by Yasmin Khan
Terrified by their loss of control and shocked by the chaos and the mess which they would inherit on Independence Day, national leaders pleaded for order. ‘Amritsar is already a city of ruins, and Lahore is likely to be in a much worse state very soon,’ Nehru told Mountbatten in the last week of June. ‘You gave an assurance even before 3rd June and subsequently that any kind of disorder will be put down with vigour. I am afraid we are not honouring that assurance in some places at least, notably Lahore and Amritsar.’ Jinnah, more bluntly, begged, ‘I don't care whether you shoot Moslems or not, it has got to be stopped.’8
Claiming the land
At the same time, Pakistan was becoming a real, earthy reality. Rapidly, the greatest minds in law, statistics and administration turned to the maps in order to construct their case. ‘I understand that a band of workers under Mr Abdur Rahim, I.C.S., has been working on the ethnological aspect of the problem. I venture to send a few figures in this connection,’ wrote Professor Qureshi to Jinnah. He enclosed lists of numerical musings on tehsils, or small administrative areas ‘contiguous to tentative districts of Pakistan where Muslims are in absolute majority’. These raw statistics make terrifying reading when we know, with hindsight, where this reduction of human beings to simple numbers was leading. Qureshi was just one of many who sent lists and he had scribbled in the margins whether the League had a case to make on the grounds of population. In tehsil Muktsar, he noted, ‘Muslims in simple majority.’ Moga was ‘Predominantly Hindu’, in Amritsar tehsil, ‘Muslims are less than combined population of Hindus and Sikhs’, but in Anjala there would be an ‘Absolute majority of Muslims’. In Dasuya, ‘Muslims are less than combined Hindus and Sikhs. But if Indian Christians are combined with Muslims, we get bare majority.’ And so it went on.9
In this frenzied rush to calculate population ratios the reality of ancient and intricately woven homelands – and sensitivity to violent repercussions – was lost. Ominously, another League supporter in North India, A.R. Khan, was calling for limited movement of the population to strengthen the Muslim position, which he predicted would not be difficult in the rural areas ‘where people have no stakes’.10 The logic of this was to reduce individuals and communities to crass ratios and statistics which stripped bare the inner complexities of friendship, community and life itself. Gandhi distilled this beautifully into five words: ‘today religion has become fossilised,’ he told a gathering of saffron-clad sadhus and Hindu ascetics in early June.11 Few talked about, or even contemplated, what this border would mean for the ordinary people who lived on either side of it. ‘My anxiety now was to work day and night and get the case ready by Friday noon,’ remembered the Muslim League's chief legal representative, Muhammad Zafrullah Khan, many years later. ‘Even now, looking back, I cannot explain how it was possible for us to produce a case which we did by the Friday noon.’ Immediately after submitting the documents to the Punjab Boundary Commission in Lahore, he went straight to a local mosque, where he led the Friday evening prayers and warned the anxious congregation to be ‘vigilant’ as he feared that the Muslims faced ‘suppression’.12
There would be one chance for the parties to present a case to the boundary commissions at their public hearings held in the High Courts of Lahore and Calcutta in late July. The chattering classes could acquire permits and some went to watch the show, packing the press and public galleries. But it was not light entertainment. The Punjab Boundary Commission received fifty-one official memorandums from political parties and organisations, the Sikhs' memorandum alone was nearly 75 pages long and the star Bombay lawyer, M.C. Setalvad, who made the case for the Congress, with the Hindu Mahasabha's backing, spoke for over three hours. Ultimately, all this fevered activity only heightened expectations.
As Independence Day drew nearer, the response to the threat of an unknown borderline was, quite simply, frantic. The telephone at the Governor of Punjab's house was ringing incessantly around the clock with callers desperate to convey their position. Depositions and appeals came in the form of telegraphs and petitions, letters and phone calls, to the commissions themselves as well as, hopelessly, to those who were not allowed to intervene in their work in any case: Mountbatten, Attlee and even the King of England. There were so many memoranda and representations to the Bengal commission that the commissioners said it would be impossible for them to finish their hearings by the set date of 26 July (to which Radcliffe could only reply, ‘I must beg you to complete by 26’). Journalists at the offices of the pro-League newspaper Dawn claimed that they had received hundreds of telegrams on the subject and warned uncompromisingly in front-page articles that local Muslim leagues were readying themselves for action against an unfavourable award. ‘Muslims of Ambala,’ the paper reported of one district which, objectively, had no chance of inclusion in Pakistan, ‘demand demarcation of boundary lines on population basis. Any departure from this fundamental rule will be fought tooth and nail.’ ‘From start to finish,’ in the words of the historian Joya Chatterji, ‘the making of the borderline was shot through with politics.’13
‘To Sikh solidarity the Mountbatten scheme will be what a knife is to a cheese piece,’ warned a Lahore newspaper: ‘it will cut through it easily and definitely.’ The Sikhs, a community of only six million, in an all-India population of almost four hundred million, became desperate. The Sikh population was almost evenly spread across the Punjab. What were the Sikhs to do now, with ‘no homeland in the whole world except in the land of the five rivers’?14 They had lost their influence on the colonial state and felt the interests of their community were being sacrificed on the altar of a broader constitutional settlement. Many had called for Partition as a way of saving at least some of the Punjab from being swallowed up by Pakistan but now they appealed to the commission to consider the ‘other factors’ – the rich regional Sikh heritage, their extensive landholdings and architectural birthright. On this basis, it was not improbable that Lahore, home to six hundred gurdwaras, might fall to the Sikhs despite the population ratios which narrowly favoured Muslims in the city. There was a confused and divided response, with some appealing for a Sikh homeland, Sikhistan, and others pushing for reconciliation to broker a deal with the Muslim League. But for many, fighting to push back the boundary line was the only option if Radcliffe presented them with a raw deal.
Allegiances were swiftly sealed with Sikh princes whose own lands abutted these tracts and who had no intention of sinking their kingdoms in a wider sea of Pakistan if they could help it. As a collection of seventeen wealthy Sikh landlords spelt out in a searing appeal to the Viceroy, nothing short of a line along the Chenab River would satisfy:
We must now rise as one man and proclaim that we shall refuse to be put in a helpless position. We have fought and defended the country for over a century with our blood out of all proportion to our numbers. Our contribution in the economic field both in industry and agriculture and development of the canal colonies of the Punjab bears the deep impression of our sweat and toil. Our religion has given India a beautiful culture which if correctly understood would banish all communal strife and bitterness from our land. We have not done all this to earn slavery and domination.
Dawn bitterly retorted that it was unthinkable that ‘the tiny little community of scattered Sikhs who have split themselves into two by their own scatterbrained policy may be awarded predominantly Muslim territories merely because there may be located in them a Sikh shrine here, or a Sikh shrine there’.15 This was a gross and disingenuous reduction of the importance of Nankana Sahib, the fifteenth-century birthplace of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. As the Maharaja of Patiala told Mountbatten directly, ‘The Sikh sentiment about this place is so strong that it would be most dangerous to minimise it, as under no circumstances they can be persuaded [sic] to allow this to go into foreign territory.’16 Couched in royal niceties, this was a very thinly veiled threat. The Maharaja had already been roundly sacking his Muslim employees and openly supporting the idea of a revitalised Sik
h state.
Princes and big parties could at least get a hearing with Mountbatten. Smaller groups such as ‘untouchables’, Christians and Anglo-Indians were simply pushed aside by the sweeping plan. Beyond the neat textbook polarisations of League and Congress were countless fragmented groups with their own worries and interests. Their voices could not be completely drowned out. Yet now these smaller groups looked as if they were up for grabs, only really able to make their voice heard through alliances with the larger parties. Chaudhri Sunder Singh was a member of the Legislative Assembly for Punjab, elected on a ticket as an ‘untouchable’. He was so worried about the fate of his community two weeks after the 3 June plan was revealed that he forced staff in the Governor's office to send a letter to Mountbatten on his behalf. This met with a curt rebuff. Politicians of the Pakistan Achhut Federation, P.S. Ramdasia and Choudhry Sukh Lal, travelled to Delhi in order to try and confront the Viceroy in person and to push forward their viewpoint, ‘in the hope that even at this eleventh hour [a] sense of justice may create an urge to minimise the wrong done to our unfortunate community at least in the province of Punjab’. Their community would prefer to be in Pakistan, they argued, rather than subsumed under the broader Hindu label. ‘It is no longer a secret that the Hindus aim at re-establishing Vedic Raj – the so-called Ram-Raj – and the untouchables do not realise that they shall have to remain chandals [untouchables] for ever under Hindu domination.’17 There was neither the time, nor the will, however, to nuance sweeping understandings of ‘Hindu’, ‘Muslim’ and ‘Sikh’. And nobody was clearly spelling out the guiding political principles behind the new India and the new Pakistan.
The basic building blocks of the new states, their economic policies and their attitude towards minorities, remained uncertain. Without this knowledge, those who feared that their land was on the verge of becoming Pakistan or Hindustan felt deeply troubled. People associated the idea of belonging to the hazy, unknown ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ with negative and upsetting connotations. Some feared infringement of their personal lives, the ruination of their religion, perhaps even the destruction of daily life as they knew it.
Portentous news began arriving in New Delhi: of the possibility of ‘active resistance’ to an unfavourable boundary and of people distributing posters in Punjabi villages summoning crowds to emergency meetings in mosques, temples and gurdwaras. On 8 July a massive hartal, as Sikh businesses, shops and markets closed all over Punjab, stretched into the cities of North India. Over half a million Sikhs wore black armbands to signal their depth of feeling. They collected together in gurdwaras to pray for the continued unity of their community. Abundant warnings stressed that violent protests were being organised in order to shape and influence directly the places where the borderline would snake through the land. Violence was the last tool of the desperate.
In this light, constitutional means were rapidly starting to seem an irrelevance. As a self-described ‘common man’ from Lahore expressed it to his Congress committee, ‘Violence is bad but non-violence is hopeless.’18 It was impossible to square the heightened sense of expectations which had been stirred by Independence with the bruising reality of a borderline penned hastily across a piece of paper. Uncertainty about the precise location of the new borderline collided with the intensely negative attributes ascribed to ‘Pakistan’ and ‘India’. Among those who had been on the front line of nationalist campaigns, membership of ‘India’ or ‘Pakistan’ was reviled as potentially life-threatening and all-engulfing. If your home fell on the wrong side of the border when it was finally announced, many argued, you would not be living as a minority in a modern, democratic nation state. Instead you would suffer oppression, exploitation, the dishonouring of religion and perhaps even conversion or death.
Fears of British foul play were also festering. ‘A nation that has regained a homeland that belongs to it never gives it up without a fight,’ spat out editorials in Dawn, inciting its readers to action if the British reneged on their agreements. ‘If that is what these last minute double-crossers want so that they may secure [a]renewed imperialist foothold under fresh excuses, they will get it.’19 The plan was condemned as ‘eyewash’ and ‘a sham’ by others. Sikhs complained that their sons had died on the battlefields of Europe during two world wars and that this was how the British repaid them.
Collections were made for a Sikh war chest and Sikh jathas assembled, dressed in red and orange bandannas and distinctive turbans, armed, and stirred to action. Two private armies, the Akali Sena and Shahidi Jatha, went from village to village recruiting men. This was preparation for civil war by any other name. By July, Evan Jenkins, the Governor of Punjab, was sending unambiguous warnings, citing depth of anger about the division and proposed borderline as the major grievance. The boundary had become a live wire, or even ‘a casus belli between the two dominions’.20 The claims of the two sides were incompatible: the Sikhs could not forgo their principal gurdwaras, which lie in present-day Pakistan, just as Muslims claimed historical and cultural rights in Lahore, the home of the formidable Badshahi mosque, while it was feared that militants on both sides might destroy cities rather than relinquish them.
As Independence Day approached, life became nightmarish for people caught between the opposing sides. ‘My head was about to burst. To me it seemed as if I was not in my senses,’ the writer Fikr Taunsvi recorded in his daily diary after another difficult day in the war-torn city of Lahore, which had now been under siege for almost six months. ‘I felt a hammering on my brain. My nerves were on edge, as if they would explode and destroy my body. The continuous sharp chain of the morning's turmoil enveloped me in its tight embrace.’21 Fear was the predominant emotion in the middle months of 1947, particularly in those districts of Punjab where inclusion in Pakistan or India was, as yet, unknown. Here, policemen and magistrates had become completely unreliable and untrustworthy, slinking away from their posts or becoming openly partisan. Sleep was disturbed by unusual, threatening noises as riots broke out in distant parts of the city or militias made their rounds in the streets: there were the beating of drums and tom-toms, the striking of cooking vessels, bells and gongs, the wail of horns, trumpets, loudspeakers, whistles and sirens.22
Curfews and closed markets caused dire hardship. Taunsvi's local street was in turmoil: ‘the washerman who lived on the ground floor … had become the father of a tiny baby at three in the morning and … was worried that the bazaars were shut. The sweet-seller who sold milk had locked his shop from inside and was hiding there. He had received no supply today because all milk-vendors are Muslim, and this being a Hindu locality, they couldn't step into it. Hospitals were not functioning, neither were doctors, nurses and medicines, and both the mother and the infant were crying. The children were asking, “Will the curfew never be lifted? Shall we never get milk?” ’ As he helplessly watched the washerman's newborn child become more sick, Taunsvi's feelings turned to anger against the politicians who had created the situation, ‘I wish you had the strength to ask great brains like Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah and other statesmen and maulvis to wear the guise of this unlettered washerman for a moment. Then you may go and request the British to give you freedom. Then demand Pakistan and Hindustan.’23 The brutality and daily privations of the time seemed far from the dreams of the long-awaited independence.
People experienced gradations of anxiety; some Punjabis felt paralysing and life-changing terror. In the worst-afflicted centres, in the hardest hit parts of Lahore and Amritsar, Rawalpindi and Sheikhupura, the most anxious took desperate measures – growing or cutting off their beards and learning the Kalma or Vedic phrases so that they could fake their religious identities if necessary. If possible, families sent their unmarried daughters away with guardians or relations, and decided upon hiding places in the roof spaces of barns or the small back rooms of temples or mosques. The optimists refused to take basic precautions but many minds turned to self-defence and the stockpiling of bags of sand and cooking fuel, and the coll
ection of extra drinking water. Newly recruited watchmen patrolled villages and towns, and missiles and ammunition piled up. The family of Shanti Seghal, a young woman aged twenty at the time, made various attempts to find safety, moving from Gujranwala to Sheikhupura in 1946 because the family thought the city would probably end up in India. ‘My father had a soda water shop; we put all the soda water bottles on the roof, lined them up, thinking that when they come we will attack them with bottles,’ she later recalled, ‘but they were no use because they came with machine guns.’24
Creating a believable border was impossible without the agreement of the people who would have to abide with it. The 3 June plan had exacerbated anxieties and accelerated the preparations for war. It was becoming more difficult to stay neutral and the formation of two new nations was forcing people to declare simple allegiances from much richer and more complicated pasts.
Making two armies
Fortifying the Punjab with a highly disciplined force of impartial, professional soldiers would have been one way of providing security and reassurance to people in the weeks between the announcement of the plan and its implementation. In the troubled district of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, ‘the sight of tanks careering round the countryside, often with the local police officer standing in the turret, had some temporary effect’.25 In Bengal, there had been ‘some ugly incidents’ but, an American diplomat reported, ‘the city is so bristling with armed troops and police that forays against public order have been discouraged and minimized’.26 Troops did have a presence in city centres in Punjab, North India and Delhi – on Independence Day in Lahore Penderel Moon found the Lawrence Gardens ‘full of troops’ while ‘the railway station was in the hands of the military and barricaded off by barbed wire’.27 There was, in addition, a special boundary force constituted to deal with the prospect of a contested borderline.