The Great Partition Read online

  Ultimately, European civilians were not harmed during the violence of 1946, or in the Partition conflict that followed, and some even commented on the ease with which they were able to move around afflicted cities: ‘the start of a street fight was delayed to allow my wife to cross the road,’ one British newspaper editor bemusedly recalled.15 Yet it was not self-evident that this would be the outcome and there was mounting anxiety about the safety of Europeans as the Raj went into terminal decline. As an alarmist intelligence report, forwarded by Wavell to the Governor-General, recorded, ‘In Delhi, large handwritten posters in red ink recently appeared threatening death for “twenty English dogs” for every INA man executed.’16 Ultimately, during the Partition that ensued, Indians turned against each other rather than against Europeans, but it was not immediately apparent that this would be the case.

  Power was slipping out of British hands and morale in the civil service, especially among European officers, reached its nadir. ‘Many of them are feeling the reaction from the strain of the war years here, and see little prospect of constructive or pleasant work,’ reported the Governor of Assam on the anxious atmosphere among his civil service cadre. ‘Among subordinates there is an increasing uneasiness and feeling that it might be wise to ally oneself with the winning side’, while among British military officers there was an itchy impatience to return home. From Bombay, by the beginning of the following year, the assessment was that 70 per cent of the European civil service officers were ‘in a mood to go this year’.17 The anti-imperial rhetoric became ever more grandiloquent and nationalist leaders deftly fused the post-war economic strains, the memory of the Bengal famine and the suppression of the 1942 movement into a powerful invective against British rule.

  The stout, mustachioed leader Pandit Pant, an influential Congressman and linchpin of the party in the United Provinces, looked out at a packed crowd of faces in a village in the district of Benaras, in the plains of the River Ganges. Like many others, he had abandoned a promising legal career in the 1920s and had dedicated his life to the Congress. He had been beaten and left disfigured in lathi charges, and had spent years in prisons, sharing a cell with Nehru who had become a close ally. On the raised platform, garlanded with heavy strings of flowers, he saw around him villagers who eagerly anticipated freedom, or swaraj. Two members of this village had died in 1942 during clashes with the British during the Quit India movement. Now Pandit Pant did not curb his words. ‘These days poor women cannot afford to buy cloth to cover their bodies,’ he told his listeners. ‘Bribery is so much rampant that nothing is available without greasing the palms of officers. In Bengal, lakhs of people died and nobody knows even their names. But they all have become martyrs and their matyrdom will be recorded in history in letters of gold. Now we can no longer tolerate the misbehaviour of officials. We have to finish the present Government and throw it away in the sea.’18

  Congress politicians, trying to keep abreast of the popular mood, did not rein in their words as they might have done in the past. The ruthlessness with which the Quit India agitation had been suppressed was fresh in the memory of Congress supporters, and British officials were starting to resort once again to the degrading suppression of political agitation; the Whipping Act was being applied in cases of rioting in Bombay. As in so many other cases, authoritarian violence was a product of a government in a position of weakness rather than flowing from a position of strength.

  Things went from bad to worse for the imperial state when a dynamic outburst greeted the British attempt to prosecute three officers of the Indian National Army at the end of the war. The officers were leaders of the break-away force that had been recruited from Indian army prisoners of war, after the Malayan campaign and the fall of Singapore, and had, under the command of Subhas Chandra Bose, fought with the Japanese in an attempt to dislodge British imperialism from the subcontinent. Soldiers captured while fighting for the INA had been court-martialled in 1943 and 1944 but the Indian public's sympathy for the rebellious army was subdued until the British decided to hold public trials of several hundred INA prisoners, seven thousand of whom had been dismissed from service and detained without trial.19 Three officers, Prem Kumar Seghal, Shahnawaz Khan and Gurbaksh Dillon, were tried for treason by the colonial state in the ill-chosen and highly symbolic venue of Delhi's Red Fort – Shah Jahan's sandstone fortress from which pre-colonial, Mughal power had emanated. The INA case also became a flashpoint for a more generalised anti-British and anti-imperial feeling, which was quickly outrunning the tempo set by the Congress's political leadership.

  Congressmen could not hope to monopolise the protests but rather rode a wave of popular feeling, at times riding in front of it, at other times being wiped aside by more radical leadership. ‘There has seldom been a matter that has attracted so much Indian public interest and, it is safe to say, sympathy,’ wrote a vexed British intelligence officer and it was reported that politicians were compelled to talk about the INA in appreciative terms during the central assembly election campaign in order to grab – and keep – the interest of their listeners.20 INA men were garlanded with flowers wherever they went, invited to speak at public meetings and lent the support of powerful backers, from barristers to businessmen. The Viceroy, who found it personally trying to overlook ‘this hero worship of traitors’, nevertheless frankly admitted in private that the INA trials were ‘embarrassing’ and although the trio were found guilty in 1946, the sentences were ultimately quashed.21 This climb-down by the imperial state marked another notch on the nationalist yardstick, as the ability of the state to enforce law and order appeared distinctly weakened once again. The last refuge and ultimate pillar of the colonial state, its army, was less reliable than at any time since the 1857 uprising and this undoubtedly influenced the British government's decision to hand back the Indian empire to Indians as soon as they possibly could. This victory, and the celebration and drilling of a well-armed military force, enhanced the sense that a revolutionary social upheaval was impending and helped to champion a cult of militarisation among young men.

  Voting for freedom

  The removal of Churchill from Downing Street, and the Labour Party landslide of the summer of 1945, made British intentions to leave India more concrete and gave the negotiations a fresh injection of realism. ‘In accordance with the promises already made to my Indian peoples,’ King George declared to the assembled members of Parliament on the benches of Westminster in 1945, ‘my Government will do their utmost to promote, in conjunction with the leaders of Indian opinion, the early realisation of full self-government in India.’22

  Before anything else could be done, though, there was a more urgent imperative – to work out who the leaders of Indian opinion really were and the political persuasions of, in the words of the British monarch, his ‘Indian peoples’. The history of imperial assessments of popular will is a troubled one: how best to find out, at the end of empire, who to hand over power to? Colonial regimes have been notoriously weak, or wilfully manipulative, when identifying and empowering representative leaders. For those engineering the transfer of power, in keeping with the British ideal of democratic decolonisation, the answer was an Indian general election. Some forty one million Indians were eligible to go to the polls in the winter months of 1945–6 or 10 per cent of the general population. The vast size of the country and the logistical difficulties of organising the counts meant that elections were staggered from December 1945 to March 1946.23

  The purpose of the election was twofold: to form provincial governments in the Indian provinces, and so to draw Indian politicians into the business of running the everyday functions of government from which Congress had been excluded during the Second World War, and to create a central body that would start designing the future constitutional form of a free India. The announcement of the election caused shockwaves that pulsed through British India; this was the first outlet for popular politics sanctioned by the British for almost a decade. All parties accelerated their fund
-raising and within days election songs, poetry and campaign propaganda filled the newspapers and the city streets.

  While the Congress claimed to speak for all Indians, irrespective of religion, the League claimed to be the mouthpiece of all Muslims. Neither would budge on this fundamental issue. Only a few far-sighted individuals warned of the dangers written on the wall, of the pressing need to address the fractured politics of Hindu and Muslim political communities. The Communist Party of India had built a realistic acknowledgement of Pakistan's popularity into its policy-making, by acknowledging the Muslim right to self-determination in 1942, but the CPI was sidelined from mainstream Congress politics and left-leaning Congressmen were marginalised from the inner workings of the Congress Party by 1945.24 None of the leading political thinkers in Congress were incorporating a national division into their thinking. Instead, the parties embarked on a concerted bid to rally supporters across the country, by welding economic concerns with religious and emotive symbols into a broad-based, popular appeal.

  A flurry of marching songs and poems rang out throughout the country. Printing presses worked overtime producing thin sheets of party information. Party workers pasted up posters and flyers on city walls and telegraph poles. ‘The land and nation are our bread and butter,’ Muslim Leaguers sang out as they paraded in North India with their distinctive green and white flags. ‘But ploughing the nation yields the best crop/ Come to the league, overwhelm all others/ Your people are in anguish/ It's voting day: let's march/ let's march in step, Mukhiaji [chief]!’25

  ‘Red box for the Congress, cast your vote in the red box of the Congress!’ called out a Congress election flyer. ‘Gandhiji and Jawaharlal Nehru are awakening us/ Kisan! Be awake and know the condition of our country/ There is no food, we can't get cloth/ No oil, it's dark in our house/ All things are controlled [i.e. rationed]/ But sometimes we don't get cloth to put round the dead body/ Vote for the Congress and win our own rule/ Then our country will be happy, Kisan!’26

  These were remarkably similar appeals based on economic hardship and brutal social realities. Before long, though, economic issues were supplanted by a more trenchant issue. The campaigning focal point quickly emerged as Pakistan. Swiftly it became the dominant election issue, and a deadly wedge was driven between the Congress and the League as both parties dug their heels in more defiantly and uncompromisingly. Pakistan was becoming a black and white issue.

  Indian leaders had demanded the election, although some criticised the rapidity with which it was thrust upon them, and embraced the opportunity to display their popular power. It was most useful to the British government, which needed to rubber-stamp any future constitutional settlement. This imperative – the need to absolutely ascertain ‘Indian will’ – meant that the election result had monumental implications that outlived the temporary formation of governments. It was a peculiar mixture of the lofty and the mundane; it was a nation-making referendum with international and permanent implications about state formation. Yet, it was also a vent for far more parochial concerns, at a time of dire economic hardship. Under the diarchal system, which pared off provincial governance, leaving the most critical aspects of the state – defence, budgets and foreign affairs – firmly in British clutches, the provincial legislators elected would be expected to take on jobs overseeing municipal water supply, the school curriculum and road-building. The voters had a double duty: to elect their local party man or woman who would fight their corner in the everyday struggles over resources, but also to express a much more amorphous and nebulous attachment to the idea of ‘Indian freedom’ or ‘Pakistan’. For would-be politicians, appealing to Pakistan, or opposing it tooth and nail, seemed an attractive short cut to winning votes.

  The clear connection between the outcome of the election and the likely future shape of the country gave the campaigns an intensely bitter flavour. A.K. Azad observed that it was ‘hardly an election in the normally understood meaning of the term’.27 The electorate was tiny, there was widespread malpractice and fights broke out in constituencies as the election evolved into a plebiscite in favour of, or against, the idea of Pakistan. The League was battling for its life, determined to build a Muslim consensus around the Pakistan demand and to win the strongest possible hand in the constitutional negotiations with the British, which were sure to follow. Nor was the Congress manifesto, which underlined its commitment to secularism, economic development and land reforms, uppermost in the minds of Congress workers whose first duty was to prove that the Congress had universal support and that the population was, therefore, anti-Pakistan.

  The central committee of the League studiously avoided publishing a manifesto altogether, and pinned their whole campaign to the demand for Pakistan. As Jinnah clarified to an audience in the North West Frontier Province, this was a winner-takes-all game, a zero sum equation: every vote cast in favour of the League was a vote in favour of Pakistan, every vote against would help create Hindu Raj. ‘That is the only choice and the only issue before us.’28 If this was a referendum, though, the meaning of the question being asked was obscure and could be interpreted in dramatically different ways. With the stakes so high and the number of voters so low, winning seats by fair means or foul was the ultimate end of every party and those who could not vote still participated in the street theatre of the electoral show.

  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 …31

  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 ord
er 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.