India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy

by Ramachandra Guha

  Two weeks before the designated day of Independence the Mahatma left Delhi. He spent four days in Kashmir and then took the train to Calcutta, where, a year after it began, the rioting had not yet died down. On the afternoon of the 13th he set up residence in the Muslim dominated locality of Beliaghata, in ‘a ramshackle building open on all sides to the crowds’, to see whether ‘he could contribute his share in the return of sanity in the premier city of Calcutta’.

  Gandhi decided simply to fast and pray on the 15th. By the afternoon news reached him of (to quote a newspaper report) ‘almost unbelievable scenes of fraternity and rejoicing’ in some of the worst affected areas of Calcutta. ‘While Hindus began erecting triumphal arches at the entrance of streets and lanes and decorating them with palm leaves, banners, flags and bunting, Muslim shopkeepers and householders were not slow in decorating their shops and houses with flags of the Indian Dominion’. Hindus and Muslims drove through the streets in open cars and lorries, shouting the nationalist slogan ‘Jai Hind’, to which ‘large, friendly crowds of both communities thronging the streets readily and joyfully responded’.10

  Reports of this spontaneous intermingling seem to have somewhat lifted the Mahatma’s mood. He decided he would make a statement on the day, not to theBBC, butthrough his own preferred means of communication, the prayer meeting. A large crowd – of 10,000 according to one report, 30,000 according to another – turned up to hear him speak at the Rash Bagan Maidan in Beliaghata. Gandhi said he would like to believe that the fraternization between Hindus and Muslims on display that day ‘was from the heart and not a momentary impulse’. Both communities had drunk from the ‘poison cup of disturbances’; now that they had made up, the ‘nectar of friendliness’ might taste even sweeter. Who knows, perhaps as a consequence Calcutta might even ‘be entirely free from the communal virus for ever’.

  That Calcutta was peaceful on 15 August was a relief, and also a surprise. For the city had been on edge in the weeks leading up to Independence. By the terms of the Partition Award, Bengal had been divided, with the eastern wing going to Pakistan and the western section staying in India. Calcutta, the province’s premier city, was naturally a bone of contention. The Boundary Commission chose to allot it to India, sparking fears of violence on the eve of Independence.

  Across the subcontinent there was trouble in the capital of the Punjab, Lahore. This, like Calcutta, was a multireligious and multicultural city. Among the most majestic of its many fine buildings was the Badshahi mosque, built by the last of the great Mughal emperors, Aurangzeb. But Lahore had also once been the capital of a Sikh empire, and was more recently a centre of the Hindu reform sect, the Arya Samaj. Now, like all other settlements in the Punjab, its fate lay in the hands of the British, who would divide up the province. The Bengal division was announced before the 15th, but an nouncement of the Punjab ‘award’ had been postponed until after that date. Would Lahore and its neighbourhood be allotted to India, or to Pakistan?

  The latter seemed more likely, as well as more logical, for the Muslims were the largest community in the city. Indeed, a new governor had already been appointed for the new Pakistani province of West Punjab, and had moved into Government House in Lahore. On the evening of the 15th he threw a party to celebrate his taking office.

  As he later recalled, this ‘must have been the worst party ever given by anyone . . . The electric current had failed and there were no fans and no lights. The only light which we had was from the flames of the burning city of Lahore about half a mile away. All around the garden, there was firing going on – not isolated shots, but volleys. Who was firing at who, no one knew and no one bothered to ask.’11

  No one bothered to ask. Not in the governor’s party, perhaps. In Beliaghata, however, Mahatma Gandhi expressed his concern that this ‘madness still raged in Lahore’. When and how would it end? Perhaps one could hope that ‘the noble example of Calcutta, if it was sincere, would affect the Punjab and the other parts of India’.

  III

  By November 1946 the all-India total of deaths in rioting was in excess of 5,000. As an army memo mournfully observed: ‘Calcutta was revenged in Noakhali, Noakhali in Bihar, Bihar in Garmukteshwar, Garmukteshwar in ????’12

  At the end of 1946 one province that had escaped the rioting was the Punjab. In office there were the Unionists, a coalition of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landlords. They held the peace uncertainly, for ranged against themwere the militant Muslim Leaguers on the one side and the no less militant Sikh political party, the Akali Dal, on the other. Starting in January, episodic bouts of violence broke out in the cities of Punjab. These accelerated after the first week of March, when the Unionists were forced out of office. By May the epicentre of violence had shifted decisively from the east of India to the north-west. A statement submitted to the House of Lords said that 4,014 people were killed in riots in India between 18 November 1946 and 18 May 1947. Of these, as many as 3,024 had died in the Punjab alone.13

  There were some notable similarities between Bengal and Punjab, the two provinces central to the events of 1946–7. Both had Muslim majorities, and thus were claimed for Pakistan. But both also contained many millions of Hindus. In the event, both provinces were divided, with the Muslim majority districts going over to East or West Pakistan, while the districts in which other religious groups dominated were allotted to India.

  But there were some crucial differences between the two provinces as well. Bengal had along history of often bloody conflict between Hindus and Muslims, dating back to (at least) the last decades of the nineteenth century. By contrast, in the Punjab the different communities had lived more or less in peace – there were no significant clashes on religious groundsbefore 1947. In Bengal large sections of the Hindu middle class actively sought Partition. They were quite happy to shuffle off the Muslim-dominated areas and make their home in or around the provincial capital. For several decades now, Hindu professionals had been making their way to the west, along with landlords who sold their holdings and invested the proceeds in property or businesses in Calcutta. By contrast, the large Hindu community in the Punjab was dominated by merchants and moneylenders, bound by close ties to the agrarian classes. They were unwilling to relocate, and hoped until the end that somehow Partition would be avoided.

  The last difference, and the most telling, was the presence in the Punjab of the Sikhs. This third leg of the stool was absent in Bengal, where it was a straight fight between Hindus and Muslims. Like the Muslims, the Sikhs had one book, one formless God, and were a close-knit community of believers. Sociologically, however, the Sikhs were closer to the Hindus. With them they had a roti-beti rishta – a relationship of inter-dining and inter-marriage – and with them they had a shared history of persecution at the hands of the Mughals.

  Forced to choose, the Sikhs would come down on the side of the Hindus. But they were in no mood to choose at all. For there were substantial communities of Sikh farmers in both parts of the province. At the turn of the century, Sikhs from eastern Punjab had been asked by the British to settle areas in the west, newly served by irrigation. In a matter of a few decades they had built prosperous settlements in these ‘canal colonies’. Why now should they leave them? Their holy city, Amritsar, lay in the east, but Nankana Saheb (the birthplace of the founder of their religion) lay in the west. Why should they not enjoy free access to both places?

  Unlike the Hindus of Bengal, the Sikhs of Punjab were slow to comprehend the meaning and reality of Partition. At first they doggedly insisted that they would stay where they were. Then, as the possibility of division became more likely, they claimed a separate state for themselves, to be called ‘Khalistan’. This demand no one took seriously, not the Hindus, not the Muslims, and least of all the British.

  The historian Robin Jeffrey has pointed out that, at least until the month of August 1947, the Sikhs were ‘more sinned against than sinning’. They had been ‘abandoned by the British, tolerated by the Congress, taunted by the Muslim Le
ague, and, above all, frustrated by the failures of their own political leadership . . .’14 It was the peculiar (not to say tragic) dilemma of the Sikhs that best explains why, when religious violence finally came to the Punjab, it was so accelerated and concentrated. From March to August, every month was hotter and bloodier than the last. Nature cynically lent its weight to politics and history, for the monsoon was unconscionably late in coming in 1947. And, like the monsoon, the boundary award was delayed as well, which only heightened the uncertainty.

  The task of partitioning Bengal and the Punjab was entrusted to a British judge named Sir Cyril Radcliffe. He had no prior knowledge of India (this was deemed an advantage). However, he was given only five weeks to decide upon the lines he would draw in both east and west. It was, to put it mildly, a very difficult job. He had, in the words of W. H. Auden, to partition a land ‘between two people fanatically at odds / with their different diets and incompatible gods’, with ‘the maps at his disposal . . . out of date’, and ‘the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect’.15

  Radcliffe arrived in India in the first week of July. He was assigned four advisers for the Punjab: two Muslims, one Hindu, and one Sikh. But since these fought on every point, he soon dispensed with them. Still, as he wrote to his nephew, he knew that ‘nobody in India will love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me . . .’16

  On 1 August a Punjab Boundary Force was setup to control the violence. The force was headed by a major general, T. W. ‘Pete’ Rees, a Welshman from Abergavenny. Under him were four advisers of the rank of brigadier: two Muslims, one Hindu, and one Sikh. In his first report Rees predicted that the boundary award ‘would please no one entirely. It may well detonate the Sikhs’.17 This was said on 7 August; on the 14th, the commander-in-chief of the British Indian Army, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, observed that ‘the delay in announcing the award of the Border Commission is having a most disturbing and harmful effect. It is realised of course that the announcement may add fresh fuel to the fire, but lacking the announcement, the wildest rumours are current, and are being spread by mischief makers of whom there is no lack.’18

  The rains still held off, and the temperature was a hundred degrees in the shade. This was especially trying to Muslims, both soldiers and civilians, observing the dawn-to-dusk fast on the occasion of Ramzan, which that year fell between 19 July and 16 August. Rees asked his Muslim driver why the monsoon had failed, and he replied, ‘God too is displeased’.

  The boundary award was finally announced on 16 August. The award enraged the Muslims, who thought that the Gurdaspur district should have gone to Pakistan instead of India. Angrier still were the Sikhs, whose beloved Nankana Sahib now lay marooned in an Islamic state. On both sides of the border the brutalities escalated. In eastern Punjab bands of armed Sikhs roamed the countryside, seeking out and slaying Muslims wherever they were to be found. Those who could escaped over the border to West Punjab, where they further contributed to the cycle of retribution and revenge. Muslims from Amritsar and around streamed into the (to them) safe haven of Lahore. The ‘stories of these Refugees, oriental and biblical in exaggeration, are in deed founded on very brutal fact, and they do not lack handless stumps etc., which they can and doparade before their fellow Muslims in Lahore and further west . . .’

  According to Pete Rees’s own figures, from March to the end of July, the casualties in the Punjab were estimated at 4,500 civilians dead and 2,500 wounded. But in the month of August alone, casualties as reported officially by the troops were estimated at 15,000 killed, and Rees admitted that the actual figure ‘may well have been two or three times the number'.)

  The Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was deeply worried about the Punjab troubles and their wider repercussions. In the last fortnight of August he visited the province three times, talking to people on either side of the border and taking aerial sorties. Nehru did not think that there was ‘anything to choose between the brutality of one side or the other. Both sides have been incredibly inhuman and bar-barous’.19 The adjective that Rees himself used for the savagery was ‘pre-medieval’. In truth, it was also medieval and modern. For the arms used by the rioters ‘varied from primitive axe, spear, and club to the most modern tommy-gun and light machine-gun’.

  On 2 September the Punjab Boundary Force was disbanded. It had not been especially effective anyway. It was hampered by the problem of dual authority: by having to report to civilian officers in the absence of martial law. With the exit of the Punjab Boundary Force, responsibility for law and order was now vested in the governments of India and Pakistan. The riots continued, as did the two-way exodus. West Punjab was being cleansed of Hindus and Sikhs, East Punjab being emptied of Muslims. The clinical even-handedness of the violence was described by the Punjab correspondent of the respected Madras-based weekly Swatantra. He wrote of seeing

  an empty refugee special steaming into Ferozepur Station late one afternoon. The driver was incoherent with terror, the guard was lying dead in his van, and the stoker was missing. I walked down the platform – all but two bogeys were bespattered with blood inside and out; three dead bodies lay in pools of blood in a third-class carriage. An armed Muslim mob had stopped the train between Lahore and Ferozepur and done this neat job of butchery in broad daylight.

  There is another sight I am not likely to easily forget. A five-mile-long caravan of Muslim refugees crawling at a snail’s pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge. Bullock-carts piled high with pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside. Women with babies in their arms and wretched little tin trunks on their heads. Twenty thousand men, women and children trekking into the promised land – not because it is the promised land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot State and the interior of Ferozepur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to death and madelife impossible for the rest.20

  Ten million refugees were on the move, on foot, by bullock-cart, and by train, sometimes travelling under army escort, at other times trusting to fate and their respective gods. Jawaharlal Nehru flew over one refugee convoy which comprised 100,000 people and stretched for ten miles. It was travelling from Jullundur to Lahore, and had to pass through Amritsar, where there were 70,000 refugees from West Punjab ‘in an excited state’. Nehru suggested bulldozing a road around the town, so that the two convoys would not meet.21

  This was without question the greatest mass migration in history. ‘Nowhere in known history ha[d]the transfer of so many millions taken place in so few days’. They fled, wrote an eyewitness,

  through heat and rain, flood and bitter Punjab cold. The dust of the caravans stretched low across the Indian plains and mingled with thes cent of fear and sweat, human waste and putrefying bodies. When the cloud of hate subsided the roll of the dead was called and five hundred thousand names echoed across the dazed land – dead of gunshot wounds, sword, dagger and knife slashes and others of epidemic diseases. While the largest number died of violence, there were tired, gentle souls who looked across their plundered gardens and then lay down and died. For what good is life when reason stops and men run wild? Why pluck your baby from the spike or draw your lover from the murky well?22

  The trouble in the province was made worse by the noticeably partisan attitude of the governor of West Punjab, Sir Francis Mudie. He was ‘inveterate against the Congress’. Mudie thought he ‘could govern himself. Thus he thwarts his Cabinet, above all in their attempts to bridge the gulf between West and East Punjab, and therefore between Pakistan and India’. Tragically, no Pakistani politician was willing to take on religious fanaticism. Whatever their private thoughts, they were unwilling to speak out in public. As for Pakistan’s new governor general, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he was headquartered in the coastal city of Karachi (the country’s capital), and had ‘only visited Lahore in purdah and most carefully guarded’. This timidity was in striking contrast to the bra
ve defence of their minorities by the two pre-eminent Indian politicians. Indeed, as a British observer wrote, ‘Nehru’s and Gandhi’s stock has never been so high with the Muslims of West Punjab’.23

  Meanwhile, trouble had flared up once more in Bengal. There were reports of fresh rioting in Noakhali. In Calcutta itself the peace was broken in Gandhi’s own adopted locality of Beliaghata. Here, on 31 August, a Hindu youth was attacked by Muslims. Retaliatory violence followed and spread. By dusk on 1 September more than fifty people lay dead. That night, Gandhi decided he would go on a fast. ‘But how can you fast against the goondas [hooligans]?’ asked a friend. Gandhi’s answer, according to an eyewitness, ran as follows: ‘I know I shall be able to tackle the Punjab too if I can control Calcutta. But if I falter now, the conflagration may spread and soon. Icanseeclearly two or three [foreign] Powers will be upon us and thus will end our short-lived dream of independence.’ ‘But if you die the conflagration will be worse,’ replied the friend. ‘At least I won’t be there to witness it,’ said Gandhi. ‘I shall have done my bit.’24

  Gandhi began his fast on 2 September. By the next day Hindu and Muslim goondas were coming to him and laying down their arms. Mixed processions for communal harmony took place in different parts of the city. A deputation of prominent politicians representing the Congress, the Muslim League and the locally influential Hindu Mahasabha assured Gandhi that there would be no further rioting. The Mahatma now broke his fast, which had lasted three days.