The government had passed an ordinance that for women whose babies were born in Pakistan they would have to leave them behind, and children born in India would have to stay in India. A conference was called in Lahore to discuss this but I refused to attend it. I told Mridulaben that I would not attend because if I did, I would be constrained to say what I felt. I said to her, how can it be a mother, who has already suffered so much, is now told that she can go across but she must leave her child?
‘All I wanted to say,’ she said, ‘was that a mother should not be separated from her child.’ Although women had a choice in whether they wanted to keep the child with them, or leave him or her behind, this was hardly a real choice, and most felt forced to leave the children to the care of the camp. ‘As each woman left,’ said Kamlaben, ‘leaving her child behind, she wept, begging the camp authorities to look after the child, to keep her informed. Promises made in good faith by the authorities were often broken — once the woman had left, for them, that was the end of the story. The child’s life was another, a different story.’
Within the Constituent Assembly, a significant part of the debate on the Abducted Persons Recovery and Restoration Act was devoted to discussing the difficult question of post-abduction children. Because the Bill/Act being debated had to do with the recovery of Muslim women in India, the question here was whether or not to send their children to Pakistan with them or to keep them in India — the flip side of the question that was discussed at the Lahore conference. Sardar Hukam Singh questioned the assumption that the mother was the person most concerned with the child. ‘There may be cases,’ he said, ‘where the mother might not be willing to take that child to Pakistan and the father may be very much anxious to keep the boy or girl here.’ His own concern for them, as indeed that of many others in the Assembly, was according to him, a humanitarian one. If such children are illegitimate on this side, ‘they will be illegitimate on the other side too and I think it would be a matter of shame for the girl to take the child to that place. If such children are taken by the girls they would be murdered or done away with.’ (my italics) Thus it was, he said, from a humanitarian point of view that he was arguing. Such a view dictated that ‘these boys and girls be kept in India’. The assumption was that their ‘natural fathers’ would look after these children. Other members of the Assembly supported this claim. Had the government looked, they asked, at the provisions of the Guardianship Act that was in force in India? Under that, the father had absolute right to custody of the child.
For the government, however, the problem were of another order. Social workers faced a major problem when recovering women: they did not want to leave their children behind. So the Minister was seeking to broaden the definition of an abducted person to take in children, or ‘any male under the age of sixteen’. If children became abducted persons too, then, under the provisions of the Inter-Dominion Agreement, they too could be recovered along with their mothers. But, the Minister was asked, was this then to over-ride the law of the land, the law of guardianship which allowed custody to the father? Another member had a different suggestion: why not allow women to keep illegitimate children with them — but if the child was legitimate, the father should have ‘absolute control’. Or, said a third, why not think of these children as ‘war babies’ and put the responsibility for them on the father? The question, of course, was: where were the fathers?
Not everyone subscribed to this view of the father’s absolute claim to the child. Gopalswamy Ayyangar, minister of Transport and Railways, said: ‘I do not know about the law of guardianship. It all depends on how you treat the child, whether it is a legitimate child or an illegitimate child and with regard to a child so long as it is a baby, I think the mother should have the first preference as regards the custody, and when she cannot have the custody, her wishes must have the greatest possible consideration.’
Although the minister had his way in expanding the definition of abducted persons as he desired, not everyone in the Assembly agreed with him. Earlier, Hriday Nath Kunzru from UP had suggested that children be kept out of the definition of abducted persons. Could a man, who had abducted a woman, he asked, claim to be father of the offspring of that union? ‘It is true Sir,’ he said, ‘that the conduct of the abductor cannot be commended. He has been guilty of a highly reprehensible conduct, conduct that has put his country to shame. But let us look at the qeustion from the point of view of the abducted woman. The children to her are a sign of the humiliation to which she has been subjected for a year or two. From her point of view, the children are unwanted, and if she returns to Pakistan with these children, I think we feel almost certain that they will not be treated as members of their mother’s family. In all probability they will be sent to an orphanage.’
Others supported this stand. Pandit Thakur Das Bhargava, for example, stressed that the children should be kept back in India because ‘all those children born in India are citizens of India’. Suppose, he went on to say, that a Hindu man and a Muslim woman had married, who would be the guardian of their children? If a Muslim woman was to take a child born of a Hindu father to Pakistan, ‘the child will be considered illegitimate and is liable to be maltreated or killed’. Simply because the Ordinance stipulated that such a child should be sent to Pakistan was no reason why that should be done. Instead, if ‘the father insists that he will look after the interests of the child and will see it properly brought up,’ he said, ‘I do not understand why, by executive action, that child should be given to Pakistan.’
But all members did not speak with one voice. Shri Brajeshwar Prasad (Bihar) felt there was little point in keeping the children in India for Hindu society was different from Muslim society and these children and had no place for these children, ‘illegitimate in the eyes of the law’. Were they to remain in India, such children would remain ‘as dogs’.
Were these children, born of Muslim mothers and Hindu fathers then really citizens of India? Were the considerations which made some members of the Constituent Assembly speak out in favour of holding them back in India with their natural-but-abductor fathers, considerations of citizenship? Would the same logic have applied to children of Hindu mothers and Muslim fathers? Did citizenship, in other words, devolve through the mothers or through the fathers, through nationality or religion?
In the newly independent, coming-into its-own State, citizenship itself was a contested question, still in its formative stages and shrouded in considerable ambivalence. The State functioned, for example, as parent-protector and benevolent patriarch towards the millions of refugees who poured into the country. All welfare schemes, all compensation and rehabilitation policies, constructed the refugee as someone needing ‘help’, ‘uplift’ and ‘welfare’. Punjabi refugees in particular countered this by asserting their self-sufficiency, their independence, and their refusal to ask the State for charity. But this was as it applied to men. The woman as citizen was a different story altogether. If we go by Hriday Nath Kunzru’s logic that children born of Hindu fathers and Muslim mothers, regardless of the fact that the father was/might have been an abductor — in other words, someone who had flouted the laws of the land — were citizens of India, this would mean that Hindu and Sikh men could then assume citizenship for themselves and their children. But for Hindu and Sikh women, on the other hand, there was no such assumption. As mothers, and as citizens of secular India, being reclaimed by the mother country, they nonetheless had to make the difficult choice of whether they could take their children with them, or leave them behind. Not only did the children occupy an ambivalent space wherein they belonged to both communities, which therefore complicated the matter of their citizenship, but it would seem that the lesser space occupied by their mothers as citizens, also devolved on them.
As the recovery operation for abducted women showed, women’s identities continued to be defined in terms of their religious communities, rather than as citizens of one or other country. They were denied the right — theoretically ev
ery citizen’s right — to choose where they wished to live. In this, they had no recourse in law beyond the tribunal set up to decide disputed cases. They did not even have the right to decide what to do with their children. Clearly, citizenship was not an entirely gender neutral concept. It is in this context that the attempt to include children in the definition of abducted persons in the Abducted Persons Restoration and Recovery Act becomes important. The Act defined an abducted person as: ‘a male child under the age of sixteen years or a female of whatever age ...’ Females of any age then, could be abducted persons, but with male children the question of their being abducted ended at age sixteen, the age at which they presumably moved from being minors to majors. Could it be that those drafting the Act felt that after the age of sixteen, a young male was capable of deciding which identity he wanted to adopt, where he wanted to live and belong, and that women — no matter what age — were not similarly capable?
The fate of abducted children threw into question another much discussed and contested subject at the time of Partition: motherhood. I have talked in the previous chapter about how the representation of India as the mother, and the violation of its (her) body through the creation of Pakistan, was mirrored by the violation of the bodies, individually and collectively, of India’s women, Hindus and Sikhs who had been raped and abducted by men of the other religion. The mothers of illegitimate children had somehow forsaken their claim to legitimate motherhood. The ‘purity’ of the mother, her sanctity, and the suppression of her sexuality, were thrown in question by the presence of such children or of their (the mother’s) wish to keep them. Just as abducted women had to be brought back into the fold of their religion, their nation, community and family, so also their children had to be separated from them, rendered anonymous, so that the women could once again be reinstated as mothers, and the material proof of their liaisons made less threatening or dangerous by being taken away from the mothers. Perhaps the greatest irony of all was that it was the State that was now defining something as private as motherhood, with, of course, the tacit support of the community and the family.
In the end, of course, each case was different. Some women kept their children, others left them, while still others had no choice in the matter. While post-abduction children posed the important problem of legitimacy and illegitimacy, the children of women widowed as a result of Partition could more easily benefit from the welfare policies of the State. These children, and their mothers, became ‘permanent liabilities’ of the State. Orphanages and homes were run by the government, as well as by voluntary organizations. Financial assistance was provided to students and a special section in the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation was devoted to the rehabilitation of displaced unattached women and children. In theory, the Government of India ‘accepted the responsibility for the care and maintenance of unattached, destitute displaced women and children.’5 State governments were authorized to pay a monthly cash allowance of fifteen rupees for one woman and seven or eight rupees for each of her dependent children to those women who were physically disabled and could not be admitted into homes. Despite the many efforts to rehabilitate destitute children, however, the scale of destitution, and all its attendant problems, was a matter of concern.
In 1954, a former general of the Indian National Army, J.K. Bhonsle, who was also, at the time, deputy minister for Rehabilitation, launched a scheme. His idea was to put in place a training programme which could ‘restore the morale of displaced students and impart to them a sense of inflexible discipline joined to physical fitness and perfect allegiance to moral and spiritual values’. In a curious twist of irony, the problem of displaced children, and indeed the problems they faced, came to be seen as one of ‘indiscipline’ and the solution — if a solution could be found at all — as one of restoring ‘moral and spiritual values’. It is not clear exactly which children the scheme was addressing. But its aim was to raise the low morale of students (for indiscipline was seen mainly as a problem of morale) and to produce a ‘strong, self-reliant citizen capable of making an enduring contribution to the nation’s destiny’. In keeping with this the scheme laid stress on ‘India’s cultural heritage and traditions, on the life of our heroes and heroines, and on citizenship and patriotism ...’6
To begin with, the National Discipline Scheme was tried out with a small group of orphans and children of widows at the Kasturba Niketan School in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi. It was then extended to other refugee schools covering, eventually, more than 100,000 children, both displaced and otherwise. For the fledgling, beleagured and embattled Indian State, the problem of orphans, deserted and displaced children, or children of abducted women, could not have been an easy one to tackle. A number of relief measures, such as setting up homes and infirmaries, giving educational subsidies, etc., were put into operation. But these could only be availed of by children who were already in homes, and for whom the government took responsibility. For those who had no home, who were out on the streets, there was no such recourse. And then, relief measures addressed only the tip of the iceberg — no matter how much different schemes focussed on discipline, and morale building, these could hardly address the trauma the children had been through, and which, at the time, they could barely have articulated. Several charitable institutions joined the relief effort. These included the Save the Children Committee, the Kasturba Gandhi National Memorial Trust, the Trust for Sindhi Women and Children, the Arya Pradeshik Pratinidhi Sabha, and the Jainendra Gurukul, Panchkula. They worked in collaboration with the Central Advisory Board. We are told that ‘ameliorative work was their forte’, but there is no way of knowing whether or not they were able to ‘ameliorate’ the kinds of problems children faced.
There is much that still remains unknown. I have often wondered, for example, how many of the children left behind, abandoned, or killed were girls. Social workers said most of the children abandoned at camps were girl children, and the pressure of work made it difficult to screen potential adopters. Many young girls then ended up as domestic workers or as prostitutes, swelling the numbers of the ‘whole generation’ of young girls that the writer Krishna Sobti said had been ‘sacrificed’ to Partition. Homes and educational institutions were set up for both girls and boys: but when it came to the time to leave and make an independent life, it was the boys — young men — who were able to do that more easily than the girls or young women. Some were married off by the ashram authorities and were able to make lives of their own. But for many, Partition changed the shape of their lives.
Concern for the legitimacy or illegitimacy of children needs to be placed in the overall context of Partition: ever since divisions began to surface between the different communities, a concern for the purity of the Hindu and Sikh religions had become important, particularly in the Punjab. Here, the growing strength of the Arya Samaj and the gradual solidification of a Punjabi-Hindu consciousness were the direct result of the fear of conversion by both Muslims and Christians. Loss of the legitimate identity through conversion was, it seemed, the greatest of dangers. With Partition, one part of the body of the nation was forever lost, effectively converted. But, inside the bodies of women and children, the boundaries remained fluid. Hindu and Sikh women were in relationships — apparently forced, but often known to be voluntary — of both love and desire, with Muslim men. But, with some help from the State, they could perhaps be brought back into the Hindu fold, purified. But inside the bodies of children the blood that flowed was intimately mixed. No separation could be made here, no clear lines drawn about where these children should go. No boundaries could be set to their beings. Better, then, to forget about them altogether, perhaps even to pretend that they did not exist.
This we have done with ease. Many parents who lost their children at the time attempted to locate them. They put in applications, filed reports, sent out messages by word of mouth. Some, like Dharam Kaur from village Dhera Dhupsadi in Kurukshetra, were lucky. She lost several relatives, in the violence of Partition.
Returning to the site of the violence, Dharam Kaur found the bodies of her relatives, but not that of her daughter, Mohinder Kaur. Unknown to her, Mohinder had been picked up by a good Samaritan, a nurse called Grace, and placed in an orphanage where she lived as Anwar Sadeeqa. It was only years later, when she married, that Grace revealed the story of Sadeeqa’s past to her.
One day, while travelling in a bus with her daughter, Azmat, Sadeeqa found herself sitting next to a Sikh. As children do, the child reached out and touched him, and for some inexplicable reason, called him mamu, uncle. Sadeeqa broke down, and told the old man her story. Niranjan Singh, who had himself just found a long lost sister, promised to help. On his return to India, he learnt that Lubanwala refugees had settled in Kurukshetra, which was near his home. As the story is told:
Other Side Of Silence Page 25
