Jinnah looked haggard, Nehru lost his cool
Syed Badrul Ahsan reads a refreshing work on Partition
In 1945, the president of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema condemned Mohammad Ali Jinnah through issuing a fatwa, calling him the great heathen, or Kafir-e-Azam. It was a pun on the honorific Quaid-e-Azam with which India's Muslims had honoured Jinnah. In the days immediately following the partition of India in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru was landed a resounding slap by a Hindu refugee from Pakistan at a camp in Haridwar. The man, unimpressed by the prime minister's efforts to assuage the troubled emotions of the men and women in the camp, screamed, 'Give my mother back to me! Bring my sisters to me!' At the railway station in Ambala, Zakir Hussain, a future president of India, miraculously escaped death at the hands of a Hindu mob. The brother of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, a prominent Congress politician, was stabbed to death. The daughter of Ghulam Mohammad, a future governor general of Pakistan, was abducted. Gandhi sat out the celebrations of independence, for all around him Hindus and Muslims were hacking away at one another in unimaginable fratricide. All across the Indian subcontinent, in the weeks and months before and following the vivisection of the subcontinent, Hindus and Muslims were on the rampage, looking for men to murder, women to abduct and rape and property to loot. The departure of the British colonial power, in hurried, almost chaotic fashion, in August 1947, as this riveting account of the partition makes clear, was accompanied by human tragedy unprecedented in its scale and unparalleled in its horror. Where Yasmin Khan differs from others who have left their own assessments of the coming of freedom to India and Pakistan is in her near complete focus on the price the partition exacted on the general population all the way from the North West Frontier Province to Bengal. A million people, perhaps more, died in the aftermath of the partition. Of course, as Khan notes, none of the politicians, Indian or British, involved in the process of carving up the country, could contemplate such all encompassing tragedy. When it came, Jinnah, Nehru and all the men who mattered in the Congress and the Muslim League felt at sea. They had only themselves to blame. The League, never having seriously considered the possibility of a mass Muslim migration to Pakistan from the regions where they had been in a minority, simply was unable to work out the best means of accommodating them. In almost similar manner, the Congress had never been prepared for the reality of Hindus and Sikhs making their way to independent India from areas that would be part of the Pakistan state. Altogether twelve million people would travel, both ways, in search of a sanctuary. Trains carrying Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan and Muslims from India arrived in grim manner at their destinations. The travellers had been murdered along the way by roving bands of fanatical Hindus and Muslims. The exhaustion brought on by the long tale of the Pakistan struggle, as the American journalist Phillips Talbot noted at the time, was all too palpable. He found the political classes tired beyond measure. Jinnah looked haggard and drawn, while Nehru was forever bursting into extremes of temper. It was particularly after the Cabinet Mission proposals for a somewhat confederal India came to nought in July 1946 that the long twilight struggle would begin in earnest. In a move that was as inexplicable as it was bizarre, the Muslim League provincial government of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy in Bengal, responding to Jinnah's call for a Direct Action Day, ordered a holiday in Calcutta to organise a mass rally. The consequences were predictable. And they would be dire, as Muslims and Hindus went out on missions to kill and maim one another over a period of four days. The Great Calcutta Killings, as the horror would come to be known, was but a prelude to other, bigger horrors only a year away. To what extent the disaster owed its origins to Mountbatten and his departing administration is a question which frequently emerges from the pages of the book. As the June 3 Plan was broadcast over the radio and disseminated through newspapers, Muslims rejoiced and Hindus groaned. Some eager Muslims, carried away by what they saw as a defining moment (it was anything but), even pictured Delhi being part of Pakistan. At that point, the thought that Punjab and Bengal would be sliced through as a price of partition simply did not occur. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the June 3 story is that no one had a clue about the shape of the Pakistan being envisaged. And the princely states? They had already begun entertaining thoughts of carrying on as independent kingdoms in post-August 1947 circumstances. Their aspirations would soon be shattered. And aspirations were laid waste all across India in that summer of frenzy and murderous strife. Despite it all, Cyril Radcliffe, never having visited India before, now stayed busy in a Delhi room drawing up the geographical parameters within which the new states of India and Pakistan would operate. The lines he drew cut across villages and homes. They pierced the soul of a country. In such macabre circumstances, Jinnah went on the airwaves speaking of 'a supreme moment' and of a 'fulfillment of the destiny of the Muslim nation'. Hours later, Nehru would declaim on free India's 'tryst with destiny'. By the end of 1947, three million refugees would find themselves in camps across the new countries. Tens of thousands would, meanwhile, be dying because of their religious affiliations all over the subcontinent.
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