The Great Partition (31 page)

Now formally labelled as ‘minorities’ in the official mindset, groups of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, and Muslims in India, felt thoroughly compromised. ‘You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan,’ Jinnah told Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan in an acclaimed speech at the time of Independence, even as arson attacks on these religious buildings and the murder of their worshippers continued unabated.
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Jinnah's commitment to a plural state was both principled and economically pragmatic, given Pakistan's position on an economic precipice. As the Chief Minister of the North West Frontier Province put it bluntly six months later, ‘We had more than one reason for wishing the Hindus and Sikhs to stay on. They controlled all the banking, trade and industry in this Province and their sudden departure has hit us very hard.’
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Some Pakistani leaders realised that the state had much to gain from stemming the flow of migration.

It was also possible for non-Muslims to be, at least in the early days of the state, enthusiastic Pakistanis. J.N. Mandal, an ‘untouchable’ from Bengal, was elected chairman of the Pakistani Constituent Assembly. The other members cheered as he signed the roll book in Karachi on Independence Day and he called on other Pakistani ‘minorities’ to be ‘responsible, loyal and faithful to the state’. Soon afterwards he was promoted to a coveted ministerial position. Mandal's experience was hardly typical, though. Everywhere minorities were feeling deeply insecure about their physical safety and their citizenship rights. It was these fears that drove people from their homes and started one of the greatest mass migrations in history.

As well as marking the end of a nationalist struggle against colonialism, then, 15 August underscored the moment at which a new project began. People felt compelled to decide upon unalloyed national attachments, demarcate clearly their patriotism and express unwavering belief in the power of one nation state or another. This was all vastly different from the
mélange
of communities and national beliefs that had been in coexistence at the end of the Second World War in India.

It had been unthinkable that twelve million people would move, absolutely impossible to conceive, even if anyone had believed it to be desirable. The mass migrations were the sting in the scorpion's tail, the unknown face of the Partition plan. The tides of people flowing out of Pakistan and India were so fantastical, so vast and so thorough, that they unbalanced the entire substructure on which Pakistan had been built. As Danial Latifi recalled years later, the plan had backfired: ‘I was in favour of self-determination … and to the extent that the Muslim League stood for self-determination I was with the Muslim League, but self-determination did not involve transfer of large groups of people.’
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The movement of millions across the new international border meant that the plan did not work as originally envisaged and this massive upheaval changed the entire composition of India and Pakistan.

Once the Radcliffe line became clear, the numbers of refugees crossing Punjab and moving out of the state intensified frighteningly quickly. In 42 days from 18 September to 29 October, 849,000 refugees entered India in formally organised foot convoys alone. Between August and November an additional 2.3 million crossed the borders by train. Thirty-two thousand, mostly the rich, the privileged or essential administrative staff, arrived by air in both directions. In East Punjab in one month alone over a million gallons of petrol were consumed carrying people across the border and 1,200 vehicles moved back and forth carrying the stranded and vulnerable. In addition, there was a much slower, more protracted movement by sea and rail from all corners of the subcontinent, from Sind to Bombay, from Dhaka to Calcutta, from Lucknow to Lahore. Numbers involved in this were impossible to count. In November alone, 133,000 people arrived into Bombay's docks by steamer from Sind. By November 1947 perhaps eight million refugees had crossed the borders in both directions.
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These figures are almost beyond belief. One in ten people in Pakistan was a refugee. Each country had to resettle, feed and house a group as large as the total population of Australia.

Overspilling trains have provided the most enduring images of Partition. In the opening scenes of Khushwant Singh's influential novel,
Train to Pakistan
, a train inhumanly crammed with refugees passes through Punjabi countryside near the Indo-Pakistan border. ‘Like all the trains it was full. From the roof, legs dangled down the sides on to the doors and windows. The doors and windows were jammed with heads and arms. There were people on buffers between the bogies.’
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Partition refugees did move in other ways, on foot, mostly in great columns or
kafilas
, but also by car and boat. Yet it is the trains piled high with people and hastily assembled goods that have provided the totemic image of Partition.

This was not simply an ‘exchange’ of population or a straightforward swap. In the months following Independence, Pakistan lost its bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs and clerks – the wheels came off the machinery of the state. Jinnah became increasingly panicked, saying that knifing Sikhs and Hindus was equivalent to ‘stabbing Pakistan’.
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In India, similarly, the sudden disappearance of Muslim railwaymen, weavers and craftsmen, agriculturalists and administrators, brought gridlock to production and trade and crippled the state's ability to function. Large numbers of the incoming refugees arrived with quite different occupational histories and could not or were not qualified to plug the gaps left by those who departed. In the autumn months of 1947 the refugee movement was a tragedy for the refugees themselves and also a tragedy for the two new states.

In September 1947 Jinnah ordered a park packed with people in Lahore to ‘make it a matter of our prestige and honour to safeguard the lives of the minority communities and to create a sense of security among them’. Nehru had long been stressing India as the land for all Indians. As he wrote to his chief ministers, ‘we have a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want to, go anywhere else’ and he urged that they must be given the same rights as other citizens and treated in a civilised manner, if the nature of the body politic itself was to be preserved.
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Political safeguards for minorities proved paper tigers, however, in the face of the Punjabi tragedy and they offered too little and too late to those who had lost faith in the state's ability to protect them; the speed of events on the ground outstripped deliberations about the rights of citizenship in the constitutional arenas of India and Pakistan. Across Punjab, coexistent communities fragmented as the entire non-Muslim population was exchanged for the Punjabi Muslim population of India. Elsewhere, across the whole of Pakistan, and in Bengal, Rajasthan, Bombay and North India, people started to leave their homes at a dizzying speed and a mass and unanticipated movement of people began to occur.

There was a big difference in the way that people left. For the majority, especially in Punjab and the other heartlands of ethnic cleansing such as Gurgaon, it was part and parcel of the terror of violence, as they literally ran for their lives or were hurriedly formed into
kafilas
and made to march without as much as a few hours' notice. They did not know where they were heading or what their final destination would be. Rajinder Singh, who finally found his way to Delhi from Punjab, described to Urvashi Butalia how his family left in the middle of the night: ‘Whatever people could pick up, big things and small, they put clothes on top of those they were wearing, and threw a
khes
or sheet over their shoulders. They picked up whatever they could and then they joined the
kafila
. Who could take along heavy things? And the
kafila
began to move.’
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Others adopted disguises or masqueraded as Hindus or Muslims to try and protect themselves. For others, with more forewarning, or further from the epicentres of violence, there were more tortuous and prolonged decisions about whether to stay or go, which sometimes divided families, as Damyanti Sahgal, living in a village 30 miles from Lahore, recalled. She tried to persuade her father to leave, but ‘Father didn't agree … the workers in his factory were mixed: Jats, Hindus, but on the whole it was a Muslim village so most of the workers were Musalmaans … at the time they were respectful and humble. They seemed safe … When I tried to persuade my father he said, well if you feel scared you go. I said but bhauji, he said no bibi, if you feel scared you go.’
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She left and made her way to Lahore, leaving her father behind. Further away from violence, the choices were different again. People could opt for one state or the other for ideological reasons, for business purposes or because they feared discrimination or job losses.

At first the new governments tried to stop these movements of people. The Partition plan envisaged that groups of religious minorities would remain in both states. If anything, these pockets of minorities formed part of the intended plan as it was believed that they would be ‘hostages’ or guarantors against any discrimination or harassment of minorities across the border. Both states showed rhetorical commitment to plurality and both countries started hammering out in their Constituent Assemblies the legal and administrative frameworks that would be put in place to secure these minority rights. The plan had not made allowances for any potential mass population exchanges and the ensuing two-way movement of people caught both national leaderships unawares, pulling the rug out from under their feet and invalidating the safeguards that had been notionally built into the plan.

At the end of August both governments reversed their initial strategy and admitted that, if the groundswell of refugees was beyond their control, they should be aiding rather than inhibiting it. On 7 September it was announced that the evacuation – at least across Punjab – was the ‘first priority’ and that Punjabi refugees would be given military and political support by both governments.
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What had begun as a spontaneous exodus was rapidly merged into an organised evacuation operation. In the first week of September a Military Evacuation Organisation was formed and by late October 1,200 military and civilian vehicles were being used to transport refugees across Punjab.
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Twelve RAF Dakotas airlifted stranded officials. Gandhi disagreed with the policy at first and stood firmly in favour of replanting uprooted populations and continuously made the case for returning and resettling the refugees in their original homes. Others, with an eye on the fratricide and daily mortality figures and the grave dangers of unorganised and unsupported refugee columns, wanted the exchange to be as organised and rapid as possible.

More controversially still, this policy could be exploited to ‘clean out’ an area and purify it of minorities. Local administrators now had the chance – either accidentally or explicitly – to help with the ethnic cleansing agenda. Administrators and police forcibly shifted whole communities as the priority became dispersal rather than violence: ‘there were certain people in plain clothes who were asking people to leave that place and go to Pakistan … but people were resisting this, people said: we won't go to Pakistan … then another military truck came, and on the top of it was some leader. He brought out a pistol and said you must leave, as soon as he said that immediately a caravan was formed, and everybody cooperated,’ recalled one Punjabi eyewitness, Harcharan Singh Nirman.
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In swathes of central and western India, Muslim communities were drummed out of India, just as Hindus and Sikhs were hounded out of many parts of Pakistan. Although some pleaded desperately for evacuation, others resisted the suggestion that they should migrate and felt angered by the confused message of the governments.

Elsewhere people wanted to leave but were being dissuaded by politicians and local magistrates, and in October, in the Punjabi district of Jhelum, a Gandhian envoy, Pandit Sundralal, called for the suspension of the evacuation in the local press. ‘The Jhelum Hindus seemed perturbed by all this,’ noted the aid worker Richard Symonds, who was co-ordinating local relief activities. ‘They wanted to leave, not to be pawns in a political game.’
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Politicians were accused of meddling in the internal affairs of the other state when they intervened and once again the political and the social were closely entwined; Acharya Kripalani raised objections to the obstacles preventing people's evacuation from Sind when he visited his former home in September.
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Penderel Moon remembered asking the blue-turbaned leader of a group of Jat Sikhs, who had halted by the roadside with their bullock carts for the night, why they had left their villages. ‘He replied, “
Hukum Hai
” (It is an order.) I asked him, “Whose order?” But to this he would give no clear reply, but just went on repeating, “It is an order. We have received an order. We have to go to Hindustan.”’ A little later in the month, Moon was shocked to hear that government officials were pushing Muslims out of East Punjab – ‘If the Sub-Divisional Officer was acting under orders, where was this all going to end? We might have the whole Muslim population of India thrust upon us’ – only to have the double shock of finding out that this transfer of people in Punjab, had, overnight, become official policy.
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Such confusion only exacerbated the voluminous problems faced by ordinary people.

Whether the state encouraged them to leave or not, the greatest numbers of people on the long march across the border had no access to transport. Circumstances compelled them to travel by foot. Foot columns sometimes 30–40,000 strong, created human caravans 45 miles long in places. It was 150 miles for those Punjabis coming to India from Lyallpur or Montgomery districts, and Muslim Meos from the Gurgaon region of India took three weeks to reach Pakistan. ‘According to our latest reports they are now without food and their cattle are rapidly dying for lack of fodder, or are being slaughtered by them for eating; their bullock carts (wherever they had any) are being used as fuel-wood and other difficulties are aggravated by the onset of winter which with their physical debility will make them an easy prey to diseases like pneumonia and influenza.’
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The journey itself proved a cruel physical punishment for many.