One of the most drastic steps taken by the Sindh government, which came as a big blow to the Hindus, was regarding empty or near-empty houses in Karachi. The combination of the overnight steep climb in demand for housing in the city and the desire of Hindus to liquidate their assets and migrate to India had resulted in the sale of houses in Karachi at exorbitant prices to incoming muhajirs. As mentioned before, many Hindu families had moved temporarily to India, leaving behind a senior male member – often the father or eldest son – to safeguard the family’s assets. In early November 1947, the Sindh government announced that empty and near-empty houses would be requisitioned by the government within a fortnight if the owners did not bring their families back to occupy them. If the families did not return, the remaining members would be ejected from their home, and the residence would then be taken over. According to Vazira Zamindar, Pir Ilahi Baksh, the minister for rehabilitation, had called on the representatives of various Hindu cooperative housing societies to give the government ‘four or five bungalows from each society by making “certain adjustments” such as “voluntarily housing two families in one house.”’10 Sales of houses had to now receive government permission. This was, in other words, a new form of forcible occupation of Hindu property, this time by the Sindh government, now disguised as a measure for ‘public’ welfare.11
However, it should also be remembered that many senior Muslim officials in the Sindh government had Hindu friends. Although the Sindh government officially discouraged migration, these senior officials were privately advising their Hindu friends to leave, even warning them unofficially that their houses were due to be requisitioned. According to Parsram V. Tahilramani, MLA and secretary of the Sind Assembly Congress Party:
It is a known fact in Karachi […] that some of the most responsible members of the Sind Government, not excluding some of the top-most Ministers, have, in private been advising their Hindu friends that it would be in the interests of their safety and honour that they would quit Sind rather than stay on, relying on the Government, who very likely may prove unequal to the task of controlling the threatening tide of surging mob passions.12
Plagued by incessant requests from various muhajir officials in the Pakistan government for first claim on vacant houses in Karachi, Khuhro’s government made it clear that they alone would not have priority; precedence would be given to requests for housing facilities and sites for factories and offices from businessmen and industrialists who offered to reconstruct the economic life of the province. The situation had worsened in November 1947 when, according to the Free Press Journal, the money market had become extremely tight, the cloth trade had become paralysed, and excise revenue had nosedived. Given the Sindhi Hindus’ penchant for liquor, the alcohol trade had undergone a ‘disastrous slump’, with cases of imported liquor lying unopened in Karachi.13
The Sindh government also reduced the amount of weekly rationed foodgrains and proposed to increase taxation in the next budget. Another step that it took was to provide insurance against ‘riots and civil commotion’ for the cotton crop, the principal cash crop in Sindh. Where Hindu landowners moved – from the hinterland to either cities in Sindh or India – their agricultural land was left fallow. Now the Sindh government construed the shortfall in harvest in 1947 as a deliberate move on the part of Hindu landowners to ‘diminish the yield of crops of Pakistan’.14 The Hindus were warned that if their rabi cultivation would fall seriously short of the previous year’s harvest, their lands would be taken over.
Dalits in Sindh
According to some estimates, there were about 2,00,000 Dalits living in Sindh at the time of Partition.15 Many of these Dalits were from Kathiawar in Gujarat or present-day Rajasthan, while others were from present-day Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh. Although they were also Hindu, their language, region of origin, occupation, caste and class meant that they and the mainstream Sindhi Hindus did not identify with each other. These Dalits lived in their own colonies in Karachi and other cities in Sindh, and were mainly employed as sweepers and cleaners in public areas such schools, hospitals and other institutions, as well as in private homes in towns where there was no drainage system for sewage.
When Partition was announced, Jogendranath Mandal (then a prominent Dalit leader from Bengal and a member of the constituent assembly) had been strongly in favour of the creation of Pakistan, optimistic that Dalits would receive better treatment from Muslims in Pakistan than from caste Hindus in India.16 However, after the creation of Pakistan and the rise of communal passions and discrimination, many Dalits living in Sindh now wanted to return to their home provinces.
Gandhi had been especially concerned about the ‘Harijans’ in Sindh. When he had visited Jacobabad in 1929, he had found that separate meetings had been organised for him to meet the local ‘Sanatani Hindus’ and the local Dalits. He promptly decided to boycott the Hindu meeting, and chose to visit only the Dalits. When he visited Karachi in 1934, he publicly censured – on more than one occasion – the poor quality of housing that the city had provided its sweepers and cleaners. Reports of the difficulties faced by Dalits in the months after Partition percolated back to Gandhi. He then sent letters to Shanti Kumar Morarjee and Shoorji Vallabhdas, both owners of shipping companies, enlisting their help in sending steamers to Karachi to bring the Dalits in Sindh to India, free of charge.17 According to the writer Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan, the Harijan Sevak Sangh18 chartered four ships of the Bombay Steam Navigation Company to evacuate only Dalits from Karachi.19
However, once Dalits began to migrate, their departure left a serious vacuum. In Sukkur city, for example, members of the Rashtra Seva Dal20 and Muslim National Guards were obliged to sweep the city. The Sind Public Safety Ordinance, which had been enforced on 4 October, had merely given the government powers to prevent (if it wished) persons from leaving essential services, which included government service, public utility concerns, municipal services, railways and port trust services. Now, faced with this civic crisis, the Sindh government amended the Sind Public Safety Ordinance to clearly prohibit washermen and sweepers – primarily Dalits – departing from Sindh without the written permission of the district magistrate. Balasubrahmanyan also tells us that the Sindh government posted police around Dalit colonies to prevent them from leaving. Dalits were asked to wear a badge around their arms, indicating their identity. Even Dalits who were not cleaners were made to do the work of cleaners, which they resented.
Gandhi’s speeches in late 1947 reflect his ongoing concern for the Dalits in Sindh, and his severe criticism of the Sindh government’s stand. When a doctor wrote to Gandhi about the hardships Dalits faced, he was arrested, along with other social workers working for Dalits in Sindh. There was great fear among caste Hindus that these Dalits would all be converted to Islam. Prominent Dalit leaders such as B. R. Ambedkar and Jagjivan Ram, also publicly stated that Dalits in Pakistan should be allowed to migrate to India.21
Despite the Sindh government’s ban, the Sindh Congress made efforts to evacuate Dalits from Sindh. Jivanlal Jairamdas Kewalramani was then a 28-year-old Congress worker, who was the manager of the Gandhi Khidmat Ghar at Ratodero. In October 1947, Jivanlal Jairamdas dropped off his family at Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, and returned to Sindh, at Gandhi’s behest, to help evacuate Dalits, other backward castes such as Bhils and Kolis, and poor Hindu farmers, with the help of Muslim camel herders. In the cities, Harijan Sevak Sangh workers disguised some Dalits as Marwaris by placing large turbans on their heads. Yet, it was estimated that only about 10,000 Dalits were able to migrate from Sindh.22
In response, the Sindh government began a crackdown on Congress workers. When a warrant was issued for the arrest of Jivanlal Jairamdas, he fled Sindh in disguise, sailing from Karachi to the port of Okha in Saurashtra and then made his way to Ahmedabad. One of his colleagues, Tillo Jethmalani, also recalls that the collector in Larkana objected to the Congress helping Dalits migrate. The collector warned Jethmalani that if he did not stop, he w
ould be arrested. Jethmalani, too, left Larkana surreptitiously, helped by a Muslim friend from his schooldays.23
In December 1947, the Indian government lodged a protest with the Sindh government, through the Indian High Commission in Pakistan; this was met with a denial that there was a ban on the evacuation of Dalits to India.
Yet not all Dalits were keen to migrate to Hindu-majority India, where they were likely to face the stigma of untouchability. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan quotes one of her respondents, Punjabhai Valodra, who then worked as a sweeper in a school run on Gandhian principles. A resident of Karachi, he had visited Kutch and Saurashtra in 1942, where he had experienced a far greater level of stigmatisation than in Sindh.
We had heard that Partition was going to come, but none of us was worried. My employer Mansukhram said: ‘Punja, you come along with me, you and your family. I will look after everything.’ But I refused. I told him I was happy in Karachi and I did not want to move. What was there for me in India? There was no house or land in the village. Here I had a secure job, a place to live. Muslims would not take our jobs away, we knew. Who would want a sweeper’s job? Who would like to clean the streets and wash toilets? I knew we would not lose our jobs. We stayed. […] The Sindhi Hindus were Banias, they had shops and land, money and goods. They were afraid of being looted and murdered. Muslims occupied their houses and looted their shops. But who would loot us? What did we have for anyone to loot? And who would murder a Harijan? We were not afraid of conversion either. Who would try to convert us? Muslims did not do sweepers’ jobs. I was not worried at all. And nothing changed for us.24
Punjabhai Valodra chose to stay on in Pakistan, for the time being. Other Dalits, especially those living in rural areas in Tharparkar, wanted to migrate only if they could bring their cattle with them, and if they were allotted farms in India.
The truth is, Dalits did have cause for fear: Even though they were not forcibly converted or looted, a newspaper article at the end of March 1948 mentions the molestation of Dalit women by muhajirs as being the cause of an exodus of Dalits from Pakistan. (Evidently, by this stage, they were allowed to migrate freely.)25 The beleaguered Karachi Municipal Corporation, faced with a shortage of sweepers, was then considering ‘importing’ 10,000 Muslim sweepers from Bihar.
Many Dalits who migrated (whether at the time of Partition or subsequently) faced humiliation and discrimination at the hands of caste Hindus in India after Partition. In some cases, they were taken by separate ships or trains. Tillo Jethmalani, who was subsequently posted as camp commandant at Marwar Junction, recalls how one goods train filled with Dalit refugees from Sindh arrived in the middle of a Rajasthani winter night, with Dalits lying freezing and semi-conscious inside the goods wagons.26 Even in refugee camps in India, Dalits were given separate living quarters and dining areas, thus maintaining the status quo of ghettoisation. In the camp at Pimpri, near Poona, Maharashtrian Dalit refugees who had migrated from Sindh were employed as servants in the living quarters of the Sindhi refugees inhabiting the same camp.27
In 1948, the Government of India set up the Displaced Harijan Rehabilitation Board, to resettle those Dalits who had migrated from Pakistan, then estimated at about 10,00,000.28 This organisation, overseen by Rameshwari Nehru, was headquartered at the Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, where Jivanlal Jairamdas was appointed zonal organiser. Together with the Dalit activist and leader, Thakkar Bapa, Jivanlal Jairamdas worked to rehabilitate Dalits from Sindh in Ahmedabad. They helped resettle hundreds of Harijan families by constructing the Thakkar Bapa Colony, where Dalits lived along with caste Hindus from Sindh, and also founded the Thakkar Bapa High School.
Meanwhile, many Dalits continued to stay on in Pakistan, and still work there as sweepers and cleaners.
Suspicions of Sabotage
On the heels of the Shikarpur Colony bomb explosion and the anti-Muslim violence in Delhi, with anti-Hindu sentiment rising sharply in Karachi, Khuhro made a highly provocative speech on 13 September. He denounced the violence committed against Muslims in independent India, as well as the poor treatment given to emigrating Muslim refugees by the Indian government. He attributed the absence of violence in Sindh to the ‘Sind Muslims [who] had controlled themselves admirably in spite of grave provocations’. He claimed that the Nawabshah Sikhs, who had departed from Sindh under the protection of the Sindh government, had gone to India and killed Muslims there.29 Only the day prior to the speech (12 September 1947) there had been press reports of emigrating Hindus and Sikhs, who had been ‘smuggling on a large scale’ – bribing customs officials in order to carry large quantities of unauthorised foodgrains, cloth and possibly fire-arms and ammunition with them. Khuhro went on to denounce these Hindus and Sikhs who were leaving Sindh ‘in droves’ and threatened to enact a law which would only allow them to take the clothes they were wearing. (It was at this point that several British officials who had continued with the Sindh government after Independence took great exception to the state’s attitude to minorities, and resigned en masse.30)
There were many factors which contributed towards the hardened stance of Khuhro and his government vis-à-vis the Hindus. For one, a high degree of communal ill-will cut across communities, whether Hindus, Sikhs or Muslims, in those days. As Gyanendra Pandey points out, the birth of India and Pakistan had resulted in the collapse of religious affiliation into national affiliation.31 Hindus and Sikhs were perceived as Indians, regardless of where they came from, just as Muslims were perceived as Pakistanis. Numerous Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, even if they did not perpetrate any violence, had no sympathy for or trust in the ‘other’ community. Many also harboured schadenfreude, on hearing of violence or discrimination against the ‘other’ community, and believed that the ‘other’ had got their just deserts or deserved to be taught a lesson.
Moreover, the Shikarpur Colony bomb explosion had put not only the RSS but the entire Hindu community in Sindh under a cloud of suspicion. Further, in recent years, there had been much opposition to the creation of Pakistan among Congress, Akali and Hindu Mahasabha members. There had been enough instances where Hindus and Sikhs had taunted Muslim Leaguers that Pakistan would fail, or that they would never allow Pakistan to happen. This was, in Khuhro’s words, ‘a combination of sinister, malignant and pitiless forces which are trying to strangle this infant state of Pakistan even before it has had time to stand upon its feet.’32 In the early weeks after Independence, there was also talk of a possible reunion of the two dominions. As a result, there was a deep suspicion in the minds of many Pakistanis that Indians – and Hindus – wanted to destabilise Pakistan. As the senior journalist, Kuldip Nayar points out:
Whoever was to blame – or, rather, more to blame – the few weeks of madness on both sides of the border embittered relations between the two countries for the generations to come. They differed on every subject, at every step. Fear and mistrust of each other made even trivial matters major issues. So bitter was the relationship at that time that I heard Jinnah was thinking of breaking off diplomatic relations with India. He genuinely believed that India wanted to destroy his country – a fear that torments Pakistan even today. […]
In fact, from the very day the two countries came into being, recriminations began piling up. Pakistan particularly blamed India for not letting it establish itself. When the dislocation of train services owing to riots hampered the dispatch of government records from Delhi to Karachi, Pakistan saw in it an Indian plot to scuttle the new country’s administration. […] New Delhi had not sent all the equipment and stores pledged at one time. Even Field Marshal Auchinleck, who continued in overall command of the armies of both Dominions, accused India of having designs to ‘prevent Pakistan receiving her just share or indeed anything of arsenals and depots in India’, and hailed Pakistan’s attitude as ‘reasonable and cooperative’.33
Mass migrations in other parts of the subcontinent were then considered to be primarily due to the terrible communal violence that had occurred there. Cons
idering that Sindh had been relatively peaceful, Khuhro found the departure of Sindhi Hindus from Sindh ‘unwarranted and part of a sinister plan.’34
Even though Hindus and Sikhs were a minority in West Pakistan, they had a substantial share in the economy. There had been strong rumours in Western Punjab, such as:
…extremist Hindu circles entertained the notion that they could ruin Pakistan by depriving it ab initio of all the banking and commercial facilities and expertise which the Hindu community had hitherto provided.35
The Times of India reported in May 1947 that the Hindu capital flight from the Punjab was estimated at Rs 250 crores. ‘After us the deluge,’ said a banking magnate, and added: ‘We are leaving Pakistan an economic desert.’36
It was this climate of suspicion, against a backdrop of communal ill-will all over the subcontinent, that soured and hardened the Sindh government’s stance towards the Sindhi Hindus, all the while professing security and equality. In this respect, Sindhi Hindus shared many parallels with Muslims in India, who also found themselves looked at with suspicion, and discriminated against, by both the Indian government and the Indian public, in many ways after Partition.
Minorities as Hostages
Permitting and practising discrimination against Hindus in many spheres of life, the Sindh government had taken only limited steps to dissipate the general atmosphere of communal antipathy. As mentioned earlier, various leaders and senior government officials – both at the provincial and the national level – attended public meetings and gave speeches assuring Hindus of safety, protection and equal rights, and also speeches to muhajirs and other Muslims, urging them to desist from violence. These speeches had failed to inspire confidence in any considerable measure among the Hindus, who instead had become alarmed by the contradictory approach of the state.
Apart from wanting to prop up Sindh’s economy, there was another reason behind the attempts of the Sindh government to reassure and retain Hindus in Sindh. According to Hamida Khuhro, Jinnah had instructed M. A. Khuhro that he specifically wanted the Hindus of Sindh to stay on in Pakistan because he saw their presence and their security as the only guarantee for the security of Muslims in India: effectively a mutual hostage situation. Moreover, Jinnah wanted to prove to the world that Pakistan could be generous to minorities, and that minorities could be safe there, unlike in India, where communal trouble continued to flare up in several areas. Hence, Jinnah, who ‘emphasised this point repeatedly’,37 directed Khuhro to reassure the Hindus of their safety and to take whatever steps were required to ensure that they did not migrate en masse from Sindh, the only province in West Pakistan where there was a considerable Hindu population left.
THE MAKING OF EXILE: SINDHI HINDUS AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA Page 15
