The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

  Whereas most Muslim businessmen and professionals in the Muslim-minority provinces of British India migrated to Pakistan to escape competition from their more advantaged Hindu counterparts, this was not the case with the socially liberal and politically progressive Muslims in Bombay’s thriving movie industry. As scriptwriters, lyricists, directors, and producers, they stayed in Bombay—all except Sadat Hassan Manto.

  Sadat Hassan Manto

  A bespectacled, oval-faced native of Samrala near Ludhiana in East Punjab, Manto was a prolific short story writer in Urdu who made a comfortable living penning screenplays. He made his debut as a writer with “Tamasha” (Urdu: Show), a short story based on the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar.

  After partition, the thirty-five-year-old Manto migrated to Lahore. Faced with a lack of demand for movie scripts, he had to rely exclusively on publishing short stories in literary magazines or newspaper supplements for paltry sums. His sexually explicit tales fell afoul of the socially conservative readership of Urdu publications. Because he wrote freely about social and sexual issues considered taboo in Indo-Pakistan society, he was charged with obscenity six times, three times in India and three times in Pakistan. Though he was not convicted, he switched to writing a regular newspaper column. It provided him with an outlet for drawing pen-portraits of leading Indian actors and writers as well as Muhammad Ali Jinnah. (His eye-opening essays on working in the Hindi movie industry—at turns nostalgic, acerbic, poetic, and gossipy—are collected in a remarkable collection Stars from Another Sky.) The constant struggle to support his wife, Safiya, and their three daughters drove him to cheap, illicitly brewed alcohol—and an early death in 1955 from cirrhosis.

  He left behind twenty-two collections of short stories, a novel, and five collections of radio plays as well as three of essays. Yet it was only on January 18, 2005, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, that he was commemorated on a Pakistani postage stamp and awarded the Nishan-e Imtiaz (Urdu: Order of Excellence), the highest official honor.

  Some months before his demise he published a satirical tale, “Toba Tek Singh.” Set in 1950, when India and Pakistan exchanged the inmates of their lunatic asylums, “Toba Tek Singh” has become a classic because it captures the demented logic of the partition. The story is based on the premise that the inmates of these asylums were largely unaware of the dramatic events in the subcontinent.

  Bishan Singh, an old Sikh lunatic in Pakistan, had owned land in his hometown, Toba Tek Singh (the name of an actual town, which remains unchanged), before going mad and was known as Toba Tek Singh among his fellow lunatics. On the day of the exchange of mad men, when Bishan Singh’s turn comes to give his personal details for the records before being transferred to India, he asks the official, “Where’s Toba Tek Singh? In India or Pakistan?” The official laughs and answers, “In Pakistan, of course.” Hearing this, Bishan Singh turns and runs back to join his companions in Pakistan. The Pakistani guards catch hold of him and try to push him across the line to India. Bishan Singh refuses to budge. “This is Toba Tek Singh,” he announces. In order to persuade him to cross the border into India, he is told falsely, repeatedly, that Toba Tek Singh is in India, or very soon will be. But he remains unconvinced. When they try to drag him to the Indian side, he resists. Since he is a harmless old man, the officials leave him alone for the time being and proceed with the rest of the exchange. Engrossed in the demanding task of accomplishing the exchange, the guards forget about him. At dawn they hear a heart-rending scream. They find Bishan Singh’s corpse, face down and sprawled between two barbed pens—one of Indian lunatics and the other of their Pakistani counterparts—on a land without name.1

  As it was, in real life, a no-man’s land had come into existence along some sections of the Indo-Pakistan cease-fire line in Kashmir—an issue that continued to exercise the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) as well as the military representatives of India and Pakistan during 1949.

  Nehru’s Nonalignment Irritates Washington

  That year witnessed the twin dominions drifting apart in such vital areas as foreign affairs. In pursuit of his policy of nonalignment with either power blocks—led respectively by the Soviet Union and the United States—Jawaharlal Nehru transferred his sister Vijay Lakshmi Pandit from Moscow to Washington as India’s ambassador in August. She set the scene for her brother’s visit to America two months later.

  Nehru started his four days of official visits and conferences in Washington with a meeting with President Harry Truman on October 13. He then addressed the US House of Representatives. “I have come here on a voyage of discovery of the mind and heart of America and to place before you our own heart,” he said. “Thus we may promote that understanding and cooperation which, I feel sure, both our countries earnestly desire.” He assured his audience that “where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.” Then he rushed to the Senate, temporarily meeting in the old Supreme Court Chamber, to deliver the same speech.2

  As the leader of a newly independent nation of 360 million people with a legacy of ancient civilization, Nehru was treated as a political superstar. “Washington’s hopes for a democratic rallying point in Asia have been pinned on India, the second biggest Asiatic nation, and the man who determines India’s policy—J L Nehru,” said the New York Times in its editorial on October 14, 1949. Time chimed in by featuring a flattering portrait of Nehru on the cover of its October 17 edition. He then undertook a three-week tour of the United States, visiting cities on the East and West Coasts and the Midwest.

  In June 1950, as one of the six nonpermanent members of the UN Security Council, India backed its Resolution 82, calling on North Korea to withdraw immediately to its border with South Korea. A few days later it supplied a medical unit to the UN Command charged with reversing North Korea’s aggression.

  But later, as the United States embarked on a policy of encircling the Soviet Union with a string of regional defense treaties, Nehru parted company with Washington in defense matters. In early October 1949, Truman signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Act to complement the Economic Cooperation Act (the Marshall Plan) of April 1948, both aimed at Europe. In 1951 these two acts were merged into the Mutual Security Act under the Mutual Security Administration, charged with overseeing all foreign aid programs, military and nonmilitary, to bolster the defense capability of Washington’s allies. This step integrated the mutual security pacts and the concept of security assistance with the US-led Western world’s global strategy of containing the Soviet Union.

  However, Washington’s modest economic aid to India, which started after Nehru’s sojourn to America, continued. In January 1952 India and the United States inked a five-year Technical Cooperation Agreement, with Washington providing funds for specific technical projects.

  The outbreak of war between North Korea and South Korea in June 1950 drew America’s attention toward Asia and heralded globalization of its security policy. Six months earlier India had recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which came into existence on October 1, 1949, with the military defeat of the Republic of China. India thus became the first noncommunist country to recognize the PRC. (Its ambassador K. M. Pannikar arrived in Beijing in April 1950.)

  In October 1950 the PRC stepped into the Korean War to ensure that the US-led UN forces did not reach its frontier. At the UN India disagreed with America in February 1951 and refused to censure Communist China as an aggressor in the ongoing war. Washington considered Delhi’s stance an example of communist appeasement. India’s refusal to join the US-sponsored 1951 Treaty of Peace with Japan—a pact designed among other things to recruit Japan as an ally against communist successes in Asia—signaled further divergence between the two nations.

  With India refusing to ally with America, the Truman administration focused on Pakistan, which had been courting the United States since its inception u
nder Jinnah, who was paranoid about the Kremlin’s ambitions in South Asia. Little wonder that it was fifteen months after his death that, following the establishment of Pakistan’s diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union, the first Pakistani ambassador arrived in Moscow.

  President Truman laid out the red carpet for Ali Khan at the airport in Washington on May 3, 1950. After their meeting the next day, the Pakistani leader addressed the two chambers of Congress separately. He reemphasized the importance of his country’s geostrategic location adjacent to Afghanistan, which shared a long border with the Soviet Union. He lined up with America to meet the Soviet menace.3 To achieve this common aim, he asked for military aid, which Truman promised to consider. Then, emulating Nehru, he toured the United States for more than three weeks.

  Soon after, he backed the UN use of force to reverse North Korea’s invasion and occupation of part of South Korea. And, unlike Nehru, he supported Washington’s peace treaty with Tokyo.

  Once the Mutual Security Act came into force in 1951, it became comparatively easy for Washington to combine its military and nonmilitary aid to Pakistan. But Truman was cautious about granting Ali Khan’s request for arms, fearing that he would use US weapons against India in Pakistan’s ongoing dispute in Kashmir. On his part, frustrated by Truman’s prevarication, Ali Khan established diplomatic relations with the PRC on May 21, 1951.

  The divergence of the two neighbors in foreign policy was reflected in their bilateral commerce. Following India’s virtual suspension of trade with it in early 1950, Pakistan tried to forge trade links with America. The outbreak of war in the Korean peninsula in June 1950 helped. The subsequent hike in the prices of such raw materials as jute, leather, and cotton benefited Pakistan, being a supplier of raw materials. The trade rupture with India also accelerated the building of cotton and jute mills in Pakistan by newly arrived Indian Muslim businessmen, whose backing of the Muslim League prepartition was premised on the hope that one day, in a Muslim state, they would no longer face competition from Hindu industrialists. These new factories reduced Pakistan’s dependence on India for finished goods. And an increased demand for raw materials enabled it to diversify its foreign commerce.

  Nehru-Ali Khan Interlude

  At home the Liaquat Ali Khan government resolved to crush the Communist Party in East Pakistan, where it had substantial support among Untouchable Hindus. During a police raid to arrest communists in the Untouchables’ settlement of Kalshira in mid-December 1949, a policeman was killed. In retribution, a contingent of armed policemen and troops raided Kalshira on December 20, beat up the villagers, and let neighboring Muslims loot their properties, kill some men, and abduct women. All except three homesteads were razed. The nearby Hindu villages suffered a similar fate. Some of the refugees from Kalshira arrived in Calcutta. Their tales of woe were publicized in the West Bengal press, inflaming the feelings of local Hindus. The result was communal rioting in Calcutta. The exaggerated reports of these events in East Pakistan’s newspapers strained fragile Hindu-Muslim relations.

  In early February the Speaker of the East Pakistan Assembly dis­allowed discussion of the incidents in Kalshira, which had been demanded by the Congress Party members, all of them Hindu. The simmering communal tensions escalated into violence in the capital, Dacca (later Dhaka), following a February 10 rally in which speakers delivered anti-Hindu tirades.

  The dispersed crowd of Muslims went on a spree of looting Hindu shops and housing, setting some of them alight. An estimated 50,000 Hindus out of 80,000 among the city’s 417,000 residents became homeless during seven hours of murder, pillage, and arson. “What I saw and learnt from firsthand information was simply staggering and heart-rending,” wrote Jogendra Nath Mandal, the (Untouchable) law minister of Pakistan.4

  The weak government of Chief Minister Nurul Amin proved unequal to the task of curbing the rioting. It also failed to instruct the authorities in district capitals to take precautionary measures. As a consequence, communal violence spread to several district capitals and rural areas. It included looting, murder, rape and abduction of women, and forcible conversions to Islam. By collating detailed information, Mandal concluded that the total Hindu deaths in Dacca and elsewhere were “in the neighborhood of 10,000,” with the district of Barisal accounting for a quarter of the figure.5 Large-scale exodus of Hindus from East Pakistan started in the second half of March.

  Reprisals followed in West Bengal with attacks on Muslims. In one instance more than one hundred Muslim workers of a jute mill were murdered in Howrah in late March. Nearly two hundred thousand Muslims from the bordering villages of West Bengal were driven into East Pakistan.6

  Both Nehru and Ali Khan realized that if they failed to act urgently in unison to stem the tide of communal violence, there would be a nightmarish reprise of divided Punjab at the time of the partition. Nehru invited his Pakistani counterpart to Delhi. Ali Khan arrived with a large delegation. After six days of intensive negotiations, on April 8 the prime ministers signed major documents on minorities’ rights, resolving disputes through peaceful means, and trade, with commercial links to be restored in February 1951.7

  The two leaders agreed to set up a Ministry for Minority Affairs to be headed by a member of the minority community. The newly established Minority Commission in each country was charged with ensuring that the refugees were allowed to return unmolested to sell their property, the pillaged possessions were returned to the owner, the abducted women repatriated, and forced conversions nullified. Even so, by the end of 1950, more than one million Hindu refugees migrated from East Pakistan to West Bengal. In contrast, of the seven hundred thousand Muslims who left West Bengal because of communal turbulence, five hundred thousand returned later.8

  On the eve of the 1951 census, East Pakistan had nine million Hindus, forming 22 percent of its population of forty-one million. In polar contrast, West Pakistan had only one million Hindus, almost all of them in Sindh. Altogether Hindus were nearly 13 percent of Pakistan’s population. And Muslims in India constituted a minority of 10 percent.

  Ali Khan and His Assassin Killed

  On the afternoon of October 16, 1951, Ali Khan was the star speaker at a huge public rally held at the Company Park in Rawalpindi. At 4:10 pm, as he opened his speech with the welcoming words “Braadran-e-Millat” (Urdu: Brothers of the nation), two shots fired from a Mauser pistol from a distance of six feet hit him in the chest. He collapsed, muttering the Islamic creed in Arabic, “La ilaha illallah, Muhammad ur rasul Allah” (“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is messenger of Allah”).

  The weapon was fired by the twenty-nine-year-old Saad Akbar, a resident of Abbottabad, where he had settled as a political refugee from Afghanistan in 1944 and survived on a modest government stipend. Intriguingly, he had arrived a few hours before the event and had assisted the volunteers of the Muslim League National Guard to fix the dais and make other arrangements for the rally.

  In the melee that followed his murderous act, Akbar was hit by five shots fired by police subinspector Muhammad Shah Gul. His fatal injuries did not spare him further stabbings, breaking of his arms, and gouging of his eyes by those who pounced on him. Meanwhile, Ali Khan was rushed to the hospital, where he died at 4:50 pm.9

  The inquiry commission led by Justice Muhammad Munir, in its report on August 17, 1952, said that it had not been possible to decide definitively whether the assassin, Akbar, had acted as an individual or as the agent of a conspiracy. The known facts and documents tended to suggest that he was “the conscious or unconscious tool of some clever third party.”10 The matter rested there, enveloped in mystery—the first in a series that dogged the history of Pakistan, the other unsolved cases being those of General Muhammad Zia ul Haq and Benazir Bhutto.

  Thus within four years of its birth, Pakistani lost its two prime cofounders, known respectively as the Quaid-i-Azam and Quaid-i-Millat (Urdu: Leader of the Nation). Since none of the succeeding politicians had the
charisma or popularity of either one, the politics of the fledgling state started to unravel.

  Contrary was the case in India. There Nehru went from strength to strength. In Delhi the Constituent Assembly adopted a new constitution in November 1949 that came into effect two months later. The newly inaugurated Republic of India (Bharat in Hindi), with Rajendra Prasad as its president, was able to maintain its membership in the British Commonwealth thanks to the change in Britain’s law. With the December 1950 death of Vallabhbhai Patel, who represented the Hindu nationalist trend within the Congress, the grip of the Nehru-led secular wing in the ruling party tightened.

  The first general election for the directly elected lower house of the national parliament, called the Lok Sabha (Hindi: People’s Council), was held with universal suffrage between October 1951 and February 1952. The Congress Party won three-quarters of the 491 seats. As in the past, the party’s star vote-puller was Nehru, who undertook a whirlwind tour of the country. He continued as the prime minister and foreign minister, assiduously pursuing his nonalignment policy.

  By contrast, Ali Khan’s successor, Khwaja Nazimuddin (in office October 1951–April 1953) kept up the practice of periodically dispatching a delegation to Washington to seek arms. His chances brightened when (Retired) General Dwight Eisenhower followed Truman into the White House in January 1953 and appointed the rabidly anticommunist John Foster Dulles as his secretary of state.

  By then the two neighbors in South Asia had consolidated their positions in Kashmir.