The Great Partition (36 page)

Both national governments remained acutely aware of their shortcomings: their poor balance sheets, the loss of senior officers, the shortfalls in available bureaucratic talent and the urgent imperative of securing hundreds of miles of newly acquired borderland. Lack of supplies hampered Indian forces in Kashmir while troops airlifted from low-lying areas were exosed to the altitude and icy conditions. Pakistan turned to militias and vigilantes while its weak army was still being consolidated in the midst of the first war over Kashmir. Army ranks had been seriously depleted by the departure of British senior officers; before Partition 13,500 of 22,000 officers in the army were British. A few hundred, at the request of the undermanned Pakistani army, stayed on to train Pakistani soldiers but the majority swapped their uniforms for civilian positions in Britain or hunted down roles in other parts of the British empire. To the newly independent governments the solution to this strategic vulnerability, particularly the apparent weakness of the new armies, appeared to lie in spending money. The origins of habitually stratospheric defence spending can be found in these early days of Independence and such spending was a product of defensive weakness rather than hubristic swagger.

Only Gandhi had anticipated this. In July 1947, he said ‘he visualised a definite increase in military expenditure’ which would be ‘all for fighting among ourselves’.
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It was a prophetic statement. Within a year Indian and Pakistani soldiers would be fighting the first war over Kashmir and soon scientists in both countries would be racing to develop nuclear missiles, with their noses pointing towards the foreign border. But all this was in the future. Needless to say, little of it was in the original Partition plan.

Acute anxieties have beleaguered Pakistan's military establishment ever since. The ability to defend the new nation was in serious doubt, and there was a constant fear that it would be swallowed up by its larger neighbour. The army lacked arms, equipment, training centres and basic supplies and as Liaquat Ali Khan told the Joint Defence Council, ‘an Army without equipment was as much use as tin soldiers’.
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The army, the League leadership presumed, was essential for uniting the nation and cementing the component parts into one viable whole, whether by suppressing Sikh incursions on the Punjabi border, dealing with the reception of refugees or managing the violent domestic insurrections breaking out in the North West Frontier Province. Pakistani leaders blamed the weakness of the state and its problems on a deliberate Indian conspiracy to undermine the state's viability from the moment of its inception – a seam which ran deeply through the national psyche – and the dominant trope of 1947 was one of defiance and the will to exist in the face of hostility. ‘Pakistan has come to stay’ became a catchy political slogan during the early years of Independence.

The evocation of an external enemy waiting on the borders to subsume Pakistan was a useful bond between Pakistani people, some of whom had little conviction in the state's viability. A group of upper-class Muslims in Lahore felt so concerned that Pakistan could be attacked that they kept their cars filled with petrol and luggage, ready to flee from an Indian invasion at a moment's notice.
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Luggage-carrying coolies at Karachi's airport talked of ‘war with the Hindus’.
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This was also a product of the overwhelming, almost revolutionary, calamities into which the state had been born and which it had faced from its inception. The Pakistani leadership tried to overcome these anxieties with overcompensation. Uncertainty about Pakistan's borders and the question marks over its creation before August 1947 were now replaced by a blatant form of pride in the nation state.

In India there was considerable defensive posturing and attempts to boost military capability – through the use of both conventional and less conventional methods. Both governments granted some official sanction to the armed militias that had helped to bring about Partition in the first place and absorbed them into the nation-making projects. Provincial governments assembled special armed constabularies, essentially upgraded policemen armed with weapons, and endowed them with new responsibilities and powers. The formation of such defence groups was explicitly tied to the protection of ‘our people’ from Partition violence, which at its worst was becoming indistinguishable from war.

They also had a local law and order purpose; ongoing student strikes, workers' protests and agricultural upheaval troubled numerous provincial governments across the subcontinent in these months, but preparations for war used up the scanty resources of both India and Pakistan. Governments bolstered home guards and strengthened their security apparatus. Policemen belonging to the minority religious communities were forced out of work in several states, and in India the Home Minister euphemistically called for the correction of ‘communal maladjustments’ in the police.

Meanwhile Punjab had a new status as a fragile border state and along both sides there was deep uneasiness. ‘The West Punjab Government is freely arming its people,’ the Indian Home Minister wrote to the defence ministry, ‘and we must encourage the East Punjab Government to do likewise.’
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In Pakistan, the frantic and overstretched government aimed to establish a Pakistan National Guard of 75,000 men only weeks after Independence. A remarkable photograph taken in 1948 in the highly contested Indian district of Ferozepore, lying flush alongside the Punjabi border, shows young women in crisp white
salwar kameez
, intently marching in formation with rifles at their sides. Members of the National Volunteer Corps of Ferozepore, these women are being trained in military tactics in case of trouble on the border. How far did this anxiety and paranoia exist in the minds of the leadership and how much did it reflect grassroots realities? This is difficult to say as both governments escalated their
real
militarisation in response to the
perceived
aggression of the other. What is certain, though, is that new groups of individuals, often former Indian National Army members, policemen or students, increasingly took part in a web of nationalistic activity which promoted India or Pakistan as ‘the other’ and created new jobs founded on these new ideologies in armed institutions such as the East Bengali Ansars, the Indian Provincial Armed Constabularies and the Pakistan National Guard.

By the time that the Pakistani and Indian governments concluded their first ceasefire in Kashmir at the start of 1949, the leaders could look back at eighteen months which approximated a revolution. Two new states, different in shape and social composition to anything they had ever anticipated, had come into existence, born in the cauldron of a traumatic transition. Old battles between Congress and League supporters looked outdated and parochial in this new environment. At the same time, a sense of the other state and of its innate violence had begun to grow. This would fuel a conflict which has lasted for the lifetime of all the Partition's survivors.

The north-western corner of the Indian subcontinent suffered the bloodiest violence and the most severe dislocation in 1947–8 but after just a few years visitors were surprised by the speed of change and the ways in which these events had faded from view. The energies and expenditure of the governments, the imperative quickly to begin farming again in the Punjabi breadbasket states that supplied vital food to the rest of India and Pakistan, and the rapid, total exchange of Punjab's population meant that, publicly at least, a line was drawn under events by the time of the first Indian general elections in 1950. Chiselled Victorian luminaries on plinths were removed and the names of streets and parks changed overnight. The landscape became increasingly alien to old inhabitants as shop names were removed and freshly painted signs hoisted up in their place. Marketplaces and segments of the old walled parts of cities were reinvented. As the new order began, and the old order fizzled out, cultural, linguistic and economic changes followed in the slipstream of Partition. Refugees made up almost half of the population of Lahore, almost a third of the population of Delhi.

Communities of refugee squatters could still be seen, camped on the outskirts of towns, and rubble still marked the sites of riots. New cities rose from the ashes, though, such as Le Corbusier's angular, uncompromisingly modernist Chandigarh, the new capital of East Punjab. The resourceful Punjabi refugee became a national stereotype and an actor on the nation-building stage. Inevitably, many of the residents who had stayed in the same place during Partition and witnessed these transformations felt nostalgic for the old cities where there had been less traffic, business had been done face to face, prices were at least remembered as cheaper, and it was possible to cross cities such as Delhi in minutes rather than hours; and they mourned the emergence of the ‘vast sprawling multicoloured soulless monster of today which we continue to call by the same name’.
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The public memory of Partition in the north-west of South Asia was gradually put to rest. Grave and invisible legacies lived on in less tangible ways, in emotional scarring and sporadic political friction, but observers were happy enough to buy into the story of regenerative enterprise told by both national governments.

Beneath the glossy factories and the meteoric rise and endless expansion of new cities, though, Partition left deep and ragged fault lines. These ran through individual lives, families and whole regions, pitching Indians and Pakistanis into new conflicts and paving the way for the troubled bilateral relationship which blights South Asia to the present day.

In the 1940s and 1950s people were not well equipped with the language of psychiatry and psychoanalysis; it was too much to hope for any systematic understanding of the collective trauma which a generation had experienced. Partition had a widespread psychological impact which may never be fully recognised or traced. This afflicted not only refugees but also eyewitnesses, perpetrators of violence, aid workers, politicians and policemen; arguably hundreds of thousands of people living in the northern and eastern parts of South Asia. The immediate trauma of the refugees was well testified in their frozen and fixed faces, uncontrollable tears and shocked inertia. More invasive mental health problems may have plagued some people for the rest of their lives. People who had managed to get away or who had been strong enough to secure themselves a place in a train compartment, or who had remained hidden while other members of their community were killed, felt guilt. Others experienced culturally specific shame and humiliation related to violations of religious or community rights that inverted the normal social order. ‘One woman wept hysterically,’ recounted Margaret Bourke-White, ‘as she told me how her home was polluted by Muslim
goondas
who placed raw meat on the window sills.’ For others, fear of starvation had left a deep mark – ‘they started stealing food,’ remembered Krishna Thapar who worked at an ashram in Punjab with rescued women: ‘we would find chapatis under their pillows, under their quilts, and their beds … Some of them had become psychological cases.’
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Some people went, quite literally, mad.

For women the trauma of rape, molestation and abduction was so grave, and made even worse in many cases because of the cultural taboos surrounding it, that it is unclear how recovery was possible at all. Relief workers were under enormous strain. ‘None of us had the ability to understand the psychology of these women nor did we try,’ admitted the social worker Anis Kidwai. ‘The few sentences that are spouted at such occasions proved totally ineffective, and often we ended up saying very unpleasant things to them.’
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Social workers often tried to steer the conversation away from memories of trauma, encouraged their charges to look to the future, and had a limited grasp of their psychological needs. They can only be judged against the standards and practices of the time. For those who saw scenes of devastation or lost loved ones, life was punctured by panic attacks and ugly nightmares for many years.

Some twenty years later, Begum Ikramullah wrote, ‘I somehow have never been able to get over the shocked impact the Calcutta riots had on me’ and Manzoor Quraishi's otherwise prosaic account of life in the Indian Civil Service is suddenly interrupted by the memory of a brother who lost his life on a train to Pakistan: ‘I loved my younger brother and could not get over the brutal and tragic end of a brilliant career at the young age of 24 years. For months I could not sleep properly and insomnia that I got from this horrible and traumatic experience has haunted me now and then throughout my life thereafter. My mother whose youngest child [had died] was completely heartbroken and cursed “Pakistan” till she died in 1978 …’
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Urvashi Butalia has pointed to the ongoing trauma of those who had been children in 1947, ‘his wife told us that he still had nightmares, that he woke in the night feeling an intense heat rising up around him, the flames which surrounded him as he lay by his father's body in 1947’, while in one instance a perpetrator of violence is also haunted by the events of the time: ‘Another Sikh living in Bhogal in Delhi who had actually been part of a killing spree as a child, would often wake in the night screaming. His wife said he could not forget the screams of the Muslims he had helped to kill.’
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These could have been exceptional cases but it seems more likely that Partition continued to echo, unrecorded, in anonymous stories of breakdowns, alcoholism and suicide.

There were other invisible trails left by Partition. By late 1948, politicians were relieved that violence had subsided, and Nehru in particular was delighted that the annexation of the troublesome state of Hyderabad passed without trouble elsewhere in India. He saw this as a sign that the corner had been turned and was elated that ‘not a single communal incident occurred in the whole length and breadth of this great country’.
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Sadly though, questions of citizenship and belonging still hung in the balance and there were numerous people and communities who had grey, uncertain allegiances to India or Pakistan and had slipped between the cracks formed by these neat parameters of nationhood.