Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day. John Keay
60,000 instead of Khosla’s 200,000–250,000); and he contradicted Moon’s contention that the killings in India’s east Punjab might be twice as many. Yet by combining these two assessments – Khosla’s 200,000–250,000 in the west and Moon’s ‘twice as many’ in the east – the total could be, and was, further conflated to three-quarters of a million.
To substantiate his findings, Khosla compiled a tabulated appendix listing over five hundred places where mass killings, conversions and conflagrations had taken place. Each entry included a note on the nature of the atrocities (‘Murder, arson, mass conversion and loot’, ‘Murder, rape, loot and abduction’ etc.) together with an estimate of the numbers killed, injured, forcibly converted or expelled. Yet on examination, all his listed incidents occurred in Pakistan, the victims being Sikhs and Hindus, as were Khosla’s informants. Of the Muslims who died in the massacres in the new India – or ‘the riots’ as he preferred to call them in this case – there is no listing at all. Nor does it appear that the figures given for any of the listed incidents were corroborated by Pakistani witnesses. Yet this was crucial, as a relief worker at the time discovered. In the Sialkot district of Pakistan, Richard Symonds was informed by the Indian Liaison Officer that in a recent assault ‘1,500 were killed’; yet ‘the Pakistan account said only thirty’. Or again, two weeks after an attack at Mianwali, ‘estimates of the number of Hindus killed varied between 400 and 2,000’.22 In the face of such flagrant misrepresentation, probably by both parties, extreme caution is in order. Without it, ‘otherising’ becomes just as partial as the blatant propaganda that has marred – indeed ‘dis-figured’ – nearly all such later calculations.23
A further explanation for the wildly divergent assessments of Partition’s casualties lies in the uncertainty over the figures for the other province to be partitioned, namely Bengal. While some calculations, Moon’s and Khosla’s for example, ignore Bengal altogether, a few go to the opposite extreme and infer a casualty rate comparable with that in the Punjab. This is absurdly pessimistic, and the ‘guesswork’ here is even more conjectural. Much depends on how ‘Partition’, a flimsy term when stripped of its more horrific associations, is defined and on what is taken to be its timeframe.
With over sixty million inhabitants, Bengal had been easily British India’s most populous province (pre-Partition Punjab had about twenty-eight million). It was also its most volatile. The potential for sectarian strife had already been demonstrated in the Calcutta Killings of August 1946 and in the subsequent massacres in Noakhali and Tripura (Tipperah). Violence like that which seems to have taken so many by surprise in the Punjab was here expected. In anticipation of it, Gandhi had already re-established himself in Noakhali, from where he transferred to Calcutta two days ahead of Independence. He needed to be at the likely epicentre when the seismic shift of 15 August occurred.
Now frailer and seemingly smaller than ever, the Mahatma was trundled round the city in an ancient Chevrolet. As he toured the trouble spots and drew massive crowds to his evening prayer meetings, his reputation transcended the religious divide. He talked up a spirit of mutual regard and inspired a sense of brotherly achievement in maintaining the peace. Mountbatten called him his ‘One Man Boundary Force’. For three critical weeks he remained there, preaching communal harmony, praying for it and fasting to exact pledges of it. He also promoted it by example, cohabiting with Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy, the bon-viveur barrister ‘with a nimble brain but an irritating habit’ who led the Muslim League in Bengal. Lately Chief Minister of the province, it was Suhrawardy whose incitement had been widely blamed for the earlier killings.24
Notwithstanding their incompatibility, such was the influence of the two men – the stick-like Mahatma and the ‘rotund’ Muslim Leaguer – and such the military presence prompted by fear of another bloodbath, that the tactic worked. Observing the near absence of sectarian massacres in the subcontinent’s greatest metropolis, first Gandhi and then the press dubbed it ‘the miracle of Calcutta’. Optimists noted ‘a spectacle of friendship and fraternity between Hindus and Muslims’; Communists detected a comradeship born of working-class solidarity; and intellectuals rejoiced in what they took to be evidence of the Bengalis’ cultural superiority. The normally dyspeptic general who headed Eastern Command went further. ‘The love in Calcutta was impressive above all other places,’ he recalled. But he ascribed it less to Gandhi’s non-violence than to a combination of the Muslim community’s ‘depression’, the non-Muslim community’s exultation and his own increased troop levels.25
The euphoria in Calcutta lasted throughout the crisis months immediately after Independence, and dissolved only when the city reverted to its usual levels of industrial strife, social upheaval and chronic politicisation in 1948. Overall, when compared to Lahore and the Punjab, Calcutta and Bengal seemed to have got off lightly. The death toll could almost be described as bearable, while the atrocities were largely localised. On the other hand, the population transfer was here more destabilising than in the Punjab, much more protracted and ultimately perhaps greater.
Dispersal being a lesser evil than death, this raises the question of why the Partition experience in Bengal differed so from that in the Punjab, and whether the precautions taken in Bengal could have proved equally effective in the Punjab. The answer to the last is probably no. In the Punjab there were more guns, for one thing. There, and in the neighbouring North-West Frontier Province, society prided itself on its decidedly military ethos. The north-west had long been the British Indian army’s main recruiting ground, and accounted for around half its intake; service families, military colonies and paramilitary fraternities abounded. Come the end of the war, many thousands of Punjabi Sikh, Muslim, Hindu (Dogra and Jat) and Pathan servicemen had been demobilised; but not all surrendered their arms, and of those who did, many were emboldened to reacquire them or obtain equivalents of local manufacture. In championing the anxieties of their co-religionists and avenging the massacres reported from across the border, Punjabi ex-servicemen of every persuasion found employment in a cause that was lucrative, congenial to their traditions and applauded by their kinsmen.
This was not the case in Bengal. Generally Bengalis, whether Hindu or Muslim, were supposed to disdain the military arts. The province was thus under-represented in the army’s ranks and almost devoid of officers. When he arrived in Dhaka as East Bengal’s first General Officer Commanding in late 1947, the then Brigadier Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s future ruler, found ‘there was no army’, just two half-battalions, and ‘no office, no table, no chair, no stationery – virtually nothing at all’.26 Firepower had played little part in the earlier ‘riots’ in Bengal, and there had been even less evidence of tactical planning. The killing sprees had often seemed spontaneous and unpredictable; and in West Bengal the heavy, and usually heavy-handed, presence of the largely Muslim police had already been depleted by migration. In short, Gandhian pressure, plus greater official awareness here stood a chance. Conversely, against the professionals orchestrating the carnage in the Punjab such intervention would probably have failed.
Other factors were also important. Given the deltaic terrain, communications in Bengal were notoriously slow and depended more on waterborne transport than on roads and railways. In the monsoon conditions of August and September whole districts were temporarily submerged, so distracting the inhabitants from mutual hostilities and severely restricting their mobility. In addition, the governments of India and Pakistan, though in the Punjab officially sponsoring an exchange of population, here actively discouraged it. It was supposed that mass migrations might destabilise the delicate political arithmetic on which both the Congress in West Bengal and the League in East Bengal based their prospects of retaining power. If conducted on any scale, migration could easily deplete one half of the province while overwhelming the other; and both Prime Ministers, Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, were dead against it. ‘I have been quite certain, right from the beginning,’ Nehru wrote, ‘that everything should be done to prevent Hindus in East Bengal from migrating to West Bengal … even if there is a war.’27 Throughout the period 1949–52, when a further two million Hindus from East Bengal joined the million or so who had migrated in 1947–48, Nehru remained firm. But twenty years later Indira Gandhi, when faced with precisely the war scenario that her father had envisaged, would take a very different line. East Pakistan’s Bengalis, now calling themselves Bangladeshis, would be admitted to India whatever their religion,