The Great Partition
Page 29
Visas and passports
Ahmad Hussain worked as a mechanic in a tin-printing plant in Lahore. He had a wife and young children to support and he performed well at his job, rising to the position of chief mechanic. During Partition, in 1947, the factory where he had been employed for over a decade was looted and his employer, the mill-owner Amar Nath Bindra, fled to India. We do not know what Ahmad Hussain made of this, or whether he was able to find alternative employment, as his life goes unrecorded in the archives until one day a year later when his former employer contacted him.
The indefatigable Amar Nath Bindra had managed to find his feet in the city of Mathura in North India. He had borrowed some money from the central government, and along with the help of ‘some good-hearted capitalist’ had managed to re-establish his factory, set up the necessary equipment and machinery and had even secured a supply of precious electricity. But now he faced a problem: he could not find suitably skilled workers needed to operate the newly installed plant. His mind turned to the men he had left behind in Pakistan. If they could come and help him, even for a limited time, he could get the factory running and use them to train some new staff. ‘I had to request the Government to allow me to have my old five Muslim artisans from Lahore who worked in my factory there for about ten years,’ he wrote to the Refugee Department: ‘during that time they served me so honestly, sincerely and faithfully that I cannot still dream that they belong to other Nationality or Dominion and I hold implicit faith in them. [sic]’16
Remarkably, this appeal worked and Ahmad Hussain was granted a six-month permit to travel to India from Pakistan, along with his teenage son, Bashir Mohammad, completely against the flow of refugees still moving in the opposite direction. Leaving his wife and three younger children behind in Lahore, Ahmad Hussain was reunited with his old boss in India, where he resumed his former occupation. Periodically, the factory boss applied to extend the men's permits: ‘when large numbers of such Muslims who are not at all of any use to India are being retained in India,’ he pleaded, in a revealing letter, ‘I see no cause why these only two most useful persons [sic] be not retained to train our people. I will stand any surety for these people.’ The pay, or the local conditions, must have been to Ahmad Hussain's liking as in 1950 he applied for permanent settlement in India.17
Now, though, three years after Partition, borderlines and permit situations had hardened between India and Pakistan and the governments were introducing passports for the first time. Ahmad Hussain's life collided once again with the contingencies of Partition and the state-making processes. In 1951, Ahmad Hussain and Bashir Mohammad had both overstayed their permits, their applications were rejected and father and son were forced to separate from their employer for the final time and were ordered by the police to return to Pakistan.
‘I do not consider Pakistan and India as two different countries. If I have to go to the Punjab, I am not going to ask for a passport. And I shall go to Sind also without a passport and I shall go walking. Nobody can stop me.’18 Gandhi made this declaration to his audience at a daily prayer meeting a fortnight after the plan for Partition had been agreed and, as so often, he captured the prevailing Zeitgeist. The creation of Pakistan was now a certainty, yet despite all the violence, the public anticipated soft borders and hoped for a free and easy association with the neighbouring country. In the summer months of 1947 there was the occasional debate in the press about whether passports would be necessary between India and Pakistan but, on the whole, the question was ignored.
The permanent separation of Indians and Pakistanis from each other, and their inability to cross the new border, was the most long-lasting and divisive aspect of Partition although it was barely taken into consideration by the politicians at the time. It is doubtful if even the leaders fully appreciated the full implications of the rubric of the Partition plan as they deferred the question of passports until a later date, leaving it to the two independent dominions to decide their own border defences and immigration controls. In the summer of 1947 few could appreciate the full connotations of the division which would ultimately result in some of the harshest border regulations in the world; indeed one newspaper headline read ‘Passport rules believed to be needless at present.’19
By this date even less affluent Indians travelled widely around the subcontinent as the railways delivered the possibility of cheap long distance journeys to pilgrimage sites, for trade and to attend and arrange weddings. It seemed unthinkable that destinations mapped in the imagination would become unreachable. ‘I did realise that it meant saying goodbye to my home and friends,’ recalled one future Pakistani Foreign Minister ‘most people didn't think that an iron curtain would come down’.20 Although the idea of distinct nation states was starting to take root, few thought that India and Pakistan would be hermetically sealed off from each other. A natural corollary to the empirical confusions surrounding Pakistan's territorial extent and Pakistan's intrinsic meaning was that it took a long time for people to come to grips with the idea of India and Pakistan as separate sovereign lands. Members of so-called ‘divided families’ – often of Kashmiri or North Indian origin – even if they made definitive choices in favour of India or Pakistan, did not anticipate the weighty consequences of such a decision. ‘I went in November,’ recalled the renowned Urdu author, Intizar Husain. ‘When I left, I had no idea that people who had migrated could never go back to the places they had left behind. That their link with the past had snapped.’21 In the semi-autobiographical novel Sunlight on a Broken Column two Muslim brothers in North India squabble about the future in 1947 and one decides to stay in India while the other opts to migrate to Pakistan:
‘Can you imagine every time we want to see each other we'll have to cross national frontiers? Maybe even have to get visas,’ he added wryly. ‘Oh come on Kemal,’ Saleem laughed, ‘there is no need to be as dramatic as all that. Visas indeed!’22
An early permit system devised in 1948 gradually evolved into full-blown citizenship legislation. By 1951 Indians and Pakistanis required a passport and visa to cross Radcliffe's infamous line in the west of the country, although the meandering East Bengali border continued to be both more porous and less systematically policed for a longer time and great stretches had not yet been marked out with barbed wire or guarded with border posts. Naturally, the poor and the illiterate could not afford the passport fee and the legal minefield of Pakistani and Indian citizenship caused hardship and complications.
The system of entry and exit permits, which began as a logical attempt to regulate the refugee flow, soon turned into a restrictive administrative regime which became self-sustaining. Now the aim was to keep out terrorists and enemies of the state, as well as stopping people from making claims on national welfare systems or abusing the franchise. Most of all, the governments needed to pin down precisely who was an Indian and who was a Pakistani. There was no room for ambiguities or uncertain grey areas. Excessive red tape tied the hands of those who wished to conduct trade or visit friends and relatives on the other side of the border. At least seven categories of visa existed between India and Pakistan by the mid–1950s. In reality, access became difficult and cast suspicion on those who wanted to cross the border, while strict conditions were attached to the visits and tough regulations limited the goods that could be transported. Carrying gold, for example, was strictly forbidden.
Long after Partition the messy complications of real lives – which did not fit within these paper categories – generated large numbers of court cases, deportations and arrests. The High Courts regularly heard cases in the 1950s and 1960s which hinted at a panoply of human dramas: wives who had migrated with their husbands to Pakistan but now wanted to return to their families in India, complications caused by cross-border marriages and divorces, the defence of people who claimed they were forced to go to India or Pakistan against their own free will, the arguments of those who had entered on false or forged passports, claimed to hold two nationalities or who overstay
ed their visas.23
Indeed, the legacies of these boundary awards have sharpened rather than blunted over time and all the paraphernalia of border control – barbed wire and fencing (more prominent in the west than in the east, but currently expanding along the Indo-Bangladeshi border), land mines, thermal imagers, floodlighting and underground sensors designed to trap ‘infiltrators’ – have been brought to bear along Radcliffe's pencil lines. Over time the determination with which these borders have been patrolled has ebbed and flowed depending on the climate of relations between the countries but the general trajectory has been towards more heavily guarded borders.
Limbs and lives have been lost as villagers caught in the middle of the border areas try to continue ploughing the land. ‘As a major part of the fence remains unlit, chances of anti-national elements sneaking in are there,’ commented the Director-General of the Indian Border Security Force interviewed in 2006 about the policing of the Indo-Bangladesh border. ‘This year alone we have shot dead 75 people trying to cross the border.’ 24 Local people and border guards fall victim to routine border ‘scuffles.’ Fishermen sailing in the Arabian Sea swept along unknowingly into foreign waters are routinely arrested and imprisoned.
Currently, confidence-building measures agreed by the Indian and Pakistani governments in 2004 give new reasons for optimism and enable separated families to meet, often for the first time in decades; poor fishermen have been freed and repatriated, the limited bus and train services between Amritsar and Lahore resumed and new ones, most significantly the Thar express train which crosses between Sind and Rajasthan and the Pan-Kashmir bus from Srinigar to Muzaffarabad, have started. Given the language of impermanency surrounding the creation of Partition and the limited way in which the emergent nationalisms related to territory, the monumental permanence of these borders is paradoxical, and has had contemporary consequences barely imaginable to the political protagonists in 1947.
These divisions have, over the years, thrown up some spectacular oddities and ironies: Fazal Mahmood, the legendary fast bowler and cricket captain, was picked to play for India on its maiden tour of Australia in 1947–8, and even attended a conditioning camp in Pune before the team's departure. On his way to Delhi, though, the twenty-year-old player was unable to proceed because of the violence. ‘I was informed about the slaughter when I reached the airport,’ he recalled much later. ‘I could not go to Delhi and Lahore. A kindly passenger gave me his ticket, and I managed to travel to Karachi. The incident changed my life. I decided to stay in Pakistan. I had a lot in India, emotionally and financially, but I had to reconcile myself and settle down in Pakistan.’25 Heading up the Pakistani national side, he played against India on numerous occasions. Another of the quirks of Partition was that many of the first and second generation of the leading officers in the Indian and Pakistani military facing each other across the Kashmiri line of control in the wars of the twentieth century had been close colleagues and worked alongside each other during the days before Independence. In one such instance, an Indian soldier, General Sinha, was responsible for the custody of an old Pakistani friend, General Niazi, as a prisoner of war after his capture during the 1971 conflict. Prior to Partition the pair had served together as captains in Indonesia during the Second World War.26
These borders and demands of statehood persist and are far more than abstractions. Border enclaves on the Indo-Bangladeshi border are perhaps the most extreme and bizarre, yet painfully real, example of Partition's logic. A product of 1947, they continue to exist and shape the lives of South Asians up to the present day. There are 123 border enclaves technically belonging to Bangladesh within India and 74 border enclaves which are legally Indian territories within Bangladesh lying in the eastern border region. These are tiny pieces of land stranded in a wider sea of the ‘other’ state. They came about as a result of the absorption of the princely state of Cooch Behar, sandwiched between the borderlines of East Pakistan and India in 1949. These scraps of land were legal oddities under the sovereign control of Cooch Behar's ruler, remnants of India's pre-colonial past and reminders of the piecemeal way in which the subcontinent's political map had emerged. With better diplomatic effort they could have been exchanged between the two new states after Partition. Instead, a 1958 agreement to effect the exchange has not been implemented, and the enclaves have persisted as a technical and legal anachronism, with devastating consequences for the inhabitants. People living in these tiny patches of land have had their lives and identities stretched to the most incredible limits by the demands of nationality and statehood.
Technically ‘Indian’ but living in Bangladesh, or vice versa, enclave dwellers have found it immensely difficult to travel or trade beyond the limits of their tiny isolated enclaves, and their movement has sometimes been at the risk of danger or death, while criminals and opportunists have taken advantage of lawlessness within these third spaces. Enclave inhabitants have been living tax free so these isolated areas have been abandoned by officials and left without a franchise, policing, roads, healthcare or electricity supplies. The enclaves have, in short, made successive generations of South Asians ‘stateless’ human beings in a world now defined by nation states.27
All these consequences of Partition have reinforced the estrangement of the two nation states. These twists and turns that have followed on from 1947 are far removed from the hopes and dreams of swaraj and Pakistan which people rallied to in the late 1940s. Indians and Pakistanis continue to feel the unforeseen repercussions of the 3 June plan. At the same time, they also live alongside memories and amnesia about what took place in 1947.
Remembering and forgetting
Two episodes which took place in 2005 shine a light on the way in which Partition is simultaneously remembered and forgotten in South Asia today.
On 4 June 2005, a remarkable event occurred. A seventy-five-year-old Indian, L.K. Advani, climbed the steps to a glistening white marble monument in Pakistan's chief commercial city and former capital, Karachi. To the sound of bugles blasted by a Pakistani guard of honour, he laid a large wreath of purple and pink flowers at the tomb of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Honouring a man who has been dead for over half a century can still have dangerous political repercussions as Advani, president and co-founder of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the chief opposition party in present-day India, quickly discovered. In India, Jinnah is, of course, widely reviled as the progenitor of Pakistan and the architect of a mistaken partition of the subcontinent, while Pakistanis cherish his memory as their greatest leader and the founder of their Muslim state. Advani, who later wrote in the visitors' book that Jinnah was a ‘great man’ who forcefully espoused ‘a secular state in which every citizen would be free to practise his own religion’, was committing virtual heresy in the eyes of many in his own party who remember Jinnah as a dangerous religious fundamentalist who forced the division of the subcontinent. BJP members called for their party president's immediate resignation.28
Advani is not known to be a friend of Pakistan, and is renowned more as a doughty-looking hawk than as a dovish peace campaigner whose personal understanding of Indian nationalism rests upon the bedrock of exclusivist Hindu ideology. His party is usually noted for its demonisation of minority groups, particularly Muslims and, by extension, for a suspicious attitude towards Pakistan. In the past he was nicknamed Demolition Man by the Pakistani press for his role in instigating the brick-by-brick destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid mosque in the North Indian town of Ayodhya in 1992 so his utterances in Pakistan unleashed widespread speculation about his motives. What had happened? Had Advani made an error of judgement and become sentimental in his old age or was this a calculated strategy to reinvent the party and broaden its electoral base? Did he really believe that Jinnah was secular? In retrospect it seems that he had made a miscalculation while trying to broaden the electoral foundations of the party and cultivate a role for himself as a centrist elder statesman at the hub of national life.
> His comments, however, struck at the heart of all the nationalist myths that are held sacred by Indians and Pakistanis, and in both countries the front pages of newspapers were consumed with the story, while reams of editorial revisited the minutiae of Jinnah's character and his political intentions in the 1940s. Roundly condemned across the board by his own party, Advani was forced to resign temporarily as president of the BJP, an embarrassing episode that signalled the beginning of his withdrawal from Indian politics and permanent removal from the post at the end of 2005. Myths of Partition are deeply ingrained and Jinnah is characterised here as a cardboard cut-out hero or anti-hero. Breaking Partition's myths comes with a price.
There was an added twist to the story; Advani, in common with President Musharraf of Pakistan, belongs to a family displaced by the Partition of 1947. Both men and their families were among the twelve million people uprooted. Both have lived the remainder of their lives many miles from their ancestral homes, which are now absorbed into foreign territory. They also belong to that first generation of independent citizens who played a part in consolidating India and Pakistan as distinct nation states and in fashioning these nations from the remnants of the Raj.
Although there are currently reasons to be optimistic about a new détente in Indo-Pakistan relations, the unfortunate price of the emergence of these states has been the mutual hostility of the countries. There have been three wars since 1947, the development of nuclear weaponry, and a putative cold war. The movement of people and goods across 2,600 kilometres of international borderline remains highly restricted. Yet, despite persistent animosities, a paradoxical fascination with and attraction to the former homeland lingers. Like Musharraf, who came to India in July 2001 and visited his crumbling ancestral home in the crowded alleys of Old Delhi, Advani desired to see places in his home town of Karachi that he had left behind as a teenager when he departed for India. With his wife and daughter he visited his former house and his old school – the school, coincidentally, that was also attended by Musharraf as a boy – and he expressed genuine emotion in the face of the intervening years: ‘I was truly overwhelmed by the warmth and affection of the people … I must confess that I am somewhat at a loss to articulate the totality of my feelings and thoughts…’29