The Great Partition Read online

  So the experience of empire exacerbated religious difference. Of course, taboos about purity and pollution, especially about eating, drinking and intermarrying, did have a far longer pedigree and much older historical precedent; internecine warfare had taken place in the past. Yet Partition and its build-up was something entirely new in India and directly related to the ending of empire. Soldiers in the wars of the pre-European era would have considered their religious affiliations in much more localised and less universal ways. They would not necessarily have identified with other co-religionists in other parts of the region, let alone the country or even the world. These earlier wars did, though, provide twentieth-century Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs with a full-blooded stock of superheroes, myths and stories, in which one righteous spiritual community pitted itself against another, from which to draw during their own struggles.20 The exclusionary politics of Partition, the scale of the killings and the grouping along religious lines were new. Even non-believers or self-proclaimed atheists were labelled as members of a ‘community’ because of the group that they happened to be born into – not what they believed. Such rigid classifications were novel and completely different from any battles of the preceding centuries.21

  Professor Mohammad Mujeeb would have meditated on this, and would undoubtedly have been familiar with the heroes and villains of the old stories of Mughal rule and Indian dynasties before the British conquest of the eighteenth century. He was an eminent scholar and educationalist, in his mid-forties at the time of Partition and Vice-Chancellor at the influential Jamia Millia University in Delhi. As a leading nationalist, from a family of staunch Congress supporters, he had a rich social circle of friends and colleagues in the urban literati, which crossed all religions. It was not untypical for Muslims such as Mujeeb to support the Congress and to oppose the League, and he was close to many prominent national politicians. And yet, despite all this, and his great personal friendship with Nehru, his account of shopping in Delhi's markets in the years leading up to Partition is highly revealing. ‘For a few years under the influence of the idea that the Muslim consumer should support the Muslim trader,’ he remembered, ‘I made it a point to buy what I needed in Muslim shops in Old Delhi.’ Among educated nationalists during these years, a sense of separateness and self-conscious awareness of difference had set in. Yet this was not the end of the story. Making such straightforward connections between co-religionists was not so easy. Whenever he went shopping, the harsh, practical realities of the situation quickly came home to Mujeeb. ‘There were good and bad salesmen,’ irrespective of religion and the shops of the good salesmen – with their stacks of sweets, silver pots and pans, or bundles of cloth – ‘were always crowded, and Muslim customers were an insignificant part of the crowd’. When the professor tried to get the women in his family to take up his scheme of ‘buying Muslim’, he was rebuffed with undisguised scorn; practical housewives would shop where the produce was good and where they were given courteous service, they told him, not on the basis of some simplistic, abstract notion.22

  Mohammad Mujeeb's tale is instructive. On the threshold of Partition, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs – especially those in the highest political circles – lived with an awareness of difference. This was not grounded on how often someone prayed or went to the temple; it transcended individual levels of piety. It was a strongly felt kinship with others of the same faith that was preserved and promoted through intermarrying (and the strict censure of those who dared to marry outside the group), shared histories and myths, and the instillation of customs, habits and superstitions from an early age. But it was pragmatic. It was not easy to hook together co-religionists in political allegiances across great expanses of territory; there was no such thing as one Muslim, Hindu or Sikh community in South Asia, as numerous demagogues found to their peril. For one thing, linguistic and cultural differences zigzagged across the country and for another, there was little common ground between people with such divergent incomes.

  On the eve of Partition, even in the places where there was a heightened sense of difference, there were many countervailing forces. Mercantile and manufacturing communities from sari weavers to tea planters depended on pragmatic co-operation for their livelihoods, while festivals and holidays were flamboyantly celebrated across the board. Class, as ever, acted as a social gel and rich Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims of the same social standing partied together in gilded hotels, irrespective of religion; university friends of various backgrounds attended the same classes; and poor agriculturalists relaxed together on charpois at the end of a day's work. Above all, it was a very long jump from a sense of difference, or lack of social cohesion, to mass slaughter and rape. There was nothing ‘inevitable’ about Partition and nobody could have predicted, at the end of the Second World War, that half a million people or more were going to die because of these differences.

  2

  Changing Regime

  On 14 June 1945, a little over a month after Germany surrendered to the Allies, Nehru and the other leading members of the Congress stepped out of jail. They were free men, released from prison for the final time.

  In the absence of the Congress leadership from national political life, however, the political tableaux in which they acted had changed drastically. As the party president at the time, A.K. Azad later claimed, in prison he had been ‘completely cut off from the outside world’, even denied his trusty portable radio, ‘and did not know what was happening outside’. On their release, the leadership was ‘thrown into a new world’.1 Indians ecstatically greeted their pantheon of heroes but Nehru and the others had fallen out of step with the popular politics of the moment. Gandhi had been freed earlier in 1944 but seemed a figure from the past, removed from the mood of anti-European populism with its roots in labour protest and peasant radicalism. Now, there was little popular regard for the ideology of non-violence and Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian National Army chief was the hero of the hour. Even more importantly, the Muslim League had been able to exploit the gaps in public leadership exposed by the removal of Congressmen from the limelight, building up a vast groundswell of support that was fatally underestimated by the Congress leadership when it returned to the negotiating table. The Congress message had become more muted in the interim years. It was not clear that the Congress leadership would be able to lead and control popular outbursts as it had done in the past.

  By this point, the Congress Party was a bulky organisation, much changed since its heyday of mass public protest against British rule in the 1920s and 1930s. It was a victim of its own success, as it had become a gargantuan umbrella party, housing all manner of political thinkers, politicians, idealists and unscrupulous opportunists. Gandhi famously suggested that the Congress should be disbanded after Independence, as it would have exhausted its stated purpose since 1929 of delivering purna swaraj, or full independence, from British rule, but his suggestion was conveniently overlooked as the Congress transformed itself from liberation movement to ruling party. Even if desirable, it was impossible to enforce one pure ideological line. Within the Congress broad church jostled committed Gandhians, liberals, socialists, politicians with narrow regional or local agendas and Hindu nationalists who drew on religious symbolism and history to define their vision of a free united India. Defections took place from smaller parties as the Congress's omnipotence became inescapable. ‘I have joined the Congress,’ said Maheshwar Dayal Seth, former president of the United Provinces Provincial Hindu Sabha, in a statement. ‘I have not joined the Congress for the loaves of office but for service through sacrifice and suffering.’2 Despite the protestations, it seemed more likely that many jumped on the Congress bandwagon because they knew it was hurtling towards the finishing line; it was obvious the Congress would be the party of power.

  The Congress hierarchy was racked with anxiety both about these ideological divisions and about the splinters surfacing in the organisational capacity of the party. National leaders and rank-and-file supporters disagreed veheme
ntly among themselves on all sorts of matters: the basis on which nationalism should be agreed, the ideological policy of the new state, in particular the place that religious symbolism would play in it, and about the meanings of freedom for ordinary South Asians. ‘The system of enrolling indiscriminately four anna members,’ complained the General Secretaries of the party about the quarter of a rupee subscription fee, ‘has led unfortunately to many forms of corruption and malpractices disfiguring our political life.’3 The leadership, which had been attracted by Gandhi's visionary call in their twenties, and drawn to his deceptively simple message of non-violence and self-rule, now approached old age. Nehru was fifty-seven, Vallabhbhai Patel, second in command to Nehru and soon to be Indian Deputy Prime Minister, was seventy-one, Gandhi himself was seventy-seven. They were still engaged in the same protracted, wearisome tug-of-war with the British rulers. Unsurprisingly, differences of opinion among the hierarchy were also transparent by 1946. Gandhi's continued emphasis on spiritual development, self-sufficiency and the foundation of village republics was viewed with barely concealed scepticism by Nehru, despite his personal love and profound respect for the Mahatma, while Nehru's own intellectual spadework and prolific writings paved the way for a liberal, industrial and plural state.

  Without anchorage in Gandhian non-violence the nationalist movement was a much more volatile and dangerous proposition, as the leaders themselves were only too aware. To be sure, Gandhi's own concern about this may have been controlling and innately conservative. ‘A great many things seem to be slipping out of the hands of the Congress,’ he protested to Vallabhbhai Patel. ‘The [striking] postmen do not listen to it, nor does Ahmedabad [where a Hindu–Muslim riot had occurred], nor do Harijans, nor Muslims. This is a strange situation indeed.’ Gandhi was far too astute not to realise that the Congress was only just managing to stay loosely in control of a much larger, more volatile and diverse collection of political movements.4

  It is little wonder, then, that the Congress tried uneasily to latch on to the popular movements that were breaking out all over India at the end of the Second World War. In particular, Congressmen teamed up with men returning from the Indian National Army. After tedious waits for demobilisation, many soldiers were recruited into military and civil police units and others became ideal recruits for the new defence groups and volunteer bodies springing up across North India. ‘Our boys cannot forget politics,’ Nehru boldly asserted, ‘and work as mere mercenary automatons of a foreign government’ and many of the soldiers had indeed developed their own appraisal of the political situation, had high hopes of the meaning of freedom and were passionately nationalistic. In the emboldened words of a Pathan soldier who had fought in North Africa and Italy to Malcolm Darling on his tour in the winter of 1946, ‘We suffered in the war but you didn't … we bore with this that we might be free.’5 Disgruntled former soldiers were not going to sit by quietly and wait for concessions from the British: they were armed with a new appreciation of the desperateness, and the injustice, of colonial rule.

  The political ‘isms’ of the post-war world – communism, socialism, fascism and nationalism – could no longer be regarded as abstract philosophies but were deeply felt as matters of life and death. Wartime had created new opportunities while exhausting older ways of doing political business, beefing up the economic and social power of India's cities and, even more importantly, changing the ways in which people thought of politics. Conditions had irreversibly changed. As 1945 drew to a close, India was rocked by rebellions and revolts on an unprecedented scale.

  The ending of an era

  ‘I am not very much looking forward to 1946,’ the British Viceroy, Wavell, wrote sombrely in his diary on New Year's Day, ‘and shall be surprised and very pleased if we get through without serious trouble.’6 His pessimism proved to be well founded and soon ships in Bombay harbour, where fireworks for New Year's Eve had boomed weeks earlier, turned their guns against British authority, and trained them on those venerable institutions of imperial life: the Taj Hotel, the Yacht Club and the other neo-Gothic buildings that lined the Bombay shore. The naval mutiny was just one of numerous popular rebellions in the early months of 1946. B.C. Dutt, a ringleader of the strike, later remembered the scene on Bombay's shoreline during those tense but festival-like days, when Indian sympathisers fearlessly came to deliver food and water to the mutineers under the full gaze of British officials:

  From every walk of life they came and crowded the seafront around the Gateway of India, with packets of food and pails of water. The restaurant keepers were seen requesting people to carry whatever food they could to the beleaguered ratings. Even some street beggars, it was reported in the press, were seen carrying tiny food packets for the ratings. The harbour front presented a strange spectacle. The whole area was patrolled by armed Indian soldiers. British forces were kept ready at a distance. Indian soldiers with rifles slung across their backs helped to load the food packets brought by the public on boats sent from the ships in the harbour. The British officers were helpless spectators.7

  It is difficult to exaggerate the turmoil that India was experiencing at the close of the Second World War and the sense of entitlement and hope that had fired the imagination of the people. This was in stark contrast to the situation the average British colonial official found himself in: disliked, overburdened and heavily constrained by a fiscally cautious regime.

  Strikes were incessant and held by everybody from tram drivers and press workers to postmen and industrial workers in cotton mills, potteries and factories.8 In 1946 there were 1,629 industrial disputes involving almost two million workers and a loss of over twelve million man-days.9 An All India railway strike, which would, of course, have brought gridlock to the country, was threatened in the summer of 1946 and was only narrowly avoided. In Bihar in March 1946 a very serious police mutiny, during which policemen broke open a central armoury, and rampaged through a handful of major towns, was brought under control by the firing of the military. A copycat incident in Delhi involved the mutiny of over 300 policemen.10 In addition to nationwide anti-British protest movements in retaliation for the firings on the naval mutineers in Bombay, Karachi and Madras, peasant movements, or kisan sabhas, attempted to seize control of food committees, resist the control of richer food-hoarders and protest against ration cuts.

  The newest aspect of 1946 was the fusion of so many different movements, some urban and some rural, some violent and some law-abiding, many of which were explicitly directed against the British while others, led by rebels, targeted exploitative Indian landlords, loan sharks, autocratic princes and existing social dynamics more broadly. The one thing in common was a feeling of resistance to the status quo. Many of these movements sliced across the neat chronological parameters of Independence and Partition. The armed clashes of the colossal Telengana uprising spread to three to four thousand villages in the Telugu-speaking regions of Hyderabad where peasants armed themselves and seized land.11 This rebellion, stretching from July 1946 to October 1951 was an interconnected series of armed reprisals for excessive rents, extortion, oppression and the pitiful living conditions in lands ruthlessly controlled by the Nizam of Hyderabad and his landed oligarchy. Radicalised by communist leadership, peasants attempted to liberate their village hinterlands, to redistribute land, and to establish a more equitable society, and even after Independence, once the Nizam had been removed from power by the violent intervention of Indian troops, rebels continued in their struggle against the Indian state itself well into the earliest years of Independence.

  Elite Indo-British relationships endured and for the select few the rounds of tea parties, shoots and open houses, attended by rich Indians and Europeans alike, continued unabated. On the streets of major cities, though, a definite streak of anti-Europeanism started to mar relationships, with western ties and hats forcibly removed from Europeans in Bombay, Calcutta and Karachi, the Punjab Governor's car stoned by student demonstrators on the Mall in Lahore and Europeans th
rown from their bicycles, while some British tommies about to be shipped home chalked ‘cheer, wogs, we are quitting India!’ on railway carriages.12 ‘I am bound to say that I cannot recollect any period,’ wrote the anguished British Governor of the Central Provinces and Berar to the Viceroy in 1945, reflecting on the charged political rhetoric of the times, ‘in which there have been such venomous and unbridled attacks against Government and Government officers.’13 The 1946 Victory Day parade, a grand spectacle that would have been utilised, in the old order, to express imperial might and to celebrate Indian and British connections, was boycotted by nearly all the major political parties and accompanied by anti-imperial rioting in New Delhi. Mills, schools, shops and colleges were closed, black protest flags were draped from windows, and European-owned cars smouldered while police used fire and tear gas to control crowds. As the procession passed through Connaught Circus, Delhi's commercial hub, crowds cheered the men of the Royal Indian Navy, which had recently mutinied in Bombay, but other units were jeered as they passed through.14 The popular mood had changed to one where anti-imperial feeling could be aired freely and without fear.