© ROYSTON LEONARD / MEDIADRUMWORLD
WWII's atrocities are recognized and studied across the Western world. However, what isn't highlighted is that fallout from that war continued to ravage south Asia as the British Empire declined. We know that Ghandi's non-violent civil disobedience was the seed that freed India from British imperialism, but the outcome of this revolution is barely a footnote in Westernized history.
War, political discord, economic depression and calamitous weather brought famine to British India and Gandhi's 'Quit India Movement' to break free from British rule. After fighting two world wars trying to sustain the British Empire, the Anglos were finally broke and unable to sustain control over their vast empire. Decolonization began in India, but not without the British firing 'a parting shot':
In the middle of World War II, with the United States pressuring Britain to loosen its colonial grip on India, Winston Churchill issued a bitter prophecy. "Take India if that was what you want! Take it, by all means!" the British prime minister raged to a U.S. diplomat in Washington. But, he argued, only British rule kept the subcontinent's Hindus and Muslims from each other's throats: "I warn you that if I open the door a crack, there will be the greatest bloodbath in all history; yes, bloodbath in all history."Churchill wasn't being prophetic, with the British empire being a 'noble force holding peoples together'. The British Raj was essentially a structure that encouraged in-fighting in order to maintain control:
At around 25% of its population, Muslims were British India's largest religious minority. Under imperial rule, they had grown accustomed to having their minority status protected by a system of reserved legislative seats and separate electorates. The British system of political control hinged on identifying interest groups willing to collaborate, a governing style often described as "divide and rule".While Britain sowed division, the religious and cultural diversity of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs actually shared a lot of common ground. "When they partitioned, there were probably no two countries on earth as alike as India and Pakistan," said Nisid Hajari, author of Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition. "Leaders on both sides wanted the countries to be allies, like the U.S. and Canada are. Their economies were deeply intertwined, their cultures were very similar."
Despite a sound basis for forging a peaceful path, natural forces of catastrophe combined with powers manufacturing social discord to maintain an unjust order to produce a recipe for disaster.
Yasmin Khan describes the environmental and social turmoil leading up to the creation of the Indian and Pakistani states in his book, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan:
In the 1940s, 40 per cent of the debt-ridden peasantry neither owned nor rented any land at all and were entirely dependent on casual, seasonal employment. Too many were barefoot, poorly dressed, sick or suffering, barely surviving on one meal a day. 'It was market day,' wrote a journalist from Bihar. 'We were surrounded by starving people and the whole of the market except for sag [spinach] and mahuwa [edible seeds and flowers] we found nothing else. For thee months, rice had not been selling in the bazaar and the people were living on sag.' The empire had not delivered much in the way of development to its poorest members.The British created similar chaos when they partitioned Ireland in 1921. In 1947, the British government decided to rapidly exit south Asia, guaranteeing chaotic transitions of power, especially for Pakistan. While India at least inherited comprehensive existing infrastructure, Pakistan had just over two months to set up a state.
Unstoppable waves of sometimes seasonal, sometimes permanent, migration to the ballooning cities persisted, despite the post-war depression, and have continued ever since.
For most Indians, especially town dwellers, life revolved around getting hold of daily essentials, especially bread. Wheat, grain, cloth, and kerosene were all in desperately short supply.
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This depth of feeling opened a window of opportunity for the politicians as perilous food shortages and hunger, the threat of hunger, and anxiety about food supply were running sores in 1946. India had been living 'hand to mouth for the past three years,' admitted the Secretary of the Food department. A devastating cyclone destroyed crops in the west of the country and the monsoon failed in the south. Nearly half the Indian population was subject to rationing. In the early months of 1946, the Viceroy was preoccupied by the food issue, which in his own words, 'threatened calamity'.
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Understandably, resistance to forced requisitioning broke out as the poor and ravenous rebelled. In a Gujarati town, hungry labourers refused to load bags of wheat onto lorries and a sympathetic crowd gathered to join their protest, tearing at the sacks with their hands. The very poorest were worst hit as they were compelled to make do with paltry leftover rations doled out by the state. At the close of the war large painted hoardings in Calcutta could still be seen, sponsored by the biscuit-maker Britannia, which depicted smiling, uniformed soldiers. The slogan in neat letters accompanying the picture spelt out the wartime food equation with stunning brevity: 'Their needs come first!' A shocking lesson that Calcutta had come to feel only too painfully. In the Bengal famine of 1943 the Bengali public had been left starving to death, and perhaps as many as three million died because of shoddy government food allocation and skewed political priorities.
It is not easy to say, then, when wartime politics ended and the politics of partitioning began. Partition took place in a society only partially emerging from long years of war. Two-and-a-half million Indian soldiers served in the Second World War, over 24,000 were killed and 64,000 wounded. This, the largest volunteer army in history, which had served in theaters from Greece to Burma, was now in the process of a euphoric and disruptive demobilization.
Liaquat H. Merchant writes in Dawn,
To expect Pakistan to have good governance as it is perceived in the developed world is asking for too much. This, however, cannot be an excuse of poor governance since the founding fathers left the scene.Placed in context, Churchill's statements suggest a message of 'If Britain can't have south Asia, no one can.' Horrific atrocities on a mass scale ensued amid the confusing creation of the new nation-states. Many in remote regions without access to media didn't understand or even know what politicians and officials in New Delhi were planning. While some of the partition leaders like Gandhi and Jinnah sought peaceful separation, it is clear there were forces at play that were beyond their control, so they too got caught up in the madness.
To understand why during the last 70 years there has been poor governance, one must go back to the pre- and post-partition era to review what we inherited and consequences of the short time at our disposal to establish a skeleton government without any back-up of the kind India had in the shape of an established system, bureaucracy, police, local administration and abundance of funds which the British left behind. This statement is by no means an attempt to condone the poor governance and chaos which followed between 1948 and 1957.
The decision by the British government to accelerate its exit from India resulted in a shock. The plan was announced on June 3, 1947, and that left only 73 days for the Congress and the Muslim League to set up their respective governments-in-waiting.
The tragedy of India's partition, 70 years on
Muslim leaders played upon fears that their faith and community were under threat, even while reminding Muslims that they'd once ruled the subcontinent. Hindu politicians dismissed their opponents as bigoted fascists, and warned of rape and mayhem if Pakistan were to be created. Both sides condemned the "atrocities" supposedly being visited upon their coreligionists by the other.The bloodshed following partition served as the basis of conflict between India and Pakistan for decades to come. Vidhi Doshi and Nisar Mehdi write in the Washington Post:
Fake news helped the flames to spread. As riots broke out ahead of independence, provocateurs crisscrossed the country with photos of dismembered bodies and charred Korans, looking to incite retaliation. Legitimate newspapers, funded by backers of one party or the other, gave space to the most bone-chilling claims. Even saintly "Mahatma" Gandhi repeated incendiary (and untrue) reports about mass rapes of Hindu women at the hands of Muslims. Others took up the cry; enraged Hindu mobs massacred 7,000 Muslims in the province of Bihar in revenge.
The legacy of that violent separation has endured, resulting in a bitter rivalry between India and Pakistan. (...) But after partition was announced, the subcontinent descended quickly into riots and bloodshed.
Bungalows and mansions were burned and looted, women were raped, children were killed in front of their siblings. Trains carrying refugees between the two new nations arrived full of corpses; their passengers had been killed by mobs en route. Even the fruit on the trees tasted of blood, recalls Sudarshana Kumari, who fled from her hometown in Pakistan to India. "When you broke a branch, red would come out," she said, painting an image of how much blood had soaked the soil in India.
Many who lived through those times describe madness taking hold. "Some people say they had temporarily gone crazy," Mr. Hajari said.
But outside of southern Asia, the brutalities of partition were not widely broadcast. Partly, Mr. Hajari says, that may be because of how the events were depicted by British sources. "At the time, there was an impetus to portray the moment of independence as a triumph - that after 200 years of colonial rule, the British could part as friends. If you emphasize the death and violence, that tarnishes the achievement," he said.
Partly, he said, it may be because Indians and Pakistanis themselves still find it difficult to discuss those horrors openly and honestly. "It is still hard to understand why those things happened. Why did that temporary insanity take over?"
© BettmannArmed soldiers join Muslim refugees as they crowd one of the very few modern vehicles on the trek to the Muslim state of Pakistan
Khan continues in The Great Partition:
Even by the standards of the violent twentieth century, the Partition of India is remembered for its carnage, both for its scale - which may have invovled the deaths of half a million to one million men, women and children - and for its seemingly indiscriminate callousness. Individual killings, especially in the most ferociously contested province of Punjab, were frequently accompanied by disfiguration, dismemberment and the rape of women from one community by men from another. Muslim, Sikhs and Hindus suffered equally as victims and can equally be blamed for carrying out the murders and assaults. The killings bridged the barbaric and the calculatedly modern, they were both haphazard and chillingly specific. A whole village might be hacked to death with blunt farm instruments, or imprisoned in a barn and burned alive, or shot against walls by impromptu firing squads using machine-guns. Children, elderly and the sick were not spared, and ritual humiliation and conversions from one faith to another occurred, alongside systemic looting and robbery clearly carried out with the intention of ruining lives. It seems the aim was not only to kill, but to break people. A scorched earth policy in Punjab, which would today be labelled ethnic cleansing, was both the cause and the result of driving people from the land. Militias, armed gangs and members of defence organisations went on the rampage. All this both preceded and accompanied the migration of some twelve million people between the two new nation states of India and Pakistan.With that said, I will end with some of the tragic stories of the survivors.
The generality of these stories does little justice to the horror of individual tales, which are difficult even for the most hardened and dispassionate reader to digest. Small details give only a glimpse of a deeper tragedy, expressed in the crisis of an unknown refugee who, when meeting Nehru as he toured the refugee camps, slapped him on the face, crying, 'Give my mother back to me! Bring my sisters back to me!' or in the grief of an unnamed villager 'whose family had been wiped out', who on meeting Jinnah as he toured the Pakistani camps in 1947, 'sobbed uncontrollably'.
70 years later, survivors recall the horrors of India-Pakistan partition
Sudershana Kumari, an 8-year-old Hindu girl who witnessed a massacre in her hometown in Pakistan:
Even as a girl, Sudershana Kumari's survival instincts were sharp enough to know that staying quiet is sometimes the best option.
Crying out would have given away her hiding place - a rooftop in her native town of Sheikhupura, where Ms. Kumari, her mother and dozens of others lay, watching the carnage on the streets below. "We couldn't show our heads," she said. "You show your head and you're dead."
Ms. Kumari's family is Hindu; they were living in an area that would soon become Muslim-dominated Pakistan. Families like hers would have to flee.
So Ms. Kumari, now 78, did not make a sound. Not when she felt pangs in her stomach after three days without food. Not even when she heard her dog Tom barking for her in the streets below.
From the holes in the roof, Ms. Kumari saw her uncle and his family being killed by men with spears in the street below. Her uncle was a tax collector who had made the error of filling their suitcases with cash - unnecessary weight that had kept his family from running fast enough, Ms. Kumari said. "My aunt was wearing white trousers, I remember," she says. "She was crying, 'don't kill my son, don't kill my son.' Then they took her daughter from her. They took her, and they pierced the spear through her body. She died like that, a one-year-old girl."
Her family scattered. Her town had been reduced to ash and rubble. For days, Ms. Kumari and her mother hid from rioters who were looking for Hindus to kill and loot.
When armed men eventually found them, they were hiding in an attic packed with around 300 others from the town.
The townspeople were ushered out to a children's playground, where the previous day's captives had been doused with oil and burned alive. Corpses lay strewn across the streets. "One dead body here, one dead body there. All people we know," Ms. Kumari said. "There's Khyaliram, there's Baleddiram."
Minutes before they were going to be killed, a cease fire was announced. Trucks rolled into the village from the cities, with Tara Singh, a famous political and religious leader known for his contribution toward independence struggles, shouting at rioters through a speakerphone. Not another drop of blood should be spilled, he was saying. They listened, because they respected him.
On the other side, they would become refugees - penniless, homeless strangers in a strange land.
Hashim Zaidi, a Muslim whose family fled India for Pakistan fearing repercussions after an uncle killed a Hindu man:For India's Oldest Citizens, Independence Day Spurs Memories Of A Painful Partition
If Hashim Zaidi and his family hadn't left his native town of Allahabad in India, the rioters would never have spared them.
His uncle, a Muslim policeman, had killed a Hindu rioter who was trying to enter his house, he said.
Violent acts of vengeance had become commonplace in 1947. Mr. Zaidi's family was taking no chances. "We had no choice but to leave India for Pakistan because of incessant attacks by rioters," he said.
Only 10 or 11 years old at the time, Mr. Zaidi was taken to Pakistan on a train. The carriages were marked to show which passengers were carrying money or other objects of value - and which ones weren't.
"They started it, and they murdered people to get their hands on money," he said. "People who have made it to Pakistan have given money in exchange for their lives."
"It was all about the loot and nothing to do with ideology," he said.
Nineteen at the time, Ahuja's narrow escape came when his family of eight was delayed catching a train near the Pakistani city of Sialkot, where they lived. A woman in their group had become ill.
"She fell sick, so we could not catch the earlier train, and all of us cursed her," he recalls. "We cursed her - in whispers!"
They anxiously waited to board the next train, only to discover that the one they had missed had been attacked - and the passengers butchered.
"I saw the breasts of the ladies slashed," Ahuja says. "The penises of the men cut, and the vultures hovering and eating the dead bodies."
At the end of the train line, they walked across a bridge and entered India. Spent and soaked from the monsoon rains, they kissed the ground.
"We thought that we had reached our so-called new motherland, you see," he says. "But what we had to go through was, again, a terrible experience."
Most refugees simply left their homes, locked the doors and never returned. S.K. Sethi's mother, a Hindu, was escorted from their house in Lahore wearing nothing more than her nightgown and slippers.
"My mother was having tea with my elder brother in the verandah of the house," Sethi says. "And [the] gate opens and a crowd of about 15 to 20 people walks in, and in Punjabi tells her, 'Madam, please leave.' 'Leave?' she asked, 'what do you mean by leave? This is my house' ... 'No, ma'am, it was your house.'"
When his mother insisted on changing her clothes, "Somebody from the crowd says, 'You will leave from this verandah as you are.' My mother and brother walked out. Partition had taken place. They had to go."
The EU wants oil from the Middle East from a newly created country Rojava that will fawn on the western world much as Iran did during the Shah's reign. The big picture is a much expanded EU including the Middle East and the Stans. That puts India/Pakistan as the new front against China and Russia. What do you think will happen then?