The Great Partition (3 page)

3 The Radcliffe Line in Punjab

4 The Radcliffe Line in Bengal

South Asians learned that the British Indian empire would be partitioned on 3 June 1947. They heard about it on the radio, from relations and friends, by reading newspapers and, later, through government pamphlets. Among a population of almost four hundred million, where the vast majority lived in the countryside, ploughing the land as landless peasants or sharecroppers, it is hardly surprising that many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, did not hear the news for many weeks afterwards. For some, the butchery and forced relocation of the summer months of 1947 may have been the first that they knew about the creation of the two new states rising from the fragmentary and terminally weakened British empire in India.

People who owned or could gather around wireless sets in family homes or in shops, marketplaces and government offices, heard the voices of four men carrying across the airwaves from the broadcasting station of All India Radio in the imperial capital, New Delhi, at 7 p.m. Indian Standard Time on the evening of 3 June. They were informed of the plan to divide up the empire into two new nation states – India and Pakistan. A live link-up from Westminster, where Prime Minister Attlee was making the announcement to the assembled benches of the House of Commons, was relayed via Delhi across the Indian empire's 1.8 million square miles, twenty times the size of Britain itself. In cities from Quetta to Madras, Calcutta to Bombay, these voices carried out along the streets, ‘By the evening of June 2, 1947, the atmosphere in Karachi was one of suppressed excitement over the new plan for India and the Viceroy's coming broadcast,’ observed an American vice-consul stationed in the port city. ‘Thousands of persons from all classes of society had assembled in the streets and public parks to hear the broadcast, while radio shops and stores put on loud-speakers to give passers-by an opportunity to hear the announcement.’
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In Bombay, the writer and producer Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was at a colleague's house discussing a new film project at the time. ‘Literally millions all over the yet-united India sat glued to their own or their neighbours’ radio sets, for the fate of India was to be decided that day,’ he later remembered. ‘From Peshawar to Travancore, from Karachi to Shillong, India became an enormous collective ear, waiting for the broadcasts breathlessly, helplessly and hopelessly.’
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Far away from Bombay, in the Himalayan foothills of Assam, where flooding and postal delays had cut off communications with the rest of India, the Governor invited local politicians to his house to hear the live announcement.
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In Delhi, as the Viceroy and the Indian politicians approached the All India Radio studio in their cars, ‘officials were leaning out of all the windows and cramming the balconies’.
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In the tense studio in Delhi four statesmen spoke one after the other; first, the British Viceroy, Mountbatten, then the Congress Party leader and future Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, followed by Jinnah, the Muslim League leader and Governor-General of Pakistan in waiting and, finally, Baldev Singh, representative of the Sikhs.

It was a burning hot summer's evening. Rumours had been flying in all directions that an announcement was imminent. Journalists had been well primed and copies of the pre-prepared scripts that the leaders would read from had been circulated in advance to give the press a head start in preparing the special editions that would be rushed to print as soon as the broadcast had finished. After almost two centuries of imperial rule in India, the collapse of the Raj and its recreation in the shape of two nation states was being declared. Independence and Partition were mutually entwined.

The speeches themselves, though, were oddly flat. Even Mountbatten who prided himself on his persuasive rhetoric gave a muted and hesitant performance. Furthermore, the British announcements were masterpieces of obfuscation. It was stated that power would be handed to the Indian people before June 1948. In fact, within days, the real date would be proclaimed: 15 August 1947, ten months earlier than anticipated. The plan paved the way for the partitioning of the highly contested provinces of Punjab and Bengal between the Congress and the Muslim League, and Indian representatives of the legislative assemblies in these two provinces, in the words of the British Prime Minister, ‘will be empowered to vote whether or not the Province should be partitioned’. If Partition was decided upon, in Attlee's oblique words, ‘arrangements will be made accordingly’.
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This meant, for those who could read between the lines, that the campaign for a Muslim South Asian state, Pakistan, had succeeded. These provincial fragments would be made into a separate sovereign state and hived off from the remaining parts of British India, which would become independent India. Yet, in these momentous and long-awaited announcements, neither Mountbatten nor Attlee mentioned the word ‘Pakistan’ once. The Viceroy went further and couched the whole proposal as a theoretical question, dependent on ‘Whichever way the decision of the Indian people may go’. This was diplomatic frippery. The votes in the assemblies were a foregone conclusion and the plan itself had been painfully hammered out in months of intense debate between Indian leaders. It was self-evident to everyone who had lived through the tumultuous months that preceded this announcement, who had witnessed rioting and murders that stretched across North India from Bengal and Bihar to Bombay, and had followed the near-misses of alternative peace proposals and the collapse of the Cabinet Mission talks in 1946 that almost resulted in a federal India, that these statements meant one thing: Pakistan was going to be created, no matter what else happened.
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What did the creation of Pakistan mean? Nehru did not mention the P word either, only once allowing that the plan laid down ‘a procedure for self-determination in certain areas of India’. Although he encouraged his listeners to accept the plan that was being presented, it was ‘with no joy in his heart’ and although he was clearly talking of a major change in the territorial map of the subcontinent, he told his listeners, confusingly, that ‘The India of geography, of history and traditions, the India of our minds and hearts cannot change.’
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Nor were there any maps to help even the most well-informed English-speaking listener understand what was happening. It was left to the newspapers to publish their own creative interpretations of exactly where a new borderline, snaking through Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west, might fall once the country was divided. The real line would not be presented to the public until two days after the new states had come into existence, on 17 August, and would be hurriedly marked on maps using censuses of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ populations. The border would be devised from a distance; the land, villages and communities to be divided were not visited or inspected by the imperial map-maker, the British judge, Cyril Radcliffe, who arrived in India on 8 July to carry out the task and stayed in the country only six weeks.

It was only Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League leader, dressed in a white linen jacket and tie, who talked of Pakistan. Jinnah claimed to be the leader of almost one hundred million South Asian Muslims who lived primarily in the north-eastern and north-western corners of British India but were also threaded in their millions throughout the subcontinent's population in towns, villages and princely states. However, he showed little sign of triumphalism. Jinnah had initially been reluctant to talk at all and then hedged his speech with qualifications and sub-clauses: ‘It is clear that the plan does not meet in some important respects our point of view; and we can not say or feel that we are satisfied or that we agree with some of the matters dealt with by the plan,’ he announced. It would be up to the Muslim League to decide whether they should accept the partition plan as ‘a compromise or as a settlement’. Rarely has the birth of a new country been welcomed with so many qualifications by its foremost champion. Clearly something strange and unprecedented was taking place.
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Over the next few days, in press conferences and speeches, the outlines of the sketchy Partition plan would be fleshed out and greeted with a mixture of joy, horror, bewilderment and fury. It is little wonder that the reactions to the 3 June plan were confused, contradictory and violent. The plan – for all its superficial complexity and fine detail – was wafer thin and left numerous critical aspects unexamined and unclear. Where was India and where was Pakistan? Who was now an Indian or a Pakistani? Was citizenship underpinned by a shared religious faith, or was it a universal right, guaranteed by a state that promised equality and freedom to all? Were people expected to move into the state where their co-religionists resided in a majority? The tragedy of Partition was that by the time people started to ask and try answering these questions, unimaginable violence had escalated to the point of ethnic cleansing.

All in all, it was probably very difficult indeed in 1946 – without the aid of fortune-telling powers – to imagine what a free South Asia was going to look like. It was evident that two
parties
, the Congress and the League, would be at the forefront of leading and designing the new state, or states, and that the most prominent leaders – Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi – would be central to carving out the future political orientation of the countries. Questions about economic and social policy, national borders, political sovereignty and constitutional rights, however, had barely been addressed or were highly contested. And yet by 1950 two nation
states
stood alongside each other in South Asia, with membership of the United Nations, full sovereignty and complete political independence.

This book is about these months of transition and how, at the end of the British empire, two states emerged from the South Asian landmass, unfortunately with deep-rooted and lasting antipathy towards each other. It aims to dig beneath the often hostile and justificatory rhetoric about Partition, as well as imperial stories of a smooth and seamless ‘transfer of power’, to show just how disorderly the whole process was and how it threatened the very existence of the two new states. It also underscores how uncertain and ambiguous the meanings of Partition and Pakistan were to people living through these events.

The brilliant success of the Congress and the League in writing post-dated histories and retrospectively ascribing meaning to the support that they gained at the time has obscured the ways in which notions such as
swaraj
(literally meaning self-rule, and invoked by Gandhi to convey freedom from imperialism) and ‘Pakistan’ were understood by people in 1947. There were various vocabularies of freedom in circulation in the late 1940s. The story of the ‘transfer of power’ used by both the outgoing imperialists and the incoming nationalist powers has been so effective, well disseminated and uncompromising that it has obscured the meanings of freedom at the time. Partition for many South Asians was far more complicated and was the beginning of a process of their construction as new national citizens, rather than simply the end point of nationalist struggles. The words ‘Pakistan’, ‘
swaraj
’ and ‘Partition’ have acquired concrete meanings in the intervening sixty years. In contrast, ‘freedom’ was not clearly defined in 1947. This was a time before these histories and national images had become standard.
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It will become apparent that the meanings ascribed to these words in 1947 were regularly at odds with the ways that we understand them now so that nobody – from Mountbatten to the most humble farmhand – foresaw their true meaning or what the future would deliver. The plan to partition the Punjab and Bengal – which in the event delivered one of the worst human calamities of the twentieth century – was heralded by a leading newspaper's special correspondent with great enthusiasm as a day which would be ‘remembered in India's history as the day when her leaders voluntarily agreed to divide the country and avoid bloodshed’.
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Both the Indian and Pakistani states have proved extremely adept at papering over these differences and muffling the multiple voices that made up the ‘nationalist’ groundswell in the late 1940s. The apparent support for the League and the Congress as displayed in rallies and general elections in 1946 was enough sanction, and sufficient proof, that the modern nation states of India and Pakistan had been envisaged collectively and that their citizens had willed them into existence. A history-writing project was commenced immediately after Independence in both states, which slotted these nationalist upsurges into a straightforward teleology that can still be viewed in the black and white photographic exhibitions in the national museums of South Asian cities or in schoolchildren's history textbooks. In short, both states have been good at promoting themselves. The growth of the nationalist parties blends seamlessly into the successful foundation of new countries. Nehru had this in mind even before India had achieved freedom, suggesting exactly a year before Independence that ‘we might hold an all India exhibition of the Congress struggle of 1920–1946’. Meanwhile, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was considering the displays in a new national museum days before Pakistan even came into existence.
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All the states involved, including Britain, have projected back on to events their own nationalistic, and indeed skewed, readings of why and how the subcontinent was partitioned.