by Yasmin Khan
Complicity and compassion
These waves of killing were not neatly bound by the provincial boundaries of Punjab but spilled into other places. In present-day Rajasthan, in the states of Alwar and Bharatpur, as the historian Ian Copland has unflinchingly described, ethnic cleansing killed tens of thousands while the mass killing in Jammu and Kashmir in 1947–8, which is usually forgotten or incorporated into the history of Kashmiri wars, shared far more characteristics with other Partition slaughters. The princely rulers of the states of Bharatpur and Alwar complied with targeted violence against the ethnic Muslim group, the Meos, who formed large minorities in their royal fiefdoms. Perhaps 30,000 Muslims were killed in these areas and 100,000 were forced to flee.19 The princes used their state forces to kill the Meos or to run them out of the region.20 There were stories of state police escorts killing Meos as they left the state, and the Maharaja of Bharatpur's younger brother was even reported to have boasted of how he had led an attack from his jeep and had used his sporting rifle on fleeing Meos.21
The methodical attempt to wipe out whole populations depended on a well-prepared, trained, uniformed and efficient body of former soldiers, policemen and students who took the shame, honour and protection of their communities into their own hands. Gangs armed with machine-guns in jeeps were able to inflict far more harm in one or two hours than villagers using lathis and pitchforks, were less alarmed by military patrols, on which they even launched unprovoked attacks, and could cover large distances. Communities gave succour and support to these militias in return for protection. To take just one example, B.L. Dutt, a government employee living in the suburbs of Lahore recalled providing a safe house for RSS meetings in the midst of the riots and hid killers in his home in the aftermath of an attack on part of the city: ‘in my own house I had lodged two men … RSS men, who had attacked the Muslims and whatnot … they remained two or three days; … government servants' houses were not searched at all’.22 The perpetrators were cushioned by sympathisers who fed or housed them in return for protection or even paid out blood money.
Neighbours sometimes looked the other way or gave tacit support from the sidelines. One of the nastiest and least discussed features of Partition was the active or passive social connivance in Punjab which radiated out beyond the province. During Partition social complicity was routine, even when those involved absolved themselves of blame and passed the responsibility for violence on to madmen, thugs and strangers. Although the timetables were supposed to be secret, it was common knowledge when trains specially arranged for refugees would run because the information was leaked by office staff, enabling the organisation of attacks along the route long before the trains had reached their destinations. On one occasion the confidential departure time of a train carrying refugees into Pakistan was even broadcast on All India Radio. Similarly, on goods trains the parcels of items belonging to refugees were selectively ransacked, suggesting that detailed information about the cargo had been passed on. Elsewhere slogans, marks on doors, census information and graffiti were employed in order to isolate and select victims. Staff on the railways were busily hoisting the new national flags on the railway stations and painting the engines with patriotic slogans. After another outrage when train passengers were robbed and slaughtered outside Macleodganj, ‘the complicity of the railway staff in the outrage was quite manifest’.23 Committed nationalists could become complicit killers.
Sometimes this complicity was motivated by fear or by the pack mentality that emerges at times of acute danger. During one attack on the Upper India Express train, when seventy or more people were killed just outside the pottery-making town of Khurja, the stationmaster refused to assist the investigating officer, denied that he would recognise any of the assailants, and said that he had been warned to stay in his office on pain of death. On a different occasion, when a man was stabbed and thrown out of a moving train, despite an immediate carriage-to-carriage search, ‘Not a soul in the train admitted to have seen anything [sic], or heard anything.’24
Sometimes passengers directly defended the culprits. One train at Hapur was held up for nearly four hours while passengers protested about the arrest of some murder suspects and elsewhere desperately thirsty refugees found that the water taps on stations had been cut off.25 The social status of those who looked the other way, or who tacitly sanctioned Partition violence, varied from prince to peasant, although the very poorest or the lowest castes rarely seem to have been the agitators. At one extreme, fabulously wealthy princes from states such as Bahawalpur, Patiala and Faridkot allowed the gangs to work freely on their lands, did precious little to disarm or suppress them and then suspiciously disappeared to summer capitals and on foreign vacations.26 At the other end of the scale, rations dealers were accused of copying their lists and helping rioters to identify the occupants of houses, and some housewives and urban craftsmen boycotted markets, ruining local traders and shopkeepers and forcing them to leave for India or Pakistan. Sometimes the joy of independence or freedom itself would spill over into euphoric bloodlust: ‘Hooligans looting in New Delhi yesterday … mob killed Muslims in shopping center while citizens hung out of windows and a sort of carnival spirit prevailed.’27
Expectations of justice plummeted. Magistrates and judges were not averse to siding with ‘their’ own community in the cases which were brought before them and acquittals were widespread on the rare occasions when Partition rioters were brought to book. Vallabhbhai Patel complained that the major problem in stemming an RSS revival after Gandhi's death in 1948 was the provincial High Courts’ acquittal of large numbers of RSS men: ‘In UP there have been several acquittals; in Bombay the acquittals have been of an almost wholesale nature and the Government has been asked to pay costs.’28 Of course, distinguishing real from imagined partiality was difficult as people lost faith in the system itself. In some cases the lack of prosecution gave rioters a sense of immunity to punishment. Frustrated and overstretched administrators or policemen were forced to release people who, in any other circumstances, they would have charged. The complete turmoil of the state made even the most meagre efforts at justice difficult but it was often well known exactly who the ringleaders were. It was difficult enough to prosecute in the first place, though, when jails were bursting at the seams. Disarming people became the next-best thing when it was impossible to put them behind bars.
The illiterate depended on others for news. In Punjab some entrepreneurial unemployed made a few rupees by cycling to the nearest town to harvest the latest stories about events and then selling them on. Rumours were not necessarily the innocent by-product of violence but played a part in creating it in the first place. Exaggeration and hyperbole paid: with limited protection from police and troops it was essential to grab the attention of the authorities, to bring help to a potential riot scene. Telegrams and appeals for help were necessarily couched in the most extreme language. But there were more calculated uses of propaganda in addition to spontaneous gossip and snatches of newsprint. This had already started in 1946, when, for instance, a delegation of Pathans from the frontier visited the cities of Bombay and Ahmedabad, inquiring into reported atrocities and carrying with them photographs of damaged mosques and half-burnt copies of the Qur'an.29
Now, in August and September 1947, professionally produced pamphlets that had an air of governmental legitimacy circulated widely. The Rape of Rawalpindi was one: a forty-page palm-sized brochure full of gruesome black and white photographs, showing burnt skulls, orphaned refugee children and ruined temples accompanied by one-sided and inflammatory captions: ‘All this is the result of the aggressive ideology of Pakistan. This is a foretaste of Pakistan.’30 Partition was a modern event: the technology of the printing press was fully utilised to promote killing and pressmen and propagandists played their role in Partition violence behind typewriters as bureaucratic killers in word if not in deed. These propaganda networks stretched tautly across the subcontinent. Such propaganda was part of a strategic plan to p
olarise the communities and helped embolden those at the forefront of gangs. Some journalists and rumour-mongers in South Asia, then and now, are not detached commentators on the clashes between communities but are deeply involved in stoking the fires to which their partial stories give legitimacy, and sometimes spur on the rioters by creating tableaux against which they believe that they can act with impunity.
Against this bleak backdrop, many people carried out unusually brave, heroic and humanitarian acts. Some individuals saved the lives of neighbours, friends and strangers of different communities, even by risking their own lives. Others gave word of impending attacks to their neighbours, sheltered large numbers of people, smuggled food to the stranded and helped secretly move them from danger in the dead of night by lending transport or arranging disguises or armed protection. ‘In the end I feel honour-bound to record that the lives of my children and those of about six hundred educated Hindus and Sikhs, male and female, of the Civil Lines, were saved by the efforts of some God-fearing Muslims who gave them shelter in their houses, even at the risk of their lives,’ noted the Civil Surgeon of Sheikhupura, a survivor of the atrocities in the district which became a byword for terror in the weeks that followed.31 Many of the acts were anonymous but abundant stories from all parts of India and Pakistan provide compelling evidence of a counter-flow to the polarisation of society in 1947. Even a future President of India, Zakir Hussain, owed his life to the intervention of a Sikh captain and Hindu railway employee who saved him from a gang at Ambala railway station. The Punjabi president of the Gujranwala City Congress Committee, Narinjan Das Bagga, was killed when he went to try and pacify an angry mob and rescue an injured Muslim.32 An unknown policeman labelled as a ‘South Asian Schindler’ used a stick to fend off a marauding gang and saved two hundred Sikh lives.33 Individuals built Hindu–Muslim unity leagues and peace brigades, and British observers, who had little reason to emphasise artificially the fraternity between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, frequently noted the extraordinary acts of heroism and generosity that occurred in the midst of Partition's worst atrocities. Groups ran ambulances and extricated the injured, ensuring that they got to hospital. Sometimes peace committees were well organised and sometimes individuals acted with spontaneous charity.
‘No words can express the innermost feelings of gratitude and thankfulness which sprout from my grateful heart every moment when I cast a look upon my children and wife who have escaped from the very brink of the other world,’ wrote one survivor to Dr Khushdeva Singh: ‘you are doubtless an angel doing humanitarian work which befits a true doctor.’34 Singh was the superintendent of a sanatorium and tuberculosis adviser to the government of Patiala in 1947. He also acted as a rationing officer for the area. Once the scale of the crisis became apparent he poured his energies into humanitarian work, collecting hundreds of rupees from local people to send to the Indian Red Cross society and urging peace. He worked with the wounded and the suffering at his clinic. Soon, he caught wind of the fact that truck drivers were leaking news of the planned evacuation of a large group of local Muslims. Avenging refugees had blocked their route out of the town and planned an ambush. Kushdeva Singh hatched a plan to evacuate the refugees secretly and to send them in an alternative direction. The doctor received 317 letters of gratitude from Muslims whose lives he had saved or from their family members.
Friends and neighbours relied upon each other. ‘I still have more non-Muslim friends than Muslim and I have reasons to be proud of them,’ wrote one Muslim author, Mahmud Brelvi to the Congress.35 Others felt guilt for not doing more to save their neighbours or lamented the destruction of life as they had known it. Joginder, a small shop owner, who was a child in 1947 recalled, ‘as soon as the Muslims left the others started coming … they took away everything, loaded them on bullock carts, and even took away the cattle … we felt very sad, we were completely heart broken, we'd been with them for generations, the elder people in our community were extremely sad, we still talk about them … we used to cry after they left…’36
Acts of mercy and charity were very common. Violence was not all encompassing. The complexities of these emotions cannot be easily stereotyped. Nationalism was entirely compatible with love for an individual neighbour, member of staff or colleague. In other ways, the passage of time makes it incredibly challenging to disentangle slivers of memory and fragmented stories. ‘On the one hand individuals like Amiruddin could save the lives of members of other communities at considerable personal risk,’ the historian Ian Talbot writes of the city's mayor, who conveyed Hindu and Sikh friends to safety under showers of bullets but also later glorified the ‘marvellous’ way that the Muslims in Amritsar ‘put up a fight’ in 1947. ‘Simultaneously they could gloat at the removal of their “enemies” symbolic and physical presence.’37
The compulsions of violence forced many to look the other way, or made them too fearful to intervene. In mixed mohallas and villages, acute anxiety about the safety of neighbours could sit flush with nationalistic feeling and fear for one's own family. At its worst, this became a Judas-like denial or incrimination. Shanti Seghal was a young woman of twenty in 1947 and lost two sisters, their children and a sister-in-law. She was caught up in an attack outside Shiekhupura in which troops lined people up against trees and mowed them down with guns. She tried to convince the attackers that her family were Muslims but believed it was a neighbour who revealed their true identity as Hindus.38
Partition was accompanied by an acidic paper trail of pamphlets, letters and newsprint that created a sphere of paranoid and partial knowledge. Abundant rumours and their magnifying, generalising tendencies made it impossible to distinguish truth from fiction, reality from apprehension. Rumours and panic spread to areas such as Sind, which remained mercifully free from violence until January 1948 as well as to those where it was becoming endemic. The shortage of sound information, among political elites as well as villagers, was a two-way process and official actions – from sending out troops to ordering mass evacuations – were based on hearsay and rehashed stories just as much as localised violence depended on distorted stories from a distant Delhi. Leaders were overwhelmed by painful stories and inundated with tales of horror. Leaders and ministers, especially in Punjab, became conduits for news between members of their rank-and-file. Mumtaz Daultana, a senior Pakistani minister, was to be found sitting near a petrol pump in August 1947 in the Punjabi countryside, on the outskirts of Okara, ‘surrounded by a group of men’. Often, the political imperative was to believe the worst about the other, a tendency still apparent in the contemporary national press of both countries: that it was the other side that was really the chief aggressor and the other side that was really responsible for the horrors of 1947.39
News was shaped so that it became entirely partial and was chiselled in such a way that people often only heard about the crimes against their own community: in the North West Frontier Province, the Muslim Pathan knew all about the terrible atrocities committed against fellow Muslims in Bihar but little of events in Bengal, where Hindus had been the victims. The public news sphere was sophisticated enough for news to travel rapidly, and between different parts of the country, connecting people together in imaginary religious communities across time and space.
Translation from English to vernaculars also offered scope for creative inventiveness. Crude tales of violence proved the most problematic obstacle to peace. Sometimes news was inverted, so that news of riots was turned entirely upside down and the real victims were painted as the culprits. After the violence in Garhmukhteshwar, ‘the propaganda was so blatantly false that in the beginning it only caused amusement’.40 Rumours of various kinds included details of major atrocities that sometimes had not actually taken place, in particular of grotesque acts against women, which intersected and overlapped with rumours about the actual course of political events – whether or not Pakistan was or was not being made, and where it was going to come into existence, what it would be like when it did.
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sp; Outside Punjab people started to worry about what was happening there, ‘Events in the Punjab and NWFP are occasioning concern,’ wrote the Governor of Bombay. ‘It is difficult to follow what is happening here as information is confusing.’41 Subsidiary rumours fed like tributaries into the wider stream: about where relief could be found, who was responsible for the trouble, preparations for attacks and stories of impending disasters. Slogans warned soldiers of the danger of rumour in watchwords reminiscent of the Blitz spirit: ‘Careless talk costs lives. Keep a 24 hour guard on your tongue. Do not listen to Rumour’, ‘Rumour-mongers are public enemies’, and ‘Do not spread bazaar talk and gossip’. The potency of rumour should not be underestimated, and more recent calamities in South Asia have continued to spark lethal rumours across the country long after events have receded from the media's purview: after the tsunami disaster in South India in 2004, news of another giant wave sparked mass evacuations along several parts of the Indian coastline, and in 2005, in Bombay, eighteen people were killed and over forty injured when a stampede broke out after word spread that a tsunami was approaching. During Partition the circulation of false information – whether intentional or accidental – frightened people in a parallel way and caused stampeding and panicked evacuations. To try and counter false propaganda the Indian government air-dropped over 20,000 newspapers to refugees in the distressed districts of Jullundur, Amritsar, Lahore and Ferozepore. Even a year later, rumour of impending riots was still a powerful weapon and a ‘whispering campaign’ among refugees in Delhi put all the law and order authorities on red alert in May 1948.42