India

by John Keay

  In a land of limited opportunity but boundless importunity the keeping of trysts and the redeeming of pledges could seem irrelevant; so could the sudden switch from bitter antagonism to mutual applause. Elsewhere a less self-conscious history was being made. Often more instructive and always more harrowing, it had a way of sabotaging noble sentiments and exploding grand creations, showing scant regard for the old or the new, let alone that ‘rare moment’ which distinguishes them.

  In 1943, like an uninvited guest from the past, famine had swept through large parts of lower Bengal. Scarcity during this bleakest period of the war had been expected. Rice imports from Burma had ceased with that country’s occupation by the Japanese; domestic food-grains were in great demand for the military build-up in eastern India; and hoarding had resulted. Additionally, rail freight was being commandeered by the armed forces while Bengal’s riverine shipping had been largely requisitioned for fear of its use by Japanese infiltrators. Yet the shortfall in food-grains was not great, and with foresight, rationing, better distribution and vigorous action against black-market hoarding, it should never have come to famine. It was a failure of personnel as much as anything. When in July the walking dead began straggling into Calcutta to expire on the streets, Linlithgow was looking forward to England, leaving India, as he rashly put it, ‘in pretty good shape’. Bengal, too, had just had a change of government; the returning Muslim League ministry was shaky and inexperienced. Worst of all, the British governor of the province, to whom ample powers were reserved for just such a crisis, was supine and very sick.

  Between July and November the famine raged almost unchecked. When in October the just-installed Wavell visited the affected areas, he acknowledged ‘one of the worst disasters that has befallen any people under British rule’. He was not exaggerating. Famine fatalities are notoriously unreliable; in this case the totals range from two million to four million. But even if the lower figure is accepted, the famine still killed more Indians than did two world wars, the entire Independence struggle, plus the communal holocaust which accompanied Partition. ‘Direct British rule had begun with a Bengal famine in 1770; it was now drawing to a close with a comparable calamity.’10

  At the time, with Congress banned and its leaders in gaol following the ‘Quit India’ movement, many of Bengal’s Hindu bhadralok had temporarily switched their support to the extremist Hindu party known as the Mahasabha. For the famine the Mahasabha, as was its wont, unhesitatingly blamed the Muslim League, accusing it of exploiting the disaster to obtain a monopoly of the lucrative distribution of relief. The League, on the other hand, blamed the hoarding and profiteering of the mainly Hindu grain-dealers. Out of famine, as out of other forms of agrarian and industrial distress (like recession in the jute industry), communal hatred was born.

  But Hindu – Muslim, or ‘communal’, violence was not inevitable. According to leftist historians, had the Congress leadership been less bent on a quick transfer of power at any price, both Partition and the communal massacres which it prompted might have been avoided. In November 1945 the British had brought to trial in Delhi three members of Subhas Chandra Bose’s INA. (Bose himself had died in a plane crash a few weeks earlier.) One of the accused was a Sikh, the second a Muslim and the third a Hindu, the idea being to avoid the accusation of discriminating against any particular community. The nationalist response partook of the same even-handedness. On behalf of the accused, student protesters in Calcutta, then mutineers from ships of the Royal Indian Navy at Bombay and Karachi, rallied beneath the green flags of Islam, the red of the communists and socialists, and the tricolour of Congress. It was a fine display of communal harmony to which labour unions and other civilian groups enthusiastically lent their support.

  Confrontations with police and troops followed. The naval mutiny was particularly menacing and brought British threats to bomb the disaffected ships, plus a high-level Congress mission under Vallabhai Patel to talk sense to the mutineers. Congress leaders, although strident in their support of the INA men, had been taken by surprise and were severely embarrassed. As the prospect of a negotiated settlement neared, militant protest was no longer welcome. It undermined the authority of the negotiators and destabilised the institutions of the state to which they expected to succeed.

  More of what nationalist histories call ‘these upsurges’ had followed. In Bengal in April 1946, following a period of direct rule by the governor, new provincial elections returned another Muslim League ministry in Calcutta. It was headed by Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, who as Minister for Civil Supplies in 1943 had been held principally responsible for the inept famine relief programme. In August Suhrawardy responded to Jinnah’s call for a Direct Action Day (following the collapse of the Cabinet Mission proposals) and proclaimed a public holiday. The police too, he implied, would take the day off. Muslims, rallying en masse for speeches and processions, saw this as an invitation; they began looting and burning such Hindu shops as remained open. Arson gave way to murder, and the victims struck back. During three days of unchecked mayhem some four thousand Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus died in what became known as the Calcutta Killings. In October the riots spread to parts of East Bengal and also to UP and Bihar, where the death toll was even higher. Nehru wrung his hands in horror; ‘a madness has seized the people,’ he reported. Gandhi rushed to the scene, heroically progressing through the devastated communities to preach reconciliation and to ‘wipe every tear from every eye’. There followed a lull, but by March 1947 the first signs of a new ‘madness’ were detected in both Calcutta and, much more ominously, in the Panjab.

  Although for Nehru the Partition of India was a tragedy, for Jinnah it was a necessity. The tragedy in Jinnah’s eyes lay in the partition of Bengal and the Panjab. To connect these two provinces he had once argued for a Pakistan corridor running right through UP and Bihar. Failing that, he had insisted that Bengal and Panjab must be transferred to Pakistan in their entirety, since a Pakistan which, as well as being divided by UP and Bihar, excluded Hindu-majority areas in the eastern Panjab and western Bengal (Calcutta itself amongst them) would be but ‘a shadow and a husk’. In the final negotiations, when the choice left to him was indeed between this ‘maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan’ or no Pakistan at all, he still could not bring himself to accept it. At the crucial meeting, unable to say yes, he had just inclined his head. It was taken to be a nod of assent, but he could as well have been placing his head on the block.

  In Bengal the job of dissecting majority Muslim areas from majority non-Muslim areas was comparatively straightforward. Curzon had already shown the way; and Gandhi, following the Calcutta Killings of 1946, continued to make Bengal his personal responsibility. There would be a massive exodus of refugees in both directions, and great economic dislocation. Without Calcutta and the more industrialised regions of West Bengal, East Bengal looked like what one British official had called ‘a rural slum’; without the agricultural yield of East Bengal, Calcutta’s mills fell silent. But, as if exhausted by the earlier killings, there was comparatively little blood-letting.

  It was otherwise in the Panjab. Here, thanks to British recruitment preferences, all communities had strong military connections and cherished martial traditions. The Muslims of the Panjab, unlike the mostly lower-caste converts of East Bengal, included descendants of long-converted rajput tribes (Bhatti, Ghakkar, etc.) and of the Turks, Mongols and Afghans who had so often traversed the region. The Hindus of the Panjab, mostly Jats and Dogras, were reckoned no less ‘sturdy’, whether as aggressive agriculturalists or indomitable infantrymen. And the Sikhs, the third dimension in the Panjab’s communal equation, provided some two-fifths of the entire Indian army and constituted the most militant religious brotherhood on the subcontinent. Though a majority in very few areas, the Sikhs were fairly evenly spread throughout the province which they regarded both as their religious homeland and as the core of Sikh ‘empire’.

  The first troubles in the Panjab broke out in early 1947. Althou
gh the Muslim League had made sensational gains in the 1946 elections, a coalition ministry cobbled together by remnants of the old Unionist Party with Sikh and Congress support denied it power. The League therefore launched a programme of civil disobedience and brought down the ministry in March 1947. Sikhs, who had most to lose from the Panjab becoming Pakistani, responded by demanding their own ‘Sikhistan’. There were riots in many of the main cities and by August the death toll had risen to about five thousand. But by then the Sikhs, following reassurances from Congress about their status within what would become India’s slice of the Panjab, had accepted the inevitability of partition. There was no lull in the violence, but official anxieties, British as well as Indian, were seemingly allayed.

  The new boundary, drawn up in great haste by a League – Congress commission under the chairmanship of an English judge (Sir Cyril Radcliffe), was not announced until after the Independence celebrations. The Sikhs had demanded that the line of Partition, whilst dividing the majority non-Muslim East Panjab from the majority Muslim West Panjab, make exceptions for sites and shrines important to them by virtue of religious and historical associations. Thus, for instance, Lahore, Ranjit Singh’s erstwhile capital, should not simply be allocated to Pakistan because its population was predominantly Muslim. In fact the Boundary Commission made no such allowances. Demography alone was decisive; Lahore went to Pakistan.

  Anticipating a massive influx of co-religionists. Sikhs in the east began expelling non-Sikhs and appropriating their lands in early August. A response to earlier Muslim expulsions in the west, this merely provoked more of the same. The announcement of the actual boundary on 17 August lent a cutthroat urgency to the tit-for-tat. The flow of refugees became a flood; word of atrocities, rapes and mass killings brought the inevitable retaliations. As the violence escalated, ghost trains chuffed silently across the new frontier carrying nothing but corpses. In the ‘land of the five rivers’ the waters ran with blood and the roads ran with mangled migrants. The twenty thousand troops who materialised to police the transfer proved at best ineffective, at worst infected by the madness. ‘Of one convoy that recently arrived,’ reported the still-British governor of West Panjab to readers of The Times, ‘over one thousand who had struggled on till they reached the frontier-post just laid down and died. They could go no further. The road was littered with corpses for miles.’11

  For many communities, self-definition was as untidy and implausible as territorial definition. The Meo or Mewati people of the desert fringes south of Delhi had long combined Islamic practices with devotion to Lords Ram and Krishna. Although few supported the Muslim League or knew of Jinnah, they were fair game for their Hindu Jat and Rajput neighbours, who in 1947 massacred and dispossessed them. Cries for help from places like Gurgaon and Rewari, that today bristle with call centres, went unheeded. The Meos accordingly headed en masse for Pakistan, only to be there stigmatised as infidel Hindus. Thousands then trekked back to Delhi and a very uncertain future when the killings subsided.

  In Bengal the new frontier stayed open well into the 1950s. Traversing a skein of wayward rivers and shifting islands, it was hard to police and far from impermeable. Here the movement of population was spread over a longer period and allowed for second thoughts and multi-stage migrations. Some fugitives – called ‘optees’ rather than ‘refugees’ in Bengal – returned, then re-emigrated, then re-returned. Muslims from Bihar uprooted by the massacres of 1946 had first sought refuge in Calcutta. Driven from there by the 1947 partition of Bengal, they fled to Dacca; and from there in 1971 they were re-exiled as non-Bengalis and supposed Pakistani sympathisers when Bangladesh was constituted. After protracted negotiations most of them were eventually packed off to Karachi. For some the odyssey continued with emigration to the UK; others still languish in refugee camps. Partition’s ramifications are still being felt. At the time its implications were so unclear that in 1949 Huseyn Suhrawardy could see nothing strange in representing East Bengal in Pakistan’s Karachi assembly while still residing at the family residence in Indian Calcutta.

  In all, east to west and west to east, perhaps ten million fled for their lives in the greatest exodus in recorded history. The killings spread to Delhi itself where non-Muslims, who a few days earlier had been amongst the throng so cheerfully hailing Independence, hailing Nehru and Mountbatten, now turned on their Muslim neighbours with knife and club. The higher the death toll, the wilder the estimates. Two hundred thousand at least, possibly as many as a million, were massacred between August and October in the Panjab partition and associated riots. But as with the famine, the earlier killings in Bengal and Bihar, and other such ‘upsurges’, the names of the victims went unrecorded, their numbers uncounted. Unprepared and overwhelmed, neither of the new nations could do more than feed the living. Meanwhile Mountbatten, ‘determined to keep clear of the whole business’,12 as he put it, had washed his hands of the Panjab and headed for the hills. The history-makers looked the other way.

  20

  Surgical Procedures

  1948–1965

  WHO HAS NOT HEARD OF THE VALE OF CASHMERE?

  FOR THE NATIONS OF the Indian subcontinent, as for the rest of the colonial world, the twentieth century peaked at Independence. Triumph in the freedom struggle brought its expected rewards – self-determination, international recognition, more accountable government and a new pride of purpose. But the subsequent enjoyment of these rewards, the constraints encountered in their exercise and the means taken to safeguard them produced half a century of erratic progress marred by internal discord and mutual aggression. In both of the successor states – and all three after 1971 – prime ministers were assassinated and constitutions suspended. India and Pakistan fought three wars in as many decades, then left a nuclear fourth well within the bounds of possibility. And all governments repeatedly felt obliged to deploy their military might against their own subjects. Looking back, the century’s first fifty years of struggle and sacrifice seem more admirable than the last fifty years. Wisdom and energy have not been lacking, nor achievement. It is just that the horrors that accompanied Independence, the hatreds they stirred and the fears they fuelled are still capable of generating suspicion and triggering violence. The Partition of the subcontinent remains unfinished business.

  Such was the impact of Partition, both politically and psychologically, that it came to be regarded as the century’s defining event, a periodising landmark worthy of a capital letter just like ‘Independence’. Indeed the currency of the term ‘post-Partition India’ soon eclipsed that of ‘post-Independence India’. For many, an experience so catastrophic had, like Hiroshima or the Holocaust, to be constantly recalled and re-emphasised if it was not to be repeated. For others, its grim logic of two irreconcilable communities had to be pursued to the bitter end through further acts of provocation and assertion. Either way, Partition stalked the collective memory and still moulds the thinking of the entire subcontinent.

  ‘There are no full stops in India,’ declared Mark Tully in his 1991 collection of contemporary Indian parables.1 In a land better known for continuities and commas, the course of history was not so much halted by Partition’s clumsy punctuation as plagued by it. There was in fact a succession of partitions – that of all British India in 1947, that which immediately followed it of the erstwhile provinces of Panjab and Bengal, that in 1971 of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and that still unendorsed and hence ongoing of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. In addition to ‘partition’ – a decidedly flimsy term with a hint of impermanence about it – words like ‘vivisection’ (Gandhi’s coinage), ‘amputation’ (another Delhi favourite) and ‘surgical separation’ (as of conjoined twins – Pakistan’s preference) were freely bandied about. To Hindus it seemed as if Mother India had herself been ‘dismembered’, ‘violated’ and ‘disfigured’, just like the raped women and bayoneted children whom confessional zealots of both sides had regarded as soft targets. There were scars to prove the pertinence of such grisly imag
ery and they were as much personal as public. For the pen and the knife had sundered not just territory but cosy lives, promising careers, protective families, bosom friendships and interdependent communities. In bustling businesses, convivial common rooms, hallowed mess halls, dank prison cells and even the odd lunatic asylum the parting of the ways left gaping voids.

  More obviously the consequences of so many partitions, the reluctance to accept them and the fear of more dictated the foreign relations and slewed the economic development of both successor states. The risk of lesser partitions also haunted domestic politics and dominated the language of internal dissent. As if rocked by identical earth tremors, India and Pakistan would lurch from one separatist crisis to the next for fifty years.

  In October 1947 no sooner were the horrors of Panjab’s partition beginning to subside than the two countries found themselves at war over Kashmir. Each had assumed that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir would pledge allegiance to itself; anything less they regarded as secession; and since neither would compromise, there began the most protracted partition of all. In the weeks prior to Independence most of the princely states had acceded to the new Indian Union and were now being bundled into digestible entities, like Rajasthan, prior to being merged into the Union with the former provinces. The princes accepted these arrangements reluctantly and in return for generous personal allowances (or ‘privy purses’) plus various fiscal and civil privileges. Technically they could opt for either Pakistan or India, and the few princely states that lay west of the Panjab frontier did indeed join Pakistan. But the vast majority were within, or contiguous to, the new India and duly became part of it.

  Serious problems arose in respect of just three states. One, Junagadh in the Saurashtra peninsula of Gujarat, was too insignificant to provoke an international crisis. Predominantly Hindu, surrounded by Indian territory, proudly possessed of that Ashoka rock inscription at Girnar and once the home of the Sanskrit-loving Rudradaman and the brightly toed Maitrakas, little Junagadh was never going to be other than part of the new India. Nor, aside from his personal preference as a Muslim and his consequent declaration for Pakistan, was Junagadh’s ruler of a stature to give Congress and Vallabhai Patel, its strong-arm negotiator, too much trouble. At the time an estimated 11 per cent of Junagadh’s revenues were earmarked for the upkeep of the royal kennels where around 800 canine pensioners lived in a luxury denied to most of Junagadh’s other subjects. To the nuptials of a favourite golden retriever the prince is said to have invited 50,000 dog-loving guests, including the viceroy. His decision to declare in favour of Pakistan partook of a similar indifference to convention and, however piously intended, met with short shrift from Delhi. A show of strength duly sent him winging his way to Karachi with just four wagging companions and a like number of wives. Pakistan of course protested. Although unwilling to risk war on behalf of such a maverick, it continued to regard the state’s accession as legal – which it was. To this day maps printed in Pakistan record the fact with a little patch of green in the middle of Indian Gujarat. Less remembered is the role played in this affair by Shahnawaz Bhutto, the chief minister of Junagadh in 1947. Having encouraged the prince to accede to Pakistan, it was this Bhutto who, after his employer’s flight, cleared the way for Indian intervention. Twenty-four years later Shahnawaz’s son, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, would play a similarly ambivalent role in respect of East Bengal/Bangladesh.