Partition and the South Asian Diaspora

Extending the Subcontinent

Papiya Ghosh

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138662346
• eBook ISBN: 9781317809654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Negotiating nations

2. Claiming Pakistan

3. Resisting Hindutva

4. Redoing South Asia

5. Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

1
Negotiating Nations

Let me begin the story from Sindh and Khanu’s barber shop in Shikarpur. The shop had a stock of fancy powders and oils and photographs of Ashok Kumar and Prithvi Raj Kapoor, a good number of Hindi and Urdu magazines, and the journals of all the colleges of Sindh. Khanu was a member of the Muslim League and proud of his Islamic heritage, and yet he felt that the lives of Hindus and Muslims were closely woven and part of the same cloth. Shaikh Ayyaz captures the drift of the late forties in his story ‘Neighbours’ when he lets us into Khanu’s mind, one day in the second quarter of 1947, as he gave Seth Shyam Das a haircut.¹

He had often thought about the cruelties committed by the Hindus of Bihar on the Muslims [in 1946]. They had shed the blood of his faith and community. They had insulted women who had never come out of purdah. He wondered if the riots would start in his city too, after the second of June. Are we going to avenge the killings of Bihari Muslims? Should I, for example, cut the throat of this seth with my razor? His heart trembled at the thought.

Later in the evening, when his neighbour Pesu Ram’s mother told his wife Jeebal that she would take shelter with them if there was a riot, Khanu had teased her: ‘I belong to the Muslim League and I wear a Jinnah cap. You should be afraid of me’. His neighbour ignored this saying, ‘you will always remain Khanu Bhaiya for me’. Khanu wondered if he could kill her: ‘No. Never. It cannot be. If the Hindus in Bihar have killed the Muslims, Pesu’s mother has nothing to do with it’.

On his way home Khanu noticed a number of carriages heading for the railway station with people who were leaving their native land for ‘places that did not have Shah Latif, Sami, Zinda Pir, Bhaga or the fair of the twelfth day, or the raag of the chaudhavin’. Khanu thought to himself that only a couple of rich seths who had bungalows in Jaipur and Udaipur would perhaps leave for they had the money. ‘But what about the clerks, the accountants and the teachers?’ With similar questions, this chapter looks at those who left Bihar for the east and the west, both before and after partition. But first, another snatch of conversation from Khanu’s shop from the day before.

Khanu heard some college boys discussing that the identity of the Sindhi nation was in danger. These Punjabis, Gujaratis and Biharis want to destroy our culture and language; they also want to take over our business and our land. It is our duty to prevent that from happening immediately. The Gujaratis are in command of the Sindh Congress. And the Muslim League is busy distributing free meals to the Biharis and the Punjabis. Neither of them is concerned with the hungry and dying Sindhis.

Even as he absorbed what he heard, Khanu felt as though some one had sprinkled his body with rose water when he heard a Hindu man shouting, ‘Jai Sindh’, to relay his resolve to stay on in his country, no matter what. But by then many refugee lives had begun on both sides of the border. For the Biharis, their staggered migrations to the new homeland began in 1946 and gave a preview of the two Muhajir formations in the forthcoming East and West Pakistan, with a thousand miles between them. There is a need to detail this early days’ movement of people at some length, both to historicize the subcontinental partition diaspora that underpins several strands of the wider South Asian diaspora, and to make sense of Muhajir perceptions of the two-nation theory in the ethnicized, and in some cases, the diasporic terrains they had to negotiate. These stories have been followed closely in the first two chapters to enable tracking the shifts in the equation between the nations in the region and to complicate the layered but connected homeland questions in the diaspora that is still being contoured by the remains of partition.

I have mapped the dimensions of the killings of the Bihari Muslims in October-November 1946 elsewhere. While the Congress figures stood at 2,000 and then 5,400, the Muslim League estimate varied between 30,000 to 50,000 (P. Ghosh 1991).² Wavell’s guess was that those killed added up to anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 but he wrote, ‘nobody really knows yet and nobody ever will know accurately’.³ By December 1946, 60,000 refugees moved to camps in Calcutta, Asansol, Burdwan and the 24 Parganas, in Muslim League-ruled Bengal. Around this time some refugees from Bihar also started heading for Sindh. By March 1947, there were about a thousand refugees in Sindh and there were reports of the Sindh cabinet readying to receive 200,000 Biharis.⁴ Addressing a group of Bihari refugees at a camp in Karachi on 23 February 1947, Jinnah emphasized that it was the sufferings of the Biharis that had made the inauguration of Pakistan imperative: ‘Nations are built through sacrifices and I am really proud of the Bihari Muslims who have sacrificed so much. The sacrifices will not go in vain. They have certainly brought the goal of Pakistan nearer and shown our readiness to make any sacrifice for its attainment’.⁵

Three months later, Ghazanfar Ali Khan, health member of the government of India, expressed much the same sentiments at a meeting organized by the Bihar Muslim Students Federation in Patna. The Muslims of Bihar had laid the foundation of Pakistan and vindicated Jinnah’s argument that there were two nations in India. He said that though the Biharis would not become citizens of Pakistan despite having made huge sacrifices, they would indirectly benefit from the establishment of an independent Muslim state because the position of the minorities in Pakistan would become worth emulating in all of India. If Muslims were again subjected to the horrors they had already been through, the Pakistan government would consider it a declaration of war against its nationals and the question would come up before the United Nations.⁶

A couple of months before the dissolution of the Bihar Muslim League, its council held an in-camera meeting in April 1948 against the backdrop of frequent police searches of the houses of Muslims and did a reality check of the hostage theory (see introduction). The councillors expressed their dismay at the neglect of the Indian Muslims by the Pakistani leaders. Their complaint was that Zahid Hussain, the high commissioner for Pakistan, was not taking any interest in their affairs, nor did he share their problems, making them feel abandoned. Having asked the Muslims to stay on in India and then doing nothing to build their confidence by appointing deputy high commissioners in the different provinces was regarded as completely ‘unjustified and atrocious’.⁷ But there was also another dimension. Several Muslim Leaguers made a political turn-about to join the Congress, a theme I look at in another project.⁸

To go back a bit, the Bihar Muslim League made its electoral debut by winning 34 out of the 40 seats set aside for Muslims, only in 1946. The Congress won merely 1 of the 10 seats it contested in this category. The premier, Sri Krishna Sinha, however, claimed that non-League Muslims got 25 per cent of the Muslim votes, and attributed the League’s sweep to a violent electioneering that had played on the fears of Muslim voters. His view was that Pakistan would do nothing for the Muslims. A transfer of populations was quite impractical and even educated Muslims did not know what Pakistan meant or implied.⁹ As it turned out, soon after the killings of the Muslims in Bihar, around November 1946, Jinnah advocated an immediate exchange of populations. A month later, he discussed a telegram from the Bihar Muslim Relief Committee asking him to move the government to work on this amid rumours that more attacks on Muslims were being contemplated. According to the Bihar governor, though Feroze Khan Noon and Khwaja Nazimuddin realized that mass transfer of populations was impractical, their efforts at persuading the Muslims not to migrate came up against Jinnah’s open advocacy of their moving out of Bihar. But Jinnah soon recognized that the transfer of populations was difficult, and if anything, a long process.¹⁰

In February 1947, the Bihar Provincial Muslim League leader Jafar Imam explained that it was the sheer scale of the riot that had convinced the Muslims that, ‘this land is not for us and we have to leave the place’. He felt Jinnah’s concept of the exchange of populations would have been completely ignored before the 1946 riot. Even hundred years of propaganda to migrate would have drawn a blank, since migration implied a break with mosques, graveyards and one’s heritage.¹¹ Abdul Aziz, an earlier president of the Bihar Muslim League, has written that the party paid railway fares to the ‘ruined, bewildered and terrified people whose resolution to leave the province was unbreakable’. But there were also thousands of people from different parts of the province who left Bihar around January 1947, ‘without taking a penny from the League’.¹²

The Bihar Muslim League was divided on the question of migrating from Bihar. But in early January 1947 it passed a resolution indicating that if the Congress government failed to restore the confidence of Muslims by conceding the demand of creating Muslim dominated pockets (of no less than 5,000 persons) by the end of the month, it would be compelled to advise the Biharis to migrate en bloc. At the same time, it advised them not to migrate in a hurry from places where they were not in a ‘hopeless’ minority, and to stand by for advice.¹³ This was repeated in February 1947, in anticipation of a decision of the All India Muslim League, even though the council recorded that the silence of the Bihar government about its demands was forcing Muslims to migrate to provinces where they were a majority. Meanwhile, a committee was appointed to do two things: to consider settling Biharis in strong, Muslim-dominated pockets within Bihar and to study and report, within six weeks, on the Muslim majority provinces where they could be settled in a planned way.¹⁴

Though the committee was meant to go into minute details and implications of migration, it appears to have been a non-starter. And despite the oft-repeated argument that the 1940 Lahore resolution was vague about the status of the Muslim minority provinces, it must be pointed out that it was amply clear that they would remain outside Pakistan. In fact, a sub-committee was constituted at the 1940 Lahore session of the Muslim League to consider the creation of ‘independent homelands’ in the provinces of UP, Bihar and Madras, but the concept was given up as impractical and unworkable. All the same, between April and July 1947, two very differently mapped homeland demands (one located in north Bihar and the other in central Bihar) were briefly considered in the Bihar Muslim League, which in effect would have expanded Pakistan to include parts of this minority province. When these fell through, an unsuccessful attempt was made to get at least east Purnea included in East Pakistan (P. Ghosh 1998: 233-38). The demand for the formation of Muslim-dominated pockets was simultaneously repeated up to June 1947 as a condition for the Muslim League accepting the government’s rehabilitation scheme.¹⁵

By late July 1947, however, the Muslim League leader M. Younus made an appeal to the Biharis to either seek state protection if they felt unsafe, or to migrate to Pakistan if they were dissatisfied. He decided to stay on in Bihar and was optimistic that the hostage theory would come into play for the security of the minorities.¹⁶ Some of the 1946 refugees were still in camps in a couple of Bihar towns as late as September 1947, waiting for repatriation to their villages.¹⁷ The number of Bihari refugees in Bengal had, meanwhile, come down from 60,000 in April (with 8,000 located in Calcutta),¹⁸ to around 51,000 in June 1947. By then the ones in Calcutta numbered around 4,876; there were 9,000 in 24 Parganas, and Burdwan had 24,000. The rest were distributed in Bankura, Midnapore, Hoogly, Howrah and Dinajpur.¹⁹ In July 1947, arrangements were made for their return to Bihar. They were to detrain at Kiul, Bakhtiarpur, Barh, Futwah and Patna, from where they would be taken to the ‘refugee stations’ closest to their homes.²⁰ The Bengal government arranged for free railway warrants, special trains, pocket money and cooked food for the journey back, and by August about 24,000 refugees returned to Bihar. Of the remaining 27,000, seven thousand refugees were to be repatriated each week.²¹ Meanwhile, the All India Fiindu Mahasabha working committee which met in Calcutta in early 1947, passed a resolution accusing the Muslim League ministry in Bengal of deliberately trying to turn the Muslim minority districts in West Bengal into ‘Pakistan’ by settling Muslims from Bihar and other provinces.²² But H.S. Suhrawardy denied the charge of the Congress premier of Bihar that the propaganda of the Muslim League (about Bihar being unsafe) was responsible for the exodus from Bihar (P. Ghosh 1998: 234).

It was in the aftermath of the Bihar riot of 1946, several months before partition, that Pakistan started getting filled in as a denominational homeland, even if with token numbers. Ironically, though the post-1971 Biharis seeking repatriation to the residual Pakistan from Bangladesh are perceived as gairmulkis (outsiders) by the Sindhis, the pre-partition scenario was quite different. By the end of December 1946, about a hundred refugees made their way to Sindh from Bihar. And by January 1947, Maulana Abdul Quddus Bihari of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Negotiating Nations
• 2. Claiming Pakistan
• 3. Resisting Hindutva
• 4. Redoing South Asia
• Conclusion
• References and Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author