So wrote the Manchester Guardian correspondent in India. In truth, the refugees were a good deal less passive than this description suggests.
Early in 1948 a ‘large number of refugees, disgusted with their miserable existence at Sealdah station, occupied the Lake military barracks, Jodhpur military barracks, the Mysore House and other large unoccupied houses and military barracks at Shahpur, Durgapur, Ballygunge Circular Road and Dharmatala. Almost overnight these deserted houses swarmed with refugee men, women and children. These were deliberate acts of trespass.’15
Where some refugees took possession of empty houses, others colonized vacant land along roads and railway lines, as well as freshly cleared shrub jungle and recently drained marshes. The squatters ‘would stealthily enter these plots at night, and under cover of darkness rapidly put up makeshift shelters. They would then refuse to leave, while offering in many instances to pay a fair price for the land.’16
It was the government of West Bengal that willy-nilly forced the refugees to take the law into their own hands. For one thing, there had been no massive migration in the other direction – as there had been in the Punjab – leaving untended fields and farms for the refugees to be settled in. For another, the government liked to believe – or hope – that this influx was temporary, and that when things settled down the Hindus would return to their homes in the east. Buttressing this belief was the claim that the Bengalis were somehow less ‘communal-minded’ than the Punjabis. Here, the Muslim spoke the same language and ate the same food as his Hindu neighbour; thus he might more readily continue to live cheek-by-jowl with him.
This latter argument was vigorously rejected by the refugees themselves. For them there was no going back to what they saw as an Islamic state. They found support for their views in the person of the historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar, arguably the most influential Bengali intellectual of his generation. Addressing a mammoth public meeting of refugees, held on 16 August 1948, Sir Jadunath compared the migration of East Bengal Hindus to the flight of French Huguenots in the time of Louis XIV. He urged the people of West Bengal to absorb and integrate the migrants, thus to nourish their culture and economy. With the help of the refugees, said the historian, ‘we must make our West Bengal what Palestine under Jewish Rule will be, a light in darkness, an oasis of civilisation in the desert of medieval ignorance and obsolete theocratic bigotry’.17
In September 1948 an All-Bengal Refugee Council of Action was formed. Marches and demonstrations were organized demanding that the refugees be given fair compensation and citizenship rights. The leaders of the movement aimed to throw ‘regimented bands of refugees in the streets of Calcutta and to maintain a relentless pressure on the Government . . . Processions, demonstrations and meetings, traffic jams, brickbats and teargas shells and lathis [bamboo sticks used by the police as weapons]coming down in showers, burning tramcars and buses, and occasional firings – these became the hallmark of the city.’18
Displaced from their homes by forces outside their control, refugees everywhere are potential fodder for extremist movements. In Delhi and the Punjab it was the radical Hindu organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that very early on got a foothold among the migrants. In Bengal the RSS’s sister organization, the Hindu Mahasabha, also worked hard at giving a religious colour to the problem. The Bengali Hindus, they said, ‘have been made sacrificial goats in the great Yajna of India’s freedom’. In asking them to return to East Pakistan, the government was guilty of ‘appeasement’ and of abetting ‘genocide’ While the state asked them to submit, what the refugees needed was a stiff dose of ‘the virility of man’. ‘One only wishes’, wrote one angry Hindu in March 1950, that ‘a Shivaji or a Rana Pratap emerged from their ranks’.19
This invocation of medieval Hindu warriors who had fought Muslim kings found more takers in Delhi and the Punjab. In Bengal, however, it was the communists who most successfully mobilized the refugees. It was they who organized the processions to government offices, and it was they who orchestrated the forcible occupation of fallow land in Calcutta, land to which the refugees ‘had no sanction other than organized strength and dire necessity’. Thus in differentparts of the city grew numerous impromptu settlements, ‘clusters of huts with thatch, tile or corrugated-iron roofs, bamboo-mat walls and mud floors, built in the East Bengal style’.20
By early 1950 there were about 200,000 refugees in these squatter colonies. In the absence of state support, the refugees ‘formed committees of their own, framed rules for the administration of the colonies and organised themselves into a vast united body’.21 A ‘South Calcutta Refugee Rehabilitation Committee’ claimed to represent 40,000 families who, in their respective colonies, had constructed a total of 500 miles of road, sunk 700 tube wells and started 45 high schools as well as 100 primary schools – all at their own expense and through their own initiative. The Committee demanded that the government make these colonies ‘legal by formally bringing them under the Calcutta Municipality, that it similarly regularize private plots and school buildings, and help develop markets and arrange loans.22
Those who spoke for these migrants frequently complained about the preferential treatment given to the Punjabi refugees. A team of Bengali social workers visiting north India found the camps there ‘of a superior kind’. The houses were permanent, with running water and adequate sanitation; whereas in West Bengal the refugees had to make do with ‘decaying bamboo hutments’ where ‘lack of privacy and of kitchen space is notorious’. Cash and clothing allowances were also higher in the north. 23
On the whole, the resettlement process was far less painful in the Punjab. By the early 1950s the refugees in the north had found new homes and new jobs. But in the east the insecurity persisted. So long as the Bengali refugees remained ‘unsettled and unemployed, wrote one correspondent in July 1954, ‘economic and political discontent will grow; the Communists will succeed in exploiting their grievances’.24
V
Unquestionably the main victims of Partition were women: Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim. As the respected Sindhi Congress politician Choitram Gidwani put it, ‘in no war have the women suffered so much’. Women were killed, maimed, violated and abandoned. After Independence the brothels of Delhi and Bombay came to be filled with refugee women, who had been thrown out by their families after what someone else had done to them – against their will.25
In the summer of 1947, as the violence in the Punjab spread from village to village, Hindus and Sikhs in the east of the province abducted and kept Muslim women. On the other side the compliment – if it may be called that – was returned, with young Hindu and Sikh girls seized by Muslim men. However, after the dust had settled down and the blood dried, the governments of India and Pakistan agreed that these captured women must be returned to their original families.
On the Indian side, the operation to recover abducted women was led by Mridula Sarabhai and Rameshwari Nehru. Both came from aristocratic homes and both had sturdily nationalist credentials. Their work was encouraged and aided by Jawaharlal Nehru, who took a deep personal interest in the process. In a radio broadcast to the refugees, the prime minister spoke especially ‘to those women who are the victims of all these hardships’. He assured them that ‘they should not feel that we have any hesitation whatsoever in bringing them back or that we have any doubts about their virtue. We want to bring them back with affection because it had not been their fault. They were forcefully abducted and we want to bring them back respectfully and keep them lovingly. They must not doubt that they will come back to their families and be given all possible help.’26
The abducted women were tracked down singly, case by case. When a person had been located, the police would enter the village at sunset, after the men had returned from the fields. An ‘informer’ would lead them to the home of the abductor. The offender would usually deny that the woman in his possession had been seized. After his objections were overcome -sometimes by force – the woman would be taken away, at fir
st to a government camp, and then across the border.27
By May 1948 some 12,500 women had been found and restored to their families. Ironically, and tragically, many of the women did not want to be rescued at all. For after their seizure they had made some kind of peace with their new surroundings. Now, as they were being reclaimed, these women were deeply unsure about how their original families would receive them. They had been ‘defiled’ and, in a further complication, many were pregnant. These women knew that even if they were accepted, their children – born out of a union with the ‘enemy’ – would never be. Often, the police and their accomplices had to use force to take them away. ‘You could not save us then’, said the women, ‘what right have you to compel us now?’28
VI
Compounding the refugee crisis were serious shortages of food. After the end of the war imports of grain were steadily on the rise, increasing from 0.8 million tons (mt) in 1944 to 2.8 mt four years later. On the eve of Independence a politician traveling through the district of East Godavari found men and women surviving on tamarind seeds, palmyra fruits, and the bark of the jeelugu tree – these boiled together into gruel, eating which led to bloated stomachs, diarrhoea and sometimes death. The following year the rainsfailed in the western province of Gujarat, leading to acute waterandfodder scarcity. Wells and river beds ran dry, and cattle and goats died ofhunger and disease.29
In some places farmers were starving; in other places they were restive. In the uncertainty following the Indian takeover of Hyderabad, the communists moved swiftly to assume control of the Telengana region. They were aided by a pile of .303 rifles and Mark V guns left behind by the retreating Razakars. The communists destroyed the palatial homes of landlords and distributed their land to tillers of the soil. Dividing themselves into several dalams,or groups, each responsible for a number of villages, the communists asked peasants not to pay land revenue, and enforced law and order themselves.30 In districts such as Warangal and Nalgonda, their work at getting rid of feudalism won the Reds much support. A Congress politician visiting the area admitted that ‘every housewife silently rendered valuable assistance to the communists. Innocent looking villagers extended active sympathy to [them].’31
Their successes in Hyderabad had encouraged the communists to think of a countrywide peasant revolution. Telengana, they hoped, would be the beginning of a Red India. The party unveiled its new line at a secret conference held in Calcutta in February 1948. The mood was set by a speaker who said that the ‘heroic people of Telengana’ had shown the way ‘to freedom and real democracy’; they were the ‘real future of India and Pakistan’. If only the communist cadres could ‘create this spirit of revolution among the masses, among the toiling people, we shall find reaction collapsing like ahouse of cards’.32
At the Calcutta meeting, the party elected anewgeneral secretary, with P. C. Joshi giving way to B. T. Ranadive. By character, Ranadive was solemn and studious, unlike the playful and likeable Joshi. (Both, notably, were upper caste Hindus – as was typical of communist leaders of the day.)33
Joshi was a friend of Nehru who urged ‘loyal opposition’ to the ruling Congress Party. He argued that after the murder of Gandhi the survival of free India was at stake. He supervised the production of a party pamphlet whose title proclaimed, We Shall Defend the Nehru Government (against the forces of Hindu revivalism). Ranadive, however, was a hardliner who believed that India was controlled by a bourgeois government that was beholden to the imperialists. Now, in a complete about-turn, the party described Nehru as alackey of American imperialism. The pamphlet printed by the former general secretary was pulped. Joshi himself was demoted to a status of an ordinary member and a whole series of charges were levelled against him. He was dubbed a reformist who had encouraged the growth of ‘anti-revolutionary’ tendencies in the party.34
The new line of the Communist Party of India held that Nehru’s government had joined the Anglo-American alliance in an ‘irreconcilable conflict’ with the ‘democratic camp’ led by the Soviet Union. The scattered disillusionment with the Congress was taken by B. T. Ranadive as a sign of a ‘mounting revolutionary upsurge’. From his underground hideout he called for a general strike and peasant uprisings across the country. Communist circulars urged their cadres to ‘fraternize with the revolutionary labourers in the factories and the students in the streets’, and to ‘turn your guns and bayonets and fire upon the Congress fascists’. The ultimate aim was to ‘destroy the murderous Congress government’35
Ranadive and his men took heart from the victory of the communists in China. In September 1949, shortly after Mao Zedong had come to power, Ranadive wrote him a letter of congratulation, saying that ‘the toiling masses of India feel jubilant over this great victory. They know it hastens their own liberation. They are inspired by it to fight more determinedly and courageously their battle for ending the present regime [in India] and establishing the rule of People’s Democracy.’36 The Indian communists were also egged on by Russian theoreticians, who believed that ‘the political regime established in India is similar in many respects to the anti-popular, reactionary regime which existed in Kuomintang China’.37 The Soviet embassy in Delhi itself had a large staff, such that (in the words of a senior civil servant) the Indian ‘communist movement [was] receiving first-class direction on the spot’.38
The communists had declared war on the Indian state. The government responded with all the force at its command. As many as 50,000 party men and sympathizers were arrested and detained. In Hyderabad the police arrested important leaders of communist dalams, although Ravi Narayan Reddy, ‘the father of the Communist movement in Deccan, [was] still at large’. The military governor, J. N. Chaudhuri, launched a propaganda war against the communists. Telugu pamphlets dropped on the villages announced that the Nizam’s private Crown lands would be distributed to the peasantry. Theatrical companies touring the villages presented the government case through drama and pantomime. In one play, Chaudhuri was portrayed as a Hindu deity; the communists, as demons.39
The propaganda and the repression had its effect. The membership of the party dropped from 89,000 in 1948 to a mere 20,000 two years later. The government’s counter-offensive had exposed the ‘lack of popular empathy it experienced for its unbridled revolutionism’. It appears the party had grossly underestimated the hold of the Congress over the Indian people.40
Even as the communists were losing their influence, a band of extremists was gathering strength on the right. This was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. After the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, the RSS was banned by the government. Although not directly involved in the assassination, the organization had been active in the Punjab violence, and had much support among disaffected refugees. Their worldview was akin to Nathuram Godse’s, and it was widely rumoured that RSS men had privately celebrated his killing of the Mahatma. Writing to the Punjab government two weeks after Gandhi’s death, Nehru said that ‘we have had enough suffering already in India because of the activities of the R.S.S. and like groups . . . These people have the blood of Mahatma Gandhi on their hands, and pious disclaimers and disassociation now have no meaning.’41
So the RSS was banned, and its cadres arrested. However, after a year the government decided to make the organization legal once more. Its head, M. S. Golwalkar, had now agreed to ask his men to profess loyalty to the Constitution of India and the national flag, and to restrict the Sangh’s activities ‘to the cultural sphere abjuring violence or secrecy’. The RSS chief promised the home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, that ‘while rendering help to the people in distress, we have laid our emphasis on promoting peace in the country’ . Patel himself had mixed feelings about the RSS. While deploring their anti-Muslim rhetoric he admired their dedication and discipline. In lifting the ban on the Sangh, he advised them ‘that the only way for them is to reform the Congress from within, if they think the Congress is going on the wrong path’.42
After the RSS was made legal, Golwalkar mad
e a ‘triumphal’ speaking tour across the country, drawing ‘mammoth crowds’ The Sangh, wrote one observer, ‘has emerged from its recent ordeal with a mass support that other parties, not excluding the Congress, might well envy and guard against, while it is yet time, unless they wish to see the country delivered to a Hindu irredentism that will lead it to certain disaster’. The RSS was the Hindu answer to the Muslim League, ‘imbued with aggressively communal ideas, and with the determination that there must be no compromise with the ideal of apure and predominant Hindu culture in Bharat-Varsh’43
Like the communist B. T. Ranadive, Golwalkar was an upper caste Maharashtrian. Both men were relatively young – in their early forties – and both commanded the loyalty of hundreds of cadres a good deal younger than themselves. The RSS and the communists likewise drew upon the energy and idealism of youth, and upon its fanaticism too. In the early years of Indian independence, these two groups were the most motivated opponents of the ruling Congress Party.
At the helm of the Congress was the Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In confronting the radicals of left and right, Nehru faced two major handicaps. First, he was a moderate, and the middle ground is generally not conducive to the kind of stirring rhetoric that compels men to act. Second, he and his colleagues were far older than their political rivals. In 1949 Nehru himself was sixty, an age at which a Hindu male is supposed to retire from the workaday world and take sanyas.
Nehru saw the RSS as the greater of the two threats. Others in his government, notably Vallabhbhai Patel, disagreed. Intriguingly, M. S. Golwalkar had written to Patel offering help in battling the common enemy – the communists. ‘If we utilize the power of your government and the cultural strength of our organization’, he wrote, ‘we will be able to get rid of the [Red] menace very soon.’44 This idea of a joint front appealed to Patel; indeed, it may have been one reason he contemplated absorbing the RSS within the Congress.