Punjab

by Rajmohan Gandhi

The Sikhs never forgot that the places of Guru Nanak’s birth and death as well as the popular Sikh shrine, Panja Sahib, lay in Muslim-majority areas of Punjab, over which Ranjit Singh had ruled in the nineteenth century. Moreover, they were strongly attached to the British-era canal colonies they had helped develop in Lyallpur, Montgomery and other Muslim-majority districts. Driven by these connections but lacking a majority in any district, the Sikhs tried nonetheless to mark out a substantial ‘Sikh’ Punjab consisting of several eastern Punjab districts where Sikhs and Hindus, taken together, constituted a majority plus a few western districts where, in their view, the Sikhs’ earlier role outweighed demographics. If such a ‘Sikh’ Punjab could not be carved out, the Sikhs would go to any lengths, some of their leaders declared, to prevent a Muslim Punjab.

Sikander was succeeded as Premier by forty-three-year-old Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana, the Aitchison-educated Unionist son of the old pro-Empire Rajput general, Sir Umar Hayat Tiwana of Kalra in Shahpur district. Punjab’s new governor, Bertrand Glancy, had first offered the Premiership to another knighted landowner-politician, the Oxford-educated Firoz Khan Noon, who as member for defence in the Viceroy’s executive council was helping recruitment. But Noon, whose Rajput clan, also long-settled in Shahpur, inter-married with the Tiwanas, chose to remain in New Delhi.

After being released in the summer of 1944 (the Raj thought he was too ill to be dangerous), Gandhi met Jinnah fourteen times in Bombay in September 1944, with Gandhi walking each time from the Mount Pleasant Road home of his hosts, the Birlas, to Jinnah’s large house on the same street. Hopes of a Congress-League accord soared. The new Viceroy, Lord (and General) Archibald Wavell, who had been commander-in-chief alongside Linlithgow during Quit India, thought that the two Indian leaders would at least ask for the release of the still-detained Congress working committee.

As long as we two brothers are alive and our rifles have bullets we will never let you touch the Muslim patients in this hospital.48 Addressed to assailants storming (and, soon afterwards, leaving) their Amritsar hospital, these words spoken by Dr Parshottam Dutt on his behalf and that of his brother Dr Narain Das reflected the gallant spirit of many unknown Punjabis, Sikh, Muslim and Hindu, of March 1947.

Kalyan Das, a prosperous Hindu living near the railway station. A man to whom Muslims had often turned for arbitrating disputes with fellow Muslims, Das was killed in his house along with his entire family. Also nearly killed in Das’s home was his house-guest that day, Saifuddin Kitchlew. The killers stripped Kitchlew completely, saw that he was circumcised and spared the Amritsar leader, and that too because an Ahrar group friendly to Kitchlew had arrived on the scene.49

two thousand or more Sikhs and Hindus were killed between 5 and 8 March in villages near Rawalpindi and Attock, and tens of thousands fled from their homes. In some villages—in the words of Lt.-Gen. Frank Messervy, the northern command chief and a future head of the Pakistan army—‘savagery was carried out to an extreme degree’. Messervy admitted that the army’s ‘ex-soldiers and pensioners [had] been heavily involved’ in the violence.52

In a reference to Jinnah, the exasperated governor added, ‘It [is] a ludicrous position in which the so-called League leaders… take orders from Bombay from a person entirely ignorant of Punjab conditions.’62 Ghazanfar, however, was not prepared to initiate a Punjabi response.

A diary entry by Rajagopalachari (a Congress member of the interim government and participant in the deliberations) states that Gandhi’s ‘illconceived plan of solving the present difficulties’ was ‘objected to by everybody and scotched’.69 If Azad was among ‘the several members of the working committee’ with whom Gandhi talked, his rejection of the Gandhi scheme—or silence over it—would have conflicted with his word to Mountbatten that it offered the best hope of stopping bloodshed.

Jinnah’s confidence about the British establishment’s attitude had been bolstered by his discovery during a Buckingham Palace luncheon in December 1946 that ‘His Majesty (George VI) was pro Pakistan… Her Majesty was even more pro Pakistan and… Queen Mary (the king’s mother) was 100% Pakistan!’ to quote his account, given on 11 April, to Eric Mieville, Mountbatten’s private secretary.

On 20 April, Yadvinder Singh pleaded with Mountbatten (the latter would record) to ‘reconsider our decision to go’. British departure, the Maharaja said, would make chaos certain and civil war likely. The Viceroy did not budge.

To his credit, Jinnah on his part ‘begged’ Mountbatten (on 23 June) ‘to be absolutely ruthless in suppressing disorder’ in Punjab, adding, ‘I don’t care whether you shoot Muslims or not, it has got to be stopped’.83 The plea was addressed to an Empire focused on departure, not on enforcing order.

Their economic strength and substantial numbers led many of Lahore’s non-Muslims to believe that they could convey the city to India. These hopes in respect of Lahore were matched by Muslim expectations regarding Amritsar town, where Muslims comprised some 47 per cent of the population, compared with the 36 per cent figure for Lahore’s Hindus and Sikhs combined.

Shaukat Hayat and other League leaders made frequent visits to Amritsar and told the city’s Muslims that they could ‘play a historic role in winning Amritsar for Pakistan’.86 In May, Muslim badmashes in Amritsar mocked their counterparts in Lahore by sending them henna and bangles. The ‘gift’ was publicized in some Lahore newspapers and seems to have played a role in stoking Lahore’s violence.

The RSS was involved in Hindu attacks in Lahore, which however were less frequent than Muslim ones. In July, a bomb was thrown in a cinema in Bhati Gate, a Muslim locality, and the next day at a train compartme...

The Shahalmi fire broke the will of Lahore’s Sikhs and Hindus ‘to fight and stay on in Lahore’. Evidence that the city magistrate, Muhammad Ghani Cheema, was deeply involved in this arson attack appears to be compelling.89 Jenkins visited the market after the fire but there is no evidence that Cheema was even questioned.

While about half a million Sikhs and Hindus had crossed over to eastern Punjab by mid-August, there was as yet no comparable movement in the opposite direction. Despite the Congress demand for partitioning the province, East Punjab’s Muslims (a higher percentage than West Punjab’s non-Muslims) were not abandoning their homes.

On the night of 13 August, the police station chief of Lahore’s Mozang quarter evidently masterminded an attack on a historic gurdwara built by Guru Arjan Dev. All the score or so Sikh men and women inside this gurdwara, which stood only fifteen yards from the Mozang police station, were killed and the shrine burnt down. The attack was carried out by about thirty Muslim youths led by ‘a devout Khaksar’, as Taj Din, the leader, called himself while admitting his involvement in an interview with a contemporary scholar in the year 2000.100

People looked on helplessly as a child or parent was slain, a wife or daughter raped and killed, an infant tossed in the air and caught by a bayonet or spear. Breasts were knifed, vaginas speared. In both halves of Punjab, deeds and sights more horrible than could be imagined were done and seen. Often the trauma was stretched out. You were seized, raped multiple times and brutally killed. Or, leaving behind dead or living relatives, you fled from an attacked house, joined a column of escapees, slipped into a clump of trees when the column was shot at, found a fresh group of assailants, eluded them—and found yourself trapped by the rising waters of a river. Or you reached a refugee camp—and starved or caught cholera there.112 Or you were stabbed or clubbed just before reaching the river or the camp.

Some women jumped into wells or rivers to save their honour, others were slain by their menfolk before the enemy’s menfolk could ravish them. A few women were killed in error. In one instance where this happened, a rumour that the Baloch regiment was coming was believed when in fact Hindu soldiers were on the way. Women who were part of columns trudging towards the border were snatched from helpless husbands, fathers and brothers, and appropriated. Elsewhere, seized women were divided among attackers, with police officers picking first. Murder often followed rape.

In well-to-do localities ugly acts of violence did not occur. Hindu-Sikh bourgeoisie of Lahore could leave more or less safely. It was petty employees, servants, shopkeepers and all who had neither the connections nor the means to arrange for their departure in time that bore the brunt.

Frightened groups often sought shelter in a mosque or a gurdwara, only to find that a sacred place merely simplified mass killing. This happened in, among other places of worship, Masjid Rangrezan in Amritsar’s inner city, where hundreds of men, women and children were slain on 15 August, and in the Gujranwala gurdwara two weeks later. Similarly, trains and railway stations, destinations of hope, frequently turned into traps of death.

Divide-and-rule was reinforced by annoyance at the Congress-led independence movement. It was to deny gains to the Congress that Khizr was let down at the Simla Conference of 1945. This betrayal of a loyal ally was a fillip to the League’s hard line and a signal for sharper polarization in Punjab. Human and understandable as it was, imperial pique contributed to the 1947 carnage and helped destroy a Punjab the British had done much to build.

Neither Punjab’s political leaders nor the all-India Congress tried seriously to unite Punjabis across the class divide between landed aristocrats and the rest, or across the communal divides. The Unionists tried to unite all large landowners irrespective of religion, but not the bulk of Punjabis. The Gandhi-led, Khilafat-linked movement of 1919-22 cut across all divides and penetrated all parts of Punjab but lasted for only three years.

While hard to hold on to in the heat of competitive politics, this truth could have been brought home to all Punjabis by the Congress. However, the Punjab Congress remained too Hindu and too urban to do this. For the failure of the Punjab Congress to grow into a party of all Punjabis, Gandhi and the Congress’s central leadership must be assigned some responsibility. The Congress’s failure to retain Fazl-i-Husain was the biggest evidence of its limitations. The anti-feudal sentiment of the Congress Left combined with the anti-Muslim sentiment of the Congress Right to block a possible understanding with Fazl and the others who formed the ‘feudal’ and ‘agricultural’ Unionist party.

The Unionist Party’s prominent Muslims were key to avoiding polarization in the province, but until the 1946 elections the Punjab Congress was opposed to approaching the Unionists. In opting to fight both the League and the Unionists, the Punjab Congress had taken on one foe too many. In the end, cooperation from the Raj too was necessary for resolving the tension between the Congress’s twin goals, freedom and unity. This cooperation was not forthcoming. The Congress’s nationwide stirs, including Quit India, had induced in the Empire a wish to hurt rather than assist the Congress.

Their unique and centuries-long identification with Punjab and the Punjabi language made the 1947 tragedy extraordinarily tough for the Sikhs. Yet, their leaders cannot escape a due share of responsibility. Their failure lay not in picking more than one foe, or in inconsistency, but in a lack of realism. To recall Ranjit Singh’s Punjab with pride was one thing. But to suggest, a century after the Sikh kingdom’s demise, that a fighting spirit could restore Sikh rule over areas where Muslims were a majority was neither reasonable nor prudent. Following on the 20 February announcement from London, this 3 March claim in Lahore accelerated the journey to tragedy.

the ordinary Punjabi also bears some responsibility. Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs embraced education, the professions, commerce and industry, but not democracy. While desiring Indian independence, they disliked and also feared popular rule. At several junctures they seemed to want a restoration of the Raj’s bureaucracy and an end to elected governments. This was not anti-Muslim prejudice as much as reluctance to lose a dominance to which they had grown accustomed. In any case, the bid to defy demography and delay democracy proved short-sighted. Punjabi Muslims, on their part, showed inadequate awareness of the problems that Hindus and Sikhs saw in majority rule. There seems to be little evidence that the average Muslim tried in the 1930s or 1940s to dispel fears about majority rule from the mind of his Hindu or Sikh neighbour.

India’s new and smaller Punjab—one-seventh the size of undivided Punjab—was essentially British Punjab’s Jullundur division (minus its hill districts) together with the Amritsar and Gurdaspur districts of the old Lahore division, plus Patiala and other Punjabi-speaking tracts previously ruled by rajas. While the hilly principalities adjoining British eastern Punjab along with Jullundur division’s hill districts became Himachal, the new state of Haryana was reminiscent of the Ambala division of British days.

Khushwant Singh, Ranjit Singh, p. 189, and Latif, History, p. 483.