The idea of Pakistan was dismissed as ‘chimerical and impractical’ in the 1930s, but it gathered steam with tacit British support as payback for Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s backing of their war effort before the colonizers quit India, leaving Indians at each other’s throats after India’s Partition
The Second World War was a cataclysm. It left millions dead and shifted the balance of power from Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union. The war sapped the mighty British Empire’s vitality and robbed it of the will and the resources to govern the jewel in its crown—India. Pakistan’s idea as a Muslim homeland, dismissed as ‘chimerical and impractical’ in the 1930s, now suddenly gathered steam for India’s Partition. A tacit British support was at play; the payback Muhammad Ali Jinnah received for backing the British war effort.
Jinnah revived a moribund Muslim League to rally support for Pakistan’s creation with India’s Partition. Jawaharlal Nehru, the main opponent of Jinnah, and other major proponents of a united India were hamstrung and behind bars until the end of the war in 1945. The Empire was bankrupt. It quit India two years later, but not before having Indians at each other’s throats after India’s Partition. Religious discord sustained British rule in India. It manifested as genocidal violence when it ended with the haphazard division of India.
India’s Partition first triggered violence in Punjab and sent tens of thousands of refugees scurrying for their lives across the newly drawn border. The brutalities in Punjab triggered violence against Muslims, particularly across north-western India. As many as 20,000 Muslims are estimated to have been killed in Delhi alone. Over a quarter of the city’s population—more than 330,000 Muslims—was forced to leave as the violence escalated.
Indiscriminate
Muslims accounted for 32.22% of Delhi’s population before India’s Partition as per the 1941 census and were spread across the city. The violence confined them to the Humayun’s Tomb area, the Jama Masjid, and Mehrauli. Muslims were forced to leave the intervening areas, Connaught Circus, New Delhi, and Karol Bagh. Even hospitals and children were not spared. At least two of the hospitals were attacked, and even seriously ill patients, drawing their last few breaths, were killed.
Precious little was done to control the situation. At an emergency Cabinet committee meeting, Vallabhbhai Patel, who was in charge of law and order as the home minister, insisted that ‘there was bound to be trouble if, as a result of these Muslims not moving out, it proved impossible to accommodate non-Muslim refugees coming from the West’. On 2 September 1947, Patel claimed people were ‘openly clamouring as to why Muslims are allowed to go about in peace openly in the streets of Delhi and other towns’.
In a speech at Lucknow, Patel told his audience to let the Muslims, who had stayed back, stay on, before sounding a warning: ‘Why do you bother to kill them? The heat from the ground will eventually become unbearable, and they will choose to leave on their own accord.’
Patel’s colleague, rehabilitation minister Mohanlal Saxena, ordered the sealing of Muslim shops in cities such as Delhi. Rajendra Prasad, who was another key minister and went on to become India’s first president, wrote to Prime Minister Nehru saying there was ‘no use in bringing in the army to protect the Muslim citizens of Delhi if the Hindus and Sikhs were expelled from the cities of Pakistan’.
Out Of Control
The situation went out of control by October 1947, when Governor General Mountbatten’s chief of staff, Lord Ismay, reported Muslims being ‘systematically hunted down and butchered’ while thousands of them ‘were herded into camps’. ‘The dead lay rotting in the streets because there was no one to collect and bury them,’ he wrote.
Tens of thousands were killed elsewhere in northwest India. Refugee caravans of an estimated 4.6 million Muslims from East Punjab and four million Sikhs and Hindus fled from the opposite direction. Many did not have the means to migrate. They stayed back to protect whatever little they possessed, and, in many cases, were forced to adopt the dominant religions of the places they were stranded in.
In 2001, Allah Ditta, aka Arun Singh, was one of the thousands of Muslims living in disguise on the Indian side of Punjab. Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar Omar Khalidi, who met Allah Ditta at a Kapurthala mosque, described him as ‘every inch a Sikh—with turban, beard and kada.’ Ditta looked over his shoulder and performed ablutions to join Khalidi and four others for Namaz.
Ditta, whose family of potters lived in a village near Amritsar in 1947, narrated his tale to Khalidi, ensuring no non-Muslim was around. They were too poor to migrate to Pakistan and were well-integrated in their village. The family thought the Partition violence would be momentary. It, however, went from bad to worse. Muslims were either forced to leave or killed, leaving Ditta’s family stranded with no co-religionists around. They could have met the same fate had they not taken Sikh names and adopted their customs to stay on.
Kapurthala, where Khalidi met Ditta, had a 60% Muslim population before the Partition. A fraction of the Muslims—mostly recent migrants from other parts of India—now live there. The Moorish Mosque, built by ruler Jagatjit Singh in 1930 as a symbol of his tolerance towards his majority Muslim subjects, retains its grandeur but remains largely deserted.
The Exodus
Almost all Muslims of the eastern part of Punjab, which included Haryana and Himachal Pradesh until the 1960s, poured into places such as Lahore and Lyallpur (now Faisalabad). By 1951, they accounted for 69% of Lyallpur and 43% of Lahore’s population. The exodus completely transformed the demographics of north-western India from Rajasthan to Jammu. The Muslim population of Gurdaspur, for instance, was down to 1.20% in 2011 from over 51% in 1941. The Muslims had a substantial presence elsewhere in the region.
Only Muslims of Malerkotla remained untouched in East Punjab during the Partition violence. East Punjab has since been divided into three states—Punjab, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh. Punjab and Himachal have 2% Muslims, while the community accounts for 5% of Haryana’s population.
In The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Stockholm University professor emeritus Ishtiaq Ahmed quotes artist Amar Nath Sehgal, saying a wholesale slaughter of the Muslim minority took place between August and September 1947 in the Kangra–Kulu Valley (now in Himachal Pradesh). ‘Out of 35000, only 9000 managed to escape alive to Pakistan. The Beas was littered with dead bodies, and a foul odour was in the air for weeks after the massacres.’
In Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, Alex Von Tunzelmann writes that more or less the entire Muslim population of Jammu, amounting to half a million, was displaced. She quotes Calcutta Statesman editor Ian Stephens saying that around 200,000 of those who disappeared completely were presumably ‘butchered, or died from epidemics or exposure’.
The number of fatalities has been disputed, but the data from the 1961 census, the first in Jammu and Kashmir after 1947, speaks for itself. As per the 1941 census, the Muslims accounted for 77.1% of the state’s population, excluding areas that came under Pakistan’s control after 1947. The Muslim population had gone down by almost 10% and plummeted to 68.29% in 1961, confirming that tens of thousands of people were either killed or forced to flee to Pakistan.
Worst Sufferers
The Partition was particularly catastrophic for the pastoral Mewati community, which was deeply attached and dependent on its landholdings and livestock. The Mewatis were among several liminal communities that straddled the rigid religious boundaries in the 1940s, coinciding with the sharpening of identities. They followed elements of both Hinduism and Islam and were caught in the middle of a growing identity-based conflict.
An estimated 30,0008 Mewatis were killed in Bharatpur (Rajasthan) alone. A handful underwent shuddhi (purification for entry into the Hindu fold). Around half of the Mewati survivors fled to Pakistan. Academic Shail Mayaram writes that the Mewati massacre was ‘one of the first exercises of ethnic cleansing’. Organised mobs slaughtered or evicted the Mewatis from their villages and razed many of them to the ground. The mob was given a free run in conversions, mobilisation of foot soldiers, and distribution of arms.
The local rulers had been angry with the Mewati resistance to their demands for an increase in revenue. The Partition offered them an excuse to vent their anger against Meos (Mewatis), who had little interest in Jinnah, Pakistan, its proponent, the Muslim League, and causes such as Urdu that it propounded. ‘But their choices were few: to die or convert or cross the border,’ Mayaram writes. Mostly Urdu-speaking migrants from India chose to settle in Karachi. But most Mewatis did not have the resources to reach the far-off coastal city. Many of them settled in the closest areas near the Wagah border between India and Pakistan.
The Little-Known Casualty
Mewatis claim descent from Arjun and Krishna, the protagonists of the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata. They came under the influence of Muslim saints and gravitated towards Islam. The Meos continued with forms of Hindu polytheistic worship, like a deep reverence towards the cow. As late as the 1920s, Muslim cleric Maulana Ilyas’s preaching met with stiff resistance in Mewat. He fainted after he was beaten up during a preaching trip in Mewat in the 1920s.
The liminal Mewati identity lasted for centuries until they were caught in competitive religious revivalism in pre-Partition India. Revivalist Arya Samaj fuelled the revivalism in the 1920s when it launched the shuddhi movement to bring into the Hindu fold communities, including Muslims. The campaign provoked competitive revivalism and played a key role in the dynamics that culminated in the Partition, which continues to cast a long shadow over India’s 200 million Muslims.
