The Great Partition (33 page)

As he was a Muslim, albeit one who had worked against the League, it was an unspoken fear that Shafi was in great danger now as he was living and working in a town where the Muslims were a small community, and there was a risk that he might be targeted. ‘You should not worry about me,’ he instructed his wife sanguinely. ‘Despite the rain, I am attending the office except for one day a week.’ But within a few days, anxiety had entered his letters again. ‘I used to listen to the news on the radio. But for three days, the radio has also stopped. I do not know why I cannot telephone Pantji [the Chief Minister] nor talk to my brother on the phone.’ There were stories of hate-mail and threats; he acquired police protection. Anis was in a paroxysm of anxiety by this time, and tried to encourage him to leave and return to the family. In one of his last letters to her, he wrote, ‘Anis, do not weaken me. Let the riots be over then I will tell the truth to everybody. Otherwise, whatever be my fate, only pray to God that I may remain firm of step.’ On 18 October, between nine and ten in the morning he was stabbed to death on his way to work at the municipal office.
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Anis Kidwai's life now took a new turn, as with great moral courage she plunged herself into social work; she moved to Delhi and began, at the behest of Gandhi, to work in the refugee camps, where she dedicated herself to the service of destitute women. Anis Kidwai's story is unique, more especially because she kept a lyrical and convincing account of her difficult days in 1947. It does provide a sense of how couples, families and individuals, far from the Punjabi centres of the worst devastation, became entangled in Partition's miseries. It also suggests how social norms had collapsed and how far the primacy of religious labelling had spread.

The 3 June plan had evidently gone catastrophically wrong. As people made the tortuous transition from subjects of the British Raj to citizens of two free states, countless communities got swept up in the chaos and panic. The violence, and its aftermath, glued people together, temporarily at least, in a new spirit of nationalism. But this was crisscrossed with deeper confusions and anger about the place of class, caste, language and religion in public life. There was no simple blueprint for becoming an Indian or a Pakistani. One thing people could agree on, though, was that the ‘other’ state was rapidly looking like an adversary, or even an enemy. Nationalist politics had collapsed into two national tragedies.

On the evening of 3 January 1948 Delhi's Superintendent of Police was making security arrangements for Gandhi's imminent arrival when he was summoned by another superintendent and they both rushed to Phatak Habash Khan, a Muslim district of the city. He was astonished by the intensity of the scene that greeted him. Refugees had illegally taken possession of houses that had previously been owned by Muslims and were refusing to vacate them. Most striking of all was the sight of hundreds of women standing at the front of the crowd who steadfastly refused to budge. ‘Police had to face great difficulty in getting the houses vacated,’ the police chief wrote, ‘as they were the target of sallies from women’. The police turned to tear gas to disperse the crowd. Despite this, the following morning the men and women had reassembled. Once again the refugees picketed the main gate to the colony and continued to try and force their way into the houses for five hours or so. ‘The number of women was about one hundred, and thousands of men refugees were backing them … Police applied all sorts of tactics to disperse the crowd but in vain.’ Eventually they once again resorted to tear gas and the anxious superintendent appealed to the government, saying that the men and women were determined to occupy the houses and that there would be no peace in the city until a solution was found to the situation.
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The angry resolve of refugee women to take possession of homes for themselves and their families provides a rare glimpse not only of the frustration of refugees – male and female – and their determination to remake their lives but also of the political risks of the situation. As their demands went unmet and ambivalent feelings about their new national status arose, in some cases refugees turned away from central government towards other political groups who championed their cause.

In the three years after Independence, India and Pakistan both faced relentless and protracted difficulties because of the refugee crisis. The South Asian political leadership did not yet have power firmly in its grip. Nether state had, as yet, a fully functioning military, clearly consolidated territory or smoothly functioning parliament. In this grey transition zone between regimes, the movement by so many people began to threaten the very existence of Pakistan and menaced the development aspirations of the Indian state, as government agencies struggled to cope with the incessant, desperate demands that they provide shelter, sustenance and protection for the displaced.

To make matters worse, in Calcutta, and Bengal more generally, the crisis was only just beginning. Bengalis from East Pakistan started to arrive in small groups as they pulled into train stations in Calcutta or made their way across in precarious, packed boats: this movement was slower and, superficially, less dramatically violent. Nonetheless it marked the emergence of a refugee culture that has never ceased to be a feature of the city's life. Twelve thousand people shifted to West Bengal every day in 1948 from East Pakistan, and the camps themselves could only accommodate a fraction of the numbers so that hundreds of thousands poured on to the streets, railway platforms and into squatters’ colonies instead.

On the two sides of the subcontinent – in the east and the west – the complications of the refugee movements were distinctive and there was no catch-all solution to ‘refugee rehabilitation’, a new and unrefined government responsibility, which had to be managed locally and through a process of trial and error. The problem was daunting. The two nation states consolidated themselves in the shadow of Partition. ‘This matter of refugees continues to be practically the only topic of discussion here. Newspapers are full with statements and counter-statements,’ the exasperated Governor of West Bengal told the Indian government in 1948.
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In the early 1950s, numerous political controversies turned on the vexed question of ‘refugee rehabilitation’ and news about refugees peppered the newspapers well into the post-Independence era. Partition was not a discrete event, rapidly dispensed with in 1947, but had, and has, ongoing repercussions in South Asia.

To add to their difficulties, the two new governments had to solve the crisis almost entirely alone, with the international community barely involved. The International Committee of the Red Cross stood on the brink of insolvency and had actually closed its delegation in India in February 1947. Europe turned inward as it attempted to heal its war wounds and to solve its own post-war refugee crisis. In December 1947 the Red Cross sent a fact-finding mission to India and Pakistan, which pessimistically reported back that the Partition crisis was ‘so enormous’ that it was beyond the scope of the international Red Cross's capability.
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Christian missionaries and small foreign organisations already operating in the subcontinent, such as the Quakers and the National Christian Council of India, ran relief operations alongside local volunteers from at least fifteen different organisations, from the Scouts and Guides to the YMCA and St John's Ambulance. This was only a drop in the ocean. There were no tried and tested responses to a mammoth disaster like this. Partition happened too early in the century to benefit from any of the post-war global institutions such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, which was established in 1950. The international tensions emerging between India and Pakistan meant they preferred to act independently; both states shied away from the United Nations Refugee Convention which was passed in 1951 and, to date, neither has ratified it. Through choice and circumstance, both states had to deal with their crisis alone.

Nor were regional governments much help. Overstretched provincial ministries across India and Pakistan dug in their heels and tried to resist taking responsibility for refugees. Across South Asia the provincial governments panicked at the prospect of absorbing trainloads of refugees, especially at a time of endemic food shortages and fragile social peace. They had to be cajoled, bribed and ordered to take responsibility for quotas of displaced. The UP state government steadfastly resisted the arrival of refugees in 1947 and attempted to seal the state borders. In Gujarat, the government announced that it would not be giving any aid to itinerant Gujarati traders coming ‘home’ from areas that now lay in Pakistan, although many of them had been away from Gujarat for generations. After Independence, non-Muslim Sindis continued to land in Bombay harbour after crossing the Arabian Sea by boat, but when the Bombay government lobbied against this, Nehru dejectedly concluded that ‘there is no help for it’ and instructed the ministry to prepare to receive more boatloads of displaced people.
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On the other side of the country the Chief Minister of Assam, less than a year after Partition, was reporting such tensions in local towns – where Bengali refugees were camped out – that he was already playing his most serious trump card against the centre: provincial separatism.
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These conflicts reached fever pitch in Sind where dislocation to the local economy caused by Partition and conflicts between old local Sindi stalwarts and patriotic Pakistani refugees became controversial from the earliest days of Independence. Pro-refugee papers such as
Dawn
waged a campaign of resistance to what was regarded as the Sind government's parochial or ‘antinational’ stance while, jealous of their city's autonomy and culture, Sindis resisted Karachi's transformation into a national capital under centralised control. This tension has existed to the present day.
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Regardless, the Indian and Pakistani governments overcame the resistance put up by their regional ministries to receiving refugees. They imposed their own formulation of the crisis as a ‘national problem’, boosting political centralisation and enhancing their own executive powers in the process. In their desperate desire to wind up the camps, ministers turned a blind eye to refugee preferences and regional jingoism, and whole groups of refugee peasants were arbitrarily selected for dispersal to regions where they could not speak the local language and had no familiarity with crop patterns, cultural practices or weather conditions.

At first, relief efforts were completely improvised; operating from their old party headquarters Congress Party workers, Muslim League volunteers and others handed out blankets and food, built temporary shelters, and administered medicines and emergency relief to people in camps and on the streets. By the end of 1947, refugees were dying of cold on the roadside in Lahore, where the mercury dropped to almost freezing point in mid-December; a journalist of the
Pakistan Times
reported the scenes:

After midnight on Wednesday I accompanied the Bait-ul-Mal workers on their ‘mercy round’ in the city in a truck loaded with
razais
[quilted blankets] and other woollen stuff. We rattled through the wide, empty streets and halted near the Braganza Hotel, outside the railway station, where one can generally find hundreds of homeless people huddled up together for the night. We debussed, carrying bundles of
razais
, and fanned out into different directions for their distribution.

As we approached the place we heard subdued groans that escaped hundreds of lips as the slashing, icy cold wind cut into their limbs. They were lying huddled together with their legs drawn up to their bellies to have some warmth. As we approached them we saw that a fairly large number had only one cotton
khais
[shawl] to cover them and the rest had a thin
razai
or a blanket to warm them up. Many mothers were leaning over their children to protect them against the biting cold. Many others blew at the dying embers of a
chilam
[hashish pipe] and toasted their hands at the glow. Men, women and children were coughing and sneezing and suckling babes were crying with cold. That night we visited many places and distributed about 250
razais
and some 100 blankets, a number which is hopelessly inadequate to meet the present requirements.
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As the sheer magnitude of the crisis sank in, in the autumn of 1947 India and Pakistan launched vast and unprecedented relief operations. Both states set up full-blown ministries in September to deal exclusively with the refugee crisis. They had to respond to the whole spectrum of human needs. Refugees badly needed basic essentials as well as everything with which to start a new life, from clothing, food rations and manufacturing materials to loans, accommodation and bank accounts. Some needed proof of identity or qualifications. Both governments had already lost millions of rupees because of unharvested, rotten crops, the closure of banks and shops and disruption to national and international trade. The Indian central government estimated that it spent 940,078 million rupees between 1947 and 1951 on the relief effort. This staggering amount was surely equalled in Pakistan, where the Walton refugee camps in Lahore alone cost 30,000 rupees per day to keep running. A special refugee tax, which stayed in place until the 1950s, was surcharged to existing taxes; Pakistani train travellers even paid a refugee supplement that was added to the standard cost of their railway ticket. In short, there was a major and prolonged wrench to the economy. Centralised planning was seen as one way of reasserting control over the crisis.

The refugees inundated the government with their demands: the illiterate employed letter-writers or a caste or community association to write for them, and signed with poignant indigo thumbprints; these became paper records of personal suffering as people described precisely what had happened to them, listed the possessions and land they had lost, as well as, not infrequently, providing the names and addresses of the attackers when they were known to the victims. One refugee from the NWFP who had worked for the Congress Party but now found himself in North India, penniless and unrecognised by the local politicians, wrote, ‘I am of 56 [years] and forcibly exiled from my home I am wandering disappointed. Will you kindly advise me what to do and where to [go] in this critical moment of my life.’
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Others were in desperate need of medication or wanted to find their children or other family members. State banks loaned former businessmen and entrepreneurs money to found factories so they could tentatively resume business. Special quotas were set aside to ensure that refugees had priority access to government jobs and university places.