by Yasmin Khan
The refugees inundated the government with their demands: the illiterate employed letter-writers or a caste or community association to write for them, and signed with poignant indigo thumbprints; these became paper records of personal suffering as people described precisely what had happened to them, listed the possessions and land they had lost, as well as, not infrequently, providing the names and addresses of the attackers when they were known to the victims. One refugee from the NWFP who had worked for the Congress Party but now found himself in North India, penniless and unrecognised by the local politicians, wrote, ‘I am of 56 [years] and forcibly exiled from my home I am wandering disappointed. Will you kindly advise me what to do and where to [go] in this critical moment of my life.’8 Others were in desperate need of medication or wanted to find their children or other family members. State banks loaned former businessmen and entrepreneurs money to found factories so they could tentatively resume business. Special quotas were set aside to ensure that refugees had priority access to government jobs and university places.
These state-sponsored efforts compared well with the apathetic approach of the British colonial state in the face of disaster, as seen during the Bengal famine of 1943, and meshed with the general swing towards state-centred policies favoured by many in both countries at the time. It was the age of the expert bureaucrat and economic specialist, as India and Pakistan stood on the cusp of a new age. In this light, men such as the Indian Planning Commission supremo, P.C. Mahalanobis, argued that Partition could even be regarded as an opportunity if refugees who were part of the old, unmodernised, agricultural order could become industrial workers, working on large public works projects and in the giant factories of the future envisioned in the five-year plans. ‘The expansion of the national economy initiated under the two Five Year Plans by itself,’ one government pamphlet commented reassuringly, ‘provides numerous opportunities for rehabilitation of displaced persons possessing initiative and enterprise.’9 Partition had to be integrated, in government eyes, into the bigger story of nation-building.
Beginning a new life
Extensive government intervention touched the lives of large numbers of refugees who benefited from state-backed plans, schemes and novel initiatives. In both countries, the state paid for the construction of schools, dispensaries, houses and workshops. The government created job centres, employed refugees in public works, cleared land in forested areas to make space for displaced accommodation, built training centres to teach women skills such as soap-making and embroidery, re-trained men as mechanics, carpenters, spinners, paper-makers, shoemakers and printers. Orphans and widows were housed in welfare homes and young girls with no families to provide for them even had their marriages arranged by the state, which literally assumed a parental role: ‘A Marriage Bureau has been organized to put displaced men and women in touch with each other,’ reported another of the many government-produced pamphlets outlining the state's diverse attempts to help the refugees. ‘As soon as news about its establishment was published, applications from eligible men began to pour in.’ In some cases the state stepped into parental shoes, providing small gifts, clothes and money as dowry.10
Nevertheless, the actual experiences of the refugees stood at odds with grand public rhetoric about refugee rehabilitation. The best schemes favoured the ‘hard-working’, the middle class and the literate.11 These were the people who were allocated the best new accommodation or received the biggest loans. Middle-class refugees did not act as one undifferentiated, victimised mass but looked after their own kith and kin and organised quickly along these lines. The Frontier and Punjab Riot Sufferer Committee requested housing colonies near business centres for ‘the deserving and the middle class men from the NWFP’, while the Pakistan Sufferers Cooperative Housing Society was open only to Hindu and Sikh government servants and businessmen, and membership was restricted to refugees of ‘good character and sound mind’.12
Certainly, Partition was indiscriminate in its cruelty at times; all kinds of people could find themselves in wretched conditions. But there is no doubt that, rather then starting completely from scratch, those who already had education, contacts and status were, on the whole, eventually able to ease themselves into a new, and sometimes more profitable, lifestyle by lobbying for jobs, gaining access to the most desirable vacated properties and extracting government loans, while the poor were the ones who suffered forced resettlement, or who languished forgotten for decades in displaced person homes, camps and squatters' colonies. Professional networks, deference to one's status and accent or simply the ability to understand and act upon news on the information grapevine gave elites a head start in recovering from Partition. In the scramble for access to compensation, as Ravinder Kaur has shown, the richer refugees already had inbuilt advantages, as they could read the lengthy paperwork, and knew how to ‘break the codes that the state had invented’ while those who had managed to transfer at least a few of their savings could use this to smooth their path. Partition did not completely shatter the social pecking order.13
The refugees lobbied for improved food and accommodation and used the tools of Gandhian satyagraha, or non violent resistance, to their own advantage long after 1947. Sit-ins, strikes and peaceful protest methods, acquired and honed during the nationalist struggle, were now turned against the new post-colonial governments. In Durgapur near Jaipur, part of the refugee camp was burned by fire in 1949 and seven hundred refugees started to protest at their conditions. A group attempted to travel to the provincial government ministry to stage a protest but when these plans were thwarted, after initially refusing to alight from the train, they sat down on the railway tracks, causing delays up and down the line. Government impatience could be lethal, however: in this instance, the Ministry for Refugee Rehabilitation itself sanctioned police firing on the group.14
Other refugee groups besieged the homes of national leaders and rejected the housing that was offered to them. Sukh Ram, a refugee from the NWFP living in the nascent city of Faridabad, led a hunger strike against the proposal to house his community in mud huts. ‘The displaced persons thought mud huts was a mad idea … they argued, “Look, after all, the mud-huts are for our convenience … we do not want them. Do not waste precious rupees. Please stop.”’15 Handouts and gifts, sanctimoniously celebrated in the official literature of the Indian and Pakistani governments, were not always received with unalloyed delight and a rare window on to the feelings of a group of poor Punjabi women, who were being taught new crafts at a women's ‘industrial home’, suggests that they could see the potential flaws in rehabilitation schemes. ‘These hardy woman [sic] of West Punjab are ready to take up any sort of job from needles to spade without any grudge,’ wrote the principal of the institution, ‘but there are occasions for them to feel down hearted when they forecast their future covered with gloom and blackness. They sometimes come and ask me “Do tell us how are we to settle up by learning Weaving or Sports Goods Making? Where are we to get so much equipment from so as to start this trade? Is it not wastage of Government money and woman power to teach us a craft which we can not take up in future?”’16 The despondency and common sense of these faceless women is palpable in this report.
Refugees who had lived in towns before Partition wanted to stay in city centres – even if this meant living in slum-like conditions – because it was here that they could hope to make a reasonable living, and ambitious but naïve government schemes to house refugees on bleak suburban outskirts or in the rural wilderness of cleared jungle areas resulted in expensive losses to the treasury. When twenty-one families were ordered to move to Kashipur in Uttar Pradesh in 1951, they elected two nominees of the families to go and inspect the land first. ‘These refugees are not inclined to accept the offer of land in village Kesri-Ganeshpur,’ the District Magistrate tactfully informed the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, after the refugees had visited the spot. ‘It shall be much appreciated if they are given some other land in Kashipur area where the
re is no threat of wild animals so that they may be asked to shift from Gandhinagar.’17
Others protested when the state reneged on promises, or started asking for rent. A group of refugees in a housing scheme at Netaji Nagar in Agra were ordered to start paying rent on huts which they had been allocated. The refugees reacted with fury, calling it a ‘hoax played on refugees’ and ‘nothing short of high handedness’. The president of their colony wrote to the government, describing the huts in which the refugees were living:
…bamboo walls with hardly half an inch coat of mud and with roof of galvanised sheets … Mostly this mud coat has also vanished away and one can see inside the room from bamboo walls … In summer this tin roof becomes very hot to such an extent that none can live in the said alleged house and due to this heat, many suffer from eyes trouble and many other diseases and income earned by the occupants is wholly spent on medicines. In winter hard and fast winds enter these rooms from pores and there is extreme cold. Not only this, but there is no privacy for night sleeping … There is neither kitchen nor bath room.18
Wantonly sacrificed to the demands of making two new nations in 1947, the refugees often felt disgusted and abandoned by a callous state, which had promised them the moon and given them, in the words of the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a ‘leprous daybreak’ instead.
Paying the price
Nonetheless, as refugees arrived in India and Pakistan they were encouraged to see themselves in a new light – to set aside their hardships momentarily and to appreciate that they were now, after all, independent citizens of free countries. Refugees were repeatedly told that they were now ‘Indian’ or ‘Pakistani’ and that they should rejoice in spite of their shattered lives. Pakistan was promoted as a safe homeland from violence and Jinnah was depicted as the refugees' saviour. The victims of Partition violence were called shahids and bathed in the language of martyrdom. Partition quickly became repackaged as a war of liberation. The West Punjab government lost no time in engraving a stone plaque and dedicating it, ‘To every Mussalman man woman and child who fought suffered and won the first battle for Pakistan through the Punjab Muslim League 1947.’19
When Jinnah visited camps in Lahore in November 1947, refugees lined the route and shouted League slogans enthusiastically. An old man approached Jinnah and, at least according to newspaper reports, ‘thanked him for establishing Pakistan where they could live safely and prosper’.20 Officials used every opportunity they could to boost national morale in the camps. On Jinnah's birthday in December 1947, after the Friday prayers, the refugees were entertained with a programme of poetry recitals, volunteers handed out sweets, games were organised for the children and the camp was lit up with bright lights. When the Lahore camps were disbanded the following year, and some of these same refugees were forcibly resettled in other Pakistani provinces, often against their wishes, the trains taking them to their new destinations pulled out of Lahore station to the sound of brass bands playing the national anthem, while hired hands waved Pakistani flags along the platforms.
These efforts could not paper over the sheer desperation of the refugees, however. A visitor to the Walton camps in Lahore found that ‘a major portion’ of the refugees were ‘complaining about the mismanagement in respect of food, supplies, sanitation and medical aid’.21 There were, as in India, fears of anti-government insurrection, bread riots and fighting between local people and refugees who had moved into their space. Jinnah made a surprise visit to the camps in Karachi in a stage-managed attempt to boost national feeling in September 1947. Even the patriotic journalist of the Pakistan Times could not disguise the contradictions of the situation: ‘The refugees were greatly cheered by the visit but there were two poignant moments when a former wealthy merchant now destitute broke down in relating the hardships he and his family had undergone, and a villager whose family had been wiped out, sobbed uncontrollably.’22
In India, the propaganda may have been more nuanced but the Congress was similarly anxious about the loyalty of the refugees and the wider public to the Congress government. In northern India, the Hindu Right, particularly the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha, which had played such a provocative role in the months leading up to Partition, and had been hand in glove with violent rioters all along, now swung firmly behind the refugee cause. Working with refugees was a direct way in which members of the Mahasabha and the RSS could challenge the power of the government, and these groups swiftly stepped in to fulfil social service functions that the state was woefully unable to provide. The Mahasabha established an All-India Hindu Refugees Committee immediately after Partition. In Delhi the RSS operated four large refugee camps and RSS members later recalled the time with nostalgia: ‘they had a sense of actively participating in a great event in which their services were both demanded and appreciated,’23 while they could simultaneously spread their political ideology. In Bengal, on the other side of the country, and in stark ideological contrast, the CPI and leftist groups gradually took the lead in organising the refugees, triggering mass protests and land occupations in the 1950s. This provided the building blocks for the communists' electoral success in the region into the late twentieth century. In Pakistan, similarly, the Jam ‘at-i Islami was running a major refugee camp in Islamiyah Park in Lahore, and their leader, Maulana Mawdudi, who was himself living under canvas in the park at the time, having arrived from Delhi in July by truck, made a powerful public call for volunteers ‘gifted with fellow-feeling, diligence, sincerity of purpose and honesty of work’.24 The Jam ‘at-i Islami quickly responded to the crisis, by burying unclaimed dead bodies, collecting funds and operating camps, doling out food and medicine and cleaning refuse, and is estimated to have helped over one-and-a-half million Muhajirs over the subsequent weeks and months. A small but vociferous core of grateful refugees became rank-and-file supporters and these efforts paid political dividends in future decades.
Domestically, the overwhelming concern for both the League and Congress leaders after 1947 was the internal threat posed by the refugee crisis to their political leadership. There was a serious risk that their own parties might be ripped apart by differences of opinion over refugee rehabilitation. In Pakistan, the League's treatment of refugees was soon causing headaches for the leading national party, which feared for its electoral future in the face of such a human catastrophe. The Governor of West Punjab was before long reporting on refugee demonstrations against the government in which the treacherous slogan ‘Pakistan Murdabad’, Death to Pakistan, was shouted, and he told Jinnah that ‘I am told that Shaukat [Shaukat Hyat Khan, Minister for Revenue] is afraid to show his face in the Muslim refugee camp here.’25 In the context of increasingly vocal refugee restlessness, showing sensitivity to the refugees was a vote-winner, as well as a moral responsibility. The Refugee Minister of West Punjab, Mian Iftikhar-ud-Din, demanded land redistribution as a solution to land shortages for the displaced. When his plan was roundly rejected by the landowning political elite in his own province, he resigned, exposing deep fissures between the organisational and cabinet-level wings of the provincial League. Another dominant Punjabi politician, the Khan of Mamdot, the largest landowner in undivided Punjab, was shorn of constituents after Partition as he had lost his extensive farmlands that lay on the Indian side. Pragmatically, he tried to rebuild his power base and cultivated refugees as his new followers while the euphemistically named Allotment Revising Committee was his personal creation; it lacked official sanction but was used to siphon off abandoned properties and cars in Lahore for his followers and former tenants.26
Dealing with the refugee crisis opened up all sorts of avenues for corruption and profiteering, while also exposing deep cracks in the party-political ideological outlook – cracks which had been pasted over while the demand to create Pakistan was foremost in the leadership's mind. It is little surprise in the face of such extensive difficulties that one year after Independence Jinnah announced that ‘a grave emergency has arisen and exists in Pakistan’ and declared a sta
te of emergency that gave the centre heightened powers over the provinces, enabling bureaucrats and administrators to rein in the politicians. In Pakistan, then, the Partition refugee crisis undermined the development of democratic politics and shook the unsteady foundations of the state.
In India, the crisis was just as acute, especially as there was, of course, still a large Muslim population living throughout the country. Controversy about how best to respond to the refugee crisis rocked the inner workings of the Congress Party. Nehru and Gandhi persistently reiterated the need to protect Muslims, to retain them in the country and to prevent their mass ejection from India. As Nehru told a group of Muslim labourers in Delhi, ‘As long as I am at the helm of affairs India will not become a Hindu state.’27 Barbed wire was fixed up in Muslim Sufi shrines and mosques, at Dargah Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia and Dargah Hazrat Qutbuddin Chisti among others, and guards shooed away looters. Gandhi imperilled his life by fasting for peace and reconciliation in 1948. During Gandhi's fast, the government swung behind the peace effort, even franking envelopes sent by post with slogans urging social reconciliation. ‘Communal Harmony will save Gandhiji’, the messages declared and, ‘It is only through communal unity that Gandhiji can survive’. The crux of the matter was keeping the minorities' faith in the state's ability to protect them.
Yet support for the refugee cause was strident within sections of Congress and was a touchpaper for broader ideas about the ideological tilt of the Indian state. It was a struggle between Nehru's secular ideal and a brand of Hindu-infused nationalism. The refugee cause, along with the stoppage of cow slaughter and the reconversion of mosques to Hindu temples, became a subject of mass protest. Many walls in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh were covered with graffiti demanding immediate abolition of cow slaughter, and these protests interlocked with deep anger about the creation of Pakistan, and the Congress's acquiescence to Partition. After Partition, any Muslim could be charged with being a ‘Pakistani’ and suspicions fell in a McCarthyite manner on fifth columnists, spies and those who displayed dubious commitment to the national interest. Speeches called for proof of loyalty. Large workshops of Muslim smiths or craftsmen were disbanded as their Hindu suppliers stopped advancing indispensable credit or materials, worried, they claimed, that the Muslim artisans would abscond to Pakistan without paying. By January 1948 the atmosphere had deteriorated alarmingly, and India's future as a secular state, and as a place with equal rights for all, looked uncertain.