Other Side Of Silence

by Urvashi Butalia

  Anyway, he signed! And with these women then we got a cent per cent result.

  5

  ‘Honour’

  Part I

  OUR WOMEN, YOUR WOMEN

  Almost from the beginning the recovery operation was fraught with difficulty and tension. In the early stages Pakistan protested at the involvement of the Military Evacuation Organization (MEO) and suggested its duties should be confined only to guarding of transit camps (these had been set up to house abducted women who had been recovered and were awaiting being sent to their ‘home country’). The actual work of rescue, they suggested, should be given to the police. The Indian government was reluctant to do this because they claimed that in many instances the police themselves were the abductors of women — and if social workers are to be believed, there was truth in this claim. Abduction by people in positions of authority happened on both sides. In Montogomery, a tahsildar of Dipalpur, while participating enthusiastically in broadcasting appeals for information about abducted women, is said to have kept an abducted woman with him for eight months. In another instance, two assistant sub-inspectors of police went to recover an abducted woman, and themselves raped her.1

  For several years after the initial treaty was signed, the fate of abducted women was of considerable concern to the two governments. Legislative Assembly records for the years following 1947, as well as newspapers and periodicals of the time, show an ongoing concern and debate about various issues: the unequal pace of recovery in the two countries, the number of women who had been recovered, where the largest number of recoveries had taken place, why the Indian government was allowing Pakistani social workers free access to the agreed upon areas when Pakistan had arbitrarily decided to close off certain areas, why was it that fewer Hindu and Sikh women had been recovered from Pakistan and more Muslim women from India, why did the Indian government not slow down the pace of recoveries of Muslim women until more Hindu and Sikh women were found and so on.

  The Ordinance which enabled the Indian government to recover abducted Muslim women from India was due to end on December 30,1949. Fifteen days before this date the government’s representative, Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, introduced a Bill in the Assembly, the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act. The Act remained in force till 1957, after which it was not renewed. By this time, the pace of recovery had slowed down considerably — many women were untraceable and others had ‘settled’ into their new homes — although the occasional search was still carried out.

  Inside the Constituent Assembly where the provisions of the Bill were being debated, many speakers were agreed that the recovery effort was one that should have been mounted, that it was ‘humanitarian’ in its objectives. And indeed, it is true that the State could hardly have remained indifferent to the fate of its citizens: the women who had been raped and abducted, nor to the pleas of another group of citizens, their families and relatives. However, the debate in the Constituent Assembly also provided Indian political leaders the opportunity to use the question of the recovery of abducted women to pronounce on something quite different: the character of Pakistan. At the bottom of this lay the profound sense of betrayal that the creation of Pakistan had meant for many Indian political leaders who saw themselves, and India, as secular, and tolerant. Speaker after speaker in the Assembly emphasized what they saw as Pakistan’s recalcitrance in keeping to the terms of the joint agreement. Such behaviour, they said, was not what one would expect from a civilized government. It was, rather, a reflection of two things: the typical uncivilized character of Pakistan (made up, as it was, of Muslim men who had fought for a communal State and who were therefore communal by nature) and the much more humane — and civilized — approach of the Indian State. At the same time, the fact that the Indian State was unable to press Pakistan to return as many women as India was recovering was seen seen as a sign of weakness on its part, an inability to draw the other country in line. Professor Shibban Lal Saxena (UP General) said he was deeply dissatisfied at the ‘failure of our government to be able to infuse a proper spirit in the other Dominion to restore our sisters to us.’ He suggested India retaliate and do something commensurate with the gravity of the situation, not only because that was the right thing to do ‘by our sisters’ but also because India had a ‘tradition’. ‘Even now,’ he said, ‘the Ramayana and Mahabharata are revered. For the sake of one woman who was taken away by Ravana the whole nation took up arms and went to war. And here there are thousands and the way they have been treated ... Our sisters from Kashmir were actually sold in the bazars and whatnot was done to them.’2 There were other criticisms, and a suggestion that the restoration of Hindu and Sikh women abducted in Pakistan should have formed part of the Ceasefire Agreement.

  While one member even suggested ‘open war if need be’ another said:

  If there is any sore point or distressful fact to which we cannot be reconciled under any circumstances it is the question of the abduction and non-restoration of Hindu women. We all know our history of what happened in the time of Shri Rama when Sita was abducted. Here, when thousands of girls are concerned, we cannot forget this. We can forget all the properties, we can forget every other thing, but this cannot be forgotten ...As descendants of Ram, we have to bring back every Sita that is alive. (my italics)

  The feeling that Pakistan needed to be brought in line was echoed by others who felt, to use the words of Pandit Hriday Nath Kunzru, that the restoration of Muslim women to ‘their rightful home’ (i.e. Pakistan) was a ‘great moral duty’. ‘We cannot refuse to fulfil our obligations because others decline to fulfil theirs.’ He was of the view that Pakistan ought to be made to feel that it was not an act of merit but of degradation to keep unwilling persons within its own territory and to ‘compel them to give up their own religion and to embrace Islam’.

  Suggestions for retaliatory action were, however, turned down by the government’s representative. In response to Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava’s statement that he saw no reason why ‘a country is not justified in keeping these [Muslim] girls as hostages for some time’, Gopalaswamy Ayyangar, speaking for the Indian government, held that such behaviour did not behove a ‘civilized’ government. Rather it was India’s responsibility, given its modern, secular, rational outlook, to persuade the other country to behave in a manner that would be ‘consistent with its claim to be a civilized government’. He reminded his colleagues that abductions had taken place on both sides: ‘We are not the monopolists of virtue and the people in the other dominion are not the monopolists of vice — we are as guilty as they have been.’

  Like its men, the Muslims who had abducted Hindu and Sikh women, Pakistan too became tarred with the same brush. It was not civilized, it had not displayed moral standards. Renuka Ray, from West Bengal, was clear that: ‘India is not going to succumb to the ideas of Pakistan. India has her own objectives and standards and whether Pakistan comes up to them or not, it does not mean that India is to go down to the level and the lack of moral standards displayed by Pakistan.’ Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava said: ‘... so far as we are concerned, we know how to honour our moral obligations.’ The clear implication was, of course, that Pakistan did not. Among this clamour about who was moral and who not, there was the occasional voice that tried to bring the discussion round to the key actors involved in it: the women. Shrimati Ammu Swaminadhan from Madras said: ‘I am very sorry that some of the members said that there should be retaliation. I think that is a most inhuman thing to do because after all, if two Governments are not agreeing with each other, that is not the fault of these innocent girls who have been victims of cruel circumstances. We should not think in terms of retaliation at all ...’

  A second thorny problem was: what to do with women who resisted being recovered. These women presented a problem for the State: the law did not allow them to exercise the choice that, as individuals and citizens of two free countries, should have been their right. Both countries had agreed that after a certain date, neither forced conv
ersions or marriages would be recognized. What was to be done if a woman claimed the relationship she was in was voluntary? Who would sit in judgment on this? The tribunals that had been set up to decide disputed cases were made up of police officers from the two countries. Were they, people asked, competent to decide on the truth or otherwise of a woman’s claim? Faced with this difficult question, Gopalaswamy Ayyangar was not willing to admit the possibility that any such claim could be genuine. ‘Women or abducted persons are rescued from surroundings which,’ he said, ‘prima facie, do not give them the liberty to make a free choice as regards their own lives. The object of this legislation is to put them in an environment which will make them feel free to make this choice.’ But how could placing the women in a different environment — usually a camp — make them feel free to make a choice? They had little freedom to move in the new environment; they were surrounded by police and social workers; pressurized — often very subtly — to return to their families and for those who now had children from their abductors or the men they were living with, the choice was no longer merely an individual one.

  The minister’s views found support among other members, but there was also opposition. Renuka Ray (West Bengal) said that even if there was one case among a hundred in which there was a woman who did not wish to go back, the government needed to pay attention to it. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘in some cases legalized marriages do take place and we have to be very cautious to see that such women who do not wish to cancel such a marriage after so much time has elapsed are not due to our overzealousness also sent back.’ Earlier, another woman, Purnima Banerji, had cautioned the government in this respect. She pointed out that considerable time had passed since many women had been taken away. During this time they

  have lived in association with one another and have developed mutual attachment ... Such girls should not be made to go back to countries to which they originally belonged merely because they happen to be Muslims or Hindus and merely because the circumstances and conditions under which they have been removed from their original homes could be described as abduction.

  Adding his voice to the concern for the double trauma women would have to face, Shri Mahavir Tyagi said that these girls had already been the victims of violence: ‘would it not be another act of violence if they were again uprooted and taken away to the proposed camps against their wishes?’

  The minister, however, was firm. He did not wish to change this clause that denied women a choice and give them the freedom to decide. He claimed that there had been ‘hardly any case where, after these women were put in touch with their original fathers, mothers, brothers or husbands, any one of them has said she wanted to go back to her abductor — a very natural state of feeling in the mind of a person who was, by exercise of coercion, abducted in the first place and put into a wrong environment.’ He insisted that he had not come across a single case ‘of an adult abducted woman who had been recovered and who was pushed into Pakistan against her will,’ although he did admit that when the woman was ‘first taken into custody her wishes are not taken into account. The idea is that in the environment that she is in at that moment, she is not a free agent, she has not got the liberty of mind to say whether she wants to leave that environment and go back to her original environment or whether she should stay here.’

  If the resistance of women to being recovered was a problem to deal with, so was the much more difficult question of what to do with their children. Curiously, many members who had held that abduction was a shameful and immoral act, were quite willing to have women leave their children behind with their abductors. ‘You must realise,’ said Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava, ‘that all those children born in India are citizens of India. Supposing a Hindu man and a Muslim woman have married. Who should be the guardian of the offspring?’ When a Muslim woman is restored, he said, she would go to Pakistan. Once there, she might change the religion of the child. But the child would continue to be treated as illegitimate and would be ‘maltreated and perhaps killed’. Between father and mother, he asked, who is entitled to guardianship? The question of children was perhaps the most vexed one in this discussion — deeply emotional, it was sought to be decided ‘objectively’, ‘practically’ and ‘unemotionally’ — but while Assembly members may have been able to be unemotional, the mothers could clearly not. Kamlaben Patel pointed to the difficulty of this problem: in Hindu society, she said, a child born of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother would not be acceptable, and if the relatives of the recovered women did not accept their children, the government would then be faced with the problem of large numbers of destitute, unwanted children. This was perhaps the rationale behind the suggestion that children be left with their ‘natural fathers’. I shall come back to the question of children later.

  The Assembly was not the only place where the fate of women was discussed. A similar, and different, discussion on the fate of abducted women took place in the pages of newspapers and journals at the time. The Organiser, the mouthpiece of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) took on the issue with gusto. On December 29, 1949 the front page of the Organiser carried a story entitled ‘Pakistan the Sinner: 25,000 Abducted, Thousands Sold.’ The story ran as follows: ‘For the honour of Sita, Sri Rama warred against and destroyed Ravana, when filthy Khilji beseiged Chitoor its thousands of women headed by Rani Padmini all clad in gerua [saffron] saris, mounted the funeral pyre smiling, ere the mleccha [impure] could pollute a drop of the noble Hindu blood. Today, when tens of hundreds of Hindu women are spending sorrowful days and unthinkable nights in Pakistan, the first free government of the Union of Indian Sovereign Democratic Republic has nothing but a whimper for them.’

  This article and its subsequent accusation that Pakistan actually deserved the epithet ‘Napakistan’ (impure) was typical of the kind of thing the Organiser voiced regularly in the years following on Partition. The rape and abduction of Hindu and Sikh women by Muslim men formed the backdrop against which accusations were levelled at Pakistan for being barbaric, uncivilized, lustful. The very formation of the nation of Pakistan out of the territory of Bharat (or, the body of Bharatmata) became a metaphor for the violation of the body of the pure Hindu woman. The Indian State was regularly assailed for its failure to protect its women and to respond to Pakistan, the aggressor State, in the language that it deserved. More than ever, the need of the hour for Hindus was to build up ‘a strong and virile state backed by a powerful army’, because, as one Chaman Lal, author of a book entitled Hindu America put it, ‘we have become such extreme pacificsts that despite receiving kicks ... we continue to appeal to the invaders in the name of truth and justice.’ If the invader was to be responded to in kind, what was required for the removal of this grave ‘national’ weakness was the ‘Kshatriyaisation’3 of the Hindu race.

  For many writers in the Organiser the rape and abduction of women was a shameful, but predictable, event for what else could be expected of Pakistan, a nation ‘built on the predatory desire for Hindu property and Hindu women [which] took practically no steps to checkmate the lust and avarice of its champions.’4 There was, however, another reality. Muslim women had also been abducted by Hindu and Sikh men. How could this be explained? In the debates in the Constituent Assembly this was seen as an ‘aberration’, these men had clearly fallen victim to ‘evil passions’. The Organiser wasn’t quite prepared to admit that Hindu and Sikh men had been guilty of abductions. Rather, they had ‘sheltered’ Muslim women. In an article entitled ‘During the War of 1947’ the writer claimed:

  During the Hindu Moslem War in the Punjab in the summer of 1947, passions ran high. Lakhs of people were slaughtered on both sides. But the war — the worse than war, abduction — on women, a notorious and age old practice of Muslims (my italics) made the Nation writhe in pain and anguish. Thousands of Muslim women, widowed and abandoned, were left in Hindu majority areas also. But as soon as recovery work started, most of them, till then sheltered by the Hindus, were handed over to the au
thorities. Hardly any Muslim women remain in Bharat against their wishes. It is significant to note that some of them were abducted by Muslims themselves. (my italics)5

  Hindu men thus, while occasionally falling victim to evil passions, were seen by and large as being harmless, even weak, and certainly not lustful. ‘The Hindu mind,’ readers were told, ‘is broad enough to do justice to others but not bold enough to demand justice.’6 This is because India has a great tradition, a magnanimous culture that has ensured that:

  throughout the ages and even at the pinnacle of her armed might, when she could easily have swept the continent she never assumed the tyrant’s role. While other people take pride in savage campaigns launched by their ancestors for enslavement, exploitation and forcible proselytization of their brother human beings, India, pregnant with the wisdom of her illustrious seers, and true to her hoary culture, remembers only the key days of her glory when the impact of her glorious civilization was felt far and wide.7

  This ancient tradition then was what made the Hindu male tolerant and civilized, such that, even having (mistakenly?) abducted Muslim women, he was willing and ready to hand them over to the State or the authorities, the moment the call is given. It is also this tolerance — hitherto important — which has, in the moment of crisis, rendered the Hindu male incapable of protecting his women. This is why then, the call to arms, to fight and retaliate in the language of the Muslim State.