The Great Partition (22 page)

The census the commissions worked with was six years out of date and of dubious veracity in the first place; the trickle of refugees which had already started and the bunching of communities together for safety during the ongoing violence meant that the population ratio of the land which was being divided was shifting beneath both boundary commissions' feet on a daily basis. Pakistan itself had never been fully defined in a territorial way by the League, which had laid claim to the whole of Punjab, while the imagery of Indian nationalists staked a claim to the whole of the subcontinent. Now the precise landmass of Pakistan had to be carved out. ‘The Assam government invited the commission to come to Shillong but they have refused on the score of shortness of time,’ the disappointed Governor of the province remarked.
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The commissions declined all the other polite invitations to come and visit affected areas. In the end, they retreated behind closed doors, working from maps using pen and paper, rather than walking the land and grasping for themselves the ways in which vast rivers, forests and administrative districts interlocked and could best be separated.

Faced with the impending reality of this arbitrary borderline, Indian groups and parties were bitterly torn among themselves about what to claim and what to relinquish and on what basis. The land question now seized centre stage. Rather than ameliorate and assuage, the 3 June plan was sparking unknown consequences. There was a ‘very mixed’ reception to the Partition plan in Lahore and Amritsar – and the imposition of the sudden division froze people together, making superficial association with one group or another more difficult to avoid. ‘The belief that the Punjab will be partitioned has intensified the communal split and most officials are wondering who their new masters will be and how best they can secure their own future,’ warned the Governor, foreseeing the complete fissure which would soon tear through the administrative offices and the police forces in the troubled province.
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Again, the implosion of the old colonial regime meant that there was very little reliable organisational infrastructure to prop up the transitional state: ‘so far as the services are concerned we are going through a very difficult time with some men yearning to leave India, others trying to please new masters, and others again upset and apprehensive. The old administrative machinery is rapidly falling to pieces.’
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He was right; the old machinery was disintegrating. Punjab was now held hostage by volatile militias. In fear of a political backlash, the government of Punjab allowed well-known ringleaders to go free and British officials and Indian politicians wavered over the banning of weapons, including guns and the unsheathed kirpans of the Sikhs. ‘There was nothing abnormal en route …’ Moon commented, on his way into Lahore, except that on roads leading through the district of Multan, ‘individual Sikhs walking or cycling were all wearing very large kirpans’.
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Bombs, often left over from the Second World War, became a new feature of the attacks in Punjab in June. On the morning of 10 June a Sikh on a bicycle hurled a bomb into a horse-drawn cart carrying passengers in Lahore. The street exploded into confusion, leaving two dead and ten injured. Ten days later, on Brandreth road, a party of labourers heading off early in the morning for their day's work, perhaps as bricklayers or rock-breakers, were attacked by a bomb thrown from a neighbouring rooftop. One of the men died. In the vegetable market in Lahore, the next day, two bombs timed to go off one after the other caused havoc; splitting apart the stalls of piled-up pyramids of vegetables, killing nine shoppers and traders and injuring at least thirty-eight more. The Sikh leaders openly threatened an uprising to the British officials and one spokesman, Giani Kartar Singh, wept as he told the Governor of the Punjab that a fight was inevitable if no heed was paid to Sikh solidarity.

Terrified by their loss of control and shocked by the chaos and the mess which they would inherit on Independence Day, national leaders pleaded for order. ‘Amritsar is already a city of ruins, and Lahore is likely to be in a much worse state very soon,’ Nehru told Mountbatten in the last week of June. ‘You gave an assurance even before 3rd June and subsequently that any kind of disorder will be put down with vigour. I am afraid we are not honouring that assurance in some places at least, notably Lahore and Amritsar.’ Jinnah, more bluntly, begged, ‘I don't care whether you shoot Moslems or not, it has got to be stopped.’
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At the same time, Pakistan was becoming a real, earthy reality. Rapidly, the greatest minds in law, statistics and administration turned to the maps in order to construct their case. ‘I understand that a band of workers under Mr Abdur Rahim, I.C.S., has been working on the ethnological aspect of the problem. I venture to send a few figures in this connection,’ wrote Professor Qureshi to Jinnah. He enclosed lists of numerical musings on
tehsils
, or small administrative areas ‘contiguous to tentative districts of Pakistan where Muslims are in absolute majority’. These raw statistics make terrifying reading when we know, with hindsight, where this reduction of human beings to simple numbers was leading. Qureshi was just one of many who sent lists and he had scribbled in the margins whether the League had a case to make on the grounds of population. In
tehsil
Muktsar, he noted, ‘Muslims in simple majority.’ Moga was ‘Predominantly Hindu’, in Amritsar
tehsil
, ‘Muslims are less than combined population of Hindus and Sikhs’, but in Anjala there would be an ‘Absolute majority of Muslims’. In Dasuya, ‘Muslims are less than combined Hindus and Sikhs. But if Indian Christians are combined with Muslims, we get bare majority.’ And so it went on.
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In this frenzied rush to calculate population ratios the reality of ancient and intricately woven homelands – and sensitivity to violent repercussions – was lost. Ominously, another League supporter in North India, A.R. Khan, was calling for limited movement of the population to strengthen the Muslim position, which he predicted would not be difficult in the rural areas ‘where people have no stakes’.
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The logic of this was to reduce individuals and communities to crass ratios and statistics which stripped bare the inner complexities of friendship, community and life itself. Gandhi distilled this beautifully into five words: ‘today religion has become fossilised,’ he told a gathering of saffron-clad
sadhus
and Hindu ascetics in early June.
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Few talked about, or even contemplated, what this border would mean for the ordinary people who lived on either side of it. ‘My anxiety now was to work day and night and get the case ready by Friday noon,’ remembered the Muslim League's chief legal representative, Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, many years later. ‘Even now, looking back, I cannot explain how it was possible for us to produce a case which we did by the Friday noon.’ Immediately after submitting the documents to the Punjab Boundary Commission in Lahore, he went straight to a local mosque, where he led the Friday evening prayers and warned the anxious congregation to be ‘vigilant’ as he feared that the Muslims faced ‘suppression’.
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There would be one chance for the parties to present a case to the boundary commissions at their public hearings held in the High Courts of Lahore and Calcutta in late July. The chattering classes could acquire permits and some went to watch the show, packing the press and public galleries. But it was not light entertainment. The Punjab Boundary Commission received fifty-one official memorandums from political parties and organisations, the Sikhs' memorandum alone was nearly 75 pages long and the star Bombay lawyer, M.C. Setalvad, who made the case for the Congress, with the Hindu Mahasabha's backing, spoke for over three hours. Ultimately, all this fevered activity only heightened expectations.

As Independence Day drew nearer, the response to the threat of an unknown borderline was, quite simply, frantic. The telephone at the Governor of Punjab's house was ringing incessantly around the clock with callers desperate to convey their position. Depositions and appeals came in the form of telegraphs and petitions, letters and phone calls, to the commissions themselves as well as, hopelessly, to those who were not allowed to intervene in their work in any case: Mountbatten, Attlee and even the King of England. There were so many memoranda and representations to the Bengal commission that the commissioners said it would be impossible for them to finish their hearings by the set date of 26 July (to which Radcliffe could only reply, ‘I must beg you to complete by 26’). Journalists at the offices of the pro-League newspaper
Dawn
claimed that they had received hundreds of telegrams on the subject and warned uncompromisingly in front-page articles that local Muslim leagues were readying themselves for action against an unfavourable award. ‘Muslims of Ambala,’ the paper reported of one district which, objectively, had no chance of inclusion in Pakistan, ‘demand demarcation of boundary lines on population basis. Any departure from this fundamental rule will be fought tooth and nail.’ ‘From start to finish,’ in the words of the historian Joya Chatterji, ‘the making of the borderline was shot through with politics.’
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‘To Sikh solidarity the Mountbatten scheme will be what a knife is to a cheese piece,’ warned a Lahore newspaper: ‘it will cut through it easily and definitely.’ The Sikhs, a community of only six million, in an all-India population of almost four hundred million, became desperate. The Sikh population was almost evenly spread across the Punjab. What were the Sikhs to do now, with ‘no homeland in the whole world except in the land of the five rivers’?
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They had lost their influence on the colonial state and felt the interests of their community were being sacrificed on the altar of a broader constitutional settlement. Many had called for Partition as a way of saving at least some of the Punjab from being swallowed up by Pakistan but now they appealed to the commission to consider the ‘other factors’ – the rich regional Sikh heritage, their extensive landholdings and architectural birthright. On this basis, it was not improbable that Lahore, home to six hundred gurdwaras, might fall to the Sikhs despite the population ratios which narrowly favoured Muslims in the city. There was a confused and divided response, with some appealing for a Sikh homeland, Sikhistan, and others pushing for reconciliation to broker a deal with the Muslim League. But for many, fighting to push back the boundary line was the only option if Radcliffe presented them with a raw deal.

Allegiances were swiftly sealed with Sikh princes whose own lands abutted these tracts and who had no intention of sinking their kingdoms in a wider sea of Pakistan if they could help it. As a collection of seventeen wealthy Sikh landlords spelt out in a searing appeal to the Viceroy, nothing short of a line along the Chenab River would satisfy:

We must now rise as one man and proclaim that we shall refuse to be put in a helpless position. We have fought and defended the country for over a century with our blood out of all proportion to our numbers. Our contribution in the economic field both in industry and agriculture and development of the canal colonies of the Punjab bears the deep impression of our sweat and toil. Our religion has given India a beautiful culture which if correctly understood would banish all communal strife and bitterness from our land. We have not done all this to earn slavery and domination.

Dawn
bitterly retorted that it was unthinkable that ‘the tiny little community of scattered Sikhs who have split themselves into two by their own scatterbrained policy may be awarded predominantly Muslim territories merely because there may be located in them a Sikh shrine here, or a Sikh shrine there’.
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This was a gross and disingenuous reduction of the importance of Nankana Sahib, the fifteenth-century birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. As the Maharaja of Patiala told Mountbatten directly, ‘The Sikh sentiment about this place is so strong that it would be most dangerous to minimise it, as under no circumstances they can be persuaded [
sic
] to allow this to go into foreign territory.’
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Couched in royal niceties, this was a very thinly veiled threat. The Maharaja had already been roundly sacking his Muslim employees and openly supporting the idea of a revitalised Sikh state.

Princes and big parties could at least get a hearing with Mountbatten. Smaller groups such as ‘untouchables’, Christians and Anglo-Indians were simply pushed aside by the sweeping plan. Beyond the neat textbook polarisations of League and Congress were countless fragmented groups with their own worries and interests. Their voices could not be completely drowned out. Yet now these smaller groups looked as if they were up for grabs, only really able to make their voice heard through alliances with the larger parties. Chaudhri Sunder Singh was a member of the Legislative Assembly for Punjab, elected on a ticket as an ‘untouchable’. He was so worried about the fate of his community two weeks after the 3 June plan was revealed that he forced staff in the Governor's office to send a letter to Mountbatten on his behalf. This met with a curt rebuff. Politicians of the Pakistan Achhut Federation, P.S. Ramdasia and Choudhry Sukh Lal, travelled to Delhi in order to try and confront the Viceroy in person and to push forward their viewpoint, ‘in the hope that even at this eleventh hour [a] sense of justice may create an urge to minimise the wrong done to our unfortunate community at least in the province of Punjab’. Their community would prefer to be in Pakistan, they argued, rather than subsumed under the broader Hindu label. ‘It is no longer a secret that the Hindus aim at re-establishing Vedic Raj – the so-called Ram-Raj – and the untouchables do not realise that they shall have to remain
chandals
[untouchables] for ever under Hindu domination.’
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There was neither the time, nor the will, however, to nuance sweeping understandings of ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Sikh’. And nobody was clearly spelling out the guiding political principles behind the new India and the new Pakistan.