The Great Partition (29 page)

Administrators and politicians hovered on the brink of nervous exhaustion; Dr Zakir Hussain, a future President of India, reporting on the state of the refugee camps in the city to his colleagues, suggested ‘that these places could not properly be called camps, but rather areas in which humanity was dumped’.
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In the imperial capital in mid-August food and milk were scarce, rubbish rotted uncollected in the streets and in the heat of summer all car windows were firmly sealed, or vehicles were mounted with guns. Many politicians personally suffered, nor were they personally immune from the terror sweeping the country; the daughter of Ghulam Mohammad, later Governor-General of Pakistan, was abducted and the brother of Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, a leading Congress politician, was stabbed to death on his way to work in a government office one morning. Dr Zakir Hussain himself was narrowly saved from death when he was attacked at Ambala train station. Leading political figures waited frantically for news of loved ones or tried their best to use their political clout in order to obtain information, to secure the safety of a specific train or to get access to a telephone line.

Guilt, shock and profound sadness had to be reconciled with the wider ideal of freedom for which the country had been striving. Indian leaders grieved for the bloody mess that they saw around them. Nehru was shattered and depressed, looking ‘inexpressibly sad’ at the first Emergency Committee meeting.
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The Prime Minister reportedly jumped out of his car when driving through the streets of Delhi one day when he saw a Hindu pushing a handcart full of goods looted from a Muslim neighbourhood, grabbing the man by the throat when he refused to take them back.
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The military general Ayub Khan, who was serving with the Boundary Force at the time of Partition, later wrote that ‘this was the unhappiest period of my life’.
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Even the optimistic and pragmatic industrialist G.D. Birla reflected sombrely that ‘Unless we can cope with the situation India is doomed.’
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There was a feeling that the new states might be on the brink of falling, irretrievably, into an abyss. ‘Most prominent and persistent was our absolute uncertainty whether we should succeed in restoring and maintaining order,’ remembered Penderel Moon who was trying to piece back together the princely state of Bahawalpur after murderers and looters had ransacked the city. ‘This gnawing anxiety amounted sometimes to the fear that not only Bahawalpur, but the whole of northern India and with it Pakistan, might sink into utter and irretrievable chaos …’
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Other administrators and officials shared this concern.

Politicians felt the full force of the refugees' grief – and anger. When Nehru went to meet refugees clustered in the pilgrimage town of Haridwar, he tried to be conciliatory and to talk to them of human losses on both sides of the border. A moving if hagiographic account by the Urdu journalist Shorish Kashmiri captures the tension at the camp:

Some young people, whose parents had been butchered and whose sisters and daughters had been left in Pakistan surrounded Panditji [Nehru] … One young man lost his temper and gave Panditji a resounding slap; a slap on the face of the Prime Minister of India. But Panditji said nothing to him. He just placed his hand on the young man's shoulder. The young man shouted: ‘Give my mother back to me! Bring my sisters to me!’ Panditji's eyes filled with tears. He said, ‘Your anger is justified, but, be it Pakistan or India, the calamity that has overtaken us all is the same. We have both to pass through it.
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Nevertheless, elite leaders, often the product of imperial schools and colleges, were as likely as the British that they had replaced to cite the madness of the masses, and apply the vocabulary of craziness, insanity and of a fever gripping the people, blaming ‘crooks, cranks and … mad people’ to try to explain the inexplicable devastation that had taken place.
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The language of class could be a convenient way for the leadership to wash their hands of their own explicit or inadvertent culpability. The poor and the uneducated must, of course, it was naturally assumed, have been mostly culpable. The information that militant, and often middle-class, organised cadres, sometimes fully answerable to Congress and League politicians, were at the forefront of events was known but glanced over. Nehru called for the rounding up of leaders causing trouble and demanded to know who was issuing orders, but the general tendency by the dramatis personae of politics was to patronise those caught up in violence and to dissociate their own actions and decisions from riots.

This intense anxiety and fear clutched hold of a broad sweep of North India. Even in places where violence hadn't occurred, communities became nervous and tense. Suhasini Das, an East Bengali Gandhian and social worker, who was in her early thirties at the time, and an indefatigable peace worker, covered miles of territory in the district of Sylhet, which joined Pakistan, persuading her fellow Hindus to stay in their homes, trying to assuage their fear and confusion. Her diary, written at the end of long days and evenings crossing the East Pakistani countryside attempting to spread reassurance and calm, conveys the tensions of the moment and the ubiquity of angst. In Sylhet, from July to September, she found people ‘tense’, ‘worried’, suffering ‘mental agony’, consumed with ‘panic’ and ‘troubled’. ‘Although no major mishap had befallen people here, they were still tense and anxious,’ she wrote in her diary, and a few weeks later, in Sunamganj, ‘People plied us with anxious queries as we went from house to house.’
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Work in government offices ground to a halt and all the talk was now of Partition and Pakistan. The daily grind of petty incidents and random stabbings kept affected populations suspended in a state of anxiety.

Far from the major sites of devastation, people were caught up in Partition's ramifications. Some had migrated far away to find work or to marry but remained worried about news from home. ‘The day before I left Ranchi [the summer capital of Bihar] for good, Inayat Khan, one of my staff-car drivers came to me to say goodbye as he was going off to Pakistan,’ recalled General Tuker. ‘His home was in Jullundur in the Indian Union. It had been destroyed with all his property. His father had died some years before. His grandfather tried to get his mother and sister away to Pakistan but the old man was waylaid by Sikhs and disappeared. His mother escaped and wrote to say that his fifteen-year-old sister had been taken as a concubine by a Sikh. To leave the Indian Army with this as the last sight of my own soldiers and friends was deeply painful.’
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In Mathura in western UP corpses floated to the surface of irrigation canals for at least four months after the first wave of massacres in nearby Gurgaon as ghostly reminders of Partition and part of its invisible but important psychological rupture.

Families negotiated a semblance of ordinary life around the edges of violence, curfews and travel restrictions. The Urdu writer Masud Hasan Shahab Dehlvi, who was living in Delhi at the time, was married in the weeks preceding Partition and had to procure curfew passes for his wedding guests, some of whom faced difficulties returning home after the celebrations. ‘These joyous moments were completely overshadowed by the atmosphere of violence and suffering,’ he later remembered.
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Gathering with relatives was preferable to being alone. Signalmen on the railways deserted their posts, afraid of spending lonely nights in their huts dotted along the tracks. In one hospital, in the northern city of Bareilly, a British army doctor found a loaded revolver under the pillow of a patient. ‘He claimed he must keep it in case anyone came in during the night.’
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In the later months of 1947 people walking unaccompanied in the afflicted parts of the country could be knifed from behind, even in broad daylight. Living through 1947 was an ordeal for many Indians and Pakistanis, even for those who escaped physically unscathed.

Partition was, then, a national crisis for India and Pakistan, notwithstanding unanswered questions about national belonging. Partition penetrated, and disrupted, normal life beyond Punjab and Bengal as people began their new lives as Indians and Pakistanis. Militias and gangs, especially the Muslim League National Guard and the RSS, were still operating with impunity on train lines in September and October 1947. Random stabbings, bombs and hate-crimes continued to pierce the social fabric far beyond Punjab. ‘The frequency, callousness and darings of these killings on trains and at stations has made staff very panicky,’ reported an East India Railway official on the line that stretched from Delhi across to Bihar, ‘and on occasions it was with difficulty that we could keep them at their posts and keep trains going.’ People travelling on passenger trains ran the risk of murder at night or could be thrown unsuspecting from the train. On this line alone, the daily reports make grim reading: on 8 September, an unidentified dead body was found in a luggage van at Ghaziabad. On 9 September a Muslim passenger who alighted from the train to drink water was dragged away and stabbed, but found alive. On 10 September, an ‘upper class’ passenger reported his two servants missing. The servants' compartment was full of blood and the two corpses were found later that day further along the tracks.
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Limited services were achieved by pushing trains through the landscape at almost any cost. Railwaymen often worked for little or no pay, while in East Pakistan they were housed in railway wagons, huts and tents up and down the East Bengal line. Here, there were no passenger services at all and the ‘refugee specials’ were the only functioning services – trains carrying refugees covered some 200,000 miles in 1947 on the North Western line alone. Train services were still abnormal at the end of 1947. Ticketless travel had become rampant across the subcontinent (Gandhi complained that ‘people evidently thought that under independence travelling by trains or buses was free for all’ – another echo of the pervasive nature of social dislocation, opportunism and confusion of 1947) and to add to the disorder, after Independence, several of Pakistan's services were brought to a complete standstill because of shortages of Indian-supplied coal.
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‘The Delhi in which I arrived on 11 September appeared physically and nervously shattered,’ Richard Symonds later remembered. ‘Stabbing and looting had spread from the narrow streets of Old Delhi to the broad boulevards of Lutyens' New Delhi. Those shops which had not been plundered in the commercial centre of Connaught Circus were boarded up. There was a rigid curfew after 6 p.m. There was no bread for ten days in the Imperial Hotel where we lived off tinned food.’
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Nehru later questioned if the public ever realised how close India had come to complete internal implosion. ‘If the disturbances had not been halted in western UP,’ he wrote to his chief ministers while reflecting on the gravity of events, ‘they would eventually have spread eastwards right up to Bihar and west Bengal and the whole of northern India would have been in chaos.’
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The situation was grave enough in September 1947 to lead some to consider ‘a compulsory evacuation’ of Delhi and the removal of the national capital to another location.
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Dealing with Partition's aftermath bled the state's income and inhibited essential economic and governmental reforms. ‘Since we assumed office my Government and myself have been spending the best part of our time and energy in dealing with this grave crisis which continues to assume greater proportions as one disaster follows another,’ admitted Jinnah.
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Post offices and airfreight offices degenerated into chaos, the floors were stacked with unclaimed parcels, letters and hessian-wrapped packages with ‘sacks of unsorted messages lying in the telegraph office’. In the Indian capital, all public holidays for bureaucrats, including Sundays, were cancelled. Profiteering was rife. Tonga and rickshawallahs charged inflated prices for those desperate to travel and precious seats on outgoing trains could be secured for the right bribe, while coolies ratcheted up the cost of carrying heavy packages. A photograph taken at Ambala station in Punjab shows a man with a rickety bamboo ladder charging two
annas
per trip for people to clamber up from the platform to the roof of a departing goods wagon.
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People trying to contact relatives jammed telephone exchanges and the Partition crisis disrupted the lines for several weeks but when an unidentified woman, named only as ‘Kamila’, tried to get through to find out news of her husband's whereabouts even the telephone operators were consumed with nationalistic loathing, neglecting their jobs and shouting down the telephone lines ‘
Jawaharlal Nehru Murdabad
’ or ‘
Jinnah Murdabad
’ [death to Nehru or death to Jinnah] so that it was impossible to hear anything on the line. ‘They'd be fighting among themselves and we'd be left saying, “Hello? Hello?” We just couldn't talk. We booked so many urgent calls, but nothing. So we couldn't consult each other.’
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Both administrations had to untie other logistical knots. Food was still desperately scarce. In one district of Punjab, in ‘dismal camps’, the ration was a
chittack
(two ounces) of flour a day, enough to make one chapatti, and nothing else. Far beyond Punjab, in the north-east, the food crisis was exacerbated by Partition and in the Chittagong Hill tracts thousands wearing rags were begging for food while ‘reports of deaths from starvation were constantly dribbling in from the villages’.
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Rumours were still rife and could bring towns to a standstill. A British officer living in the imperial summer capital, Simla, reported. ‘The other day a rumour was spread that the water supply had been poisoned. Every person on the road was talking about it. After several hours' anxiety, we managed to contact, by phone, the Health Officer who informed us that the water had been tested and that it was quite all right.’
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The transition of power in South Asia was overcast by a cloud of fear.