by Ali, Tariq
Partitions along ethnic or religious lines usually result in mutually inflicted violence, but the politicians of that time had no understanding of the magnitude of what they had prepared. Astonishingly, given the shrewd and effective barrister that he was, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, or the Quaid-i-Azam,* the leader of the new country, seemed unaware of the logic of his own arguments. As late as May 1946, Jinnah had not believed that the creation of a Muslim state separated from India would lead to the partition of Bengal or the Punjab, where the three communities lived in roughly equal numbers, with Muslims more predominant in western Punjab. He had argued that splitting these two provinces “would lead to disastrous results.” This was certainly true, but it was pure fantasy to imagine that this could be avoided once a partition along religious lines had been agreed to. The Great Leader thought of Pakistan as a smaller version of India with one small difference: the Muslims would be a majority. He had not thought of asking himself why Hindus and Sikhs should now accept what he had refused to countenance: living under a majority composed of another religious group.
Confronted with a mass influx of refugees, a panic-stricken Muslim League leadership in Karachi now told Indian Muslims that the new state was not intended for all Muslims but only those from east Punjab. The Muslims in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh (UP) should stay where they were. This was bluntly asserted by Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, himself a scion of the UP gentry. What he really meant was that there was no place for middle- and lower-middle-class Muslims from the named regions. Nobody paid any attention. Muslim refugees from Delhi and other areas continued to pour into the new country. The creation of a “separate homeland” for India’s Muslims had been taken seriously by the lower orders. They had no idea that it was a state for landlords alone. It’s not that many Muslims wished to leave their ancestral villages and towns in search of an uncertain future. The pogroms, real and threatened, left them no alternative.
The Muslim League, a creation of Muslim conservatives, was founded in 1906 when a Muslim delegation sought and obtained a meeting with the British viceroy, Lord Minto. They pledged loyalty to the empire and demanded job quotas and separate electorates for Muslims. Underlying it all was the fear of Muslim professionals that they would lose out badly to the Hindu majority unless the British agreed to positive discrimination. The League’s politics varied as did its social composition, and not until 1940 did it pass the Lahore Resolution, demanding a separate state for Indian Muslims, but clearly not all Muslims, since this was not considered feasible.
A conflict of myriad wills sometimes results in the creation of something that nobody willed. At best it can be an approximation of what was desired. At worst a meaningless by-product. So it came about that on the morning of August 14, 1947, a group of surprised men woke to find themselves at the helm of a new Muslim state—Pakistan. They were gathered in Karachi, its then capital. Once a small Sindhi fishing village, it had grown to house parts of the Royal Indian Navy and its population had accordingly increased. Few of them had believed that this would ever come about. In private they whispered to each other that the idea of Pakistan had largely been a bargaining ploy to win institutional safeguards for the large Muslim minority in postindependence India.
Events took another course. Now they had a country. They were, in the main, bandwagon careerists from landed Muslim families who had eagerly collaborated with the British Empire and only lately joined the Muslim League. Their brain cells had become rusty from lack of use. In the old days the “great” imperial bureaucracy had done most of the thinking for them. Their task was to convey orders or transmit ideas received from above to their subordinates. Confronted with actual independence, their lack of substance became apparent. In years to come most of them would dispense with reason altogether, resort to force, and back ambition-soaked generals desperate for power, while bemoaning the fickleness of democracy, which had, in reality, never been given a chance. The reason was never hidden. A structural contradiction lay at the heart of the new country. Religious affinity was the only rationale for uniting West Pakistan and its Muslim-majority provinces—Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan and North-West Frontier—with East Pakistan, which was the Muslim-majority slice of Bengal. The result was one sovereign state consisting of two territorial units separated not only by geographical distance but by linguistic, cultural, social, and ethnic differences that had no commonality other than religion and the state airline. Across this artificial structure, where the center of “national” power was separated from the majority of the population by over one thousand miles of hostile Indian territory, there lay the army and the civil service, both of which treated the Bengali majority as if they were colonial subjects. The absurd attempt to impose Urdu as the lingua franca of the new state had to be abandoned when angry Bengali crowds rioted as they confronted Jinnah on his first and last visit to Dhaka in 1948. The Bengalis, unlike the Punjabis, refused to permit any downgrading of their language. The formative years of Pakistan witnessed a squalid attempt by the new rulers to prevent a majority of citizens in the country from playing a part in determining its future. The Bengalis had to be kept under control, and this became the guiding principle of Jinnah’s heirs. For this reason they delayed the adoption of a new constitution for almost a decade, fearing that franchise would give the Bengali majority an advantage.
By this time another “great thing” had come into play: the United States of America was slowly taking over the role of the British Empire. Its needs were different, its method of functioning favored indirect rule via pliant politicians or generals, and as time progressed it would become equally demanding. It was never to be a question of objectively evaluating Pakistan’s real needs. As in the case of its British predecessor, U.S. interests were paramount.
Looking back on this period now, it’s clear that even though an influential section of the imperial bureaucracy in India was citing the idea of “Muslim civilization versus Hindu civilization” to promote separation on the familiar lines of “two distinct nations,” it was, in fact, the Second World War that proved to be decisive in the partitioning of the subcontinent. During the war, when the hub of the British Empire was fighting for its existence, the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru demanded immediate independence so that a free India could determine whether it should participate in the war effort. The British were angered by the request and refused. The Congress contemptuously broke off relations with the British and boycotted its institutions. The colonial power was even less pleased when after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in February 1942 Gandhi proposed and launched a “Quit India” movement in August. An offer from the British cabinet pledging independence at the end of the war was rejected with a biting phrase—“a blank cheque from a failing bank,” retorted Gandhi, who was convinced the British would lose in Asia and independence might have to be negotiated with the Japanese.
In polar contrast, the Muslim League had always remained on the British side. It was firmly supportive of the war effort. The British responded in kind. Pakistan was, in effect, a big thank-you present to the Muslim League. Had the Congress Party adopted a similar strategy, the result might well have been different. It is an intriguing counterfactual notion. Once the idea of a division had been agreed on, all movements that became an obstruction were gently discouraged. One of the least discussed aspects of the twenty months preceding partition was a wave of strikes that swept India, putting class above separatism. In the Punjab, Muslim peasants were ranged against Muslim landlords. The most important of these strikes was the naval mutiny in February 1946 that had paralyzed the Royal Indian Navy, evoking the specter of the naval mutinies that had heralded the 1917 Russian Revolution and the triumph of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. Ships were occupied and the strike spread from Bombay to Karachi and Madras. Rear Admiral Godfrey threatened to bomb his own battleships, but his was impotent rage. The Strike Committee comprised Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. All were united. Then the politicians stepped in
and both the Congress Party and the Muslim League backed the British and helped defuse the strike. Nehru was unhappy. “The choice was a difficult one,” he said of his decision.
Jinnah’s appeal to the naval ratings was also straightforwardly communal: “I call upon the Muslims to stop and create no further trouble until we are in a position to handle this very difficult situation.” A general strike in solidarity with the sailors paralyzed Bombay and crippled industry. British-led troops and police opened fire, killing five hundred people. The politicians were shamefaced, but muted in their criticisms. The poet Sahir Ludhianvi asked, “O leaders of our nation tell us / Whose blood is this? / Who died?”*
In addition to the naval uprising, three hundred sepoys mutinied in Jabalpur, and in March that same year the Gurkha soldiers raised the flag of revolt at Dehra Dun. In April, ten thousand policemen went on strike. Gandhi now became nervous and referred to the united Hindu-Muslim strikes as “an unholy combination.” To support them, he argued, meant “delivering India to the rabble. I would not wish to live up to 125 to witness that consummation. I would rather perish in flames.”† The acclivity of class tensions helped determine the fate of the subcontinent. Everyone was in a hurry now lest the situation become uncontrollable for all three sides—the British, the Congress Party, and the Muslim League. The deal was done in a hurry.
A sprinkling of lawyers and a clutch of clever businessmen (more interested in influence and increasing their assets than achieving greatness) had provided the Muslim League with brains and cash, but they were never in control of the organization. The principal leaders were all men of a conservative temperament, though modern in outlook.‡ Few had ever been involved in the civil disobedience movements or helped organize peasants or trade unions. Aware that their nationalist credentials were limited, they had staged a few token protests, such as Direct Action Day a few months before the British left. As a result they were able to spend a few hours in prison, about which they would talk for the rest of their lives.
In London, on the eve of partition, an emergency Labour cabinet assembled in a somber mood at 10 Downing Street. Presided over by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, it was devoted exclusively to the growing crisis in India. The secretary of state for India was despondent. The search for a last-minute way to stem the flow of blood resulting from the amputation had proved unsuccessful. The minutes reported, “Mr Jinnah was very bitter and determined. He seemed to the Secretary of State like a man who knew that he was going to be killed and therefore insisted on committing suicide to avoid it.” Surely he was not alone. The refusal of Congress Party leaders to accept a number of proposals that might have preserved the unity of the subcontinent had left him with no other alternative.
As late as March 1946, Jinnah had been prepared for an honorable compromise, but the visionless and arrogant Congress Party leaders (Gandhi, an honorable exception in this case, had suggested that Jinnah become the first prime minister of a united India) had prevaricated and then the opportunity was lost forever. Had Jinnah been able to peer a few years ahead, he might well have abandoned the experiment. The dust never settled on the state he had created. Jinnah was surrounded by a swarm of excited young men who were in the habit of talking of a “new spirit” without ever being able to explain what it meant. It is too late to turn the clock back now, but it certainly needs to be readjusted to South Asian time.
THE BIRTH OF Pakistan was considered, by most of its supporters, as a great achievement, but the danger of embracing “great achievements” is only understood when the greatness, if ever it really existed, lies buried in the past. It takes decades for most modern states to acquire an identity. Pakistan’s rulers, attempting to stamp one by force, downgraded the existing identities of the regions comprised within the new state. Punjabis, Pashtuns, Bengalis, Sindhis, and Baluchis were, in the main, Muslims, but religion, while important culturally, was but one aspect of their overall identity. It was not strong enough to override all else. Historically, for most of these nationalities, Islam was essentially a set of rituals. It appealed to emotions, it made people feel part of a wider history. For the peasants, the interpreters of the true faith were not mullahs, but the great mystic poets whose verses were sung and celebrated in each region. In the early decades of the new state, religion was never ideological except for a handful of clerics and the two small political parties discussed in the previous chapter, the orthodox Jamaat-e-Islami (JI, or the Islam Party) and Jamiat-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI, or Party of Islamic Scholars). Even these organizations and others had espoused universalism and had opposed the creation of a separate Muslim state, referring to Jinnah as Kafir-i-Azam (the Great Infidel), which reportedly amused him a great deal. Pushed by the turn of events, both groups rapidly reconciled themselves to the new reality, and the former became a stern guardian of the “ideology of Pakistan” against secularists, Communists, liberals, and anyone who felt that things were going seriously wrong.
THE HORRORS OF partition could not be addressed by those responsible for the division. It was left to poets and novelists to express the suffering of the many. Three of them produced work that has remained peerless. One was Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84), who together with Pablo Neruda and Nazim Hikmet formed the much celebrated triumvirate of radical twentieth-century poets who shared a common experience of imprisonment and exile. Faiz was one of the greatest South Asian poets of the modern period. A Punjabi by birth, he wrote mainly in Urdu. “The Dawn of Freedom,” composed soon after the massacres of August 1947, reflected a widespread sadness, despair, and anger:
This pockmarked daybreak,
Dawn gripped by night,
This is not that much-awaited light
For which friends set out filled with hope
That somewhere in the desert of the sky
The stars would reach a final destination,
The ship of grief would weigh anchor....
Our leaders’ style is changing,
Sexual pleasures permitted, sadness for separation forbidden,
This cure does not help the fevered liver, heartburn or the unsettled eye.
That sweet morning breeze
Where did it come from?
Where did it disappear?
The roadside lamp has no news;
The heavy night weighs the same
The heart and eye await deliverance;
Forward, we have not yet reached our goal....
Saadat Hasan Manto (1912–55), one of the most gifted Urdu short-story writers produced by the subcontinent, took an even more detached view of the killings. Like Faiz, he too was able to turn painful events into great literature. He took no sides. He wrote with a passionate detachment, depicting the summer of 1947 as a state of utter madness. For Manto, it was a crisis of human nature, a sharp decline in moral conduct and behavior, and this shaped the structure of his stories about partition. The fear that gripped northern India in the months leading up to partition profoundly affected most people.* Manto’s stories help us understand how and why.
Manto died in Lahore when I was eleven years old. I never met him and have always wished I had. In later photographs his melancholy is striking. He appears exhausted, the consequence of unhappiness and a ravaged liver; but earlier portraits reveal an intelligent and mischievous face, sparkling eyes, and an impudence almost bursting through the thick glass of his spectacles, mocking the custodians of morality, the practitioners of confessional politics, or the commissariat of the Progressive Writers. “Do your worst,” he appears to be telling them. “I don’t care.” He could never write to please or produce formulaic literature in the name of “socialist realism.”
Manto wrote “Toba Tek Singh” immediately after partition. The setting is the Lahore pagalkhana (lunatic asylum). When whole cities are being ethnically cleansed, how can the asylums escape? Bureaucrats organizing the transfer of power tell the Hindu and Sikh lunatics that they will be forcibly transferred to institutions in India. The inmates rebel. They embrace each other, wee
ping. They will not be willingly parted and have to be forced onto the trucks carrying them to new asylums. One of them, a Sikh, is so overcome by rage that he dies on the demarcation line that now divides Pakistan from India. Confronted by so much insanity in the real world, Manto found normality in the asylum. The city he loved was Bombay, but he was forced to move to Lahore. He would later write:
My heart is heavy with grief today. A strange listlessness has enveloped me. More than four years ago when I said farewell to my other home, Bombay, I experienced the same kind of sadness. There was a strange listlessness in the air much like that created by the forlorn cries of kites flying purposelessly in the skies of early summer. Even the slogans of “Long Live Pakistan” and “Long Live Quaid-e-Azam” fell on the ear with a melancholy thud.
The airwaves carried the poetry of Iqbal on their shoulders, as it were, night and day and felt bored and exhausted by the weight of their burden. The feature programs had weird themes: how to make shoes . . . how to propagate poultry . . . how many refugees had come to the camps and how many were still there.
Faiz belonged to the region that became Pakistan. Manto migrated from India. Amrita Pritam, a Sikh by birth (1919–2005), was younger than both of them. She was born in Gujranwala, a small Punjabi town, but was educated in Lahore. Her father was a schoolteacher who also wrote poetry. Amrita wrote in Punjabi (the divine language of the Sikhs) and published an acclaimed first collection when she was seventeen. She did not want to leave Lahore and her many Muslim friends, but was swept across the new border by the merciless tide of history. Traumatized by the partition, which would mark much of her work, she invoked Waris Shah (1706–98), the great mystical love poet of the Punjab, whose epic Heer and Ranjha, a ballad of impossible love, parental tyranny, and forced marriage, remains a great favorite on both sides of the Punjabi divide and is performed as regularly as Shakespeare. Pritam described the division of the Punjab as a poison that had destroyed a common culture:
