Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  The banished monarch, now put out to grass

  with patient oxen and the humble ass,

  said, as he champed the unaccustomed food,

  ‘It may be wholesome, but it is not good.’51

  John Christie, one of his personal secretaries, was sad to see him go. Much as he liked him, he acknowledged that he ‘was tired and could make no progress. He was liked and trusted by all; except for the murderous Calcutta riots in August 1946, he had managed, more or less, to keep the peace between Hindus and Moslems; he had maintained the political dialogue but he lacked the flair, the zest and perhaps the imagination to break the deadlock’.52 Attlee reflecting on Wavell thought him a ‘great man in many ways but a curious silent bird’53 while Wavell’s own valedictory was more straightforward. ‘I have heartily disliked my enforced connection with politics’, he told the king.54

  3. MARCH

  THE MUSLIMS DISAGREE

  ‘Never was there a nature whose qualities provided so complete an antithesis of its inner worth’

  (SAROJINI NAIDU on Jinnah)

  On 3 March, Malik Sir Khizar Hyat Khan Tiwana, Premier of the Punjab and leader of its fragile coalition government, resigned. His had not been a strong administration. He was not a supporter of Jinnah, opposed the idea of a separate Muslim state and had been expelled from the League in 1944. He had ruled with those non-League Muslims who still agreed with him, with Congress and the Akali Sikhs.1 Khizar’s ministry had foundered badly at the end of January when they had tried to ban the paramilitary organisations of both the Hindu and Muslim communities, an order they had quickly rescinded. The League, who operated on the assumption that they had a God-given right to govern the Punjab,2 had long been agitating for Khizar to go. He had, he told Sir Evan Jenkins, become increasingly gloomy about his ability to govern after he had heard Attlee’s 20 February announcement and that the ‘League must be brought up against reality without delay. They had no idea of the Hindu and Sikh feeling against them’.3 His resignation marked the end of twenty-three years of coalition government in the Punjab and would come to be seen as a harbinger of the sad fate the province would soon suffer.

  Yet it was what followed that would make the events of the coming August inevitable. The League reaction to Khizar’s fall was ‘jubilant and noisy’.4 On 4 March Muslim gangs, egged on by the League paramilitaries, attacked Hindus and Sikhs in Lahore. There was serious rioting and six people were killed that first afternoon. By 5 March large parts of the city were in flames and the police considered the situation ‘extremely grave’.5 The next day the violence spread to Multan. Non-Muslim students staged a march shouting ‘Quaid-i-Azam Murda-bad’, which roughly translates as ‘Death to Jinnah’; by the end of the march, 150 were dead.6 In the following week the violence became widespread throughout the province and Sikhs retaliated against Muslims in Amritsar. As with so much of the inter-communal violence in India, the reasons were not just political or religious but also local and criminal.

  One of the worst incidents occurred in Bir Bahadur Singh’s village of Thoa Khalsa near Rawalpindi. It was a rich village with ‘fifty to sixty large traders’,7 mostly Sikhs and Hindus who were also the larger landowners. They were thought to have been taking advantage of the current shortages of cloth and sugar to overcharge and operate a black market.8 The village had an important Sikh temple, a gurdwara. The Muslims, who Bir Bahadur Singh thought so badly treated, lived in the smaller satellite settlements without shops and were mostly employed as farm workers or servants, although some families had a son in the army. Lieutenant General Frank Messervy, the army commander in the area, thought that these settlements contained a sizeable goonda element, who ‘lived for violence and robbery’.9 Encouraged by these goondas, a Muslim mob attacked the village for three days but were beaten off by the well-organised Sikhs. On the third day both sides decided they should try to reach some sort of truce but there appears to have been an altercation with the Muslims demanding that the Sikhs hand over some of their women. It may have been that news reached the Sikhs of another Muslim mob who had demanded the return of a Sikh woman they had kidnapped and forcibly converted in the North West Frontier Province but who had subsequently escaped back to her family. This was rightly considered outrageous and seems to have made the Sikh population across the Punjab fearful that the same thing would happen to their own wives and daughters.

  Whatever the final provocation, the Sikh community preferred to kill their women themselves than risk having them defiled by Muslim men. Bir Bahadur Singh’s father and uncle gathered their extended family in one house. There were about twenty-five girls. First, a man with disabled feet, who knew he couldn’t run, asked to be killed to avoid forced conversion to Islam. He clutched Bir Bahadur Singh’s father’s feet. His head was taken off in one swing of Bir Bahadur Singh’s father’s kirpan, his curved Sikh sword. Next the old man lined up his daughters.

  He killed two and the third was my sister Maan Kaur . . . my sister came and sat in front of my father . . . but when my father swung the kirpan perhaps some doubt or fear came into his mind, or perhaps the kirpan got stuck in her dupatta [plait]. . . . No one can say. It was such a frightening, such a fearful scene. Then my own sister, with her own hand she removed her plait and pulled it forward . . . and my father with his own hands removed her dupatta aside and then he swung the kirpan and her head and neck rolled off and fell . . . I crept downstairs, weeping and sobbing and all the while I could hear the regular swing and hit of the kirpans. . . . twenty-five girls were killed.

  One girl who was pregnant somehow was not killed and was later shot by her husband who then killed himself and his father.10 Death was preferable to dishonour.

  The Sikh vengeance in Amritsar, where they were in a clear majority, was swift. By the evening of 7 March the city ‘was completely out of control. Many buildings were burning. Most of the population seemed to have produced arms. Masses of people are running away’.11 By 17 March ‘several important streets look as if they had a heavy raid with many shops and houses completely down and the roads heaped high with rubble. There was no electricity. The Muslims suffered worse’.12 In retaliation in Lahore a gurdwara was set on fire killing all twenty Sikhs inside.13 Sikh folklore has it that in one village near Rawalpindi one thousand women jumped into a well to avoid rape and forcible conversion, which, although an obvious exaggeration, gives some indication of the depth of fear in the rural areas. ‘The disturbed area is full of crowds of villagers armed with lathis [heavy bamboo sticks with metal bound ends], spears, axes, agricultural implements and . . . firearms. In several villages the Hindus have all been massacred’, noted the Inspector General of Police.14

  By the third week of March, when Jenkins had assumed control of the province under ‘Section 93’, the clause in the 1935 Act that allowed governors to reassert control in times of crisis, and the British and Indian armies had finally restored order, it is estimated that 5,000 people had been killed and 3,000 seriously injured. The Punjab Police, already demoralised and short of officers, and 90 per cent of whom were Muslim, had been found to be useless. The Hindu population lost what little faith they had in them, something that was soon to have a disastrous impact. The majority of the casualties were Sikhs and Hindus, and most of them in the Rawalpindi area; the killings quickly became known as ‘The Rape of Rawalpindi’. Messervy, an old India hand with extensive service in the Punjab, ‘would never have believed that agitation could have aroused the normally chivalrous and decent Punjabi Muslim peasant to such frenzied savagery’. He noted that ex-soldiers had played a significant part in its organisation.15

  There were, apart from the unbridled savagery and obvious human suffering, two serious consequences. First, the Sikhs ‘felt they had suffered more than the Muslims and that they had been caught unprepared. They were therefore likely to have their revenge’, noted Jenkins.16 Sensing what was coming, Sikh leaders would spend the spring arming and organising their community. Secondly, the Congress Working Com
mittee, the CWC, publicly called for the partition of the Punjab, an anathema to Jinnah and the League for whom an undivided Punjab was an essential part of their plans for a Muslim entity in an independent India.

  The violent animosity between the Muslims and the Hindus and Sikhs in India in 1947, which has translated into the friction and bad relations between Pakistan and India today, is all the more tragic because history does not suggest that it was inevitable. One of the most depressing things in researching this book is that it is virtually impossible to find one Indian commentator with anything good to say about Pakistan and vice versa; indeed that trait has been equally prominent in Indian–Pakistani relations since 1947. Yet for long periods of Indian history, both communities coexisted and cooperated.

  About one quarter of India’s population in March 1947 was Muslim. Islam had not come in the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, which had culminated in Persia, but much later. In 1192, Mahmud of Ghazni, a renowned Afghan warrior, had conquered the Punjab in a campaign still remembered for its ferocity but it wasn’t until the fourteenth century that Islam spread south and, under the leadership of the Delhi Sultanate, reached most of India. Yet this was due as much to conversion as to conquest. India’s Muslims were not an immigrant population but generally native Hindus, usually low caste, who preferred the freedom and spiritual promise that Islam offered. It was more attractive to be considered equal before God, and to live one’s life with the promise of salvation and paradise, than under the rigidity of caste and the weariness of endless cycles of reincarnation. This was particularly true in Bengal, where a largely animistic peasantry resented Hindu domination and quickly succumbed to the teaching of the pirs and Islamic preachers. Vallabhbhai Patel’s dismissive comment that all Indian Muslims were just converted Hindus was often true but it underplayed the sincerity of that conversion, and throughout India’s independence struggle Congress can justifiably be accused of consistently underestimating both the depth of belief that Islam engenders and the attraction of its offer of equality before God.

  This pattern of conversion also explains why the Muslim population was so widely and unevenly spread. Sometimes a few families had converted; in other cases a whole community would go over, sometimes for political reasons, as Muslim warlords extended their influence. By 1947 the far western provinces, Sind and the North West Frontier Province, were effectively Muslim. There were large Muslim populations in the United Provinces, in Bihar and Orissa, originally having part of Bengal, and in Bombay. Muslims formed the majority, as we have seen, in the Punjab and in Bengal proper.

  The coming of the Mughal emperors in the sixteenth century did not bring about further mass conversion. Rather the Mughals were content to work with Hindu states and communities. Muslim warlords did take over large tracts of land but they tended to rely on Hindus for their administration, such as the Nehrus in Delhi. Consequently there was never really a Muslim middle class, well illustrated by Hyderabad ruled by a Muslim Nizam but with only a few Muslim families who governed an overwhelmingly Hindu population. What the Mughals did do was institute a Persian legal system, which the British initially kept until they gradually replaced it with their own complicated and foreign code. In 1835 English became the language of government and of the courts, with Muslims beginning to feel increasingly marginalised. In 1867 Muslims held 11.7 per cent of government jobs in Bengal; by 1887 that had shrunk to just 7 per cent. In 1871 they enjoyed 12 per cent of ‘gazetted’, in other words public, appointments but by 1881 that had been reduced to 8 per cent.17

  The period of introspection that followed the Mutiny was interrupted by thinkers such as Sayid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) who thought that Islam should now come to terms with the West. He was influential at a time when there were many across the Islamic world who advocated the same thing, men like Mohammed Abduh in Egypt who argued that there was nothing in the Holy Qur’an or Hadiths that precluded Muslims taking advantage of Western progress in much the same way that the West had used Islamic scientific invention in the medieval world. Ahmad Khan cited a common Judaic/Christian heritage which, he argued, justified Indian Muslims working with the British. He founded the famous Aligarh College in 1875, the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, which became the Oxford of Muslim India, producing generations of Western-leaning thinkers. Realising, as the nationalist movement took root, that an independent, democratic India would inevitably mean a Hindu majority government, he also saw a vested interest in Muslim cooperation with the Raj as some sort of guarantee of their interests. It was this influence that lead to the inclusion of a separate Muslim electorate in the 1909 Morley-Minto Reforms.

  Again it was the British actions during the First World War that changed Muslim perception. Muslims were unhappy at the British fighting the Turks, whose sovereign was still the Caliph. They also, like Congress, thought that the 1909 reforms were the first stage of full independence once the war was over and saw that continued cooperation with the Raj may not necessarily work in their best interest. The All India Muslim League, founded at Dacca in 1906, came together with Congress at Lucknow in 1916 and produced the Lucknow Pact in which Congress accepted separate electorates. The harsh terms imposed by the Allies on Turkey after the war meant that many Muslims were comfortable in supporting Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation but gradually, as Atatürk swept away the Caliphate and it became clear that Congress saw itself as representing all Indians, whatever their creed, some of the leaders of the League began to realise that they would have to fight on their own. Jinnah left Congress at the end of 1920 after its stormy meeting in Nagpur. Many others followed him after Motilal Nehru’s 1928 draft constitution seemed to negate the key Muslim demand of separate electorates.

  The late 1920s and early 1930s were something of a period of crisis for India’s Muslims. There was clearly little future now in sticking with the Raj, although right up until 1947 there were many who identified closely with Britain and still saw the Attlee announcement of 20 February as a betrayal. Equally they felt betrayed by Congress, although some Muslim leaders were to stay with Congress throughout, such as the mild and approachable academic Maulana Azad, who would go on to serve as Congress president and to play a major role in the coming events. But, V. P. Menon thought, ‘The Muslims with Congress were not a very impressive lot. Azad was not man of the crowds. He was retiring. A very good man – his heart absolutely in the right place – but not a strong leader’.18

  How were they therefore to protect their future interests? In 1930 Sir Muhammad Iqbal suggested the concept of a separate Muslim homeland in the north-west. It was in part a spiritual inspiration, a movement that never caught on as Gandhi’s did but at least served to give Muslims some sort of collective identity. It was also part practical. The homeland would be called PAKIstan; the ‘P’ came from the Punjab, the ‘A’ from Afghanistan, reflecting both the Pathan population of the North West Frontier Province and the lack of definite geographical limitation to Iqbal’s idea, the ‘K’ was Kashmir, the Princely state with its majority Muslim population, and ‘S’ was for Sind; ‘stan’ was the Central Asian suffix denoting a country which referred to Baluchistan, the remote area west of the Indus delta which bordered Iran. It was an inspired choice as Pakistan meant ‘land of the pure’ in Urdu. Yet Pakistan remained just an idea. It was at this stage simply an expression for a Muslim entity within India; Pakistan and Hindustan were seen as two parts of the same whole and would go through many different variations before they became separate countries in August 1947. Even as late as March 1947 it was not at all clear what, if anything, Pakistan would look like.

  The 1930s also produced a leader for the Muslim community in the form of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam whose death the Hindu students in Lahore had so imprudently been demanding. Of all the great leaders of the independence movement, Jinnah is one of the hardest to fathom, partly because so little of his correspondence has been released. He is the one with the least sympathetic profile outside Pakistan,
with none of Nehru’s easy cosmopolitan charm nor Gandhi’s ability to connect to the masses. Reserved, frequently aggressive in argument, and famously described by the Raj’s officials as a man with a problem for every solution, Jinnah was also man of impressive conviction, penetrating intellect and who inspired prophet-like devotion among his followers. Even Nehru, ever courteous, said he was ‘one of the most extraordinary men in history’ although he could not resist adding, inaccurately, that he was ‘a financially successful though mediocre lawyer’.19 By 1947 he was as undisputed a leader of Indian Muslims as Nehru was of Congress. In Pakistan today he enjoys similar status to George Washington in the United States, is known as Baba-i-Qaum, or ‘Father of the Nation’, and his birthday, 25 December, which he shares with another notable leader, is a public holiday.

  Like Gandhi and Patel, Jinnah was a Gujarati and in fact his early life was very similar to Gandhi’s. Born into a middle-class Ismaili Muslim family in Karachi, he spent his childhood in Bombay. Married young like Gandhi, he was sent to England to work in a shipping company. His young wife and his mother died while he was in London, where he changed to study law. After qualifying by the age of twenty, he returned to Bombay where he established a successful practice. His period in London turned him, like Nehru, into someone who liked and admired the British way of life but equally someone who detested the British inability to practise in India what they preached at home. London would remain his second home throughout his life and he became a very English sort of Muslim. Although he habitually wore his Jinnah cap, it usually topped immaculate Savile Row suits, and he both drank and smoked. Although nominally a Shia Muslim by virtue of his Ismaili birth, Jinnah in fact defied narrow Islamic theological stereotyping, regarding himself just as a ‘Muslim’. V. P. Menon wondered if he ‘even knew how to perform his prayers’.20 Jinnah was never a religious leader as such; to him India’s Muslims were rather a political body. He was, as such, a Muslim leader ahead of his time and one who saw the tenets of Islam as no barrier to the community flourishing in a modern state.