Partition's Legacies

Joya Chatterji

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438483344, 9781438483337
• eBook ISBN: 9781438483351
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Essays on modern Indian history and the legacy of Partition.

Partition's Legacies offers a selection of Joya Chatterji's finest and most influential essays. "Partition, nation-making, frontiers, refugees, minority formation, and categories of citizenship have been my preoccupations," she writes in the preface, and these are also the major themes of this book.

Chatterji's first book, Bengal Divided, shifted the focus from Muslim fanaticism as the driving force of Partition towards "secular" nationalism and Hindu aggression. Her Spoils of Partition rejected the idea of Partition as a breaking apart, showing it to be a process in the remaking of society and state. Her third book, Bengal Diaspora, cowritten with Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais, challenged the idea of migration and resettlement as exceptional situations. Partition's Legacies can be seen as continuous with Chatterji's earlier work as well as a distillation and expansion of it.

Chatterji is known for the elegance of her prose as much as for the sharpness of her insights into Indian history, and Partition's Legacies will enthrall everyone interested in modern India's apocalyptic past. "What emerges from the essays," David Washbrook writes in the introduction, "is often quite startling. The demarcation of Partition followed no master plan or even coherent strategy but was made up of myriad ad hoc decisions taken on the ground, often by obscure actors. Refugee policy, immigrant rights, and even definitions of national citizenship … were produced by no deus ex machina but out of day-to-day struggles on the streets and in the courts."

5

Rights or Charity?

The Debate over Relief and Rehabilitation in West Bengal 1947–1950

IN THE HALF-CENTURY since India was partitioned, more than twenty-five million refugees have crossed the new frontier mapped out by Radcliffe between East Pakistan and the state of West Bengal in India. The migration out of East Bengal was very different from the rush of refugees into India from West Pakistan, which was immediate and immense, as was the way the dispossessed were received by the country to which they fled. Unlike those from the west, the refugees from the east did not flood into India in one huge wave; they came sometimes in surges but often in barely perceptible trickles over five decades of Independence.1

The elemental violence of Partition in the Punjab explains why millions crossed its plains in 1947. By contrast, the causes of the much larger migration out of East Bengal over a much longer time span are more complex. That migration was caused by many different factors: minorities found their fortunes rapidly declining as avenues of advancement and livelihood were foreclosed; they also experienced social harassment, whether open and fierce or covert and subtle, usually set against a backcloth of communal hostility which, in Hindu perception at least, was sometimes banked but always burning. Another critical factor was the ups and downs in India’s relationship with Pakistan which powerfully influenced why and when refugees fled to West Bengal.2

Given this context, the strikingly different way in which the Government of India viewed the refugee problem in the east and in the west is not altogether surprising, although the refugees from the east paid dearly for it. The crisis in Punjab, Government decided, was a national emergency, to be tackled on a war footing. In September 1947, Government set up the Military Evacuation Organisation to get Hindus and Sikhs out of Pakistan in a swift and orderly fashion. By 15 November, within just two months, the Government of India had escorted 1.7 million Punjab evacuees into its refugee camps.3 From the start, Government accepted that a transfer of population across the western border with Pakistan was a fact of Partition, inevitable and irreversible. So it readily committed itself to the view that refugees from the west would have to be fully and permanently rehabilitated. It also quickly decided that property abandoned by Muslims who had fled to Pakistan would be given to the refugees as the cornerstone of its programmes of relocating and rehabilitating them.4

The influx of refugees into Bengal, on the other hand, was seen in an altogether different light. In Nehru’s view, and this was typical of the Congress High Command, conditions in East Bengal did not constitute a grave and permanent danger to its Hindu minorities. It was convenient for Delhi to regard their flight westwards as the product of fears, mainly imaginary, and of baseless rumours, rather than the consequence of palpable threats to life, limb, and property. Well after it had begun, Nehru continued to believe that the exodus could be halted, even reversed, provided the Government in Dacca could be persuaded to deploy “psychological measures” to restore confidence among the Hindu minorities.5 The Inter-Dominion Agreement of April 1948 was designed, Canute-like, to prevent the tide coming in.6 In the meantime, Government saw the giving of relief to refugees from East Bengal as a stop-gap measure since permanent rehabilitation was judged to be unnecessary; indeed it was something to be positively discouraged. So it set itself against the redistribution of the property of Muslim evacuees from Bengal to incoming Hindu refugees; the policy was to hold it in trust for the Muslims until they too came back home, pace NATO’s latter-day plans for Kosovo. The official line was grounded in the belief that Bengali refugees crossing the border in either direction could, and indeed should, be persuaded to return home. Government clung to this view, in which optimism triumphed over experience, long after it had become patently obvious that the refugees in Bengal had come to stay and that their numbers would only increase. It was several months before the Government of West Bengal accepted that it had to do something for the refugees. When it belatedly set up a rehabilitation board, it was never given adequate resources to do the job. Even after the number of refugees in Bengal had outstripped those from Punjab, such relief and rehabilitation measures as Government put into place still bore the mark of its stubborn unwillingness to accept that the problem would not simply go away on its own.7

This was what led the refugees to organise and demand that Government give them what they regarded as their “right”. Their movement of protest embroiled refugees and Government in a bitter and long-drawn-out battle over what legitimately could be expected from the state. These increasingly entrenched positions were set out in official policy decisions and the campaigns against their implementation launched by refugee organisations. The nub of the matter, however, was quite simple: did the refugees have rights to relief and permanent rehabilitation, and did Government have a responsibility to satisfy these rights? As both sides argued their corner, they were forced to spell out their own (often unexamined) assumptions on a range of critically important issues about the ethical prerogatives of citizenship and the imperatives of realpolitik.

This essay looks at the main arguments that emerged from the confrontation and tries to tease out their inwardness. In examining what divided Government and the refugees, it assesses how far apart their positions were and how different the premises on which they were based. It also locates the common ground, if any, that they shared. In so doing, this enquiry may contribute to a better understanding of the ideological underpinnings of Independent India and the role that marginal groups, notably refugees, have played in creating notions of legitimacy and citizenship which came to challenge India’s new orthodoxies.

Government Directives: The Construction of Relief as “Charity”

Campaigns by refugees against Government diktat were a persistent and highly visible feature of political life in West Bengal well into the 1960s.8 But their formative period coincided with the initial wave of migration between 1947 and 1950, which is the focus here. The issues began to crystallise after the Government of West Bengal decided, quite early on, to deny relief to “able-bodied males” and to phase out relief camps. As soon as refugees demanded a say in their rehabilitation, the battle lines had been drawn.

Stopping free relief to able-bodied males was only the first of a series of measures to limit Government’s liability towards the refugees. The essence of the policy was to whittle down, by one device or another, the numbers eligible for help from the state. By November 1948, the surge in migration caused in large part by events in distant Hyderabad began to tail off.9 As soon as the number of refugees entering West Bengal had slowed, Government was quick to claim that the worst was over and some officials, adding their two-anna bit, even argued that the lure of handouts in the relief programmes was itself attracting migrants – a convenient justification when Government decided to stop providing the pitifully meagre relief it had reluctantly given.10

In late 1948, Government began to put a new and harsher policy into place. On 25 November 1948 Calcutta announced that only refugees, narrowly defined as persons ordinarily resident in East Bengal who had managed to get to West Bengal between the precise dates of 1 June 1947 and 25 June 1948, “on account of civil disturbances or fear of such disturbances or the Partition of India”, were entitled to relief and rehabilitation.11 A second order published in December 1948 declared that refugees would not be registered after 15 January 1949, further cutting back the official definition of a “refugee”.12

A month earlier, on 22 November 1948, the Government of West Bengal had decreed that “no able-bodied male immigrant … capable of earning his own living [would] be given gratuitous relief either in cash or in kind for himself as well as members of his family for more than a week from the date of their arrival at … camps.”13 Relief with no questions asked would be given for just one week. After that, relief would be conditional “only against works” – shades of the much criticised famine relief policy of the British Raj; indeed Samuel Smiles could hardly have done better.

It was all very well for Government to offer relief “against works”. But there were no such “works” to employ the able-bodied in need of relief, and Government gave no assurance that it would create them. Instead, the official line was that the immigrant himself “through his own effort [must) find work suitable to himself.”14 Male refugees who were physically capable of working had, somehow or the other, instantly and miraculously to find themselves jobs sufficiently remunerative to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their dependent families, all within seven days of setting foot across the border. In this triumph of fantasy over fact, Government outdid itself by urging refugees go anywhere in Bengal except to Calcutta and its suburbs, where casual employment was most easily to be found.

To begin with, Government had allowed camp offices discretion to make an exception in those cases where they felt that free relief (or “doles”, as they were called in terminology unattractively reminiscent of the Poor Law) was “essential for preservation of life”. Put bluntly, Government realised that it would not look good if people starved to death in its camps. Two months later, however, in the wake of refugee hunger strikes against its Gradgrind directives, it hardened its heart. On 15 February 1949, a Government brought to office by the sacrifices of generations of freedom fighters, decreed that “Such able bodied immigrants as do not accept offers of employment or rehabil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Identities, Decolonisation, Nation-Making
• II. Refugees, Mobility, Migration
• III. Immobility
• IV. Citizenship
• Index
• Back Cover