Partition
Page 38
Although Bengal was spared the huge movement of refugees in 1947, and the slaughter of the Punjab, the subsequent steady flow of non-Muslims from east to west would mean that West Bengal continued to have a serious refugee problem up until the 1970s. By 1973, the numbers swelled by the Brahmaputra floods of 1970 and the Pakistani civil war of 1971, 15 per cent of its total population would be refugees from East Bengal. West Bengal never seemed able to deal with this in the way the Punjab had and the issue would remain politically toxic for years. At one point a decision was taken to resettle 25,000 families in the Dandakaranya area, 30,000 square miles of very poor and infertile land in Orissa and Bihar. Its previous inhabitants were the Gond forest dwellers who led the nomadic life that was all the land could support. Described by one official as ‘a forest of breathtaking loveliness . . . where God manifested himself as Rama’, the refugees were initially taken as labour gangs and then settled in 300 new villages. The project was, predictably, a disaster, with families leaving in droves. This was ascribed variously to their love of Bengal, which they couldn’t bear to leave, to their low-caste status or to their being work-shy. Ultimately the Bengal government admitted that only 10 per cent of Dandakaranya was in fact cultivatable.8
Many East Bengali refugees simply squatted on what vacant land they could find around Calcutta and other West Bengal cities and relied on their own initiative and skills to secure shelter and work. It was a long and hard struggle, the effects of which are still evident in Calcutta today, and shows that, in its own way, the partition of Bengal was as brutal and damaging as that of the Punjab.
In West Punjab, the Pakistani government faced similar pressures to Kirpalani. Despite all the work done to date in setting up the camps, the refugee problem remained enormous. One of the main difficulties was to know when the flow might start to ease up. Wild rumours reached Lahore that Hindu zealots were intent on expelling every Muslim in India. Would a second mass migration, this time from the United Provinces, follow on behind the East Punjabis? Would Pakistan be swamped at birth by a human flood it could not possibly support? How could resettlement start until there was a clearer idea of how many people would actually need supporting? In late November the huge columns still continued to arrive. ‘Hundreds of refugees sat day after day by the roadside huddled together, half dead or dying, in squalor, filth, utter wretchedness and dumb despair’, noted Moon.9 By the beginning of December a floating population of about two thousand squatted and defecated near Samasatta railway station. There were an average of six deaths daily, mostly old people and infants. Very soon the mess and filth in the station became indescribable and there was apparently no one to clear it up. Looting of any removable property left behind was widespread. Moon noted that many refugees died from hunger or exhaustion on arrival; 2,000 succumbed in Bahawalpur alone. It was not until early December that it became clear that the stream was slowly beginning to dwindle.
Resettlement work was, however, well under way by December, with an urgency to get people onto the land so that they could plant the rabi, the winter crop that would be harvested in the coming May. Land was given to those who had owned and worked land in India. Applicants were required to submit a sworn affidavit stating how much they had owned before and, although there was a certain amount of fraud, the system worked moderately well. The old settlement system had been to give applicants in the irrigated canal zones a ‘square’ of 25 acres but now there was insufficient land to do this. The average holding allocated was a quarter of a ‘square’, so 6.25 acres. The land previously owned by the Sikhs was relatively straightforward to reallocate as they had worked it themselves. That which had belonged to Hindus, who had tended to sublet, was more complicated as their Muslim tenants had already taken possession. The legal basis of this process taxed officials until Mudie produced a very simple ordinance for West Punjab which was copied throughout Pakistan. This nominated a Custodian of Refugee Property, much as India had done. He became the sole legal authority for title and allocation with an appeals system operating under him.
The Pakistani government also made a plan to redistribute refugees around the country, principally moving them from West Punjab to Sind and the North West Frontier Province, where there was more available land. One hundred and fifty thousand were selected to make the 125-mile journey on foot from the Punjab to Sind, accompanied by their bullock carts. The route lay through Bahawalpur. Moon and his colleagues were asked to prepare camping grounds and lay on food and water along the way. After several postponements the date was finally fixed but in the event nobody showed up; the refugees had, as in India, refused to leave the Punjab for the arid and foreign Sind.
There were some happier individual stories. Naffese Chohan, still miserable and homesick, was made to marry a man eighteen years older than her and who had been in the army. She did not know him, although she recalled him being in the truck that they had escaped in. She didn’t want to marry him but her mother needed her married off and soon after their wedding her new husband went to work in England. In 1948 he came back for her. She did not want to go to England; even at fifteen she had already suffered enough upheaval in her life. ‘I was screaming. I was crying. I didn’t know him. I didn’t like him. I was eighteen days on a ship from Karachi. I never ate and got ill.’ When she arrived in England she weighed just five stone. She spent her first five weeks in her new country in hospital. Her husband spent time caring for her and she came to realise that he was actually quite a decent man; later she described him as ‘a man in a million’. Naffese’s long journey from her happy childhood near Simla ended running a shop in Nottingham but she was, finally, happy.10 Abdul Haq, the boy who had escaped from the jatha in Jullundur in the week after partition came to Leeds in 1961 where he discovered he had a surviving elder brother. He married and enjoyed a happier second half of his life until his wife died in 1997, when the old feelings of loneliness and despair returned.11
In the Vale of Kashmir the fighting, which had died down after the Indian Army had retaken Baramulla, flared up again in early December as what remained of the lashkar regrouped and counter-attacked Uri. Srinagar appeared to be once more under threat. Political talks continued. Mountbatten refereed a further session between Nehru and Liaquat on 9 December. The same arguments were rehearsed. Both sides agreed to a plebiscite but Pakistan wanted all Indian troops withdrawn before it took place and Sheikh Abdullah to be removed. Nehru again refused. Mountbatten suggested that the UN be approached to organise the plebiscite. Both countries would make a joint request for intervention. Nehru refused, saying it had nothing to do with Pakistan. Grudgingly, he was slowly coaxed into agreeing. However, while the application was being prepared, news came that Uri was about to fall and that the Indian garrison at Jhangar, a town on the Jhelum and close to the border south-west of Poonch, had to be evacuated. Nehru threatened war. ‘The only inference to draw from this is that the invasion of Kashmir is not an accidental affair resulting from the fanaticism or exuberance of the tribesmen but a well-organised business with the backing of the state. The present objective is Kashmir.’ He continued, ‘The next declared objective is Patiala, East Punjab and Delhi. On to Delhi is the cry all over West Punjab’. It was Nehru at his most emotional but threats to invade West Punjab were not made lightly and the Indian military were instructed to prepare plans. Mountbatten asked Attlee to come out urgently and mediate. Attlee refused saying, sensibly, there was very little he could do.
India’s application to the UN was now made alone and under Article 35, the one that allows member states to represent against another state threatening international peace. It called on Pakistan to end its aggression against India. Luckily the Indian garrison at Uri held and, as the renewed threat to Srinagar faded, the Indian chiefs of staff put down their planning maps of the Punjab, at least for the time being. The UN’s reaction to India’s request was not what they had been anticipating; the Security Council favoured the Pakistan position, which was to call for a neutral administrati
on. Senator Warren Austin, the US representative, ‘made no bones about his sympathy for the Pakistan case’, complained Nehru, ‘Mr. Noel Baker, the leader of the United Kingdom Delegation, had been nearly as hostile to India except he had been more polite and had wrapped up his phrases in more careful language’.12 He now bitterly regretted approaching the UN at all. As December drew to its close there was no material progress towards a solution in Kashmir; there would not be in the lifetime of anyone who took part in those early negotiations. In January 1949 the United Nations would deploy an Observer Mission to Kashmir. It would still be there sixty-eight years later.
The only other state that had not acceded, Hyderabad, continued to prevaricate. Walter Monckton shuttled between the Nizam’s court and Delhi. Well paid as he was, his position was not an easy one. Patel was determined that Hyderabad would form part of India. Any idea that such a large and relatively prosperous state with a majority Hindu population in the centre of India should form part of Pakistan was unacceptable. He was, however, prepared to discuss some flexibility in the arrangements under which that integration would happen. The Nizam, on the other hand, remained determined that he would become independent. He was not altogether a free agent and power in Hyderabad was increasingly in the hands of the new president of his council, Mir Laik Ali, and a hard-line Muslim elite. They saw any concession to India as ‘spelling the end of their privileged position’.13 They were supported by an increasingly extreme militia, the Razakars, drawn from the Ittihad-ul-Muslimeen organisation, who demanded that all recruits swear, ‘In the name of Allah, I hereby promise that I will fight to the last to maintain the supremacy of Muslim power in the Deccan’.14 Laik Ali calculated that the Indian government had its hands too full with Kashmir to take any action against Hyderabad. In December 1947 he was correct. The negotiations dragged on into 1948. They were ‘for the most part wearisome, repetitive and frustrating’.15 They ended in failure and once Nehru and Patel felt Kashmir had stabilised, if only temporarily, they moved. In September 1948, amid riots in Secunderabad and rumours of a gun-running operation from Pakistan, an Indian Army task force under General Chaudhuri conducted the most inappropriately named Operation Polo and invaded Hyderabad. There were 800 casualties, mostly among the Nizam’s forces. They would have been considerably higher had Chaudhuri’s men not captured early on one of the Nizam’s officers en route to order the demolition of the bridges they would have to advance across. It was the third time India had used military force to achieve accession.
There was one more development between Patel and the States that December and one which indicated how Indian policy would develop. Patel, with V. P. Menon once more acting as his henchman, determined to start integrating the smaller states into viable administrative units or, more controversially, simply to merge them into their neighbouring provinces. He started with the group known as the Eastern States of Orissa and Chattisgarh, forty-one mostly minor states, which bordered Orissa or the Central Provinces. Only two of these had a population of more than a million – Bastar and Mayurbhanj – and they were mostly poor and undeveloped. On 14 December their rulers were invited to gather at Nagpur. Here, with Menon cajoling them and in direct contradiction of both Patel’s own statement of 5 July and Mountbatten’s speech to the Chamber of Princes on 25 July, they signed away their independence and all powers of government in exchange for a tax-free privy purse, retention of their personal property and various other privileges. Their territories were now administered by the Indian government.
Patel was also concerned that what had happened in Kashmir might be repeated in the states which bordered East Bengal. The circumstances in Tripura, a state of about half a million people with a Hindu ruler but a large Muslim majority population, were similar. It was almost an island in East Bengal through which all its communications ran. Its population and, interestingly, its Hindu chief minister, wanted to join Pakistan but the maharajah, a thirteen-gun ruler, had acceded to India. Patel wanted to send troops to stop any possible secessionist moves but there were no aircraft to get them there, despite Tripura having a well-established airport at Agartala. The Assam government was asked whether they could provide troops but the Assam Rifles were one of the units that still had mostly British officers so could not be sent. Eventually the trouble calmed down which, for Tuker, still running Eastern Command, was a relief; Agartala was hard against the border of East Bengal and within thirty miles of a large Pakistani garrison.
Tuker was also concerned about Darjeeling, the famous tea-growing area in the hills north of Calcutta, which Liaquat had been so angry had not been assigned to Pakistan. Patel was afraid that the local hill tribes would rise up and take control; again he wanted to send troops but again it proved impossible to get them there. Although the situation remained tense, nothing actually happened and Indian control was not disputed.
Early in 1948 Patel and Menon turned their attention to the west-coast states in a continuing process of integration that would see the eastern states model repeated across India. By May 1948 the princes had lost the power they had been promised they would keep and, in 1971, Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, Indian prime minister, would remove their privy purses and their remaining privileges. It was, to people who thought like Nehru and Patel, inevitable. For them, and the remorseless anti-monarchical rationale of the late-twentieth century, princely power had no place in a democratic India. Many in that older, deeper India, which politicians so often fail to see, were not so convinced. In March 2017 the Maharajah of Patiala was elected with an overwhelming majority as chief minister of the Punjab.
India that December was not just a nation reeling from the shock of the tragedy of the Punjab and the breakdown of relations with Pakistan. It was also a country establishing itself uncertainly as a nation. Grumpy ex-Raj types would complain that nothing worked in those early months. Railways ran ‘to any time they pleased’ and it was quicker to send an internal letter via England than trust the local post.16 Food prices were worryingly high. The truth was very little had been working properly for some time, as Kirpalani had discovered when he attempted to set up his new ministry in Delhi. The new Indian government was not just confronted with transferring the administration from the British but in many cases actually starting it from scratch.
British attitudes varied sharply. Tuker thought that most British officers who had remained in Indian service were disillusioned by December and felt they were not valued. ‘The British officer’s greatest enemy was depression’, he wrote gloomily. ‘This was born of a knowledge of failure – failure to produce anything of permanent value in India – the knowledge of a life wasted, the blank future before him; his own wrecked career and personal difficulties.’ The British government was, he felt, unsympathetic and even charged customs duties on what little returning officers possessed. ‘It took a very optimistic and determined officer to remain happy and balanced through all his troubles.’17
Others took a more positive view. Ann Wright, the daughter of a senior ICS officer and who had been away at school in Europe during the worst of 1947, regarded India as home. It did not occur to her that she might leave. She would always stay on, in Calcutta and Delhi, taking a particular interest in conservation and pioneering game reserves. She remembered her acute embarrassment when a young Indian ICS officer was posted to her father’s remote district in the Central Provinces. He came to live in their house. Despite there being only a handful of British around, the poor young man was still refused membership of the local club, effectively cutting him off from all relaxation. For people like her, the post-Raj generation, India is a nation defined by your allegiance rather than what you were born. She still lives in Delhi today.18
John Christie enjoyed the new-found freedom and lack of stuffiness. He left the ICS, taking a job running a Chamber of Commerce in Delhi and later as managing director of a company in Cawnpore. For eleven years he and his family would ‘taste the freedom of India’, enjoying ‘happy and stimulating days in Delhi�
�. He thought that the fact that a few people like him stayed on helped restore some confidence in the British–Indian relationship, which had been so shaken by ‘the appalling aftermath of partition’. He was, like many, gratifyingly surprised that there was hardly any anti-British feeling. Delhi, he felt, changed markedly. First, the influx of refugees brought, despite an associated misery and depression, a new group of people to energise a society where the Raj had previously dominated. Secondly, the arrival of a diplomatic corps gave India international exposure and, thirdly, he and his family felt they could now meet and socialise with Indian women, something that had not happened under the Raj. Even the Gymkhana Club, the arch-preserve of the establishment, both British and Indian, admitted women. ‘Indian women’, Christie noted, ‘began to take their rightful place as hostesses and leaders of society in their own capital city whereby we all immeasurably benefitted’.19