The Great Partition (9 page)

Never before had Indian politicians needed to demonstrate and prove quite so visibly that they had mass support and backing. Ends began to justify means as internal consistency in speech and thought became dispensable. The words ‘Pakistan’ and ‘
swaraj
’, which were already barely defined, began to be used with deliberate impreciseness. People did not just support a political party by this stage – they felt its importance was integral to their sense of self. As the battle to claim the future shape of the Indian state intensified in 1946, politicians wilfully muddied the meanings of freedom and outdid each other in their promises at mass election rallies as they attempted to secure proof of their popularity, to demonstrate their status to the British government, to achieve the right to represent the populace.

It is little wonder that the exaggerated and utopian strand in political rhetoric might be taken at face value; Nehru gave one speech at Sukkur in Sind to a crowd estimated to be 50,000 strong in which he said that, in the free India, ‘everybody would be provided with sufficient food, education and all the facilities including a house to live’ and that Pakistan was a ‘useless idea’ which meant ‘slavery forever’.
²⁹
During the post-war Indian general election politicians roused their followers with the vocabulary of wartime and articulated their struggle in the global language of alliances and enemies, using the metaphors of battle and blood. ‘To vote for the Congress is tantamount to baring one's chest before bullets,’ Pandit Pant loftily declared at a public meeting. Jinnah made a direct comparison between his leadership and Churchill's, while Congressmen drew parallels between the Muslim League and the activities of the Nazis.
³⁰
Similarly, a League activist, Zawwar Zaidi, a student who canvassed for the party, later recalled the way in which the idea of Pakistan was propagated during the elections.

We had a sort of training camp where we were trained … what sort of questions might be asked of us, what sort of reply we should give; where and how to contact the voters … the message was that we are working for the creation of a new state; sometimes they would not fully understand it and we had to explain this, the idea of a Muslim state, and the slogans that were raised … according to the audience that we had, if he was a villager we would say that things would be different, he would have his own state … if it was an educated person, and if it was a Congressman then we would adopt a different strategy …
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The vital importance of the elections as a means of deciding the nature of free India, the speed with which the contests were called and the lack of clarification over what freedom was going to deliver meant that a great many politicians fell back on expedient populism.

The politicisation of religion became the order of the day. Islamic
fatwas
were invoked by all political parties – from the Socialists to the most rabid right-wing nationalists – as they attempted to inject their party image with a quick shot of legitimacy. Put simply, it was not only the League which was manipulating religious feelings in order to gain votes. Congressmen reminded crowds that the Gandhian preference for liquor prohibition was fully in keeping with the Islamic injunction against alcohol. At a speech in support of a candidate it was claimed that at least two Congress measures, alcohol prohibition and curbs on usury, ‘virtually translated into practice the commandments of the
Shariat
’.
³²
Even the Anglophile Unionist Party leader in Punjab, Khizr Tiwana, stalwart of the privileged Punjabi landlord class and an optimistic advocate of cross-community co-operation, ‘garnished his speeches with quotations from the Quran’.
³³
The Congress camp too put the icons and networks of Hinduism to practical use to convey the Congress message, by distributing literature at religious
melas
and fairs, encouraging saffron-clad
sadhus
to support the Congress and linking together repellent practices, such as the slaughter of the holy cow, with anti-British and anti-League tirades.
³⁴
Further from the Hindustani-speaking centre of party politics, especially in the Muslim majority provinces, the language of Congress could become unrecognisably twisted by its local allies; in the NWFP allies of the Congress – the Ahrars and Jamiat-ul-Ulema – were endorsing Gandhi and Nehru at Congress meetings yet underpinning this support with Qur'anic injunctions. Bigotry and bare-faced chauvinism were used to attract voters on all sides and raked the ground for the violent encounters to follow.

For their part, the League played on the motif of exclusionary Islam, tapping into pre-existing chauvinism towards
kafirs
or unbelievers. The language used was prejudiced and bigoted. Little by little the League was able to claim a bedrock of support in the NWFP, a province in which they had failed to win even one seat in the elections of 1937. Flagrant propaganda was used to weld Muslims together and to frighten them into supporting the Pakistani cause. At polling booths the vote was sometimes reduced to a thoroughly misleading question of religion; holding a copy of the Qur'an in one hand and a book of Hindu holy texts in the other, a representative would ask the voter which one they would choose before hustling them inside the polling booth. Elsewhere a respected religious leader, Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Osmani, exhorted his followers to support the League: ‘Any man, who gives his vote to the opponents of the Muslim League, must think of the ultimate consequences of his action in terms of the interest of his nation and the answers that he would be called upon to produce on the Day of Judgement.’
³⁵
Even the word ‘Pakistan’, which literally means ‘land of the pure’, had multiple resonances. Sayyid Muhammad Ashrafi Jilani, one of the leading speakers at the All-India Sunni Conference in April 1946, said to have been attended by over 200,000 people, gave an address in which he played on the word: ‘when a community becomes pure in knowledge, in deed, in disposition, it transforms whichever place it sets foot on into a pure abode’.
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The emphasis was on restoring order in a world gone awry and on re-establishing local sovereignty.

Not everyone was convinced, of course, by the Pakistan slogan. Different Muslims hailed the League for their own localised, diverse and sometimes contradictory reasons. Some of the most forthright and bloody opposition to the League came from within Muslim communities themselves, especially in the edgy build-up to the elections when some Leaguers and their ‘Nationalist Muslim’ opponents fought over the same seats, while their supporters fought openly in the streets. Arguments for and against Pakistan took place among members of the same families and the reasons for the division of opinion stretched across the spectrum from piety to agnosticism; some of the most pious
ulema
, or Muslim divines, rejected Pakistan's call because they saw within it the seeds of the delimitation of Islam: the scope and project of Islam would, they felt, be boxed in within artificial national limits. Others were turned off for other ideological reasons or by the upper-crust calibre of the League leadership itself. The president of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema denounced Jinnah in a
fatwa
of 1945 as the great heathen, Kafir-i-Azam, in a pun on the League leader's popular title, Quaid-e-Azam, great leader.
³⁷

For many Muslims, Jinnah was most emphatically not their ‘Great Leader’. For ‘Nationalist Muslims’ – as those who stayed loyal to the Congress were called – it was a difficult balancing act. As their label flagged up, they were seen as different from plain ‘Nationalists’.
³⁸
‘Nationalist Muslim’ politicians had to fight the election in Muslim constituencies and had to go head to head with League candidates for seats. Right on the front line of anti-League politics, these electoral contests became particularly fiery and divisive as they spilled over into street fights and candidates were ostracised by their communities, spat upon or garlanded with humiliating necklaces of shoes. One son complained that his ‘Nationalist Muslim’ father had been sworn at and ‘not allowed to take his prayer in the mosque’.
³⁹
In some cases
fatwas
were passed suggesting that Muslims who opposed Pakistan could not be given a proper Islamic burial. As these Muslims attempted a last ditch attempt to thwart the League, they were ridiculed as traitors or poster boys for the Congress. In the eyes of the League propagandists, these Muslim Congressmen were not real Muslims at all and made good targets for songs and party propaganda. ‘Though Muslims in name, in action they are Hindus, Call them half fish, half fowl – if you choose!’
⁴⁰

Although money was poured into these constituencies by the Congress Party during the elections (they had become ‘almost a bottomless pit’), the battle for popular support had been won long before. ‘Mass contact’ campaigns initiated by the Congress in the late 1930s to rally Muslims to the Congress side faded away and finally ended in the summer of 1939, unmissed by many in Congress who were consumed by more pressing political and economic issues or feared that the campaign would generate more problems than it solved. ‘The Nationalist Muslim,’ observed the Socialist leader J.P. Narayan, ‘not only finds himself ostracised by his own community but also let down by the Congress itself.’
⁴¹
The truth was that the Congress had, ever since the end of the First World War, been establishing an overwhelming base of support in the country and also had some visible, prominent, Muslim supporters. This seemed good enough; ensuring that the party had a soundly representative, plural basis was less urgent in the late 1930s. By the time the Congress leadership emerged from imprisonment at the end of the Second World War it was too late to recover this lost ground and to rally Muslim support. It was even more difficult for the Congress to attract Muslim supporters, especially in North and West India because, for ordinary people, it could seem like a ‘Hindu’ organisation despite its official open-door policy. Some Congressmen fused their politics with Hinduism and worked closely alongside
sadhus
, taking advantage of religious holidays and religious iconography to appeal to supporters. Leaguers made the most of this, declaring that Congress was really a cover for a Hindu party and that Indian Islam was under attack or in danger. By the eve of Partition this was a real image problem for the Congress at the grassroots. In practice, if not in theory, the Congress
looked
as if it had long conceded the Muslim vote.

On the election days, shops were firmly shut, clusters of people gathered on street corners waiting for news and party workers travelled through the streets in jeeps or on elephants strung with party flags. In Sind, brightly decorated camels languished outside the polling stations and young children were employed to chant party slogans. Vitriol was poured on opposing parties in pamphlets and through loudspeakers. At the polling booths, people long dead were frequently registered, boxes of ballot papers went missing and women electors wearing veils impersonated other women in order to vote multiple times, in at least one case by changing saris on every occasion.
⁴²

Despite the affrays, voter-bashing and ballot-rigging, and the Victorian ‘franchise’, it could be claimed that this was the most democratic exercise ever undertaken in the history of the subcontinent at the time, at least by comparison with the even more tightly restricted franchise used during the elections of 1937. It may have been grossly unrepresentative of India as a whole, yet it was electrifying for the urban middle and lower-middle classes, large segments of which enjoyed their first taste of democratic representation. Millions of those with a little land or a small stake in property could vote: clerks, teachers, landed farmers and stallholders.

Women in particular grasped this opportunity to vote with both hands in 1946 and in countless constituencies the turn-out was high for women. Women League and Congress campaigners explained how to use the ballot paper, accompanied women voters to election meetings and manned the polling stations. ‘They went house to house for canvassing, brought ladies to the polling booths and have made a good awakening in women of Delhi.’
⁴³
Photographs show women in
burqas
casting their votes in the provinces. They waited patiently in queues, up to half a mile long in places, and in Bombay, in the midst of a heat wave, several women waiting to vote fainted from heatstroke. Among men, too, the enthusiasm for voting was palpable; in the Netaji Park in Bombay, a sick voter was brought on a stretcher by volunteers, and at least two blind men were assisted into the polling booth.
⁴⁴
Public fervour, press reports and governmental analysis collided in a moment of collective expectation about the future of the country.

Official interpretations of the electoral results now took on momentous significance. The results showed that the League had become a force to be reckoned with. Massive and polarised support for the League and Congress shocked even those who had expected some degree of division, as it appeared to reflect that Indian society had been pulled apart magnetically along religious lines. The League, which had polled notoriously weakly in the previous elections of 1937, now walked away with a full hand. In the Central Assembly it won every single Muslim seat, and a majority of seats in the provinces. As expected, the Congress swept up the bulk of non-Muslim seats in the provinces and at the centre.
⁴⁵
It was certainly not a straight fight between the League and the Congress; the revitalised political machinery of the two major players was pitted against older, established regional parties and the Congress fended off local challenges from communists, Hindu Mahasabhites and independent candidates. In Punjab, most significantly of all, some of the landed Muslim stalwarts of the Unionist Party stood their ground, despite growing rifts in the party and the defection of older members to the League, and the Unionists won over 20 per cent of the vote polled. The trouble was that these parties, even if significant on their regional home turf, could not hope to cobble together India-wide support, or to make a great claim to representation in a centralised assembly.
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