The Great Partition (35 page)

Dealing with the refugee crisis opened up all sorts of avenues for corruption and profiteering, while also exposing deep cracks in the party-political ideological outlook – cracks which had been pasted over while the demand to create Pakistan was foremost in the leadership's mind. It is little surprise in the face of such extensive difficulties that one year after Independence Jinnah announced that ‘a grave emergency has arisen and exists in Pakistan’ and declared a state of emergency that gave the centre heightened powers over the provinces, enabling bureaucrats and administrators to rein in the politicians. In Pakistan, then, the Partition refugee crisis undermined the development of democratic politics and shook the unsteady foundations of the state.

In India, the crisis was just as acute, especially as there was, of course, still a large Muslim population living throughout the country. Controversy about how best to respond to the refugee crisis rocked the inner workings of the Congress Party. Nehru and Gandhi persistently reiterated the need to protect Muslims, to retain them in the country and to prevent their mass ejection from India. As Nehru told a group of Muslim labourers in Delhi, ‘As long as I am at the helm of affairs India will not become a Hindu state.’
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Barbed wire was fixed up in Muslim Sufi shrines and mosques, at Dargah Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia and Dargah Hazrat Qutbuddin Chisti among others, and guards shooed away looters. Gandhi imperilled his life by fasting for peace and reconciliation in 1948. During Gandhi's fast, the government swung behind the peace effort, even franking envelopes sent by post with slogans urging social reconciliation. ‘Communal Harmony will save Gandhiji’, the messages declared and, ‘It is only through communal unity that Gandhiji can survive’. The crux of the matter was keeping the minorities' faith in the state's ability to protect them.

Yet support for the refugee cause was strident within sections of Congress and was a touchpaper for broader ideas about the ideological tilt of the Indian state. It was a struggle between Nehru's secular ideal and a brand of Hindu-infused nationalism. The refugee cause, along with the stoppage of cow slaughter and the reconversion of mosques to Hindu temples, became a subject of mass protest. Many walls in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh were covered with graffiti demanding immediate abolition of cow slaughter, and these protests interlocked with deep anger about the creation of Pakistan, and the Congress's acquiescence to Partition. After Partition, any Muslim could be charged with being a ‘Pakistani’ and suspicions fell in a McCarthyite manner on fifth columnists, spies and those who displayed dubious commitment to the national interest. Speeches called for proof of loyalty. Large workshops of Muslim smiths or craftsmen were disbanded as their Hindu suppliers stopped advancing indispensable credit or materials, worried, they claimed, that the Muslim artisans would abscond to Pakistan without paying. By January 1948 the atmosphere had deteriorated alarmingly, and India's future as a secular state, and as a place with equal rights for all, looked uncertain.

Both the Indian and Pakistani governments worried about the damage caused to their international image by the crisis, especially as the relationship between the two new nations deteriorated. This was part of the crude process of making the two nation states. Effective rehabilitation was a moral duty but also a point of pride and nationalistic validation. Nehru, for instance, was anxious about international press coverage of the refugee camps in Delhi, and Dr Mookerjee, a leading Mahasabha politician, suggested that foreign press correspondents should be banned from photographing the camps.
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‘You might have seen Chandni Chowk is hardly passable because all the pavements and part of the roads are blocked by refugee stores,’ Nehru complained, of one of Delhi's main thoroughfares a year after Partition.
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The overspill of refugees on to the streets of the national capitals marred the leader's long-envisaged dreams of freedom, and soiled the international image of the new nation states in the eyes of the rest of the world. But it was the coverage of abducted and traumatised women about which both governments were hypersensitive. As so often happens, debate over the status of women became the focal point of much deeper anxieties.

During an Iranian dignitary's tour of Pakistan, a group of recovered abducted women arrived in a truck from a camp in East Punjab and were welcomed by villagers who wept and created a major scene. ‘The whole show was so staged as to create an impression of Pakistan having recovered these women at great risk and cost,’ complained the Indian Deputy High Commissioner who was stationed in Lahore, claiming that the entire situation had been faked: ‘Villagers had been hired to act as fathers and relatives of the recovered women and immediately on arrival of the women very touching scenes of reunion were staged before the
Alama
[an Iranian scholar], which brought tears to his eyes.’ It was feared that ‘the
Alama
is carrying back with him deep impressions of Pakistani Muslims having suffered untold horrors at the hands of Hindus and Sikhs’.
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In this international war of words and deeds, the Indian government lashed back, and Iran was notified about the stunt, while Patel suggested that pamphlets were compiled of the most ‘glaring, barefaced and shameful pieces of propaganda by Pakistan’ to be circulated to the foreign press under titles such as ‘How Pakistan lies’ or ‘How Pakistan vilifies’.
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Other tactics were for both sides to play down news of local Hindu–Muslim–Sikh violence, to limit news of fresh bouts of refugee departures (and to attribute these to economic causes alone), to criticise the provision made in exit camps for departing refugees and to emphasise state complicity in any poor treatment of the other country's minorities.

This was particularly the case with the restoration of abducted women initiated by both governments and nationalistic point-scoring trumped any consideration of refugee sensibility. The needs and rights of the refugees were overridden by nationalistic self-righteousness. Some women had reconciled themselves to a new life with their abductor. They were able, little by little, to piece together some form of normality, to find happiness in the arrival of children or to adjust and bury their memories of life before 1947. The fortunate ones may even have found love. Women whose lives to date had already been severely controlled by social values found that any small freedoms and hard-won contentment that they had forged over the years – through family life, routine and security – could be rebuilt. For some poor women, who had never known control over their own lives and had always gone hungry, a life in a more prosperous home or away from a violent or abusive husband could bring some consolation. But now, to add to their miseries, the state intervened and forcibly collected them by truck to repatriate them.

India and Pakistan now looked to each other as an inverted mirror image. In India, the visible presence of mutilated and suffering refugees was viewed as a manifestation of Partition's callousness, which was conflated with Pakistan's creation, while in Pakistan, the incoming refugees and those who died in Partition violence were represented as sacrificial martyrs to the Pakistani national cause. So refugees were important citizens in the eyes of the brand new post-colonial states which needed, after Independence, to account for and justify the refugees' presence, assimilate and assuage them. Their suffering and experiences were woven into the fabric of national history that was constructed around the events that had occurred. ‘We crossed a river of blood to achieve independence …’ wrote one future President of Pakistan. ‘People were uprooted and driven like millions of dry leaves by a turbulent gust of fanaticism and blind passion.’
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Indian prose could be equally florid and a government-produced pamphlet told how ‘The people were afflicted with sufferings and agony more terrible than has ever fallen to the lot of human beings … This has been a legacy of insensate outburst of communal frenzy, generated by the pernicious Two-Nation theory and its attendant cult of hate.’
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Circumstances suddenly changed in India because of one climactic event. Gandhi was shot in the chest on 30 January 1948. He died shortly afterwards. The murder was carried out by a Hindu nationalist who, although clearly a fanatic, was also an articulate and well-connected member of the Hindu extremist parties. The shock of the assassination (perhaps, as Ashis Nandy has argued, almost a product of a ‘death-wish’ by Gandhi, who knew better than anyone how his own death might help to pull together Indian society) immediately helped to stabilise and enforce national feeling and undoubtedly gave ascendancy to secular policy.
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The assassin had opposed Gandhi's powerful fasts for peace, his conciliatory policy towards Muslims and peace overtures to Pakistan.

Gandhi's assassination was carried out in the national capital itself and the ensuing funeral processions spread out like radial arteries from New Delhi, drawing people together in their shared grief and solidifying national feeling. Dazed and shocked crowds began to assemble outside the gates of Birla House to catch a glimpse of the Mahatma's body laid out on a simple bier surrounded by flowers as the news of the tragedy spread. The following day, the funeral cortège loaded with sandalwood logs, flowers and incense moved slowly through the dense crowds in Delhi, slowly winding its way through the streets to the
ghat
on the banks of the River Yamuna where the cremation took place. Thirteen days of official state mourning followed the cremation. In February, two weeks later, a special night train carried Gandhi's ashes for immersion in the Ganges at Allahabad. Along the train tracks from Delhi to Allahabad, mourners looked on with grim and curious faces and crowds collected as the copper urn was carried on a flower-bedecked trailer to the riverside. At the sacred meeting place of the Ganges and the Yamuna Rivers, swathes of people waded into the water as Gandhi's youngest son scattered his ashes.

The assassination proved a cathartic experience which enabled and embodied the beginning of the new nation. Beyond North India, the country was echoing and mirroring the ceremonies, united in observance of Gandhi's passing. Shops shut, public services were suspended and places of amusement closed. People collected by rivers and seafronts such as Bombay's Chowpatty beach, where vast crowds gathered to perform rituals of mourning and to hold religious services. In Karachi, too, many shopkeepers closed their shops as a mark of respect and Pakistani newspapers spoke warmly of Gandhi and sadly of his death. It was a moment for re-evaluation across the subcontinent.

Gandhi's death and its attendant rituals forged a new sense of unity and community in North India where these had been sorely lacking in previous months and Nehru spoke on the theme of unity in a radio broadcast to mark the end of the fortnight of mourning, raising a whole string of divisive issues on which the country now needed to unite. He appealed to the press to avoid criticism of the Congress Party, for his Congress colleagues to patch up their own factional differences, spoke out against provincialism and even made public his personal efforts at unity, by extending olive branches to his estranged colleagues Vallabhbhai Patel and Jayaprakash Narayan. Nehru, always alive to the importance of history and adept at writing Congress's history even as it was made, was quick to ensure that the tragedy of Gandhi's death was redeemed and put to a practical purpose by remodelling the nation along united lines. ‘Even in his death there was a magnificence and complete artistry,’ the premier himself wrote of Gandhi's assassination.
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The institutionalisation of Gandhi's memory was a persistent feature of post-Independence politics and it was telling that the All India Congress Committee met for the first time in Independent India exactly eleven months to the day after Gandhi's death, in Gandhinagar, a newly built township for refugees displaced by Partition.
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Yet it would be misleading to see Gandhi's death, as is sometimes suggested, as the full stop to India's internal Partition crisis. Gandhi's death strengthened Nehru's ascendancy and, temporarily, facilitated an effective backlash against the extremists. The Government of India did at least attempt to imprison the culprits, compensate some of the affected and acted to quash the most brutal assaults. Nevertheless, despite these initiatives, numerous communities continued to live in fear in the years following Partition, discriminated against or economically boycotted. Nehru was surrounded by cabinet colleagues who had equivocal feelings about Indian Muslims' rights. Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, opposed state intervention in reform of Hindu personal laws, wanted cow slaughter banned and in October 1949, while Nehru was abroad, the All India Congress Working Committee passed a vote allowing RSS members to become primary members of the Congress Party, although this decision was rapidly revoked. Partition boosted the strength of the Hindu Right and relegated Indian Muslims to a difficult and precarious position in the early years of Independence.

A culture of high defence spending and militarisation in South Asia dates from 1947, and the roots of the ongoing Kashmiri conflict are deeply entwined with the moment of Partition. In October 1947, the pressurised Maharaja's hesitant accession to India overlapped with a rebellion in Poonch, in the south-western corner of the princely state. This was led by Hazaras, Punjabis and some militias under the command of former INA officers. Simultaneously, Indian troops airlifted into the Kashmir valley faced a tribal incursion of men from the frontier who fought with some covert support from the Pakistani army. The psychological ruptures of Partition undermined a peaceful solution to the Kashmiri conflict, and the war escalated in intensity until an official UN-sponsored ceasefire was announced on New Year's Day, 1949.

The vulnerability of both new nations was nakedly exposed by the dislocations of Partition: the refugee crisis, economic uncertainties and contestations over borders, twinned with the violent events in Kashmir, explain the intense paranoia that set in instantaneously regarding the relative strengths and motives of the other country. The Pakistani leadership – owing to the inherent limitations caused by their country's position as the seceding state and its smaller size – felt exposed to the risk of collapse or invasion. Indian intelligence written in purple prose warned that the Pakistani government was training ordinary people with arms and encouraging the ‘war-minded’, while in Pakistan, the official talk was of enemies attempting to paralyse the new nation. The Prime Minister spoke freely in broadcasts of ‘the enemies of Pakistan’ who ‘indulged in their black hatred to the full’.
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