Other Side Of Silence Page 7

  When things became particularly bad, he said, We realized it was time to leave. This whole area was going to go to Pakistan and we had to leave. The zamindars began to say, well, it is easy for you shopkeepers — all you have to do is take your weighing scales and stones and go off, but what about us, we have land here. How can we take that away? We can’t carry our land on our heads. Shopkeepers can take up anywhere. And people kept telling themselves these kinds of things, saying, no, it won’t happen, kings may change, but when does the public ever leave its place and go? When Ranjit Singh began to rule, did the public change? When the Sikhs came into power did they throw the Musalmaans out? Don’t worry, they said, nothing will happen ... this is how they used to reassure themselves. My father said ... he said, the story is over, finished. Even in the villages people don’t look you in the eye.

  Perhaps the most astonishing thing was that, despite the concern expressed by many people, neither the Indian nor the Pakistani governments — nor indeed the British — seemed to have anticipated that there would be such a major exchange of population; that, driven by fear, people would move to places where they could live among their own kind. By the time the Partition Plan was announced, the Punjab had already seen major violence: riots in Rawalpindi district in March 1947 had left thousands dead, and there had been widespread loot, arson, destruction and violence towards women, all of which were to become the hallmarks of Partition violence. Earlier, in 1946, there was violence in Bengal, Noakhali, Bihar, Garh Mukteshwar, and both Hindus and Muslims had been at the receiving — and attacking — ends. Yet, it was only on August 17, two days after Partition, that the prime ministers of India and Pakistan met at Ambala and agreed to an exchange of population. By this time, according to Reports of the Ministry of Rehabilitation, more than 500,000 people had already moved across to India from Pakistan, and an equal number had moved the other way. Once it became clear that people would move, both governments were forced to accept this. But while refugees were allowed to move, they were prohibited from taking away their machinery, their vehicles, equipment in factories and other such assets. Not only would these slow their movement, but they would be useful for the country they were leaving behind.

  For years afterwards — indeed well into the present day — people involved in Partition violence would ask themselves what it was that turned the interconnectedness of entire lifetimes, often generations, of shared, interdependent, albeit different lives, into feelings of enmity. ‘I cannot explain it,’ said Harjit, a Sikh who lives close to the border town of Attari, ‘but one day our entire village took off to a nearby Muslim village on a killing spree. We simply went mad. And it has cost me fifty years of remorse, of sleepless nights — I cannot forget the faces of those we killed.’ His feelings find an almost exact echo on the ‘other side’ — in those of Nasir Hussain, a farmer and an ex-army man: ‘I still cannot understand what happened to me and other youngsters of my age at that time. It was a matter of two days and we were swept away by this wild wave of hatred ... I cannot even remember how many men I actually killed. It was a phase, a state of mind over which we had no control. We did not even know what we were doing.’ Like Harjit, he too is haunted by remorse for that moment of madness in his life.

  The transformation of the ‘other’ from a human being to the enemy, a thing to be destroyed before it destroyed you, became the all important imperative. Feelings, other than hate, indifference, loathing, had no place here. Later, they would come back to haunt those who had participated in the violence, or remained indifferent to its happening. A seventy-year old professor recounted how, as a young volunteer with the RSS in Patiala, he remembered hearing the screams of a Muslim woman being raped and then killed in the nearby wholesale market. He had listened, and felt nothing because, he said, ‘at the time, as members of the RSS, we were not allowed to feel for “them”.’ Fifty years later, he wept, tears of mourning for the woman, and for his own indifference.

  The irony of the ‘solution’ put forward by the leaders was nowhere more evident. Naively, they had imagined that if the warring factions (if warring factions they were) were to be separated, and a line drawn between them to mark their territorial separation, the problem would be solved. But wars and battles are notorious for crossing and not respecting boundaries. And the intricate intertwining of centuries can hardly be undone in one stroke. In what is perhaps the most tragic irony of all, the ‘solution’ actually became the beginning of the problem.

  Once the Partition Plan was announced and accepted by both parties, a machinery had to be set in motion to implement it. Almost as if by tacit agreement, the most tricky question of all, the laying down of the boundary that was to change millions of lives, was put aside for a later date. Cyril Radcliffe, recruited to the task of deciding what the maps of Pakistan and India would look like, had not finished work when the transfer of power took place, and the two countries became independent. They were to learn the geographical limits of their territories later — and to dispute them for many years after. On July 18, 1947, shortly after the announcement of the Partition Plan, the Indian Independence Bill was passed by the British parliament and became law. By its provisions, ten expert committees were set up to deal with various aspects of Partition. These were:

  Organization, Records and Government Personnel.

  Assets and Liabilities.

  Central Revenues.

  Contracts.

  Currency, Coinage and Exchange.

  Economic Relations. (i)

  Economic Relations. (ii)

  Domicile.

  Foreign Relations.

  Armed Forces.2

  Not one of these dealt with the dislocation and rupturing of people’s lives. Despite the growing atmosphere of fear and mistrust, scant attention was paid to people’s concerns for their safety and well being. Instead, political leaders naively continued to assert that things would be all right if people simply remained where they were. Early in August 1947, Gandhi regretted that people were leaving their homes and running away. This, he said, was ‘not as it should be’. Later, in November of the same year, the AICC resolved to persuade people to return to their original homes. Appeal after appeal was issued to people, assuring them safety, asking them not to move.

  These reassurances and exhortations fell on deaf ears. People knew that moving was now inevitable. They had seen what had happened in Rawalpindi, in Bihar, in Noakhali. When it did happen, the dimensions of the move were staggering. Never before or since, in human history, has there been such a mass exodus of people, and in so short a time. Just the mere scale was phenomenal. Twelve million people crossed the border in both directions. Between August and November 1947 — a bare three months — as many as 673 refugee trains moved approximately 2,800,000 refugees within India and across the border; in just one month, the Military Evacuation Organisation (MEO, made up of military personnel and set up, as the name suggests, to evacuate people) used some 10,00,000 gallons of petrol to evacuate people in East Punjab. By the end of August, planes also began to be deployed though air travel was mainly limited to public servants and the rich. Even so, an average of six to seven planes flew every day between India and Pakistan carrying refugees from Sargodha, Lyallpur, Multan and Rawalpindi. This was in addition to the existing flights between Delhi, Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Rawalpindi. By around the third week of November some 32,000 refugees had been flown in both directions. From Sind, for example, the most direct route to Bombay, where large numbers of people went, was by sea. By November 21, 133,000 people had been moved by steamer and country craft. This number, it seemed, could have been greater, but the port authorities at Karachi allowed the departure of only 2,000 people a day, as that was the maximum number they were able to handle.3

  For the poor, and those who did not, or could not, get access to trains or road transport, the only way to leave to seek their new homeland was on foot, in massive human columns known as kafilas. These began to move roughly two weeks after Partition. Initia
lly 30,000–40,000 strong, kafilas grew, the largest consisting of some 400,000 people, an enormous, massive, foot column which, it is said, took as many as eight days to cross a given spot. Between September 18 and October 22, twenty four kafilas of Hindus and Sikhs had moved from Lyallpur and Montogomery, to India, taking with them some 849,000 people. It is believed that in all, a million people crossed the border on foot, travelling from West to East.4

  Everywhere along the route, whether people were on foot, in trains, cars, or lorries, attackers lay in wait. As kafilas crossed each other, moving in opposite directions, people who looked exactly the same — for little in their appearance would, at first glance, tell whether they were Hindu or Muslim — and were burdened with poverty and grief, would suddenly turn in murderous attack on each other. Of the thousands of women who were raped and abducted, large numbers were picked up from the edges of kafilas. In the desperation of flight, the weak and vulnerable — the old and infirm, the physically disabled, children, women — often got left behind. Few had time for anyone other than themselves. In September, the elements lent a hand: unusually heavy rain led to floods and disrupted the lines of communication. Rail traffic had to be slowed down, it became difficult to travel by road, and in the kafilas, the rain led to illness and disease. The army had to be called in to repair roads and bridges, and the police and army were given the task of accompanying and protecting people travelling on foot and by road and rail.

  But the police was no longer just the police — supposedly impartial people whose task was to protect law and order. Nor were the armed forces any longer just the armed forces — supposedly neutral forces intent only upon performing the task allotted to them. Partition shattered the myth of the neutrality and objectivity of such arms of the State conclusively. Sixty per cent of the police force at the time of Partition was made up of Muslims. Non-Muslims travelling from Pakistan to India, and Muslims travelling from India to Pakistan, felt safe only if they were accompanied by police ‘of their own kind’. But this was only possible in a limited sense, for the police and army too had to mark out their territorial jurisdiction. Refugees travelling within Pakistan towards the Indian border were accompanied by the Pakistani ‘military’ as they called them, and from a certain point, the Indians took over.

  If the police force was largely made up of Muslims, in the army, these numbers were reversed: Muslims made up only thirty per cent, while non-Muslims comprised the rest. Once the decision to divide up the country had been taken, everything else had to be divided too. This included the army: not only stores and equipment such as vehicles, tanks, guns, ammunition depots, but also people. The forces were thus divided on a communal basis: Muslim soldiers to Pakistan, non-Muslims to India. Clause (f) of the general principles laid down by the Partition Council for the reconstitution of the armed forces read as follows:

  The Partition of the Forces will be in two stages. The first one will be a more or less rough and ready division of the existing Forces on a communal basis and the Plan should be prepared forthwith. The next phase will be to comb out the units themselves on the basis of voluntary transfers. However, there will be an exception — the Muslims from Pakistan now serving in the Indian Armed Forces will not have the option to join the Armed Forces of the Indian Union and similarly a non-Muslim from the rest of India now serving in the Armed forces would not have the option to join the Armed Forces of Pakistan.5

  There was an element of choice, but this was denied to Muslims who were at the time in what became Pakistan, or Hindus and Sikhs who were at the time in what became India. It was an odd kind of logic. If you’d been a Muslim, serving in the army at Lahore, you could not elect to join the Indian army, but if you had been a Hindu, serving in the army at Lahore, you had the choice to join the Indian or the Pakistani armies. Gurkhas stayed out of this: they formed seven per cent of the Indian army and were somehow seen as separate, neutral — even though they came from a Hindu country, Nepal. The army of undivided India had ten Gurkha regiments: by an interim agreement arrived at between India, Nepal and Britain, six of these regiments remained in the Indian army, while four went over to the British army. For many who travelled from Pakistan to India and in the other direction at the time, the only safe escorts were the Gurkha regiments, seen somehow as more neutral than the Hindu or Muslim armies.

  Looking back on it now, there are times at which the whole business seems absurd. Partitioning two lives is difficult enough. Partitioning millions is madness. So much had to be divided: drawing physical boundaries was no easy task. A network of roads and railways criss-crossed undivided Punjab: how could this be divided? Five rivers flowed through and provided water to the state: these would now have to be divided. A system of canals fed by these rivers irrigated many parts of Punjab; the Upper Bari Doab canal, for example, irrigated Lahore and Montgomery districts which came into West Punjab, but its headworks lay in East Punjab; the Depalpur canal which irrigated areas of West Punjab was controlled by the Ferozepur Weir which lay in East Punjab. Every administrative unit was divided, its employees being given the choice to move to India or Pakistan.

  For those who did move, other problems now arose: what would happen to their pensions, to things such as provident fund accounts, to loans taken from banks and employers? Opting for one or other country may have been relatively simple for some people (and not so for others) but when it came to the question of actually exercising that option, things were not that easy. An uncertain, disturbed situation meant that people sometimes had to wait, for days or even months, before they could move. What would happen to their jobs in this time of limbo? Who would pay their salaries? Education was disrupted, and endless arguments now took place about whether or not it was advisable to divide up universities. Away from the turmoil and ferment of home were a number of scholars: State scholars, studying for one thing or another abroad, and paid for, wholly or partially, by the State. Now they too had to opt for one of two countries. And there was no clarity about who would pay their stipends while the two countries got themselves organized. The departure of Muslim skilled labour from East Punjab left industries such as hosiery, metal works and railways crippled as Muslims formed the bulk of the workforce in these. Batala, for example, a centre for metal work, went into a decline following the departure of the Muslim workforce. Trade between the two sides of Punjab had to be restricted. Raw materials and chemical and machine goods that were earlier available from Karachi could now no longer be had, and new suppliers had to be found in Bombay. The textile industry, one of the key industries in Amritsar, now had to look for markets in the Indian interior. The shape of cities also changed: Lahore no longer remained the vibrant cultural centre it had once been. Amritsar, once in the heart of Punjab, and a thriving commercial city, now became the last city on the Grand Trunk Road before the border at Wagah.6 In the rush to leave, everyone had left behind some kind of property: cash, jewellery, personal effects, deposits, securities, things in safes, old letters, account books ... all sorts of things. Many people, believing they would return, had buried jewellery, money, gold in all sorts of places. How was all this to be recovered? The years following August 1947 were full of meetings and discussions between the two governments on who owed whom how much, and how what was owed — or owned — by those who had left was to be recovered. People who had money or goods deposited in banks had to apply to the Custodians of Evacuee Properties for permission to take these away; those who had National Savings Certificates, Defence Certificates and other similar securities could claim these at any post office in either dominion after which an elaborate process of verification needed to be gone through before these could be realized. Even weapons had to be exchanged, the first such exchange taking place in Lahore in October 1956 and in Jalandhar on the same day. Four other exchanges took place, at the end of which, in February 1958, India had received 1200 weapons to be restored to their owners. Almost in tandem with this, in 1954, and upto May 1958, some 2200 searches for buried treasures were carried o
ut in Pakistan treasures, and about 1300 of these were successful, with Rs 69 lakhs worth of such treasures being recovered.7 One of the enduring legacies of the Raj has been the administrative system and its reliance on ‘files’ — files that have notations, those that have been cleared, those that are pending ... In 1947 as one administrative system transformed itself into two, it became necessary to duplicate all files.8 At the time, though, duplication wasn’t qute as simple as it is today. So, for several months, administrators who had opted for Pakistan had to be located inside Indian ministries, copying all the documents they wanted to take along with them. What would have happened, I have often wondered, if someone had fallen asleep over the copying or made mistakes in the notings? Of such details is history made.

  On June 30, 1947, some three weeks after the Partition Plan had been announced, the Governor General of India constituted the Boundary Commissions for Punjab and Bengal. Each had four members, two Hindu and two Muslim, and both came to be chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer from England, said to be a man of ‘great legal abilities, right personality and wide administrative experience’. The task of the Boundary Commissions was to demarcate the boundaries of India and Pakistan on ‘the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims,’ and in doing so, to take into account ‘other factors’ — it was never clear quite what this last meant. With a bare five weeks in which to decide (Radcliffe arrived in India on July 8, 1947 and the award was announced on August 16, 1947) Radcliffe got down to the momentous task of deciding a boundary that would ‘divide a province of more than 35 million people, thousands of villages, towns and cities, a unified and integrated system of canals and communication networks, and 16 million Muslims, 15 million Hindus and 5 million Sikhs, who despite their religious differences, shared a common culture, language and history.’9 Predictably, there were irreconciliable differences between the members, and the different political organizations each had their own interpretation of where the boundary should be laid. While the Muslims made their claim on the basis of demography, outlining the districts that they saw as contiguous for Muslims and non-Muslims, the Hindus staked their claim on the basis of ‘other factors’ — they wanted Lahore to become part of East Punjab because of its ‘historical associations with Hindu and Sikh history’, and because much of its commerce and industry was owned by non-Muslims. If the line of partition was, however, drawn on the basis of Muslim and non-Muslim majority districts, the Sikhs would be split down the middle. They then staked their claim on the basis of the fact that many of their most sacred religious shrines would fall in Pakistan if this principle was followed and asked for portions of certain Muslim majority districts on the basis of the fact that much of the land revenue was paid by them and they had extensive landholdings in these areas. Clearly, there was no reconciling these conflicting claims, and in the end, the decisions were left to Cyril Radcliffe.