left with the cold realisation that Pakistan was not going to include their home areas. This affected leadership and masses alike. Z.H. Lari, a lawyer, had campaigned energetically for the League. When the final form of Pakistan was announced, however, he was bitterly disappointed with the result, and gave an emotional speech in which he said that if the plan was accepted it would be ‘a major catastrophe’ as ‘the Pakistan which is being offered to us will be from every point of view so weak that we will find ourselves in serious difficulties’.
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The crushing fact, from the League's viewpoint, was that Pakistan's limits would be marked by two half-provinces, not the whole of Punjab and Bengal, and more expansive dreams of Pakistan's future had to be promptly reined in. Professor I.H. Qureshi, who had lavished praise on Jinnah's successful establishment of Pakistan just six days earlier, now wrote to him again. He had had time to examine the terms and conditions of Partition, the reality of the settlement had sunk in and he urged his leader to create a committee, ‘to study and prepare the Muslim case for increased territories in Eastern Punjab and Western Bengal’.
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He pressed the urgency of the situation on Jinnah. ‘You have perhaps read a news item in today's paper saying that the Hindus and Sikhs will advance considerations other than population for demanding certain areas. I think that we should also prepare a case on the basis of history, strategic considerations, irrigation and a feasible customs barrier.’ Minds turned to squeezing the settlement for the best possible deal. In Jinnah's own words the plan was ‘titanic, unknown, unparalleled’.
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Among those who had vocally supported the Pakistan demand without giving much detailed thought to its potential territorial implications at all, and who had pinned their hopes and dreams on religious revival or revitalised power, there was more unhappiness. In the United Provinces, elation about achieving Pakistan ‘got moderated by the realization among the more sober elements … of its logical implications for Muslims outside Pakistan’.
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Some members of the League continued to hope that the boundaries of the new Pakistani state would include the Mughal heartlands of North India, in the face of all the demographic evidence to the contrary, and even after the declaration that the Punjab and Bengal were to be divided, a circular was issued by some members of the provincial League trying to popularise the idea of ‘Pakistan pockets’ in the province.
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A hastily convened provincial League committee in Bombay demanded the establishment of a ‘homeland or homelands for the Muslims in Bombay province’.
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Firoz Khan Noon, a Punjabi League leader and later Prime Minister of Pakistan, responded to the 3 June plan by suggesting that the Sikhs should be incorporated as members of the new Pakistani Constituent Assembly, or that the Punjab's boundaries should be redrawn on a linguistic basis, while in Amritsar a former newspaper editor started a campaign for a united Punjab.
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Other Muslim groups, with different political attachments, felt aghast at the prospect of the new state. On the Afghan frontier, the Muslim Congress supporters felt an immediate sense of betrayal and Abdul Ghaffar Khan said, ‘the idea that we could be dominated by outsiders is beyond my comprehension’.
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The militant Muslim Khaksars violently rejected the plan, demanded the whole of Punjab and Bengal and ransacked the stately Imperial Hotel in Delhi, smashing glass and wreaking havoc, as nearly five hundred League legislators met to ratify the plan. One hundred or more were arrested as they tried to storm the hotel's staircase and the police fired tear gas to quell them.

Accompanying the shocked reactions to the Partition plan, there was also the new date to be contemplated; freedom had been advanced from a vague time in 1948 to the definitive date of 15 August 1947. ‘Necessity for Speed’ was, in case anyone was in any doubt, one of the subheadings of the 3 June plan. The diary of Shahid Hamid, private secretary to Auchinleck at the time and later a major-general of the Pakistan army, reveals little ambivalence about the
idea
of Pakistan but total outrage at the manner with which the 3 June plan was delivered and the urgency with which freedom was granted: ‘It was a bombshell! I wonder what brought this last minute change? Does he [Mountbatten] realize its consequences? Why this hurry? Why this shock treatment? … Why is he bulldozing everything and leaving no time for an organized handover …’
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He also acknowledged that there was confusion about the plan in the army, even among commanding officers, and that some suspected that ‘the plan is some sort of trap’.
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Haji Moula Bux, a member of the Sindi Legislative Assembly who had stood against the League, reassured his followers in Karachi that a reunion of the two countries was absolutely inevitable within two years, ‘as sure as day follows night’.
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Muslim Leaguers' thoughts now turned to what sort of country they wanted to build up. One Abul Quasem, a junior judge or
munsif
from Bengal, sent Jinnah his ‘Thoughts on Pakistan’. ‘To my mind it appears that we have not only not achieved Pakistan but our journey to the achievement of Pakistan has only begun and the way is full of dangers and pitfalls …’ he wrote.

If Pakistan means majority rule of the Muslims, I would not much care or labour to have it as it was almost in our grip if we accepted the A.B.C. plan [i.e. the Cabinet Mission plan] with right of succession from the Centre … Thus let us not mistake what we are for. If Pakistan means a homeland for the Muslims to develop their manhood to the fullest stature according to Islamic ideals, traditions and cultures, I must give my all to achieve it and here would come the question of my vision, sacrifice and labour.
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In not so many words, he was asking, what role will Islam play in the new state? Immediately Pakistan was declared a reality, the convenient ambiguities which had been used to glue the League together – hazy idealism and imaginative aspiration towards Islamic statehood – started to haunt the new country's leadership.

Among non-Muslims, too, the same questions were in circulation. Was this a temporary or a lasting settlement? Even as it reluctantly accepted the partition, the All India Congress Committee simultaneously kept alive the older idea of the indivisible Mother India. ‘Geography and the mountains and the seas fashioned India as she is and no human agency can change that shape or come in the way of her final destiny,’ resolved the Congress at an emotional meeting where it accepted the Partition plan in June 1947. ‘The picture of India we have learnt to cherish will remain in our minds and hearts.’
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From the standpoint of many Congress-supporting Indians it was unthinkable that those parts of the country in the north-east and the north-west which became Pakistan should be cut away, and the nationalistic imaginings of India, as part religious goddess, part mother figure, meant this was a debate about more than territory.

‘I have lived and worked for freedom of India as a whole for the last 40 years,’ declared Dr Chothi Ram Gidwani, president of the Sind Provincial Congress Committee, ‘and today when [a] great many portions of India are as good as liberated, apart from other harmful effects of partition which need not be enumerated here, I cannot reconcile myself to the very conception of a divided India in which I become an alien in a great part of my own beloved motherland, and a citizen of a new Muslim theocratic state created overnight.’
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His speech in reaction to news of the 3 June plan typifies the horrified reaction among many Indian nationalists.

All of this involved psychological adjustment. The nationalist map of ‘India’ – with territory reaching as far north as Afghanistan and as far south as Sri Lanka – was lodged firmly in the middle-class mind. This was a vast, sweeping picture of India as a continent rather than a country. Companies advertised by picturing their products against the silhouettes of Indian maps: they featured on everything ranging from lamps and tobacco to wristwatches. The black outline of India's shape was printed on letterheads and books. Furthermore, the idea of India had become, for many, personified in the shape of Bharat Mata or Mother India, who was both a goddess and geographical entity. Not just cold cartography, she embodied a real, warm, all-embracing mother figure. Her distinctive figure, in red flowing sari and often holding a flag, had many incarnations, ranging from ferocious Goddess Kali to demure housewife.
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The goddess, Mother India, and the map were entwined together. A temple to Bharat Mata in Varanasi had been opened by Gandhi himself in the 1930s where worshippers could gaze on a vast marble depiction of the subcontinent. It was difficult to give up this idea and this dream. For this reason, Partition was (and is) often described in India using medical imagery, such as the severing of limbs, the hacking off of body parts.