The Great Partition (37 page)

In Bengal, in contrast to the north-west, the physical reality of the refugee crisis was only just beginning to take shape in the 1950s. By 1951, there were at least three million refugees squeezed into every nook and cranny of Calcutta. They slept on pavements and in Nissen huts, made their homes on railway platforms and along riverbanks. The consequences could not be easily ignored and the unceasing flow of refugees brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war in early 1950. As Nehru wrote to the British Prime Minister, Attlee, in 1950 the treatment of minorities in both countries was ‘far more important for the maintenance of peace than the settlement of the Kashmir dispute’.
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A proclamation of emergency was kept ready to be used at a moment's notice in West Bengal and the Governor suggested declaring a state of martial law. The prolonged, tortuous Partition of Bengal would prove a whole chapter in the Partition story. It was a political and social drama which stretched well into the twentieth century. The war of 1971, and the secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan, exacerbated the human crisis in the region and, by 1973, West Bengal was coping with a refugee population of around six million.

After 1947 East Pakistan's ability to survive hung in the balance and the province's continued viability as a part of Pakistan was already in doubt. The desperately poor, waterlogged province, economically dependent on the unreliable jute crop and physically distanced from the Pakistani capital one thousand miles away, had to struggle with two dominant issues from the moment of its independence: on its borders it faced a refugee crisis of epic proportions and a brewing conflict with India, while East Bengalis also began a long battle with their compatriots in Karachi, who began trying to stamp their cultural and political imprint on the province. Jinnah declared Urdu the Pakistani national language in 1948, deaf to the passion of Bengali linguistic patriotism and the complaints of the majority of Pakistanis who could not speak the language. After Independence, East Pakistan suffered from inflation and shortages of basic goods as it was cut off from Calcutta, but the Chittagong port, which was critical for East Pakistan's industrial development and imports, was developed too slowly. All this was underlined by bigotry shown towards the rural Bengali peasantry and a barely concealed implication that the province was a poor cousin to the ‘real’ Pakistan: Jinnah took seven months to make his first brief visit to Dacca and although Liaquat Ali Khan announced that he would aim at two visits a year, he never managed to reach his own target. The fissures which would eventually result in civil war, the bloody cracking apart of the country and the creation of Bangladesh in 1970–1 were already visible in 1947.

Meanwhile, massive communities of Hindus who remained in East Bengal found little to commend in their poorly administered new country, and clung tenaciously to their older political affiliations. Many had ties to Calcutta and remained unreconciled to Partition, which was seen as an arbitrary imposition from outside. ‘Their temple bells can be heard in the evening and in their shops in the bazaar are exhibited portraits of Nehru, Patel and other Indian leaders,’ noted one foreign visitor to Dacca.
⁸
Hindus had overwhelmingly been the
zamindars
, or landlords, in undivided Bengal, while Muslims had been the tenants, and Hindus remained the wealthy gatekeepers of Bengali
bhadralok
culture; even in 1950 they still dominated the Dacca bar and held one third of the university's places.
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Simultaneously, the promises of Pakistani nationalism had fired the imagination of Muslim tenants who hoped to improve their lot at the expense of their erstwhile masters. In this light, well-meaning Pakistani guarantees of a plural state decreed from the capital, and the promise of a 30 per cent reservation for the minority, looked hollow and capricious from the perspective of the East Bengali Hindu who, although represented in the provincial Legislative Assembly, had no figurehead in the cabinet and little reason to believe that his children or grandchildren would benefit from the same access to educational opportunities and legal rights as himself.

Fears of outright persecution were strengthened by real assaults and murders of East Bengalis in the grievous riots in Khulna, Chittagong, Barishal and Sylhet in 1950 and the ruthless requisitioning of Hindu property by a partisan and unaccountable state administration. Disentangling the truth from fiction about the persecution of East Bengali minorities is still immensely problematic, but as news of rapes, murders and massacres gained currency, fears of war between the two countries over Kashmir and the worried intercessions from family members and political groups on the Indian side of the border all added to the maelstrom. Rich and poor Bengali Hindus became fused in a new collective consciousness of their vulnerable minority status. The full ambiguities of Pakistan's territorial creation came to light as many Bengalis on both sides of the border lamented its creation and echoed Vallabhbhai Patel's declaration that Partition was a tragedy.

Ultimately, although some minorities held out in East Pakistan and tried to preserve their community rights, there was an alternative option for those who decided that they could not remain in East Bengal: migration to India. Many did not think this would be permanent, while some remained in East Pakistan for as long as possible and tried to claim their political rights, waiting for the storm to pass. Migration decimated ever more communities, leaving small isolated families targets for criminals and creating a vicious circle. By early 1950 some of the Congress regarded war as possibly the only solution that would stop the tide of refugees, push back Pakistan's borders and create a safe zone for non-Muslims in East Bengal which could be subsumed within Indian territory. Daily border clashes and riots in East Bengal started to threaten the security of Muslims in North India, in Calcutta and West Bengal and in March 1950 riots in East Bengal had ‘repercussions’ hundreds of miles way. The reflex action of many Indian Muslim communities was to pack up their belongings and to consider the possibility of migration to Pakistan. ‘The common folks are concerned – peasants, artisans, metal workers, domestic servants and the like,’ Nehru lamented. ‘Their
panchayat
s decide and whole groups pack up and want to go.’
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Independence had not delivered on its promises. J.N. Mandal, the leader of the local
dalits
who had vigorously backed the Pakistan demand and had been sworn in as a minister in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, was racked with regret and dashed expectations. In 1950 he resigned from his post and migrated to India. It was the result of a long personal tussle with his own emotions and responsibilities. ‘It is with a heavy heart and a sense of utter frustration at the failure of my life-long mission to uplift the backward Hindu masses of East Bengal,’ he wrote sadly in his resignation letter, ‘that I feel compelled to tender resignation of my membership of your Cabinet.’ The daily persecution and harassment of peasants whom Mandal was elected to represent had become too much as ‘untouchables’ found themselves discriminated against, attacked and persecuted in East Pakistan, lumped together in popular thinking with ‘Hindus’ and exploited by unaccountable administrators who, Mandal was convinced, were determined to squeeze out all the minorities from the land.

The riots in East Bengal 1950 proved the final straw for Mandal like many others. ‘The news of the killing of hundreds of innocent Hindus in trains, on railway lines between Dacca and Narayanganj, and Dacca and Chittagong gave me the rudest shock,’ he wrote. ‘I was really overwhelmed with grief.’ Shortly afterwards, Mandal made his way to India. The final part of the sorry tale came afterwards in a twist which reflects both the ironies and the complications of defining citizenship in the partitioned subcontinent. Mandal's departure was rewritten as treachery and anti-nationalism. The Pakistani Prime Minister, standing on an airfield in Karachi, when asked about his minister's departure declared that he hoped Mandal would come back to Pakistan. ‘A number of nationals betray their country and run away,’ Liaquat Ali Khan declared imperiously to the assembled journalists, ‘but by doing that they do not cease to be the nationals of that country.’
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Once again the murky lack of clarification about citizenship entangled the two states. The bitterness engendered by Partition was still palpable and in 1950 the prime ministers bickered in personal letters to each other about responsibility for the violence in 1947.
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‘The disturbances which led to mass migrations covered three hundred thousand square miles in Pakistan,’ argued an Indian government pamphlet, ‘while the area affected in India was only eighty-seven thousand square miles.’
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The real cost of Partition was lost in this scramble to attribute blame.

Both governments became blind to the real human misery of the refugees as the ‘refugee question’ became another focal point for Indo-Pakistani conflict. In provocative rhetoric the governments fixated on their own righteousness, undermined the journalism and reportage emanating from the other nation's press and denied their own culpability for what had happened in 1947. ‘Wielding administrative power and having at their command the police and the military as engines of oppression, these [Pakistani] officials committed the worst savagery in human history. The riots in West Punjab had their natural repercussions in East Punjab, of which exaggerated reports were published in the Pakistan press and broadcast by the Pakistan radio,’
¹⁴
claimed the Indian government publications division while Pakistani propaganda perpetuated similarly partial interpretations in pamphlets such as
The Sikh Plan in Action
. The question of culpability for the crisis of 1947 remained a powerful silence in the background of later diplomatic discussions over Kashmir, and it still exerts a deep-seated force in the official mindset of both nations.

War over conditions in Bengal was narrowly averted in 1950. The Indian and Pakistani prime ministers sealed the peace – at least temporarily – by signing a far-sighted pact in April 1950. The Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact addressed desperately urgent questions of fair press reportage, protection for migrants in transit, affirmation of minority rights, the property rights of migrants and restoration of women who had been held captive against their will. It came just in the nick of time.

In Delhi in May 1950 newspaper editors gathered from India and Pakistan at a joint conference. The Nehru–Liaquat Ali pact encouraged journalists to tone down their alarmist coverage of what was happening in the two countries. Journalists spent hours talking, trying to get to the bottom of what was happening across the border and learning about life in a place which had now become mysterious and inaccessible. A Pakistani journalist admitted that he was relieved to find that the reports he had seen in Pakistan of gangs massacring Muslims had been exaggerated.
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At the conference, journalists wept to see each other for the first time in three years. On hearing this, Nehru reflected that the two states had to find a way to get their people to meet as often as possible. Sadly, the pact was a temporary sticking plaster and this aspiration towards open borders remained a vain hope.

Ahmad Hussain worked as a mechanic in a tin-printing plant in Lahore. He had a wife and young children to support and he performed well at his job, rising to the position of chief mechanic. During Partition, in 1947, the factory where he had been employed for over a decade was looted and his employer, the mill-owner Amar Nath Bindra, fled to India. We do not know what Ahmad Hussain made of this, or whether he was able to find alternative employment, as his life goes unrecorded in the archives until one day a year later when his former employer contacted him.

The indefatigable Amar Nath Bindra had managed to find his feet in the city of Mathura in North India. He had borrowed some money from the central government, and along with the help of ‘some good-hearted capitalist’ had managed to re-establish his factory, set up the necessary equipment and machinery and had even secured a supply of precious electricity. But now he faced a problem: he could not find suitably skilled workers needed to operate the newly installed plant. His mind turned to the men he had left behind in Pakistan. If they could come and help him, even for a limited time, he could get the factory running and use them to train some new staff. ‘I had to request the Government to allow me to have my old five Muslim artisans from Lahore who worked in my factory there for about ten years,’ he wrote to the Refugee Department: ‘during that time they served me so honestly, sincerely and faithfully that I cannot still dream that they belong to other Nationality or Dominion and I hold implicit faith in them. [
sic
]’
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Remarkably, this appeal worked and Ahmad Hussain was granted a six-month permit to travel to India from Pakistan, along with his teenage son, Bashir Mohammad, completely against the flow of refugees still moving in the opposite direction. Leaving his wife and three younger children behind in Lahore, Ahmad Hussain was reunited with his old boss in India, where he resumed his former occupation. Periodically, the factory boss applied to extend the men's permits: ‘when large numbers of such Muslims who are not at all of any use to India are being retained in India,’ he pleaded, in a revealing letter, ‘I see no cause why these only two most useful persons [
sic
] be not retained to train our people. I will stand any surety for these people.’ The pay, or the local conditions, must have been to Ahmad Hussain's liking as in 1950 he applied for permanent settlement in India.
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Now, though, three years after Partition, borderlines and permit situations had hardened between India and Pakistan and the governments were introducing passports for the first time. Ahmad Hussain's life collided once again with the contingencies of Partition and the state-making processes. In 1951, Ahmad Hussain and Bashir Mohammad had both overstayed their permits, their applications were rejected and father and son were forced to separate from their employer for the final time and were ordered by the police to return to Pakistan.