The Great Partition Read online

  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’.36 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 ha
d 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.46

  In the short-term, the reversal in the League's dismal electoral fortunes in the North East and North West of undivided India by 1946, and Jinnah's new popularity in these regions, were the indispensable trophy that allowed Jinnah to press ahead confidently with the Pakistan demand. This may appear, at first glance, to be deceptively straightforward: a Muslim party won lots of votes in Muslim-dominated areas. But there was nothing at all inevitable about this and the increase in the League's new popularity broke through the regional barriers that had blocked the expansion of a centralised Muslim party in the past. On a case-by-case basis Jinnah attempted to bring the League's imprimatur to regional politics by making pacts with local politicians, enrolling well-revered pirs and spiritual leaders and using the popularity of pre-existing local campaigns. It was a feat of extraordinary political brokerage but also meant bringing together tenuously linked interests and groups. Perhaps the most striking feature is the great differences from place to place among League supporters and the diverse rationales for becoming a Leaguer.

  The British watched the results with a view to forging a representative, central body to which it could legitimately pass the baton. From the vantage point of bureaucrats collating results in the imperial capital the results seemed obvious. Any future state would have to take account of the strength of support for the League and Congress and these parties were anointed the legitimate heirs to imperial power. The battle over the precise contours of a free India looked as if it was going to be a two-horse race. As Penderel Moon, a senior government secretary and one of the sharpest political insiders in Delhi at the time, wrote in January 1946, ‘It is now abundantly clear that the Pakistan issue has got to be faced fairly and squarely. There is no longer the slightest chance of dodging it.’47 The League had won its seat at the negotiating table.

  In all of this, though, there was a vital element missing: the ideas of freedom and the meanings that people attributed to the intense debates over a future dedicated to swaraj or ‘Pakistan’ (in the most literal interpretation of the word, as life in the land of the pure) had been lost. British administrators unquestioningly accepted that the League and the Congress had become pugilistic and polarised because Islam and Hinduism were such incompatible religious doctrines – and the vitally important reasons why these parties had become so alienated from one another were left unexamined and disregarded as fundamentally uninteresting. The British thought in terms of territory. The grey margins between territorial nationalism and other forms of patriotic, emotive expression – not so easily linked to land – remained imperial blind spots.

  Fervent public displays of anti-colonial sentiment in post-war India help to explain the frenzied British scramble to depart from the Indian subcontinent. As the British government began to negotiate its withdrawal from South Asia in late 1945 and the early months of 1946 the political parties – the Congress and the League – that would replace the imperial rulers had been decided, but far less thought had been given to the shape of the state or states that would inherit the empire or to the meaning of the mass support for these parties. Meanwhile, the narrow electorate in the general elections of 1945–6 blocked the participation of millions of Indians from electoral politics and necessarily pushed political demonstrations into the streets and marketplaces where the disenfranchised were determined to have a hearing. The newly installed provincial governments, if they intended to keep in control of this powder keg, evidently would have to enact popular legislation and ensure that they protected the rights – or even the safety – of their constituents. The conditions were ripe for raised expectations of freedom, localised and community interpretations of its meaning, and wildly improbable millenarian dreams. Absent from the official British discussion, and from the League and Congress (which had an interest in keeping their appeal as broad as possible) was any real thought regarding these thousands of divergent expectations and how they might be met in one, single constitutional settlement. This would prove a fateful oversight.

  3

  The Unravelling Raj

  Passing through the lanes of the North Indian city of Aligarh in the spring of 1946 nobody could have been in any doubt about the intensity of feeling over the question of Pakistan. The word ‘Pakistan’ was daubed on front doors, pictures of Jinnah could be seen pasted on walls, and green and white tinsel and League banners were suspended across the narrow alleyways of the old city, where metalworkers and artisans produced locks, scissors and tools for the rest of the subcontinent in their workshops facing on to the streets. In local mosques and on street corners Muslims heatedly debated the demand for Pakistan while vocal members of groups such as the Jamiat-ul-Ulema's loud rejection of the idea sometimes led to street fights with their co-religionists. The small city, a few hours' drive to the east of Delhi, founded on the site of an old Mughal qasbah would have been indistinguishable from many other small cities in the Gangetic plains, sitting squarely in the Hindustani-speaking hinterland where the Pakistan demand was at its most intensely bitter, apart from the fact that, across the railway tracks in the wide open spaces of the civil lines, the soaring rooftops of Aligarh Muslim University could be seen.

  Created by Syed Ahmed Khan in the nineteenth century, Aligarh Muslim University was intended as a place to blend Islamic instruction with the demands of the encounter with the western world, an institution that would impart all the manners and educational benefits that an English public school could offer to well-heeled Muslims. Here, enthusiastic support for both the League and the Pakistan demand had been a long-standing feature of university life, dating back to the earliest years of the Second World War. As Jinnah's self-described ‘arsenal’ of Pakistan, Aligarh University students were at the cutting edge of pro-Pakistan thinking, and they retrospectively claimed the credit for founding the state. In early 1946, the League leadership was energetically courting their support, and when leaders such as Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan, a future Prime Minister of Pakistan and university old boy, visited the college they were given rapturous receptions. League leaders were carried aloft on the shoulders of students, who set crackers on the railway lines to welcome them.

  The university was well known for having a large Muslim League membership but this was now spreading to the town, where enthusiasm for Pakistan was steadily building. Women organised pro-League meetings and encouraged donations of jewellery for the League's cause while their husbands and sons used printed leaflets, persuasion, processions and placards to bring Pakistan into existence. By the spring of 1946, with the League's victories in the elections confirmed, the whole campus was in a frenzy of Pakistani fever and academic work had been abandoned in favour of political activism. There was consternation and outspoken opposition from some on the campus. At the same time, non-Muslims in the town started to become nervous and looked to their local politicians to protect them from this nebulous and repetitive Pakistan demand.

  In Aligarh, in the atmosphere of violent rhetoric, rumours of trouble and
the visible drilling of students, suspicion between communities increased. Could Muslim administrators still be trusted? The president of the Aligarh City Congress Committee asked for arrangements to be made for people to register crimes at the local Congress office, rather than the local police station, because the latter was in a ‘Muslim part of town’. Political organisations that campaigned for ‘Hindu’ rights started to attract large numbers, meeting in public places and circulating petitions that called for protection from the university on their doorstep. A retaliatory and accusatory tone crept in. The relationship between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ was stretched to breaking point in March 1946. A riot erupted less than a week after noisy celebrations marked ‘Pakistan Day’ and the League's electoral success in the province. A few Aligarh students buying cloth from a local Hindu cloth merchant quibbled over the price of a bolt of fabric. An altercation broke out, a crowd formed. In the arson attack that swiftly followed at least four people burned to death and the thatched market area of the town was left in ashes.

  The Congress government, now in power in the provincial ministry based in Lucknow, lashed back, passing punitive collective fines on numerous local Muslim inhabitants – who said they knew nothing about the whole business – and launching a party-political inquiry into what had taken place. Over time, this became a bitter local dispute between the provincial League and the Congress. Nehru was one of the few politicians who could see the dangers of the alienation of the Congress ministers in the province from the local populace of the city and, after receiving complaints from poor local ‘Nationalist Muslims’ about the levy, he urged the provincial government to deal with the situation differently in case ‘they are driven against their will into the Muslim League’.1 The risk was, just as Nehru perceived, that Congress and League politicians would start playing up to their core constituents even more, colour their speeches with religious language and stop offering olive branches to the other community. The fines were a direct parody of colonial thinking and simplistic religious assumptions were being made about the multifarious inhabitants of Aligarh. The danger was they could become self-fulfilling. This was, unfortunately, exactly what happened. In the city of Aligarh, a frightening level of polarisation was developing among some of the leading public figures and by the end of the year, the Aligarh University Student Union leader was claiming publicly to have killed Hindus with his own bare hands.