The Great Partition Read online

  The British cut their losses. It was a classic imperial response. By mid-1946, the British government was reluctant to invest a penny more in India's administrative infrastructure. Intelligence units were run down and reports reaching district officers, magistrates, policemen and Criminal Investigation Departments suffered in quality. This would become deadly in time. ‘Police intelligence in Bombay City is said to be poor,’ the Governor reported, ‘with the result that the Government are not in full possession of information as regards the leaders of miscreants.’20 In 1946, the government disbanded Information Films of India, which produced black and white newsreels and propaganda films shown in cinema halls. The ailing colonial machinery could not even produce a figure when asked to say how many Europeans were living in India. The figure of 97,000 was settled upon somewhat arbitrarily when an initial educated guess of 44,000 was considered to be too low. At exactly the time when clear information was most in demand it became a scarce commodity. The last British census in India was a slender volume compared to its decennial predecessors and much of the information collected for the census still had not been collated by the end of British rule. As W.H. Auden accurately pointed out in his poem ‘Partition’, the census returns were ‘almost certainly incorrect’ and the calculations of ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ Muslim populations, which were so indispensable to the political debates, were based on out-of-date information.

  Access to information meant power. Recognising in which direction the wind was blowing, some Indian civil servants and other government employees started showing their political colours more openly now that the end of the Raj appeared to be imminent, and forged relationships with the Indian politicians-in-waiting. Sympathetic ICS officers were eased into key positions, such as Govind Narain, who became Home Secretary in the United Provinces after Independence, had close family links with the Congress, and had, he later admitted, given the Chief Minister surreptitious assistance when he campaigned in his district during the 1946 elections.21 The imperial institution in 1946 was a very different-looking beast to its pre-war incarnation. After his release from prison, the Congress President, A.K. Azad, albeit a distinctive figure with his small round glasses and pointed beard, was astonished by his apparent celebrity among policemen and officials – more often perceived as the lackeys of British imperialism, who would have steered clear of openly celebrating a nationalist leader in the past. One afternoon Azad was amazed to find police constables saluting him and shouting political slogans in his favour as he stepped out of his car outside Government House in Calcutta after he had been released from prison. On another occasion when his car was held up in traffic in the city, ‘Some police constables recognised me and reported to their barracks which were nearby. In a few minutes a large gathering of constables and head constables surrounded my car. They saluted me and some touched my feet. They all expressed their regard for Congress and said that they would act according to our orders.’22 Clerks and policemen were making entirely rational and sensible adjustments to the new order and many changed their allegiances long before any formal transfer from the incumbent British had been properly planned. Similarly, supporters of the League inside the secretariats were using office stationery and telephone lines and taking time off work in order to help out with the Pakistan campaign.

  Defending the nation

  During this terminal breakdown of power in the spring of 1946, in the cities of North India militia groups, extremist parties and armed groups rapidly burgeoned. Their members suddenly became more noticeable in crowded marketplaces, marching in the streets, sometimes with long sticks or lathis under their arms, or under banners with lurid slogans. Sometimes they noisily careered around in the back of jeeps. They produced more heat than light, and their activities were casually brushed aside by many as the over-enthusiasm of young men. But students were skipping classes to attend rallies and meetings and strident political opinions crept into their college work. The Ram Sena, a group linked to the Hindu Mahasabha was typical: young students and boys could join up once they had solemnly promised, in front of their fellow members, to ‘bear all sacrifices involved cheerfully without any compensation for any kind of loss or injury suffered in the discharge of my duties’.23 Decked in khaki shorts and shirt, with an orange cap and spear, topped off with the society's flag, they marched through the streets, helped out at political rallies, and in their free time played sports and spent time together. It was both a youth club and a political party, providing an image and a social life into the bargain.

  In towns across North India men were collecting together and arming. Month on month, as the temperature climbed from spring to summer, officials returned lines of neat statistics, which showed that membership figures for these groups were moving upwards. In early 1946, it was being reported that a large number of deserters from the United Provinces were still untraced, and that many of them were likely to have firearms.24 Former soldiers, fired-up students, party activists and opportunist criminals coalesced together in a rag-bag of organisations. Some were entirely amateur. Pre-existing athletic associations, wrestling or football teams were given a political edge and started to participate in patrolling the cities or collecting weapons after their matches.

  Such self-defence groups were different in purpose, outlook and levels of structure to more ideologically honed and well-organised armies. These armed bands could be pre-emptive, provocative and defensive, and disentangling which was which was difficult. The strategic picketing and well coordinated drills could become overt aggression, and as one colonial official observed, ‘a readiness for defence too easily passes into a desire to attack’.25 From a different viewpoint, these militias could seem reactionary and threatening rather than reassuring.

  Other groups were larger, more professionalised and more closely resembled private militias on the offensive, creating and forging ahead with their own pernicious visions of the nation. Kewal Malkani, who was twenty-four years old at the time, was a typical prize recruit for the RSS. Intelligent, well educated and from a respectable Sindi family from the city of Hyderabad, he heard about the RSS from his older brother and started to attend meetings in 1941. The ‘clean, uplifting atmosphere’ appealed and before long he was inducted as a member into the local shakha or branch. Here, standing alongside his new brothers-in-arms, he swore solemn promises to the nation, drilled in formation, and listened to lectures on morality, duty and ‘history’ – in which exciting, epic battles were waged against Muslim enemies and an inventive panorama of Hindu gods and national heroes fought to save the Motherland. He later remembered the emphasis on ‘character, on discipline … a certain element of Puritanism’. For Malkani, and thousands like him, the attraction was in the simplicity of the organisation's call. It rode roughshod over India's linguistic, religious and regional melting-pot.26 Militant groups provided easy answers to complex questions.

  The dark underbelly of these organisations was their exclusive, rigid, right-wing ideologies. These ‘nationalistic’ visions were flagrantly at odds with the way in which Indian freedom was being envisaged in Delhi and London. Other militia groups with clearly defined histories and ideologies included the Khaksars, the Ahrars, the Muslim League National Guards and the Akali Fauj. All used a heady combination of bombastic rhetoric, militaristic boot-camps and sexually charged appeals which often drew on religious imagery and stripped down ideas of ‘religious identity’ to its barest essentials. The ‘shadows of the swastika’ were not only cast by the RSS. Across North India other private armies and militia movements blossomed on the student campuses and in the comfortable living rooms of middle-class urban India.27 The Khaksars, founded in Punjab in 1930, wore khaki uniforms, carried spades or trowels and were preoccupied with an intoxicating creed of violent action. For the Khaksars, Islamic ideas played a supporting role, but the core tenets were ‘unity’ and ‘discipline’. Khaksars kept themselves busy with daily parades, between evening and night prayers, compulsory tasks such as street-cleani
ng, roll calls and collecting subscriptions. Lord Baden-Powell's Scouting movement had been an inspiration.

  Prior to Partition, the similarities of these bodies – whether affiliated to the ‘Muslim’ or the ‘Hindu’ cause – far outweighed their differences. The imprint of western fascism is clear and these armed groups had distinctly modern precedents; the Khaksars' leader acknowledged the example of Hitler, reading Mein Kampf and modelling his forces on the SA and the SS. ‘Freedom can be secured only in the field of battle,’ the Khaksar leader commanded, ‘therefore for the field of battle prepare only military strength …. Against one who uses violence, non-violence, civil disobedience, imprisonment, ahimsa, humbleness, and the philosophy of getting freedom by begging is absolutely wrong.’28 M.S. Golwalkar, leader of the RSS, wrote warmly of the Third Reich. ‘To keep the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic Races – the Jews,’ he wrote in We, or Our Nationhood Defined, ‘Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.’29 Similar batches of young men, often bachelor students, the educated unemployed or those let loose from the army, found that these ideas resonated with their own lives and concerns.

  During the summer of 1946, at the same time, more people were enthusiastically signing up for membership of the Congress and League's own cadres. Various groups of volunteers cleaned the gutters of dirty cities, offered first-aid services or dug gardens, filling the vacuum in services that the skeletal colonial state was not able to offer. Others stood guard as night-watchmen, or helped control the crowds at Congress or League demonstrations. The novel Tamas, set in Punjab in the months leading up to Partition, opens with the scene of a band of Congressmen dressed in distinctive homespun cloth – some cheerfully, some rather more grudgingly – sweeping and washing the narrow lanes in a poor Muslim part of town.

  Most of the houses in the locality were small single storeyed houses, built in two parallel lines on either side of a spacious courtyard. Gunny-cloth curtains hung over the front doors of most of them. The lanes were not paved. Only one of the lanes had a kachcha drain, the other one had no drain at all. In some lanes, cattle were tied. From the houses, now and then, women emerged with earthen pitchers on their heads to fetch water. A small boy was collecting dung from under a buffalo … Mehtaji and Master Ram Das picked a tasla each and went to work in the yard. Shankar and Kashmiri Lal, armed with shovels headed for the drain, while Sher Khan, Des Raj and Bakhshiji began sweeping the courtyard with brooms. The residents of the locality watched them, puzzled.’30

  Volunteerism was an essential part of being an Indian nationalist, and had longer antecedents in Gandhian spinning and swadeshi campaigns.

  Many provincial politicians went further, rejecting conventional forms of policing, and looked to their own volunteer bodies, nationalist training groups and assorted gangs of volunteers and helpers who, they argued, were more imbued with the ‘nationalist’ spirit. The Muslim League National Guard was an integral part of the League's armoury. By March, F.K. Khan Durrani, a correspondent living in Lahore, was seeing the writing on the wall. His warnings are even more striking because he was a loyal Leaguer and friend of Jinnah. While pledging his loyalty to the ‘Muslim Nation’ he was warning that the activities of the Muslim Leaguers were getting out of hand. ‘At present one must shout with the crowd or get lynched by the crowd, and the feeling has been created that one who is not a Leaguer is worse than a kafir and should be hanged like a dog forthwith.’31 There was a great danger, he correctly foresaw, of militias going into battle against each other.

  Congress politicians similarly continued broadening their vote-banks and built up disciplined bands of followers. One of the first jobs carried out by the newly installed Congress ministry in the Central Provinces was to hire a retired army officer to recruit ‘young, well-built and able-bodied people’, to give them ‘basic military training’ and to coach them ‘in the art of self-defence’.32 ‘I want every boy and girl to become a soldier in the cause of the independence of the country. By soldier I mean a disciplined and honest worker who will serve the country and maintain the honour and prestige of the motherland,’ Nehru told a crowded audience of Congress volunteers in 1946 and, six weeks later, ‘There is no doubt that our organisation has non violence as its creed yet unless the discipline of the army and the spirit of the volunteer are blended together, we cannot have a good organisation.’33 These workers, it was claimed, were completely different and were working towards a true, peaceful unsullied version of nationalism. For some, the coming of Independence meant a total overhaul of the old administration and displacing the police – the old stooges of imperialism – with new forms of order and social control.

  There was an obvious danger here. By the spring of 1946, Gandhian nonviolence, or ahimsa, had become a weak currency among sections of the Congress Party. During the long years of non-cooperation and civil disobedience of the 1920s and 1930s, there had been numerous lapses and peaceful protests against the British had been frequently punctured by violence, such as the arson attack on a police station in Chauri Chaura in 1922. Notwithstanding this, during these earlier years the moral high ground created by ahimsa was held firmly by the Congress Party and there was a widespread belief in the efficacy of non-violence among Congressmen from the cities to the smallest towns and villages of India. By the end of the war Gandhi's ability to enforce this non-negotiable pillar of his belief, even within his own organisation, was terminally weakened. Fears of Muslim League assertiveness, uncertainty about the future and, in many cases, the sheer size of the Congress Party which embraced so many of the politically active across the country by 1947, irrespective of the nuances of their thinking, undermined the policy of non-violence.

  Gandhi's coherent ideology, which he regarded as timeless and universal, had been utilised by many in a temporal and limited way to fight British imperialism. By 1946, with freedom from the imperial masters already conceded, however, the rules of the game had changed so that Gandhian non-violence was eschewed by many as a spent force. By the spring of 1946 volunteer wings and militarised groups could charm new recruits and justify their violence on the grounds of self-defence. Their presence speaks of the lack of faith in the traditional state apparatus and the grinding down of trust in the usual ways of policing the towns. Even the epitome of Gandhian forbearance, the peaceful Red Shirts of the North West Frontier Province who had used non-violence for over two decades and swore heartfelt allegiance to peaceful means, splintered in the political tension; in defiance of the leadership a popular youth wing, the Young Pathans, or Zilme Pukhtun, renounced non-violence, and its members added ominous black stripes to the collars and cuffs of their scarlet uniforms.34 As the Congress leader in the mountainous borderland with Afghanistan, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, ruefully admitted, ‘While I was away from my frontier land for three and a half months in Bihar my people got much agitated over the violent League movement and themselves began to harbour violence in their hearts.’35 Sorrowfully, those who had faithfully followed Gandhi since the agitations of the 1920s watched the belief in non-violence that they had carefully nurtured break down.

  In the prelude to Partition, therefore, the Congress Party itself might become implicated in violent action, just like the League, even when this had not been officially sanctioned by the upper echelons of the party. Nehru, although an impeccable pluralist and desperate for peace (personally risking his own life in order to break up fighting when he witnessed it in the streets of Delhi), wavered on the issue of violence in the heightened tension of 1946; could and should the Congress organise for self-defence if the Muslim League were the aggressors? Nehru spoke out against violence and suggested that people collect together in their mohallas for protection, and trust their local police force. He gave a frank, and p
ained, assessment to one correspondent: ‘You ask me about non-violence in these circumstances. I do not know what I would do if I was there [in Calcutta, during the riots of 1946] but I imagine that I would react violently. I have no doubt whatever that violence in self-defence is preferable to cowardly non-violence.’36

  In the polarised atmosphere of 1946, the words used by numerous politicians became overtly incendiary and coasted perilously close to incitement to violence. Some now talked openly of civil war. It was widely reported that one of the foremost Congressmen, Vallabhbhai Patel, had declared, ‘Pakistan is not in the hands of the British government. If Pakistan is to be achieved the Hindus and Muslims will have to fight. There will be a civil war.’ A prominent Leaguer, Liaquat Ali Khan, echoed this inflammatory tone: ‘the Muslims are not afraid of a civil war,’ he told his listeners. Others invoked earthquakes, volcanoes, blood and fire to describe the revolution that was approaching.37

  Last push for peace

  ‘The triumvirate of Cabinet Ministers cannot realise with what hopes and misgivings their coming is awaited in this country,’ wrote the Punjabi physicist and chemist Ruchi Ram Sahni, in March 1946. Sahni was eighty-two years old at the time and approaching his last days in Lahore. He had seen India transformed since his birth in 1863 and had played his own part in this transformation by popularising science, setting up educational institutions and a library and, in his youth, giving incredibly popular scientific lectures in Punjabi to ordinary crowds of people gathered in parks, gurdwaras and in open stages, on topics from electricity to soap-making. Now, though, his mind was firmly turned to politics. ‘Attlee's own words inspire the hope that a heavy weight may soon be lifted from India's breast and that we may at last have a chance to stand erect like self-respecting men. For England no less than for other great nations of today it is a time of serious searching of the heart.’ Sahni's appeal was to three men, Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Secretary of State for India, Sir Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade and Mr A.V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, collectively known as the Cabinet Mission, or, in Wavell's words, ‘the three magi’. They had come to India to try and forge a compromise, to create a constitutional package for one united India and to plan the British handover of power.