The Great Partition

by Yasmin Khan

  Other Muslim groups, with different political attachments, felt aghast at the prospect of the new state. On the Afghan frontier, the Muslim Congress supporters felt an immediate sense of betrayal and Abdul Ghaffar Khan said, ‘the idea that we could be dominated by outsiders is beyond my comprehension’.33 The militant Muslim Khaksars violently rejected the plan, demanded the whole of Punjab and Bengal and ransacked the stately Imperial Hotel in Delhi, smashing glass and wreaking havoc, as nearly five hundred League legislators met to ratify the plan. One hundred or more were arrested as they tried to storm the hotel's staircase and the police fired tear gas to quell them.

  Accompanying the shocked reactions to the Partition plan, there was also the new date to be contemplated; freedom had been advanced from a vague time in 1948 to the definitive date of 15 August 1947. ‘Necessity for Speed’ was, in case anyone was in any doubt, one of the subheadings of the 3 June plan. The diary of Shahid Hamid, private secretary to Auchinleck at the time and later a major-general of the Pakistan army, reveals little ambivalence about the idea of Pakistan but total outrage at the manner with which the 3 June plan was delivered and the urgency with which freedom was granted: ‘It was a bombshell! I wonder what brought this last minute change? Does he [Mountbatten] realize its consequences? Why this hurry? Why this shock treatment? … Why is he bulldozing everything and leaving no time for an organized handover …’34 He also acknowledged that there was confusion about the plan in the army, even among commanding officers, and that some suspected that ‘the plan is some sort of trap’.35 Haji Moula Bux, a member of the Sindi Legislative Assembly who had stood against the League, reassured his followers in Karachi that a reunion of the two countries was absolutely inevitable within two years, ‘as sure as day follows night’.36

  Muslim Leaguers' thoughts now turned to what sort of country they wanted to build up. One Abul Quasem, a junior judge or munsif from Bengal, sent Jinnah his ‘Thoughts on Pakistan’. ‘To my mind it appears that we have not only not achieved Pakistan but our journey to the achievement of Pakistan has only begun and the way is full of dangers and pitfalls …’ he wrote.

  If Pakistan means majority rule of the Muslims, I would not much care or labour to have it as it was almost in our grip if we accepted the A.B.C. plan [i.e. the Cabinet Mission plan] with right of succession from the Centre … Thus let us not mistake what we are for. If Pakistan means a homeland for the Muslims to develop their manhood to the fullest stature according to Islamic ideals, traditions and cultures, I must give my all to achieve it and here would come the question of my vision, sacrifice and labour.37

  In not so many words, he was asking, what role will Islam play in the new state? Immediately Pakistan was declared a reality, the convenient ambiguities which had been used to glue the League together – hazy idealism and imaginative aspiration towards Islamic statehood – started to haunt the new country's leadership.

  Among non-Muslims, too, the same questions were in circulation. Was this a temporary or a lasting settlement? Even as it reluctantly accepted the partition, the All India Congress Committee simultaneously kept alive the older idea of the indivisible Mother India. ‘Geography and the mountains and the seas fashioned India as she is and no human agency can change that shape or come in the way of her final destiny,’ resolved the Congress at an emotional meeting where it accepted the Partition plan in June 1947. ‘The picture of India we have learnt to cherish will remain in our minds and hearts.’38 From the standpoint of many Congress-supporting Indians it was unthinkable that those parts of the country in the north-east and the north-west which became Pakistan should be cut away, and the nationalistic imaginings of India, as part religious goddess, part mother figure, meant this was a debate about more than territory.

  ‘I have lived and worked for freedom of India as a whole for the last 40 years,’ declared Dr Chothi Ram Gidwani, president of the Sind Provincial Congress Committee, ‘and today when [a] great many portions of India are as good as liberated, apart from other harmful effects of partition which need not be enumerated here, I cannot reconcile myself to the very conception of a divided India in which I become an alien in a great part of my own beloved motherland, and a citizen of a new Muslim theocratic state created overnight.’39 His speech in reaction to news of the 3 June plan typifies the horrified reaction among many Indian nationalists.

  All of this involved psychological adjustment. The nationalist map of ‘India’ – with territory reaching as far north as Afghanistan and as far south as Sri Lanka – was lodged firmly in the middle-class mind. This was a vast, sweeping picture of India as a continent rather than a country. Companies advertised by picturing their products against the silhouettes of Indian maps: they featured on everything ranging from lamps and tobacco to wristwatches. The black outline of India's shape was printed on letterheads and books. Furthermore, the idea of India had become, for many, personified in the shape of Bharat Mata or Mother India, who was both a goddess and geographical entity. Not just cold cartography, she embodied a real, warm, all-embracing mother figure. Her distinctive figure, in red flowing sari and often holding a flag, had many incarnations, ranging from ferocious Goddess Kali to demure housewife.40 The goddess, Mother India, and the map were entwined together. A temple to Bharat Mata in Varanasi had been opened by Gandhi himself in the 1930s where worshippers could gaze on a vast marble depiction of the subcontinent. It was difficult to give up this idea and this dream. For this reason, Partition was (and is) often described in India using medical imagery, such as the severing of limbs, the hacking off of body parts.

  It was a stirring, potential assault on the psyche of Indian nationalism. So there was vociferous denunciation of Mountbatten's Partition plan by the various parties gathered under the Hindu nationalist umbrella. The Hindu Mahasabha attempted to organise black flag days and passed indignant resolutions that Mother India's body could never be ripped asunder. On 3 July an anti-Pakistan day was marked with considerable success in Bombay, especially in Marathi-speaking districts, where almost all factories, shops and schools remained closed in protest and several effigies of Jinnah toured in funereal processions, one garlanded with a degrading necklace of shoes.41

  Away from such certitudes, the predominant feeling was one of intense confusion, angst and anxiety about the future from all sections of society. Days after the plan had been formally announced, it was reported from Bengal by an American diplomat that ‘The significance of the British decision substantially to complete transference of power by August 15, 1947 still seems not to be fully comprehended by most of the provincial politicians. A number with whom I have talked during recent days continue to feel that they will have the protection of British authority and military power at least until June 1948.’42 The confusion and fear is palpable in the archives, diaries and letters of the time. If this plan brought an end to violence and delivered the long-awaited freedom might it not in reality be a positive development? The optimists were pitted against the pessimists, who perceived the logistical nightmare which lay ahead. Socialist Party members expressed ‘disapproval and grief’, generally seeing in the plan the seeds of British neo-colonialism and denouncing it as an international conspiracy to weaken Asia and prolong British economic and military might in India. As the Socialist Party leader confidently asserted, ‘It should be realized that the plan is a stop-gap arrangement of a defined duration.’43

  Others called for the separation of major South Asian cities as city states: just a fortnight prior to Independence Day, Sardar Sardul Singh Caveeshar, a Punjabi politician and president of the All India Forward Bloc, suggested that Calcutta, Delhi, Karachi and Lahore be singled out as city states, ruled independently by elected governors.44 Countless politicians announced that there was every chance that the subcontinent would be reunited within a decade. ‘I have not lost faith in an undivided India. I believe no man can divide what God has created as one,’ declared the first President of India, Rajendra Prasad, on the day the plan was made public.45 N
ew and belated schemes were rushed out to try and change the fate of the subcontinent. In Bengal, as the historian Joya Chatterji has depicted, a last-ditch campaign was launched to try and keep Bengal united by regional politicians, including Sarat Chandra Bose and Suhrawardy, for which, Gandhi lamented, ‘money (was) being spent like water’ although of course this was to no avail in the face of the finalised plan which was being hurriedly rolled out from the Indian capital.46

  ‘I am being flooded with telegrams,’ Gandhi told his followers at his prayer meeting in June. ‘I cannot say I am the only one to receive telegrams.’ Just as some of Jinnah's supporters turned to thinking about the role of Islam in Pakistan, thousands of Congress supporters made appeals for the banning of cow slaughter which, for them, was integral to the meaning of true freedom; local understandings of what nationalism meant could be quite different to the conception of national political leaders. As the Bareilly Goshala Society put it, ‘the British regime in which cows were slaughtered has ended and self-government has been set up’. Wasn't banning the killing of the sacred cow an essential part of real freedom? ‘Rajendra Babu tells me,’ Gandhi said, referring to his fellow Congressman, ‘that he has received some 50,000 postcards, between 25,000 and 30,000 letters and many thousands of telegrams demanding a ban on cow slaughter … why this flood of telegrams and letters?’ He was continually telling people to stop the tide of telegrams; it was ‘not proper to spend money on them’.47

  Today we are accustomed to the fixed boundaries of the Indian and Pakistani states and their ideological orientation. In 1947, however, very different outcomes were contemplated with seriousness by the leading politicians of the day. The existence of such ideas, and their support among supposedly well-informed regional politicians and intellectuals, suggests the dislocation that had occurred between centralised constitution-making and provincial politics in India in 1947. Profound confusion, both about the precise boundaries, and about the meaning of ‘freedom’ and ‘Pakistan’, was part of the cause of the mass movement of people and stoked the ethnic violence that followed. Among poor agriculturalists there was little clarity about what Pakistan would be and where it would lie, even if there was an understanding about the manner in which the empire had been brought to its end. As one peasant farmer told a friend of Malcolm Darling, ‘The English have flung away their Raj like a bundle of old straw and we have been chopped in pieces like butcher's meat.’48

  The division of the Indian army was surrounded by so much uncertainty and lack of clarity that the Daily Telegraph headline in Britain only hesitatingly proclaimed on 4 June 1947 that ‘Army may be split into two parts.’ As with so many aspects of the Partition plan, national leaders publicly countenanced this part of the scheme only after the decision to partition had been announced. Even the highest ranks displayed bemusement about the real implications of Partition and the Indian army's division came as ‘a great surprise to all’ (except Field Marshal Auchinleck, who had been part of the confidential inner circle) when the top brass of the military establishment dined at the Viceroy's house the evening before the plan was announced to the world. In Bombay public opinion was aghast at the prospect of the army's division, ‘as it seemed to destroy even the remote hope of India and Pakistan uniting again in the future’.49 The complicated untangling of soldiers reduced the strength of the army just as it was needed more than ever to ward off militants. The sudden cracking in two of the army – and the creation of a new rival – coexisted with a broader feeling of disbelief about the reality of Partition and opposition to change within the military ranks. The deliberately vague wording of the Partition documents which spoke of ‘reconstituting’ rather than ‘partitioning’ the massive and intricately organised army into two parts further obscured the real meaning and permanence of the initiative.

  There was some fierce resistance within the institution itself to breaking up the army and those Sandhurst-educated Indian officers, including some who would come to play decisive roles in Pakistan's future after 1947, pointed to the military's aloofness from local political control, and to distinguished regimental histories and military fraternity as they tried to avoid the inevitable division. The British Commander-in-Chief, Auchinleck, stubbornly refused to countenance division of his hallowed army into two halves when the idea was first tentatively raised by the League in a Defence Committee meeting in April 1947 and his attachment to the unity of the Indian army complicated the situation further as the terms of reference for the division were only placed on the table in July. Beneath this high-level wrangling, day by day the situation in Punjab was becoming more anarchic and bloody.

  The most stunned and frightened reactions to the plan naturally came from Punjab. People living alongside the proposed Punjabi borderline, settled for generations on the fertile farmlands, could not, and would not, accept that they might become aliens, minorities or subjects in a state ruled by another religious group. The guesswork of newspaper artists who sketchily traced the provisional border on hastily constructed maps did not help. The border itself would not be finalised until mid-August and, preposterously, would remain a secret in the hands of an elite cabal headed by the Viceroy until Independence Day had passed. Caught in a horrible double bind, those Sikh leaders who had miscalculated and urged Mountbatten to divide the Punjab, in order to limit Pakistan's extent and to save the whole province from Pakistani domination, now faced the unimaginable prospect of a severed community, with one half in India and the other half in Pakistan. The regions around Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi were dominated numerically by Muslims but home to over half a million Sikhs, and the holiest Sikh pilgrimage sites, including Guru Nanak's birthplace, fell squarely in territory which was now labelled Pakistani. Any farmer worth his salt knew that the prosperity of the region rested on a complex interlocking set of canals which now risked separation under the terms of the plan. Fissiparous arguments broke out among Sikhs about the best course of action and for many the emerging consensus was that the best tactic was to force the boundary westwards, either by appeals to the boundary commission or through violent tactics, pushing the limits of Pakistan back beyond Sikh heartlands to the Chenab River.

  Adding to these conceptual confusions about what the newly independent India and Pakistan would look like was the entirely precarious position of the princely states. The future of the princes was relegated to a secondary problem by Mountbatten, to be picked up again in June only after the League–Congress deadlock had been broken and the Partition plan agreed. Some princes had taken up the offer of seats in the Constituent Assembly, while others resisted participating, but the absorption of the states by the Indian and Pakistani territories and their democratisation still seemed unlikely in mid–1947. Some European states, including France, reassured the princes of their status by signalling that they would open diplomatic ties with independent princely states. The rulers of extensive lands such as Bhopal and Hyderabad, which had potential as viable states, manoeuvred themselves towards an independent future.50

  In the weeks before Independence, the majority of the princely states yielded to Indian pressure, granting the right to the new national government to intervene in matters of defence, foreign affairs and communications. At this moment, though, the continuation of local princely power was not a pipe dream. Patel told the princes in July 1947 that it was ‘not the desire of Congress to interfere in any manner whatever in the domestic affairs of the states’.51 When pressure to accede and merge was ratcheted up by the new governments in the summer, it caused explosive situations and armed resistance in the princely states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, where national allegiances were not clear-cut and were complicated by diverse populations. Hyderabad was only resolved in 1948 when Nehru resorted to force and ordered the annexation of the state. Up to the present day, Kashmir has not been decided to the satisfaction of all parties and remains one of the longest running disputes in the world. But aside from these more infamous cases, numerous smaller states faced troubled internal stri
fe and determined popular and princely resistance to being subsumed into the all-encompassing Indo-Pakistani framework. There was a popular revolt in the tiny isolated North Indian state of Rampur in August 1947, an Indo-Pakistani scuffle over the accession of Junagadh perched on the tip of the Kathiawar peninsula (a state still claimed on Pakistani maps today) and, further north, the princely states of Bahawalpur and Kalat made overt bids for freedom from Pakistani control; the New York Times printed a map of Kalat as an independent state two days before Independence Day in August 1947.52

  The extensive territories of the princely states alone, covering well over a third of India's total territory, meant that these territories, their wealth and populations, mattered to the future of the subcontinent even if the leaders of the Congress and the League only came to recognise their real importance late in the day. The lack of resolution of the princely state question by the time that the Partition plan was decided added immensely to the confused interpretations of Indian and Pakistani statehood and, ultimately, to the scale of Partition violence. Some decided to hold out and retain their old borders and try for independence while others hoped to reconfigure, merge and link up with kinsmen to create new states. In present-day Rajasthan, the Maharaja of Alwar had hopes of expanding his territory and creating a kingdom infused with the imagined warrior spirit of the Kshatriya caste, while the ruler of Bharatpur believed in the possibility of an independent land for his fellow Jat caste members. In Punjab, it seems that the Sikh princes of Patiala and Faridkot had set their hearts on the possibility of carving out a separate, independent Sikh kingdom under their own leadership. In their eyes, there was still everything to play for.53 Seeing the confusion around them, the princes rallied their own bodyguards and small armies which were capable of serious military manoeuvres. These armies proved more than just royal playthings – the Maharaja of Bahawalpur kept three infantry battalions and some other units, including a few platoons of Gurkhas, and his force included local men as well as soldiers recruited in the frontier.54 Kings harked back to the days of their family's former glory before the British arrived in India. Some imagined defending or even expanding their own territories.