Unlike the Hindus of Bengal, the Sikhs of Punjab were slow to comprehend the meaning and reality of Partition. At first they doggedly insisted that they would stay where they were. Then, as the possibility of division became more likely, they claimed a separate state for themselves, to be called ‘Khalistan’. This demand no one took seriously, not the Hindus, not the Muslims, and least of all the British.
The historian Robin Jeffrey has pointed out that, at least until the month of August 1947, the Sikhs were ‘more sinned against than sinning’. They had been ‘abandoned by the British, tolerated by the Congress, taunted by the Muslim League, and, above all, frustrated by the failures of their own political leadership . . .’14 It was the peculiar (not to say tragic) dilemma of the Sikhs that best explains why, when religious violence finally came to the Punjab, it was so accelerated and concentrated. From March to August, every month was hotter and bloodier than the last. Nature cynically lent its weight to politics and history, for the monsoon was unconscionably late in coming in 1947. And, like the monsoon, the boundary award was delayed as well, which only heightened the uncertainty.
The task of partitioning Bengal and the Punjab was entrusted to a British judge named Sir Cyril Radcliffe. He had no prior knowledge of India (this was deemed an advantage). However, he was given only five weeks to decide upon the lines he would draw in both east and west. It was, to put it mildly, a very difficult job. He had, in the words of W. H. Auden, to partition a land ‘between two people fanatically at odds / with their different diets and incompatible gods’, with ‘the maps at his disposal . . . out of date’, and ‘the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect’.15
Radcliffe arrived in India in the first week of July. He was assigned four advisers for the Punjab: two Muslims, one Hindu, and one Sikh. But since these fought on every point, he soon dispensed with them. Still, as he wrote to his nephew, he knew that ‘nobody in India will love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me . . .’16
On 1 August a Punjab Boundary Force was set up to control the violence. The force was headed by a major general, T. W. (‘Pete’) Rees, a Welshman from Abergavenny. Under him were four advisers of the rank of brigadier: two Muslims, one Hindu, and one Sikh. In his first report Rees predicted that the boundary award ‘would please no one entirely. It may well detonate the Sikhs’.17 This was said on 7 August; on the 14th, the commander-in-chief of the British Indian Army, Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, observed that ‘the delay in announcing the award of the Border Commission is having a most disturbing and harmful effect. It is realised of course that the announcement may add fresh fuel to the fire, but lacking the announcement, the wildest rumours are current, and are being spread by mischief makers of whom there is no lack.’18
The rains still held off, and the temperature was a hundred degrees in the shade. This was especially trying to Muslims, both soldiers and civilians, observing the dawn-to-dusk fast on the occasion of Ramzan, which that year fell between 19 July and 16 August. Rees asked his Muslim driver why the monsoon had failed, and he replied, ‘God too is displeased’.
The boundary award was finally announced on 16 August. The award enraged the Muslims, who thought that the Gurdaspur district should have gone to Pakistan instead of India. Angrier still were the Sikhs, whose beloved Nankana Sahib now lay marooned in an Islamic state. On both sides of the border the brutalities escalated. In eastern Punjab bands of armed Sikhs roamed the countryside, seeking out and slaying Muslims wherever they were to be found. Those who could escaped over the border to West Punjab, where they further contributed to the cycle of retribution and revenge. Muslims from Amritsar and around streamed into the (to them) safe haven of Lahore. The ‘stories of these Refugees, oriental and biblical in exaggeration, are indeed founded on very brutal fact, and they do not lack handless stumps etc., which they can and do parade before their fellow Muslims in Lahore and further west . . .’
According to Pete Rees’s own figures, from March to the end of July, the casualties in the Punjab were estimated at 4,500 civilians dead and 2,500 wounded. But in the month of August alone, casualties as reported officially by the troops were estimated at 15,000 killed, and Rees admitted that the actual figure ‘may well have been two or three times the number’.
The Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was deeply worried about the Punjab troubles and their wider repercussions. In the last fortnight of August he visited the province three times, talking to people on either side of the border and taking aerial sorties. Nehru did not think that there was ‘anything to choose between the brutality of one side or the other. Both sides have been incredibly inhuman and barbarous’.19 The adjective that Rees himself used for the savagery was ‘pre-medieval’. In truth, it was also medieval and modern. For the arms used by the rioters ‘varied from primitive axe, spear, and club to the most modern tommy-gun and light machine-gun’.
On 2 September the Punjab Boundary Force was disbanded. It had not been especially effective anyway. It was hampered by the problem of dual authority: by having to report to civilian officers in the absence of martial law. With the exit of the Punjab Boundary Force, responsibility for law and order was now vested in the governments of India and Pakistan. The riots continued, as did the two-way exodus. West Punjab was being cleansed of Hindus and Sikhs, East Punjab being emptied of Muslims. The clinical even-handedness of the violence was described by the Punjab correspondent of the respected Madras-based weekly Swatantra. He wrote of seeing
an empty refugee special steaming into Ferozepur Station late one afternoon. The driver was incoherent with terror, the guard was lying dead in his van, and the stoker was missing. I walked down the platform – all but two bogeys were bespattered with blood inside and out; three dead bodies lay in pools of blood in a third-class carriage. An armed Muslim mob had stopped the train between Lahore and Ferozepur and done this neat job of butchery in broad daylight.
There is another sight I am not likely to easily forget. A five-mile-long caravan of Muslim refugees crawling at a snail’s pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge. Bullock-carts piled high with pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside. Women with babies in their arms and wretched little tin trunks on their heads. Twenty thousand men, women and children trekking into the promised land – not because it is the promised land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot State and the interior of Ferozepur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to death and made life impossible for the rest.20
Ten million refugees were on the move, on foot, by bullock-cart, and by train, sometimes travelling under army escort, at other times trusting to fate and their respective gods. Jawaharlal Nehru flew over one refugee convoy which comprised 100,000 people and stretched for ten miles. It was travelling from Jullundur to Lahore, and had to pass through Amritsar, where there were 70,000 refugees from West Punjab ‘in an excited state’. Nehru suggested bulldozing a road around the town, so that the two convoys would not meet.21
This was without question the greatest mass migration in history. ‘Nowhere in known history ha[d] the transfer of so many millions taken place in so few days’. They fled, wrote an eyewitness,
through heat and rain, flood and bitter Punjab cold. The dust of the caravans stretched low across the Indian plains and mingled with the scent of fear and sweat, human waste and putrefying bodies. When the cloud of hate subsided the roll of the dead was called and five hundred thousand names echoed across the dazed land – dead of gunshot wounds, sword, dagger and knife slashes and others of epidemic diseases. While the largest number died of violence, there were tired, gentle souls who looked across their plundered gardens and then lay down and died. For what good is life when reason stops and men run wild? Why pluck your baby from the spike or draw your lover from the murky well?22
The trouble in the province was made worse by the noticeably partisan attitude of the governor
of West Punjab, Sir Francis Mudie. He was ‘inveterate against the Congress’. Mudie thought he ‘could govern himself. Thus he thwarts his Cabinet, above all in their attempts to bridge the gulf between West and East Punjab, and therefore between Pakistan and India’. Tragically, no Pakistani politician was willing to take on religious fanaticism. Whatever their private thoughts, they were unwilling to speak out in public. As for Pakistan’s new governor general, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, he was headquartered in the coastal city of Karachi (the country’s capital), and had ‘only visited Lahore in purdah and most carefully guarded’. This timidity was in striking contrast to the brave defence of their minorities by the two pre-eminent Indian politicians. Indeed, as a British observer wrote, ‘Nehru’s and Gandhi’s stock has never been so high with the Muslims of West Punjab’.23
Meanwhile, trouble had flared up once more in Bengal. There were reports of fresh rioting in Noakhali. In Calcutta itself the peace was broken in Gandhi’s own adopted locality of Beliaghata. Here, on 31 August, a Hindu youth was attacked by Muslims. Retaliatory violence followed and spread. By dusk on 1 September more than fifty people lay dead. That night, Gandhi decided he would go on a fast. ‘But how can you fast against the goondas [hooligans]?’ asked a friend. Gandhi’s answer, according to an eyewitness, ran as follows: ‘I know I shall be able to tackle the Punjab too if I can control Calcutta. But if I falter now, the conflagration may spread and soon. I can see clearly two or three [foreign] Powers will be upon us and thus will end our short-lived dream of independence.’ ‘But if you die the conflagration will be worse,’ replied the friend. ‘At least I won’t be there to witness it,’ said Gandhi. ‘I shall have done my bit.’24
Gandhi began his fast on 2 September. By the next day Hindu and Muslim goondas were coming to him and laying down their arms. Mixed processions for communal harmony took place in different parts of the city. A deputation of prominent politicians representing the Congress, the Muslim League and the locally influential Hindu Mahasabha assured Gandhi that there would be no further rioting. The Mahatma now broke his fast, which had lasted three days.
The peace held, prompting Lord Mountbatten to remark famously that one unarmed man had been more effective than 50,000 troops in Punjab. But the Mahatma and his admirers might have treasured as much this tribute from the Statesman, a British-owned paper in Calcutta that had long opposed him and his politics: ‘On the ethics of fasting as a political instrument we have over many years failed to concur with India’s most renowned practitioner of it . . . But never in a long career has Mahatma Gandhi, in our eyes, fasted in a simpler, worthier cause than this, nor one calculated for immediate effective appeal to the public conscience.’25
On 7 September, having spent four weeks in Beliaghata, Gandhi left for Delhi. He hoped to proceed further, to the Punjab. However, on his arrival in the capital he was immediately confronted with tales of strife and dispossession. The Muslims of Delhi were frightened. Their homes and places of worship had come under increasing attack. Gandhi was told that no fewer that 137 mosques had been destroyed in recent weeks. Hindu and Sikh refugees had also forcibly occupied Muslim homes. As a Quaker relief worker reported, ‘the Muslim population of Delhi of all classes – civil servants, businessmen, artisans, tongawallahs, bearers – had fled to a few natural strongholds’ – such as the Purana Qila, the great high-walled fort in the middle of the city, and the tomb of the Mughal emperor Humayun. In the Purana Qila alone there were 60,000 refugees, huddled together in tents, ‘in the corners of battlements and in the open, together with their camels and tongas and ponies, battered old taxis and luxury limousines’.26
Gandhi now put his Punjab programme on hold. He visited the camps in the capital and outside it. In the plains around Delhi lived a farming community called Meos, Muslims by faith, but who had adopted many of the practices and rituals of their Hindu neighbours. In the madness of the time this syncretism was forgotten. Thousands of Meos were killed or driven out of their homes, whether these lay in Indian territory or in the princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur.27
Through September and October, writes his biographer D. G. Tendulkar, Gandhi ‘went round hospitals and refugee camps giving consolation to distressed people’. He ‘appealed to the Sikhs, the Hindus and the Muslims to forget the past and not to dwell on their sufferings but to extend the right hand of fellowship to each other, and to determine to live in peace . . .’ He ‘begged of them all to bring about peace quickly in Delhi, so that he might be able to proceed to both East and West Punjab’. Gandhi said ‘he was proceeding to the Punjab in order to make the Mussalmans undo the wrong that they were said to have perpetrated there [against the Hindus and the Sikhs]. But he could not hope for success, unless he could secure justice for the Mussalmans in Delhi.’28
Gandhi also spoke at a camp of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Founded by a Maharashtrian doctor in 1925, the RSS was a cohesive and motivated body of Hindu young men. Gandhi himself was impressed by their discipline and absence of caste feeling, but less so by their antagonism to other religions. He told the RSS members that ‘if the Hindus felt that in India there was no place for any one except the Hindus and if non-Hindus, especially Muslims, wished to live here, they had to live as the slaves of the Hindus, they would kill Hinduism’. Gandhi could see that the RSS was ‘a well-organized, well-disciplined body’. But, he told its members, ‘its strength could be used in the interests of India or against it. He did not know whether there was any truth in the allegations [of inciting communal hatred] made against the Sangha. It was for the Sangha to show by their uniform behaviour that the allegations were baseless.’29
Unlike Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru was not inclined to give the Sangh the benefit of doubt. ‘It seems to me clear’, he told his home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, ‘that the RSS have a great deal to do with the disturbances not only in Delhi but elsewhere. In Amritsar their activities have been very obvious’. Nehru’s feelings about the RSS stemmed from his deeper worries about the communal situation. He thought that there was ‘a very definite and well-organized attempt of certain Sikh and Hindu fascist elements to overturn the government, or at least to break up its present character. It has been something more than a communal disturbance. Many of these people have been brutal and callous in the extreme. They have functioned as pure terrorists.’30
The worry was the greater because the fanatics were functioning in ‘a favourable atmosphere as far as public opinion was concerned’. In Delhi, especially, the Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan were baying for blood. But the prime minister insisted that India must be a place where the Muslims could live and work freely. An Englishman on the governor general’s staff wrote in his diary of how ‘to see Nehru at close range during this ordeal is an inspiring experience. He vindicates one’s faith in the humanist and the civilised intellect. Almost alone in the turmoil of communalism, with all its variations, from individual intrigue to mass madness, he speaks with the voice of reason and charity.’31
At the initiative of Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress now passed a resolution on ‘the rights of minorities’. The party had never accepted the ‘two-nation theory’; forced against its will to accept Partition, it still believed that ‘India is a land of many religions and many races, and must remain so’. Whatever be the situation in Pakistan, India would be ‘a democratic secular State where all citizens enjoy full rights and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong’. The Congress wished to ‘assure the minorities in India that it will continue to protect, to the best of its ability, their citizen rights against aggression’.32
However, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was actively sceptical of this viewpoint. Its sarsanghchalak, or head, was a lean, bearded science graduate named M. S. Golwalkar. Golwalkar was strongly opposed to the idea of a secular state that would not discriminate on the basis of religion. In the India of his conception,
The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hi
ndu culture and language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . in a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizens’ rights.33
On Sunday 7 December 1947 the RSS held a large rally at the Ramlila Grounds in the heart of Delhi. The main speech was by M. S. Golwalkar. As the Hindustan Times reported, Golwalkar denied that the RSS aimed at the establishment of a Hindu Raj, but nevertheless insisted: ‘We aim at the solidarity of the Hindu society. With this ideal in view, the Sangh will march forward on its path, and will not be deterred by any authority or personality.’34
The authorities being alluded to were the Congress Party and the government of India; the personalities, Nehru and Gandhi, towards whom there was much hostility among those sections of the refugees sympathetic to the RSS. Gandhi had his meetings disrupted by refugees who objected to readings from the Quran, or who shouted slogans asking why he did not speak of the sufferings of those Hindus and Sikhs still living in Pakistan. In fact, as D. G. Tendulkar writes, Gandhi ‘was equally concerned with the sufferings of the minority community in Pakistan. He would have liked to be able to go to their succour. But with what face could he now go there, when he could not guarantee full redress to the Muslims in Delhi?’
With attacks on Muslims continuing, Gandhi chose to resort to another fast. This began on 13 January, and was addressed to three different constituencies. The first were the people of India. To them he simply pointed out that if they did not believe in the two-nation theory, they would have to show in their chosen capital, the ‘Eternal City’ of Delhi, that Hindus and Muslims could live in peace and brotherhood. The second constituency was the government of Pakistan. ‘How long’, he asked them, ‘can I bank upon the patience of the Hindus and the Sikhs, in spite of my fast? Pakistan has to put a stop to this state of affairs’ (that is, the driving out of minorities from their territory).
India After Gandhi Revised and Updated Edition Page 5