The Great Partition Read online

  March Widespread destruction in Lahore and Amritsar Gandhi goes to Bihar

  15 April Joint appeal for peace made by Gandhi and Jinnah

  May Mass violence in Lahore

  End May Widespread fighting and destruction of villages in Gurgaon

  3 June The plan to partition the subcontinent is agreed and made public

  20 June Bengal and Punjab Legislative Assemblies vote on partitioning the two provinces

  June Violence in Lahore, Amritsar and Punjabi villages

  1 July Partition Council formed (takes over from a special committee of the Cabinet)

  1–10 July Serious rioting in Lahore and Calcutta

  8 July Radcliffe arrives in India

  16–24 July Bengal Boundary Commission holds public sittings in Bengal

  20–30 July Punjab Boundary Commission holds public sittings in Lahore

  28 July Indian Constituent Assembly sub-committee votes against separate electorates for Muslims in India

  14 August Independence Day in Pakistan

  15 August Independence Day in India

  17 August New ferocity in Punjab

  First British troops sail from Bombay

  Boundary Commission Award is announced

  18 August Prime ministers Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan issue a joint statement from Amritsar after visiting affected areas

  28 August Nehru announces the Indian government will have to rethink policy regarding transfer of populations

  31 August Punjab Boundary Force dissolved; replaced by two military evacuation operations

  United Council for Relief and Welfare formed under the co-ordination of Lady Mountbatten

  2 September Jinnah appeals for help for Pakistani refugees

  3 September Joint dominion conference held in Lahore

  7 September K.C. Neogy appointed first Indian Minister for Relief and Rehabilitation of Refugees; Emergency Cabinet Committee established in India

  19 September Iftikhar-ud-din sworn in as West Punjab Refugees Minister

  21 September Joint statement of Nehru–Liaquat Ali from New Delhi

  21 November Numbers of evacuations in Punjab exceed eight million people

  6 December Inter-dominion Conference, Lahore: operation to recover and restore abducted women agreed

  December A.K. Azad recommends Indian Muslims join the Congress at a convention in Delhi

  14–15 December All-India Muslim League Council meeting, Karachi. The League splits into two branches: the Pakistan Muslim League and the Indian Union Muslim League

  1948

  12 January Atrocity against trainload of refugees at Gujrat, Pakistan

  30 January Assassination of Mahatma Gandhi

  Ban on the RSS and Muslim National Guard in India

  14 February Two weeks of mourning in India end; Gandhi's ashes immersed at Allahabad

  28 February Last British troops in India depart

  March Refugee–local conflicts in Godhra, Gujarat

  Inter-dominion arbitral tribunal meets

  Early July Hindu–Muslim riots in Bombay

  July Over 15,000 abducted women recovered by both governments since December 1947

  Permit system introduced in West Pakistan

  12 September Jinnah dies

  Mid-September ‘Police Action’ in Hyderabad and accession of the Nizam to India

  30 September Indian banknotes no longer legal tender in Pakistan

  November RSS initiates civil disobedience against the ban on the organisation

  11 November Inter-dominion agreement sets out terms for recovery of abducted women

  15 December Godse and Narain Apte hanged for Gandhi's murder

  21–23 December Idols found installed in the temple at Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh.

  December RSS begin a campaign against Golwalkar's detention

  1949

  1 January United Nations-sponsored ceasefire announced in Kashmir

  19 February Tara Singh jailed for leading agitation for a Sikh homeland

  12 March Objectives Resolution adopted by Pakistani Constituent Assembly

  May Indian Constituent Assembly votes against reserved seats for religious minorities

  29–30 July All-India Refugee Conference, New Delhi

  12 July Ban on RSS lifted in India

  19 December Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Bill passed in India

  1950

  26 January Inauguration of the Republic of India

  January–March Attacks on non-Muslims in East Bengal, especially in Khulna, Chittagong, Barishal and Sylhet

  Early March Attacks on Muslims in west Uttar Pradesh

  8 April Nehru and Liaquat Ali sign pact on protection of minorities in New Delhi, followed by further talks in Karachi

  19 April Nehru accepts resignation of K.C. Neogy and S.P. Mukherjee owing to disagreements over Pakistan

  28 June Agreement signed on settlement of moveable assets lost during Partition

  30 July All-India Refugee Conference, Delhi

  15 December Death of Vallabhbhai Patel, Indian Deputy Prime Minister

  1 India before Partition

  2 India and Pakistan after Partition

  3 The Radcliffe Line in Punjab

  4 The Radcliffe Line in Bengal

  Introduction: The Plan

  South Asians learned that the British Indian empire would be partitioned on 3 June 1947. They heard about it on the radio, from relations and friends, by reading newspapers and, later, through government pamphlets. Among a population of almost four hundred million, where the vast majority lived in the countryside, ploughing the land as landless peasants or sharecroppers, it is hardly surprising that many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, did not hear the news for many weeks afterwards. For some, the butchery and forced relocation of the summer months of 1947 may have been the first that they knew about the creation of the two new states rising from the fragmentary and terminally weakened British empire in India.

  People who owned or could gather around wireless sets in family homes or in shops, marketplaces and government offices, heard the voices of four men carrying across the airwaves from the broadcasting station of All India Radio in the imperial capital, New Delhi, at 7 p.m. Indian Standard Time on the evening of 3 June. They were informed of the plan to divide up the empire into two new nation states – India and Pakistan. A live link-up from Westminster, where Prime Minister Attlee was making the announcement to the assembled benches of the House of Commons, was relayed via Delhi across the Indian empire's 1.8 million square miles, twenty times the size of Britain itself. In cities from Quetta to Madras, Calcutta to Bombay, these voices carried out along the streets, ‘By the evening of June 2, 1947, the atmosphere in Karachi was one of suppressed excitement over the new plan for India and the Viceroy's coming broadcast,’ observed an American vice-consul stationed in the port city. ‘Thousands of persons from all classes of society had assembled in the streets and public parks to hear the broadcast, while radio shops and stores put on loud-speakers to give passers-by an opportunity to hear the announcement.’1 In Bombay, the writer and producer Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was at a colleague's house discussing a new film project at the time. ‘Literally millions all over the yet-united India sat glued to their own or their neighbours’ radio sets, for the fate of India was to be decided that day,’ he later remembered. ‘From Peshawar to Travancore, from Karachi to Shillong, India became an enormous collective ear, waiting for the broadcasts breathlessly, helplessly and hopelessly.’2 Far away from Bombay, in the Himalayan foothills of Assam, where flooding and postal delays had cut off communications with the rest of India, the Governor invited local politicians to his house to hear the live announcement.3 In Delhi, as the Viceroy and the Indian politicians approached the All India Radio studio in their cars, ‘officials were leaning out of all the windows and cramming the balconies’.4

  In the tense studio in Delhi four statesmen spoke one after the other; first, the British Viceroy
, Mountbatten, then the Congress Party leader and future Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, followed by Jinnah, the Muslim League leader and Governor-General of Pakistan in waiting and, finally, Baldev Singh, representative of the Sikhs.

  It was a burning hot summer's evening. Rumours had been flying in all directions that an announcement was imminent. Journalists had been well primed and copies of the pre-prepared scripts that the leaders would read from had been circulated in advance to give the press a head start in preparing the special editions that would be rushed to print as soon as the broadcast had finished. After almost two centuries of imperial rule in India, the collapse of the Raj and its recreation in the shape of two nation states was being declared. Independence and Partition were mutually entwined.

  The speeches themselves, though, were oddly flat. Even Mountbatten who prided himself on his persuasive rhetoric gave a muted and hesitant performance. Furthermore, the British announcements were masterpieces of obfuscation. It was stated that power would be handed to the Indian people before June 1948. In fact, within days, the real date would be proclaimed: 15 August 1947, ten months earlier than anticipated. The plan paved the way for the partitioning of the highly contested provinces of Punjab and Bengal between the Congress and the Muslim League, and Indian representatives of the legislative assemblies in these two provinces, in the words of the British Prime Minister, ‘will be empowered to vote whether or not the Province should be partitioned’. If Partition was decided upon, in Attlee's oblique words, ‘arrangements will be made accordingly’.5 This meant, for those who could read between the lines, that the campaign for a Muslim South Asian state, Pakistan, had succeeded. These provincial fragments would be made into a separate sovereign state and hived off from the remaining parts of British India, which would become independent India. Yet, in these momentous and long-awaited announcements, neither Mountbatten nor Attlee mentioned the word ‘Pakistan’ once. The Viceroy went further and couched the whole proposal as a theoretical question, dependent on ‘Whichever way the decision of the Indian people may go’. This was diplomatic frippery. The votes in the assemblies were a foregone conclusion and the plan itself had been painfully hammered out in months of intense debate between Indian leaders. It was self-evident to everyone who had lived through the tumultuous months that preceded this announcement, who had witnessed rioting and murders that stretched across North India from Bengal and Bihar to Bombay, and had followed the near-misses of alternative peace proposals and the collapse of the Cabinet Mission talks in 1946 that almost resulted in a federal India, that these statements meant one thing: Pakistan was going to be created, no matter what else happened.6

  What did the creation of Pakistan mean? Nehru did not mention the P word either, only once allowing that the plan laid down ‘a procedure for self-determination in certain areas of India’. Although he encouraged his listeners to accept the plan that was being presented, it was ‘with no joy in his heart’ and although he was clearly talking of a major change in the territorial map of the subcontinent, he told his listeners, confusingly, that ‘The India of geography, of history and traditions, the India of our minds and hearts cannot change.’7 Nor were there any maps to help even the most well-informed English-speaking listener understand what was happening. It was left to the newspapers to publish their own creative interpretations of exactly where a new borderline, snaking through Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west, might fall once the country was divided. The real line would not be presented to the public until two days after the new states had come into existence, on 17 August, and would be hurriedly marked on maps using censuses of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ populations. The border would be devised from a distance; the land, villages and communities to be divided were not visited or inspected by the imperial map-maker, the British judge, Cyril Radcliffe, who arrived in India on 8 July to carry out the task and stayed in the country only six weeks.

  It was only Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League leader, dressed in a white linen jacket and tie, who talked of Pakistan. Jinnah claimed to be the leader of almost one hundred million South Asian Muslims who lived primarily in the north-eastern and north-western corners of British India but were also threaded in their millions throughout the subcontinent's population in towns, villages and princely states. However, he showed little sign of triumphalism. Jinnah had initially been reluctant to talk at all and then hedged his speech with qualifications and sub-clauses: ‘It is clear that the plan does not meet in some important respects our point of view; and we can not say or feel that we are satisfied or that we agree with some of the matters dealt with by the plan,’ he announced. It would be up to the Muslim League to decide whether they should accept the partition plan as ‘a compromise or as a settlement’. Rarely has the birth of a new country been welcomed with so many qualifications by its foremost champion. Clearly something strange and unprecedented was taking place.8

  Over the next few days, in press conferences and speeches, the outlines of the sketchy Partition plan would be fleshed out and greeted with a mixture of joy, horror, bewilderment and fury. It is little wonder that the reactions to the 3 June plan were confused, contradictory and violent. The plan – for all its superficial complexity and fine detail – was wafer thin and left numerous critical aspects unexamined and unclear. Where was India and where was Pakistan? Who was now an Indian or a Pakistani? Was citizenship underpinned by a shared religious faith, or was it a universal right, guaranteed by a state that promised equality and freedom to all? Were people expected to move into the state where their co-religionists resided in a majority? The tragedy of Partition was that by the time people started to ask and try answering these questions, unimaginable violence had escalated to the point of ethnic cleansing.

  All in all, it was probably very difficult indeed in 1946 – without the aid of fortune-telling powers – to imagine what a free South Asia was going to look like. It was evident that two parties, the Congress and the League, would be at the forefront of leading and designing the new state, or states, and that the most prominent leaders – Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi – would be central to carving out the future political orientation of the countries. Questions about economic and social policy, national borders, political sovereignty and constitutional rights, however, had barely been addressed or were highly contested. And yet by 1950 two nation states stood alongside each other in South Asia, with membership of the United Nations, full sovereignty and complete political independence.

  This book is about these months of transition and how, at the end of the British empire, two states emerged from the South Asian landmass, unfortunately with deep-rooted and lasting antipathy towards each other. It aims to dig beneath the often hostile and justificatory rhetoric about Partition, as well as imperial stories of a smooth and seamless ‘transfer of power’, to show just how disorderly the whole process was and how it threatened the very existence of the two new states. It also underscores how uncertain and ambiguous the meanings of Partition and Pakistan were to people living through these events.

  The brilliant success of the Congress and the League in writing post-dated histories and retrospectively ascribing meaning to the support that they gained at the time has obscured the ways in which notions such as swaraj (literally meaning self-rule, and invoked by Gandhi to convey freedom from imperialism) and ‘Pakistan’ were understood by people in 1947. There were various vocabularies of freedom in circulation in the late 1940s. The story of the ‘transfer of power’ used by both the outgoing imperialists and the incoming nationalist powers has been so effective, well disseminated and uncompromising that it has obscured the meanings of freedom at the time. Partition for many South Asians was far more complicated and was the beginning of a process of their construction as new national citizens, rather than simply the end point of nationalist struggles. The words ‘Pakistan’, ‘swaraj’ and ‘Partition’ have acquired concrete meanings in the intervening sixty years. In contrast, ‘freedom’ was not clearly defined in 19
47. This was a time before these histories and national images had become standard.9 It will become apparent that the meanings ascribed to these words in 1947 were regularly at odds with the ways that we understand them now so that nobody – from Mountbatten to the most humble farmhand – foresaw their true meaning or what the future would deliver. The plan to partition the Punjab and Bengal – which in the event delivered one of the worst human calamities of the twentieth century – was heralded by a leading newspaper's special correspondent with great enthusiasm as a day which would be ‘remembered in India's history as the day when her leaders voluntarily agreed to divide the country and avoid bloodshed’.10

  Both the Indian and Pakistani states have proved extremely adept at papering over these differences and muffling the multiple voices that made up the ‘nationalist’ groundswell in the late 1940s. The apparent support for the League and the Congress as displayed in rallies and general elections in 1946 was enough sanction, and sufficient proof, that the modern nation states of India and Pakistan had been envisaged collectively and that their citizens had willed them into existence. A history-writing project was commenced immediately after Independence in both states, which slotted these nationalist upsurges into a straightforward teleology that can still be viewed in the black and white photographic exhibitions in the national museums of South Asian cities or in schoolchildren's history textbooks. In short, both states have been good at promoting themselves. The growth of the nationalist parties blends seamlessly into the successful foundation of new countries. Nehru had this in mind even before India had achieved freedom, suggesting exactly a year before Independence that ‘we might hold an all India exhibition of the Congress struggle of 1920–1946’. Meanwhile, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was considering the displays in a new national museum days before Pakistan even came into existence.11 All the states involved, including Britain, have projected back on to events their own nationalistic, and indeed skewed, readings of why and how the subcontinent was partitioned.