THE MAKING OF EXILE

by NANDITA BHAVNANI

  Lila Shahani moved to Quetta in 1944, after her marriage to Bulo Kripalani, who had lived there since birth. In her account of the Quetta violence, Lila Kripalani describes how she, her husband and their small son received help from a Muslim, despite her suspicion of them.

  [In] 1947, news reached us that riots had started in Lahore. We heard about many people getting killed in these riots. Then there was news that Muslims from Lahore had arrived in Quetta and were armed with a list of the ten most prominent families in Quetta whom they were targeting. In that list was the name of Bulo Kripalani.

  One night, as we were returning from a party we had attended, we saw many people sleeping on the roads. Only later did we discover that those were not sleeping people, but corpses, dead people. Those were Hindus who had been killed by Muslim mobs. As we entered our home we found the house silent, which was very unusual. Even our four servants, strangely, were not to be found in attendance. Our neighbour came to warn us that there was a danger to our family.

  Bulo immediately donned the Baluchi cap and since he had the tall look of a Pathan he easily passed off as a Muslim Baluchi. When he saw the mob approaching our house Bulo went out wearing the Baluchi cap. They said to him, ‘Allah o Akbar! Allah o Akbar! Maaro Hindu ko! Kahan hai woh khabees? [Kill the Hindu! Where is that bad person?]’; they spoke in Pushto. Thinking on his feet, Bulo smiled and answered triumphantly, ‘Usko to maar dala! [I have killed him.]’ Convinced by his attire and triumphant smile, they left him but they killed two of our four staff, and injured two of them.

  Near our home, there was a very good lawyer, Mr. Lalchandani, who had a home right on the street. Many Hindu families had moved to his house because it was easy to escape from and make a quick getaway in case of an attack. […] I was dressed in party clothes and had nothing else with me. The military arranged three passes for [us] the next day and we were to be transported in a truck to the racecourse where all the fleeing Hindus were being kept under military protection. One lady asked me to take her 10-year-old along with me because she didn’t want him to stay back. Since we had only three passes, Bulo and I had to lie and say there had been some mistake, that we had two children, not one, and that the authorities had erred by leaving one child’s name out. They believed us and we took the child with us. At the racecourse, we handed over the child to his relative. Then I requested an army man to shelter us and the man had tears in his eyes as he turned to his wife. ‘See, they have come, here you were complaining that nobody is coming to us for shelter and now she has come!’ He made his canteen available to us and gave us a very comfortable stay in his home.

  My parents lived in Karachi, next door to [the Mohattas.]13 They had attended my wedding earlier and they remembered that I was now living in Quetta. They were sending a plane to Quetta to bring back one of their employees who was operating their office in Quetta. [Mr. Mohatta] asked my mother if my family and I would like to fly down to Karachi along with their manager, since the aircraft would be returning only with him and would have space for the three of us. […]

  But we somehow had to reach the airport. Bulo didn’t even have a proper shirt, so he borrowed a shirt from our host and then we took a gaadi, a horse-carriage. I realised that a Muslim was driving and I was frightened so all through the journey I kept my hand firmly on the door latch, ready to escape in case he tried anything. He saw me tense and turned around and said very kindly, ‘Amma (Mother) don’t worry, I will reach you to the airport.’ He drove so fast, very fast, so that we could make it for the deadline and we reached at 12.30 pm, well in time. When we offered him the fare for the ride, he point-blank refused. He said that it was wrong to accept a fare under those conditions. I was touched and felt ashamed, how could I have mistrusted him?14

  According to their daughter, Sonu Kripalani, Lila could not even take her jewellery with her. When they were being taken by truck to the racecourse, their dog ran after the vehicle for quite a distance, but unfortunately, they were unable to take their pet with them when they left Quetta. Lila and Bulo Kripalani flew to Karachi, and subsequently sailed to Bombay, where they spent the rest of their lives.15

  A significant number of Quetta’s Hindus were originally from Sindh, and now there was an exodus out of Baluchistan and into their home province. In two days’ time, Quetta city was cleared of its minorities, who were then shifted to the cantonment, where they were in relatively greater safety. Most of them were unable to leave Quetta for three days, since the railway lines between Quetta and Kolpur, some miles away, had been sabotaged. Two aircrafts were chartered from Karachi, however, to help evacuate the Hindus and Sikhs.

  Dr Choithram Gidwani rushed to Quetta to meet Sindhi Hindus and help with their evacuation. By early September, two-thirds of Quetta’s minorities – which had originally been in the vicinity of about 27,000 – had left the city, and some of them were looted on their journey eastwards. A large number of these Hindus and Sikhs – both Sindhi and Punjabi – proposed to migrate to India, and so they were taken by train to Hyderabad (Sindh), where a temporary camp had been set up for them. From Hyderabad, they took other trains to India, as also to Karachi, from where they sailed to Bombay.

  There was great sympathy for these refugees among the Hindus living in Sindh, and during their journey from Quetta to Hyderabad, down the length of Sindh, arrangements for food and refreshments for the refugees were made at each principal station where their train stopped, such as Shikarpur and Sukkur, not to mention Hyderabad itself. At these places, the refugees’ accounts of what they had witnessed only served to amplify panic among the Hindus living there. This triggered off another, lesser migration – from Sindh to India – mainly of middle class Sindhi Hindus in these cities as well as of non-Muslims living in Karachi who hailed from outside Sindh, such as Kutchis, Kathiawaris, Marwaris, Maharashtrians, Punjabis and Goans.

  The Start of Communal Violence in Sindh

  The violence in Quetta was followed, in the last days of August 1947, by attacks on Sindhi Hindus – generally individuals travelling alone or in twos and threes – in trains in Northern Sindh, mostly at night. The main motive behind the attacks appears to have been robbery, since their belongings were forcibly taken from them, and the victims – about 30 in total – were knifed and/or thrown from the train. A few were killed, some injured. (Not many days later, several suspects, including a Christian and a Sikh, were arrested.)

  Manohar Bhambhani was a small boy in 1947, living in Northern Sindh. After Partition, he and his family headed for Karachi, from where they were to sail to Bombay. Bhambhani recalls the train journey from Sukkur to Karachi:

  I had my first encounter with riots in the train. The train had just about started from Sukkur that two burly men in shalwar kameez tried to force their way into the compartment, but since they couldn’t get in through the locked door, they threw two knives, of the Rampuri kind, into the compartment from the window. Mercifully, we escaped. At night, at almost every halt, somebody banged on our door and shouted threats to us, saying that if we did not open the door they would kill us, by setting the compartment on fire. This was a complete nightmare for me, an experience I will never forget.16

  It is worth remembering that Sindh has had a long history of crime, dating back many centuries.17 By the end of the 19th century, the rate of crime in Sindh was almost double that in the rest of Bombay Presidency.18 Crime in Sindh – especially kidnappings, dacoities and highway robberies – continues at a high rate to the present day.

  With many Hindus liquidating their considerable assets, it was not surprising that thefts and robberies increased; these crimes were not always motivated by communal hatred. Yet it is likely that anti-Hindu sentiment did play some role in these crimes, with Sindhi Hindus perceived to be more vulnerable. In early September 1947, the temple at the town of Uderolal, in Southern Sindh, was attacked by dacoits, who shot the priest and made off with the gold ornaments of the deity. Later the same month, this scenario was replicated at the Shiva temple at
Tirth Laki near Sehwan.

  On the heels of these attacks on Hindus, in temples and in trains across Sindh, came communal violence in the Central Sindh town of Nawabshah and its adjoining areas.

  There had been a large number of Punjabi Sikhs settled in the Nawabshah area. The arrival of throngs of disgruntled Muslims from East Punjab had perturbed the Hindus and Sikhs living there, who had made requests to the authorities for additional security. However, the district magistrate of Nawabshah was a Punjabi Muslim called Masud, who had acquired a reputation for both highhandedness as well as extreme prejudice against Hindus, and according to several narratives, he allegedly instigated and abetted the perpetrators of violence so as to create lebensraum for the Muslim refugees from East Punjab.19 According to one account, when local Hindus and Sikhs came to Masud with their complaints and fears, he even demanded a sum of Rs 1,00,000 from them, for the relief and rehabilitation of muhajirs arrived in the area, claiming that ‘the collection of this amount was an indispensable factor in the task of the maintenance of peace of the district’.20

  According to one account, a 150-strong armed mob attacked a Sikh colony in the middle of the night of 30 August. With the Sikhs fleeing for their lives, there were not many casualties, but several houses were looted and set on fire.21 These Sikhs were targeted simply because Punjabi Sikhs had played a very visible role in the recent carnage in East Punjab.

  Given the anti-Sikh hostility prevailing among the muhajirs, many Sikhs started migrating from Sindh to India. On 1 September 1947, some Sikhs boarded a train from Nawabshah to Khokhrapar, and onwards, to India. The train was stopped 20 minutes after it had left Nawabshah. According to one account, an armed mob of 200 had tampered with the rails near Shafiabad, 15 kms from Nawabshah, and once the train was forced to stop, the mob, which had been hiding in bushes nearby, emerged to attack the Sikhs on the train. Between 15 to 20 Sikhs were killed, and their belongings looted, and about 17 Sikhs were injured.22 In 1947, Narayan Malkani and his Hyderabad-based family had gathered in his brother’s house at Mirpur Khas in Southern Sindh before migrating to India. His brother worked as a guard on the Jodhpur railway, and had been on the same train that had been attacked, but was lucky to have survived. Narayan Malkani recalls that his brother brought the train to Mirpur Khas and then came home, his clothes drenched in blood.23

  This was followed by several incidents of violence in Nawabshah town and district, which left about 35 dead and 25 injured – most of the casualties were from the Sikh community.24 In the north too, there were stray incidents around Sukkur, which had a reputation for inflamed communal passion. In the Punjab, meanwhile, communal violence continued to rage, and the Pakistan government, preoccupied with containing the situation, was obliged to postpone the next session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, scheduled for October 1947, to the first week of December.

  The communal violence in Nawabshah was followed by a string of knife attacks in Karachi in early September. These were again scattered incidents allegedly perpetrated by muhajirs; several of the victims were Sikhs. This violence occurred in the wake of the recent anti-Muslim violence in Delhi.

  On 7 September, about 500 junior Pakistan government employees – mostly muhajirs – called on Jinnah at Government House to protest against the recent violence in Delhi and to plead for the safe passage to Pakistan of their relatives who still remained in India. Jinnah, however, was busy hosting a reception for the Sultan of Kuwait, and Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan tried in vain to pacify the government employees. After the reception, Jinnah appeared at his balcony for a few minutes and addressed the crowd, assuring them that the government was doing its best. On their way home, the crowd attacked a local bus in the city and a few cigarette shops; they did not attack individuals however. Soon after, however, attacks on individual Sikhs and Hindus began in Karachi. Curfew was imposed in Karachi for the first time in living memory. By now there were more than 11,000 muhajirs in Karachi, half of whom were in large refugee camps, and the rest scattered throughout the city.

  Delhi

  If Karachi had been a Hindu-dominated city before Partition, Delhi was considered a ‘Muslim’ city. Capital of the Mughal empire, it was the bastion of elite Muslim culture and the cream of Muslim society. It was in this city – the capital of a supposedly secular India – that Muslims were attacked, looted, killed, driven out of their homes in the early days of September 1947. Muslim houses and mosques were vandalised and/or forcibly occupied. In some areas, Dalits were threatened by organised Hindu and Sikh militants to deter them from giving protection to their Muslim neighbours. The local police and military proved to be quite prejudiced against Muslims and therefore watched passively or sometimes even took an active part in the violence.25

  Ostensibly, the pogrom against Muslims in Delhi was perpetrated as retaliation by Hindu and Sikh refugees who had suffered violence in their home province of Punjab and had now flooded Delhi.26 However, a major motivation for this violence was housing for the incoming refugees. According to Sahibzada Khurshid, the chief commissioner of Delhi, the large-scale arson that was carried out for two to three days only ceased when Hindus occupied Muslim houses. According to the historians, Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, almost 44,000 Muslim houses were occupied in Old Delhi alone.27

  Thousands of Muslims were now obliged to take refuge in the many camps that sprang up all over the city. There were estimated to be between 62,000 and 80,000 refugees at one time in the camp at Purana Qila which, in the words of Dr Zakir Hussain, the future president of India, was a ‘living grave’. The Purana Qila camp, meant for Muslim refugees, was treated for a while as the responsibility of the Pakistan government (which even sent food from Pakistan for a while), while the Indian government ran another camp for Muslims at Humayun’s tomb. Various narratives assert that the Indian government paid far more attention to camps meant for Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Pakistan than it did to camps for Muslims headed for Pakistan.

  It became impossible for many of these Delhi Muslims to return to their homes even after the violence had abated. The Indian government declared the forcible occupation of Muslim houses by Hind and Sikh refugees illegal, but being partisan towards the latter, it also declared that ‘no (non-Muslim) refugee would be evicted for illegal occupation without being provided with alternative accommodation.’ The majority of the Muslims in the Purana Qila camp ultimately left India for Pakistan.28

  About those who remained, Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi, then a resident of Delhi, says:

  The Muslims of Delhi lived in fear… They trusted no one and spoke in whispers, constantly on the lookout for “informers”. Muslims were considered anti-national. Large numbers had been, and were being, arrested. Seeking to hide their Muslimness, some – especially younger – men had shaved off their beards. The few Muslim shopkeepers still in business tried to protect themselves by hiring Hindu/Sikh agents and workers. It was difficult to breathe freely.29

  In the context of Hindu and Sikh refugees in Delhi, the historian Gyanendra Pandey remarks on the double standards in society, of a privileged ‘ruling class’ celebrating Independence and a newly arrived ‘refugee class’ unable to do so. Pandey further talks of a third class, that of the resident minority: ‘a whole community [that had come] to feel defenceless, isolated and increasingly suffocated.’30

  Maintaining Law and Order

  It was in the context of the terrible anti-Muslim violence in Delhi and in other parts of Independent India that the Sindh government took swift steps to staunch the communal violence that had begun in Sindh. Armed guards were posted both on trains as well as at stations, to deter trouble-makers at the railways, a popular target. A bill was passed to provide for the externment of any non-Sindhi creating communal trouble in the province. District authorities banned the carrying of weapons of all kinds and prohibited the collection of acids, stones, etc. Premier Khuhro, as well as other prominent Sindhi Muslim politicians, made several tours of the Sindhi hinterland to assess con
ditions; these Muslim leaders, including Governor Hidayatullah, addressed peace conferences, reassuring the Hindus of their safety. The firm stance of the Sindh government against violence played a significant role in its mitigation.

  While the violence against Sikhs and Hindus in Nawabshah, and the scattered stabbings in Karachi and across Sindh were no doubt grave, Punjab had experienced a bloodbath. Since March 1947, there had been anti-minority pogroms in numerous villages and cities across that province, with each cycle of communal violence reaching new depths of barbarity. Foot convoys and refugees in trains – travelling in both directions – had been butchered. Women had been abducted, raped and sold into prostitution. In contrast, the communal violence in Sindh was of a relatively lower magnitude and intensity.

  Several personal narratives about Partition, as well as newspapers from 1947 – The Times of India and Free Press Journal, for example – refer frequently to ‘lawlessness’ in conjunction with ‘communal violence’. The term ‘lawlessness’ meant more than merely the commitment of crimes such as murder, rioting, arson, rape or abduction. It signified the breakdown of law and order as society knew it, a form of anarchy: a perceived state of mind in which acts previously proscribed by law, religion, or custom could become possible. As Ashis Nandy describes it, it signified: ‘not only a collapse of authority but also an apparent suspension of traditional codes of conduct […]’31

  Penderel Moon, an Oxford scholar, an ex-ICS officer, and, at that time, the revenue and public works minister in the princely state of Bahawalpur, describes this collapse of authority as: