This is an original article on the Partition of India written and edited by me.
Category - Indian History/World History
The Partition of the mainland of the world’s most ethnically and linguistically diverse country - India to form the new State of Pakistan in 1947 and the cataclysmic events besieging it were one of the worst in the history of mankind. The idea of Partition of the country still apprehensively credited to one or more among the Muslim Nationalist Chaudhury Rahmat Ali, the Urdu poet, Sir “Allama” Mohammed Iqbal, Lala Lajpat Rai or the Mohammed Ali Jinnah, made a tumult of human lives to a great extent.
It was Chaudhury Rahamat Ali who advocated the name “Pakistan” in his Pakistan Declaration pamphlet of 1933. Though it may seem ironical to a section of Indians, the term means, “The Land of the Pure”. However, that name was widely accepted and was used after the Lahore Resolution of 1940. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who stood for Hindu Muslim unity until then was seen to jump ship as the supreme leader of the Muslim League demanding a wholly sovereign state for the Muslims, only after the Lahore Resolution.
The background
After Field Marshall Archibald Percival Wavell stepped down as the Viceroy of India in February 1947, Winston Churchill appointed Lord Mountbatten, as the last Viceroy of British India. He was infact appointed as an emissary of the Empire with the forlorn task of handing over power to the Indian dominion peacefully. He arrived in India in March 1947. The deadline was decided to be the end of June 1948 by which Britain had to transfer power to India. In this period, Lord Mountbatten was stowed with two tasks, to hand over power and to decide on whether to divide the country or not. Both were to be executed within the minimum time possible, as already the country was in turmoil due to the ongoing Hindu Muslim riots. The anti-British movement unanimously led by the religious heads were eventually turning out to be a clash between themselves – something of the sort of a brutal civil war. The political leadership on either sides were unable to contain it. The two provinces of Punjab and Bengal were the worst fought for as they contained almost equal proportions of Hindus and Muslims. Punjab was one of the most important provinces of undivided India with almost equal number of Hindus and Muslims and Lahore was its capital. Lahore is infact the Pakistani city closest to India at the moment. It was only by a whisker that the city went to Pakistan at Partition.
Lord Mountbatten, in his genuine attempts to transfer power smoothly, held talks with almost all the leaders possible, in the limited time he could, including the triumvirates, Gandhi, Jinnah and Nehru. Gandhi, the “incorrigible idealist” as the BBC christens him, even recommended that Jinnah be made the first Prime Minister of Independent India so that he thinks away from Partition. Nothing worked in anyone’s favour and eventually the mainland was decided to be axed into two, formally by the then British Parliament. Though historically debatable due to the hands of Winston Churchill meddling in it, the final executed plan of Partition is still known to the world as the Mountbatten Plan. The hastily-arranged partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan was brokered by the departing British colonialists[1].
The drawing
Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the lawyer from England who was employed to draw the line was someone surprisingly who had never been to anywhere east of Paris before, let alone India. He arrived in India on 8/7/1947. He was appointed the Chairman of the Boundary Committee and was given a deadline of the midnight of 14th of August 1947, just 38 days away, by Nehru, Jinnah and Lord Mountbatten, to cut India into two. This date of handing over of power was ten months ahead of schedule[2] as the British did not wish to be held responsible for the communal carnage mounting up every second, everywhere in India. Ignoring his repeated pleas that the time allowed to him was not at all sufficient, he was made to draw a line, which he drew not on the geography, but on the hearts of millions on either side of his line. Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims were all affected. There were approximately 12-14 million who moved in either direction across the lines that Radcliffe drew, just because they found themselves in the “wrong” country when the lines came to light. Ironically, those areas where they found themselves to be “wrongly” placed where areas where they had lived for generations. Sir Radcliffe himself is quoted to have stated that had he been given more time; he could have drawn a better line eventually causing lesser sanguinary exodus[3]. The infamous line of Partition came to be known as the Radcliffe’s Line which he completed drawing on 9/8/1947. The drawing, which Lord Mountbatten was sure, would be egregious to many, was kept a secret until both countries were granted independence on the midnight of 14/8/1947. Sir Cyril Radcliffe left India a day earlier, on 13/8/1947, never ever to return to the subcontinent until he died in 1977 in England.
The carnage
People had to leave their houses, property, wealth and everything they had garnered over generations while moving from the West to East and vice versa in what could still be called the fattest ever transmigration in the history of mankind. There are millions, or their generations that followed, who still cannot stand the loss of their immovable ancestral property which they had to forcefully leave behind, at the Partition. Rentiers, even those who stayed back in either country, lost all income. The relocated ones had to set up their lives from scratch with absolutely nothing at their disposal. They were forced to occupy property left behind by those who fled. There were of course people who were benefited financially by it, as they turned nouveau riche by their unexpected discoveries of abandoned wealth, but such people were numerically less. The majoritarian refugees were stranded and helpless.
Perdition was over the roof. Rabbles had pyromaniacs who held faggots and arsoned everything eyes could see. The mob looted buildings, houses, banks and what not. There was wrecking, burning and looting all around causing mass destruction and making the provinces a complete chaos. Dead bodies lay scattered on public roads in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore and Rawalpindi. Almost one million lives were reported to be lost in this entire process. “The atmosphere was that” as a local resident in Lahore told a BBC interviewer, “that they would catch, kill and burn anyone” in the other religion. Both the communities attempted a genocide of the other. The once undivided India tuned into burning cauldron of communal violence. Salman Rashid, the ace Pakistani travel writer calls it “The Mother of all Holocausts”[4]. The iron curtains that fell over the Radcliffe’s lines decided the fate of millions who freely travelled across it in either directions before it came into existence.
One of the worst among those killings were the Gahrmukteshwar massacre of 6/11/1946 that remains uninvestigated till date. Excerpt from an account where senior British Indian army officer Lieutenant Sir Francis Tuker quoted eyewitnesses, reads thus – “Pregnant women were ripped up, their unborn babies torn out and the infant brains bashed out on the ground. There were rapes and women were torn apart. Most were killed with fishing spears and some by strangulation….shocking was the unbridled savagery where the homicidal maniacs were let loose to kill and maim and burn…….”. Another episode was the “The Great Calcutta Killing” of August 1946 between Hindus and Muslims which had left close to 5,000 dead and another 10,000 injured. These pogroms which started pre-partition and lasted months after the actual cut, shattered the chances of any compromise talks between Jinnah and Nehru.
Women, children and men were slaughtered if not willing to convert to the other religion. There were women who committed suicide just because they did not wish to be killed by the mob. There were fathers and brothers who hid their little daughters and sisters for fear of being killed or raped. There were unbelievable horrifying instances where fathers martyrised their daughters by cutting their necks for them to be saved from being raped by men of the “other” religion, which, in their outlook, tantamount to death. Close to 75,000 women were reportedly killed and/or raped – another 25,000 to be added to this figure if the incidents from Kashmir had to be included. Women were abducted and taken away to the “other” new land. They were raped, some had breasts cut off and paraded naked in the streets, a lot of them had their body tattooed with symbols of the ‘other’ religion[5]. These were acts that were condemned by the entire world, later. A vast majority of them were impregnated by men of the other religion making their relatives refrain from accepting them back, if ever they were lucky enough to get back to their home in India somehow, post partition. This is in strong contradiction to those Muslim women recovered from India, who were taken back by their families and later remarried with the help of social organisations in Pakistan. These abducted women were those, who were deprived of a choice of choosing their dominion at partition, which millions of others could and stories of their awful travails are legion.
After independence, the Interdominion Treaty made on 6/12/1947 was an agreement between India and Pakistan to find and rehabilitate missing women from either countries. The Central Recovery Operation was on for nine years after the partition. These women who were able to be recovered, were taken to recovery and rehabilitation camps and were reassured and emotionally remodelled to cope up with the new environment. So many years down the lane, there were plenty of women who “settled down” in their new environments in which they were forcefully planted a few years back. The Gandhi Vanita Ashram in Jalandhar Punjab, is still a home for destitute women and children. Urvashi Butalia, the ace activist exclaims there were also thousands of women who were successfully spirited away, never to be found[6]. Lady Edwina MountBatten who, along with her family, stayed back in India[7] until the end of 1948, took part in this rescue and rehabilitation process to a great extent.
The true reason behind Partition
Who was the raison d'être behind partitioning India? With an inquisitive mind, I, who was born thirty-two years after Partition, even after reading so much of literature on Partition and on the formation of the State of Pakistan, out of sheer curiosity, doubt the following:-
1. Was it the racist dealings of Hindu Indian households who kept Muslims away as untouchables the principal reason for the Muslims to feel insecure in a Hindu dominated dominion, post-independence?
2. Was it the infirmity of Gandhi’s thought processes that made every single Muslim feel that they are not properly addressed in a country (at that time) having 25% of Muslim population?
3. Was it the vicious motives of the British in finding a stable base in the eastern subcontinent to keep away the Russians post World-War II, which, when added to the the insecurities of the Muslims in undivided India, that lead to the creation of another country to the West of India?
4. Was it the alacrity of Jawaharlal Nehru, who, initially had stood up for an undivided India, to get rid of the British at the quickest, that led to him changing opinions and accepting to partition India?
5. Was it the illness that Jinnah was fighting due to which he wanted to create a country for the fellow Muslims before he passed away, made him take decisions with haste, abdicating his true responsibilities regarding structuring the new country?
6. Was it the apprehension of Lord Mountbatten for having to be responsible later for the bloodshed that made him speed up the liberation and the partition process ten months ahead of time?
The answer is still unclear, though I would personally choose option one, if given an opportunity. In his socio-cultural travelogue “iratta mukhamulla nagaram” written in Malayalam, the vibrant Malayali writer Benyamin, on his visit to Karachi for the famous Karachi Literature Festival, faced this question by an official of the American Consulate who shot the query to an audience comprising Benyamin and other noted Indian littérateurs. He unsurprisingly states that no one had a lucid reply to give the American.
At the end of all, the State of Pakistan, in my point of view, is a half-stewed product which was hastily made with not all ingredients in correct proportion. The country has endured almost all of its issues because of this erroneous making. Jinnah had conceived a secular country with Muslim dominance, but it was unfortunate that almost all the rulers who ruled the country after Jinnah passed away, could never do justice to Jinnah’s dream on his baby viz., to be one upholding the virtues of “Unity, Discipline and Faith”. Had it ever took effect, it could have repaid at least a smidgen to the sacrifices of millions around the dreaded August.
The conclusion
The Partition of the country proved upsetting to millions who left their homeland and went elsewhere. So many have experienced the pain of visiting their lost paradises, decades later and finding them occupied by aliens. The pain of having to lose their near and dear, of having to even kill their woman-folk to preserve the honor and culture of the community they belonged to, were all an ordeal. The undivided country whose economy accounted for 23% of the world’s GDP[8] before the British Raj and was crumbled to dabs two hundred years later, could have regained its lost strength and eventually could have been an impregnable super power in seventy years, had it remained as one. On the contrary, the country was scaled down to two mere developing dominions by the Partition. However, amongst the two new countries, India developed a lot post-partition[9], laying new roads, railway lines and bridges and more importantly developing a constitution which was strong enough to withstand threats – political and communal, whereas Pakistan could become only a fraction of what India could, in these seventy odd years, thanks to its home-grown terror conglomerates.
So that makes anyone think - Was a Partition necessary? Whom did it benefit? Who made profits? In my opinion, none. It was a game of catastrophe in which everyone lost. The two countries eventually became enemies fighting a couple or more wars over the attachment of Kashmir towards themselves, again leading to innumerable deaths and carnage in the area. As a reader involved in the study of Pakistan and the Partition of India, I sincerely wish and dream, even though unheard of in world history, that the geography of British India be recreated and that the Radcliffe’s line be erased, some time in future. Being together, the country has the potential to continuously remain being the strongest power, not just in Asia, but in the entire world.
[1] https://www.dawn.com/news/1169309 [2] Clement Richard Atlee in his statement in the House of Commons on 20/2/1947 had stated that power would be transferred to India not later than June 1948 [3] as Sir Radcliffe himself said in an interview given to Kuldeep Nayar in his residence in London in 1971 published in Scoop: Inside Stories from the Partition to the Present, Kuldip Nayar, HarperCollins India [4] Page 114, “A time of Madness: A memoir on Partition” [5] as detailed in “Mool Suta Ukhde” a Gujarati non fiction account of women in Partition by Kamala Ben Patel [6] Page 147, “The other side of silence”, Urvashi Butalia [7] Lord MountBatten was the first Governor General of Independent India until 6/1948 [8] Shashi Tharoor, “An Era of Darkness” page 4 [9] India has recently surpassed the UK in becoming the fifth largest economy in the world. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-vs-pakistan-a-tale-of-two-economies/articleshow/79450051.cms
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