Beyond the Lines: An Autobiography

by Kuldip Nayar

  I saw corpses lying on both sides of the road and empty suitcases and bags which bore testimony to the looting that had taken place either before or after the killing. The storm of fury seemed to have blown over. There was nervousness as we neared Wagah.

  The men in khaki – the army, the police, and other services – were meant to bring the riots under control but they too were infected by the communal virus. To expect them to be impartial and punish the guilty from their own community was to hope for the impossible. They had lost all sense of right and wrong. These custodians of the people knew they would go scot-free in their ‘own country’ after the transfer. I think it was a blunder to give the choice to civil servants, the police, and the armed forces to opt for India if they were non-Muslims and Pakistan if they were Muslims. A mixed administration would have behaved differently and infused the minorities with confidence.

  Jinnah would not believe the reports that thousands of people were migrating from both sides of the border. Both the Congress and the Muslim League had rejected the proposal for an exchange of population and had insisted on Muslims and non-Muslims staying back in their homes. Jinnah remained sullen for a few days and then accused India of seeking to undermine Pakistan. Even so, he was deeply concerned not only about the migration of people but also recurrent news that several lakhs of people had been butchered on either side of the border.

  One day when Jinnah was in Lahore, Iftikhar-ud-din, Pakistan’s rehabilitation minister and Mazhar Ali Khan, editor of Pakistan Times, flew him in a Dakota over divided Punjab. When he saw streams of people pouring into Pakistan or fleeing it, he struck his hand on the forehead and said despairingly: ‘What have I done?’ Both Iftikhar and Mazhar vowed not to repeat the remark. Mazhar took his wife Tahira into confidence and told her what Jinnah had said, and she communicated Jinnah’s comment to me long after her husband’s death.

  It was late in the afternoon when our jeep reached the outskirts of Lahore. It halted, but nobody knew why. Word was that a convoy of Muslims had been attacked in Amritsar and that Muslims in Lahore were waiting to take revenge. We waited in silence. There was some stray shooting in the distance and from nearby fields came the stench of decomposed flesh. We heard cries of ‘Allah ho Akbar, Ya Ali, Pakistan Zindabad’ but there was no attack. Our fears were proved unfounded.

  It was then that we heard ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’. That was it; the end of the line. We drove past the hurriedly erected, whitewashed, overturned drums and the Indian national flag aloft a bamboo pole marking the border. There was rejoicing and people hugged one another. It was great to be alive. The major’s wife in the jeep distributed sweets from a packet which she had apparently been hiding under her seat. It was still daylight.

  As I looked around, I saw people huddled in trucks and many on foot passing us going in the opposite direction. They were Muslims. Our jeep stopped to make way for them. I got down to see around, just to see. No one spoke, neither they nor I, but we understood each other; it was a spontaneous kinship. Both had seen murder and worse; both had been broken on the rack of history; both were refugees. I hoped the new India would know no killings in the name of religion. How wrong I was proved!

  I was taken for a Muslim in the second-class compartment in which I travelled from Amritsar. Non-Sikh Punjabis on both sides looked alike. They spoke the same language and dressed in the same way; ate the same food and even behaved in the same manner. Everyone was condemning their leaders for letting them down, but I was abusive and that too at the top of my voice. I undoubtedly attracted attention, but also some hostile glances.

  My bare right arm flashed the crescent and star which I had got tattooed at Sialkot at the insistence of my friend Shafquat. I heard whispers of suspicion about my identity. Was he a Muslim abusing loudly to cover up his religion? The tattoo heightened the suspicion and convinced more and more people that I was a Muslim.

  I was pulled out of the compartment at Ludhiana, coincidentally the city where most people from Sialkot had migrated. Burly Sikhs with spears and swords joined a hostile crowd around me at the platform, asking me to prove that I was a Hindu. I could see blood in their eyes. Before I could pull my pants down, a halwai from Sialkot, from our very locality, came to my rescue. He shouted that I was Doctor Sahib’s son. Another joined him to confirm this and the unbelieving crowd dispersed. This ended my agony as well as the excitement of the spectators. I was let off, but those few minutes still haunt me. There was no mercy in those days.

  Meanwhile, my parents and two brothers came separately through another route, across Narowal rail bridge which had to be negotiated on foot to reach the Indian soil. My father, who was carrying all the jewellery and cash the family had in a small suitcase, was pushed at the bridge. A young man snatched the suitcase and melted away into the crowd. My parents, by then in their sixties, had to start their life all over again in Jalandhar where they decided to settle. They borrowed money and bought earthenware pots and pans to enable my mother to cook.

  My father, however, narrated to me how some Muslim youth at Sialkot had saved them. One day, not knowing the fate of their children, both he and my mother boarded a train for Narowal. Some Muslim youths recognized my father and asked him not to travel by that train. When my parents resisted, they told them that the train would be attacked 10 km ahead, and that was what actually happened. All the passengers on that train were butchered. The youths took my parents back to the house and brought them back the following day, ensuring them a safe journey.

  There were many such instances of Hindus saving Muslims and Muslims saving Hindus. A report by Ashis Nandy, a leading Indian academic, has analyzed many incidents and says that the number of Muslims saved by Hindus in India and Hindus by Muslims in Pakistan averaged 50 per cent, an equal number on both sides.

  Estimates of the scale of the killing and migration vary, but one figure generally accepted is: one million killed and 20 million uprooted. Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was the last governor general of free India, put it between two and three million. The enormity of what occurred is beyond conjecture. In the two Punjabs there was a wholesale transfer of populations, which amounted to ethnic cleansing. The city of Lahore, former capital of Ranjit Singh’s kingdom and a great centre of Sikh culture, became an exclusively Muslim city within a matter of days, while Delhi, the capital of successive Muslim empires, saw most Muslim families leaving for Pakistan. It was an irony of the times that the grounds around the great Red Fort, built by Shah Jahan as a symbol of Mughal power, became a refugee camp for Delhi’s Muslim community. Even so, many Muslims argued that the British had seized rule from Muslims and should have returned the country to them.

  The unbounded ferocity witnessed on both sides of Punjab was exceptional. Bengal did not experience that, nor did Muslim-minority provinces, the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), Bihar, or the Central Provinces (now Madhya Pradesh). However, bulk of the Muslim middle class from these states migrated in huge numbers to the urban centre of Sindh where they came to be known as Mohajirs, a description that still lingers.

  Nonetheless, all across India, Muslims were under considerable pressure to go to Pakistan. Still, with the exception of East Punjab, Muslims, by and large, stayed back, and the migration of people was limited and mostly voluntary. The Muslims who remained in India constituted about 12 per cent of the population in comparison to 2 or 3 per cent Hindus and Sikhs who stayed back in Pakistan.

  The fact was that from the very day the two countries came into being, recriminations began piling up. Pakistan, in particular, blamed India for not letting it establish itself. When the riots disrupted train services, delaying the dispatch of government records from Delhi to Karachi, Pakistan saw it as an Indian plot to destabilize the administration of the new country. The delay, however, helped Karachi because it was able to avoid excessive red tape.

  The Joint Defence Council was disbanded on 30 November 1947, four months earlier than scheduled. This caused the Pakistani government to infer that
it was a ploy to deprive it of military stores. I was greatly disturbed by the growing hostility because I wanted the two countries to settle down to normalcy and talk about cooperation rather than engage in confrontation. New Delhi still had not sent all the equipment and stores pledged to Pakistan when the assets were divided.

  Even Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, commander-in-chief of India before Independence, accused India of having designs to ‘prevent Pakistan receiving her just share or indeed anything of arsenals and depots in India’. It was Sardar Vallabbhai Patel who was the stumbling block. He would say that India could not send Pakistan weapons in the midst of a war in Kashmir. When Mahatma Gandhi’s advice to Patel to release Pakistan’s assets had no effect, Gandhi went on a fast, forcing New Delhi to honour its pledge. Even then India returned only Rs 20 crore as part of Pakistan’s assets out of the fixed Rs 75 crore.

  Delhi was in the throes of rioting when I reached the city on 15 September 1947. Our train was rerouted and detained at Meerut for 24 hours because of the riots. Muslims were fleeing the city as Hindus and Sikhs had been doing from West Punjab. It was a replay of the same bloody drama, only the victims had changed. I had not witnessed killings in Pakistan because I had left home only a month after Partition but I saw it in India’s capital, New Delhi.

  As Muslims were not safe on the streets of Delhi, most of them were moved to Purana Qila for security. Rioters went to the residence of diplomats in search of Muslim cooks and bearers, and this was rationalized as retaliation. The majority of the troops in Delhi were Hindus and Sikhs. The government suspected they were partial and were not wrong. The communal virus had infected many. By contrast I saw soldiers from southern India restoring law and order, without any favour.

  Strangely, both Patel and the president of the constituent assembly, Dr Rajendra Prasad, reacted strongly to Jawaharlal Nehru’s proposal to reserve certain residential areas in Delhi for Muslims. Nehru wanted to employ Muslims to protect the Muslim refugees. A few years later, when I, as the home ministry information officer, was part of the team escorting Rajendra Prasad after his retirement to Patna, his home town, he confirmed that he had written a letter to Nehru to warn him that ‘his proposal would lead to undesirable and unexpected results’.

  I could not understand the objection as the arrangement to house Muslim refugees was a temporary measure in order to make them feel secure. It reflected the general anti-Muslim bias, which I never imagined would exist at the level of Rajendra Prasad. He told me that he did not like Nehru’s exhortations to his countrymen to behave in a civilized manner after hearing the news of killings from across the border. Prasad said that Nehru’s speeches had only defamed India. I failed to understand the logic of remaining silent when dastardly acts were tearing asunder the fabric of pluralism in India.

  Nehru found himself isolated in governance. Firstly, he had never thought that Pakistan would come into being. Secondly, he was confident that there would be no communal trouble after the British left. ‘Was I not wrong?’ he admitted later to a foreign dignitary. Nehru, however, pulled himself together and began depending upon Abul Kalam Azad and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, the two minority members in the cabinet. Patel and Shyama Prasad Mukherjee invariably opposed him.

  Gandhi supported Nehru’s efforts to protect the minorities but he could not help him in the administration. Nehru constituted an emergency committee of the cabinet and got Mountbatten to preside over it, feeling it was beyond his capacity to handle ‘so many problems at the same time’.

  Mountbatten’s version was that Nehru and Patel jointly appealed to him to handle the situation for them, and that he agreed provided his active role was kept secret for the time being and, while he would go through the motions of consulting his ministers, what he decided would be final. These conditions were accepted.

  Patel also joined issue with Nehru on the powers of cabinet ministers. According to Patel, the prime minister could not interfere with the functioning of a ministry. He was only a leader among equals. If the prime minister wanted to overrule a minister, he (the prime minister) must bring the matter before the cabinet for its collective verdict.

  I could not live in the past. Whatever my agony, I had to start my life afresh. After leaving my bag at mausi’s place in Daryaganj, I went to Birla House where Mahatma Gandhi lived. I wanted to see him, not only because he had won us freedom from the British but also because he had given us dignity. I remembered how in my early teens in Sialkot, a white soldier in a sola topi had caned me because I was part of a procession shouting slogans for azadi. I did not approach the Mahatma but looked at him from afar. He was walking up and down in a veranda with his arms on the shoulders of two young women. I thought that one day I would tell my children and grandchildren that I had seen Gandhiji with my own eyes.

  He would address a daily prayer meeting, when in Delhi, in the garden of Birla House. After a couple of bhajans, there were recitations from the Bible, the Quran, and the Gita, in that order. The venue was largely thronged by Punjabis who had come from Pakistan. The day I attended the meeting, one person objected to the recitation of the Quran. Many of us requested him to sit down but he kept standing. Gandhiji said that there would be no prayers because of the objection raised.

  The following afternoon, the person withdrew his objection. Addressing the gathering, Gandhiji said he knew that many in the gathering had lost everything, even family members, but the country ‘we are trying to build will be pluralistic and democratic’ in character as envisioned during the freedom struggle. Taking off his spectacles, he said: ‘Remember, Hindus and Muslims are my two eyes.’ I live with those words to this days.

  Jama Masjid, near Daryaganj was an area which I most frequented during those days. The non-vegetarian food there was cheap and delicious. Conspicuous was a red flag atop a building opposite the masjid. This was the headquarters of the Communist Party in Delhi. I went up the rickety staircase to inquire about my radical friends who had worked with me in the Students’ Federation at Lahore and received no worthwhile information because the bespectacled Mohammed Farooqi, then secretary of the party’s Delhi unit, lectured me instead on the British designs to stay back in India using the maharaja of Kashmir and the nizam of Hyderabad as their proxies. Subsequently, I learnt that the Communists had been advised by Moscow to wage a war against the Indian bourgeoisie who had taken over the country. The Communists went underground and then resurfaced to participate in the first general election in April 1952.

  Farooqi asked me to go and sell the Communist weekly, then called People’s Age. I stood at a corner of nearby Sadar Bazar with a bundle of newspapers. A middle-aged woman approached me and began crying. She gave me a ten-rupee note, remarking that she did not know that the Doctor Sahib’s family had reached the stage of selling newspapers. Apparently, she knew my parents. I tried to explain that it was not what she had imagined but she went on wiping her tears. I returned to the office and told Farooqi that I wanted a job. He asked me whether I knew Urdu. I was a graduate in Persian.

  Farooqi was the person who, unwittingly, initiated me into journalism. Any job was good enough at that time and it did not necessarily have to be in the legal field. An affluent Muslim, Mohammed Yasin, who had stayed back in India, was the owner of an Urdu daily, Anjam. He had requested Farooqi to look for a Hindu who knew both English and Urdu. His was a pro-Muslim League and pro-Pakistan daily, which had poured venom against the Hindus but the paper felt rudderless after Partition.

  Alongside the job at Anjam I also had to teach English and Mathematics to Yasin’s two sons. He was more interested in my religious credentials than in my educational qualifications, viewing me as a liaison man who could help him secure his brother’s property which had been sealed after the latter’s departure to Pakistan.

  When my visiting cards were delivered, I was surprised to see the designation of joint editor. In the proprietor’s estimate, a joint editor would open more doors in the government than a low-level reporter. The of
fice was located in Ballimaran, a Muslim locality, which looked forlorn; the atmosphere seemed congealed with submerged personal tragedies; the suffering of a community without any tangible sense of hope.

  The Muslims felt cheated, not having realized that they would have to pay the price of Partition: a pronounced bias against them and the Hindus’ demand that they go to Pakistan. Even today the same thing echoes in the ears of some of them. Muslims were afraid and confused, yearning to turn a new leaf but the Hindus were too bitter and too hostile to allow them any quarter.

  The attitude of my Muslim colleagues at Anjam towards me indicated what was going on in the mind of the community. They treated me as if I was a first-class citizen and they were second class. Their dependence on the generosity of the majority community was pathetic. They behaved like people with a hat in hand, little realizing then that Pakistan was the cross they would have to carry for generations.

  It was futile to argue who was responsible for the partition of the subcontinent. With the sequence of events stretching back decades, such an exercise could only be an academic distraction. It is, however, clear that the differences between Hindus and Muslims had become so acute by the mid–1940s that something akin to Partition had become inevitable.

  Nothing has had a greater impact on me than Partition because it severed me from my roots and forced me to live in a new environment, embark on a new life. It is an irony of history that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, himself had not wanted it this way. He had fought for the creation of Pakistan but did not favour an exchange of population. Over the years what I have learnt is that Partition could have been averted. In any event, Jinnah was not happy with the way India was divided. From what I have heard, he regretted the events because in the final analysis he was uncertain about the way Pakistan would shape in the future.