NINE
TOWARDS INDEPENDENCE
THE GOOD TIMES came to an end quickly. Within a year of the Wall Street Crash, passenger numbers started falling and, more significantly, freight tonnages plummeted. The worldwide economic crisis had an immediate impact on India as it was highly dependent on its exports of raw materials. The introduction of protectionist policies by the United States, which imposed extra tariffs on many imports, proved deeply damaging both to the Indian railways and to the wider economy, sparking off a decline in railway revenues that lasted until 1937, by which time a third of the railways’ income had been lost.
The railways did not only suffer a downturn in traffic. They were also failing to become more efficient, which meant less money was available for investment in new lines, equipment and maintenance. The successes of the 1920s, when passenger numbers rose steadily, meant that little attention had been paid to the economic performance of the railways. However, when passenger numbers stopped rising and costs remained high, their relative inefficiency caused consternation in government circles.
Until the First World War, productivity had been on an ever upward curve, as would be expected in an industry with a rapidly improving technology, but the conflict had left the railways in a parlous state, requiring massive amounts of capital investment to renew the infrastructure and the rolling stock. However, the new investment, far from making the railways more productive in relation to each pound invested, had the opposite effect. Many extra workers were employed because of a tendency of the rail companies to take on extra staff along with the introduction of new equipment. The tradition of overstaffing in the railways dates from this period but the underlying reasons for it remain unclear, though at root it is undoubtedly down to the weak management of the network. Interestingly, Britain’s railways, too, experienced a similar level of inefficiency during the interwar period and in both nations there seems to have been a failure to exploit the potential of modern technology to reduce the need for labour.
John Hurd, an economist who has written extensively on India, suggests that managerial ‘arteriosclerosis’ might have played a role: ‘Many of the directors of management companies were old India hands, chosen for their connections but not necessarily for their knowledge of running complex organisations that were designed, in theory, to serve the public.’ While many directors were engineers, this did not mean they were good at making long-term decisions over investment in proposed projects. Others, however, were barely compos mentis as, according to Hurd, ‘some directors were so aged, in their 90s, that they had to be carried into the meetings’.1 The minutes of these meetings, invariably held in London, reveal that the focus was not always on the most urgent matters. It was not unusual, for example, that these illustrious men – and, of course, they were all men – would indulge in lengthy discussions as to whether the wife of a particular British engine driver should be allowed to accompany her husband for free on the boat journey to India and how much that would set the company back, while ignoring far more weighty matters, such as overall staffing levels or where best to target investment.
There were, in fairness to these geriatric directors, numerous other reasons for the overall inefficiency of the network. The various government committees and commissions, such as Acworth’s, which recommended modernization were not always consistent with one another and led to the sort of regular administrative reorganizations that today bedevil large establishments such as the UK’s National Health Service. As we have seen, while Acworth suggested expansion and investment, the purpose of several subsequent reports, with words like ‘retrenchment’ and ‘efficiency’ in their titles, was all too obviously the opposite.
Furthermore, there was a growing fear among railway managers of unrest, given that the unions gained considerable strength in the immediate postwar period and managements were far more reluctant to take them on after the spate of strikes in the early 1920s. The right of labour to organize was now largely accepted by both the railway companies and the Government of India. Union rights became entrenched in law through the passing of the Trade Unions Act of 1926, which allowed groups of seven or more workers to form a trade union and register it with a government agency to ensure recognition from the employer. Crucially, too, the new legislation gave trade union leaders immunity from prosecution in some circumstances. An amendment to the 1890 Indian Railways Act, passed in 1930, limited the maximum time staff were allowed to work to sixty hours per week, in line with international conventions, which resulted in more staff having to be taken on.
While providing these improved conditions for workers, the Government of India missed an opportunity to raise productivity by refusing to sanction several planned mergers between the major railway companies because it did not want to pay compensation to their British owners for ending contracts prematurely. Moreover, there was too much government enthusiasm for the construction of new lines when the available money would have been better targeted on renewing worn-out equipment. Many of these new routes were branch lines, built to satisfy local political interests rather than to serve profitable local markets, and consequently were little used but still required considerable extra staff.
Increasing concerns of the Government of India about the poor economic performance of the railways led, in 1936, to the establishment of yet another committee, this time to ‘examine the position of Indian state-owned railways’ (which by then were the majority), in order to suggest ways of improving profits and ‘at a reasonable and early date place railway finances on a sound and remunerative basis’.2 This was the type of enquiry that, incidentally, was paralleled across the world as railways everywhere faced increasing competition from road transport, which was wrecking the economic viability of many networks and placing ever-increasing financial burdens on the governments which owned them. The search for a ‘profitable’ or ‘economic’ railway was akin to seeking the Holy Grail, and discovered almost as rarely. India, in fact, was rather ahead of the game in that work on the infamous Beeching Report, which had a very similar remit in the UK, did not start until a quarter of a century later.
The Indian Railway Enquiry Committee was chaired by Sir – of course – Ralph Wedgwood, who, reporting in 1937, found that the tendency to spend lavishly on new projects had surprisingly survived the Depression. The railways, in other words, had got in the habit of spending above their means, which had been fine in the highly profitable 1920s but was now a serious problem. Sir Ralph mused: ‘We cannot help feeling that in the past 15 years stations, workshops and marshalling yards have often been built to be the last word in railway technique rather than on a careful calculation of probable requirements, and that prestige has perhaps counted far more than prudence.’3 Such excesses were made more costly by the rise in interest rates following the Depression, which further worsened overall railway finances.
Thanks to Wedgwood’s experience as the chief officer of the London & North Eastern Railway, a job he retained while he investigated India’s railways, his report was far more incisive and positive than many others in this endless series of government investigations into the state of India’s railways. Wedgwood travelled extensively around the country on the railways accompanied by his wife, Iris, who, as mentioned previously, was a novelist and travel writer, and she has left us with a delightful account of her travels for the Railway Gazette. She clearly relished the whole experience of learning about India and its iron road, and her descriptions give us a rather better insight into the realities of rail travel in the 1930s than the articles in the Gazette, which were mostly written by the companies’ bosses or public relations officers.
Unlike most visitors from Britain, Mrs Wedgwood actually enjoyed the climate, commenting that the tropical heat ‘was a joyful change after the English summer and it made the electric fans welcome enough’. However, the nights, in the north, were cold and she was grateful she had brought her fur coat, which doubled as an extra blanket. Noting that the temperature change from day to night could be as much as forty degrees, she wrote: ‘To the Europeans living in India, it is their one chance of being cool; to me it was my one chance of being hot.’ Her description of the relationship between the railway and the countryside is wonderfully evocative: ‘At times the train seemed so terribly small, a little ridiculous toy running through eternity, an absurd thing that no one wanted, that would get lost and never be found and then I used to be just frankly afraid because India looked so immense from the carriage window.’4
The by-product of the railways’ poor productivity was an increase in fares and freight rates. Although these still remained low in international terms, they reduced the number of passengers and the amount of freight carried. Moreover, they went some way to breaking the implicit pact between the railways and the Indian people which had been established since the first line opened more than three quarters of a century previously. While the British determined the routes and the services in line with the requirements of their economic interests, the people at least benefited from cheap travel in return. As fares rose, so did levels of resentment, especially as the increases had a wider effect on the economy and on the nation’s growth prospects, as John Hurd emphasizes: ‘India may have paid a terrible price for the ineptitude. Costs for railway production rose in crucial years. Real rates and fares charged on customers rose at key points. This could have been a factor in the stagnation of the economy.’5 The lack of money available for investment had the effect of slowing down the modernization of the network, such as electrification, which, as we have seen, ground to a halt in 1936 and was not restored until after Independence more than a decade later.
Nevertheless, the railways were by no means the financial basket case they had been until the turn of the century. Despite the low level of productivity, they were profitable and, in international terms, gave a decent rate of return on capital. By the mid-1930s, invested capital on Indian railways was earning 3.4 per cent annually, compared with 3.1 per cent back in the UK and just 2.6 per cent in the US, which was already beginning to suffer more intensely from road and air competition. The relatively high profitability of the Indian system remained the result of the heavy patronage by third-class travellers, who still made up 90 per cent or more of passengers.
The railways, of course, are not just about money collected through the fare box. Their value also comes in the form of what economists call the ‘externalities’, which are the positive aspects, such as the benefits to industry, to job creation and to economic development generally. Because these benefits are less easy to quantify, they are often omitted, but in India they were clearly enormous. Without the railways, Indians would not have been able to move faster than those wretchedly slow bullock carts.
As a result of the Wedgwood report, the government appointed for the first time a minister for transport and communications, who had the power to intervene in any decisions made by the Railway Board. The minister, though, was a senior civil servant and it was not until after Independence that the role became the preserve of a politician. There was, too, a change in emphasis to a more commercial approach by the railways, as recommended by Wedgwood. Already, in the early 1930s, there had been some effort on the part of the railway companies to attract new passengers and retain existing ones. Air-conditioned carriages made their first appearance around this time, but only for first-class passengers on services between Calcutta and Bombay, operated jointly by the East Indian and Great Indian Peninsula railways. In overall terms, the few thousand travellers who benefited from the cool air were a tiny proportion, fewer than 0.1 per cent, of annual passengers carried on the network, but ‘AC’, as it is always known in India, had a symbolic importance, demonstrating the subcontinent was embracing modernity. For freight carriers, there was a series of targeted rate reductions and efforts to develop new markets, and there was considerable success with boosting the transport of sugar cane. Parcel traffic was also encouraged and the mail services, a traditional part of railway transport in India, were expanded.
The exotically named His Exalted Highness, the Nizam’s Guaranteed State Railway – known more prosaically as the Nizam’s State Railway – was an innovator in trying to increase passenger traffic. The railway, whose rate of return was guaranteed by Hyderabad state, rather than the Government of India, introduced a series of connecting buses to feed into its rail network. This not only boosted the number of passengers, but the buses themselves made a profit, and eventually a network operated by sixty-five vehicles was developed. Wedgwood recommended that rail companies should be running their own road services, as they did in the UK, but the chaotic conditions resulting from an almost complete absence of any rules for road traffic and the failure to implement even the most basic safety regulations made this difficult elsewhere. Hyderabad had the advantage of having a state government that had imposed some controls over its road traffic, and consequently its buses were able to operate reasonably efficiently and without unfair competition.
This was a growing issue for the railways. As in many countries in the world, the interwar years were the period when road competition started to have an impact on the railways, and the Wedgwood Committee’s report emphasized the need to impose regulations on the use of roads by motor vehicles as otherwise they represented unfair competition. In the first of many criticisms that would be heard from railway managers in the following years, J. A. Bell, the agent (general manager) of the East Indian Railway, complained about the chaotic unregulated conditions on the roads and the widely used subterfuge to avoid paying taxes: ‘Conditions in regard to the regulation and control of road motor transport are generally far from satisfactory. The overloading of buses and lorries, and the registration of goods lorries as private vehicles in order to avoid payment of higher taxation, registration and licence fees, are commonly resorted to.’6 Bell stressed that unrestricted bus and lorry competition was the major problem of the day. Despite the Wedgwood Committee’s recommendation for new laws on stricter control of road traffic, legislation was slow to be passed, and even then enforcement of rules was non-existent, as it largely remains today, despite recent government attempts to fine or even jail bad drivers.
By forcing the railways out of their complacency, born of having long enjoyed an effective monopoly on medium- and long-distance travel, the competition did have beneficial effects. The general manager of the North Western Railway, for example, realized the need for the railways to combat the threat from other modes of transport: ‘Competition from road transport has awakened the railway to the necessity of providing greater facilities to the public and they are now showing a belated but nonetheless welcome regard for the convenience of both passengers and merchants.’7 In particular, freight for shorter journeys was being lost to the roads while, for the most part, long-distance freight stayed on the tracks because the condition of the roads and the reliability of the lorries were so poor.
Bell, in common with many other senior rail managers, was in no doubt that the railway companies had to respond. He suggested a range of measures, such as increasing the frequency of services and making them faster, having greater flexibility in rates for freight, introducing road services to take goods to and from their final destination, and greater marketing of services for both passengers and freight. On the South Indian, the reduction of fares for third-class passengers and the introduction of cheap return tickets resulted in some journeys costing as little as 2 pies per mile (a mere 0.19 of an old penny). The manager of the South Indian reported that these measures had met with success and had the effect of forcing bus companies to serve as feeders to the trains, a move which the railway encouraged through the issuing of joint bus/rail tickets, a very early example of integrated transport. Another innovation by the South Indian was the abolition of first class on the Madras electric network, which boosted the space available to the other two classes. The number of trains was increased as well, to a train every seven minutes, allowing for 140 trains per day rather than ninety. Most other railways, aware of the threat of competition, introduced similar measures of cutting fares, increasing frequencies and offering an improved service for freight users.
As well as providing more trains, the railway companies responded to Wedgwood’s injunction to be more commercial by seeking to attract extra passengers. One imaginative innovation was the introduction of the bazaar train. The huge distance between Indian cities meant many rural dwellers had little access to the range of goods offered in larger conurbations. The solution was for the companies to run long-distance tours by a bazaar train, which was fitted out as a travelling shop offering a huge range of goods that could not be obtained locally. It would be hauled overnight to relatively remote stations and then opened up to local shoppers during the day. The Eastern Bengal Railway was the first to adopt this idea, running a train which stopped at thirty stations round its network, and that initiative was so successful the service became an annual event. The Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway responded in 1934 with a far more ambitious tour, covering 5,000 miles from Ahmedabad to within 300 miles of Calcutta in a journey that took 112 days. The new service was welcomed by the Viceroy, the Marquess of Willingdon, who saw it as a way of not only providing a profit for the railways but also of promoting the sale of locally produced goods. The Marquess was so impressed that he, and his wife, the Countess, met the train personally when it arrived in Delhi.
The railways started to recover after the low point of 1933, which was when the total of passenger numbers annually dipped below 500 million for the first time in a decade, and carryings returned to their pre-Depression levels in 1937/8, helped by the efforts of the railway companies to boost traffic. This would be the beginning of a remarkable decade of growth for the railways, despite it also being a time of political turmoil and conflict when the British government began to recognize it could not hold on to India indefinitely.
The Government of India Act 1935 had mandated elections to the provincial (state) governments for the first time, albeit on a limited male franchise, and these were held in 1937, despite the Congress Party not yet having decided whether it would agree to form administrations if elected. Nevertheless, the Congress leader and future Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, crisscrossed the country electioneering by train and was mobbed at every station he visited. He was not averse to commenting on the relative merits of the railway lines on which he travelled, and complained, in his autobiography, about the incomprehensible fares structure: ‘I think I gave first place to the East Indian Railway, the North Western was fair; but the Great Indian Peninsula was bad and shook one thoroughly. Why this was so I do not know, nor do I know why fares should differ so greatly between the different railway companies all under state control.’8 The Great Indian Peninsula, he complained, was far more expensive and did not even issue ordinary return tickets.
The railways were subject, too, to rather less peaceful politically motivated interventions. The rise of nationalism in the interwar period inevitably affected the railways, not least because of their symbolic importance for both the British and the Indians. As the historian David A. Campion puts it, ‘For the British, the railways remained the most visible symbol (with the possible exception of the army) of their technical superiority and the physical conquest of the land as well as their political control over its people.’9 For Indians, the railways were an all too obvious target. As we have seen, the humiliations imposed on third-class passengers were a radicalizing force experienced by millions of Indians, and the railway companies, many still controlled from London, easily became the subject of their resentment. Moreover, taking action was easy. Ticketless travel, already the bane of the railway companies, was perceived by many as a political act as it deprived British shareholders or the British-controlled Government of India of revenue. With a bit of encouragement from nationalist leaders, fare dodging became more widespread and reached levels where it was impossible for the overworked rail staff to cope, even though at times they travelled with a magistrate able to impose immediate fines on miscreants: ‘The ultimate goal was to wrest control of India’s railways from the state and return it to the people who paid for its operation.’10
The other simple trick to disrupt services was to pull the communication cord, which was supposed only to be used in an emergency. Unlike on most modern trains, the device on Indian trains activated the brakes directly, rather than simply communicating a warning to the driver, and therefore could be used to stop the train in order to disrupt services. Heavy fines were imposed on those misusing the system, but these were hardly a deterrent since finding the culprits, particularly if all the passengers around them were fellow political activists, was nigh on impossible. Cleverly, the nationalists were using the great iron road against the very people that had introduced it in India, as Ritika Prasad notes: ‘Railway lines, which had been imagined as conduits that allowed India’s rulers to travel to hill stations to recuperate and replicate a sense of home, instead became the means through which the message of satyagraha [Gandhi’s concept of ‘search for the truth’, which underpinned his non-violent philosophy] was transmitted.’11
At times, inevitably, more concerted and violent action against the railways was undertaken by nationalist forces. Relatively peaceful periods were interspersed with others when there were numerous and prolonged attempts to disrupt the working of the network because: ‘Trains never lost their appeal as the object of anti-government fury. To disrupt the smooth running of the rail system remained the easiest and most dramatic way to strike at the heart of the colonial regime and cripple its military and economic power.’12 Just as in the years running up to the First World War mentioned in Chapter 7, attacks on the railway intensified. One notable incident was the unsuccessful attempt near Delhi to blow up the train carrying the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, by Punjabi revolutionaries in December 1929, which caused only minor injuries and little damage because the bomb failed to detonate properly. This was part of a series of assassination attempts by radical nationalist elements during a particularly violent but fortunately brief period.
Another series of coordinated attacks on the railways was launched a decade later in the run-up to the Second World War. Normally, the rail companies and the Government of India were reluctant to mention the existence of attacks, but in its summary of ‘recent events’ published in the 1939 overseas edition of the Railway Gazette the East Indian Railway company revealed that it had been the subject of numerous attacks in the previous year: ‘1938/9 was marked by regular outbreaks of sabotage on the system. In three instances, there were derailments attended by loss of life. In two subsequent cases, serious disaster was averted by the timely discovery of damage to the track. The Government of India viewed the frequency of these incidents with grave concern and ordered a thorough inquiry by a tribunal headed by a high court judge.’13
The inquiry revealed that these attacks had, indeed, been caused by terrorists who were probably responsible for a series of other derailments. Extra police were taken on to patrol lines at night, but the railways are incredibly difficult to defend against such acts of sabotage. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, dacoits (bandits) stopped trains and robbed mail vans to raise funds for the nationalist movement.
The entry of India into the war, without any reference to local politicians, was extremely controversial as it was opposed by the Congress Party, which, in the summer of 1942, launched the Quit India movement with the aim of ending the British Raj. Although both Gandhi and Nehru were sympathetic to the Allies, neither, for different reasons – one was a pacifist, the other a socialist – supported India’s involvement in the war. The methods of the independence campaign, however, were the subject of fierce debate within the Congress Party. Gandhi was always opposed to any violent action, but elements within Quit India were not so restrained. After the arrest on 9 August 1942 of Gandhi, Nehru and all the other Congress leaders, who would spend the rest of the war in jail without facing trial, there were widespread protests, many of them violent, with the railways as the principal target. The crucial north-eastern corner, where the railways were needed as the principal line of communication for the war against Japan, suffered the worst. Within a couple of days of the arrests, large parts of the East Indian Railway and almost the entire Bengal & North Western were put out of action. For much of the next few weeks, Bengal was virtually cut off from northern India, but there were also attacks as far south as Madras. The railways in Bihar, too, suffered greatly, with many of the Bengal & North Western’s stations in the state being destroyed by arsonists. The damage was carefully directed, with control centres and communications equipment being targeted. Many stations and signal boxes were set on fire and several trains were derailed as sections of track were removed, with, on at least three occasions, fatal consequences. There were many peaceful protests, too. In Bihar, one of the most active states, students hijacked trains and used them to travel to the countryside, telling local people that the Raj had gone and that India was free. The engines of the trains were draped with the national flag and Quit India slogans were daubed on the carriages. According to one report, ‘students also wiped out class distinctions by asking villagers to board the first class compartments. Passengers wearing western clothes were not allowed to board the train.’14
The British responded very forcefully, jailing tens of thousands of activists, imposing fines on countless others and violently breaking up crowds of protestors, causing hundreds of deaths. There were even public floggings and the antagonism raised by the British actions made independence inevitable. The ferocity of the British response was born of the fear that the whole war effort could be undermined by the Quit India activists. Repression rather than conciliation was the order of the day. The military men saw it as a life-or-death struggle, and viewed the Quit India activists as being a kind of fifth column of the German–Japanese Axis tactics. Commenting on the destruction of a crucial section of line in Bihar, one officer later wrote: ‘If the attacks had been coordinated from Tokyo the wreckers could not have chosen a more vital length of track for their attentions. The only direct route from western India to the front line areas was rendered useless.’15 He was convinced that ‘the attacks were not spontaneous expressions of anti-Government feeling. They were planned moves in a deliberate scheme to impede the war effort.’16
There is no doubt that the war effort was hampered and that much of the damage was strategically inflicted, but, by and large, the aim of most of those involved was not to help the Japanese win the war but rather to show the British that they could no longer hold on to their most prized colonial possession. Although clearly there was much local planning of the protests, which were often well-organized and targeted, there was little national coordination because the leadership had been incarcerated. In particular, the Congress Party, which as a result of the entire top level in the organization’s hierarchy being jailed was run by a group of inexperienced young activists, was divided on the issue of how far the protests should go. While Gandhi abjured any violence, it was not exactly clear what was permissible to those organizing protests. K. G. Mashruwala, one of the editors of Gandhi’s Harijan newspaper, argued that disrupting transport communications was acceptable, provided precautions were taken to safeguard life, as was cutting wires, removing rails and destroying small bridges. Although he stressed this was his personal opinion, the official report into the role of Congress in railway sabotage published in 1943 concluded that Gandhi must have sanctioned this policy, given that the editors of his newspaper were unlikely to depart radically from his ideas.
The violence continued into the autumn but largely abated by the end of the year because of the strength of the response from the British and the lack of coordination among the few remaining Congress activists who had not been detained. Order was eventually restored but only at the cost of many lives and hundreds of thousands of people being thrown into jail without trial. The driving force behind the repression was to ensure that the trains had to be kept running. The 1857 Rebellion had demonstrated the importance of the railways in keeping order and had led to their expansion. The Quit India campaign had shown how easy it was to disrupt services and how much repression was needed to ensure their continued functioning. However, the campaign had shown that the railways were a double-edged sword. They were still the mainstay of transport for the police and troops and without them it was impossible to keep hold of the country. On the other hand, they were also used by militants to travel around India rapidly and their very ubiquity meant that there was invariably a local line or station that could be made the focus of an attack by a group of activists. The events of just a few years later, during the Partition, would show the disastrous consequences of the authorities totally losing control of the railways.
As in the First World War, the railways were the cornerstone of transport for the war effort because they were vital in moving troops and supplies across the country. By the outbreak of the war in 1939, the network had 41,000 miles, of which just over half were broad gauge, with the rest divided between 15,700 miles of one-metre gauge and a surprisingly significant 4,200 miles of narrow gauge, split between 2ft and 2ft 6in. It was, in truth, still not a very extensive network for such a big country. The US, by contrast, had six times the number of route miles for an area that was only double that of India. Just under 10 per cent of India’s total mileage was both run and owned by private companies, however, a further 14,000 miles were still in the hands of private companies but run by public organizations. However, the government, through ownership and its control and regulation of train operations, was able to decide which trains should run once conflict broke out as the rail network became the engine room of the war effort.
This time the conflict, which, thanks to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, included Asia, was far closer to home for Indians and consequently the railways played an even greater role than during the First World War. The railways were, again, worked into the ground while routine maintenance was neglected and investment postponed. The east–west routes across northern India were the most heavily used, playing a key role both in helping evacuate troops fleeing, with large amounts of equipment, from the Japanese, who had quickly conquered Singapore, Malaya and Burma, and in supporting the build-up of the counter-offensive.
In the first part of the war, before Pearl Harbor, India’s network not only had to accommodate the transport needs of the huge Indian army, whose numbers increased more than tenfold during the conflict to a staggering 2.5 million, but also was forced to close several lines and despatch the dismantled equipment to build and expand railways in the Middle East. It was mostly the metre-gauge lines, which were less well-used, that were closed, and provided 4,000 miles of rail, hundreds of locomotives and several thousand wagons, all of which were shipped westwards from Bombay. Overall, twenty-six branch lines were closed and services on many others curtailed. The timetable on main-line railways was also greatly reduced, with ordinary passenger traffic being officially ‘discouraged’ and at times reduced to a skeleton service. War traffic was prioritized. This included massive quantities of coal from the Bengal and Bihar mines alone, which formerly had been transported via Calcutta. A large number of daily trains were now rerouted through Bombay because of the lack of coastal shipping, necessitating the operation of thousands of additional special services, which clogged up the network.
After Japan had overrun much of south-east Asia, the priorities changed. Some branch and minor lines that had been neglected suddenly became vital links in the logistical exercise of defending India’s eastern border. Burma, which had been a province of India until 1937, was overrun in 1942 by Japan, which attempted to use it as a staging post for the invasion of India, constructing the infamous Death Railway between Thailand and Burma as a way of keeping its troops supplied.
The Allies were conscious of the need to protect eastern Bengal and Assam from Japanese attack and began to strengthen the railway line of communication. There was an irony here. All that effort to build up the railways on the North-West Frontier, from where an attack on India had been expected, proved to have been wasted. On the other hand, the railways in the north-east had been neglected and were a mess, with three different gauges, many single-track lines and a historic lack of investment. The most immediate threat was to the line which runs on the west bank of the massive Brahmaputra River and was, at times, very close to the Japanese front lines. The route to Assam from Calcutta initially headed north on a broad-gauge line on the west side of the Brahmaputra River towards Siliguri, at the foothills of the Himalayas, but at Parbatipur, 233 miles from Calcutta, all passengers and freight had to be transshipped to a metre-gauge railway which terminated at Amingaon, on the river bank, where a small ferry was the sole route across the massive waterway. From Pandu, on the other bank, the metre-gauge single line wound on through the Brahmaputra valley to Tinkusia in the north-east corner of Assam. A plan to ford the river with a bridge was considered but eventually ruled out as impractical during the war, which meant that the manhandling of goods three times between the various forms of transport had to be maintained throughout the conflict.
This route was not only important for resisting the Japanese invasion, but also because the Allied forces in China were supplied by an airlift over the Himalayas from a series of landing strips dotted along the railway in Assam. The metre-gauge line had originally been built to serve the tea plantations in Assam but was utterly inadequate for the war effort. As John Thomas, an officer who wrote an account of the way the line assumed such importance during the war, put it, with possibly just a hint of hyperbole: ‘The fate of India, and to a degree, the British Empire, depended on this slender line of communication.’17
The transport difficulties were compounded by the fact that this railway suffered from a chronic shortage of locomotives and, as mentioned above, was repeatedly the subject of acts of sabotage by Quit India activists. There were also floods to contend with, which swept away major bridges, and a famine in 1943 that not only killed an estimated 3 million people but weakened many railway workers who operated the trains or shifted goods. Thanks to the arrival of 4,000 American and 400 British troops to oversee work on the line, huge improvements were made rapidly which increased capacity more than tenfold, from 600 to 7,000 tons per day, through the construction of passing loops, the doubling of all the broad-gauge as well as sections of the metre-gauge tracks, and other improvements to speed up services, such as running trains on single-track sections in ‘fleets’ in the same direction for several hours and then in the other direction for a similar period.
It was not only a matter of overcoming the physical obstacles, but also, according to Thomas, of instilling a sense of urgency among the Indian staff, whose work practices were, at times, singularly inefficient. While Thomas was rather too ready to recount stories of Indian railway workers that fitted in with his prejudices, there is enough that rings true to suggest these are genuine accounts. He recalls how a train carrying an urgent military load was due to leave a yard when the guard noticed one of the wagons had a door open. It was only two cars away, but instead of shutting the door himself, he walked the length of the train to find the train examiner whose job it was to close it and consequently delayed the departure by twenty minutes. This insistence on refusing to carry out a task that was another man’s job was deeply ingrained: ‘This was not an isolated example. Such incidents occurred frequently and the combined result of the efficiency of the system can be well imagined.’18
The most intractable problem was convincing signallers to stop prioritizing the old ‘Mail’ and ‘Express’ services, which previously had always been given precedence over other traffic: ‘The Indians could not get out their heads that the Mails must not be delayed a minute and Indian controllers, horror-stricken by the thought that they might commit the supreme sacrilege of causing a mighty Mail to meet an adverse distant [a yellow signal warning of a red one ahead] often put vital military trains into loops out of the way.’19 Meanwhile, the Mail would thunder through on the main track.
Despite his criticisms, Thomas repeatedly expressed his deep respect for the Indian railway workers, who kept the system going in very difficult circumstances and consequently played a key role in the war effort. Moreover, he did not confine his criticism to the locals, as he was also scathing about some of his American counterparts, such as the fellow who pulled the communication cord upon discovering that no toilet paper had been provided on his train and the officers who habitually took over the most comfortable carriages as offices, leaving the railway short of rolling stock.
The Americans, who arrived in large numbers from late 1943 to assure the integrity of the line of communication, ran the railway by their rules, cannibalizing anything available to provide the equipment they needed, such as ripping out fans from carriages to provide ventilation for their offices and recycling components from lesser-used railways. They ignored the safety rules that had been built up over the years, with the result that while services were, indeed, speeded up, there was a spate of accidents that left a trail of broken wagons and derailed locomotives by the side of the tracks. While the American intervention was successful, it caused widespread resentment among both Indians and even the British.
After the invasion of Singapore and Burma in 1942, the British had expected the Japanese to attack Dinapur, 600 miles north-east of Calcutta, which would have given them a new supply route for invading India via the port of Chittagong. In the event, hampered by the lack of supplies, the Japanese hesitated and the attack was delayed, by which time the defences had been strengthened thanks to the improved line of communication. As a result, the Allies won the crucial battle of Imphal in the spring and summer of 1944, averting the Japanese threat. Thomas has no doubts about the importance of this little-known part of the conflict: ‘The Bengal– Assam line of communication was an epic in the history of railway transport.’20
The war left the railways in an exhausted and overused state. One side effect was that many of the British railway managers and, indeed, the senior engineers and locomotive drivers left India to fight, never to return, because they foresaw that the end of the Raj would soon see them displaced by locals. The conflict consequently speeded up the Indianization of the senior railway staff, which turned out to be fortuitous since they would soon be required to take over the whole service. To add to the difficulties, passenger numbers were increasing rapidly thanks to the growth in the economy and the effects of war. Between 1938/9, the last year before the war, and 1947/8, the year of Independence, the numbers using the railways (excluding the lines affected by Partition) went up from 355 million to 902 million, an increase of 154 per cent. Yet, the train mileage remained broadly the same, as little money was available for investment, resulting, not surprisingly, in serious overcrowding, delays to passenger services and widespread, lengthy hold-ups in the movement of freight.
The railways would soon become subsumed into one national concern, Indian Railways, which would recognize the need for massive investment through a series of Five-Year Plans, but first there was the rush to Independence and the consequent disastrous and hurried partition of India and Pakistan in which the railways played a crucial and, at times, tragic role. Although the British had begun to realize that Independence could no longer be avoided, due mainly to the widespread actions of the Quit India campaign, together with the growing strength of the Congress Party, India was to be the first major non-white decolonization and they had little idea of how to go about it. The very forces which the British had encouraged with their divide-and-rule policies that were intended to emphasise, rather than dissipate, religious difference were to be the major obstacle to a peaceful transfer of power. Given Britain’s depleted economy at the end of the war, the imperial power was hardly worthy of that term. Britain simply did not have the resources or the desire to control its greatest colonial asset, but the mistakes of the Labour government elected in 1945 and the haste to get out contributed to the unrest and the massacres in which an estimated 2 million people died.
At the end of the war, Independence was widely recognized as inevitable, but there was still a whiff of hope that partition would not be necessary. That last bit of optimism was soon snuffed out when Lord Mountbatten came to India as its last Viceroy in February 1947. Within a few days of arriving, talks with the main politicians led him to decide he had no chance of keeping a united India, given the antagonism between the two Hindu leaders, Gandhi and Nehru, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the head of the Muslim League. Mountbatten, eager that Britain should not oversee what he thought looked like becoming a civil war and bloodbath, brought forward the date of Independence, announcing on 3 June 1947 that the handover would be on 15 August, a mere ten weeks away.
Mountbatten brought in a British lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had no knowledge of south Asia, had never even been there and would never return, to head two boundary commissions (one for the east, one for the west), which would determine the territory of the two states, and gave him just five weeks to carry out this momentous task. Radcliffe, whose odd nickname at public school had been ‘Squit’, spent most of that time sweating over Ordnance Survey maps in a bungalow in the Viceroy’s grounds and admitted later that it would have taken years to establish proper boundaries recognizing the communal preferences. He could not, however, be blamed for the chaos that ensued. The key decision, to accede to the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state, was effectively made by default. The new nation, Pakistan, was to have two separate parts, East Pakistan and West Pakistan, separated by 1,000 miles of Indian territory. It was not a sustainable solution, as the secession of East Pakistan and its transformation into the new nation of Bangladesh a mere twenty-four years later showed.
The unseemly haste with which Mountbatten implemented the process of independence undoubtedly contributed to the orgy of violence and killing. The British failed to anticipate the huge numbers who would want to move to the state where their religion was dominant or the violence that this would engender. Around 15 million people moved between India and Pakistan during the period of Partition, the largest such migration in world history. The railways were to be the main mass transport mode, carrying around 4 million refugees during this period, and therefore its passengers, travelling en masse in confined spaces with greatly overcrowded conditions, were sitting ducks. The year 1947 would be the bleakest in the near century of Indian railway history, and the violence would at times bring parts of the system to a complete halt, forcing refugees onto the roads, where they faced even greater danger.
The prospect of independence had already triggered, in the summer and autumn of 1946, sporadic communal violence between Muslims and Hindus, and, occassionally, Sikhs, who also formed a separate religious group that was at times hostile to Islam and indeed participated strongly in many attacks. In particular, a bloody riot and massacre of Hindus in Calcutta in August 1946 led to tit-for-tat reprisals later in the year in Bihar, the start of the series of killings that would ultimately take 1–2 million lives – the very vagueness of the estimate shows the extent of the loss of control by the authorities. In the days running up to Independence, services began to be disrupted as railway staff stayed at home to protect their families. Lahore, which became the capital of the new Pakistan state of Punjab, was in chaos as, according to Khosla, the historian of the Indian railways, ‘there seemed to be no authority in command and it was surprising how a few trains moved in and out’.21
Even before the formal separation of the countries, there were attacks on the railway traffic between India and the soon-to-be-created Pakistan. The first special train carrying the secretariat personnel and records of the new government of Pakistan was blown up on its way from Delhi to Karachi on the night of 9 August, near Girddarbaha in the Punjab. After independence was declared on 15 August, the situation deteriorated rapidly. Inevitably, the Punjab, which was split by the boundary line established by Radcliffe between India and West Pakistan, was the worst affected. Trains across the new frontier were soon halted, and the carnage began. William Dalrymple, the historian and writer, describes how events worsened on the very day of Independence:
Outside the well-guarded enclaves of New Delhi the horror was well under way. That same evening [15 August 1947], as the remaining British officials in Lahore set off for the railway station, they had to pick their way through streets littered with dead bodies. On the platforms, they found the railway staff hosing down pools of blood. Hours earlier, a group of Hindus fleeing the city had been murdered by a Muslim mob as they sat waiting for a train. As the Bombay Express pulled out of Lahore and began its journey south, the officials could see that Punjab was ablaze, with flames rising from village after village.22
In his award-winning book, Midnight’s Furies, Nisid Hajari wrote:
Foot caravans of destitute refugees fleeing the violence stretched for 50 miles and more. As the peasants trudged along wearily, mounted guerrillas burst out of the tall crops that lined the road and culled them like sheep. Special refugee trains, filled to bursting when they set out, suffered repeated ambushes along the way. All too often they crossed the border in funereal silence, blood seeping from under their carriage doors.23
As he puts it, ‘the image of the “corpse train” arriving full of dead and mutilated bodies remains perhaps the most enduring icon of Partition’.24 The worst period for the railway massacres was September, when several ‘“corpse trains” rolled into Lahore station dripping blood, their carriages filled with hacked-off limbs, women without breasts or noses, disembowelled children’. The arrival of these trains was used by ‘provocateurs [who] made sure that even those who did not witness these atrocities heard about them in graphic, often exaggerated detail’ in order to encourage their coreligionists to carry out revenge attacks.25
One of the first railway massacres occurred on 24 August on the southbound Frontier Mail, which ran from Peshawar on the North-West Frontier, which had just become part of Pakistan. It arrived, a day late, in Bombay having been held up by several hundred armed men who murdered many passengers and looted their baggage. The arrival of trains at their destination littered with corpses began to be a regular phenomenon. By simply pulling the communication cord, trains could be stopped in places where gangs were waiting in lineside ambushes to massacre the passengers. As is often the case in such periods of civil strife, routine criminal activity increased greatly, as thieves and rapists took advantage of the lack of authority from the British, who had simply decamped, to join in the mayhem. There was less violence in the east, possibly because Gandhi was in Calcutta and announced he would fast until peace was restored, which had the effect of greatly reducing the killings.
The railways quickly became overburdened. In the first month after Partition, 700,000 refugees were carried, far more than the railways could cope with. Special refugee trains, which were supposed to take people over the border in safety, were introduced, but often people had to wait days or even weeks in terrible conditions at the stations before they were able to leave. For a time, both main termini in Bombay were so clogged up with refugees hoping to be taken to Pakistan that few other services operated. Similarly, both Sealdah and Howrah stations in Calcutta were packed with refugees arriving from East Pakistan with nowhere to go. In Delhi, the huge groups of Muslims awaiting transportation were attacked several times, and at one point all services were suspended for a week.
One woman’s experience is typical. Shrimati Laj Wanti, a Hindu woman, was just twenty-three when she and the rest of the family were advised to flee Khewra in the Punjab, where her husband worked in a chemical factory. In early September, they left Khewra by train but it was stopped at Kamoke station en route to India and then, without explanation, stayed there all night. The following morning all the men’s weapons, even penknives, were taken away and then the killing began. As the train was about to start, a large group of Muslims, armed with axes, rifles and knives, surrounded the carriages and started murdering the male passengers. The Pakistan military did not intervene and soon actually joined the mob in shooting passengers. As she said in her statement:
Those of the passengers who tried to run towards the platform out of the compartments were shot dead by the police and the military and those who went out of the compartments towards the maidan [the public open space] were butchered by the Muslim mob. In this way, most of the passengers were either butchered or shot dead. A few who were taken as dead after having been injured were later rescued.26
Her uncle, aunt and husband were all killed at the station and she never discovered the fate of her son or the daughter of her aunt. Her story would be repeated millions of times over.
Stations were, indeed, not safe havens and there were numerous attacks on refugees by armed vigilante groups in several major towns and cities. Corpses would be left unattended for days because of the breakdown of law and order, and basic toilet facilities were not available, leading to the spread of disease.
The need to prioritize refugee trains paralysed large parts of the network, and at times other services ceased entirely. On occasion, trains carrying refugees in opposite directions would be stopped next to each other, resulting in a murderous pitched battle. Due to the frequency of attacks, the railways temporarily stopped carrying refugees until protection arrangements were agreed with the military. Each refugee train, which normally carried 5,000 people, with as many as a third of these travelling on the carriage roofs, was given an escort of sixty soldiers travelling at the rear in a sandbagged flat wagon, but this was often not sufficient as the front of the train remained largely unprotected and could still be attacked. Moreover, soldiers tended to side with their coreligionists, though this improved when emergency legislation introduced the death penalty for those who failed to make sufficient effort to protect the lives of civilians.
In a cruel twist of fate, as if to compound the misery of the refugees and the difficulty for the railways, the monsoons in September that year were particularly strong, causing widespread flooding and the breach of numerous embankments. Several bridges on the key Ghaziabad–Delhi–Amritsar line were swept away or damaged by floods and had to be hastily rebuilt.
The reciprocal nature of the violence suggested it was well-organized. In September, a train near Amritsar was attacked and 3,000 Muslim refugees trying to reach Pakistan were murdered. As a reprisal, a few days later, a train containing Hindus and Sikhs was set upon in Lahore, resulting in a death toll of around 1,500. Overall, a total of 673 refugee trains were run up to the first week of November 1947, by which time the worst of the violence was over, and while they probably saved thousands of lives, the image of the death trains remains seared in India’s history. The massacres would leave a legacy of antagonism between India and Pakistan which lasts to this day. It was a time, as Ian J. Kerr puts it eloquently, when ‘Hindus and Moslems – and other communities – as the politics of identity intensified, lost sight of their shared humanity’.27
The violence abated in the late autumn, though sporadic attacks erupted again in early 1948. The killings finally stopped later that year when the civil and military authorities at last managed to impose control. A few thousand refugees were still carried on the railways between the two countries in 1948, but the main task within India shifted to transporting hundreds of thousands of refugees stuck in major cities, where they had arrived from Pakistan, to new homes around the country. The railways were left to their own devices in their struggle to restore a normal service. Given the damage caused during the strife, together with the obvious problems of splitting up a rail network into three sections, it would not be an easy task.