The Great Partition (21 page)

Of course, nobody, as yet, had properly defined Pakistan's territory and some League leaders clung to the prospect of linking up with Muslim-ruled states such as Bhopal and Hyderabad, although they sat squarely in India, or even achieving the accession of the tiny states lacing the deserts along the Rann of Cutch on India's western flank. Well-tended myths and histories in these states reminded people that their communities had prospered through war. If well-educated Indian princes and maharajas, who had the ear of Mountbatten and open invitations to Delhi's political drawing rooms, genuinely, if quixotically, aspired to radically different visions of South Asia's future, then it is little wonder that the ordinary people living within these princely states were confused about Independence and regarded preparations for self-defence as a rational proposition.

Journalists bombarded Mountbatten with questions in press conferences in the days after the 3 June plan was announced and pressed him for information about procedural details, India's membership of the Commonwealth and the timing of the British departure, but only one thought to ask what would, in retrospect, turn out to be the most vital question of all. ‘Do you foresee any mass transfer of population?’ ‘Personally I don't see it,’ the Viceroy replied. ‘There are many physical and practical difficulties involved. Some measure of transfer will come about in a natural way … perhaps Governments will transfer populations. Once more, this is a matter not so much for the main parties as for the local authorities living in the border areas to decide.’
⁵⁵
The fuzzy thinking on this critical question was the fatal flaw in the Partition plan. Nobody had foreseen the risks of unprecedented population movements as a result of the plan and only feeble mechanisms had been put in place to reassure, protect or secure the position of the petrified communities living in the border regions of Bengal and Punjab. In the event, the resulting movement of people was so large that it changed the very nature of the newly independent states of Pakistan and India and altered the entire meaning of Partition.

Even as the plan was being agreed, the slow trickle of refugees had started and the decision to flee was weighed up. Those who could afford to travel left their keys with their neighbours or moved away from the Punjab to be with relatives. Anxious and confused students, businessmen and government employees penned tense and sometimes furious letters to the government or to their political heroes. The choices before them were limited. The very existence of the new state meant that those Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan or Muslims in India immediately fell under the label ‘minority’. It no longer mattered at all what their political inclinations were as, by the logic of the state, by a twist of fate decided at birth people were classified as members either of majorities or of minorities. Reports from the Central Provinces suggested that the ministry regarded ‘every Muslim as a Pakistani’ and that Muslim policemen were being encouraged to leave.
⁵⁶
The Chief Minister of the province, as he reviewed the smart ranks of the Hindustani Seva Dal cadets a few days after the Partition plan was announced, suggested jokily that the Muslim minister sitting next to him on the platform would now have to find a new home in Pakistan. Rather less jocularly, he added that, ‘even though religious and cultural freedom may be conceded to the Muslims living in Hindustan they will have no representation in the legislatures or in the services’.
⁵⁷
The fundamentals of ethnic identity now looked as if they trumped everything else.

Masood Hussain, a twenty-three-year-old bachelor from the North Indian district of Moradabad, turned to Jinnah for help. Educated at Aligarh, with a Master's and a law degree, he was deeply worried about supporting his family. He had no capital, no business prospects and was worried about discrimination from local Congressmen as he had fought on the side of the League during the 1946 elections. As an unemployed student, his first concern was making a living and finding a modicum of economic security. ‘Most Respected Quaid-i-Azam,’ he wrote,

I am ready to serve anywhere you order me – Sindh, Punjab, Sarhad, Baluchistan, Bengal or overseas … I assure you that I am passing very anxious days and nights. My father is dead and I have no property which can yield any income for the maintenance of my family. The capital left by my father, he having been a railway official, has gradually dwindled and has now come to Rs. 5,000 only. How long will it help, as our monthly expenditure is no less than Rs. 275 per month? I am in suspense and the future is uncertain. The last thing I could do was to approach you for help and sustenance.

Like many others, his attraction to Pakistan was framed in the language of economic and personal safety and security: ‘It is my earnest desire that I should serve Pakistan and thus my family and myself.’
⁵⁸

The wealthy, far-sighted and well-connected made sure that their assets were safe. It is no surprise that the great industrial magnate G.D. Birla who had long been advocating Partition managed to extricate 80 per cent of his liquid assets from Punjab and Sind months before Partition. By May 1947 the capital shifting out of Punjabi banks to Delhi was being estimated at 250
crores
, or 250 million pounds, and a banking magnate announced ‘we are leaving the “Pakistan” an economic desert’.
⁵⁹
Penderel Moon advised his ‘unduly sanguine’ Hindu friends in West Punjab to get out. ‘One of them took the hint and expressed gratitude to me afterwards. The rest clung obstinately to their ancestral homes and in the end escaped with little more than their lives.’
⁶⁰
Nobody leaves their home without a good reason, though, and the poor lacked the means to pack up and go, even if they wanted to. There was an urgent necessity to give rock-solid reassurances to these groups and to guarantee citizenship, property and security rights for all Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, irrespective of where they lived. Catastrophically, this was not done in time and petrified communities threaded throughout India and Pakistan thought that they would suddenly be reduced to the status of ‘minorities’. The corollary, they believed, was second-class citizenship, persecution and even death. In this light, waging a violent sectarian battle to preserve the land from intruders or outsiders became a perversely logical option.

Some leaders heard the 3 June plan as the starting gun for a
de facto
civil war; the demagogue Purushottam Das Tandon declared it would be the duty of the youth to take back the parts of the country that had been sliced away and appealed to the young, especially students, to train in arms even at the expense of their studies. ‘It is the crying need of the hour. We are being subjected to onslaughts from every direction and enemies are waiting like hungry wolves to pounce upon us.’ In Karachi, a packed crowd gathered to hear the provincial League president swear to ‘fight to the last ditch for the honour and prestige of the Muslims of these two provinces’, that the Muslims would ‘never part with an inch of the Punjab’ and that Pakistan might have to be claimed with ‘the might of the Muslim sword’.
⁶¹

Deluded and earnest attempts were made to bypass the plan and to reshape Pakistan along alternative lines. In the United Provinces, politicians in the west of the province set up committees to patch up a Pakistan corridor which would branch across from east to west, linking up the two wings of the new state. The secret Indo-Pakistan League campaigned doggedly for the ‘original Pakistan’ right into the earliest days of Independence, claiming that the British had ignored cultural and social considerations in their division of the country, that the separation of the two wings of Pakistan was illogical and that the remaining portions of the ‘original Pakistan’, such as Delhi, UP and Kashmir, should be released immediately.
⁶²
These moves were entirely unrealistic by this date and reflect how detached many Leaguers had become from the politics of decolonisation and nation state formation being played out in New Delhi.

Numerous unambiguous warnings arrived daily in New Delhi and London of the turbulent state of affairs in the countryside, particularly the increasingly urgent and insistent warnings of the British Governor, Evan Jenkins, in Punjab. In London, politicians washed their hands of responsibility and showed vague, but uncommitted, concern. In a private conversation Attlee sombrely said that ‘he was hopeful that there would be no bloodshed but feared that there would be’. The onus was on the South Asian leadership to take control and in the detached official colonial mind, Partition violence was perceived as
their
problem, a highly dubious perception considering the fact that the nascent governments had not yet begun to function and that, when they did, they would be understaffed, under-resourced and sometimes operating from under canvas. In a frank and astonishing exchange between Sir Paul Patrick of the India Office and American diplomats, the British official admitted that ‘widespread violence and bloodshed’ was likely from the first week of June and that ‘legally there was no way of avoiding full British responsibility for public security in India until after the passage of the act and power transfer’.
⁶³
It had taken six years to piece together the last major parliamentary act regarding India in 1935. Now, in less than six weeks, the final act of Parliament which unhooked India from its imperial master, ‘a nice tidy little bill’, in the words of the Secretary of State, was hurried through Westminster.
⁶⁴
It is difficult to avoid the damning conclusion that, in the minds of British policy-makers, the duty to protect the lives of South Asians had already ended.

At the end of June, the Muslim League held a meeting at a large, private house in Lahore to decide the collective reaction to the boundary commissions. All the parties now scrambled to present their viewpoint to the commissions, to justify and explain why certain parts of territory should be destined to fall inside Pakistan. Penderel Moon attended the meeting and entered the house where a crowd of prominent Leaguers had gathered to deliberate over Pakistan's proposed boundaries, to decide what claims they should stake to the Punjab: ‘On the floor and on a big table a number of maps of the Punjab were strewn about, variously coloured and chequered so as to show the distribution of the population by communities. We all fell to poring over these maps,’ he later remembered. ‘It became plain in a very few minutes that no-one had any definite idea of where we should claim that the dividing line should run – indeed, except for Gurmani [his colleague] and myself, no-one seemed to have given much thought to the matter or even to know the basic facts about the distribution of the population.’
¹

The open-ended, conveniently ambiguous Pakistan demand now came crashing into territorial realities of population ratios and land usage. Between 3 June and 15 August the imaginary, but deeply felt, attachment to Indian and Pakistani nationalism was to metamorphose into two, real sovereign nation states. Land, assets and armies were to be severed in seventy-three days. As Gandhi put it, intuiting the chasm between conflicting understandings of nationalism, ‘Pakistan is not something imaginary. India is not something imaginary … No poison must be spread.’
²
Regrettably, however, the poison had already seeped deep into the arteries of the nationalist firebrands. Like a distorted fairground mirror, India and Pakistan became warped, frightening, oppositional images of one another.

The political decisions could no longer be made in a sealed bubble away from prying eyes. Penderel Moon was taken aback to see a young, junior official present at the League meeting in Lahore, one Mohammad Ali, with whom he had worked four years earlier in Amritsar. Mohammad Ali, a subordinate revenue official, was standing in a group of people near the window. Moon was surprised that someone so junior should have found his way into the inner circle of decision-making about depositions to the boundary commissions. He crossed the room and asked, ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ to which came the reply, ‘My friend brought me along and we just walked in. Nobody stopped us.’ Information was leaking profusely from the party strongholds, giving ample opportunity for rumours and misinformation to take hold. The centre of political gravity was shifting from New Delhi to the offices and front rooms of clerks, petty officials, policemen and administrators. Friends and relations passed news to one another as the political classes tried to extract information and to steer the boundary award in their own favour.
³
Simultaneously, decisions and statements were couched in so much uncertainty that ordinary Punjabis were left completely in the dark about whether their homes were soon going to be in India or Pakistan.

The border had to be decided against the clock. The Bengal Boundary Commission and the Punjab Boundary Commission, both under the chairmanship of Cyril Radcliffe, were formed on 30 June. Radcliffe was a respected judge, well known for his piercing intellect, but had none of the requisite technical skills for drawing a border, and had, infamously, never been to India before. The British government considered this an asset lending itself to impartiality rather than the self-evident drawback which it proved. Until he arrived in India, on 8 July, Radcliffe did not realise quite what he had bitten off: there were eventually 3,800 miles of border between the two countries. The terms of the commissions' briefs included not only the statistical proportions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs by district but also a woolly and much-debated reference to ‘other factors’ – cultural, geographical and historical – which left the boundaries open to repeated challenges. In the long run this undermined the moral authority of the final settlement. In Punjab, over half of the districts were contested, making the provisional boundary line a sham. For Radcliffe it was, quite simply, a thankless task.