|
Muslim |
Non-Muslim |
| North-Western Area— |
|
|
| Punjab |
16,217,242 |
12,201,577 |
| North-West Frontier Province |
2,788,797 |
249,270 |
| Sind |
3,208,325 |
1,326,683 |
| British Baluchistan |
438,930 |
62,701 |
|
22,653,294 |
13,840,231 |
|
62.07 per cent. |
37.93 per cent. |
| North-Eastern Area— |
|
|
| Bengal |
33,005,434 |
27,301,091 |
| Assam |
3,442,479 |
6,762,254 |
|
36,447,913 |
34,063,345 |
|
51.69 per cent. |
48.31 per cent. |
The Muslim minorities in the remainder of British India number some 20 million dispersed amongst a total population of 188 million.
These figures show that the setting up of a separate sovereign state of Pakistan on the lines claimed by the Muslim League would not solve the communal minority problem; nor can we see any justification for including within a sovereign Pakistan those districts of the Punjab and of Bengal and Assam in which the population is predominantly non-Muslim. Every argument that can be used in favour of Pakistan can equally, in our view, be used in favour of the exclusion of the non-Muslim areas from Pakistan. This … would particularly affect the position of the Sikhs.
7. We, therefore, considered whether a smaller sovereign Pakistan confined to the Muslim majority areas alone might be a possible basis of compromise. Such a Pakistan is regarded by the Muslim League as quite impracticable because it would entail the exclusion from Pakistan of (a) the whole of the Ambala and Jullundur divisions in the Punjab; (b) the whole of Assam except the district of Sylhet; and (c) a large part of Western Bengal, including Calcutta, in which city the percentage of the Muslim population is 23.6 per cent. We ourselves are also convinced that any solution which involves a radical partition of the Punjab and Bengal, as this would do, would be contrary to the wishes and interests of a very large proportion of the inhabitants of these provinces. Bengal and the Punjab each has its own common language and a long history and tradition. Moreover, any division of the Punjab would of necessity divide the Sikhs, leaving substantial bodies of Sikhs on both sides of the boundary. We have therefore been forced to the conclusion that neither a larger nor a smaller sovereign state of Pakistan would provide an acceptable solution for the communal problem.
8. Apart from the great force of the foregoing arguments there are weighty administrative, economic and military considerations. The whole of the transportation and postal and telegraph systems of India have been established on the basis of a United India. To disintegrate them would gravely injure both parts of India. The case for a united defence is even stronger. The Indian Armed Forces have been built up as a whole for the defence of India as a whole, and to break them in two would inflict a deadly blow on the long traditions and high degree of efficiency of the Indian Army and would entail the gravest dangers. The Indian Navy and Indian Air Force would become much less effective. The two sections of the suggested Pakistan contain the two most vulnerable frontiers in India and for a successful defence in depth the area of Pakistan would be insufficient.
9. A further consideration of importance is the greater difficulty which the Indian States would find in associating themselves with a divided British India.
10. Finally, there is the geographical fact that the two halves of the proposed Pakistan state are separated by some seven hundred miles and the communications between them both in war and peace would be dependent on the goodwill of Hindustan.
11. We are therefore unable to advise the British Government that the power which at present resides in British hands should be handed over to two entirely separate sovereign states.
12. This decision does not, however, blind us to the very real Muslim apprehensions that their culture and political and social life might become submerged in a purely unitary India, in which the Hindus with their greatly superior numbers must be a dominating element. To meet this the Congress have put forward a scheme under which provinces would have full autonomy subject only to a minimum of central subjects, such as foreign affairs, defence and communications.
Under this scheme provinces, if they wished to take part in economic and administrative planning on a large scale, could cede to the centre optional subjects in addition to the compulsory ones mentioned above.
13. Such a scheme would, in our view, present considerable constitutional disadvantages and anomalies. It would be very difficult to work a central executive and legislature in which some ministers, who dealt with compulsory subjects, were responsible to the whole of India while other ministers, who dealt with optional subjects, would be responsible only to those provinces who had elected to act together in respect of such subjects. This difficulty would be accentuated in the central legislature, where it would be necessary to exclude certain members from speaking and voting when subjects with which their provinces were not concerned were under discussion. Apart from the difficulty of working such a scheme, we do not consider that it would be fair to deny to other provinces, which did not desire to take the optional subjects at the centre, the right to form themselves into a group for a similar purpose. This would indeed be no more than the exercise of their autonomous powers in a particular way.
14. Before putting forward our recommendations we turn to deal with the relationship of the Indian States to British India. It is quite clear that with the attainment of independence by British India, whether inside or outside the British Commonwealth, the relationship which has hitherto existed between the Rulers of the States and the British Crown will no longer be possible. Paramountcy can neither be retained by the British Crown nor transferred to the new government. This fact has been fully recognised by those whom we interviewed from the States. They have at the same time assured us that the States are ready and willing to co-operate in the new development of India. The precise form which their co-operation will take must be a matter for negotiation during the building up of the new constitutional structure and it by no means follows that it will be identical for all the States. We have not therefore dealt with the States in the same detail as the provinces of British India in the paragraphs which follow.
15. We now indicate the nature of a solution which in our view would be just to the essential claims of all parties and would at the same time be most likely to bring about a stable and practicable form of constitution for All-India.
We recommend that the constitution should take the following basic form:—
(1) There should be a Union of India, embracing both British India and the [Princely] States, which should deal with the following subjects: foreign affairs, defence, and communications; and should have the powers necessary to raise the finances required for the above subjects.
(2) The Union should have an executive and a legislature constituted from British Indian and States representatives. Any question raising a major communal issue in the legislature should require for its decision a majority of the representatives present and voting of each of the two major communities as well as a majority of all the members present and voting.
(3) All subjects other than the Union subjects and all residuary powers should vest in the provinces.
(4) The States will retain all subjects and powers other than those ceded to the Union.
(5) Provinces should be free to form groups with executives and legislatures, and each group could determine the provincial subjects to be taken in common.
(6) The constitutions of the Union and of the groups should contain a provision whereby any province could by a majority vote of its legislative assembly call for a reconsideration of the terms of the constitution after an initial period of ten years and at ten-yearly intervals thereafter.
16. It is not our object to lay out the details of a constitution on the above programme but to set in motion machinery whereby a constitution can be settled by Indians for Indians.
It has been necessary, however, for us to make this recommendation as to the broad basis of the future constitution because it became clear to us in the course of our negotiations that not until that had been done was there any hope of getting the two major communities to join in the setting up of the constitution-making machinery….
We hope that the new independent India may choose to be a member of the British Commonwealth. We hope, in any event, that you will remain in close and friendly association with our people. But these are matters for your own free choice. Whatever that choice may be, we look forward with you to your ever-increasing prosperity among the greatest nations of the world and to a future even more glorious than your past.
[From C. H. Philips, ed., The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947, 355–360.]
The Congress Working Committee came to the following resolution on May 24, 1946.
In considering the Statement [of 16 May], the Working Committee have kept in view the picture of the future, in so far as this was available to them from the proposals made for the formation of a Provisional Government and the clarification given by members of the Delegation. This picture is still incomplete and vague. It is only on the basis of the full picture that they can judge and come to a decision as to how far this is in conformity with the objectives they aim at. These objectives are: independence for India, a strong, though limited, central authority, full autonomy for the provinces, the establishment of a democratic structure in the centre and in the units, the guarantee of the fundamental rights of each individual so that he may have full and equal opportunities of growth, and further that each community should have opportunity to live the life of its choice within the larger framework.
The Committee regret to find a divergence between these objectives and the various proposals that have been made on behalf of the British Government, and, in particular, there is no vital change envisaged during the interim period when the Provisional Government will function, in spite of the assurance given in paragraph 23 of the Statement. If the independence of India is aimed at, then the functioning of the Provisional Government must approximate closely in fact, even though not in law, to that independence and all obstructions and hindrances to it should be removed. The continued presence of a foreign army of occupation is a negation of independence.
The Statement … suggests a procedure for the building up of a Constituent Assembly, which is sovereign in so far as the framing of the constitution is concerned. The Committee do not agree with some of those recommendations. In their view it will be open to the Constituent Assembly itself at any stage to make changes and variations, with the proviso that in regard to certain major communal matters a majority decision of both the major communities will be necessary….
The Statement of the Cabinet Delegation affirms the basic principle of provincial autonomy and residuary powers vesting in the Provinces. It is further said that Provinces should be free to form groups. Subsequently, however, it is recommended that provincial representatives will divide up into sections which “shall proceed to settle the Provincial Constitutions for the Provinces in each section and shall also decide whether any Group Constitution shall be set up for those Provinces.” There is a marked discrepancy in these two separate provisions, and it would appear that a measure of compulsion is introduced which clearly infringes the basic principle of provincial autonomy. In order to retain the recommendatory character of the Statement, and in order to make the clauses consistent with each other, the Committee read paragraph 15 to mean that, in the first instance, the respective provinces will make their choice whether or not to belong to the section in which they are placed. Thus the Constituent Assembly must be considered as a sovereign body with final authority for the purpose of drawing up a constitution and giving effect to it…. The provisions in the Statement in regard to the Indian States are vague…. A Provisional National Government … must be a precursor of the full independence that will emerge from the Constituent Assembly. It must function in recognition of that fact, though changes in law need not be made at this stage. The Governor-General may continue as the head of that Government during the interim period, but the Government should function as a cabinet responsible to the Central Legislature. The status, powers and composition of the Provisional Government should be fully defined in order to enable the Committee to come to a decision. Major communal issues shall be decided in the manner referred to above in order to remove any possible fear or suspicion from the minds of a minority.
[India, Statement by the Cabinet Mission, Cmd. 6835 (1946), reprinted from C. H. Philips, ed., The Evolution of India and Pakistan, 1858 to 1947, 382–384.]
As noted in the introduction, Dr. Ambedkar presented forceful arguments against any attempt to make a logical case for Pakistan. He did this, inter alia, by comparing India to other nations around the world composed of multiple communities. He maintained that there were many more reasons for sustaining its unity than for dividing the political community. But, he said, emotions, not reason, must be the deciding factor. If the Muslims—meaning Jinnah and the Muslim League and their supporters—passionately wanted Pakistan, then it had to be accepted. He felt that a nation of several communities—for example, a free and united India—had to have citizens and an army completely committed to it. Anything less would mean disaster. If the Muslims could not make this wholehearted commitment, they should be granted Pakistan.
I. With all that has gone before, the sceptic, the nationalist, conservative and the old world Indian will not fail to ask “Must there be Pakistan!?” … The problem of Pakistan is indeed very grave and it must be admitted that the question is not only a relevant and fair one to be put to the Muslims and to their protagonists…. Its importance lies in the fact that the limitations on the case for Pakistan are so considerable in their force that they can never be easily brushed aside…. That being so, the burden of proof on the Muslims for establishing an imperative need in favour of Pakistan is very heavy. Indeed the issue of Pakistan or to put it plainly of partitioning India, is of such a grave character that the Muslims will not only have to discharge this burden of proof but they will have to adduce evidence of such a character as to satisfy the conscience of an international tribunal before they can win their case….
II. Must there be Pakistan because a good part of the Muslim population of India happens to be concentrated in certain defined areas which can be easily severed from the rest of India? Muslim population is admittedly concentrated in certain well defined areas and it may be that these areas are severable. But what of that? In considering this question one must never lose sight of the fundamental fact that nature has made India one single geographical unit. Indians are of course quarreling and no one can prophesy when they will stop quarreling…. What does it establish? Only that Indians are a quarrelsome people. It does not destroy the fact that India is a single geographical unit. Her unity is as ancient as Nature. Within this geographic unit and covering the whole of it there has been a cultural unity from time immemorial. This cultural unity has defied political and racial divisions. And at any rate for the last hundred and fifty years all institutions cultural, political, economic, legal and administrative have been working on a single, uniform spring of action. In any discussion of Pakistan the fact [that] cannot be lost sight of … is the fundamental unity of India. For it is necessary to grasp the fact that there are really two cases of partition which must be clearly distinguished. There is a case in which the starting point is a pre-existing state of separation so that partition is only a dissolution of parts which were once separate and which were subsequently joined together. This case is quite different from another in which the starting point … is a state of unity. Consequently partition in such a case, is the severance of a territory which has been one single whole into separate parts. Where the starting point is not unity of territory, i.e., where there was disunity before there was unity, partition—which is only a return to the original—may not give a mental shock. But in India the starting point is unity. Why destroy its unity now, simply because some Muslims are dissatisfied? …
III. Must there be Pakistan because there is communal antagonism between the Hindus and the Muslims? That communal antagonism exists nobody can deny. The question however is, is the antagonism such that there is no will to live together in one country and under one constitution. Surely that will to live together was not absent till 1937. During the formulation of the provisions of the Government of India Act 1935 both Hindus and Musalmans accepted the view that they must live together under one constitution and in one country and participated in the discussions that preceded the passing of the Act. And what was the state of communal feeling in India between … say 1920 and 1935 …? The history of India from 1920 up to 1935 has been one long tale of communal conflict in which the loss of life and loss of property had reached a most shameful limit. Never was the communal situation so acute as it was between this period of 15 years preceding the passing of the Government of India Act 1935, and yet this long tale of antagonism did not prevent the Hindus and the Musalmans from agreeing to live in a single country and under a single constitution. Why make so much of communal antagonism now? …
Obviously India is not the only place where there is communal antagonism. If communal antagonism does not come in the way of the French in Canada living in political unity with the English, if it does not come in the way of the English in South Africa living in political unity with the Dutch, if it does not come in the way of the French and the Italians in Switzerland living in political unity with the Germans why then should it be impossible for the Hindus and the Muslims to agree to live together under one constitution in India?
IV. Must there be Pakistan because the Muslims have lost faith in the Congress majority? As reasons for the loss of faith Muslims cite some instances of tyranny and oppression practised by the Hindus and connived at by the Congress Ministries during the two years and three months the Congress was in office. Unfortunately Mr. Jinnah did not persist in his demand for a Royal Commission to inquire into these grievances. If he had done it we could have known what truth there was in these complaints. A perusal of these instances, as given in the reports of the Muslim League Committees, leaves upon the reader the impression that although there may be some truth in the allegations there is a great deal which is pure exaggeration. The Congress Ministeries concerned have issued statements repudiating the charges. It may be that the Congress during the two years and three months that it was in office did not show statesmanship, did not inspire confidence in the minorities, nay tried to suppress them. But can it be a reason for partitioning India? … May it not be that if the Congress returns to office it will profit by the mistakes it has made, revise its mischievous policy and … allay the fear created by its … conduct?
V. Must there be Pakistan because the Musalmans are a nation?—It is a pity that Mr. Jinnah should have become a votary and a champion of Muslim Nationalism at a time when the whole world is decrying against the evils of nationalism and is seeking refuge in some kind of international organization. Mr. Jinnah is so obsessed with his new-found faith in Muslim Nationalism that he is not prepared to see that there is a distinction between a Society, parts of which are disintegrated, and a Society parts of which have become only loose, [a distinction] which no sane man can ignore. When a society is disintegrating—and the two nation theory is a positive disintegration of society and country—it is evidence of the fact that there do not exist what Carlyle calls “organic filaments”—i.e., the vital forces which work to bind together the parts that are cut asunder. In such cases disintegration can only be regretted. It cannot be prevented. Where, however, such organic filaments do exist, it is a crime to overlook them and deliberately force the disintegration of society and country as the Muslims seem to be doing…. But isn’t there enough that is common to both Hindus and Musalmans, which if developed, is capable of moulding them into one people? Nobody can deny that there are many modes, manners, rites and customs which are common to both. Nobody can deny that there are rites, customs and usages based on religion which do divide Hindus and Musalmans. The question is, which of these should be emphasized. If the emphasis is laid on things that are common, there need be no two nations in India. If the emphasis is laid on points of difference, it will no doubt give rise to two nations. The view that seems to guide Mr. Jinnah is that Indians are only a people and that they can never be a Nation…. Granted Indians are not a nation, that they are only a people. What of that? History records that before the rise of nations as great corporate personalities, there were only peoples. There is nothing to be ashamed if Indians are no more than a people. Nor is there any cause for despair that the people of India—if they wish—will not become one nation. For, as Disraeli said, a nation is a work of art and a work of time. If the Hindus and Musalmans agree to emphasize the things that bind them and forget those that separate them there is no reason why in course of time they should not grow into a nation. It may be that their nationalism may not be quite so integrated as that of the French or the Germans. But they can … produce a common state of mind on common questions which is the sum total which the spirit of nationalism helps to produce and for which it is so much prized. Is it right for the Muslim League to emphasize only differences and ignore altogether the forces that bind? Let it not be forgotten that if two nations come into being it will not be because it is predestined. It will be the result of deliberate design….
VI. Must there be Pakistan because otherwise Swaraj will be a Hindu Raj? … It is a very strange sort of conscience. There are really millions of Musalmans in India who are living under unbridled and uncontrolled Hindu Raj of Hindu Princes and no objection to it has been raised by the Muslims or the Muslim League….
The political objections to Hindu Raj rest on various grounds. The first ground is that Hindu society is not a democratic society. True, it is not. It may not be right to ask whether the Muslims have taken any part in the various movements for reforming Hindu society as distinguished from proselytising. But it is right to ask if the Musalmans are the only sufferers from the evils that admittedly result from the undemocratic character of Hindu society. Are not the millions of Shudras and non-Brahmins or millions of the Untouchables, suffering the worst consequences of the undemocratic character of Hindu society? Who benefits from education, from public service and from political reforms except the Hindu governing class—composed of the higher castes of the Hindus—which form not even 10 per cent of the total Hindu population? Has not the governing class of the Hindus … shown more regard for safeguarding the rights and interests of the Musalmans than they have for safeguarding the rights and interests of the Shudras and the Untouchables? Is not Mr. Gandhi, who is determined to oppose any political concession to the Untouchables, ready to sign a blank cheque in favour of the Muslims? …
Is it proposed that the Hindu Raj should be the rule of a naked Communal majority? Are not the Musalmans granted safeguards against the possible tyranny of the Hindu majority? Are not the safeguards given to the Musalmans of India wider and better than the safeguards which have been given to the French in Canada, to the English in South Africa and to the French and the Italians in Switzerland? To take only one item from the list of safeguards. Haven’t the Musalmans got an enormous degree of weightage in representation in the Legislature? …
If Hindu Raj does become a fact, it will, no doubt, be the greatest calamity for this country. No matter what the Hindus say, Hinduism is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity. On that account it is incompatible with democracy. Hindu Raj must be prevented at any cost. But is Pakistan the true remedy against it? What makes communal Raj possible is a marked disproportion in the relative strength of the various communities living in a country. As pointed out above, this disproportion is not more marked in India than it is in Canada, South Africa and Switzerland. Nonetheless there is no British Raj in Canada, no Dutch Raj in South Africa, and no German Raj in Switzerland. How have the French, the English and the Italians succeeded in preventing the Raj of the majority community being established in their country? … What is their method? Their method is to put a ban on communal parties in politics. No Community in Canada, South Africa or Switzerland ever thinks of starting a separate communal party. What is important to note is that it is the minority nations which have taken the lead in opposing the formation of a communal party. For they know that if they form a communal political party the major community will also form a Communal party and the majority community will thereby find it easy to establish its Communal Raj. It is a vicious method of self-protection….
Have the Muslims thought of this method of avoiding Hindu Raj? Have they considered how easy it is to avoid it? Have they considered how futile and harmful the present policy of the League is? The Muslims are howling against the Hindu Mahasabha and its slogan of Hindudom and Hindu Raj. But who is responsible for this? Hindu Mahasabha and Hindu Raj are [the] inescapable nemesis which the Musalmans have brought upon themselves by having a Muslim League. It is action and counteraction. One gives rise to the other. Not partition, but the abolition of the Muslim League and the formation of a mixed party of Hindus and Muslims is the only effective way of burying the ghost of Hindu Raj. It is, of course, not possible for Muslims and other Minority Parties to join the Congress or the Hindu Mahasabha so long as the disagreement on the question of constitutional safeguards continues. But this question will be settled, is bound to be settled and there is every hope that the settlement will result in securing to the Muslims and other Minorities the safeguards they need. Once this consummation, which we so devoutly wish, takes place nothing can stand in the way of a party re-alignment, of the Congress and the Mahasabha breaking up and of Hindus and Musalmans forming mixed political parties based on an agreed programme of social and economic regeneration and, thereby avoid the danger of both Hindu Raj or Muslim Raj becoming a fact. Nor should the formation of a mixed party of Hindus and Muslims be difficult in India. There are many lower orders in the Hindu society whose economic, political and social needs are the same as those of the majority of the Muslims and they would be far more ready to make a common cause with the Muslims for achieving common ends than they would with the high caste of Hindus who have denied and deprived them of ordinary human rights for centuries. To pursue such a course cannot be called an adventure. The path along that line is a well trodden path. Is it not a fact that under the Montagu-Chelms-ford Reforms in most Provinces, if not in all, the Muslims, the Non-Brahmins and the Depressed Classes united together and worked the reforms as members of one team from 1920 to 1937? Herein lay the most fruitful method of achieving communal harmony among Hindus and Muslims and of destroying the danger of a Hindu Raj. Mr. Jinnah could have easily pursued this line…. He has the ability to organize. He had the reputation of a nationalist. Even many Hindus who were opposed to the Congress would have flocked to him if he had only sent out a call for a united party of like-minded Hindus and Muslims. What did Mr. Jinnah do? In 1937 Mr. Jinnah made his entry into Muslim politics and strangely enough he regenerated the Muslim League…. Everybody felt that with the leadership of Mr. Jinnah the League could never become a merely communal party. The Resolutions passed by the League during the first two years of its new career indicated that it would develop into a mixed political party of Hindus and Muslims….
Mr. Jinnah showed that he was for common front between the Muslims and other Non-Muslim minorities. Unfortunately the catholicity and statesmanship that underlies these resolutions did not last long. In 1939 Mr. Jinnah took a somersault and outlined the dangerous and disastrous policy of isolation of the Mussalmans by passing that notorious resolution in favour of Pakistan. What is the reason for this isolation? Nothing but the change of view that the Musalmans were a nation and not a community!! One need not quarrel over the question whether the Muslims are a nation or a community. But one finds it extremely difficult to understand how the mere fact that the Muslims are a nation makes political isolation a safe and sound policy…. But let Muslims consider what Mr. Jinnah has achieved by making the Muslim League, the only organization for the Musalmans. It may be that it has helped him to avoid the possibility of having to play the second fiddle. For inside the Muslim camp he can always be sure of the first place for himself. But how does the League hope to save by this plan of isolation the Muslims from Hindu Raj? Will Pakistan obviate the establishment of Hindu Raj in Provinces in which the Musalmans are in a minority? Obviously it cannot. This is what would happen in the Muslim-minority Provinces if Pakistan came. Take an All-India view. Can Pakistan prevent the establishment of Hindu Raj at the centre over Muslim minorities that will remain in Hindustan? It is plain that it cannot. What good is Pakistan then? Only to prevent Hindu Raj in Provinces in which the Muslims are in a majority and in which there could never be Hindu Raj!! To put it differently Pakistan is unnecessary to Muslims where they are in a majority because there, there is no fear of Hindu Raj. It is worse than useless to Muslims where they are in a minority, because Pakistan or no Pakistan they will have to face a Hindu Raj. The Muslim League started to help minority Muslims and has ended by espousing the cause of majority Muslims. What a perversion in the original aim of the Muslim League! …
VII … What I feel like asking the critics is … Do they expect the Musalmans to give up Pakistan if they are defeated in a controversy over the virtues of Pakistan? … It may be that the Musalmans will agree, as most rational people do, to have their case for Pakistan decided by the tests of reason and argument. But I should not be surprised if the Muslims decided to adopt the method of Dr. Johnson and say “Damn your arguments! We want Pakistan.” In that event the critic must realize that any reliance placed upon the limitations for destroying the case for Pakistan will be of no avail….
Let me now turn to the other question which I said the critic is entitled to put to me. What is my position regarding the issue of Pakistan in the light of the objections, which I have set out? … If the Musalmans are bent on having Pakistan then it must be conceded to them. I know my critics will at once accuse me of inconsistency and will demand reasons for so extraordinary a conclusion—extraordinary because of the view expressed by me in the earlier part of this chapter that the Muslim case for Pakistan has nothing in it which can be said to carry the compelling force which the decree of an inexorable fate may be said to have. I withdraw nothing from what I have said…. Yet I hold that if the Muslims must have Pakistan there is no escape from conceding it to them…. In my judgment there are two governing factors which must determine the issue…. One cannot ignore that what is important is not the winning of independence but the having of the sure means of maintaining it. The ultimate guarantee of the independence of a country is a safe army—an army on which you can rely to fight for the country at all times and in any eventuality. The army in India must necessarily be a mixed army composed of Hindus and Muslims. If India is invaded by a foreign power, can the Muslims in the Army be trusted to defend India? Suppose the invaders are their co-religionists. Will the Muslims side with the invaders or will they stand against them and save India? This is a very crucial question. Obviously, the answer to this question must depend upon to what extent the Muslims in the Army have caught the infection of the two-nation theory, which is the foundation of Pakistan. If they are infected, then the Army in India cannot be safe…. Indians will be able to defend a free India on one and one condition alone—namely if the Army in India remains non-political, unaffected by the poison of Pakistan. I want to warn Indians against the most stupid habit that has grown up in this country of discussing the question of Swaraj without reference to the question of the Army. Nothing can be more fatal than the failure to realize that a political Army is the greatest danger to the liberty of India….
Equally important is the fact that the Army is the ultimate sanction which sustains Government in the exercise of its authority inside the country, when it is challenged by a rebellious or recalcitrant element. Suppose the Government of the day enunciates a policy which is vehemently opposed by a section of the Muslims. Suppose the Government of the day is required to use its Army to enforce its policy. Can the Government of the day depend upon the Muslims in the Army to obey its orders and shoot down the Muslim rebels? …
Turning to the second governing factor[,] the Hindus do not seem to attach any value to sentiment as a force in politics. The Hindus seem to rely upon two grounds to win against the Muslims. The first is that even if the Hindus and the Muslims are two nations, they can live under one state. The other is that the Muslim case for Pakistan is founded on strong sentiment rather than upon clear argument…. That the Muslim case for Pakistan is founded on sentiment is far from being a matter of weakness; it is really its strong point. It does not need deep understanding of politics to know that the workability of a constitution is not a matter of theory. It is a matter of sentiment…. If a constitution does not please, then however perfect it may be, it will not work. To have a constitution which runs counter to the strong sentiments of a determined section is to court disaster if not to invite rebellion….
The Non-Muslims do not seem to be aware that they are presented with a situation in which they are forced to choose between various alternatives…. In the first place they have to choose between Freedom of India and the Unity of India. If the Non-Muslims will insist on the Unity of India they put the quick realization of India’s freedom into jeopardy. The second choice relates to the surest method of defending India, whether they can depend upon Muslims in a free and united India to develop and sustain along with the Non-Muslims the necessary will to defend the common liberties of both; or whether it is better to partition India and thereby ensure the safety of Muslim India by leaving its defence to the Muslims and of Non-Muslim India by leaving its defence to Non-Muslims. As to the first, I prefer Freedom of India to the Unity of India….
On the second issue I prefer the partitioning of India into Muslim India and Non-Muslim India as the surest and safest method of providing for the defence of both…. To leave so important an issue, as the defence of India, to chance is to be guilty of the grossest crime.
Nobody will consent to the Muslim demand for Pakistan unless he is forced to do so…. It would be a folly not to face what is inevitable and face it with courage and common sense. Equally would it be a folly to lose the part one can retain in the vain attempt of preserving the whole.
These are the reasons why I hold that if the Musalmans will not yield on the issue of Pakistan then Pakistan must come. So far as I am concerned the only important question is: Are the Musalmans determined to have Pakistan? … Or does it represent their permanent aspiration? On this there may be difference of opinion. Once it becomes certain that the Muslims want Pakistan there can be no doubt that the wise course would be to concede the principle of it.
[From B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan; or, The Partition of India (Bombay: Thacker and Company, 1945), 343–345, 348–350, 352–364.]
Although the Sikhs of India numbered only about six million, they were the second-largest minority in India after the Muslims, and the one most disastrously affected by the partition. Perhaps they did not have the greatest number killed or the most property losses in absolute terms, but they were spread out in the Punjab, their longtime homeland, and mixed in with Muslims and Hindus on both sides of the eventual dividing line. When the division came, and animosities and killing raged, it became clear to British officials and to the Sikhs themselves that they would have to move in large numbers and make their place in India. They gave up rich agricultural lands and urban livelihoods and property. With a long history of adaptability, they did not move to squatter camps to live in poverty for the rest of their lives. More than any other refugees of the partition, they moved not only to East Punjab, but also throughout India, wherever they could make a good living. They also moved to the United Kingdom and later to the United States in considerable numbers. Eventually they gained their own state in the Indian Union, with Panjabi its state language and Chandigarh its capital (though shared with Haryana).
While the negotiations for the transfer of power were going on in the 1940s, the Sikhs were divided and torn. They hoped to have a large part of the Punjab, all the land east of the Chenab River, given to India. But the “other factors” to be taken into account by the boundary commission chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe did not weigh enough to give such a large part of the Punjab to India. Lahore and about 62 percent of the land and 55 percent of the population of the Punjab went to Pakistan, and the Sikhs had to stay there or move. Feeling, not unreasonably, that they would be slaughtered if they stayed, they moved.
Alan Campbell-Johnson, Mountbatten’s press attaché, wrote in his account of June 14, 1947:
We are in the heart of Sikh country here, and the prevailing atmosphere is one of tension and foreboding … they [the Sikhs] see the partition of India means substantially and irrevocably the partition of the Sikhs, and they feel themselves to be sacrificed on the altars of Muslim ambition and Hindu opportunism … No juggling of the Boundary Commission can prevent their bisection. They react accordingly and their leaders, hopelessly outmanoeuvred in the political struggle, begin to invoke more primitive methods. 31
The Sikhs had started as a small group of Punjabi agriculturalists who followed a Guru with ideas slightly different from local religious practices of the fifteenth century; Guru Nanak wanted to go beyond existing religions to find and worship the one formless God. The Sikhs grew into a small religious group that eventually had to organize as a community, the Panth, for self-defense. After a history of frequent political clashes with the Mughal emperors, when the Mughals went into decline the Sikhs moved to control the Punjab. Under the leadership of Ranjit Singh, they continued their sovereignty over this area well into the nineteenth century. After Ranjit Singh’s death, they came under pressure from the expanding British Raj: when two Sikh wars ended in 1849, the Sikh kingdom was incorporated into the British Empire. The days of independence and control in the Punjab, and their living sense of a community, remained in their memories and imaginations, for new possibilities seemed to open up with the imminent departure of the British. Some writers and leaders advocated a sovereign and independent Sikh state carved out from the Punjab, as do the two authors here. They put forth passionate arguments, but these could not outweigh the numbers calculated by the boundary-deciders, and the idea of a separate Sikh state did not go anywhere. Neither did the idea of an independent Bengal. The men with the power to decide did not want further fragmentation of the subcontinent, which Mountbatten and Nehru referred to as the “balkanization” of India.
The ideas presented by Gurbachan Singh and Lal Singh Gyani—who in 1946 were teachers at the Sikh National College, Lahore, and the Sikh Missionary College, Amritsar, respectively—lived on in the agitation for a Punjabi state in the Indian Union and in the movement for Khalistan.
This booklet is an attempt to present … the demand which the Sikh people have formulated for being given a State in their Homeland, the Punjab. This particular demand, which in its essence is quite old, [is] … put forth with full vigour by the Sikhs all over the Punjab and outside, and is at present the national political objective of the Sikh people…. The Sikhs have arrived at the objective of demanding a State for themselves after making trial of safeguards, communal settlements and various kinds of guarantees. With the best of intentions, constitutional safeguards and guarantees cannot be sufficient to protect smaller peoples these days against powerful and organised majorities…. The pressure of majorities tells. The Sikhs are keenly alive, on the basis of the experience of the past, to the danger of living in a state of permanent dependence upon the rule of any majority—Hindu, Muslim or other. They have, therefore, made up their mind … to carve out a State … in which they can be independent, free from interference and suppression….
Democracy as a political system is good within homogeneous societies, but where permanent and unalterable barriers exist, unadulterated democracy proves ruinous to small groups, which are placed permanently in a position of helplessness. For the minorities only one democratic safeguard is adequate, and that is that the majority agree to shed its character of majority and accept a position of parity with the minority. Unless such willingness is forthcoming on the part of the Muslims in the Punjab it is apparent that the Sikhs have no reason to feel secure. The only alternative to such an arrangement is the splitting up of the Punjab, and carving the Sikh State out of its present boundaries.
The Sikh demand is not based upon the spirit of aggressive communalism. It is the only effective scheme for survival which they can think of in these critical days of communal bitterness and imminent persecution and attempt at extermination or absorption. The Sikhs make an appeal to the conscience of the world to recognize their right of survival and to give them that self-determination which is the admitted right of nations all over the world….
The Panth [community] notes … that in a situation so greatly charged with aggressive communalism, the minorities, and especially the Sikhs, find themselves placed in a position in which they cannot safeguard their national existence against the high-handedness of a politically organised communal majority, which conviction is further strengthened by the experience of the working of Provincial Autonomy for nine years, resulting in grave attacks being made on the cultural, civic and political rights of the Sikhs in the Punjab….
In order to ensure the free and unfettered growth of the Sikh Panth, the Panth demands the splitting up of the existing province of the Punjab, with its unnatural boundaries, so as to constitute a separate autonomous Sikh State in those areas of the Central, Northern, Eastern and South-Eastern Punjab in which the overwhelming part of the Sikh population is concentrated, and which because of the proprietors in it being mostly Sikhs, and its general character being distinctly Sikh, is also the de facto Sikh Homeland—the area, extent, the status and constitutional frame-work of such a State being left to be settled by negotiation between the … representatives of the Sikh Panth and the other … parties, such as the British[,] … the Hindus and the Muslims…. The above demand is the unconditional, absolute and minimum demand … of the Sikh Panth….
This feeling of the urgent need of a separate state has been growing upon the Sikhs now for close upon two decades…. The problem of any political future had not come before the people so clearly as it came when after survey of the Simon Commission [1928] it became evident that some kind of constitutional changes were imminent. The Muslims began to clamour for a permanent, unalterable Muslim majority in the future legislature of the Punjab. In the event of this Muslim demand being accepted the Sikhs saw for themselves a very dark future, for they would never be able to make their voice effective in the administration of the province…. The Sikhs in this situation cast about for some way of safeguarding their national existence; and carving a new province out of the existing province of the Punjab was the solution … which they suggested in 1930 to Mahatma Gandhi, in 1931 to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, and in the same year, to Lord Willingdon, his successor. In placing this proposal for the solution of the Sikh problem, and incidentally, the communal problem of India, all parties among the Sikhs were united…. The same suggestion … was presented to the British Government at the 2nd Round Table Conference….
The demand at that stage was, however, not for a separate Sikh State; it was for the splitting up of the Punjab, so as to alienate some Western Districts with an overwhelming Muslim majority from the province and to leave a smaller province, also more compact and homogeneous, from which the pressure of a permanent Muslim majority would be lifted. It was this demand which later on grew to be the well-known Azad Punjab Demand and has been put forward at present as the demand for an independent Sikh State.
The Sikh demand was nothing very novel or impracticable. It was fully in line with what both the British Government and the Congress had admitted in principle and later in practice in some parts. The Congress had already visualized the redistribution of the existing Indian provinces into 21, on the basis of language, while the British Government had on several occasions actually shifted the boundaries of provinces, as when Eastern Bengal and Assam were constituted into one province and the North-Western Frontier Province and Delhi were separated from the Punjab…. The Sikh demand, however, went unheeded and the Communal Award was given, which saddled a permanent unalterable Muslim majority on the Punjab. The strongest and bitterest opposition to this iniquitous piece of constitution-making came from the Sikhs, out of all the political groups in India. Then came Provincial Autonomy, as a result of which the Muslim-dominated Unionist Party was installed in the seat of Government in the Punjab. Under Provincial Autonomy the Sikhs suffered terrible hardships. Their religious and cultural rights were wantonly attacked, their proper share in the services was denied to them, and they were thwarted in every sphere of life. Their national language, Punjabi, was suppressed and discouraged; the administration of the Gurdwaras was sought to be interfered with, and Sikhs were persecuted by the emboldened Muslim fanatics in several parts of the Punjab….
In 1940 came the Pakistan Resolution of the All-India Muslim League. This was only a symbol of the rising aggressive intentions of the Muslims, whose ambition to rule over and dominate others was now only too manifest…. The Congress sought to appease the Muslims at the cost of the Sikhs, and while taking exception to the Sikhs organizing themselves in self-defence, encouraged and accommodated Muslim Communalism. The Sikhs at that time felt that national survival and an honourable existence for them were possible … only in a tract where they would not be at the mercy of a constitutional majority of any other group. In this situation emerged a further step in the old Sikh demand for splitting up of the Punjab, called the Azad Punjab Scheme. This scheme visualized the constituting of a new province, out of the Lahore, Jullundur, Ambala, and part of the Multan Divisions, in which area the Sikhs would be able to have an effective voice in the administration. In this area the Sikhs would hold the balance of power. This scheme was presented as the Sikh demand to Sir Stafford Cripps by the Sikh leaders in 1942, while rejecting the Pakistan demand…. The Shromani Akali Dal, the National political organization of the Sikhs, demanded the establishment of Azad Punjab by its Resolution dated the 7th June, 1943.
When the famous Gandhi–Raja[ji] Formula was floated, according to which the Muslim aspiration for Pakistan was to be accommodated, after separating the non-Muslim majority areas from the absolute Muslim majority areas, the Sikhs saw that according to this suggestion, the Sikhs would be divided into two—one part of them bottled up in Muslim Punjab and the other in Hindu India, both dominated by overwhelming non-Sikh majorities. Such a situation would put an end to the integrity of the Sikh nation for ever…. So the Panthic Gathering which assembled at Amritsar on the 20th August 1944 … made the demand for the establishment of the Azad Sikh State in the event of Pakistan being established…. The Sikh aspiration … has been to establish a democratic state, in which the liberal and socialistic Sikh basis of life should be made the basis of general civic life.
Since the meeting of the Panthic Gathering the demand for the establishment of the Azad Sikh State has come from Sikh Sangats all over India. It has caught also the younger generation…. The demand has found support from the Communist Party of India. The Communists have supported the Sikh claim to a separate autonomous area under the name Sikh Homelands, where they can develop unhindered culturally and politically, on progressive and democratic lines….
The Sikhs find that while the Muslim is hostile to them with all the bitter memories of the Sikh–Muslim-struggles handed down from history, the Hindu Nationalism, especially its Punjab brand, has tried to disrupt the Sikhs, to break up their unity and to reabsorb them into Hinduism. Without political strength no minority can survive, especially in the present-day world of total organization and mobilization of peoples. The only way, therefore, in which the Sikhs can escape the fate of such almost extinct peoples as the Parsis, the Jews, the Jains and others is that they carve out for themselves a state in which they can make laws and be free from aggression….
The Sikhs organized as “the Khalsa” acted as a distinct, separate nation in the days of the Misals [fighting bands] and under Ranjit Singh and after. The Khalsa is the name conferred by Guru Gobind Singh upon a people knit together by faith in a common religious Scripture and religious preceptors, in a certain way of life, marked by the institution of the community kitchen or langar and a puritanical, military organization and having a supreme seat of authority and legislation in the Akal Takht at Amritsar. Guru Har Gobind, the Sixth Guru and Guru Gobind Singh, the Tenth Guru, who organized the Sikhs for fighting Moghal Imperialism, gave them all the qualities and attributes of a nation—all that makes a people active, alive and able to maintain a rigorous political character…. The Sikh people were at first theocratic in their political organization, submitting later to the monarchical dispensation, and now they are organizing their national life on a democratic basis like the other Indian nationalities. The Sikhs have all through history acted as a separate nation, with a distinct polity, outlook and political objective….
So long as the Sikhs remained independent, they maintained in theory as well as in fact a distinct national political existence. They dominated the political scene in the Punjab, in the North-Western and South-Western parts of what is now known as the United Provinces, in Kashmere, in the Province of Peshawar and in other parts. They negotiated as a sovereign people with the Government of the East India Company in India and with … other Eastern countries.
When British rule came, the British Imperial Government set about the task of destroying and obliterating the vestiges of Sikh nationhood. The Sikh democratic way of life was suppressed, and the Gurdwaras, centres of the Sikh national life, were placed in the hands of hereditary priests, who tried as far as practicable, to dilute this Sikh feeling…. The Panth was no longer a living, vigorous nation, but a herd of unorganized people led by corrupt priests and hereditary aristocrats, selfish tools of British Imperialism.
The Sikh revival from this state of prostration dates from the great days of the Gurdwara Reform Movement, 32 which made the Sikhs aware after nearly three quarters of a century of atrophied national existence, of their great and splendid heritage of being the Khalsa, the Pure, the Elect, the band of Guru Gobind Singh, Lord of the Hawks. It aroused in the Sikhs the feeling that they were meant for a higher destiny than that which appeared to be marked out for them under the two-fold domination of the British rule and their own priest-craft. So they resumed in those critical days the entire consciousness, organization and paraphernalia of completely developed nationhood…. The Khalsa is essentially a political conception, a fusion of the people into a nation on the basis of religion—a conquest not political, but spiritual, through conversion to faith….
The Hindus of the 19th century turned the defeat and misery of Sikhs to their own account. Hindu propaganda spread the view that the Sikhs were Hindus, and so great was the confusion of thought that so many Sikhs lost along with their feeling of nationhood, even the faith of their ancestors. Little was done at the time by the Sikh leaders to combat this evil. Later, in the 20th century, with the rise of the Congress as the dominant force on the Indian political scene, emerged the conception of the “Indian Nation” of which all Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and others were component groups and were to be styled as mere “communities.” From this feeling of being a community the Sikhs have taken very long to emerge. The Khalsa of Guru Gobind Singh, the Commonwealth of the Elect, the erstwhile conquerors and rulers of the Punjab, Kashmere, Peshawar and Lower Tibet, the people who alone in India had developed all the distinct attributes of nationhood, and had lived as a nation were content to be styled as a “community,” and relegated to a very back seat indeed in this group of communities. The Sikhs have, however, now emerged from the illusion of being a community … and have formed the true conception of their status, and demanded a National State….
At present to a Sikh there never is any doubt that he belongs to a different nationality from that to which, for example, a Hindu belongs. As soon as one turns Sikh, one is a changed person. His group-consciousness undergoes a change. Conversion to Sikhism is not a mere incident in his life; it is a complete transformation of outlook and personality. One’s hopes and aspirations, one’s entire pattern of life, one’s political ideals—all acquire a new synthesis of which the component elements are the distinctive Sikh way of life and the Sikh feeling of oneness as a nation all over the world, irrespective of the country where any Sikh may at the moment be residing.
[From Gurbachan Singh and Lal Singh Gyani, The Idea of the Sikh State (Lahore: Lahore Book Shop, 1946), vi–viii, 1–3, 5–21.]
A Bengali political leader involved in the Indian nationalist movement in the first half of the twentieth century, Sarat Chandra Bose (1889–1950) was an elder brother of the more charismatic Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945). Both attended Presidency College, Calcutta.
Sarat Bose was called to the bar from Lincoln’s Inn and had a lucrative legal career before the Calcutta High Court. The political activity of Subhas Bose drew his older brother into nationalist politics and Calcutta affairs. Sarat Bose became a stalwart of the nationalized Calcutta Corporation, or city government, and a leader of the Bengal Congress in legislative affairs.
Along with other Congress leaders, Sarat Bose was arrested in 1932, and was not freed until 1935. A lover of Shakespeare with a degree in English literature, he read all the major works of the Russian novelists of the nineteenth century while imprisoned. But prison conditions caused his health to deteriorate, and he was finally released in 1935.
In 1938 Subhas Bose returned from abroad to become Congress president, and Sarat Bose assumed leadership of the opposition in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. A conflict with Gandhi led to Subhas Bose’s resignation from his Congress leadership post in 1939, and then to his suspension for disobeying Congress strictures about demonstrations. Sarat Bose continued to play an important role in Bengal politics until December 1941, when events in World War II changed everything.
Believing that the British would never leave India peacefully, Subhas Bose secretly left the country in January 1941 and made his way to Germany. Because his younger brother was working with the enemy, and he himself was secretly meeting the Japanese consul general in Calcutta, Sarat Bose was imprisoned from 1941 to 1945. When he was arrested, Sarat Bose was in the process of forming a coalition government in Bengal with the Muslim leader Fazlul Huq. His imprisonment was a setback to Hindu–Muslim relations, and also severely damaged his health. He had a fever throughout these long years in prison, and never fully recovered.
Upon his release in 1945, he organized the Congress election campaign in 1945–1946, and was briefly a cabinet minister in the interim government in 1946. As the Congress moved toward acceptance of a division of India on the basis of religion, Sarat Bose, to whom this was anathema, worked to prevent such an outcome.
With the secretary of the Muslim League, Abul Hashim, Sarat Bose put forward a scheme for a united Bengal. But it failed to gain popular support, as communal riots spread through India. Jinnah approved of it because he hoped it would mean that all Bengal might be ruled by a Muslim-majority government. Gandhi, also against Partition on the basis of religion, said he would back it if it gathered wide popular support. But when it did not, Gandhi went along with his Congress colleagues and reluctantly agreed to Partition.
On Partition day, Sarat Bose sat quietly in his garden. After Independence and Partition in August 1947, he resigned from the ruling Congress Party and became a critic of it and a major figure in West Bengal politics. He put forth a stronger socialist program than the ruling party from which he had resigned, and he predicted that the communists would win in China. His positions antagonized Nehru. Never having fully regained his health after his two terms of incarceration, Sarat Bose died at age sixty-one in 1950.
I. On 12 May 1947 the Associated Press of India released a report … that Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose took the initiative in January 1947 in the matter of settling communal differences and bringing about an agreement regarding the formation of a new Cabinet in Bengal and also regarding the future Constitution of Bengal…. It was further stated that discussions that had taken place between Mr. Bose and Congress and Muslim League leaders during the last four months … were still under consideration.
II. In the course of a Press statement on 20 May 1947 Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose said:
During the last few years I have given considerable thought to the question of the future constitution of India and of the provinces…. In January last I took the initiative in the matter of settling communal differences and bringing about an agreement regarding the formation of a new Cabinet in Bengal and also regarding the future Constitution of Bengal and discussed my ideas with Mr. Abul Hashim, Secretary, Bengal Provincial Muslim League … On the 26th January last … I said … “I have always held the view that India must be a Union of autonomous Socialist Republics and I believe that if the different provinces are redistributed on a linguistic basis and what are called provinces are converted into autonomous Socialist Republics, those Socialist Republics will gladly co-operate with one another in forming an Indian Union. It would be an Indian Union of Indian conception and Indian making….”
Events have happened in Bengal and in other parts of the country which have driven large sections of my countrymen to desperation and have led persons prominent in public life, who until recently had unequivocally declared that they were against Pakistan and partition, to lend their support both to Pakistan and to partition…. Conceding Pakistan and supporting partition would be suicidal to the cause of Indian independence and also to the cause of social progress. It will make the partitioned provinces happy hunting grounds for imperialists, communalists and reactionaries. It will dissolve the existing linguistic bonds and instead of resolving communal differences will accentuate and aggravate them. Instead of thinking and talking of Pakistan and partition and thereby bringing into existence armed communal camps, we have to devise ways and means as to how to live and work together and how to form people’s governments which will look not to communal interests but to common political, social and economic interests of the people…. We cannot and must not allow ourselves to be led by the British imperialists or the Indian Communists and reactionaries….
III. The Associated Press of India reported on 22 May 1947 … that complete terms had emerged out of the discussions that took place between Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose and certain prominent Congress and Muslim League leaders regarding the future constitution of Bengal and the formation of a new Cabinet. The terms were as follows:
1. Bengal will be a Free State … [that] will decide its relations with the rest of India.
2. The Constitution of the Free State of Bengal will provide for election to the Bengal Legislature on the basis of joint electorate and adult franchise, with reservation of seats proportionate to the population amongst the Hindus and Muslims. The seats as between the Hindus and the Scheduled Caste Hindus will be distributed amongst them in proportion to their respective population, or in such manner as may be agreed among them. The constituencies and the votes will be distributive and not cumulative. A candidate who gets the majority of the votes of his own community cast during the elections and 25 per cent of the votes of the other communities so cast, will be declared elected. If no candidate satisfies these conditions, that candidate who gets the largest number of votes of his own community will be elected.
3. On the announcement by His Majesty’s Government that the proposal of the Free State of Bengal has been accepted and that Bengal will not be partitioned, the present Bengal Ministry will be dissolved and a new Interim Ministry brought into being, consisting of an equal number of Muslims and Hindus (including Scheduled Caste Hindus) but excluding the Chief Minister. In this Ministry, the Chief Minister will be a Muslim and the Home Minister a Hindu.
4. Pending the final emergence of a Legislature and a Ministry under the new constitution, the Hindus (including the Scheduled Caste Hindus) and the Muslims will have an equal share in the services, including military and police. The Services will be manned by Bengalees.
5. A Constituent Assembly composed of 30 persons, 16 Muslims and 14 non-Muslims, will be elected by the Muslim and non-Muslim members of the Legislature respectively, excluding the Europeans….
V. A special messenger carrying a sealed cover from Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose to Mahatma Gandhi left on 22 May 1947 for Patna where the latter was then staying…. The following letter to Mr. Bose from Mahatma Gandhi … is of great interest.
Patna 25/5/47
My dear Sarat,
I have your note. There is nothing in the draft stipulating that nothing will be done by mere majority. Every act of Government must carry with it the co-operation of at least two-thirds of the Hindu members in the Executive and the Legislature. There should be an admission that Bengal has common culture and common mother tongue—Bengali. Make sure that the Central Muslim League approved of the proposal…. If your presence is necessary in Delhi I shall telephone or telegraph. I propose to discuss the draft with the Working Committee.
Yours, Bapu
VI. The Associated Press of India released the following report … on 26 May 1947:
Some changes are understood to be under discussion in the terms relating to the future constitution of Bengal that have emerged from the talks initiated by Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose with certain League and Congress leaders.
The authors of the terms have been continuing their discussions with a view to improving them and these talks have mostly centred round the provisions relating to (1) the Bengal Free State’s relations with the rest of India and (2) elections to the Legislature….
Amended Paragraph 1: Bengal will be a Free State. The Free State of Bengal will decide its relations with the rest of India. The question of joining any Union will be decided by the Legislature of the Free State of Bengal by a two-thirds majority.
Amended Paragraph 2: The Constitution of the Free State of Bengal will provide for election to the Bengal Legislature on the basis of joint electorate and adult franchise, with reservation of seats proportionate to the population amongst Hindus and Muslims….
VII. Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose told the Associated Press of India in New Delhi on 31 May 1947 that he had discussed with Mahatma Gandhi the Bengal situation….
Mr. Bose expressed the belief if the Congress High Command would accept his plan, then it would be easier to persuade the League High Command to agree to Mr. Suhrawardy’s scheme of United Bengal which was virtually the same as his own plan.
Mr. Bose said:
I do not say that Bengal should remain outside the Union. What I say is that only a Free Bengal can decide her relations with the rest of India.
VIII. Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose addressed this letter to Mr. M. A. Jinnah on 9 June 1947:
1, Woodburn Park, Calcutta 9th June, 1947
My dear Jinnah,
… Bengal is passing through the greatest crisis in her history, but she can yet be saved. She can be saved if you will kindly give the following instructions to Muslim members of the Bengal Legislative Assembly:
(1) At the meeting to be held of all members of the Legislative Assembly (other than Europeans) at which a decision will be taken on the issue as to which Constituent Assembly the province as a whole would join if it were subsequently decided by the two parts to remain united, to vote neither for the Hindusthan Constituent Assembly nor for the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, and to make it clear by a statement in the Assembly or in the press or otherwise, that they are solidly in favour of Bengal having a Constituent Assembly of her own;
(2) At the meetings of the members of the two parts of the Legislative Assembly sitting separately and empowered to vote whether or not the province should be partitioned, to vote solidly against partition.
The request I am making to you is in accordance with the views you expressed to me when we met. But it seems to me that if you merely express your views to your members and [do] not give them specific instructions as to how to vote, the situation cannot be saved. I hope you will do all in your power to enable Bengal to remain united and to make her a free and independent State.
If the Muslim members of the Bengal Legislative Assembly vote solidly as suggested in paragraphs (1) and (2) above, I think Lord Mountbatten will be compelled to convene another meeting of all members of the Assembly (other than Europeans) at which a decision can be taken on the issue as to whether the province … desires to have a Constituent Assembly of her own….
Yours sincerely,
Sarat Chandra Bose
… Further conversations with him had to be dropped as the Congress High Command turned down Mr…. Bose’s scheme for a united and independent Bengal … Gandhiji said in one of his prayer speeches that he “had been taken to task for supporting Sarat Babu’s move.”
IX. Mahatma Gandhi wrote the following letter to Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose on 21 June 1947 from Hardwar:
My dear Sarat,
… The way to work for unity I have pointed out when the geographical (unity) is broken.
Love, Bapu
ON THE MOUNTBATTEN PLAN (I), [the agreement on partition by the main parties]
Interview to the Free Press Journal, Bombay, released at New Delhi on June 5, 1947:
H.M.G.’s India Plan has dealt a staggering blow to the cause of Indian unity and independence—a blow from which we may not be able to recover for many years. It is true that the plan has been accepted by the two High Commands, but if we analyse it carefully, we shall find that instead of accelerating our pace towards the goal of freedom, it makes its attainment more difficult. What has surprised me most is that those who were until recently most vehement in demanding that India should remain one and undivided should have so readily supported division of India and even partition of provinces.
The plan has given no satisfaction to the Sikhs of the Punjab and I feel sure that … we shall find that it will give no satisfaction to the people of Bengal also. The demand of the people of the N.W.F.P. both Muslims and Hindus, for the establishment of an independent Pathan State has been ignored and what has been offered them is a choice between Hindusthan and Pakistan.
The tragic happenings in Bengal, Bihar, the Punjab and the Frontier Province are as fresh in my mind as in that of anybody else; nevertheless, I feel that a different and more satisfactory remedy could have been found for the ills that have overtaken our body politic. If the people of Bengal, the Punjab and the Frontier Province had been allowed to find their own remedy themselves without any interference from the top … the establishment of free and independent States in Bengal, the Punjab and the N.W.F.P. would have laid the foundations for a real and lasting peace…. It would have eventually led to the establishment of the Indian Union of our dreams….
ON THE MOUNTBATTEN PLAN (II)
Extract from a statement to the Press released at Calcutta on June 8, 1947:
British Imperialists have won. “Divide and Rule” has been their policy for the last 150 years and it continues to be their policy, even at the moment when they are supposed to be quitting India…. The top-ranking Congress leaders have already begun to talk in the Churchillian strain about “Co-operative Commonwealth.” Some of them have envisaged very close relations with Britain. In that background, British Imperialist manoeuvering will go on, but possibly in a more subtle and insidious way…. But the dream of independent India, free from British Imperialist control and influence, will more and more become a forgotten dream….
I have no doubt what H. M. G.’s plan would lead to. It is bound to lead to perpetual conflicts between the Hindus and the Muslims in the Hindu majority provinces as well as in the Muslim majority provinces. If peace is what we seek, we cannot get it by accepting H. M. G.’s plan. If independence is what we seek, the Plan sounds its death knell. It is possible even now for Congress and Muslim League leaders to retrace their steps. Will they have the vision and the courage to do so? Let them reform the provinces on [a] linguistic basis and give them independence. Let them introduce in the reformed provinces adult franchise and joint electorate. If they do that, they will be sowing the seeds out of which will grow an independent and united India, an India not of Hindus against Muslims, or Muslims against Hindus, but an India of Hindus and Muslims, an India which will take her rightful place among the nations of the world.
[From Sarat Chandra Bose, I Warned My Countrymen (Calcutta: Netaji Research Bureau, 1968), 183–187, 190–197, 199.]
Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900–1979) was the last viceroy of the British Raj; he presided over the final steps to Partition and the exit of the British from the crown jewel of their empire in 1947. Connected to almost all the royal families of Europe and a descendant of Queen Victoria, Mountbatten was the son of the first lord of the Admiralty; he came from a family that had changed its name from Battenburg to Mountbatten in a time of anti-German hostility. Handsome, charming, quick-witted, and intelligent, Louis Mountbatten pursued a military career, rose rapidly in the naval ranks, and married Edwina Ashley, a wealthy and attractive heiress, who accompanied him to India.
During World War II he became supreme commander of the Allied forces in mainland Southeast Asia. Since he was often in India, he came to know a great deal about the problems of the subcontinent. He and Jawaharlal Nehru became friends, which facilitated his final work in India.
In January 1947 Prime Minister Attlee announced that Lord Mountbatten would become the last viceroy and the transfer would take place no later than August 1948. Mountbatten reached India in March, and conferred with political leaders. A rapid and decisive decision-maker, Mountbatten concluded within weeks that a partition would have to accompany the transfer of power. Although he did not like this conclusion, his talks with Jinnah convinced him that an undivided and free India was not possible. In the historical record that he left, Mountbatten placed the blame for the division of India on Jinnah.
As a British nationalist and pro-Commonwealth man, Mountbatten thought that an undivided India would be easier to defend, better for Britain and the Commonwealth, and better for the economic future of South Asia. But he too, like his predecessor Wavell, proved unable to devise a satisfactory agreement on the sharing of power between the Congress and the Muslim League.
Once he saw that partition and independence would go together and that violence was increasing, he determined that the British should leave sooner rather than later. He also wanted to avoid what he called “the balkanization of India,” meaning that he preferred two independent, successor states to three, five, or five hundred. There was to be no independent Bengal and no independent states formed by the former princely states. He did all in his power, and used his royal ties and charm and muscle, to achieve the outcome he thought best.
Jinnah and the Muslim Leaguers felt that he was too friendly to the Congress, but they could do nothing to limit his moves in carrying out his plans. The Leaguers—and later, many Pakistanis—felt that he influenced Lord Radcliffe’s border recommendations in favor of India, allowing India to finally claim most of Jammu and Kashmir when it should have gone to Pakistan. Mountbatten, for his part, maintained that he had been evenhanded and had wanted to be governor-general or crown representative to both successor states after August 15, 1947. He did become the governor-general of India, but Jinnah denied him this role vis-à-vis Pakistan.
In 1948 Mountbatten returned to Great Britain and to his military career. He was one of the most beloved members of the royal family, and thus became a target for IRA assassins, who killed him in 1979. He was greatly mourned in Britain and also in India, but not in Pakistan.
These selections from his interviews with Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, whom he helped to write Freedom at Midnight, give a sense of his personality and of the dilemmas he faced.
Q. Would you say you were pre-disposed in any way, before you reached India?
A. It’s very difficult to say for certain what the state of my mind was on arrival. I was a great believer in a unified India. I thought the greatest single legacy we could leave the Indians was a unified country…. I realized I still had to unify the [princely] states with the rest of India. That, I thought was going to be the greatest difficulty and indeed it was an absolute miracle that we managed to get that straightened out. I thought we should try everything we could to keep India united and I really was very keen that we should find a solution.
Q. What did the Hindu leaders think of partition?
A. Nehru was horrified by the idea of partition. He was an extraordinarily intelligent man. He saw the point on everything…. I was completely in step with him. He would have given me any help he could to try and keep India unified if Jinnah had shown any sort of advance at all….
Gandhi had no key at all. The key to the whole thing obviously was Jinnah. Not only that, but I believe there was confusion all the way through. Most people thought it was Gandhi. If they didn’t think it was Gandhi they thought it was Nehru. But it wasn’t Gandhi, it wasn’t Nehru, it was Jinnah and Patel. They were the two people.
If Mr. Jinnah had died of this illness about two years earlier, I think we would have kept the country unified. He was the one man who really made it impossible. I didn’t realize how impossible it was going to be until I actually met Jinnah.
I have the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right and intelligent thing, not because I am persuasive, so much, as because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favourable light. I didn’t realize there was nothing at all you could do about Jinnah. He had completely made up his mind….
Q. There was an impasse?
A. All I could do was just to negotiate. For instance, he wanted to have the whole of the Punjab, the whole of Bengal, and I told him this was not on. And then of course there followed that amusing and rather tragic game of around and around the mulberry bush which I shall describe.
When I told Jinnah I don’t want you to have a partitioned India, I gave him all my reasons, and he said, “Well, I am afraid we must. We can’t trust them. Look what they did to us in 1938–39. When you go, we’ll permanently be at the mercy of the elected Hindu majority and we shall have no place, we shall be oppressed and it will be quite terrible.”
I told him I was quite certain that people like Nehru, and there were many of his colleagues like him, had no intention whatever of oppressing them.
He said, “Well, that’s what you say, but Nehru was still the most important figure when they did, in fact, oppress us in 1938–39. And he failed to stop it. But,” he said, “you must give me a viable Pakistan. You must give me the whole of the Punjab as well as Sind and NWFP and Bengal and Assam, and I shall want a corridor to unite them.”
I said, “Look, Mr. Jinnah, you have said that you won’t agree to having a minority population ruled by a majority population.”
“Absolutely.”
“Alright. I happen to know that in the Punjab and Bengal there are wide areas where the opposite community is in the majority. It happens also that they just about divide east and west. So I’m afraid that if you want Pakistan, I shall have to arrange for the partitioning of both the Punjab and Bengal. You cannot take into Pakistan the Hindus of Punjab and Bengal.”
“Your Excellency doesn’t understand that the Punjab is a nation. Bengal is a nation. A man is a Punjabi or a Bengali first before he is a Hindu or a Muslim. If you give us those provinces you must, under no condition, partition them. You will destroy their viability and cause endless bloodshed and trouble.”
“Mr. Jinnah, I entirely agree.”
“Oh, you do.”
“Yes, of course. A man is not only a Punjabi or a Bengali before he is a Muslim or Hindu, but he is an Indian before all else. What you’re saying is the perfect, absolute answer I’ve been looking for. You’ve presented me the arguments to keep India united.”
“Oh, you don’t understand. If you do that …” and so we’d start all over again.
“Look, Mr. Jinnah, it is a fact you want partition?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, if you want partition then you must have partition of Punjab and Bengal.”
You know … this … went over several discussions. He simply was caught in his own trap. He finally gave up and said, “So you insist on giving me a motheaten Pakistan.”
I said, “You call it a moth-eaten Pakistan. I don’t even want you to take it at all if it’s as moth-eaten as that. I’d really like you to leave India unified.”
But he was absolutely set on his great cry of no…. I realized the man was quite unshakeably immovable and quite impervious to any quarrel or logical argument and not even prepared to look at any safeguards which I might be able to devise. I told him, “Mr. Jinnah, if only you would believe me, if only you would accept some organization like the Cabinet Mission Plan you would find that you could have great autonomy, the Punjab and Bengal could rule themselves…. It would be quite independent. What is more, you could have the great pleasure of oppressing the minorities in any way you wanted to, because you’d be able to prevent the centre from interfering. Doesn’t that appeal to you?”
“No … I’d sooner lose everything than be under a Hindu raj.”
He went on and on…. I had never visualized that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in England, was capable of closing his mind—it wasn’t that he didn’t see it—he closed his mind….
Mind you, Jinnah is now forgotten. He was the man who did it. Bangladesh and all that misery which I forecast. Twenty-five years ago Rajagopalachari and I said it would last 25 years…. It couldn’t go on. All this misery and trouble was caused by Jinnah and no one else…. He was the evil genius in this whole thing…. You couldn’t move him….
The only difference between the scheme I was prepared to give Jinnah and that which he would have got under the Cabinet Mission Plan was that under the Cabinet Mission Plan he was obliged to accept a small, weak centre at Delhi controlling the defence, communications and external affairs. The three might really be lumped together under the general heading of defence.
That speech was absolutely the last plea for a united India…. I then realized that he had this faculty of closing his mind to the thing—he could see points, he was an able debater, he had a well-trained mind, he was a lawyer, but he gave me the impression of having closed his mind, closed his ears; he didn’t want to be persuaded…. In the case of partitioning Punjab and Bengal, he didn’t even seem to have been listening … at all….
I can remember when Jinnah had got his Pakistan. When the British Government was prepared to let me put forward the plan of June 3, when even the Sikhs had swallowed it, and Congress. This is what he’d been playing for, and he’d got it. And he said, “No.”
Actually what he said was, “I shall have to put it to the Muslim League Council.”
I said, “I can give you until midnight. Or 8 a.m.”
He said, “I can’t get them here before a week.”
I said, “Mr. Jinnah, if you think that I can hold the position for a week you must be crazy. You know this has been drawn up to the boiling point. A miracle has been achieved in that the Congress Party, for the first time, is prepared to accept this sacrifice of partition. But they are not going to be shown up. Having to wait for you to get your Muslim League to accept it tonight or tomorrow morning, it’s out for good….”
And we went on and on. And he said, “No, no, I must do this thing the logical, legal way, as is properly constituted. I am not the Muslim League.”
I said, “Now, now Mr. Jinnah, come on … please don’t try and kid yourself that I don’t know who’s who and what’s what in the Muslim League.”
And then he said, “I must do this thing absolutely legally.”
I said, “I’m going to tell you something. I can’t allow you to throw away the solution you worked so hard to get. It’s absolutely idiotic to refuse to say yes. The Congress has said yes. The Sikhs have said yes. Tomorrow at the meeting, I shall say I have received assurance from the Congress Party, with a few reservations, that I am sure I can satisfy and they have accepted. The Sikhs have accepted. And I had a very long, very friendly conversation with Mr. Jinnah last night, we went through every point and Mr. Jinnah feels this is an absolutely acceptable solution. Now, at this moment, I will turn to you and you will nod your head in agreement…. If you shake your head (to indicate disagreement) you will have lost the thing for good, and … you can go to hell.”
I didn’t know whether he was going to shake his head or nod his head the next morning.
I said, “Finally, Mr. Jinnah has given me his personal assurance that he is in agreement with this plan,” and I turned to him and he went like that. (Mountbatten nodded his head imperceptibly, as Jinnah had done.)
Now I can tell you that if he had shaken his head, the whole thing would have been in the bumble pot. To think that I had to say yes for this clot to get his own plan through, it shows you what one was up against. This was probably the most hair-raising moment of my entire life. I’ve never forgotten that moment, waiting to see if that clot was going to nod or shake his head. He had no expression on his face. He couldn’t have made a smaller gesture and still accepted.
The funny part is that the others, I knew, guessed that Jinnah was being difficult…. He was the Muslim League and what he said, they did. He knew he’d got the last dreg….
Q. Was there a sense of relief among the others?
A. I, in fact, realized that none of them had the faintest conception of the administrative consequences of the decision they were taking. I’d given Ismay the special task with a high priority to work out all that had to be done. God knows, 30, 40, 50 major things. He produced this admirable paper on the administrative consequences of partition and transfer of power…. This was really stage managed. The result was that their whole attention was distracted by this…. Then I did a thing that was very unpopular…. I had a calendar made, which showed how many days were left to the transfer of power.
They disliked it because they thought it was a trick of mine. I knew it was unpopular but I couldn’t care less. It was unpopular because they felt they were being put under pressure and they were…. If I’d let up on them the whole thing would have blown up under my feet.
I have no worry about Jinnah being shown up for the bastard he was. You know he really was. I actually got on with him, because I can get on with anybody…. The worse thing he did to me was that he kept on saying I mustn’t go, that I must stay, that if I didn’t stay they wouldn’t get their assets transferred so that after the transfer of power I must stay out in over-all charge. When this was analysed by my staff and myself, we realized that we couldn’t have two governors-general with a viceroy over them after independence. Quite clearly the only way we could do the thing was if I were Governor-General of both provinces just for the transfer, and that was accepted tacitly…. My staff talked about it with his staff. And indeed we know that this came about because of the Indian side which first suggested that I should stay with them—and when they suggested that, which staggered me, that they were prepared to do it, then I said that I thought the solution would be if Jinnah wanted me to stay, then I must also stay as Governor-General of Pakistan.
It would have been absolute hell, living in two houses, it would be almost untenable, but I was prepared to try it. But he led us up the garden path. At the last moment this man—who obviously wanted to run Pakistan—instead of running it as the chief executive, i.e. the prime minister, decided to be the constitutional head of state who had no authority whatsoever….
[From Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, eds., Mountbatten and the Partition of India, March 22–August 15, 1947 (Delhi: Vikas, 1983), 61–69.]
Background on Jawaharlal Nehru is given in chapter 6.
In this statement of June 3, 1947, when the final decision had been made for Partition, Nehru insisted that he had never wanted it, but that the leaders of India—including himself, other Congress leaders, and Jinnah—had recommended the decision as the best for the country. As someone who believed that religion should be a secondary factor in forming national identity, he had been surprised by the strength of the Pakistan movement among India’s Muslims, but after the riots and the deadlocks in the Interim Government, he agreed to Partition. But he also maintained that the people, i.e., their representatives in the Bengal and Punjab Legislative Assemblies, would have the ultimate word. They would vote for either separation or unity. He well knew, however, that the Muslim Leaguers in these assemblies would follow their leader and vote for secession of the Muslim-majority areas of these two provinces, which is what Jinnah had agreed to in the days up to June 3. Nehru looked ahead to days of difficulty, and, hopefully, to the development of a better India. He called for calm and non-violence, but could not control the passions and hatreds that had been released.
Nine months have passed, months of sore trial and difficulty, of anxiety and sometimes even of heartbreak. Yet looking back at this period with its suffering and sorrow for our people there is much on the credit side also, for India has advanced nationally and internationally and is respected today in the councils of the world. In the domestic sphere something substantial has been achieved though the burden on the common man still continues to be terribly heavy and millions lack food and cloth and other necessaries of life. Many vast schemes of development are nearly ready and yet it is true that most of our dreams about the brave things we were going to accomplish have still to be realized.
You know well the difficulties which the country has had to face, economic, political and communal. These months have been full of tragedy for millions and the burden on those who had the governance of the country in their hands has been great indeed.
My mind is heavy with the thought of the sufferings of our people in the areas of disturbance, the thousands who are dead and those, especially our womenfolk, who have suffered agony worse than death. To their families and to innumerable people who have been uprooted from their homes and rendered destitute I offer my deep sympathy and assurance that we shall do all in our power to bring relief. We must see to it that such tragedies do not happen again….
You have just heard an announcement on behalf of the British Government. This announcement lays down a procedure for self-determination in certain areas of India. It envisages on the one hand the possibility of these areas seceding from India, on the other it promises a big advance towards complete independence. Such a big change must have the full concurrence of the people before effect can be given to it, for it must always be remembered that the future of India can only be decided by the people of India and not by any outside authority…. These proposals will be placed soon before representative assemblies of the people for consideration…. So while we must necessarily abide by what the people finally decide, we had to come to certain decisions ourselves and to recommend them to the people….
It is with no joy in my heart that I commend these proposals to you though I have no doubt in my mind that this is the right course. For generations we have dreamt and struggled for a free and independent united India. The proposal to allow certain parts to secede if they so will is painful for any of us to contemplate. Nevertheless I am convinced that our present decision is the right one even from the larger viewpoint. The united India that we have laboured for was not one of compulsion and coercion but a free and willing association of a free people. It may be that in this way we shall reach that united India sooner than otherwise and that she will have a stronger and more secure foundation.
We are little men serving great causes, but because the cause is great something of that greatness falls upon us also. Mighty forces are at work in the world today and in India, and I have no doubt that we are ushering in a period of greatness for India. The India of geography, of history and tradition, the India of our minds and hearts cannot change…. Let us face the future not with easy optimism or with any complacency or weakness but with confidence and a firm faith in India.
There has been violence, shameful, degrading and revolting violence, in various parts of the country. This must end. We are determined to end it. We must make it clear that political ends are not to be achieved by methods of violence, now or in the future.
On this the eve of great changes in India we have to make a fresh start with clear vision and a firm mind, with steadfastness and tolerance and a stout heart. We should not wish ill to anyone but think always of every Indian as our brother and comrade. The good of the four hundred millions of India must be our supreme objective.
[From Jawaharlal Nehru, An Anthology, ed. Sarvepalli Gopal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1980), 72–74.]
Although Gandhi was consulted throughout the negotiations over the transfer of power and the prospective division of the country, he also acted as if the process was going on without him. He considered, as he said, all Indians, regardless of religion, as his “brothers,” and so could not understand why the Muslims, wherever they lived, wanted to separate from other Indians. He well knew that even if there was to be some transfer of population, there were sufficient numbers of Muslims in India that many would remain and never go to Pakistan. So Partition would not bring the separation that Jinnah seemed to want. Hindus and many Muslims would have to live together in India, and so he spoke with great sorrow and intelligence about questions of language, identity, non-violence, etc., as he tried to come to terms with what, against his better judgment, was happening as India was divided.
NEW DELHI, JUNE 4, 1947
Brothers and Sisters,
… I told you that we would not give even an inch of land as Pakistan under coercion. In other words, we would not accept Pakistan under the threat of violence. Only if they can convince us by peaceful argument and if their proposal appeals to our reason would we concede Pakistan.
I cannot say that this whole question has been treated rationally. The Congress Working Committee insists that they have not granted anything under duress. They are not scared because so many people are dying and property is being destroyed…. They have taken this course because they realized that it was not possible to get round the Muslim League in any other way….
We do not wish to force anyone. We tried hard. We tried to reason with them, but they refused to come into the Constituent Assembly. The League supporters kept on arguing that they were afraid of the Hindu majority in the event of their joining the Constituent Assembly…. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs all can say that the Muslims have committed a great blunder. But on what ground can we absolve ourselves of the blame? Let us leave it to God to pass judgment.
I would say this much, that it was wrong on their part to demand Pakistan. But they can think of nothing else. They say that they can never live where the Hindus have a majority. They are harming themselves by making this demand…. When my own brother, whether he follows my religion or some other religion, wants to harm me I cannot aid him, even though he may not be aware that he is harming me. If I do it I am sure to be crushed between the two stones of a quern. Why should I not keep my own millstone apart? …
The Viceroy has had no hand in this decision. The decision has been taken jointly by all the leaders in consultation…. The Cabinet Mission also gave a reasonable award. But the League went back on its assurance and now this course has had to be adopted. They [the Muslims] have got to come back to India. Even if Pakistan is formed, there will have to be mutual exchange of populations and movements to and fro. Let us hope that co-operation endures….
For the Hindus, the Sikhs, all say that they would live in their own homelands, not in the Muslims’. The Hindus are willing to be under Sikh rule because they say the Sikhs never compel them at the point of the sword to bow before the Granth Saheb….
The Viceroy has already stated in his speech and he has also assured me that when we approach him united this decision would be revoked…. The Viceroy says that his task is merely to see that the British carry on their task honestly till power is transferred and then quit in peace. The British people do not wish that chaos should reign after they quit this country.
I had already said that they should not worry about anarchy. I am, after all, a gambler. But who would listen to me? You do not listen to me. The Muslims have given me up. Nor can I fully convince the Congress of my point of view. Actually I am a slave of the Congress, because I belong to India. I tried my best to bring the Congress round to accept the proposal of May 16. But now we must accept what is an accomplished fact….
But I would like to request Jinnah Saheb, implore him, to have direct talks with us at least now. Whatever has happened is all right, but now let us sit together and decide about the future.
[From CWMG, 88:73–76.]
NEW DELHI, JUNE 9, 1947
Brothers and sisters,
When I said that the country should not be divided I was confident that I had the support of the masses. But when the popular view is contrary to mine, should I force my own view on the people? I have repeatedly said that we should never compromise with falsehood and wickedness…. I must admit that today the general opinion is not with me … so I must step aside….
Another friend writes that this Viceroy is even more dangerous than the other Viceroys…. I can never agree with this opinion…. Why can he not understand the simple thing that the general opinion, that is, the opinion of those who are fit to hold any opinion, is supporting the Congress leaders? The leaders are not fools. They too find the partition repugnant, but as representatives of the country they cannot go against public opinion. They derive their power from the people. The situation would have been different if the correspondent had the power. And under no circumstances would it be proper to criticize the Viceroy when the leaders are elected representatives of the people or when our own people betray the country. The saying “as the king so the subjects” is not so apt as its reverse: “As the subjects so the king.”
[From CWMG, 88:118.]
NEW DELHI, JUNE 12, 1947
Brothers and sisters,
You see Khwaja Saheb 33 sitting to my right…. He did not want the country to be divided. Nevertheless it has happened and he has come to me to lament it….
Well, the League wanted it, but the Congress did not like it. How long can a thing over which the two are not agreed last? Geographically we may have been divided. But so long as hearts too have not been divided, we must not weep. For all will be well so long as our hearts remain whole. The country may well be divided today into Pakistan and Hindustan. In the end we have to become one. Not that they will come and join us through vexation. Our behaviour will be such that even if they want to they will not be able to keep themselves away from us.
It irks Jawaharlal that the rest of the country should be called Hindustan. When one part is now Pakistan, how can the other part be Hindustan, he asks. He is right. For it will mean that it belongs to the Hindus. What then would the Christians, the Jews and the Muslims left here do? Must they leave? Must Pantji ask Khwaja Saheb, who belongs to U. P. and is a friend of his, to leave U. P.? If this happens, Mr. Jinnah will have been proved right in his assertion that the hearts were already divided.
It would mean that if my son becomes a Muslim he becomes a national of another country. If we segregate three-quarters of our fellow countrymen and keep them away from the governance of the country, our Hindustan will be just as Mr. Jinnah has pictured it.
Then there will be a Parsistan, a Sikhistan, separate bits for the untouchables, the Adivasis and so forth and Hindustan will no longer remain Hindustan. It will undergo Balkanization….
Jawaharlal has suggested Union of Indian Republic as the name for the country. That is, all will live together here. If a part wants to secede we shall not force it to remain, but those that remain shall live as brothers. We shall so treat them that they will not want to break away, they will not feel that they are separate….
Today someone asked me why we should still continue with Hindustani. Such a question should not be raised. If we adopt the attitude that since Urdu will be the language of Pakistan we should have Hindi as our language then the charge of separatism against us also will be proved. Hindustani means an easy language to speak, read and write. It used to be one language at one time but lately we have Urdu loaded with Persian expressions which the people cannot understand and Hindi crammed with Sanskrit words which also people cannot understand. If we used that language we should have to eject from our midst people like Sapru. 34 Although a Hindu, his mother tongue is Urdu. If I start talking to him in Sanskritized Hindi he will not be able to make head or tail of it. We should therefore continue the work of Hindustani—of the Hindustani Sabha 35—and prove our love for those whose language is Urdu.
I see God’s will in what has happened. He wants to test us both to see what Pakistan will do and how generous India can be. We must pass the test. I am hoping that no Hindu will be so mad as to show inadequate respect for things the Muslims consider sacred or fail to accord the same status to the Aligarh University as he does to Malaviyaji’s [Banaras] Hindu University. If we destroy their sacred places we shall ourselves be destroyed.
Similarly we should protect the fire temples of Parsis and the synagogues of Jews…. We have to answer lies with truth and meanness with generosity. Always and in every situation our eyes, ears and hands should remain pure. Only then can we save ourselves; only then can the world survive. I have not the least doubt of it. We must not run away with the idea that now that we have given the Muslims what they wanted we can do what we like.
[From CWMG, 88:138–141.]
NEW DELHI, JULY 13, 1947
… There has been a Press conference addressed by Mr. Jinnah…. He holds out the assurance that the minorities in Pakistan will not be put to any hardship. They shall be accorded the same treatment as Muslims. The Hindus will be free to visit their temples and the Sikhs their Gurudwaras. Of course, I cannot take anyone’s word at face value. Even today in Pakistan carnage and arson are rampant. This is happening in the Indian Union too. Who is doing this? Is it only the Muslims or are Hindus too responsible for it? I am flooded with letters of all kinds. People ask why they cannot live in peace. I ask Mr. Jinnah when his assurance will be put into practice. Will it be effective only after August 15? Sind will be a part of Pakistan. The Muslim League has the most influence there. Mr. Jinnah has become the Governor-General…. We are in some way still connected with him through the Governor-General and the Governor-General still remains responsible to the king. Mr. Jinnah also remains the President of the League. This further strengthens his status. He should act with justice. Why should Sindhis be running away from Sind? If even a single Sindhi leaves Sind it will be a matter of shame to Mr. Jinnah….
I do not know what has happened … in U. P. But the Muslims of U. P. are walking in fear. They do not know whether they can continue to live there or not. But why can’t they live there, I ask? I ask U. P. and Bihar as I ask Mr. Jinnah: Can Muslims live in those provinces or not? … If I can say anything on behalf of Muslims or the Indian Union, it is only this, that everyone should have justice. If this is ensured then there will be nothing more left to say and the pain of partition will have been forgotten….
Even if we have not learnt the lesson of ahimsa, we should at least from our thirty years of experience learn the lesson that we shall never again become slaves irrespective of whether we achieve this through violence or non-violence. I do not say that it should be only through non-violence. I have been saying this since I was in Bihar. People ask for guns and swords. I say, why do you want these weapons? Proclaim that you will never bow down. I said the same in Noakhali. If we can show that we have learnt this lesson after thirty years of experience, it will not matter whether people are violent or non-violent. If they … ask me, I shall still say that they must follow only non-violence. If a single individual has to defy the world he can do so only through non-violence. Where there is non-violence there is God. The sword breaks before it.
[From CWMG, 88:329–331.]
There were many Muslims who rejected the two-nation theory of Jinnah and the Muslim League. They were convinced that the best hope for the future of the Muslim population of the subcontinent was in a united India, and they supported the Indian National Congress. Among them was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (1888–1958), a distinguished scholar and writer who was president of the Congress during the difficult period from 1940 to 1946. Born in Mecca of an Indian father and an Arabian mother, he received a traditional Islamic education in Calcutta, but he was persuaded by the writings of Sayyid Ahmad Khan to study the historical and philosophical heritage of Europe through the medium of English. “The ideas I had acquired from my family and early training could no longer satisfy me,” he wrote. “I felt that I must find the truth for myself. Almost instinctively I began to move out of my family orbit and seek my own path.” He adopted the pen name of Azad (“free”) to indicate this change in outlook, and joined an all-Hindu revolutionary group (partly through the influence of Aurobindo Ghose). In 1912 he founded the Urdu journal al-Hilāl (“the crescent moon,” an Islamic symbol). Like Mohamed Ali, he was kept in detention during World War I and later joined the pro-caliphate non-cooperation movement under Gandhi’s leadership. Unlike Mohamed Ali, Jinnah, and others, however, he remained within the Congress, believing that Muslims and Hindus could share citizenship in an independent India without compromising their religious beliefs. He became the Union of India’s minister of education from its birth until his death. His great work of scholarship was his commentary on the Quran in Urdu, in which he stressed God’s benevolent guidance of mankind.
The following selection is taken from the speech Maulana Azad gave as Congress president in 1940. He said that when India adopted a new constitution, the rights of the minorities would be guaranteed; furthermore, the minorities, not the majority, would decide what safeguards were necessary.
We have considered the problem of the minorities of India. But are the Muslims such a minority as to have the least doubt or fear about their future? A small minority may legitimately have fears and apprehensions, but can the Muslims allow themselves to be disturbed by them? … Nothing is further removed from the truth than to say that Indian Muslims occupy the position of a political minority. It is equally absurd for them to be apprehensive about their rights and interests in a democratic India….
During the last sixty years, this artificial and untrue picture of India was made…. This was the result of the same policy of divide and rule which took particular shape in the minds of British Officialdom in India after the Congress launched the national movement. The object of this was to prepare the Musalmans for use against the new political awakening. In this plan, prominence was given to two points. First, that India was inhabited by two different communities, the Hindus and the Musalmans, and for this reason no demand could be made in the name of a united nation. Second: that numerically the Musalmans were far less than the Hindus, and because of this, the … consequence of the establishment of democratic institutions in India would be to establish the rule of the Hindu majority and to jeopardise the existence of the Muslims. Thus were sown the seeds of disunity by British Imperialism on Indian soil. The plant grew and was nurtured and spread its nettles….
Politically speaking, the word minority does not mean just a group that is so small in number and so lacking in other qualities that give strength, that it has no confidence in its own capacity to protect itself from the much larger group that surrounds it. It is not enough that the group should be relatively the smaller, but that it should be absolutely so small as to be incapable of protecting its interests. Thus this is not merely a question of numbers; other factors count also…. Let us apply it to the position of the Muslims in India…. They stand erect, and to imagine that they exist helplessly as a “minority” is to delude oneself.
The Muslims in India number between eighty and ninety millions. The same type of social or racial divisions, which affect other communities, do not divide them. The powerful bonds of Islamic brotherhood and equality have protected them to a large extent from the weakness that flows from social divisions. It is true that they number only one-fourth of the total population; but the question is not one of population ratio, but of the large numbers and the strength behind them. Can such a vast mass of humanity have any legitimate reason for apprehension that in a free and democratic India, it might be unable to protect its rights and interest?
These numbers are not confined to any particular area but spread out unevenly over different parts of the country…. The position of the Muslims is not that of a minority only. If they are in a minority in seven provinces, they are in a majority in five. This being so, there is absolutely no reason why they should be oppressed by the feeling of being a minority.
Whatever may be the details of the future constitution of India, we know that it will be an all-India federation which is, in the fullest sense, democratic, and every unit of which will have autonomy in regard to internal affairs. The federal centre will be concerned only with all-India matters of common concern, such as foreign relations, defence, customs, etc. Under these circumstances, can any one who has any conception of the actual working of a democratic constitution, allow himself to be led astray by this false issue of majority and minority? …
I am a Musalman and am proud of that…. Islam’s splendid traditions of thirteen hundred years are my inheritance. I am unwilling to lose … the smallest part of [it]. The teaching and history of Islam, its arts and letters and civilisation are … my fortune. It is my duty to protect them.
As a Musalman I have a special interest in Islamic religion and culture and I cannot tolerate any interference with them. But in addition to these sentiments, I have others also which the realities and conditions of my life have forced upon me. The spirit of Islam does not come in the way of these sentiments; it guides and helps me forward. I am proud of being an Indian….
It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable soil, and that many a caravan should find rest here…. One of the last of these caravans … was that of the followers of Islam. This came here and settled here for good. This led to a meeting of the culture-currents of two different races. Like the Ganga and Jumna, they flowed for a while through separate courses, but nature’s immutable law brought them together and joined them in a sangam [union]. This fusion was a notable event in history…. We gave her, what she needed most, the most precious of gifts from Islam’s treasury, the message of democracy and human equality….
Eleven hundred years of common history have enriched India with our common achievement. Our languages, our poetry … our culture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs … the … happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour…. Our languages were different, but we grew to use a common language; our manners and customs were dissimilar, but they acted and reacted on each other and … produced a new synthesis….
This thousand years of our joint life has moulded us into a common nationality. This cannot be done artificially. Nature does her fashioning through her hidden processes in the course of centuries. The cast has now been moulded and destiny has set her seal upon it. Whether we like it or not, we have now become an Indian nation, united and indivisible.
[From Sankar Ghose, ed., Congress Presidential Speeches (Calcutta: West Bengal Pradesh Committee, 1972), 356–363.]
In his last years, Azad, with the help of writer and educationist Humayun Kabir, and possibly others as well, wrote an account of the Indian freedom struggle entitled India Wins Freedom. The first published edition omitted some crucial passages from Azad’s original manuscript, in which Azad’s version of Partition history differs from that of some of his closest colleagues, including Jawaharlal Nehru. A second, more complete edition restores those passages. Below, passages that were originally omitted in the first edition and that have been added in the second are rendered in italics. There were objections to Azad’s account, including allegations that he exaggerated his role and often did not tell the truth. The fullest critique is by Rajmohan Gandhi, India Wins Errors (1989).
On 15 March 1946, Mr. Attlee made a statement in the House of Commons on the Indian situation. This statement had no precedents in the history of Indo-British relations. He frankly admitted that the situation had completely changed and demanded a new approach…. He went on to say that he did not wish to stress on the differences between the Indians, for … Indians were united in their desire for freedom. This was the underlying demand of all the Indian people, whether they were Hindus or Muslims, Sikhs or Marathas, politicians or civil servants. Mr. Attlee frankly admitted that the conception of nationalism had continually grown stronger…. He concluded by announcing that the Cabinet Mission was going out in a positive mood….
The Cabinet Mission arrived in India on 23 March…. I came to the conclusion that the Constitution of India must from the nature of the case be federal. Further, it must be so framed as to ensure complete autonomy to the provinces in as many subjects as possible. We had to reconcile the claims of provincial autonomy with national unity….
It was clear to me that defence, communications and foreign affairs were subjects which could be dealt adequately only on an all India basis. Any attempt to deal with them on a provincial level would defeat the purpose and destroy the very basis of a federal Government. Certain other subjects would be equally obviously a provincial responsibility but there would be a third list of subjects where the provincial legislature would decide whether to retain them as provincial subjects or delegate them to the Centre….
If a Constitution was framed which embodied this principle, it would ensure that in the Muslim majority provinces, all subjects except three could be administered by the province itself. This would eliminate from the mind of the Muslims all fears of domination by the Hindus. Once such fears were allayed, it was likely that the provinces would find it an advantage to delegate some other subjects as well to the Central Government. I was also satisfied that even apart from communal considerations, this was the best political solution for a country like India…. The Working Committee had given me full powers to negotiate with the Cabinet Mission…. I met the members of the Cabinet Mission for the first time on 6 April 1946…. I indicated the solution I had already framed. As soon as I said that the Centre should have a minimum list of compulsory subjects and an additional list of optional ones, Lord Pethick-Lawrence said, “You are in fact suggesting a new solution of the communal problem.”
Sir Stafford Cripps … seemed to be satisfied with my approach.
The … Working Committee was convinced about the soundness of the proposal and Gandhiji expressed his complete agreement with the solution….
The Muslim League had for the first time spoken of a possible division of India in its Lahore Resolution. This later on came to be known as the Pakistan Resolution. The solution I suggested was intended to meet the fears of the Muslim League…. I felt that the time had come to place it [my scheme] before the country. Accordingly on 15 April 1946, I issued a statement….
I have considered from every possible point of view the scheme of Pakistan as formulated by the Muslim League … I have come to the conclusion that it is harmful not only for India as a whole but for Muslims in particular. And in fact it creates more problems than it solves. I must confess that the very term Pakistan goes against my grain. It suggests that some portions of the world are pure while others are impure. Such a division of territories into pure and impure is un-Islamic and is more in keeping with orthodox Brahmanism which divides men and countries into holy and unholy—a division which is a repudiation of the very spirit of Islam…. The prophet says, “God has made the whole world a mosque for me.”
Further, it seems that the scheme of Pakistan is a symbol of defeatism and has been built up on the analogy of the Jewish demand for a national home. It is a confession that Indian Muslims cannot hold their own in India as a whole and would be content to withdraw to a corner….
One can sympathise with the aspiration of the Jews for such a national home, as they are scattered all over the world…. The condition of Indian Muslims is quite otherwise. Over 90 million in number, they are in quantity and quality a sufficiently important element in Indian life to influence decisively all questions of administration and policy….
In such a context, the demand for Pakistan loses all force. As a Muslim, I for one am not prepared for a moment to give up my right to treat the whole of India as my domain and to share in the shaping of its political and economic life….
As is well known, Mr. Jinnah’s Pakistan scheme is based on his two nation theory. His thesis is that India contains many nationalities based on religious differences. Of them the two major nations, the Hindus and Muslims, must as separate nations have separate states. When Dr. Edward Thompson once pointed out to Mr. Jinnah that Hindus and Muslims live side by side in thousands of Indian towns, villages and hamlets, Mr. Jinnah replied that this in no way affected their separate nationality. Two nations according to Mr. Jinnah confront one another in every hamlet, village and town, and he, therefore, desires that they should be separated into two states….
If it can be shown that the scheme of Pakistan can in any way benefit Muslims I would be prepared to accept it myself and also to work for its acceptance by others…. I am forced to the conclusion that it can in no way benefit them or allay their legitimate fears.
Let us consider dispassionately the consequences which will follow if we give effect to the Pakistan scheme. India will be divided into two States, one with a majority of Muslims and the other of Hindus. In the Hindustan State there will remain three and a half crores of Muslims scattered in small minorities all over the land. With 17 per cent in U.P., 12 per cent in Bihar and 9 per cent in Madras, they will be weaker than they are today in the Hindu majority provinces. They have had their homelands in these regions for almost a thousand years and built up well-known centres of Muslim culture and civilisation there.
They will awaken overnight and discover that they have become alien and foreigners. Backward industrially, educationally and economically, they will be left to the mercies [of] what would become an unadulterated Hindu raj…. Their position within the Pakistan State will be vulnerable and weak. Nowhere in Pakistan will their majority be comparable to the Hindu majority in the Hindustan States…. Their majority will be so slight that it will be offset by the economical, educational and political lead enjoyed by non-Muslims in these areas. Even if this were not so and Pakistan were overwhelmingly Muslim in population, it still could hardly solve the problem of Muslims in Hindustan.
Two states confronting one another, offer no solution of the problem of one another’s minorities, but only lead to retribution and reprisals by introducing a system of mutual hostages. The scheme of Pakistan therefore solves no problem for the Muslims…. It may be argued that if Pakistan is so much against the interests of the Muslims themselves, why should such a large section of Muslims be swept away by its lure? … They argued that if Hindus were so opposed to Pakistan, surely it must be of benefit to Muslims. An atmosphere of emotional frenzy was created which made reasonable appraisement impossible and swept away, especially the younger and more impressionable among the Muslims….
The formula which I have succeeded in making the Congress accept secures whatever merit the Pakistan scheme contains while all its defects and drawbacks are avoided….
When India attains her destiny, she will forget the chapter of communal suspicion and conflict and face the problems of modern life from a modern point of view. Differences will no doubt persist, but they will be economic, not communal. Opposition among political parties will continue, but it will be based, not on religion but on economic and political issues….
The League had moved further along the path of separatism since the Lahore Resolution of 1940 popularly described as the Pakistan Resolution…. The Cabinet Mission was not prepared to concede the demand. On the contrary, the Mission was in favour of a solution more or less on the lines I had suggested….
I have already mentioned that the Cabinet Mission published its scheme on 16 May. Basically, it was the same as the one sketched in my statement of 15 April. The Cabinet Mission Plan provided that only three subjects would belong compulsorily to the Central Government. These were the three subjects—defence, foreign affairs and communications—… The Mission … added a new element to the Plan. It divided the country into three zones, A, B and C, as the members of the Mission felt that this would give a greater sense of assurance among the minorities. Section B would include Punjab, Sind, NWFP and British Baluchistan. This would constitute a Muslim majority area. In Section C, which included Bengal and Assam the Muslims would have a small majority over the rest. The Cabinet Mission thought that this arrangement would give … assurance to the Muslim minority, and satisfy all legitimate fears of the League….
Since the Cabinet Mission Plan was in spirit the same as mine and the only addition was the institution of the three sections I felt that we should accept the proposal.
At first Mr. Jinnah was completely opposed to the scheme. The Muslim League had gone so far in its demand for a separate independent State that it was difficult for it to retrace its steps. The Mission had stated in clear and unambiguous terms that they could never recommend the partition of the country and the formation of an independent State…. Mr. Jinnah had to admit that there could be no fairer solution of the minority problem than that presented in the Cabinet Mission Plan…. He advised the Muslim League to accept the scheme and the Council voted unanimously in its favour….
The acceptance of Cabinet Mission Plan by both the Congress and the Muslim League was a glorious event in the history of the freedom movement in India. It meant that the difficult question of Indian freedom had been settled by negotiation and agreement and not by methods of violence and conflict…. We rejoiced but we did not then know that our joy was premature….
The Working Committee met on 6 July and prepared … resolutions for the consideration of the AICC…. Then I moved the resolution on the Cabinet Mission Plan…. I further pointed out that the Cabinet Mission Plan had accepted in all essentials the Congress point of view. It guaranteed the unity of India, while at the same time it held out the necessary assurances to the minorities. The Congress had stood for the freedom and unity of India and opposed all fissiparous tendencies….
My speech had a decisive influence on the audience. When the vote was taken, the resolution was passed with an overwhelming majority. Thus the seal of approval was put on the Working Committee’s resolution accepting the Cabinet Mission Plan….
Now happened one of those unfortunate events which change the course of history. On 10 July, Jawaharlal held a press conference in Bombay in which he made an astonishing statement…. Press representatives asked him whether, with the passing of the Resolution by the AICC, the Congress had accepted the Plan in toto, including the composition of the Interim Government.
Jawaharlal in reply stated that Congress would enter the Constituent Assembly “completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise.”
Press representatives further asked if this meant that the Cabinet Mission Plan could be modified.
Jawaharlal replied emphatically that the Congress had agreed only to participate in the Constituent Assembly and regarded itself free to change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan…. The Muslim League had accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan only under duress. Naturally, Mr. Jinnah was not very happy about it. In his speech to the League Council, he had clearly stated that he recommended acceptance only because nothing better could be obtained…. Jawaharlal’s statement came to him as a bombshell. He immediately issued a statement that this declaration by the Congress President demanded a review of the whole situation. He accordingly asked Liaqat Ali Khan to call a meeting of the League Council and issued a statement to the following effect. The Muslim League Council had accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan in Delhi as it was assured that the Congress also had accepted the scheme and the Plan would be the basis of the future constitution of India. Now that the Congress President had declared that the Congress could change the scheme through its majority in the Constituent Assembly, this would mean that the minorities would be placed at the mercy of the majority. His view was that Jawaharlal’s declaration meant that the Congress had rejected the Cabinet Mission Plan and … the Viceroy should call upon the Muslim League, which had accepted the Plan, to form the Government.
The Muslim League Council met at Bombay on 27 July. Mr. Jinnah in his opening speech reiterated the demand for Pakistan as the only course left open to the Muslim League. After three days’ discussion, the Council passed a resolution rejecting the Cabinet Mission Plan. It also decided to resort to direct action for the achievement of Pakistan.
The unequivocal acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan by the Congress Working Committee led to an immediate response from the Viceroy. On 12 August, Jawaharlal was invited by him to form an interim Government at the Centre in the following terms:
His Excellency the Viceroy, with the approval of His Majesty’s Government has invited the President of the Congress to make proposals for the immediate formation of an interim Government and the President of the Congress has accepted the invitation….
Mr. Jinnah issued a statement the same day on which he said that “the latest resolution of the Congress Working Committee passed at Wardha on 10 August does not carry us anywhere.” … On 15 August, Jawaharlal met Mr. Jinnah at his house. Nothing however came out of their discussion and the situation rapidly deteriorated.
When the League Council met at the end of July and decided to resort to direct action, it also authorised Mr. Jinnah to take any action he liked in pursuance of the programme. Mr. Jinnah declared 16 August the Direct Action Day, but he did not make it clear what the programme would be…. I noticed in Calcutta that a strange situation was developing. In the past, political parties had observed special days by organising hartals, taking out processions and holding meetings. The League’s Direct Action Day seemed to be of a different type. In Calcutta, I found a general feeling that on 16 August, the Muslim League would attack Congressmen and loot Congress property. Further panic was created when the Bengal Government decided to declare 16 August a public holiday…. There was a general sense of anxiety in Calcutta….
16 August was a black day in the history of India. Mob violence unprecedented in the history of India plunged … Calcutta into an orgy of bloodshed, murder and terror. Hundreds of lives were lost. Thousands were injured and property worth crores of rupees was destroyed. Processions were taken out by the League which began to loot and commit acts of arson…. The whole city was in the grip of goondas [trouble-makers] of both … communities.
Sarat Chandra Bose had gone to the Governor and asked him to take immediate action to bring the situation under control. He also told the Governor that he and I were required to go to Delhi for a meeting of the Working Committee. The Governor told him that he would send the military to escort us to the airport. I waited for some time but nobody arrived. I then started on my own. The streets were deserted and the city had the appearance of death. As I was passing through Strand Road, I found that a number of cartmen and darwans were standing with staves in their hands. They attempted to attack my car. Even when my driver shouted that this was the car of the Congress President, they paid little heed. However, I got to Dum Dum…. I found there a large contingent of the military waiting in trucks. When I asked why they were not helping … they replied that their orders were to stand ready…. Throughout Calcutta, the military and the police were standing by … while innocent men and women were being killed.
Sixteen August 1946 was a black day not only for Calcutta but for the whole of India. The turn that events had taken made it almost impossible to expect a peaceful solution by agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League. This was one of the greatest tragedies of Indian history and I have to say with the deepest of regret that a large part of the responsibility for this development rests with Jawaharlal. His unfortunate statement that the Congress would be free to modify the Cabinet Mission Plan reopened the whole question of political and communal settlement. Mr. Jinnah took full advantage of his mistake and withdrew from the League’s early acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan.
Jawaharlal is one of my dearest friends and his contribution to India’s national life is second to none. I have nevertheless to say with regret that this was not the first time that he did immense harm to the national cause. He had committed an almost equal blunder in 1937 when the first elections were held under the Government of India Act 1935. In these elections, the Muslim League had suffered a great setback throughout the country except in Bombay and the UP…. It was in the UP that the League attained its greatest success….
Chaudhari Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Ismail Khan were then the leaders of the Muslim League in the UP. When I came to Lucknow for forming the Government, I spoke to both of them. They assured me that they would not only cooperate with the Congress, but would fully support the Congress programme. They naturally expected that the Muslim League would have some share in the new Government. The local position was such that neither of them could enter the Government alone…. I had therefore held out hopes that both would be taken into the Government. If the Ministry consisted of seven members only, two would be Muslim Leaguers and the rest would all be Congressmen. In a Cabinet of nine, the Congress majority would be still more marked…. A note was prepared to the effect that the Muslim League party … would … accept the Congress programme. Both Nawab Ismail Khan and Choudhari Khaliquzzaman signed this document, and I left…. I returned to Allahabad and found to my great regret that Jawaharlal had written to Choudhari Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Ismail Khan that only one of them could be taken into the Ministry. He had said that the Muslim League Party could decide who should be included…. Neither was in a position to come in alone. They therefore expressed their regret and said that they were unable to accept Jawaharlal’s offer.
This was a most unfortunate development. If the League’s offer of cooperation had been accepted, the Muslim League party would for all practical purposes merge with the Congress. Jawaharlal’s action gave the Muslim League in the UP a new lease of life…. It was from the UP that the League was reorganised. Mr. Jinnah … started an offensive which … led to Pakistan.
The mistake in 1937 was bad enough. The mistake of 1946 proved even more costly. One may perhaps say in Jawaharlal’s defence that he never expected the Muslim League to resort to direct action. Mr. Jinnah had never been a believer in mass movement…. He had perhaps hoped that when the Muslim League rejected the Cabinet Mission Plan, the British Government would reopen the whole question and hold further discussions….
[In the fall of 1946, the Muslim League agreed to join the Interim government.]
Now that the League had agreed to join the Government, the Congress had to reconstitute the Government and accommodate the representatives of the League. We had to decide who should leave the Government…. Lord Wavell had suggested that one of the major portfolios should go to a representative of the League. His own suggestion was that we should give up the Home Department but Sardar Patel who was the Home Member vehemently opposed the suggestion…. I was therefore for accepting Lord Wavell’s suggestion but Sardar Patel was adamant. He said that if we insisted, he would rather leave the Government than give up the Home Department….
When Lord Wavell conveyed this information to Mr. Jinnah he said that he would give his reply the next day…. He had decided to nominate Liaqat Ali as the chief representative of the League in the Cabinet but he was doubtful if Liaqat could adequately handle Finance. Some Muslim officers of the Finance Department … contacted Mr. Jinnah. They told him that the offer … marked a great victory for the League. They had never expected that Congress would agree to hand over Finance to the Muslim League…. The League would have a say in every Department of the Government. They assured Mr. Jinnah that he need have no fears. They would give every help to Mr. Liaqat Ali and ensure that he discharged his duties effectively. Mr. Jinnah accepted the proposal and … Liaqat Ali became the Member for Finance….
In all countries, the Minister in charge of Finance plays a key role in the Government. In India, his position was even more important, for the British Government had treated the Finance Member as the custodian of its interests. This was a portfolio which had always been held by an Englishman specially brought to India for the purpose. The Finance Member could interfere in every Department, and dictate policy. When Liaqat Ali became the Finance Member, he then obtained possession of the key to the Government. Every proposal of every Department was subject to scrutiny by his Department….
Sardar Patel had been very anxious about retaining the Home Membership. Now he realised that he had played into the hands of the League by offering it Finance. Whatever proposal he made was either rejected or modified beyond recognition by Liaqat Ali. His persistent interference made it difficult for any Congress Member to function effectively. Internal dissensions broke out within the Government and went on increasing.
I have already said that the League’s rejection of the Cabinet Mission Plan had caused us a great deal of anxiety. I have also mentioned the step which the Working Committee took to meet the League’s objection. This we did by passing a resolution on 10 August in which it was clearly stated that in spite of our dissatisfaction with some of the proposals contained in the Cabinet Mission Plan we accepted the scheme in its entirety. This did not however satisfy Mr. Jinnah as he held that the Working Committee did not still state in categorical terms that the provinces would join the groups envisaged in the Cabinet Mission Plan. The British Government and Lord Wavell generally agreed with the League on this particular point.
Looking back after ten years, I concede that there was force in what Mr. Jinnah said. The Congress and the League were both parties to the agreement, and it was on the basis of distribution among the Centre, the Provinces and the Groups that the League had accepted the Plan. Congress was neither wise nor right in raising doubts. It should have accepted the Plan unequivocally if it stood for the unity of India….
On the one hand, communal passions were mounting. On the other, the administration was becoming lax. Europeans in the services no longer had their heart in the work…. The situation was made worse by the deadlock between the Congress and the Muslim League within the Executive Council…. There were some very able and senior Muslim officers in the Finance Department who gave every possible help to Liaqat Ali. With their advice Liaqat Ali was able to reject or delay every proposal put up by the Congress members of the Executive Council….
A truly pathetic situation had developed as a result of our own foolish action in giving Finance to the Muslim League. Lord Mountbatten took full advantage of the situation. Because of the dissensions among the members, he slowly and gradually assumed full powers…. He started to mediate between the Congress and the League to get his own way. He also began to give a new turn to the political problem and tried to impress on both the Congress and the Muslim League the inevitability of Pakistan. He pleaded in favour of Pakistan and sowed the seeds of the idea in the minds of the Congress members of the Executive Council.
It must be placed on record that the man in India who first fell for Lord Mountbatten’s idea was Sardar Patel. Till perhaps the very end Pakistan was for Jinnah a bargaining counter, but in fighting for Pakistan, he had overreached himself. His action had so annoyed and irritated Sardar Patel that the Sardar was now a believer in partition. The Sardar’s was the responsibility for giving Finance to the Muslim League. He therefore resented his helplessness before Liaqat Ali more than anybody else. When Lord Mountbatten suggested that partition might offer a solution to the present difficulty, he found ready acceptance to the idea in Sardar Patel’s mind…. It would not perhaps be unfair to say that Vallabhbhai Patel was the founder of Indian partition.
Lord Mountbatten was extremely intelligent and could read into the minds of all his Indian colleagues. The moment he found Patel amenable to his idea he put out all the charm and power of his personality to win over the Sardar. In his private talk, he always referred to Patel as a walnut—a very hard crust outside but soft pulp once the crust was cracked…. When Sardar Patel was convinced, Lord Mountbatten turned his attention to Jawaharlal. Jawaharlal was not at first ready for the idea and reacted violently against the idea of partition. Lord Mountbatten persisted till Jawaharlal’s opposition was worn down…. Within a month of Lord Mountbatten’s arrival in India, Jawaharlal, the firm opponent of partition had become … acquiescent to the idea.
When I became aware that Lord Mountbatten was thinking in terms of dividing India and had persuaded Jawaharlal and Patel, I was deeply distressed…. Partition of India would be harmful not only to Muslims but to the whole country…. I was also convinced that if the Constitution for free India was framed on this basis and worked honestly … communal doubts and misgivings would soon disappear. The real problems of the country were economic, not communal….
I did my best to persuade my two colleagues not to take the final step. I found that Patel was so much in favour of partition that he was hardly prepared even to listen to any other point of view…. I pointed out that if we accepted partition, we could create a permanent problem for India. Partition would not solve the communal problem but would make it a permanent feature of the country. Jinnah had raised the slogan of two nations. To accept partition was to accept that slogan. How could Congress ever agree to divide the country on the basis of Hindus and Muslims? Instead of removing communal fears, partition would perpetuate them by creating two States based on communal hatred. Once States based on hatred came into existence, nobody knew where the situation would lead.
Now that Sardar Patel and even Jawaharlal had become supporters of partition, Gandhiji remained my only hope…. We expected that he would come to Delhi to meet Mountbatten and he actually arrived on 31 March. I went to see him at once and his very first remark was, “Partition has now become a threat. It seems Vallabhbhai and even Jawaharlal have surrendered. What will you do now? Will you stand by me or have you also changed?”
I replied, “I have been and am against partition. Never has my opposition to partition been so strong as today. I am however distressed to find that even Jawaharlal and Patel have accepted defeat and … surrendered their arms. My only hope now is in you. If you stand against partition, we may yet save the situation. If you however acquiesce, I am afraid India is lost.”
Gandhiji said, “What a question to ask! If the Congress wishes to accept partition, it will be over my dead body. So long as I am alive I will never agree to the partition of India.” …
Later that day Gandhiji met Lord Mountbatten…. But when I met Gandhiji again, I received the greatest shock of my life to find that he had changed. He was still not openly in favour of partition but he no longer spoke so vehemently against it. What surprised and shocked me even more was that he began to repeat the arguments which Sardar Patel had already used….
The AICC met on 14 June 1947…. Congress which had always fought for the unity and independence of India was now considering a … resolution for dividing the country. Pandit … Pant moved the resolution and after Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal spoke on it…. It was impossible for me to tolerate this abject surrender on the part of the Congress. In my speech I clearly said that the decision which the Working Committee had reached was the result of a most unfortunate development. Partition was a tragedy for India and the only thing that could be said in its favour was that we had done our best to avoid division but we had failed…. If we wanted freedom here and now, we must submit to the demand for dividing India. We must not however forget that the nation is one and its cultural life is and will remain one. Politically we had failed and were therefore dividing the country. We should accept our defeat but we should at the same time try to ensure that our culture was not divided.
When the resolution was put to the vote, 29 voted for it and 15 against…. Even those who accepted partition had all their feelings against it. What was worse was the kind of insidious communal propaganda which was gaining ground. It was being openly said in Congress circles that Hindus in Pakistan need not have any fears as there would be four and a half crores of Muslims in India and if there was any oppression of Hindus in Pakistan, the Muslims in India would have to bear the consequences…. I immediately saw that this was a dangerous sentiment and could have the most unfortunate and far-reaching repercussions. It implied that partition was being accepted on the basis that in both India and Pakistan, there would be hostages who would be held responsible for the security of the minority community in the other State. The idea of retaliation as a method of assuring the rights of minorities seemed to me barbarous. Later events proved how justified my apprehensions were. The river of blood which flowed after partition on both sides of the new Frontier grew out of this sentiment of hostages and retaliation.
[From Azad, India Wins Freedom (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1988), 146–153, 156–158, 163–166, 168–172, 177–179, 185, 196–198, 200–203, 214–216.]
Jinnah did not leave the kind of intimate record or account of the events leading to Partition and independence that several congressmen left. Among the few valuable Muslim League accounts is that of Begum Shaista Ikramullah (1915–2000) in From Purdah to Parliament. Writing some years after Partition, Begum Ikramullah presents the view of an active and intelligent Muslim Leaguer devoted to Jinnah. Her account may be compared with that of Azad.
Begum Ikramullah came from a distinguished Muslim family of Bengal; she was the only daughter of Sir Hassan Suhrawardy, doctor and politician, and was the niece of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, chief minister of Bengal in the crucial years 1946–1947. Begum Ikramullah was prominent in the politics of Pakistan in the decade after independence. She was well educated, having earned a doctorate at London University with a thesis on the development of Urdu literature. Drawn into politics after her marriage to civil servant Mohammad Ikramullah in 1933, she worked with the Muslim League Women’s Sub-Committee. She was closely associated with Fatima Jinnah in setting up the Muslim Women Students’ Federation. Students and women were very active in the growth of Muslim League support among Indian Muslims in the 1940s. Begum Ikramullah was elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1946, and later served in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly.
Though from Bengal, she was an Urdu-speaking Muslim who tried to balance and understand the political demands from the eastern as well as western wings of Pakistan. After independence, her husband served as foreign secretary and as ambassador to several countries. She served in Pakistan’s United Nations delegation, participated in the drawing up of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and later was ambassador to Morocco. One of her daughters married into the Jordanian royal family and another, Salma, a barrister, married Rehman Sobhan, a leading economist of Bangladesh.
The Muslim League had been reorganized in 1937 under the presidency of Mr. Mohammad Ali Jinnah but it was still weak. It had not captured sufficient seats even in the Muslim majority Provinces to form a 100 per cent Muslim League Government, but in each of the Provincial legislatures it was the largest Muslim party; yet when the Congress Ministries were formed in the seven Provinces not one League member found a place in any of them. A Muslim was taken here and there but the Muslims contended that the man thus chosen was a nominee of the Hindus and not their true representative. But weak though the Muslim League was in 1937 it was a mistake for the Congress to ignore it as completely as they did. Of course they did not know that the dynamic personality of Mohammad Ali Jinnah was going to transform that loosely organized ineffectual body into a well-knit, superbly disciplined, organization which in seven brief years was to formulate a demand, gain support for it and achieve what it set out to get. They cannot be blamed for not foreseeing this, one of the greatest miracles of modern times, but they were wrong to ignore the aspirations of the Muslims, because they were not then strong enough to present their case forcefully. In not a single province did Congress try to come to any understanding with the Muslim League Party. But that was not the only instance of their ignoring Muslim sentiments. The heady wine of power went to the head of the Congress Ministries. They passed laws forcing Muslim children to attend government schools which in their tone were completely Hindu, to salute the Congress flag, to sing the Bande Mataram. Petty Hindu officials harassed Muslims everywhere. A hundred and one small pin-pricks and irritations cropped up daily; unimportant in themselves, they were like the proverbial leaf which indicated the way the wind was blowing, and the indication in this case was that it was blowing toward Hindu imperialism and Hindu domination which would attempt to exterminate eight hundred years of Muslim influence and culture. Alarm and panic swept through the Muslims and resulted in the strengthening of the Muslim League. It also resulted in great bitterness, so that when the Congress Ministries resigned in September 1939, the Muslim League ordered a “Deliverance Day” to be celebrated throughout the length and breadth of India.
That is why New Delhi of 1940 was different from that of ’33. India had come a stage nearer independence and, because of that, Indians were less eager to ape their rulers. This difference I was to feel almost immediately on my arrival. The second change, namely the growing rift between the two communities, I was not to be aware of for some little while yet. In my three years’ absence from India, though bits of news had come to me and every now and then I read an article in some Urdu magazine protesting against Congress attempts to stamp out Urdu or stating the injustices Muslims were suffering under Congress rule, I had not realized its extent.
It was a very trivial incident that brought home to me how Hindu communalism had grown in the last few years. A Hindu friend of mine objected to my using the word “Begum” as it underlined the fact of my being Muslim…. It certainly had no communal intention, and Hindu objection to it showed the extent of their narrow-mindedness.
But the event that was to change the course of my life was yet to occur. In October, 1941, my father came from England on leave and came to stay with me in my house in New Delhi. One morning he said to me, “I am going to see Mr. Jinnah. You come along with me.”
“Oh, I don’t think I will,” said I. “I believe he is very rude and snubs everybody.”
“Don’t be silly,” said my father. “That is just Hindu propaganda. I want you to meet him.”
So I went rather reluctantly and apprehensively….
My father had certain proposals which he wanted to discuss. He felt that, as Adviser to the Secretary of State for India, he might be able to bring about some sort of understanding between the British Government and the Muslim League. Quaid listened to what Father had to say very attentively and began to explain his point of view. And then, before I knew what I was doing, I was asking Quaid questions and he was answering them!—not impatiently or brusquely but kindly and in great detail. Quaid-i-Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the President of the All India Muslim League, the leader of the majority of the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent, reported to be arrogant and dictatorial, was allowing a completely inexperienced, unimportant young person to argue with him and was taking the trouble of meeting her arguments! The wonder of it did not strike me for the moment as I was carried away [with] the fascination of listening to Quaid.
Now, after nearly twenty years, during which I have met some very great statesmen, I still maintain that to listen to Quaid and not be convinced was not possible. It was not that he overruled you, it was not that he did not reply to your argument, but that he was so thoroughly, so single-mindedly, so intensely convinced of the truth of his point of view that you could not help but be convinced also. You felt that if a man with an intellect so much superior to yours believed this, then it must be right. Call it hypnotism or what you will, that is the effect he had on me…. He had it on all who came in contact with him….
I always mention this [low attendance at Muslim women’s conferences], for it shows how little interest in politics there was amongst women in February ’42 and how quickly and rapidly political consciousness grew, for in March, 1947, when in this self-same hall we organized a meeting of the Muslim League Women’s Sub-Committee which Quaid-i-Azam honoured by coming and addressing, the hall was packed to capacity….
The Conference lasted three days and followed the usual procedure. Subject committee meetings were held, resolutions passed, and speeches made…. None of us had really pushed the idea of Pakistan to its logical conclusion. The demand for Pakistan was an assertion of our separate, independent, religious, and cultural existence. We feared and objected to the assimilation being attempted, for we were proud of our culture and wanted to keep it intact. We wanted political power to enable us to preserve it. If we could have been assured that our religion, language and culture would be respected, that it would be possible for us to live our own way of life, then we would not have forged ahead and fought for political independence, which we did not originally seek…. We merely wanted safeguards….
But it was dawning on our leaders that if we wished to preserve our culture, then we must have a country of our own to enable us to do so. And that is why, after only three years as President of the Muslim League, Quaid-i-Azam had already put forward the resolution that the Muslim majority continuous areas should form a separate sovereign state of Pakistan. The Lahore Resolution, as this epoch-making resolution was called, had been passed in March, 1940, that is six months after the Second World War had begun, and it was now February ’42.
However, to the majority of Muslims Pakistan was an idea rather than a reality, something they thought was their inviolable right but which they had not yet decided to exercise. The most ardent of Muslim leaders at this stage still hoped that it would be possible to come to a compromise which would enable Muslims to continue as a separate cultural entity within a wider political framework. Quaid-i-Azam himself favoured this. I definitely remember him telling me at that first meeting we had with him that the Canadian Constitution would probably be the best solution for us, and the fact that for seven years after the passing of the Pakistan Resolution he agreed to discuss and negotiate with the British and Congress and more than once almost came to agreement, is further proof. That an agreement was not reached is not because of Quaid-i-Azam’s intransigence but because of the narrow-mindedness and bigotry of the Congress….
There was no doubt in our minds that we stood in danger of the annihilation of our culture and that if we wanted to preserve it and our separate entity we had to organize ourselves into an effective body. This the Muslim League was enabling us to do, and therefore was daily succeeding in getting more and more support.
The Conference came to an end after the passing of the resolution supporting the demand for the establishment of Pakistan and for the preservation … of Urdu, and some other resolutions concerned exclusively with students’ affairs…. It was the beginning of political consciousness amongst Muslim women, and, as such, was of great importance. For me personally it was an achievement. I had … single handed[ly] organized and called an All Indian Conference….
In April, 1943, the All Indian Muslim League held its Annual Session in Delhi. This was one of the most important sessions of the League since the passing of the Pakistan Resolution…. The Muslim League had grown tremendously in importance…. It was only Quaid-i-Azam’s leadership that had managed to steer it clear of pitfalls and dealt with each crisis in a manner which made it come out at the end stronger than before.
Congress had followed the resignation of its Ministries by launching a fully-fledged direct movement against the British.
The 1942 disturbances, as they were called, were really an abortive rebellion. They did not succeed because the British took prompt and drastic measures, but despite that they caused tremendous loss of life and property….
The Muslim League kept itself aloof from this movement and was criticized by Congress, and by the nationalist Muslims as well, for not taking part in what was, from their point of view, a war of liberation. Quaid-i-Azam kept the League aloof and prevented it from getting involved in violence because he did not think it was strong enough to withstand the repercussions that would have followed. Congress could and did; for it had been organized forty years ago. It was now sufficiently entrenched to risk taking direct action and its leaders being arrested without running the risk of completely going to pieces. But the League could not; it was still at the stage of being welded together. Had its leaders been put in gaol in 1942, or I should say its leader for it only had Quaid-i-Azam, it would have broken up. He realized that for the League to plunge into action before it was strong enough internally would be suicidal. The oft-flung accusation that he was frightened of going to gaol weighed nothing with him, for he was a man who was swayed by neither praise nor blame…. Had he not been such a man he could not have done what he did, that is—to quote him own words: “make a disorganized mob into a disciplined nation.”
To achieve this end it was necessary not only to keep the Muslim League from precipitate action but also to restrain some of its prominent members from taking independent uncoordinated action. While he did not think the League was ready for direct action he was not in favour of whole-hearted co-operation in the war effort because he felt that the Muslim point of view was not receiving the consideration it deserved from the British. This involved him in direct conflict with prominent Muslim Leaguers among whom was Mr. Fazlul Haq, the Chief Minister of Bengal. His refusal to resign from the Defence Council when asked by the League to do so caused the first serious crisis in its ranks….
My husband had not seen Quaid for two years, when we had all lunched at his place. But at the end of the Simla Conference, when I went to say goodbye to Quaid, he came to pick me up and met Quaid again. He discussed the cause that had led to the failure of the Simla Conference, and I remember his looking very thoughtful and preoccupied as we stood at the door of the Hotel Cecil waiting for our rickshaw to be called. Then looking at the hills, remote and silent witnesses to human conflict and turmoil, he said: “You’re right. He really means to have Pakistan.” “Of course, he does,” I said indignantly.
That was so but it was not because Quaid disregarded other people’s points of view or forced his opinion on them, he did not…. He had what few people possess in this world, an absolutely single-minded conviction. It somehow had the effect of removing all one’s doubts. To say that he was a dictator and forced Mussulmans to accept his idea of Pakistan is ridiculous because he had no arbitrary powers—only the force of his own personality….
During those years in Delhi, my life was full of varied interests and activities…. That I would ever have to leave this city which I loved in its every mood, as one does a person, I never even dreamt. The frontiers of Pakistan had not been defined and it never entered our heads that Delhi would not be included within it. How sure we were that Delhi was ours and would come to us can best be illustrated by this incident. We were having a picnic on the terrace at Humayun’s Tomb one afternoon, when my sister-in-law remarked: “Do you think you will get Delhi if Pakistan is established?” My husband replied pointing to the domed and turreted skyline of Delhi: “Look at it—whom do you think it seems to belong to?” and Dina could not deny that the essentially Muslim character of its architecture seemed to proclaim that Delhi belonged to the Muslims. And so it did, in every way, except population….
The failure of the Simla Conference in the summer of 1945 caused tension and bitterness. Elections, following in 1946, further intensified this—one could feel it everywhere. Social relations between Hindus and Muslims which, up till now, had been free and easy, became increasingly strained…. Thinking men of every party were beginning to get alarmed.
And everyone began to realize the urgency of coming to an agreement soon. Now that the election results had clearly and unmistakably shown the Congress and the Muslim League to be the two political parties claiming the allegiance respectively of the Hindus and Muslims, Britain had to … reconcile their claims, so that a transfer of power might be possible.
For this purpose a Parliamentary Delegation composed of Lord Pethick Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps, and Mr. A. V. Alexander came out, bringing with them what came to be known as the Cabinet Mission Plan. The subsequent division of the Indian sub-continent was based more or less on the proposals contained in this plan, though, at this stage, it was still hoped that it would not be necessary to follow it. But by conceding the maximum amount of autonomy to the Provinces, within a united framework, the claims both of Congress and the Muslims League would be met. And for a brief period that hope looked like being realized….
But this … hope was very short-lived. On the 9th June, I attended the League Council meeting. The next morning I left for Calcutta, for my father was very ill, and from now on, for the next year, while the dramatic struggle of the people of India was reaching its climax, I went through a period of great personal anguish and suffering…. For this year in the history of India and Pakistan can truly be called a black year. The short-lived agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League had come to naught and thus resulted in the long pent-up tension and hatred breaking out into terrible communal riots all over the country. Calcutta, my home town, where my father lay ill, was the scene of the first of the terrible riots that were to break out in India with increasing ferocity during the next few months. My cousin, Shaheed Suhrawardy, was the Prime Minister of Bengal at this fatal hour and this made us, the members of his family, somehow feel more responsible for what was happening….
Once again we are too near the events … to take a really objective view of the horror that began on the 16th August, 1946; it lasted for four whole days, but the effects lasted for months, and in fact, can even be said to have lasted until today.
This briefly is what had happened since the 9th June, 1946. Congress had repudiated the agreement reached in Simla. It began by Pandit Nehru’s statement in the Press on the 12th July that he had accepted nothing but the convening of a Constituent Assembly, to which the British would transfer power and then get out, after which all questions would be decided by the majority vote, which meant by the Hindus, as they were in absolute majority. It meant that none of the provisions regarding the division of power between the provinces and the Central Government could be taken as binding. That meant that the Muslim majority provinces of Punjab, Bengal, Sind, N.W.F.P. and Baluchistan could not expect to be virtually autonomous, as proposed by the Cabinet Mission Plan, but could be subject to the Central Government in every detail. This statement of Pandit Nehru was preceded and followed by statements by other Congress Leaders. It created a wave of distrust among the Muslims, who reiterated the demand for Pakistan, saying that they could never hope to have a fair deal within a united framework….
It seemed after all we would not get our rights through negotiation and would have to be ready for action. This was the gist of most of the speeches delivered in the Bombay session, and it was decided to hold a Direct Action Day when the future plan of action of the League was to be explained to Muslims all over the country.
It was on Direct Action Day that the Calcutta riots broke out, and the Congress has always tried to fasten the blame for this on the Muslim League, but as far as I can judge the matter dispassionately I feel that this is not true. In fact, nothing was planned for Direct Action Day except large-scale meetings all over the country, and it was while the Muslims of Calcutta were attending such a meeting that the riot broke out, not in the area of the meeting, but in the areas of the unprotected homes of these people. And the carnage that took place during these first few hours, where women and children fell as completely helpless and defenceless victims, was greater than the subsequent retaliatory attacks by the Muslims on the predominantly Hindu areas….
It made me realize what a terrible responsibility we take on ourselves when we champion a cause and ask people to be ready to sacrifice and die for it. How few of us realize, as these words glibly pass our lips, what it actually costs people in blood and tears….
There is no doubt that the increasing lawlessness in India alarmed the British, but it was not this that made them decide to quit India. There had been rioting and civil disturbances in India before, and they had managed to quell them and remain here. But something else had happened … which made the British realize that the time had come for them to leave. This was the I.N.A. trials and the reaction they had [in] the length and breadth of India….
I cannot remember what the prosecution case was, I know that it was a brief one, after which Desai got up and opened the case for the defence … As he ended his speech with the words, “If it be treason to try and break the shackles of foreign rule, then these men are traitors; if it be treason to adopt whatever means presents itself to free one’s country from hated foreign rule, then these men are traitors; if it be treason to work to free one’s country from bondage, then these men are traitors, and not only these men, all of us are traitors. All of us, every man, woman, and child in India, are today working for the same end.”
There was such tension in the atmosphere that one could almost feel it. Desai had expressed what, rightly or wrongly, was felt about the I.N.A. by everybody in India….
Pakistan was established on the 14th August, 1947. My baby was barely three weeks old, and it was impossible for me to travel. I longed to be in Karachi and to take part in the joyful celebrations that were taking place there, but I could not do so….
The next day was the 15th August, the day of the Indian Independence. Since the Calcutta riots, things had never been normal in Calcutta, and for the last few weeks as the day of the Independence drew near, tension had reached fever pitch. It was rumoured that Hindus meant to wreak their vengeance on the Muslims on the day. This was no idle rumour, there was concrete proof that a large-scale disturbance was being planned. That it did not take place is almost a miracle, and this miracle was brought about by the superhuman efforts of Gandhi and my cousin Shaheed Suhrawardy.
Gandhi was proceeding to Noakhali, to be there in case fresh rioting should break out. He had to pass through Calcutta to go to Noakhali. My cousin … said to him that it was Calcutta and not Noakhali he was needed at…. By staying here Gandhi could stop a flare-up. Gandhi said he would agree to stay on and do what he could, provided my cousin agreed to work with him.
Agreeing to work with Gandhi meant, of course, agreeing to work in his way. In this case, it meant going and staying in a mud hut in the poorest and most badly affected part of the town, eating vegetarian food and following the routine that he followed. This must have entailed a lot of discomfort for a person like my cousin who was used to a very different sort of life, but so great was his desire to prevent another holocaust that he agree to these conditions and carried them out meticulously for over a fortnight. It also meant facing much physical danger; several attacks were made on his life, and his car was blown up by a hand grenade, but he persisted in the task he had undertaken.
Gandhi and Shaheed Suhrawardy started their crusade for peace together on the 11th August. They went to different parts of the town and held meetings in which they exhorted people to be worthy of the new independence that was coming to them, and asked Hindus to treat Muslims as their brothers and asked Muslims to think of Hindus in the same way. They sent volunteers in lorries shouting peace slogans all over the city, and somehow managed in three or four days to ease the tension and bring out an upsurge of goodwill. For on the 15th August, the day that was dreaded, Hindus and Muslims instead of killing each other fraternized together and celebrated the coming of independence joyfully. It was a wonderful achievement and I am proud of the part my cousin played in it…. He showed courage, boldness and most of all, a real concern for the people’s welfare.
This act of my cousin was misconstrued by his enemies and eventually cost him his career in Pakistan, though in actual fact this was … a great service to the newly established State of Pakistan…. If he had not acted in the way he did, riots would have broken out in Calcutta also, in which case Pakistan would have had to cope with an influx of refugees on both its fronts….
We had been given a house in Clifton, a suburb of Karachi…. I went into Karachi to look at the city which was now going to be my home. I saw the flag fluttering from the Government House and realized that it was now inhabited by Mr. Jinnah. I, who for years had avoided calling at Government House, immediately went in and signed my name in the visitors’ book with a flourish. I beamed at the policeman and the A.D.C.s, for all these appurtenances to the British Raj had now become the symbols of our own sovereignty. We were now a nation and a state, the realization went to my head like wine….
But there was no time to indulge in ecstasy or joyful celebrations, for the price paid for Pakistan was very great indeed: no less than five million people had been uprooted, many thousands of whom had been killed, their houses looted and their womenfolk raped. Now they trekked their way to the newly established State. This had begun twenty-four hours after Pakistan came into existence, and before the State was more than a few days old it had to face the alarming task of absorbing five million people. That it could do so was a miracle….
What the world has not understood yet is why it came about. Why should one hundred million Muslims in India have decided to carve out a state for themselves at the cost of such terrible suffering? This has not yet been understood by the world at large, for no one has taken the trouble to understand the particular psychology of the Indian Muslims….
I have often heard people say: “Isn’t it remarkable that in the brief period of seven years, Jinnah put forward the idea of Pakistan, had it accepted by the people and sanctioned by the British?,” but that is not so. It is true the demand for Pakistan was made only seven years before it was established, but this demand only gave concrete expression to the dream of the Indian Muslims to have “a local habitation and a name.” This dream they had cherished since 1857…. But I must go back farther than that in order to explain it all.
Muslims had come to India as conquerors and for eight hundred years had ruled the country. During this period, they had settled down and married and accepted many of the customs of the land of their adoption, but had never become absolutely one with the people of the country. The reason for this continued detachment lay in the religion these people followed. It baffles Westerners that it should be so…. Religion did make different people of them, influencing their way of life…. Hinduism had hitherto absorbed most other conquerors, but the clear-cut tenets of Islam defied amalgamation with any other creed…. The rigid caste system of the Hindus … prevented any possibility of free social intercourse … [and] there was also the gulf separating the rulers from the ruled…. Though in the case of the Muslims and Hindus, the gulf was not as great as between the British and the Indians, it still existed.
When the Muslim rule in India was succeeded by the British, the basic difference between the two peoples did not disappear. If anything, it grew stronger. The Muslims felt themselves threatened both by the supremacy of the British as rulers and by the numerical superiority of the Hindus…. They held more tenaciously to their own way of life[,] … to every little thing that made their culture different from the Hindus. These differences may seem trivial … but to the Muslims they were like sentinels guarding their separate existence in a sea of aliens.
[From Begum Shaista S. Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (London: Crescent Press, 1963), 86–88, 89, 99–102, 103, 118–119, 135–136, 137–138, 139–140, 141, 142, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155–157, 158–161.]
The events that led up to Partition, and then the division of the subcontinent as the British exited, affected millions of ordinary people. Most of the documents above describe the views and actions of the elite actors in this immense drama. For the impact of these events on the lives of the many, we have to turn to extracts from an excellent work of oral history by Urvashi Butalia, a director and cofounder of the feminist organization Kali for Women, who spent years gathering these stories on both sides of the border and putting them in vivid shape for her readers.
FROM 3. “FACTS”
In 1990 Sudesh and I began to speak to Rajinder Singh, a three-wheeler scooter driver in Delhi. We boarded his scooter, to get from one part of the city to another. Somewhere along the way, because he looked the right age, we asked him where he was from. He suggested that we come to his home and he would tell us his story. The story took us to Gandhi Nagar, a resettlement area on the outskirts of Delhi where Rajinder Singh and his family lived in a small house set deep in a narrow, crowded lane. As with all the families we visited, they welcomed us into their homes as if we belonged there. The several sessions during which we interviewed him and his brother, Manmohan Singh, were interspersed with long conversations with neighbours … who had their own stories to tell…. Rajinder or Manmohan asked themselves if they should be telling us this. As always in family situations, we seldom got to speak to the wives…. We later decided not to attempt to speak to men and women at the same time, but to do so separately.
Partition meant many different things to different people. For Rajinder Singh, his most powerful memory is not of the event itself but of something that took place a few years earlier when, as a young boy, he ran away from home to join a group of street singers and prostitutes in Hira Mandi in Lahore. Four years after his disappearance, his father managed to track him down and went to the kothah [courtesans’ house] to fetch him back. The young Rajinder watched from the roof of the kotha as his father walked through the marketplace, he listened to the jibes and taunts directed at the old man, and then saw him being deliberately tripped by a flower seller at the foot of the stairs of his “home.” As he fell, Rajinder’s father’s turban came loose and rolled off, the ultimate loss of honour for a Sikh. Broken, the old man gathered up his turban and walked slowly away. Torn between his wish to stay on in a place which he loved and his compassion for his father, Rajinder followed him to the railway station, and … to his home where he then began a job in a utensil factory….
It was there that he first came across evidence of the divisions that became much more visible after Partition. The factory owner, a Hindu, employed Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims and, as Partition drew closer, fights began to break out between them. Rajinder has no special feelings of enmity or hatred towards his Muslim co-workers…. Like many people who did not have a “profession,” Rajinder turned his hand to different things after he crossed over to India: he worked in a halvai [sweet] shop in Amritsar, later set up his own halvai shop, drove a tonga for a while, and when we met him, was driving a scooter which he owned. I have chosen to include a section of Rajinder’s interview here because he describes how people from his family and his village came away on foot, in a kafila [caravan] that grew as more and more people joined it. Up to a certain distance the kafila was accompanied, and presumably protected, by the Pakistani army, and then the Indian army took over. He said he had never really told this story to anyone before…. Yet, as we sat and spoke, family members came in again and again and asked us to replay this or that incident, as if listening to his voice on tape somehow invested it with a greater authority…. I find Rajinder’s account moving, for its sense of inexorable, slow, tortuous movement as people headed … from a life shattered by forces beyond their control, into an unknown future. In his words, “Our hearts were full of fear—where were we headed? Where would we end up?”—a question that runs through virtually every Partition narrative …
Rajinder Singh:
“My bua’s [older sister’s] older son’s in-laws lived in a village called Richade. My brother went there with my bua’s younger son. He thought, we have to go out this way anyway, so let’s go little by little so that everyone does not get killed all at once. We sort of knew we would have to die anyway, so we thought that if we spread ourselves out then we could perhaps see if one or the other could be saved. I went to fetch my wife … but I was worried that my brother would get left behind. So we all came to a place called Baba Lakhan, we came there and people from that village stopped there. I said to them, there are so few of you, why don’t you also include people from this village. There are many Sikhs, include them and our kafila will grow large and become strong. As it is there are only a few people from this one village, why not increase the size of the kafila? In this way we kept progressing and others joining up and the kafila kept growing. We went to another village and found that everyone there was sleeping comfortably … When we went and told them, they said, no, can these sorts of things ever happen? I said to them if they have not happened before, they have happened today. If you think these kinds of things will not happen, you are mistaken, they are happening. So some of the older people started to pay attention. They asked, are you speaking the truth? I said, yes, go outside and look, go to Baba Lakhan. There are many people there, waiting … When we came back to Baba Lakhan we found people from two more villages had collected there. Now there were some thousand people or so … earlier there had only been four or five hundred … Hindus, Sikhs … Whatever people could pick up, big things and small, they put clothes on top of those they were wearing, and threw a khes or sheet over their shoulders. They picked up whatever they could and then they joined the kafila. Who could take along heavy things? And the kafila began to move. The next village on the way was Katiana. There, there was a marriage, a Musalmaan’s wedding, and there were a lot of fireworks and things going on. We thought there was firing and guns, so we stopped the kafila some distance away from the village. Some people said they would go and find out … as they were leaving people said to them, you should be careful, don’t go openly. It shouldn’t happen that you have gone to find out and you just get killed yourself … they went … and they heard music and realized it was a wedding!
“Gradually, daylight came. This was the first night, and then it became morning and as the sun rose, it began to rain. It rained so much and our clothes became so heavy … we could not even lift them. Our clothes got more and more wet, and people just left them there. Our stomachs were empty, we were hungry, our clothes were wet and sodden, our hearts were full of fear—where were we headed? Where would we end up? Our hearts were full of grief: what will happen? Where will we go? It’s like when you started from home today, you knew you were going to Gandhi Nagar. We did not even know this. Which nagar [city], which side, which direction … we had no desire to eat, nor was there anything to eat. After all, when we left our homes, we did not carry our atta [grain] with us, we did not take the rotis from our tavas [metal griddles]. We did not think that we will take atta and knead it and cook it. We just left, as we were, empty-handed. Then some people fell ill—some fell ill from grief, some got diarrhoea, some had fever … so many people had left all of a sudden, they could not all be healthy and stay well. Some were ill from before, some fell ill from sorrow, and then there was rain and then the sun. The heat and cold made people’s bodies shrivel up … from … these changes people fell ill … it was afternoon in Batiana before we knew it.
“There was one woman who was pregnant and about to give birth. The whole kafila began moving, but she was already a little upset and she said, you people go on ahead, I am prepared to die. In any case, I have no one to call my own. The hardship I have to face, I will bear, don’t worry about me … the baba who was with me, I said to him, baba, it is given to some people to do good. Your granddaughter was with you and you decided to come with me. I kept telling you why bother … but look at this poor woman, she is about to give birth, she is a young woman, and here she is lying in the road … let us try to do good. We are all full of grief, we are all weeping. He said, what is it? I said, look at that girl, she has no brother or father, and she is alone, her man has been killed and she is about to give birth. There were some other women sitting with her, and when the kafila began to move, they too started to move. So my baba said, girl sit on my horse, and wherever we find someone who can help, we will take you there. But perhaps from fear, she gave birth right there, to a daughter. Out of fear. No one had a knife or anything, you know the instruments you need to cut the cord. There was one man, and he had a kind of sword, we asked him, baba, this is the thing, please help us. So he gave it to us and the women cut the cord, and we stopped the kafila for about three quarters of an hour. We said to them, you are leaving your honour behind to go to the houses of unknown people. Even if you get a little late, how does it matter? On the way there was a village called Pasroor. We had the Baluchi military with us. They put us in a school there. They said, anyone who tries to get out of here, out of these four walls, we will cut him down. The school had a four-foot-high wall. They tried to be strict but we had nothing to eat or drink … so people went, they broke into a shop and they brought some sacks of mungphalis [peanuts], so we roasted those and ate them. After all, what else could we do? Someone got this much and someone got that much. Then someone else jumped the wall and got to the sugarcane fields nearby to steal sugarcane. The military people killed some of them—in front of us they killed a Jat. His family had a cart, they had loaded things on to it and brought it, so they set fire to it and used it for the last rites of their man who was killed …
“After Narowar, the Madrasi military joined the kafila … they told the Baluchis to go away, that their duty had finished and they should go away…. The two militaries confronted each other. One said, it is our duty, while the other said, your duty is over, you should go away … the wells had medicine and poison in them, there were dead people in there, there was no water to drink, we were hungry and thirsty … nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Then our military brought two trucks to Narowar and they were filled with atta. They spread a tarpaulin and handed out atta to people, saying take as much as you want. They gave us corn, they kept giving it to us saying eat, destroy their fields. The Madrasi military really helped us. Everyone was grief stricken. Someone’s mother had died, someone’s father had gone, someone’s daughter had been abducted … then we moved on. You know you feel some fear of a dead body, but at the time, we had no fear at all…. From there we came to the bridge on the Ravi. There they told us, this is the limit of our duty, we are now going back to help the kafila that has come from Daska. We saw a trainload of Hindus had been killed and in Dera Baba Nanak, a trainload of Musalmaans who had come from the direction of Ludhiana had been killed … they killed each other’s people. We saw bodies of Musalmaans, utensils lying in the mud, clothes[,] … some people buried under others, and disease and illness all around. When we got to Dera Baba Nanak they said to us, you have come home. But we thought, our home was over there. We have left it behind. How can this be home?”
[From Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 78–83.]
FROM 5. “HONOUR”
“My name is Basant Kaur. My husband’s name was Sant Raja Singh. We came away from our houses on March 12, and on the 13th we stayed out, in the village. At first, we tried to show our strength, and then we realized that this would not work, so we joined the morcha [procession] to go away. We left our home in Thoa Khalsa on the 12th. For three or four days we were trapped inside our houses, we couldn’t get out, though we used to move across the roofs of houses and that way we could get out a bit. One of our people had a gun, we used that, and two or three of their people died. I lost a brother-in-law. He died from a bullet they fired. It hit him and he died. So we kept the gun handy. Then there were fires all around, raging fires, and we were no match for them. I had a jeth, my older brother-in-law, he had a son, he kept asking give me afim [opium], mix it in water and I will take it. My jeth killed his mother, his sister, his wife, his daughter, and his uncle. My daughter was also killed. We went into the morcha inside the village, we all left our houses and collected together in the centre of the village, inside the sardaran di haveli, where there was also a well. It was Lajjawanti’s house. The sardar, her husband, had died some time ago but his wife and other women of the house were there. Some children also. They all came out. Then we all talked and said we don’t want to become Musalmaan, we would rather die. So everyone was given a bit of afim, they were told, you keep this with you … I went upstairs, and when I came down there was my husband, my jeth’s son, my jethani, her daughters, my jeth, my grandsons, three granddaughters. They were all killed so that they would not fall into the hands of Musalmaans. One girl from our village, she had gone off with the Musalmaans. She was quite beautiful, and everyone got worried that if one has gone, they will take all our girls away … so it was then that they decided to kill the girls. My jeth, his name is Harbans Singh, he killed his wife, his daughter, his son … he was small, only eight days old. Then my sister-in-law was killed, her son and her daughter, and then on the 14th of March we came to Jhelum. The vehicles came and took us, and we stayed there for about a month and then we came to Delhi.
“In Delhi there were four of my brothers, they read about this—the camp—in the papers and they came and found us. Then, gradually, over a period of time the children grew up and became older and things sorted themselves out. My parents were from Thamali. Hardly anyone survived from there. You know that family of Gurmeet’s, they had two sisters, the Musalmaans took them away. It’s not clear whether they died or were taken away, but their bodies were never found … Someone died this way, someone that, someone died here and someone there, and no one got to know. My parents were burnt alive.
“That whole area was like jungle, it was village area. One of my brothers survived and came away, one sister. They too were helped by a Musalmaan, there were some good ones, and they helped them—he hid them away in his house—and then put them into the vehicles that came, the military ones. The vehicles went to Mator and other places. In Mator, Shah Nawaz made sure no harm came to them. People from Nara managed to get away, but on the way they were all killed. Then my brothers read the papers and got to know. My husband, he killed his daughter, his niece, his sister, and a grandson. He killed them with a kirpan. My jeth’s son killed his mother, his wife, his daughter, and a grandson and granddaughter, all with a pistol. And then, my jeth, he doused himself with kerosene and jumped into a fire.
“Many girls were killed. Then Mata Lajjawanti, she had a well near her house, in a sort of garden. Then all of us jumped into that, some hundred … eighty-four … girls and boys. All of us. Even boys, not only children, but grown-up boys. I also went in, I took my two children, and then we jumped in—I had some jewellery on me, things in my ears, on my wrists, and I had fourteen rupees on me. I took all that and threw it into the well, and then I jumped in, but … it’s like when you put rotis into a tandoor, and if it is too full, the ones near the top, they don’t cook, they have to be taken out. So the well filled up, and we could not drown … the children survived. Later, Nehru went to see the well, and the English then closed it up, the well that was full of bodies. The pathans took out those people who were at the top of the well—those who died, died, and those who were alive, they pulled out. Then they went away—and what was left of our village was saved, except for that one girl who went away.
“I was frightened. Of course, I was … we were also frightened that we would be taken away by the Musalmaans. In our village, already, in the well that was inside the village, girls had jumped in. In the middle of the night they had jumped in. This happened where the morcha was. The hundred … eighty-four women who jumped in they were just outside, some two-hundred yards away from Lajjawanti’s house. In the morcha, the crowd had collected in Lajjawanti’s house. She was some seventy, seventy-five years old. A tall, strapping woman. She did a lot of seva of [service to] all the women, she herself jumped into the well. Many people were killed in the morcha, and the Musalmaans climbed on top to kill others, and then many came and tried to kill people with guns, one of them put a gun to my jeth’s chest and … and we began to jump in. The others had died earlier, and we were in the morcha, the well was some distance away from Lajjawanti’s house, in a garden. There were two wells, one inside and one outside, in the garden. My nanan [sister-in-law] and her daughter, they were both lying there … close by there was a ladle, I mixed afim in it, and gave it to them, and she put it in her mouth … she died, and I think the village dogs must have eaten her. We had no time to perform any last rites. An hour or so later, the trucks came….
“She did path [oral recitation of prayers], and said don’t throw me away, let me have this afim, she took god’s name and then she died. We had afim because my jeth’s son used to eat it, and he had it with him and he got more and gave it to everyone. My jeth’s son, his daughter-in-law and his daughter, they died in Jhelum later, when we were going to the Dinia camp, on March 15 or so. The camp was close to the Jhelum. Four days we fought, and we remained strong, then around the 12th we got into the morcha, on the 13th our people were killed … then the trucks came … and took us to Rawat….
“They brought us there [to the well]. From there … you know there was no place … nothing to eat, some people were eating close by but where could I give the children anything from … I had barely a few paise … my elder son had a duvanni (two annas) with him, we thought we could use that … my brother’s children were also hungry … but then they said the duvanni was khoti, damaged, unusable … [weeping ] such difficulties … nothing to eat … we had to fill their stomachs … today they would have been ranis … so many of them, jethanis, children … I was the youngest … now I sit at home and my children are out working and I keep telling them these stories … they are stories after all … and you tell them and tell them until you lose consciousness …”
The abduction and rape of women, the physical mutilation of their bodies, the tattooing of their sexual organs with symbols of the other religion—these acts had been universally condemned. But no mention was made of family violence by anyone—neither the families, nor the State, nor indeed by historians…. Its scale was not small. Virtually every village had similar stories. Gurmeet Singh, a survivor from village Thamali … in the same district, described their flight:
“On the night of the 12th of March we left at 4 a.m…. Our own family, all the people, we collected them in the gurudwara and got some men to guard them. We gave them orders to kill all the young girls, and as for the gurudwara, to pour oil on it and set it on fire.
“We decided this among ourselves. We felt totally helpless—so many people had collected, we were completely surrounded. If you looked around, all you could see was a sea of people … After all, you get frightened … people collected together to comfort each other. But then we found we were helpless … we had no weapons, whatever little we had they had taken. Then they took a decision in the gurudwara that all the young girls and women … two or three persons were assigned the task of finishing them off. Those in the gurudwara were asked to set it on fire with those inside … we killed all the young girls with our own hands; kerosene was poured over them inside the gurudwara and the place was set on fire … women and children, where could they go?”
Over the years, as I spoke to … more people, both men and women, I was to come across this response again. The tone adopted … was similar to that adopted by families when they spoke of the hundreds of women they had “martyred” in order to “save” the purity of the religion….
Some negotiations had clearly taken place between the attackers and the victims in most of the villages. Kulwant Singh, another survivor, this time from Thamali, remembers a meeting at which an understanding was reached (between the two communities) that “we would be let off.” According to Kulwant Singh, the amount negotiated was between sixteen and thirty thousand rupees and the laying down of all weapons. Having done this, “at night they started fires and some of our sisters, daughters and others, in order to save their honour, their relatives, our veers [heroes], they martyred them and in this way … some of our women and children were killed. In the gurudwara there were piles of bodies.” There is no record of the numbers of women and children who were killed by the men of their own families, their own communities. Unlike in the case of abducted women, here families did not report the deaths of their women, for they themselves were responsible for them. But while abducted women then entered the realm of silence, women who were killed by families, or who took their own lives, entered the realm of martyrdom.
[From U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, 157–165.]