The Great Partition (23 page)

The basic building blocks of the new states, their economic policies and their attitude towards minorities, remained uncertain. Without this knowledge, those who feared that their land was on the verge of becoming Pakistan or Hindustan felt deeply troubled. People associated the idea of belonging to the hazy, unknown ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ with negative and upsetting connotations. Some feared infringement of their personal lives, the ruination of their religion, perhaps even the destruction of daily life as they knew it.

Portentous news began arriving in New Delhi: of the possibility of ‘active resistance’ to an unfavourable boundary and of people distributing posters in Punjabi villages summoning crowds to emergency meetings in mosques, temples and gurdwaras. On 8 July a massive
hartal
, as Sikh businesses, shops and markets closed all over Punjab, stretched into the cities of North India. Over half a million Sikhs wore black armbands to signal their depth of feeling. They collected together in gurdwaras to pray for the continued unity of their community. Abundant warnings stressed that violent protests were being organised in order to shape and influence directly the places where the borderline would snake through the land. Violence was the last tool of the desperate.

In this light, constitutional means were rapidly starting to seem an irrelevance. As a self-described ‘common man’ from Lahore expressed it to his Congress committee, ‘Violence is bad but non-violence is hopeless.’
¹⁸
It was impossible to square the heightened sense of expectations which had been stirred by Independence with the bruising reality of a borderline penned hastily across a piece of paper. Uncertainty about the precise location of the new borderline collided with the intensely negative attributes ascribed to ‘Pakistan’ and ‘India’. Among those who had been on the front line of nationalist campaigns, membership of ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ was reviled as potentially life-threatening and all-engulfing. If your home fell on the wrong side of the border when it was finally announced, many argued, you would not be living as a minority in a modern, democratic nation state. Instead you would suffer oppression, exploitation, the dishonouring of religion and perhaps even conversion or death.

Fears of British foul play were also festering. ‘A nation that has regained a homeland that belongs to it never gives it up without a fight,’ spat out editorials in
Dawn
, inciting its readers to action if the British reneged on their agreements. ‘If that is what these last minute double-crossers want so that they may secure [a]renewed imperialist foothold under fresh excuses, they will get it.’
¹⁹
The plan was condemned as ‘eyewash’ and ‘a sham’ by others. Sikhs complained that their sons had died on the battlefields of Europe during two world wars and that this was how the British repaid them.

Collections were made for a Sikh war chest and Sikh
jathas
assembled, dressed in red and orange bandannas and distinctive turbans, armed, and stirred to action. Two private armies, the Akali Sena and Shahidi Jatha, went from village to village recruiting men. This was preparation for civil war by any other name. By July, Evan Jenkins, the Governor of Punjab, was sending unambiguous warnings, citing depth of anger about the division and proposed borderline as the major grievance. The boundary had become a live wire, or even ‘a casus belli between the two dominions’.
²⁰
The claims of the two sides were incompatible: the Sikhs could not forgo their principal gurdwaras, which lie in present-day Pakistan, just as Muslims claimed historical and cultural rights in Lahore, the home of the formidable Badshahi mosque, while it was feared that militants on both sides might destroy cities rather than relinquish them.

As Independence Day approached, life became nightmarish for people caught between the opposing sides. ‘My head was about to burst. To me it seemed as if I was not in my senses,’ the writer Fikr Taunsvi recorded in his daily diary after another difficult day in the war-torn city of Lahore, which had now been under siege for almost six months. ‘I felt a hammering on my brain. My nerves were on edge, as if they would explode and destroy my body. The continuous sharp chain of the morning's turmoil enveloped me in its tight embrace.’
²¹
Fear was the predominant emotion in the middle months of 1947, particularly in those districts of Punjab where inclusion in Pakistan or India was, as yet, unknown. Here, policemen and magistrates had become completely unreliable and untrustworthy, slinking away from their posts or becoming openly partisan. Sleep was disturbed by unusual, threatening noises as riots broke out in distant parts of the city or militias made their rounds in the streets: there were the beating of drums and tom-toms, the striking of cooking vessels, bells and gongs, the wail of horns, trumpets, loudspeakers, whistles and sirens.
²²

Curfews and closed markets caused dire hardship. Taunsvi's local street was in turmoil: ‘the washerman who lived on the ground floor … had become the father of a tiny baby at three in the morning and … was worried that the bazaars were shut. The sweet-seller who sold milk had locked his shop from inside and was hiding there. He had received no supply today because all milk-vendors are Muslim, and this being a Hindu locality, they couldn't step into it. Hospitals were not functioning, neither were doctors, nurses and medicines, and both the mother and the infant were crying. The children were asking, “Will the curfew never be lifted? Shall we never get milk?” ’ As he helplessly watched the washerman's newborn child become more sick, Taunsvi's feelings turned to anger against the politicians who had created the situation, ‘I wish you had the strength to ask great brains like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah and other statesmen and
maulvis
to wear the guise of this unlettered washerman for a moment. Then you may go and request the British to give you freedom. Then demand Pakistan and Hindustan.’
²³
The brutality and daily privations of the time seemed far from the dreams of the long-awaited independence.

People experienced gradations of anxiety; some Punjabis felt paralysing and life-changing terror. In the worst-afflicted centres, in the hardest hit parts of Lahore and Amritsar, Rawalpindi and Sheikhupura, the most anxious took desperate measures – growing or cutting off their beards and learning the
Kalma
or Vedic phrases so that they could fake their religious identities if necessary. If possible, families sent their unmarried daughters away with guardians or relations, and decided upon hiding places in the roof spaces of barns or the small back rooms of temples or mosques. The optimists refused to take basic precautions but many minds turned to self-defence and the stockpiling of bags of sand and cooking fuel, and the collection of extra drinking water. Newly recruited watchmen patrolled villages and towns, and missiles and ammunition piled up. The family of Shanti Seghal, a young woman aged twenty at the time, made various attempts to find safety, moving from Gujranwala to Sheikhupura in 1946 because the family thought the city would probably end up in India. ‘My father had a soda water shop; we put all the soda water bottles on the roof, lined them up, thinking that when they come we will attack them with bottles,’ she later recalled, ‘but they were no use because they came with machine guns.’
²⁴

Creating a believable border was impossible without the agreement of the people who would have to abide with it. The 3 June plan had exacerbated anxieties and accelerated the preparations for war. It was becoming more difficult to stay neutral and the formation of two new nations was forcing people to declare simple allegiances from much richer and more complicated pasts.

Fortifying the Punjab with a highly disciplined force of impartial, professional soldiers would have been one way of providing security and reassurance to people in the weeks between the announcement of the plan and its implementation. In the troubled district of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, ‘the sight of tanks careering round the countryside, often with the local police officer standing in the turret, had some temporary effect’.
²⁵
In Bengal, there had been ‘some ugly incidents’ but, an American diplomat reported, ‘the city is so bristling with armed troops and police that forays against public order have been discouraged and minimized’.
²⁶
Troops did have a presence in city centres in Punjab, North India and Delhi – on Independence Day in Lahore Penderel Moon found the Lawrence Gardens ‘full of troops’ while ‘the railway station was in the hands of the military and barricaded off by barbed wire’.
²⁷
There was, in addition, a special boundary force constituted to deal with the prospect of a contested borderline.

But just as land was being divided, so were soldiers. Nearly half a million Indian soldiers commanded by a predominantly white British officer corps had to be cut and pasted into the new national formations. The division of the army along religious lines, which Auchinleck had reckoned would take ‘between five and ten years’, in March 1947, was hurried through in months, although it was only completed in full in March 1948.
²⁸
In the midst of the most appalling killings which were ripping through North India and just at a time when a united, neutral army was needed to suppress militias – which were often composed of ex-soldiers themselves and hence not averse to engaging the authentic army in battle – the regiments of the Indian army were dismembered. Soldiers were combed out and mechanically divided according to their religious hue; blocs of Muslim soldiers were hastily packed off to Pakistan while non-Muslim soldiers were dispatched in the opposite direction.

Of the twenty-three infantry regiments in pre-Partition India, only seven consisted exclusively of Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs. Now, no Muslim who was resident in the Pakistan areas could choose to serve in India, and vice versa for non-Muslims living in India. Much effort had been expended by the British during the Second World War trying to keep the military immunised from the cross-currents of Indian nationalism. Before Independence, fervent nationalists were unlikely to sign up for careers in the imperial army. Now, though, more narrowly defined allegiances to the League and the Congress became irrelevant. The religion into which a soldier was born became the
sine qua non
of his new national identity. Now all Muslims were fundamentally equated by the state apparatus with Pakistan and all non-Muslims were assumed to have a natural allegiance to India, whether they had expressed support for the creation of the new states or not. Given this stark choice it was unusual for soldiers deliberately to choose to serve in a country where they would be part of a ‘minority’. The chances of a quick promotion, family persuasion, marital prospects or judgements about personal safety rapidly took precedence.

Men of various castes and communities lived intimately alongside each other in the Indian army. Some companies remained immune from jingoistic outbursts, whereas others became more highly politicised. News of army indiscipline was suppressed and the army appeared to remain more ‘reliable’ and less polarised along ethnic lines than the severed and pugilistic local police forces. Nevertheless, the cart followed the horse as soldiers were encouraged to display patriotic feeling. Now, labelled Indian or Pakistani, many soldiers started to identify openly with one side or the other. ‘Mussalman officers are Jubilant and talking openly of being generals in the Pakistan army, and that Pakistan will eventually be greater than the previous Moghul Empire,’ wrote one British colonel.
²⁹
Many sepoys came from the Punjabi and North Indian heartlands where violence was raging and felt extremely anxious about the fate of their families. Nervous and irritable soldiers waited for information of their new postings in the maelstrom of misinformation and rumour.

As rail and road networks remained vulnerable to attack, the precise moment at which units of Muslim soldiers would be evacuated to Pakistan from India – and vice versa on the Pakistani side – was kept a closely guarded secret and usually announced at very short notice. A group of Pakistani cadets stationed in the northern hill station of Dehra Dun had just four hours’ notice to pack for their new homeland, and their superiors bundled them out of their base in a heavily guarded convoy at 5.30 in the morning. The British medical officer Anthony Epstein, who was looking on, wrote home to his family about the sudden departure of the Muslim cadets. ‘It was all very dramatic and tense, with a farewell parade in the dim lights of lorries and everyone cheering and very excited. This incident only heightens the sense of foreboding there is here as everywhere.’
³⁰
Soldiers who had forged friendships over many years of shared daily routine were suddenly separated and there was genuine sadness about the division; glasses were raised in heartfelt toasts, addresses were exchanged and pledges made. Every company of the 3rd Rajputana Rifles hosted a leaving party for their Muslim co-soldiers before they took their leave for Pakistan. As a senior officer in 1947, Sahabzada Yaqub Khan, later a Pakistani Foreign Minister, remembered in discussion with the journalist Andrew Whitehead,

Many of the men I commanded, Punjabi Muslims, they had homes in what would become Pakistan, but in the villages there had been many cases of abduction of women, and some of the men were affected, their families and so on had been abducted … but I must say this also, their Sikh comrades made many efforts to go down to those villages and to try and secure release of abducted women, not always successfully; but you can imagine that events of that kind, which touched so deeply … were bound to prey on the minds of the people concerned; these events were a strong indication that the fabric would not be able to hold together.
³¹

In the shadow of the continuing Punjabi violence, the fragmentation of mixed regiments was a constant concern despite the strong thread of comradeship running through the armed forces. Whole squadrons of Sikhs and Muslims waited cheek by jowl for movement to their permanent units in Jhansi and as rumours of their impending transportation came and went, alongside new stories of calamities in Punjab, there was a risk of the soldiers turning on each other. As they nervously waited for news of loved ones the strain could become too much. In Gujranwala there was a mutiny in one Pakistan battalion and the non-Muslim soldiers had to be urgently removed to safety, while in Ambala an inquiry found Pakistani troops guilty of firing at civilians from the carriage windows of their passing train, killing or wounding sixty people. A Sikh captain was charged after a shooting incident in an unspecified Punjabi suburb in which eighteen people died.
³²
On board a ship sailing from Bombay to Karachi after Independence, General Tuker, who was no stranger to the extent of Partition's damage, was astonished to find just how many soldiers on board had had relatives killed in the violence or had not heard from their families for months.