The India-Pakistan partition in 1947 was a significant event in the subcontinent history, and its impact can still be seen in the politics as well as the socio-cultural landscape of the region. It’s important to recognise that history books, in both the countries, are often influenced by national narratives and might not capture the full complexity of events.
Therefore, in order to understand the complete picture, we must begin by carefully observing the events that led to the India-Pakistan partition. This is what we find in Madhav Godbole’s book The Holocaust of Indian Partition. The author describes a series of news reports from 1947 and gives us a glimpse of what was going on at that time. Let’s take a look at them in the first part of this series.
June 3, 1947
The Times of India said, “June 3, 1947, will be remembered in India’s history as the day when her leaders voluntarily agreed to divide the country and save bloodshed….Tributes to the statesmanship of Lord Mountbatten are unanimous.”
June 5, 1947
This time, The Times of India said, “Mountbatten has been able to please all alike… That any mortal should have earned tributes from such contending forces is an achievement unprecedented.”
June 7, 1947
As for the reactions of the provinces which were likely to be affected by the impending partition, Mudie, governor of Sindh, wrote to Mountbatten, Viceroy of India, on June 7, 1947 to say, “I don’t expect many real Sindhis to leave the Province….The great things is that the tension is over.” Jenkins, governor of Punjab, in his letter to Mountbatten, on the same day, assured that, “Hindus in West Punjab and Muslims on East Punjab are dissatisfied but Congress and Muslim League both claim that plan is masterstroke of their respective leaders and that all will be well in the end. Sikhs pin their faith on Boundary Commission and say that they will accept no western boundary short of Chenab river.”
June 15, 1947
In a further letter dated June 15 to Mountbatten, Jenkins stated that “there is a complete absence of enthusiasm for the partition plan — nobody seems pleased, and nobody seems to want to go on with the job….Generally, the atmosphere of fatalism continues. It was ordained from the first that the communities should massacre and loot one another; nothing can alter this; unity means ruin of one kind, and partition, ruin of another; if there is to be ruin anyway, partition seems to be simpler and perhaps the less bloody form of it.”
Communal Violence in June, 1947
Following the announcement of the partition plan, there had been violence in different parts. There were organised raids by armed gangs of Muslims on several villages in Amritsar district. There was a communal clash in Benaras and forty-eight-hour curfew had to be imposed. There was also a communal clash in far away Madura in Madras province in which seven persons were injured. On June 6, 1947, a thirty-five-hour curfew was imposed in some areas of Bombay. There were several stabbing cases in Lahore.
Newspaper reports day after day made a sickening reading. There was a flare up in Lahore with half a dozen explosions on June 13. There was unabated violence in several places — Lahore, Gurgaon, Kanpur, Calcutta, Bombay, Multan, Benaras, New Delhi, Ahmedabad. Civic life in Lahore had been paralysed with a complete breakdown of food supplies; about hundred houses had been destroyed by fire.
According to a newsreport in the Tribune datelined Lahore June 16, Nehru “expressed his horror and disgust at the riots in Punjab, Bengal and elsewhere and said that these were not isolated riots. They were planned attacks.” Only six days later, Nehru wrote a letter to Mountbatten in which he observed, “The old tension is gone or is much less. There is no more talk, as there used to be, of civil war and the like.”
On the very next day, June 23, in a meeting with Mountbatten, Jinnah proposed, and the viceroy agreed, that a suggestion should be made to Jenkins that “he should issue a statement in the near future to say that he would not tolerate any longer the violence and bloodshed that was going on in the Province and that be intended to stop it.” In the letter to Jenkins on June 24, Mountbatten wrote, “I talked with Jinnah last night and he begged me to be utterly ruthless in suppressing trouble in Lahore and Amritsar. He said: ‘I don’t care whether you shoot Muslims or not, it has got to be stopped.’ Today, Nehru came to see me and talked in the same strain. He has suggested that what is required is a fresh approach to the problem. He suggests — (i) That martial law should be declared forthwith in Lahore, Amritsar and any area you think fit; (ii) That the whole operation should be handed over to the military; and (iii) The troops should be utterly ruthless and to shoot at sight. I entirely agree with Indian leaders that something must be done….”
Though Mountbatten wanted “something to be done”, that “something” remained as amorphous and undefined as ever. Instead, Jenkins once again underlined that the “real remedy is active intervention by political leaders not by Press statements but by contacts which they unquestionably possess with violent elements.” Mountbatten followed the line of his advisors and said that martial law was not likely to be effective. Later Jenkin made an assessment: “I have no doubt whatsoever that [in Lahore and Amritsar] the Muslim League approved, and in some degree directed, the burning. Most of it was done by Muslims.” The subject of military measures to be adopted in Punjab came up for discussion in the twenty-first miscellaneous meeting of Mountbatten on July 20, 1947 when it was decided to recommend the creation of Punjab Boundary Force from August 1.
Newsreports from July, 1947
In response to the article in the Dawn titled “Sowing Seeds of Hatred”, the New York Herald Tribune observed that, “If the Muslim minority in Hindustan and the Hindu minority in Pakistan are encouraged to cause as much trouble as possible, there may be a renewal of the dreadful mass murders that have been the shame of India for the last year. Nowhere in the world tolerance and goodwill pay such dividends as in India.
Dawn, writing under the title “Stop This Violence”, stated, “We should go so far as to say that if any Muslim still feels tempted to put his knife into a Hindu or a Sikh, he must realise that by doing so he will be stabbing Pakistan.”
The Hindustan Times reported the rapidly deteriorating communal situation in Lahore with widespread arson at its worst, bomb explosions, life in the city being completely paralysed, firing by troops on rioting mobs, and finally the run on the banks. The North Western Frontier Province too was declared a “disturbed area” with the governor and the leaders of political parties making an appeal for peace. The situation is Calcutta was horrible. By July 11, business life in Calcutta was at a standstill and the city had a deserted appearance.
In the meanwhile, in the press note issued by the Partition Council on July 24, it was stated that the governments of both India and Pakistan were both united in their determination not to tolerate violence in any form in either territories. But, this statement had no effect whatsoever. A disturbing feature of the widespread violence was the growing use of bombs, revolvers and other arms. The Times of India, on July 29, lamented the senseless violence in its column, stating, “The discovery of bomb factories and the haul of arms in several places point to the deep and widespread roots which the rioters have struck.” Gandhi grieved at this growing violence and said, “there was no enthusiasm over freedom.”
It was significant that The Hindustan Times, which reflected the Congress thinking on all important matters at the time, asked the Sikhs to give up their demands and just be satisfied with common citizenship of India and all the rights that go with it. The editorial (July 10) advised the Sikhs to make out a case for transfer of population in border districts to the Boundary Commission, something which was not in the terms of the Commission.
The Long Journey in August, 1947
By July, the figure of riot-affected refugees, who had come over to India, was assessed in the neighbourhood of one million. In his visit to Lahore on July 20, Mountbatten was told that fifty percent of the Hindu population were believed to have left the city. By the beginning of August, there were 80,00 refugees in Delhi itself. In the Uttar Pradesh, no less than thirty-three out of the forty-nine districts had reported influx of refugees numbering over 100,000. In fact, there was hardly a part of India which had not reported arrival of refugees from Pakistan.
On the night of August 9, a Pakistan special train rain over a mine on the track at Giddarbaha in East Punjab which led to blowing off of eleven feet of track and derailment of the engine and six coaches. Four persons were killed and twenty injured in the incident. Nehru sent a telegram to Liaquat Ali Khan on the same day expressing his anxiety at the rapidly deteriorating situation in West Punjab. He referred to the happenings in the previous week in Gujranwala, Wazirabad and Lahore. In the note recorded by Douglas Hawthorn, deputy chief of General Staff, India on 11 August 1947, it was mentioned that the disturbances were producing an average daily killing of about 100 people with occasional large raids in which 70-80 people were killed at one fell swoop. In his letter dated August 13, 1947 to Mountbatten, Jenkins reported that, “most of the rural casualties — and they have been very heavy — have been caused by Sikhs working in fairly large bands and raiding Muslim villages or Muslim pockets in mixed villages. The Muslims in the Amritsar district have occasionally hit back, and in a village named Jalalabad near the Beas have eliminated a local Hindu minority, killing probably over 70 people.”
While the country was in the grip of such large-scale communal violence and upheavals, the front pages of English newspapers were occupied by freedom struggles in Indonesia, Burma, Hungary, Palestine, Egypt and so on, with communal incidents in the country being relegated to other pages as routine happenings. Nehru was more pre-occupied with foreign affairs than with paying his undivided attention to the horrific problem facing the country. “Indonesia was a test for powers of UN,” he had declared on July 31. In fact, during this critical period preceding the independence day, most of the important political leaders were all tied up in the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly and its committees.
As if the unprecedented communal violence and the questions of life and death facing large sections of the population were of no consequence, preparations were afoot for celebration of independence day on a grand scale. Fifteenth and Sixteenth August were to be public holidays in India. Plans were being drawn up for impressive ceremonies on August 15. Congress president, Acharya Kripalani, however, declared at his press conference in Karachi that, the hearts of all Congressmen and Congress sympathisers in Sindh, East Bengal, West Bengal, and the North West Frontier Province are lacerated at the division of the country and that they were in no mood to rejoice with the rest of India. As was to be expected, this was strongly condemned by Muslim League leaders on the ground that the non-Muslims in Pakistan were being encouraged not to be loyal to Pakistan.
On being elected president of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, in his very first speech on August 11, 1947 Jinnah declared that religion had nothing to do with the business of the state and that “in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims….” Jinnah reminded Mountbatten that the treatment of non-Muslim minorities ‘with utmost tolerance and regard and respect for their faith and beliefs’ was in Muslim blood, going back to the time of the Prophet [PBUH] himself.
The hostage theory — considering each other’s minorities as hostages for the well-being and security of one’s co-religionists in the other country — was seriously propounded and advocated by several Muslim and non-Muslim leaders of the time. In his “innocence”, Acharya Kripalani had observed, “Pakistan cannot afford to ill-treat Hindus. If 20 million of Hindus were included in Pakistan, 45 million of Muslims came within Hindustan.” It is another matter that even before the ink was dry on such pronouncements, this ceased to be of any importance as a guarantee for protection of the Muslim minority in India, as practically the entire non-Muslim population in West Pakistan was driven out to India.
In the front-page headline on August 8, 1947, The Hindustan Times reported that Gandhi had declared that he would spend the rest of his life in Pakistan to protect the interests of minorities in that country. Such thinking aloud without weighing the implications of the proposed step, failed to inspire any confidence among the minorities in Pakistan and was treated as a sign of his old age. As was to be expected, Dawn was quick to react, in its editorial “A Quixotic Decision”, it observed, “Strange are Mr Gandhi’s ways.”
Kalampedia 