Midnight's Descendants

by John Keay

  Discouraging migration did not, of course, prevent it. In 1947 the new border had yet to be marked, and was impossible to police since it wandered across existing roads and railways as capriciously as the annual floods. Wags quipped that Radcliffe could not have been sober when he wielded his red marker. Until new roads and rail tracks could be laid, India’s West Bengal was cut in two, and its north-eastern extremity in Assam (and beyond) was little better than an enclave, reachable only by air or by obtaining authorisation to cross Pakistani territory. Such authorisation was not impossible to obtain, and refugee trains continued to operate between Dhaka and Calcutta until 1965. Calcutta’s Sealdah station turned into a vast dormitory for displaced persons; public spaces throughout the city, and even private gardens, were similarly commandeered. Yet to many Bengalis this may not have been entirely alarming. Refugees often considered their displacement temporary, and expected to return to the homes and lands they had left behind as soon as circumstances permitted. At the time it seemed quite inconceivable that the economic, cultural and social links that bound the commercial and manufacturing centre of Calcutta to its productive eastern hinterland could simply be severed by constitutional diktat.

  Hence, instead of the fraught and one-off mass migrations typical of the Punjab, in Bengal in 1947 ‘there was no immediate interchange of population, nor even panic’. In fact in India’s West Bengal ‘it was not till December 1949 that it became obvious that an influx of refugees from East Pakistan had started’.28 Thereafter the millions of comings and goings, sometimes by the same people, would extend over a period of years and eventually decades. How many crossed or recrossed, whether permanently or temporarily and whether coerced or voluntarily, it is impossible to say. In India such ‘refugees’ were quickly downgraded as ‘evacuees’ or ‘optees’. They might thereby be entitled to some minimal relief but they were not, as in the Punjab, afforded compensation in the form of land grants or rehabilitation expenses; such favourable treatment might have acted as an incentive and increased the flow. As a result, many incomers went unrecorded and the surviving tallies are far from complete.

  Yet they kept on coming. A million or so Muslims crossed out of West Bengal and Assam to East Bengal in the first five years, many being originally from Bihar, from where they had earlier fled to Calcutta during the 1946–47 massacre in their homeland. It was thus their second such migration, though by no means their last; in the case of these Muslim Biharis the nightmare of dispossession would continue on down the generations. In the same period anything from four to ten million Hindus from East Bengal crossed into the Indian states of West Bengal, Assam and Tripura. The largest of these migrations took place in the 1950s and ’60s, prompted by the persecution of Hindus in East Bengal (early 1950s) and Muslim outrage over events in Kashmir (1963–65). Later disturbances, like the birth pangs of Bangladesh in 1971, that country’s first military coup in 1975, and the communal disturbances in India after the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque, would precipitate still other dramatic exoduses.

  The introduction of frontier formalities to some extent regulated this ebb and flow. Passports became mandatory in 1952, immigration certificates in 1956 and visas after 1965. Yet such obstacles also served to divert the tide of migrants away from the regulated crossing points to the 2,700 kilometres of poorly patrolled frontier in between. The real number of migrants thus became more incalculable than ever. Pocked with enclaves and punctured by waterways, the border in the east remained decidedly ‘soft’ and, in the eyes of many, only quasi-legitimate. As late as 1950 no less a figure than ex-Chief Minister Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy saw nothing odd about attending Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly in Karachi while continuing to make his main place of residence in India’s West Bengal, in fact in a salubrious part of Calcutta. Similarly Nurul Amin, the then Chief Minister of East Bengal, continued to rely on his old physician in West Bengal for medicine. The latter was none other than Dr B.C. Roy, the Congress Chief Minister of West Bengal; ‘and would you believe it, when Nurul Amin’s gout was very bad, he came to Calcutta just for an hour by plane for a consultation’, reported an East Bengali informant. ‘Despite the riots [of 1950], the two are still good friends.’29

  If ‘Partition is both ever-present in South Asia’s public, political terrain and continually evaded,’ this may in part be because, in the east as in Kashmir, it is still being enacted.30 Indeed in Bengal a degree of population movement appears to be endemic. Once somewhat unfairly described as ‘a rural slum’, East Bengal in 1947 had no industrial base; even its cash crop of jute was dependent on West Bengal’s processing mills. Its population stood at around forty-two million, of whom about eleven million (i.e. 26 per cent) were Hindus, mostly lower-caste agriculturalists and artisans but with an influential landowning and commercial elite. On the other hand, across the border, India’s West Bengal, along with Assam, had just six million Muslims, about 16 per cent of their total population, most of these being landless labourers or urban poor. Additionally, West Bengal embraced Calcutta, India’s largest industrial and commercial centre, while the tea plantations in the Darjeeling hills and Assam afforded a further source of employment. In Bengal as a whole, therefore, the post-1947 movement of peoples was overwhelmingly one-way, from east to west, Pakistan to India; and although triggered by sectarian killings or the fear of such violence, it was often lubricated by more practical considerations such as economic advancement, employment opportunities, educational advantage or marital ties.

  This was nothing new. The east–west flow, the rural–urban drift, and the quest for improved livelihoods may be rated permanent features of the Bengali economy. As a result of the 1943 famine, Calcutta already hosted a large refugee population before Partition. Floods and agrarian distress in East Bengal/Bangladesh would replenish the resettlement camps of both Calcutta and Dhaka with depressing regularity. Distinguishing between political refugees and economic migrants is here problematic.

  How to cope with the influx of often destitute and traumatised millions taxed both successor governments, so detracting from their ability to conduct the business of administration. In the Punjab, on both sides of the border, the problem had been somewhat eased by the availability of land. Since most migrants were agriculturalists, landholdings vacated by uprooted Punjabi emigrants were hastily re-allocated to grateful Punjabi immigrants. This ensured continuity of food production and warded off famine. It also created tenacious settler communities whose intransigent attitudes towards their former country of residence would bedevil future Indo–Pak relations and be compared to those of Israeli settlers on the West Bank. But in West Bengal it was different. There was almost no available land. The smallest of the new India’s provinces, West Bengal was also much the most densely populated and had the highest rate of unemployment. Prospects for the incoming flood of refugees were grim.

  In the immediate aftermath of Partition it was Delhi that had been convulsed by the levels of violence and displacement expected of Calcutta. Refugees from Lahore and other cities in West Pakistan, many of them Sikhs, poured into the capital, there to spread horrific tales of the violence they had either suffered or witnessed at the hands of Muslims in what was now Pakistan. Naturally this excited hostility towards the city’s large Muslim community and brought calls for revenge. The patriotic crowds that had hailed Independence on 15 August were baying for blood by the end of the month. Muslims, regardless of whether they supported Pakistan or had any intention of moving there, found themselves liable to be massacred in the streets; their homes were appropriated, their womenfolk molested, their businesses plundered and torched.

  As the mayhem extended from Old Delhi to New, some 60,000 Muslims sought refuge behind the high walls of the Purana Qila, a craggy ‘old fort’ that supposedly complemented Rashtrapati Bhawan at the opposite extremity of Rajpath; others encamped round the Taj-like tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun or barricaded themselves in quarries on the ridge to the north-west of the city. Until mid-Septemb
er ‘the Indian government regarded these camps as the responsibility of the Pakistan High Commissioner’. He, however, was ‘hardly in a position to move out of his house’, noted the relief worker Richard Symonds. In ‘places that could not properly be called camps but rather areas in which humanity was dumped’ eminent families squatted side by side with once-prosperous shopkeepers from Old Delhi and never-rich Meos from nearby villages like Gurgaon.31 There was no sanitation, few tents, little food and only a skeleton guard to man the gates.

  You might meet anyone from a nawab to a professor. Rich men offered thousands of rupees if we could hire them an aeroplane to Karachi. It seemed possible to buy anything from a taxi to a hawker’s box of matches.32

  Taxis did change hands. As of September 1947 beturbanned Sikhs replaced henna-ed Muslims at the wheel of most of the capital’s public conveyances. The burning, looting and lynching lasted the best part of a month; and as with the next pogrom to overtake the capital – that of 1984, in which Sikhs would be the target – some officials were accused of connivance and numerous political hotheads of incitement. On both occasions, adequate troops failed to materialise, with the peacekeeping burden in 1947 being assumed by a variety of volunteer organisations.

  On one occasion Nehru himself joined the volunteers. Leaping from his official car, he laid into a Hindu trundling a handcart piled high with stolen goods. He demanded that they be returned. The man refused, whereupon the Prime Minister seized him by the throat and shook him. The offender did not strike back. ‘If I must die, it is an honour to do so at your hands,’ he croaked. Nehru then relented.33

  *

  In the camp at Humayun’s Tomb, which backs onto railway tracks, Taya Zinkin, a young volunteer and later a reporter, welcomed the news that some of the refugees were to be moved out by train to Pakistan. They, however, refused to budge without a military escort and an assurance that she would personally hold herself responsible for their safety. Both safeguards were forthcoming, and ‘7,500 men, women and children piled into the train, onto it, under it and in between it’.

  It was an incredible sight. They were riding to safety and a new life. In the setting sun they waved at me from the roofs, the windows, the footboards. I stood on the platform waving back … My train was the biggest train to Pakistan. For a long time it would be the last. It was ambushed in Patiala by the Sikhs. The military escort did its duty to the last man; not one survived; they were Gurkhas. Five hundred refugees reached Lahore safely but as the train pulled up in the Lahore station there were 3,000 dead and 4,000 so severely wounded as to be left for dead.

  By the time calm had been restored in Delhi, the city could no longer be described as having India’s largest urban concentration of Muslims. Not all were evacuated to Pakistan, but the incoming tide of Hindus and Sikhs so swamped their numbers as to transform the city’s demography and geography and launch its population’s inexorable growth from around a million in 1950 to nearly twenty million by the century’s end. The same tragic scenes and the same dramatic growth were witnessed in Lahore, which became a wholly Muslim city when its sizeable Hindu-Sikh population virtually disappeared overnight. Other cities on both sides of the new border were similarly affected. Karachi, though comparatively calm, lost its large Hindu mercantile community to Bombay. In their stead, it absorbed the bulk of those Muslims from cities in central and northern India (principally Lucknow, Allahabad, Bhopal, etc.) who had opted for Pakistan. Mostly Urdu-speakers and once prime movers in the demand for a Muslim homeland, these muhajirs (a term cognate with haj/hijra that sanctified their ‘flight’ from India by associating it with that of the Prophet from Mecca) would jealously retain their identity in their promised land and contribute a clamorous new element to Pakistan’s ethnic mix. As muhajirs competed with Sindhis, Pathans and Balochis for jobs and housing in what was Pakistan’s commercial as well as its administrative capital, Karachi underwent a transformation into Pakistan’s Calcutta.

  Even places in the extreme south of the subcontinent were affected when the Indian government in Delhi urged constituent provinces/states, like Madras, to take such refugees as they could handle. But the response was not always favourable, mainly because it was unclear whether the control and expense of relief and rehabilitation should be borne by the states affected or by the central government. Friction and delays resulted. Nor were the refugees themselves always keen on resettlement in distant lands. The rains there might fall at the wrong time of year, the crops might be new to them and the language unknown to them. Just as Punjabis preferred to be accommodated in the Punjab, Bengalis expressed a preference for staying in Bengal.

  This was bad news for Calcutta. As East Bengali refugees poured into the city after 1948, the numbers living on the streets or sleeping on the railway platforms could be counted in the hundreds of thousands, and those corralled into shanty towns and squatter camps in the millions. The camps spread to the west bank of the river Hooghly and to all the city’s surrounding districts: ‘what was once a rural hinterland was transformed in less than two decades into a huge urban sprawl’.34 By the 1990s it was estimated that there were 2,000 bustees, or shanty slums, on the east bank of the river and a further 1,500 on the west bank. Three million people lived in them, representing 49 per cent of the city’s total population; and of these, 87 per cent were classed as immigrants, mostly from East Bengal.

  Amongst the immigrants themselves there was a sense that they were in Calcutta as of right. Mostly Hindus and all Bengali-speakers, they felt safe among other Hindu Bengalis and, though now in India, were consoled to be still in their native Bengal. Conditions might be appalling but they were reluctant to embrace onward resettlement in some totally alien corner of the subcontinent. A few lucky thousands were squeezed into vacant lands either within West Bengal itself or in neighbouring Bihar. And some of the urban colonies actually prospered as employment initiatives blossomed and the tents gave way to mud and thatch, then clapboard, corrugated iron and a semblance of permanence. For most, though, a sheet offered the only shelter and minimal government relief the only sustenance. Laid out like sardines on roadsides and railway platforms, they blocked the thoroughfares and fouled the amenities. Cholera became rife. The city was choking to death on a surfeit of people.

  To address the situation, an ambitious scheme was launched in the late 1950s. A substantial part of West Bengal’s East Bengali intake was to be resettled five hundred kilometres away in sparsely populated forest uplands along the borders of Orissa and what is now Chattisgarh. The 200,000 square kilometres allocated for this exercise in pioneering was known as Dandakaranya, a term that translates as either ‘the forest of Dandak’ or ‘the forest of punishment’. Trees and scrub were cleared, plots laid out, loans offered, wells dug, roads cut, and by 1973 some 25,000 families had removed there. But they had often done so reluctantly, and already they were drifting back to Bengal. By 1979 nearly half had left. To riverine rice-farmers, getting crops to grow in the thin and moisture-unretentive soil was worse than punishment; dams had failed to materialise, crop yields were dismal, there was no alternative employment and the indigenous tribal people deeply resented the newcomers. The settlers, in short, were far from settled. ‘They say that their love for West Bengal is alive as their hope about Dandakaranya is dead,’ ran a 1978 news report of the new exodus, ‘that all their Dandakaranya days were dark and dreary … “because of the humiliating conditions in which they lived”.’35

  But returning to Bengal was not that easy. By now the whole issue of the East Bengali refugees had been heavily politicised. To the astute politicians of West Bengal the grievances of a vast and heavily concentrated community had initially represented a desirable vote bank. Leftist parties, especially the Communist Party of India, had espoused the refugee cause and had duly fought the Dandakaranya plan on their behalf. Congress, happy to see the Communist vote depleted, had supported it. But by the time the Dandakaranya settlers began drifting back, the Communists were in power in West Bengal as p
art of a Left Front government. The votes of the returnees were no longer a priority. Re-rehabilitating them could only alienate existing supporters and damage the prospects of reconstruction. Tens of thousands were therefore turned back. Thousands more were forcibly evicted from an island they had nevertheless illegally occupied amid the mangroves of the Sundarbans.

  Exiles four times over – from East Bengal, West Bengal, Dandakaranya and then the Sundarbans – this pathetic band typified the tragedy of Bengal’s ‘long Partition’. What became of them is unclear, but it may be no coincidence that in the wake of their wanderings there would spread what in 2010 Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister, would call the nation’s ‘gravest internal security challenge’. He was referring to the so-called ‘Naxalite’ or ‘Maoist’ revolutionaries whose armed insurrection was terrorising large parts of eastern and central India. In one of several attacks, seventy-six members of the Central Reserve Police Force had just been ambushed and killed by a Naxalite group calling itself the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee. Dandakaranya itself, according to the Times of India, was now ‘the den’ of the Naxalites; and their supporters, many of them indigenous tribal people, candidly traced both their grievances and their political indoctrination to the unwelcome influx of Bengali settlers in the wake of Partition.

  Sixty-five years after the event, the impact of the Great Partition is still being felt – and not just in Bengal and the Punjab. In Karachi the influx of Muslim muhajirs from India was on a scale comparable with that of East Bengalis into Calcutta. Literate and industrious, the muhajirs would stay put and through their MQM party become a thorn in the flesh of successive regimes in Islamabad. Not without bloodshed, they still control much of Pakistan’s largest metropolis. Parts of Hyderabad, the south Indian city that was the scene of another Partition-related crisis, are periodically devastated by motorbike bombers keen to incite their large Muslim component. Markets in Delhi and suburban trains in Bombay have also been targeted.