“The exchange of population is uncivilised. The exchange of population would testify to unalterable and unnecessary hostility between peoples who are akin in blood, customs and economic and cultural interests.”
Louis Fischer
Following the India-Pakistan partition, the migration of their respective populations had begun. It was one of the biggest migrations in history.
The Partition Council which reviewed the problems of refugees at its meeting on August 6, 1947 did not want to accept the reality. The members of the Council, representing the future governments of India and Pakistan decided to take the following action “with a view to arresting further exodus of refugees and encouraging the return of those who had already left”
- To retain the refugee camps for Muslims in India and for non-Muslims in Pakistan, and themselves to undertake responsibility for the purpose of both administration and finance.
- To make arrangements to enable officers of the two governments to visit the affected areas and the refugees in the two Dominions, and to discuss from time to time with local officers, matters relating to any problem of relief and rehabilitation that may be involved.
With all that was going on around them, it made little sense to expect the exodus of refugees to stop or the refugees to return to their homes. The stand-still agreement between India and Pakistan permitted travel freely across the border for six months. This had particular relevance for the huge movement of refugees in both directions in the succeeding weeks and months. The refugee problem had already started causing anxiety by the third week of August when there were 40,000 non-Muslim refugees in Delhi and 70,000 Muslim refugees in Lahore. By August 25, 300,000 refugees from East Punjab had poured into Lahore. By the end of August, exchange of population had become a reality from which there was no escape.
Surprisingly, the leaders of India and Pakistan were still not prepared to face realities. At the Joint Defence Council meeting held in Lahore on August 29, 1947, Liaquat Ali Khan expressed the hope that, “as the general situation improved, those gathered in refugee camps would return to their homes.” A few days later, on September 9, Nehru, in his broadcast on the All India Radio, too appealed to the people not to migrate but stay on. But, it became more and more difficult as the days went by and violence continued.
The trans-border movement of refugees each day was mind-boggling. A month after Indian independence day, the newspaper reported that the world’s biggest convoy consisting of 800,000 non-Muslim refugees from West Punjab had left on foot for East Punjab. Over one million refugees had been evacuated to East Punjab in just nine preceding days. As Mountbatten described it, “I flew over them; the entire roadwork of India was like a bank holiday crowd, choked from end to end. In a refugee train, they were not only in compartments, they were lying on top of each other, like in a sardine-box. They were hanging on to the windows, standing on the running-boards, and standing on the roofs of the trains. It looked like a living sort of a caterpillar.”
There were reports of attacks on refugee convoys and trains leading to innumerable deaths and merciless massacres. Trains arrived at their destinations with blood-splattered compartments, closely packed corpses, and bold inscriptions “Present to India” or “Present to Pakistan”. Describing one such train reaching Amritsar, the station master, Channi Singh, stated, “No one was getting off the Ten Down Express in Amritsar that night. It was not a trainful of phantoms they had brought him, it was a trainful of corpses. The floor of the compartment before him was a tangled jumble of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bowels, eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments….One woman picked her husband’s severed head from the coagulating blood by her side. She clutched it in her arms shrieking her grief. He saw weeping children clinging to the bodies of their slaughtered mothers, men in shock as they pulled the body of a mutilated child from the piles of corpses….In every compartment of every carriage the sight was the same….He saw in great whitewashed letters on the flank of the last car the assassins’ calling card: This train is our Independence Gift to Nehru and Patel.”
By the beginning of 1948, 5.5 million refugees had to rehabilitated in India. Even by the end of 1949, there were still over 7,50,000 refugees in 182 camps all over India. This was due to continuously deteriorating state of minorities in Pakistan. Over 2 million Hindus had to leave East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and migrate to India between August 1947 and December 1949. The report of the Ministry of Rehabilitation for June 1950 showed that the refugee movement was continuing both ways even though nearly three years had elapsed since the partition. During the first six months of 1950, over two million Hindus arrived from East Pakistan directly in West Bengal, Assam, Tripura and Bihar. During the same period, over 400,000 were estimated to have gone back to East Pakistan, mostly after the Minorities Agreement was signed between the prime ministers of India and Pakistan on April 8, 1950.
According to the 1941 census figures adopted by the Boundary Commission, the percentage of Hindus in the areas which eventually formed Pakistan was 19.52 percent of the total with Muslims constituting 72.45 percent. This changed after the partition. According to the 1951 Pakistan census, non-Muslims constituted only 14.1 percent of its total population, with Muslims comprising 85.9 percent (today the number is 95 percent in Pakistan and 90 percent in Bangladesh). Not everyone moved, many lost their lives along the way.
In both India and Pakistan, the refugees were largely considered unwelcome guests and an imposition. The impact of Urdu-speaking Mohajirs (migrants) on Sindhi cities such as Karachi and Hyderabad was enormous. By 1951, the native Sindhi community, for example, had been completely outnumbered; just 14 percent of the city’s population spoke Sindhi as opposed to 58 percent who spoke Urdu. The Mohajirs in East Pakistan too have been treated as outcasts and found it most difficult to assimilate in the mainstream national life.
The leaders of Congress and Muslim League failed miserably in creating public opinion for extending warm reception to the displaced persons to make their life somewhat less demeaning. Perhaps people failed too, especially those who had not seen the horrors of partition and were going on about their lives just fine. You might say… what if? But then, you could say that at every point in this horror story of India-Pakistan partition. What if?
Reference Books:
Kalampedia 