Making Of India , Pakistan and Bangladesh and the Plights of East Bengal Refugees and Muslims in India
Palash Biswas
Contact: Palash C Biswas, C/O Mrs Arati Roy, Gosto Kanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 91-033-25659551
Email: palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
"In the post-World War II period refugee problem emerged out to be one of the biggest problems before the international community. India has also experienced it at a large scale. Factors such as rise of religious nationalism, ethnicisation of politics, state terrorism, anarchic majoritarianism and above all state's refusal to conform to norms set by the international refugee regime, rendered the refugees stateless and subjects for inhuman treatment. On the other hand, historical forces like religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism and regional economic disparity continue to generate refugees in the eastern and north-eastern regions of India. Faced with unfriendly state, both in the country of origin and the country of adoption, the refugees struggle to find the ways and means for a healthy living, and wherever possible they make efforts to put up an organised movement for their 'human rights'.
Politics of Demography in India may be well explained with case studies in West Bengal and Gujrat. Sharing the state power by enslaved communities in North India under leadership of the likes Mayawati, Mulayam,Nitish Kumar, Lalu yadav and Mulayam is also a classical example of Demography politics. In every case ,the Muslim Vote Bank and minority psyche plays the key role. In West Bengal, after Modi`s charishma in Gujrat and BJP in the helms in Himachal it is near impossible to dislodge the ruling Left Front despite violent and vigourous War cry by Mamata Bannerjee. Thus, capitalist marxist Chief minister of West Bengal Buddhadeb defying ideology, party, history and culture , follows the dictates of MNCs and Corporate Finance capital. Bengal has become the free hunting ground for Ruling Hegemony. The regemented Gestapo won`t allow you to breathe until you surrender! The North India type change in political scenerio in Bengal is impossible because of Demography. Marxist have hijacked Muslim vote Bank for ever. Muslims may not ally with SC and ST and OBC as the allied before independence. Majority of SC, ST and OBC from the subaltern base East Bengal have been uprooted and scattered all over this bloody sub continent. Even the rfugee influx has not stopped at all. Mrs Indira Gandhi might have pondered over the option of annexing East Bengal like Sikkim later, had she opted for it, Bengali Elites would have resisted as the Polpulation of East and North East India including bangladesh establishes dominance of Muslims.
Bengali SC and St aborigin peple are being persecuted in Bangladesh, we know well. We know all about the Genocide of 1971. But, in fact, the East Bengal partition Victim refugees resettled in different parts of India including homeland Bengal are persecuted much more.
Citizen Amendment Act happens to be Death warrant for all East Bengal Refugees. In context to Partition and great Population Transfer, Dalit Bengalies were never treated as par as the West Pakistan refugges. They got War Level Resettlement with compensation while East Bengal Fellows lived on Dole. They were ejected from their homeland and dumped in unfriendly landscape as well as humanscape. East Bengal refugges have been used as Vote Bank in every state of India. They have been used against tribals as well as Muslims for further demographic readjustment. Now, Pranab Mukherjee and Buddhadeb lead a deportation drive against them. A refugee Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh leads the drive.Another refugee from sindh, Lalkrishna Adwani as the deputy prime minister plus Home Minister in NDA goverrnment enacted the anti bengali Citizenship act with active help of Parnab Mukherjee who chaired the Parilamentary committe. Marxist and all SC, ST and OBC Mps supported.
Manmohan is the Comrador Prime Minister of Zionist Brahmincal White Post Modern Galaxy Order neoliberal MNC Corporate Colony that Shining India has become losing Freedom, Sovereignity and Democratic institutions as well as Productio n System and cultural roots. But remote control happnes to be in the hands of Italian born white woman Mrs sonia gandhi. Pranab Mukherjee works as De Facto Prime minister and he heads 39 parliamentary committees instrumental to kill huaman and civil rights, finsh higher education and reservation. Not only reservation or Citizenship, the Brute Ruling Hegemeony is working Up the Hills to kill the Constitution of India to nullify the Empowerment of enslaved Indian majorty Eighty Five percent People.
Taslima Nasrin and dead Rizwan are the examples of West Bengal politics. In Nandigram, no caste Hindu is killed. Every victim happens to be either Muslim or SC OBC marginalised people deprived of life and livelihood. Nadigram is a Muslim majority area. Nandigram Insurrection would have been impossible withot the particiaption of Muslims. Women also played key role to mobilise in resistance. They were killed, gangraped. Intlligentsia, NGOs and Opposition could not defend the victims neither they could stop the capitalist annihilation of peasants. Under this scenerio, CPIM made an issue of Taslima Nasri to subvert Nandigram Insurrection. Ration riots were also tamed in between. Ant American Campaign in the light of War against terrorism also helped the Marxist. Muslims overlooked the meeting of Buddhadeb with Henry Kissinger. Nuclear Deal Dram had been played nationally and Taslima was used for locaised agenda, which eventually became national as well as international. CPIM also encashed the Rizwan Love Tragedy in its favour to mobilise Muslim Vote Bank.
What happened at last?
In a new twist to the Rizwanur Rehman case, the CBI says that Rizwanur, a graphic designer who was found dead along the railway tracks in Kolkata on September 21, committed suicide.
According to reports available to NDTV, the investigating agency has found that the Todis abetted 30-year-old Rizwanur's suicide.
The agency will tell the Kolkata High Court on Tuesday that it has established through scientific and electronic evidence that it was not a case of murder.
It says that Rizwan was driven to suicide after being separated from his wife Priyanka Todi, the daughter of rich industrialist Ashok Todi.
But, NDTV's sources have said that the agency will chargesheet all those persons who were involved in separating Priyanka and Rizwanur soon after their wedding in August.
The CBI feels that the separation and attempts to intimidate him had a 'cumulative effect' that led to his suicide.
Those likely to be charged are Priyanka's uncle and her father, Ashok Todi, against whom the CBI had initially registered a murder case.
But the charge will now be a lesser abetment to suicide charge carrying the maximum penalty of imprisonment upto 10 years.
The CBI has also found that senior police officers considered close to the Todis acted improperly in this case and will also be recommending action against them.
Due to the extremely sensitive nature of this case, the agency is still finalising exactly what action to take against whom.
For instance, they are looking at each police officer's role separately and deciding action. But one thing they claim is indisputable that when Rizwanur went to dumdum railway tracks on September 21, he wanted to end his life.
For his family, this may be hard to digest but they will have to wait for the full report in the high court on Tuesday, where the CBI is expected to explain in detail what it has found.
The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. This paper focuses on the predicament of the minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal. It considers the responses of Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the refugees by colonising forest land: the project was sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal. However, this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees moved back into regions which formed a part of erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any government aid and planning, they colonised lands and created their own habitats. Many preferred to become squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding their lives is analysed in the paper.
Refugees and Displaced Persons
Who
A refugee is someone with a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, who is outside of his or her country of nationality and unable or unwilling to return. Refugees are forced from their countries by war, civil conflict, political strife or gross human rights abuses. There were an estimated 14.9 million refugees in the world in 2001 - people who had crossed an international border to seek safety - and at least 22 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had been uprooted within their own countries.
What
Enshrined in Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the right "to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." This principle recognizes that victims of human rights abuse must be able to leave their country freely and to seek refuge elsewhere. Governments frequently see refugees as a threat or a burden, refusing to respect this core principle of human rights and refugee protection.
Where
The global refugee crisis affects every continent and almost every country. In 2001, 78 percent of all refugees came from 10 areas: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Eritrea, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia and Sudan. Palestinians are the world's oldest and largest refugee population, and make up more than one fourth of all refugees. Asia hosts 45 percent of all refugees, followed by Africa (30 percent), Europe (19 percent) and North America (5 percent).
When
Throughout history, people have fled their homes to escape persecution. In the aftermath of World War II, the international community included the right to asylum in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1950, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to protect and assist refugees, and, in 1951, the United Nations adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a legally binding treaty that, by February 2002, had been ratified by 140 countries.
Why
In the past 50 years, states have largely regressed in their commitment to protect refugees, with the wealthy industrialized states of Europe, North America and Australia - which first established the international refugee protection system - adopting particularly hostile and restrictive policies. Governments have subjected refugees to arbitrary arrest, detention, denial of social and economic rights and closed borders. In the worst cases, the most fundamental principle of refugee protection, nonrefoulement, is violated, and refugees are forcibly returned to countries where they face persecution. Since September 11, many countries have pushed through emergency anti-terrorism legislation that curtails the rights of refugees.
How
Human Rights Watch believes the right to asylum is a matter of life and death and cannot be compromised. In our work to stop human rights abuses in countries around the world, we seek to address the root causes that force people to flee. We also advocate for greater protection for refugees and IDPs and for an end to the abuses they suffer when they reach supposed safety. Human Rights Watch calls on the United Nations and on governments everywhere to uphold their obligations to protect refugees and to respect their rights - regardless of where they are from or where they seek refuge.
Refugees
Every year millions of people around the world are displaced by war, famine, and civil and political unrest. Others are forced to flee their countries in order to escape the risk of death and torture at the hands of persecutors. The United States (U.S.) works with other governmental, international, and private organizations to provide food, health care, and shelter to millions of refugees throughout the world. In addition, the United States considers persons for resettlement to the U.S. as refugees. Those admitted must be of special humanitarian concern and demonstrate that they were persecuted, or have a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.
Each year, the State Department prepares a Report to Congress on proposed refugee admissions, then the U.S. President consults with Congress and establishes the proposed ceilings for refugee admissions for the fiscal year. For the 2005 fiscal year (i.e. October 1, 2004 - September 30, 2005), the total ceiling is set at 70,000 admissions and is allocated to six geographic regions: Africa (20,000 admissions), East Asia (13,000 admissions), Europe and Central Asia (9,500 admissions), Latin America/Caribbean (5,000 admissions), Near East/South Asia (2,500 admissions) and 20,000 reserve.
Joining a civilisation
January 04, 2008 New Delhi's National Museum houses an outstanding Harappan gallery, one that unfailingly attracts visitors. Not many, though, stop to wonder about the objects from Mohenjodaro and Harappa displayed there. If India — as we have been told — had lost her Indus heritage because most Indus sites in 1947 fell within the national boundaries of Pakistan, how has she retained such a superb collection of Indus artefacts from those 'lost' cities?
An answer to this can be excavated out of the treasure trove of files in the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This is because the ASI was centrally involved in tortuous negotiations through which undivided India's past was partitioned.
Why, though, were these negotiations so twisted and prolonged? The Partition Council itself, in October 1947, had resolved that museums would be divided on a territorial basis. This Council had been set up to deal with the administrative consequences of Partition, and decided on a wide range of issues, from revenue and domicile to records and museums. In addition to its decision concerning a territorial division of museums, the council also stipulated that when the territory of a province was partitioned, the museum exhibits of the provincial museums would also be physically divided. On this basis, the exhibits in the Lahore Museum which belonged to the united Province of Punjab before Partition, were to be split between East Punjab and West Punjab. This was straightforward enough.
More complicated though was the fate of objects that had been sent on temporary loan to places which, on August 15, 1947, happened to be on the wrong side of the border, far away from the original museums to which they belonged. On that date, we know that there were objects from Harappa, Taxila and Mohenjodaro in India, and in London as well. These were on loan to the Royal Academy of Arts. In its wisdom, therefore, the Partition Council ruled that all objects that had been removed for temporary display after January 1, 1947, were to be returned to the original museums.
For Pakistan, this did not pose any problems in relation to most museums, since nothing had been removed from their precincts after January 1. At Harappa, some antiquities had been taken out of its site museum in July and September 1946, and these they were willing to treat as belonging to India. The real problem, though, revolved around the antiquities of Mohenjodaro.
This is because, on the day of Partition, as many as 12,000 objects from Mohenjodaro were in Delhi. Since Mohenjodaro fell within the territory of Pakistan, the objects should have fallen in their share. However, India's negotiators maintained that these rightfully belonged to India because they had not been removed for after January 1, 1947 from the original museum (which was at Mohenjodaro) but came from Lahore. Similarly, they had not been removed for the purposes of temporary display but because, as early as 1944, the Director General of Archaeology, Mortimer Wheeler, had wanted to concentrate all the best Indus objects in a Central National Museum. It was in the absence of such a museum that it had been decided that Lahore Museum would act as a substitute, pending the establishment of a Central National Museum. Wheeler had continued to reiterate that "all objects from Mohenjodaro now on exhibition at Lahore are deposited by the Central Government on loan, and the Punjab Government has no lien upon them."
It was this — the question of intention about the future disposal of the objects in a Central National Museum — that was central to the contentious dispute around how the antiquities were to be divided. Several formulae were suggested and rejected, pressure tactics were used by both parties. In order to make things difficult, the West Punjab government postponed the actual handing over of East Punjab's share of the Lahore Museum holdings till such time that India had handed over to Pakistan their share from the central museums. And a final decision on the central museums remained pending till the Mohenjodaro matter was sorted out.
That India considered Indus objects to be an integral part of its own heritage was equally an issue. N.P. Chakravarti, who succeeded Wheeler as Director General in 1948, said it in so many
1
Interrogating Victimhood: East Bengali Refugee Narratives of Communal Violence
Nilanjana Chatterjee
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
Introduction
In this paper I am interested in analyzing the self-representation of Hindu East Bengali
refugees as victims of Partition violence so as to historicize and politicize their claims to inclusion
within India and their entitlement to humanitarian assistance in the face of state and public disavowal.
I focus on the main components of their narratives of victimhood, which tend to be framed in an
essentializing rhetoric of Hindu-Muslim difference and involve the demonization of "the Muslim." I
conclude with a brief consideration of the implications of this structure of prejudice for relations
between the two communities in West Bengal and the rise of Hindu fundamentalism nationwide. A
story I was told while researching East Bengali refugee agency and self-settlement strategies in West
Bengal bring these issues together for me in a very useful way.
Dr. Shantimoy Ray, professor of history and East Bengali refugee activist had been sketching
the history of the refugee squatter colony Santoshpur, referred to the enduring sense of betrayal, loss
and anger felt by East Bengalis after the partition of Bengal in 1947: becoming strangers in their own
land which constituted part of the Muslim nation of Pakistan, being forced to leave and rebuild their
lives in West Bengal in India, a "nation" that was nominally theirs but where they were faced with
dwindling public sympathy and institutional apathy. Spurred by their
bastuhara (homeless) condition-- a term which gained political significance and which referred to their Partition victimhood, groups
of middle and working class refugees began to "grab" land and resettle themselves in West Bengal.
Santoshpur was one such colony which was founded on the outskirts of Calcutta in 1950. Dr. Ray had
not mentioned anti-Muslim sentiment in the colony although India's Partition is synonymous with
sectarian violence.
Then he began to speak of an incident in 1964. A relic of the Prophet Muhammad was
rumoured to have been stolen from a shrine in Kashmir and this was followed by attacks on Hindus
in East Pakistan, and rioting against Muslims in India. Thousands of Hindu East Bengalis began to
seek refuge in West Bengal.
Some local Muslim families who still lived scattered around
the colony--they were mostly agricultural labourers, carpenters
--poor people, came to our compound in terror. Colony youth
had destroyed their huts and were out to slaughter them. I let
them in and locked our gate. Our household was overwhelmed.
We had over forty people in our care--bereft, wounded, fearing
for their lives. And then I saw the boys approaching. I knew them
well. We all knew each other in those days. I had seen them
grow up here. Kanu, Romesh, Madhab--they were unrecognizable
in their hatred. They were armed with sticks and knives and screaming
about avenging the murder of Hindus in East Pakistan. Slaughter
them as they slaughtered us, they shouted. I was stunned by
2
the insanity of their words. But I knew that if I did nothing,
they would kill the Muslims cowering behind my flimsy walls.
I opened the gate and shouted for quiet. I did not know if they
would strike me down but something made those boys hesitate.
Perhaps they were still a little in awe of an old schoolmaster.
I told Kanu to come forward and asked him when he had come
to this country. He looked bewildered and said impatiently, You
know it was 1950--during the riots in Barisal. Yes, I said and
did you lose any members of your family during your journey here?
No he replied, but others did. Those Muslim pigs made the rivers
of Bengal run with Hindu blood. And now they are doing it again.
Except this time we'll take care of them. His eyes were red and I
could see he would not humour me much longer. Quietly I asked
him how he had come to Calcutta. By boat, by bullock cart, on foot,
he shouted, what does that matter? And who drove the cart? Who
ferried the boat? I shouted out for the first time. His belligerent glare
wavered as he said, I remember one-- Rahim
chacha (uncle). So Rahimchacha saved your lives, did he? And now you have come to
repay him? Well, come in then. I stood back with the gate open.
Silence. One of the boys began to weep. Kanu stood still as stone
and then dropped to my feet. Forgive me, he mumbled. It is not my
forgiveness you need, I replied. Go home and let these poor people
go home as well. Gradually the crowd dispersed and the Muslims were
able to return to their neighbourhood (Interview with Shantimoy Ray,
June 1994).
One of the reasons Dr. Ray told me this was to explain the successful role of Communist
activists--mostly East Bengali refugees themselves--in blunting anti-Muslim sentiment among refugees
and directing their sense of victimhood away from the "communal" towards mobilization as "havenots"
for rehabilitation in keeping with their Marxist politics. But while he saw the youths' hesitation
as acknowledgment of the resilience of local bonds between Hindus and Muslims in East Bengal, I
was struck by the strong hostility toward Muslims evinced by these East Bengali refugees and their
selective memory. The fact that they had "forgotten" individual Muslim saviours speaks to the erasure
of the Muslim in their nostalgic conceptualization of East Bengal. Dr. Ray's appeal to their memories
and their consciences worked this time, but memories are sites of construction and contestation, and
in this case the refugees' attitudes about Muslims were structured as much by experience as by a
hegemonic discourse about "bad" Muslims in Bengali culture. In what follows I will deal with the
East Bengali refugees' construction of the image of Partition victimhood--the self-conscious
insistence on the historicity of their predicament as patriots and subjects of "communal" persecution,
which challenged their marginalization after Partition and legitimized their demand for restitution.
First a note on communalism. Unlike its Anglo-American sense which conveys community
feeling and obligation, in its Indian usage has a specific history. It refers to collective identity defined
by religious identification and expressed in chauvinist, exclusivist and oppositional terms vis-a-vis
other communities seen to be similarly defined. "Communalism not only produces an identification
with a religious community but also with its political, economic, social and cultural interests and
3
aspirations" (Kakar 1996: 13). The category "communalism" was a product of British Orientalist
ideology and practice which "systematically institutionalized a nation of communities, above all what
were deemed to be the two great communities of Hindus and Muslims" (Metcalf 1995: 951, Pandey
1990) through enumeration and classification which in turn shaped the emergence of interest groups,
their demands for political representation, employment quotas and so on, in the colonial period. In
addition to the reification of "Hindu" and "Muslim" as ahistorical essences, "communal strife--
conflict between people of different religious persuasions--was represented by the British colonial
regime in India as one of the most distinctive features of Indian society, past and present (Pandey
1990: 94) and attributed to instinctive difference and animosity. In postcolonial liberal-left discourse,
communal ideology and action is cast in negative terms and associated with intolerance.
This paper locates itself within two sets of ongoing academic discussions: one, which focuses
on the lived and remembered experiences of Partition as distinct from what might be called its "high
politics"(Sen 1990); and a second, more general one, which involves the exploration of refugee
agency and questions hegemonic representations of them as victims and passive objects of
intervention. While a review of gendered, subaltern and partial or fragmentary perspectives on
Partition history is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that these intellectual
approaches are productive in several ways: they challenge official nationalist history and examine the
operation of power/knowledge in postcolonial context, seek to recover the voices and silences of the
subordinated, prioritize the particular, and seek to develop a new language for understanding ethnic
and sectarian violence. While much of the new work in this vein is oriented to Punjab and North India
(Butalia 1998, Das 1990) Menon and Bhasin 1998, Pandey 1992), it has gradually expanded to
include perspectives on Bengal (Bose et al 2000, Chakrabarti 1990, Chakrabarty 1995, Chatterjee
1992, Ghosh 1998) and Assam (Dasgupta 2001), and is not merely confined to the experience of the
bhadralok
1. Another crucial referent for me is the anthropological literature on refugees which makes central the linkage of displacement to national belonging and exclusion, and refugee identity to
hegemonic nationalist ideologies; the construction of refugees not only through the languages of law
and humanitarianism but by the institutional management of "the refugee problem"; the silencing of
refugees by humanitarian rhetoric and practice as dehistoricized victims so that their own assessment
as historical actors is bypassed (Malkki 1996); and most importantly, the agency of the displaced--
appropriating, transforming and contesting hegemonic discourse and interventions.
Mistrusting refugees
1
The Bengali word bhadralok means a respectable person of middleclass background-- landowners or professionals, usually but not exclusively upper caste, and distinguished socially by
education, non-manual labour and a refined lifestyle.
The partition of British India and the emergence of the independent states of India and Pakistan
in 1947, is linked to the largest recorded population dislocation in history. The two-nation solution
negotiated by the competing nationalist movements led by the Congress Party and the Muslim League
produced a territorial settlement linked to the principle of religious majoritarianism. Pakistan came
to consist of the North West Frontier Provinces, Baluchistan, Sind, and West Punjab, separated by
4
nearly thousand miles from East Bengal and the Sylhet district of Assam. Though two-third of India's
Muslims became Pakistanis, both nations included numerically large yet vulnerable minorities. In
Punjab, nearly 12 million Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus were displaced and 1 million lost their lives
(Zolberg et al 1989) during the so-called "exchange of populations". In the case of Bengal however,
Partition was predated by sectarian violence in 1946 which spurred the initial two-way movement of
Hindus to West Bengal and Muslims to East Pakistan, and unlike the situation in Punjab, the flight of
Hindu refugees eventually overtook that of Muslims and has continued sporadically through the brutal
civil war in Pakistan in 1971 and the birth of Bangladesh into the present. Not only is Partition
associated with national and personal trauma for many Bengalis, the presence of over 8 million
refugees from former East Bengal irrevocably shaped West Bengal's political economy and popular
imagination and is seen to be symptomatic of Bengali decline.
The Government of India's conservative and disputed schematization of population dislocation
from East Pakistan over nearly a quarter century helps situate the refugees' own assessment of their
predicament. Among other things, it does not include the 9 million Hindu and Muslim refugees from
the war of 1970-71 in East Pakistan (Luthra 1971)
2. The United Nations estimated that the majority of these refugees returned home--an assessment disputed by the Government of West Bengal with
regard to the displaced Hindus (Goverment of West Bengal 1980).
Initially, the Government of India attempted to discourage the migration of East Bengalis to
India by exhorting them to pledge their allegiance to Pakistan, offering temporary and limited relief
rather than permanent rehabilitation, and signing a series of agreements with Pakistan aimed at
assuring the minorities of security and preventing mass migration. But as the migrations became a
persistent and irreversible reality, the state attempted to regulate them. The border in the east was left
open until 1952 to give people time to decide on their citizenship, and then passports were introduced
to reduce further migration from East Pakistan. As the population movement continued, an additional
barrier of permits and migration certificates was instituted in 1956. Then from 1958-64, the Indian
government tried to deter East Bengali Hindu migrants by refusing to recognize them as "refugees" and
thereby making them ineligible for relief and rehabilitation assistance. This changed with the riots of
1964 in East Pakistan, and the displaced were given permanent refuge in India through the civil war
of 1970-71 in Pakistan after which East Pakistan seceded as the independent state of Bangladesh.
Post-1971 migrants were declared ineligible for settlement assistance in India, a "deterrence" that
seems not to have affected migration in subsequent decades. Border watchers seem agreed that
displacement in the 1980s was mainly due to economic privation in Bangladesh and included Hindus
and Muslims, while the early 1990s saw a rise in the numbers of East Bengali Hindu victims of
communal violence following the demolition of the medieval Babri mosque in India by Hindu
nationalists. The chart is interesting, not only because it reflects the Indian state's failure to stop the
migration of East Bengalis, but a cursory reading of the causes of displacement indexes the latter to
diplomatic ruptures in Indo-Pakistan relations, tensions between East and West Pakistan which finally
culminated in the east's separatist movement for Bangladesh, and conflicts between Hindus and
Muslims in each nation which sparked retaliatory violence in the neighbouring country. This is a
representation of events which while not disputed in its details by the East Bengali Hindus refugees,
is linked by them to one originary cause--Partition on religious lines--which, they contend, made all
2
Muslims who migrate to India from Bangladesh are labeled "infiltrators" by the Indian state.
5
East Bengali Hindus homeless in a Muslim dominated nation.
Refugee rehabilitation was designated a national responsibility by the postcolonial Indian
government and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru explained in a public speech that this was not
merely a humanitarian act on the part of the state for the welfare of the displaced alone, but a
pragmatic one
Refugee Influx from East Pakistan, 1946-70
Year Reason for Influx Total
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
Noakhali riots
Partition
Police action in Hyderabad
Khulna, Barisal riots
idem
Agitation over Kashmir
Economic conditions, passport scare
Unrest over Urdu in E. Pakistan
Pakistan's Islamic constitution
Hazrat Bal incident in Kashmir
Elections in Pakistan
19,000
334,000
786,000
213,000
1,575,000
187,000
227,000
76,000
118,000
240,000
320,000
11,000
1,000
10,000
10,000
11,000
14,000
16,000
693,000
108,000
8,000
24,000
12,000
10,000
250,000
Total 5,283,000
on which the future and welfare of India depended (
The Statesman, 25 January 1948). But the primary object of this early initiative was the resettlement of refugees from West Pakistan. The national
leadership was ambivalent regarding its responsibilities toward East Bengalis--unwilling and unable
to block migration altogether, but afraid of "inviting" millions of East Bengali Hindus into the country
6
and alienating Pakistan as a result, undermining India's foundational principle of secularism, and
burdening the fragile economy. Nehru's letter to the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Bidhan Chandra
Roy reflects this quandary: "It is wrong to encourage any large-scale migration from East Bengal to
the West. Indeed, if such a migration takes place, West Bengal and to some extent the Indian Union
would be overwhelmed... If they come over to West Bengal, we must look after them. But it is no
service to them to encourage them to join the vast mass of refugees who can at best be poorly cared
for" (Chakraborty 1982: 106). A half century after Partition, reviews of the Central Government of
India's record on East Bengali refugee rehabilitation suggest that it was not only inadequate but
discriminatory in view of its policy toward West Punjabi refugees of Partition (Estimates Committee
1989, Govt.of West Bengal 1980).
The East Bengali migrants' access to rehabilitation assistance in India rested on their
recognition as "refugees"--and therefore eligibility for assistance by the state. A "refugee" or
"displaced person" was defined as A "person who was ordinarily resident in the territories now
comprising East Pakistan, but who on account of civil disturbances or the fear of civil disturbances
or on account of the partition of India has migrated" (Ministry of Rehabilitation 1957: 86). But while
acknowledging that "fear" of persecution or violence was a valid justification for migration, the
official definition was imprecise about the preconditions of fear that the state would accept as meriting
shelter in India. Increasingly the Indian government tuned its antenna to spectacular worse-case
scenarios in Pakistan and tried to ignore complaints of "everyday" insecurity--quick to declare that
it was "not aware that the East Bengali Hindus had problems" or it knew of no "incidents" in East
Pakistan to justify a population displacement (
Ananda Bazar Patrika, 21 February 1948). This euphemistically termed "incident" was an incontrovertible and immediate event of life-threatening
violence--the quintessential case of which was taken to be a "communal riot". In other words, the state
sought to distinguish between "voluntary" and "forced" migrants.
A distinction was also sought to be made between "economic" and "political" refugees. In
1948, the provincial Government of West Bengal issued a press note stating that they would
discontinue registering East Bengalis coming to the state as refugees because "whatever might have
been the cause of the exodus in the past, similar conditions do not now prevail. There is hardly any
communal disturbance in Eastern Pakistan... Therefore, the present exodus is due to economic causes"
(
Ananda Bazar Patrika, 26 June 1948). This assumption was challenged by the president of the East Bengal Minority Welfare Committee in Calcutta: "The Press Note... lightheartedly refers to the
'economic causes' of the steadily continuing exodus. These 'economic causes' are a direct
consequence of partition on a communal basis" (ibid). There can be little doubt that he considered the
government's hairsplitting, specious and his explicit linkage of refugee status to Partition victimhood
will be shown to be a part of a resistant discourse of entitlement among displaced East Bengali
Hindus.
The government's "mistrust" of the refugees (Daniel and Knudsen 1995) reflected that of the
general West Bengali population's. Cartoons appeared in Calcutta newspapers revealing public
apprehension regarding the costs of assisting a large population of East Bengali refugees. In one, West
Bengal was depicted lying in a hospital bed with various ailments including "refugee-itis". A worried
visitor was shown asking the attendant doctor, Chief Minister B.C. Roy, if the case was "hopeless"
(
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 14 January 1950). West Bengalis associated the influx of thousands of East Bengali refugees with every malaise from overcrowding, squalor, social disintegration and soaring
crime rates to unemployment and the rising cost of living. It was anticipated that the Hindu refugees
would stoke communal violence against the Muslims of West Bengal or be manipulated by political
7
parties seeking constituencies. And the refugees' acts of trespass on private and state property as they
attempted to resettle themselves, only confirmed popular misgivings. Communist workers trying to
build up a following among the local poor and the refugee testify to the anger of the rural West Bengali
landless over the distribution of precious agricultural land among the refugees, and occasions when
refugees were prevented by locals from settling on land that the government had allocated for their
resettlement (Interview with Bijoy Majumdar, 1988). There were several clashes between industrial
worker striking for higher wages and improved working conditions, and refugees eager to work for
a pittance. Against this background, it becomes clear that the West Bengali joke that back "home"
every East Bengali was a
zamindar (landlord) reflected suspicion about the authenticity of the refugees claims to be victims. But there was considerable sympathy as well which acknowledged this
public reluctance to engage with the humanitarian burden signalled by East Bengali claims of
victimhood. Another cartoon by the same artist whose work I referred to earlier showed a swordwielding
Liaquat Ali Khan, the Premier of Pakistan, standing over mutilated bodies while a
Congressman pulled away in a boat while pleading with folded hands: "There is no space, this boat
is small." It was an unambiguous representation of the East Bengalis as victims--both of physical
violence in Muslim Pakistan and of epistemological denial in India.
The refugee discourse of "Historic Rights"
East Bengali migrants were quick to counter the power imbalance inherent in the state's
attempt to determine eligibility and the reservations on the part of a section of the local population
regarding the validity of their claim to refugee status. The politico-social category of the "refugee"
and its Bengali synonym
sharanarthi (someone who seeks refuge from a greater power ) were initially the topic of intense debate. For many East Bengali Hindu migrants the image conveyed was a
derogatory one, conflated with the act of begging, dependence on the charity and compassion of
strangers and demeaning supplication. As one East Bengali commentator noted, "Those who roamed
the streets of Dhaka soliciting support for the Partition didn't even dream that, as a reward for their
gesture in agreeing to leave, they would be forever labelled 'refugees', a word that does more
violence to the idea of a home than any other in any language"(The Sunday Statesman, 2 March 1986).
But increasingly, it was this word "refugee" with its powerful connotations of loss, that was
appropriated by the displaced as they collectively sought to represent their interests on a political
platform. A pamphlet issued to commemorate a refugee convention organized by the Refugee Central
Rehabilitation Council--the refugee wing of the Revolutionary Socialist Party in West Bengal--makes
it clear that the migrants were determined to establish their entitlement to protection and assistance
in India as an inalienable right--not subject to the host people or government's pity or whim:
The East Bengalis expelled from Pakistan, can demand to
build their homes on every inch of Indian soil on the strength
of their
adhikar (own right). They are not sharanarthi (supplicants) but
kshatipuraner dabidar (claimants to compensation for losses) (RCRC n.d.: 1).
Consider the following exerpt from a pamphlet entitled "
Aitihashik Adhikar" or "Historic Rights", published by the East Bengal Minority Welfare Association which advocated refugee rights for post-
1971 migrants who were denied state assistance.
The partition left us homeless, bereft of everything. We did
not fight for independence in order to lead the lives of
8
beggars. Those of us who cannot remain in East Pakistan are
not doing anything wrong by seeking shelter in India. Why
should the police push us back? Why should we live in hovels
next to rail-tracks? Why should we be the object of people's
mercy? ... it is only right that those who struggled
and sacrificed for independence be repaid (EBMWA n.d.: 8-9).
Rehabilitation with dignity was not to be seen as an act of charity but as the repayment of a national
debt to the East Bengali Hindus represented in this passage as historic agents--freedom-fighters and
victims of Partition which consigned them to minorityhood and therefore subordination in a Muslimmajority
state.
Identification as a refugee was important since this entitled them to relief and rehabilitation
aid from the state or a least recognition of their special history and needs. It came to be used
interchangeably with "displaced person" and "migrant" which are part of the official vocabulary of
humanitarian assistance in India; and also with the more evocative "
udbastu" and "bastuhara" of Bengali public discourse. "
Bastu" means foundation of a house, and is associated with originary, foundational, ancestral and sacred. The prefix "
ut" means "out of" and thus the word "udbastu" signals loss of home and by extension homeland; as does "
bastuhara." Both these no longer simply index a lack of shelter but bear the weight of the trauma of Partition. What is significant is that the
migrants appropriated the signifiers, investing it with a positive repertoire of meanings, turning a lack
into a strength, a powerful moral claim to victimhood which would have to be assuaged. Especially
with the transformation of the displaced into voters, those who turned to the Left for redress took to
the streets with the slogan "
Amra kara? Bastuhara!" ("Who are we? Refugees!") a signal of their presence and predicament. And in later years those who continued to define themselves as "refugees"
did so in a spirit of critique, as a commentary on the failure of the government to rehabilitate them.
In addressing the ideas embedded in the concept "historic rights", I would like to talk briefly
about the refugees' representation of themselves as exemplary nationalists and move on to considering
the question of Partition victimhood. I draw here on documented evidence such as public speeches,
press notes, letters to newspapers
3, pamphlets/circulars, depositions to "fact" finding commissions, as well as personal interviews and auto-biographical or literary sources. The text of a letter to the
editor of the Bengali-language newspaper,
Ananda Bazar Patrika in 1948 by self-proclaimed East Bengali refugee is revealing:
The dissection of India and division of Bengal has prevented
the enjoyment of our hard-won independence. Hindus and Sikhs
have left their homes in the Punjab, North West Frontier
Provinces, Sind, and Baluchistan and the Indian government
have helped to evacuate them and are trying to solve the
complicated problem of resettling them. But it is our
3
The readership of papers like the Ananda Bazar Patrika and the Amrita Bazar Patrika which were based in Calcutta, continued to span the two Bengals as late as 1950-1. They
published news on and letters from East Bengalis, and were perceived as a window into the
condition of the Hindus in post-partition East Pakistan--where they were first censored and then
banned for inciting communal animosity.
9
misfortune that those who have undertaken the greatest
atmatyag
(self sacrifice) and given the most blood in the independence movement are neglected at home and abroad.
The West Bengal government is ashamed to think of East Bengali
Hindus. The Government of India neither are nor feel the need
to be informed about them. And this, even though the first to
dream of freedom was the sage Bankimchandra and the first
general in the battle for independence was Bengal's
Surendranath. (5 January 1948)
In the 19th century, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee instructed Bengalis through his historical, nationalist
novels into a consciousness of themselves as a proud and virile
jati or race, capable of future greatness. Surendranath Banerjee, also mentioned in the letter, was a founder of the Indian Association
which later merged into the Indian National Congress--the political organization which dominated the
nationalist movement for an independent India. By invoking these two names, the writer was tapping
into a self-image that is widely prevalent among all Bengalis--that as torchbearers to the rest of India,
they had initiated the nationalist movement against the British, radicalized it, and lost the most in its
cause. Bengali intellectuals and activists had been prominent in the nationalist movement in the 19th
and early 20th centuries, but in the 1930s, Bengal's leadership was eclipsed by the Gandhian faction
in the Congress. With the attrition of Bengal's power, developments like Partition came to be cast by
the people of the region as an anti-Bengali plot or rationalized as a sacrifice willingly borne by the
East Bengalis for the greater good of India
4. The argument continued that they had struggled for a life of emancipation in India, not of subordination in a Muslim nation not of their own choosing, and
therefore had a right to live in a Hindu homeland.
The patriot proved to be an evocative signifier in terms of which East Bengali Hindus made
claims about the distinctiveness and exemplariness of their nationalism, contradicting the disparaging
allegations of non-migrants and Indian officialdom, that migration was an act of passive cowardice
and burdensome disservice to the inhabitants of both India and Pakistan. The self-referential use of
the allied image of the
shahid or martyr was also a authenticating gesture that drew on the traditional Indic concept of "generative sacrifice" (Das and Nandy 1985: 178) as and projected East Bengali
Hindus as historical agents to whom the nation owed a collective debt--asylum and resettlement.
Finally, this discourse of patriotism and sacrifice included each East Bengali Hindu in its address,
serving to unify and mobilize the refugees into a community of solidarity and expectation by smoothing
over the unevennesses of caste, class and interest so that every refugee became the historical heir of
the
swadhinata sangrami or "freedom fighter." The ultimate act as true nationalists was to go to India- -the destiny of Hindu East Bengali refugees who must abandon their ancestral homes for a Hindu
4
Having played a key role in the anti-colonial movement in Bengal, the Hindu elite had hoped to replace the British in the postcolonial order and rejected the idea that a united Bengal
would be included in Pakistan, unwilling to be subjected to the rule of a Muslim majority in the
province. Thus the partition of Bengal was actively proposed by West Bengali politicians--of both
the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. And while Bakarganj was the only East Bengal district to
endorse the partition campaign, many East Bengalis considered the redrawing of boundaries
preferable to losing undivided Bengal to Pakistan.
10
homeland of the spirit. A doggerel that a refugee interviewee remembered being taunted with by
Muslims in the days leading up to Partition, drew on this structure of feeling: (Interview with
Mahendra Mondal from Barisal, 1989)
On the excuse of Noakhali,
5 They made Bihar into Karbala
6. Bihar has become Hindustan.
Bengal has become Pakistan.
Go away--each to his own address.
The refugees as Partition victims
As we have seen earlier, in the government's scheme of things "partition" was presented as
the reason for the refugee influx of 1947 alone, "communal riots" were recorded as the official reason
for the migration of 1950--each episode in the massive and protracted flight from East Pakistan was
related to a different cause. The reason for this was to attempt to establish a sliding scale of true or
deserving displacement to ease the state's humanitarian responsibility. But in the refugees' own
accounts of their displacement it was "
desh bhag," literally the "division of the homeland" or Partition which is the dominant reference. There is of course the detail of year and "immediate" cause,
but as a schoolmaster interviewee pointed out, the "underlying cause" for the insecurity of Bengali
Hindus in East Pakistan and their ultimate exodus was Partition (Interview with Nirmal Chandra
Sarkar, 1989). I found when I asked my interviewees the question, "Why did you leave your
desh (homeland)?", the answer was often on the lines of "After
desh bhag we could no longer remain there", and sometimes an outraged "Don't you know!" I was seen to be casting doubt on what the
refugees assumed to have been established beyond question--that the East Bengalis were victims of
the partition of India on the fundamental basis of religion, which uprooted them psychologically and
then physically. Was I trying to imply that they had left their ancestral homes "for fun?" Partition
functioned as a structuring device, describing one original trauma and a shared experience of
misfortune. It provided a central and awful image that had the power to explain the migrants'
collective predicament. The description of their victimhood in terms of Partition-induced
homelessness, minorityhood and Muslim communalism reflected their opposition to the Indian
leadership's scepticism about their allegations of post-Partition insecurity in East Pakistan and
reluctance to accord them refugee status.
Saadat Hasan Manto wrote on a note of mordant prophecy after the bloody partition of Punjab
in 1947, "...India was free. Pakistan was free from the moment of its birth. But man was a slave in both
countries, of prejudice, of religious fanaticism, of bestiality, of cruelty" (1987: 6).This equation of
the moment of independence with the unfreedom of fear and prejudice, of nationalism with exile
affords us an insight into the condition of insecurity and degradation experienced by the religious
minorities in India and Pakistan. Nationalisms with their declared affiliation to a place, a people and
a past arrogate truth exclusively to themselves and assign falsehood and inferiority to others. The
presence of 40 million Muslims in India, and over 12 million Hindus in Pakistan--as visible religious
5
This is a reference to the Noakhali riots of 1946 in East Bengal. 6
The Imam Husein was martyred at Karbala--a powerful symbol of the triumph of evil over good for Shia Muslims--and a shorthand for the slaughter of innocents.
11
minorities, proved to be a source of friction as nationally guaranteed rights came to be equated with
rights guaranteed only to "nationals," or the majority community. And the Hindu minority in Pakistan
and the Muslims in India came to be perceived as political misfits or worse--enemies of the state.
The minorities in Western Punjab have known at their cost
what partition means, and if there is any such thing as
political experience, we should be under no illusions
about our future. ...there is a fundamental flaw in the
policy of the Government of India. The division has been
accepted on the basis of the two-nation theory which
obviously implies the elimination of non-nationals from
each state... That being so, the minorities of East Bengal
have a right to demand a place in India. ...We are tired of
the platitudinous effusions of leaders who in most cases do
not even live here among us (A.B.Chaudhuri of Dacca,
Amrita Bazar Patrika
, 12 March 1948). There was a creeping awareness of fear among us, as if we
were criminals of some sort ...Our position was like
that of a servant suspected of theft. Even if he is innocent,
he has no way of asserting that. He has to submit to being
beaten up, and often has to lose his job. The misconceptions
of a few leaders turned millions of people into servants.
(Gangopadhyay 1987:49)
After Partition the
babus of the village left. The shastras (holy texts) say that the upper castes are the head of Hindu society and
we Namasudras
7 are the hands and feet. How long does a headless body survive? In our village in Khulna, we bit the earth and clung on.
But the Muslims stole our land, cut our paddy, refused to pay for fish
we caught. The police called us
kafir when we went to complain and beat us. They told us we were sitting on land which was rightfully theirs,
eating food that was theirs. (Prafulla Gharami of Khulna, who left with
his family after the riots of 1964 in East Pakistan.)
The Muslims became very arrogant after Partition. They said,
Charaler po
(son of an untouchable), come eat with us. Let your girls marry our sons. Then the son of the President of the village union--he was
Muslim--molested one of our
Namasudra girls. Someone from our side could not take that and the president's house burnt down. Of course
after that we were finished. The Muslims told us they would teach
us how to enjoy ourselves in Pakistan and attacked the Hindu
neighbourhood. Many were murdered. Some of us hid in the canal
7
Low caste peasants and fishermen. 12
holding water hyacinth over our heads. We heard one woman drowned
her crying baby because she did not want her other children to be
found and killed. That night we left. We managed to escape to Narayanganj
where there were more Hindus and then to India. This was five years after
Pakistan (Interview with Jadunath Mondal from Bariba, Dacca, 1988).
We came after
Joi Bangla8.You may ask why we stayed so long. Bangladesh is my homeland. I come from a family of schoolmasters.
I was determined to prove their two-nation theory wrong. We
withstood every riot and humiliation. I worked in the language
movement because I believed that Muslim or Hindu, we are
Bengalis. My son worked for the Awami League
9. He was killed by Pakistani soldiers. They castrated his dead body. So many
people were slaughtered. We became refugees in India but I
went back after Mujib became leader of free Bangladesh. I
could not stay. The Pakistanis are gone but the
maulavis (religious teachers) have poisoned the minds of Bengali Muslims. Bangladesh
is an Islamic state. The two-nation theory was right. (Interview with
Nirmal Chandra Sarkar of Faridpur, 1989).
From the available public "evidence" it seems East Bengal Hindus left their ancestral homes for
contingencies of varying compulsions and at different times because of riots, the fear of riots,
economic privation, political targeting, insecurity about the maintenance of their cultural lives, an
attrition in their numbers, the existence of pre-partition family and business connections in India--
because they felt they had no choice.
8
The term means "Hail Bangladesh!" and refers to Bangladeshi independence from West Pakistan.
9
The Awami League was the Bengali party which led the nationalist movement for an independent Bangladesh, and included Muslims and Hindus among its members.
Their recourse to Partition as the historical explanation for their victimhood as a minority and
then a displaced population has to be seen as partially determined by their experience of migration
laws which created a hierarchy of acceptable causes for migration in order to determine aid-worthy
"authentic" refugees and by which logic, Partition, was represented as the definitive instance of
sectarian violence. By linking themselves to this paradigmatic "communal incident"--the refugees
constructed themselves as "involuntary" political refugees, dramatized and legitimized their condition.
They were also responding to the strand of public scepticism they encountered in West Bengal which
dismissed their accounts of Partition-related displacement as exaggerated, and unreliable. According
to this mode of thinking, the reason for the migration of East Bengalis was not life-threatening
13
violence. It was in this vein of distrust that a prominent Calcutta intellectual wrote "Exodus" to
disabuse Hindus of the widely held belief, "that most of the Muslims in Pakistan are communal
fanatics and that all Hindus were forced to leave East Pakistan due to riots" (Maitreye Devi 1974: ii).
After the 1964 riots in Dhaka and Narayanganj, she visited the refugee resettlement site at
Dandakaranya in central India in search of people who had been "directly involved" in a riot. She
reported a "typical" exchange in which an elderly refugee woman answered her question "Why did
you come to India?" by saying, "For fear of the
mian (Muslim men), what else?" Maitreyee Devi's next query was "What did they do?" and the answer, "They kidnap our daughters, burn our homes, stab
us, kill us"--the response particularly remarkable for the use of the present tense. She continued,
"Were any of your relations' or friends' houses burnt?" and was told, "No, nothing happened in our
village, but in other villages there was trouble." Maitreye Devi concluded that "socio-economic
reasons were the real cause of the exodus, more than riots" (ibid). In rejecting the migrants' claim to
be victims of violence as symptomatic of extreme prejudice, and untrue, the writer was not only
minimizing the gravity of their predicament in Pakistan but in effect, questioning their eligibility to
refugee status.
The refugees, for their part, insisted that Partition set in motion a telos of annihilation of the
Hindu minority community in Muslim East Pakistan (and in Bangladesh). The president of the
revolutionary nationalist organization Anusilan Samiti
10, an East Bengali, wrote in the Ananda Bazar Patrika
: Ever since independence on the basis of partitioned rather
than a united India, the condition of the minorities of
Pakistan is becoming unbearable with every passing day. If
something is not done soon the minorities of East Pakistan
will cease to exist (
astittwa bilop) The wealth, lives and honour (
dhon, pran, man) of the minority community in East Pakistan are endangered in every way. (Nalini Ranjan
Bhattacharya, 2 January 1948)
This attribution of a sort of murderous intentionality to the Muslim majority was, as critics
contended, contradicted by accounts of Hindu-Muslim friendship, of aid and succour, of political
solidarity during the anti-Urdu language movement in East Pakistan and the struggle for the liberation
of Bangladesh. In other words, inter-community relationships which depended on bonds other than
those of religious affiliation, and identities which encompassed religion but were not reduced to it.
But since the characterization of the political effects of Partition as physical obliteration and cultural
erasure, a planned and certain assault on the wealth, life and honour of the Hindu community was a
recurrent one, it is necessary to examine the key elements of this narrative of victimhood.
(I)Threat to
dhon (wealth) In the years immediately after Partition there was a movement toward redressing the stark
10
At the turn of the century in Bengal, anti-colonial organizations with a terroristnationalist agenda such as
Jugantar and Anusilan Samiti emerged as an militant alternative to the moderate politics of the Congress. They were ultimately absorbed into the Congress as radical
cells, or formed Left parties outside it like the Revolutionary Socialist Party.
14
inequalities of wealth in East Pakistan--though the Muslim underclasses may not have benefitted as
much as the West Pakistani and to a smaller extent, the emerging Bengali Muslim middleclasses. As
part of its programme of national reconstruction, the Pakistan government took steps to abolish
landlordism without compensation, to review the process of granting licenses for industries and
commercial ventures, raise income tax, and requisition houses for refugees--all of which hit the Hindu
propertied classes the hardest and not unexpectedly, drew strong complaints of discrimination. The
minority community also felt itself to be singled out for routine attacks on their property and economic
security by the majority community--which the perpetrators might have described as redistributive
justice--the non-payment of rent, boycott of Hindu businessmen and professionals, and larceny. The
minority's attempts at obtaining redress were apparently less than successful and only reinforced their
conviction that the "criminals" were backed by the authority of the state.
In his speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 28 March 1952, Bhupendra Kumar
Dutta, a "Minority member" stated the "basic problem" to be one of "livelihood":
Practically all sources of livelihood have been ...closed to
them. Government jobs, jobs in private firms, they are
not to have. In the professions there has been a silent
campaign of boycott.. Control shops, licenses for motor
buses and taxis the Hindus have been quickly deprived of.
Formerly, some of them had agencies for various oil companies,
The Imperial Tobacco Company ...and such other firms. They
have almost all changed hands. If they are professors or school
masters, as soon as a fresh graduate is available to replace an
experienced M.A., some fault is found with the latter, in the long
run he would be accused of anti-State propensities. If he does not
get into other troubles, he must, give up his job and run for safety
across the border.
Even the poorer folk, the peasant, the fisherman, prove no exceptions.
A peasant is busy ploughing by a riverside, a constable appears and
asks him to ferry him across, the peasant points to a bamboo
bridge nearby, the peasant gets a sound drubbing not only there
but subsequently in the police camp. A constable asks a fisherman
for some fish for the Havildar and when somebody takes up
the fisherman's case for payment the intermediary is taken to the
thana on a false charge and given such a beating he is rendered
disabled for the rest of his life. A villager's paddy is attempted to be
reaped by some neighbours of the other community. For resisting
them, he is falsely charged by a sub-inspector, not produced before
any court but assaulted severely. None of these are merely imaginary
instances. They are all concerned with the Scheduled Castes
11 and happened in recent months around various Police camps near
11
Name given to low castes and "untouchables" in India following their inclusion in a schedule or classificatory list.
15
Gopalganj inspite of the Delhi agreement. (Indian Commission of Jurists,
1965: 13-14.)
The deliberate inclusion of lower caste Hindus in the constituency of injured minority is interesting
because a class-based analysis of anti-Hindu sentiment is sought to be deflected by positing the
conflict in purely religious terms. In the early phase of the migrations--through the 1950s, the majority
of the refugees were upper and middleclass in origin--landlords, a wide range of rentier interests,
people in the services, large entrepreneurs and to a lesser extent petty traders and artisans. Peasants
made up the bulk of migrants after 1964. And while some workingclass refugees remembered their
displacement as driven by the migration of the
babus--on whom they were dependent for patronage, others attributed it to their experience of plunder by Muslims who coveted their property--the product
of their industriousness.
(II) Threat to
pran (life) These accounts were primarily tied to Hindu-Muslim riots in East Bengal in 1946, 1949-50,
1964 and the war of 1970-7, as well as routine and random acts of violence. East Bengali refugees
for the most part were very aware of the retaliatory character of the cycles of violence on either side
of the border but in many tellings the aggression attributed to Muslims in Pakistan was described as
opportunistic, incited by baseless propaganda and fueled by communal exclusionism. According to
Prafulla Kumar Chowdhury of Dacca, an East Bengali journalist,
The Muslims wanted an Islamic state all along right from the time
of the League. They formed the provincial government in 1946
when the Great Calcutta Killing took place and thousands of
Hindus were massacred. Then again in Noakhali. In 1950, after
they got Pakistan, they claimed that Muslims were being murdered
in India and began to murder the Hindus in Barisal, Dacca, Chittagong.
I remember papers like the
Azad saying that Hindus cannot be trusted, they would kill their mothers and fathers. They would
throttle Muslims to death if not watched. Our family left then but
the genocide continued. In 1964, they used the excuse of the
theft of a relic from Kashmir to incite communal violence in Khulna.
And of course during the war of independence of Bangladesh, the
West Pakistani army targeted Hindus as anti-nationals. Even after
the Awami League's victory, Muslim communalists have gained
the upper hand and Hindus are still under suspicion (Interview
with Prafulla Kumar Chowdhury, 1988).
Other commentators were more nuanced in their analysis of violence against the Hindu minority in
East Pakistan, arguing that non-Bengali Muslims were the actual perpetrators of such violence, or that
"reactionaries" used the "weapon of communalism" to destroy East Bengali unity and the struggles
for social justice. But in general, Muslim nationalism and mobilization for statehood--such that led
to the birth of Pakistan and Bangladesh--was perceived as having disastrous consequences for
Hindus.In the refugees' narratives of victimhood, the violence they were subjected to was the work
of outsiders to the local community, raging mobs, criminals, representatives of the state, and
16
treacherous neighbours--the impression conveyed was that no Muslim could be trusted. Thus the
Muslim who helped the Hindu was cast as an exceptional figure--isolated and inexplicable, implying
survival to be an exceptional outcome as well. A deposition to a "fact-finding" committee by a refugee
named Mohendra Dhali conveys this impression.
I witnessed the terrible mass killing by Muslim rioters at Khulna
Launch Ghat on 3rd January 1964 when I arrived there in a
launch from the village. .I was with Sushil Kumar Biswas, a
doctor...and Faik Mia, a locally well-known person. It was
dark in town, which frightened us. ..We saw at least fifty men
dressed in black with daggers in hand waiting on the jetty to
start killing Hindus. We were about sixty among three to
four hundred Muslim passengers...We wore lungis for it was
unthinkable to move in public in Khulna in Hindu attire. We
begged Faik Mia to save our lives..We were on the deck from
where I saw a few Muslims drag one Hindu on to the jetty where
they butchered him with a dagger... there were innumerable
dead bodies. Then came two notorious
goondas (criminals) of Khulna--and Faik too lost all hope for us. ..one cut me on the left
side of the neck with a dagger. Had it not been for Faik again
who caught the dagger in motion, I would have been slain. Dr.
Biswas and I jumped into the river ..hiding ourselves behind
water plants for two miles. We saw villages burning. I believe
that night on the Khulna Launch Ghat alone Hindus numbering
two to three hundred were killed. The river water turned red..@
He pointed out the cut on his neck to the investigator. (Indian
Commission of Jurists 1965: 68).
The refugees tales are of rivers reeking of rotting corpses; factories bolted from the outside
to prevent the escape of panic-stricken workers and set ablaze; faceless, marauding Muslim mobs
screaming that they would make shoes out of the skins of Hindus; the "disappearance" of radical
Hindu student activists who were involved in the Bangladeshi nationalist movement; of men and
women bayonetted to death in front of their families during the civil war and of attacks on trains and
river as terrified Hindus sought to flee to India. The image of the Muslim as aggressor is leached of
historicity and particularity, reified as a Hindu-hating barbarian--a knife-wielding, blood-thirsty
"butcher." A typical example of this was an account, which with minor variations, involved a
Muslim's physical assault on a Hindu woman--her helplessness signified by her pregnancy or the
infant at her breast, which also identify her as a Hindu man's property and means of reproduction,
followed by the slashing off of her breasts, and the act of placing the foetus or child at the dead
woman's mutilated nipple. This was taken to be a cruel travesty of the nurturing implication of a
"normal" maternal gesture, as the woman and the dead or dying infant were converted to symbols of
the physical, generational annihilation of the Hindu "race" or
jati. Only one ex-refugee admitted to actually having witnessed such a scene, others ascribed it to hearsay--but in choosing to retell it to me,
most insisted that the attack was an established practice. The narratives of physical violence against
East Bengali Hindus were not only a register of the refugees' cultural prejudice, of the effects of
political mobilization on sectarian lines during the anti-colonial, nationalist movement, but also an
17
index of their insecurity as a minority. And the reiteration that their predicament was one of lifethreatening
insecurity--a historical correlate of Muslim communalism--constructed the refugees as
political sufferers.
(III) Threat to
maan (honour) In his semi-autobiographical chronicle of refugee rehabilitation, the Indian Commissioner of
Rehabilitation, Hironmoy Bandyopadhyay described an encounter with an East Bengali refugee while
touring a relief camp in Jalpaiguri in 1948. He asked the man why he left East Bengal when there were
no outward signs of unrest. The man burst out: "It is true we have experienced no beatings or murder,
but all people do not have the same degree of endurance." He then recounted his reason for leaving
East Bengal. One evening, he had heard a loud call outside his house, "
Ho korta (master of the house)! Are you home?" Thinking it was a neighbour or distinguished member of the village he stepped out
and was surprised to see a Muslim tenant. The man smiled, "
Korta, the English have left, the country is free, and we have our Pakistan. So I came to make friends with you." Angered by his tenant's loud
tone of voice and familiar manner, the man remembered how, not too long ago, these very same people
would have stood ten yards away to pay their respects. But it was "the time of Pakistan," so he
pretended pleasure. The tenant proceeded to walk right in to the man's home "as if the house was his
own property--and not to the sitting room outside, but right inside to the sleeping quarters." Sitting
down on the man's bed without his permission he said in an unmistakeable tone of threat, "
Korta, this is Pakistan. Don't forget (and he no longer used the respectful
apni but the familiar tumi) we are no longer your inferiors (
chhoto). Remember, from now on we have to be friends as equals." The refugee exclaimed accusingly to Bandyopadhyay, "After all this, how can you still expect us to stay in
Pakistan!" (Bandopadhyay 1970: 13-4).
For the
bhadralok, escape to West Bengal seemed the only way to "keep face"--avoid assimilation and humiliation by those they had considered their social inferiors. This was also
partially true of the gentry of smaller means, and even of the Namasudras who had their own stories
of Muslim "insolence": Muslims proposing inter-community marriages; contravening pollution laws
by "accidentally" touching the Hindus' bodies, their food and water, or entering their homes or ritual
spaces; "tricking" them into eating proscribed food (beef); speaking without deference--all these
turned out to be common complaints. Minority organizations repeatedly drew the Pakistani
administration's attention to threats' to the Hindu community's religious integrity. An example of such
a "threat" was the text of an anonymous letter sent to the residents of Newa village from Bare Bara-Id,
both in the Narayanganj subdivision of Dacca and published in the
Ananda Bazar Patrika, 4 January 1948 at the urging of the Dacca District Minority Association.
Become Musalman and perform
namaz12 ...There are many educated Musalman amongst us who wish to
marry your girls. Become Musalman and eat beef. It
is very tasty. Let us know whether you will vacate your
houses soon. If you do not, come to our League office to
accept the faith of Islam and eat beef. We will take your
women, you may have ours. We will visit your houses,
12
The formal prayer Muslims are required to perform five times a day. 18
you will come to ours. Signed--your well wishers.
The destruction and defiling of temples and shrines and threats of conversion, were seen as attacks
on the very core of Hindu identity and integrity, and there was a heightened sensitivity to the
experience of religious minorityhood or "second-class citizenship" in an Islamic state. The obsession
with this compromised condition are evident from the many comparisons of the Jinnah Fund--to which
all Pakistani citizens were expected to donate as part of the effort to rehabilitate the refugees from
India--with the
jizya or poll tax which used to be paid by non-Muslims in medieval times to the Islamic state for the privilege of living under its protection. The Hindus also emphasized their sense
of religious subordination by referring to themselves as
zimmis--to denote subjecthood, and to communal riots as
jehad. According to a pamphlet issued on behalf of the refugees from Noakhali in India, "Repeated declarations that Pakistan is an Islamic State make both the Hindus and the Muslims
think alike that Pakistan is ultimately meant exclusively for the Muslims" (
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 21 December 1948).The implication of this was that the migration of the East Bengali Hindus was
constructed as inevitable.
Besides religion, the other elements of their identity that the East Bengali Hindus said they
were anxious to protect from Islamic influence were their historical and cultural achievements.
Pakistan was seen as a betrayal of secular and/or Hindu nationalist aspirations and labelled a
"theocratic" state bound to destroy and deny Bengali Hindu culture and nationalism, and to celebrate
Muslim victories. Thus Dhirendranath Roy Chowdhury told me, "The Barisal town hall had been
named in the memory of Aswini Kumar Dutta whose leadership in the nationalist movement forced
the British to revoke the first partition of Bengal in 1911. After 1947, the Pakistani authorities made
that glorious symbol of Bengali nationalism into an office for the Muslim National Guard and the
Ansars
13. They butchered a cow in the courtyard" (Interview with Dhirendranath Roy Chowdhury, 1988).There was no doubt in his mind that the choice of that space was deliberate and the act a brutal
reminder that the Muslims of East Bengal had won the struggle for independence. The refugees
boasted that East Bengal once had the most advanced and numerous institutions of learning in India--
a pre-eminence that they feared would be dismantled with the introduction of Islamic education, the
supercession of traditional Hindu teachers, and the marginalization of the Bengali language in favour
of Urdu. A story that is symptomatic of their cultural and nationalist anxiety concerns the rewriting of
history books. In keeping with the new post-independence syllabus students in Pakistan were
apparently asked the following examination question: "What role did the
kafirs (non-believers) play in helping the British gain an empire in India?" (Interview with Rasaraj Goswami, 1988). The
imputation of "treacherous" collaboration with British imperialists was perceived as a calculated slur
on their "nationalist" heritage.
The "chastity" of married and unmarried Hindu women seemed to symbolize most potently,
the honour, exclusivity and continuity of the community--and to represent its site of transgression.
Violence against women featured widely in the Hindu minority's complaints of ill-treatment in
Pakistan and as a matter of concern in West Bengal--the sexual possession of Hindu women by Muslim
men being seen to stand for Muslim domination, "miscegenation," the loss and humiliation of the
(male) Hindu self. Such acts compromised the "purity" of the community, contravening prescriptions
enjoining endogamy. When Suresh Chandra Banerjee, President of the West Bengal Provincial
13
Muslim para-police made up of volunteers and constituted after the birth of Pakistan. 19
Congress Committee apprised party activists in the state on the condition of Hindus in East Bengal,
he claimed that as an East Bengali himself--albeit one who had been living in Calcutta for twenty
years--he could vouch that they were leaving because they "prized their self respect and the honour
of their women above everything else" (
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 October 1948).The violent acts commonly referred to were rape, abductions, forced marriages and the deliberate flouting of rules of
seclusion. For example much was made of rumours that Muslim boys were taking photographs of
Hindu girls on their way to school--the appropriation of the image by the camera's lens being
construed as violation by the gaze. The "outraging of female modesty" was described by the refugees
as an attack on the individual Hindu and the community as a whole, since women were "responsible
for the continuity of tradition and the race" (Interview with Prafulla Kumar Chowdhury, 1988). It
bears noting here, that the rhetoric of sexual assault was not so much concerned with the plight of the
women in question--who were usually abandoned if they returned to the Hindu community--as with
the protection of patriarchal Hindu society.
The dissolution of social barriers in a classist-casteist, denominationally segregated world
ostensibly in favour of the erstwhile underprivileged--was life-threatening for some and disquieting
for others. In explaining why his father left their home, Anil Sinha, a veteran Communist activist, said
simply, "It was sheer thin-skinnedness." His father had been incensed when the local Muslim cobbler
offered to "protect" him should there be any communal trouble in their neighbourhood, and announced
his refusal to live in a country where he was beholden to the charity of
chhotolok (lower classes). The upper and middle castes' inability to command deference was a painful indication of their
disempowerment, while being hailed as "
charaler po" or "son of an untouchable" by Muslims they considered lower in the caste hierarchy was interpreted by Namasudras, as a sign of their relative
decline. According to Anil Sinha the tragedy was that though many East Bengali migrants justified
their escape as the preservation of "Hindu" identity, the experience of refugeehood forced them not
only to "turn their backs on caste rules"--his father was forced to live cheek by jowl with
"untouchables" in refugee colony--but even to forgo their much vaunted "Bengaliness" as they were
dispersed all over India (Interview with Anil Sinha, 1989).
The East Bengali Hindus' discourse of Partition victimhood reflected their acute sense of
insecurity with regard to life, livelihood and honour as a numerically and politically subordinate group
in a Muslim-majority nation, as much as it reflected entrenched anti-Muslim prejudice. Since the selfimage
of Hindus in East Bengal was founded on a racialized asymmetry with the Muslim
conceptualized as the opposite and inferior of the Hindu--even progressives reacted negatively to
becoming a "minority"--with its connotations of secondariness. As inheritors of a colonial
revisionist-nationalist historiography that denigrated the medieval or "Muslim period" of Bengal's
history as the "dark ages," the East Bengali Hindus were in agreement with their supporter, the
eminent Bengali historian Jadunath Sarkar, who asserted that East Bengal was "lapsing into
barbarism"—"going the way of Palestine without the Jews" (
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 August 1948). By representing Pakistan as an icon of ossified backwardness and fundamentalism, East Bengali
Hindus were being told that they owed it to their national and cultural heritage to save themselves from
cultural annihilation. The East Bengal they left behind was depicted in commemorative literature as
"dead without a vibrant community of Hindus. ..The villages, markets, settlements of East Bengal are
today speechless and without life, their consciousness wiped out by the horrors of the end of time...
mice and cockroaches have probably built their world in the leather drums of the Harisabha
20
devotees"
14 (Chakrabarty 1995: 128). Migration to India was therefore an imperative--the realization of East Bengali Hindus
aspirations for postcolonial national reconstruction. In his speech at the University Institute Hall in
Calcutta in 1948 referred to earlier, Sarkar told his audience that like the Jews--paradigmatic
refugees--who would convert Palestine to "a spark of light in the midst of the mess of Muslim
misgovernment and stagnation," the East Bengali refugees would vivify WestBengal's moribund
culture and economy. Drawing positive parallels between the East Bengali diaspora and the migration
of English Puritans to Holland and France, and then to Massachusetts; and of the French Huguenots
to Holland and England, he declared that their going was a loss to their native countries and a boon
for their countries of asylum. "However crushed and benumbed they may look when they are unloaded
from their third class wagons at Sealdah Station yard, the refugees are the most valuable elements of
the population of East Bengal," he said, and urged West Bengalis "...to engraft this rich racial branch
upon its old decaying trunk and rise to a new era of prosperity and power" (
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18 August 1948).
14
Meeting place for Hindu devotional singing. The Communal East Bengali refugee?
I have tried to show that East Bengali claims to victimhood used the language of Muslim
communal violence--to life, property and honour--to legitimize their claim to be political refugees and
to gain public sympathy in India. But it also revealed deep antagonism toward Muslims in general and
Bengali Muslims in particular. Drawing on his reading of
Chere Asha Gram, a compilation of essays written by East Bengali refugees in a nostalgic vein, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that the
home/homeland remembered was a Hindu one. Bengali Hindu nationalism "had created a sense of
home that combined sacredness with beauty. This sacred was not intolerant of the Muslim. The
Muslim Bengali had a place created through the idea of kinship . But the home was Hindu which the
non-Muslim League Hindu was a valued guest...What had never been thought about was how the
Hindu might live in a home that embodied the Islamic sacred" (Chakrabarty 1995: 129). Herein lay
the unexamined structure of prejudice evident in this public discourse which ostensibly avoids a "low
language of prejudice" (128). In an autobiographical essay on growing up in a refugee colony Manas
Ray refers to this prejudice, "The Muslims were a constant presence in ...stories but only in the figure
of the eternal peasant, hardworking, obliging, happy with his marginality, part of Hindu domestic
imagery. No space was allowed to his rituals, his universe of beliefs nor did the middleclass Muslim
ever figure" (Ray 2000: 168).
21
If this strand of elite East Bengali public discourse is implicitly dismissive of Muslims, the
refugee testimonies of victimhood across class tend to be overtly anti-Muslim. In recognition of this,
the Government of India instituted an investigation of "social tensions" among refugees from East
Bengal in 1950 under the direction of the Anthropological Survey. The report noted "marked tension"
against Muslims irrespective of caste status and sex, though found it "softened" among upper castes
because of their education and stronger among women across caste because of their "identification"
with "traditional ideology" (Guha 1959: ix). The negative stereotype of the Muslim which emerged
in this study included such characteristics as cruelty, crudeness, lust, cow-killing, treachery, dirtiness
and fanaticism. According to the researchers, the most significant feature about the stereotype was its
"nonpolitical and nonreligious nature"--its emphasis on what they termed the "behavioral." "The
political ideology of the Muslim League or features of Islam as a religion found no place in it. Though
aggravated by political conflicts in recent years, the basic roots of tension lay in deeper trends of
personality structure which prevented Hindus from identifying with Muslims" (ibid). The suggestion
is that the refugee rhetoric of victimhood constructed the East Bengali Muslim as the ontological
"Other" of the Hindu--both superhuman in ferocity, strength and rampant sexuality, and subhuman
because of dirtiness--associated with the moral pollution of beef consumption--rather than the
physical, and with treachery and sexual transgression. And while I would question the analytical
relevance of "personality structures" the broader point the report made is that the opposition between
Hindus and Muslims was cast in essentialized terms rather than in those of historical or local context.
This hegemonic narrative about "the Muslim," systematically circulated in the press, pamphlets and
commemorative literature and repeated in private in story and rumour, both erased the Muslim's
docile presence in an idyllic Bengali past and demonized "his"
15 antagonistic presence in a language of excess.
15
The negative and totalizing image of the Muslim in East Bengali refugee stories is explicitly gendered as male.
What was the immediate implication of this refugee rhetoric of prejudice and antipathy? While
East Bengali refugees who sought asylum in India represented themselves as victims of Muslim
communalism to claim refugee status and thereby humanitarian assistance, they found it very difficult
to influence the state's rehabilitation intervention and experienced both relief and long-term
rehabilitation policy as painfully inadequate. Large numbers of frustrated refugees took matters into
their own hands and began to "resettle" themselves by squatting on land they argued to be unoccupied
and unused. The words they used were "vacant," and the Bengali equivalent "
khali" as well as "patit" or abandoned, and "
jola jami" which meant marshland. The impression these words conveyed was clearly that such lands were marginal and available for settlement--which was referred to as "colony"
construction. In some cases this land belonged to the state, but for the most part the refugees squatted
on privately owned property including that belonging to local West Bengali Muslims. Particularly in
the areas around the city of Calcutta, many refugee settlements were established on land "formerly
inhabited by Muslim labourers and artisans" who were "replaced by displaced Hindus from East
Pakistan" (Bose 1968:33). Many Muslims were dispossessed of their homes in the city leading to their
"ghettoization" in a few neighbourhoods (Deb 2000:68). It could be argued that East Bengali refugee
settlement across West Bengal affected the minority Muslim community most adversely. While
22
researching refugee self-settlement strategies I visited colonies on the outskirts of Calcutta as well as
along the Hooghly river. It was not uncommon for me to be told while I was being shown around a
colony by a refugee settler, that a soccer field or community gathering point was once a "Musalman"
eggplant field or graveyard, or that when the East Bengalis arrived the land was "overgrown with
weeds, home to jackals and mosquitos, and a handful Muslims whose homes consisted of shacks"
(Interview with Paresh Haldar, 1988). There were a few instances when I noticed the contours of a
mosque or Muslim saints's shrine in the foundation of a refugee home. The need of the refugees' for
new homes pitted them against local West Bengalis, but the widespread dispossession of West
Bengali Muslims must be seen as a manifestation of East Bengali refugee communalism driven by as
much revenge, as a racist consciousness that marginalized or erased Muslim presence in the new
refugee homeland of West Bengal.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM emerged as the main political opposition to
the ruling Congress regime in West Bengal after Partition, and as the "old guard" like to tell it, party
workers recognized the destabilizing force of East Bengali refugee anger against Muslims and the
imperative to resettle them. This prompted the Left's inclusion of the refugee cause in its broader
programme of redistributive justice--a move which they claimed to have "neutralized" refugee
communalism, helped prevent large-scale violence against West Bengali Muslims and minimized the
ir migration to Pakistan (Interviews with Bijoy Mazumdar, Anil Sinha, 1988-89). Gyan Pandey has
argued that the history of sectarian violence "has been treated in the historiography of modern India
as aberration and absence" (1992: 27). In the Left's master narrative of successful leadership of
subaltern movements, the material or economic has been stressed as an explanation for Hindu-Muslim
conflict. In this version the East Bengali refugees' communalism--and expropriation of Muslims--is
represented as an aberration, a distortion of the normal condition of inter-community harmony.,
cultural syncretism and class solidarity, corrected as it were by the Left successful efforts at
consciousness raising. This erases the recent history of East Bengali communalism, and marginalizes
Muslim victims. The fact that the Congress and the CPM insist on a small figure for Muslim outmigration
to Pakistan (relative to East Bengali Hindus) and take pride in the state's apparent restitution
of property to Muslim "returnees," posits secularism as normative in India as a policy and an
objective condition. I return here to the story of "thwarted communalism" that I began this paper with.
In that story, East Bengali refugees' "momentary" communalism--cast as an aberration--was
ostensibly corrected by a liberal appeal to the East Bengali refugee rioters to remember the "good"
Muslim. Manas Ray writes, "Today the Left draws its rhetorical force from an act of remembrance:
it asks not to forget the early days of hardship and achievement of the colony people" with the support
of the Left in the face of Congress indifference. For those too young to remember, there is another
"brand of the politics of memory that gestures at the treatment meted out to Hindus by the Muslims in
undivided Bengal. Those born after the Partition are more eager to subscribe to this thesis of the past."
(188).
It is my submission that not only was the good Muslim itself a product of condescension and
erasure--and therefore of communalism, but as I have tried to show in this paper, East Bengali refugee
identity was predicated on the claim to communal victimhood which explicitly demonized Muslims.
Even if one were to accept the argument that Bengali Hindu communalism has been muted relative
to north and west India and that the politics of Hindu nationalism have not gained much ground in West
Bengal despite the presence of the second largest populations of Muslims after Uttar Pradesh and a
porous border with Bangladesh (Ruud 1996), I would suggest that the case of the East Bengali Hindus
refugees demonstrates the existence and elaboration of a collective cultural memory of "bad"
23
Muslims, a particular history of Hindu communalism, and a past which may seed anti-Muslim politics
in West Bengal in the years to come. While acknowledging East Bengali Hindu refugee agency, it is
important to research further its communal effects on the Muslim minority in West Bengal; to examine
the dynamics of Bengali refugee communalism, its distinguishing features and self-location relative
to the Bharatiya Janata Party and its "family" of Hindu fundamentalist organizations; and to probe for
alternative stories--perhaps those that tell of shared experiences and solidarity among Hindu and
Muslim Bengalis.
24
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The Statesman
Email: palashbiswaskl@gmail.com
"In the post-World War II period refugee problem emerged out to be one of the biggest problems before the international community. India has also experienced it at a large scale. Factors such as rise of religious nationalism, ethnicisation of politics, state terrorism, anarchic majoritarianism and above all state's refusal to conform to norms set by the international refugee regime, rendered the refugees stateless and subjects for inhuman treatment. On the other hand, historical forces like religious, linguistic or ethnic nationalism and regional economic disparity continue to generate refugees in the eastern and north-eastern regions of India. Faced with unfriendly state, both in the country of origin and the country of adoption, the refugees struggle to find the ways and means for a healthy living, and wherever possible they make efforts to put up an organised movement for their 'human rights'.
Manmohan is the Comrador Prime Minister of Zionist Brahmincal White Post Modern Galaxy Order neoliberal MNC Corporate Colony that Shining India has become losing Freedom, Sovereignity and Democratic institutions as well as Productio n System and cultural roots. But remote control happnes to be in the hands of Italian born white woman Mrs sonia gandhi. Pranab Mukherjee works as De Facto Prime minister and he heads 39 parliamentary committees instrumental to kill huaman and civil rights, finsh higher education and reservation. Not only reservation or Citizenship, the Brute Ruling Hegemeony is working Up the Hills to kill the Constitution of India to nullify the Empowerment of enslaved Indian majorty Eighty Five percent People.
The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was followed by the forced uprooting of an estimated 18 million people. This paper focuses on the predicament of the minority communities in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) who were uprooted and forced to seek shelter in the Indian province of West Bengal. It considers the responses of Indian federal and provincial governments to the challenge of refugee rehabilitation. A study is made of the Dandakaranya scheme which was undertaken after 1958 to resettle the refugees by colonising forest land: the project was sited in a peninsular region marked by plateaus and hill ranges which the refugees, originally from the riverine and deltaic landscape of Bengal, found hard to accept. Despite substantial official rehabilitation efforts, the refugees demanded to be resettled back in their "natural habitat" of Indian Bengal. However, this was resisted by the state. Notwithstanding this opposition, a large number of East Bengal refugees moved back into regions which formed a part of erstwhile undivided Bengal where, without any government aid and planning, they colonised lands and created their own habitats. Many preferred to become squatters in the slums that sprawled in and around Calcutta. The complex interplay of identity and landscape, of dependence and self-help, that informed the choices which the refugees made in rebuilding their lives is analysed in the paper.
A refugee is someone with a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion, who is outside of his or her country of nationality and unable or unwilling to return. Refugees are forced from their countries by war, civil conflict, political strife or gross human rights abuses. There were an estimated 14.9 million refugees in the world in 2001 - people who had crossed an international border to seek safety - and at least 22 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) who had been uprooted within their own countries.
Enshrined in Article 14 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the right "to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution." This principle recognizes that victims of human rights abuse must be able to leave their country freely and to seek refuge elsewhere. Governments frequently see refugees as a threat or a burden, refusing to respect this core principle of human rights and refugee protection.
The global refugee crisis affects every continent and almost every country. In 2001, 78 percent of all refugees came from 10 areas: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa, Eritrea, Iraq, the Palestinian territories, Somalia and Sudan. Palestinians are the world's oldest and largest refugee population, and make up more than one fourth of all refugees. Asia hosts 45 percent of all refugees, followed by Africa (30 percent), Europe (19 percent) and North America (5 percent).
Throughout history, people have fled their homes to escape persecution. In the aftermath of World War II, the international community included the right to asylum in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1950, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was created to protect and assist refugees, and, in 1951, the United Nations adopted the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a legally binding treaty that, by February 2002, had been ratified by 140 countries.
In the past 50 years, states have largely regressed in their commitment to protect refugees, with the wealthy industrialized states of Europe, North America and Australia - which first established the international refugee protection system - adopting particularly hostile and restrictive policies. Governments have subjected refugees to arbitrary arrest, detention, denial of social and economic rights and closed borders. In the worst cases, the most fundamental principle of refugee protection, nonrefoulement, is violated, and refugees are forcibly returned to countries where they face persecution. Since September 11, many countries have pushed through emergency anti-terrorism legislation that curtails the rights of refugees.
Human Rights Watch believes the right to asylum is a matter of life and death and cannot be compromised. In our work to stop human rights abuses in countries around the world, we seek to address the root causes that force people to flee. We also advocate for greater protection for refugees and IDPs and for an end to the abuses they suffer when they reach supposed safety. Human Rights Watch calls on the United Nations and on governments everywhere to uphold their obligations to protect refugees and to respect their rights - regardless of where they are from or where they seek refuge.
Refugees
New Delhi's National Museum houses an outstanding Harappan gallery, one that unfailingly attracts visitors. Not many, though, stop to wonder about the objects from Mohenjodaro and Harappa displayed there. If India — as we have been told — had lost her Indus heritage because most Indus sites in 1947 fell within the national boundaries of Pakistan, how has she retained such a superb collection of Indus artefacts from those 'lost' cities?
An answer to this can be excavated out of the treasure trove of files in the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). This is because the ASI was centrally involved in tortuous negotiations through which undivided India's past was partitioned.
Why, though, were these negotiations so twisted and prolonged? The Partition Council itself, in October 1947, had resolved that museums would be divided on a territorial basis. This Council had been set up to deal with the administrative consequences of Partition, and decided on a wide range of issues, from revenue and domicile to records and museums. In addition to its decision concerning a territorial division of museums, the council also stipulated that when the territory of a province was partitioned, the museum exhibits of the provincial museums would also be physically divided. On this basis, the exhibits in the Lahore Museum which belonged to the united Province of Punjab before Partition, were to be split between East Punjab and West Punjab. This was straightforward enough.
More complicated though was the fate of objects that had been sent on temporary loan to places which, on August 15, 1947, happened to be on the wrong side of the border, far away from the original museums to which they belonged. On that date, we know that there were objects from Harappa, Taxila and Mohenjodaro in India, and in London as well. These were on loan to the Royal Academy of Arts. In its wisdom, therefore, the Partition Council ruled that all objects that had been removed for temporary display after January 1, 1947, were to be returned to the original museums.
For Pakistan, this did not pose any problems in relation to most museums, since nothing had been removed from their precincts after January 1. At Harappa, some antiquities had been taken out of its site museum in July and September 1946, and these they were willing to treat as belonging to India. The real problem, though, revolved around the antiquities of Mohenjodaro.
This is because, on the day of Partition, as many as 12,000 objects from Mohenjodaro were in Delhi. Since Mohenjodaro fell within the territory of Pakistan, the objects should have fallen in their share. However, India's negotiators maintained that these rightfully belonged to India because they had not been removed for after January 1, 1947 from the original museum (which was at Mohenjodaro) but came from Lahore. Similarly, they had not been removed for the purposes of temporary display but because, as early as 1944, the Director General of Archaeology, Mortimer Wheeler, had wanted to concentrate all the best Indus objects in a Central National Museum. It was in the absence of such a museum that it had been decided that Lahore Museum would act as a substitute, pending the establishment of a Central National Museum. Wheeler had continued to reiterate that "all objects from Mohenjodaro now on exhibition at Lahore are deposited by the Central Government on loan, and the Punjab Government has no lien upon them."
It was this — the question of intention about the future disposal of the objects in a Central National Museum — that was central to the contentious dispute around how the antiquities were to be divided. Several formulae were suggested and rejected, pressure tactics were used by both parties. In order to make things difficult, the West Punjab government postponed the actual handing over of East Punjab's share of the Lahore Museum holdings till such time that India had handed over to Pakistan their share from the central museums. And a final decision on the central museums remained pending till the Mohenjodaro matter was sorted out.
That India considered Indus objects to be an integral part of its own heritage was equally an issue. N.P. Chakravarti, who succeeded Wheeler as Director General in 1948, said it in so many
INDEPENDENT PAKISTAN
![[JPEG]](http://www.country-data.com/frd/cs/pakistan/pk01_06a.jpg)
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-i-Azam
Courtesy Embassy of Pakistan, Washington
![[JPEG]](http://www.country-data.com/frd/cs/pakistan/pk01_06b.jpg)
Liaquat Ali Khan, the Quaid-i-Millet
Courtesy Embassy of Pakistan, Washington
Problems at Independence
In August 1947, Pakistan was faced with a number of problems, some immediate but others long term. The most important of these concerns was the role played by Islam. Was Pakistan to be a secular state serving as a homeland for Muslims of the subcontinent, or was it to be an Islamic state governed by the sharia, in which non-Muslims would be second-class citizens? The second question concerned the distribution of power between the center and the provincial governments, a question that eventually led to the dissolution of the country with the painful loss of the East Wing (East Bengal, later East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) in 1971, an issue that remained unresolved in the mid-1990s.
The territory of Pakistan was divided into two parts at independence, separated by about 1,600 kilometers of Indian territory. The 1940 Lahore Resolution had called for independent "states" in the northwest and the northeast. This objective was changed, by a 1946 meeting of Muslim League legislators to a call for a single state (the acronym Pakistan had no letter for Bengal). Pakistan lacked the machinery, personnel, and equipment for a new government. Even its capital, Karachi, was a second choice--Lahore was rejected because it was too close to the Indian border. Pakistan's economy seemed enviable after severing ties with India, the major market for its commodities. And much of Punjab's electricity was imported from Indian power stations.
Above all other concerns were the violence and the refugee problem: Muslims were fleeing India; Hindus and Sikhs were fleeing Pakistan. Jinnah's plea to regard religion as a personal matter, not a state matter, was ignored. No one was prepared for the communal rioting and the mass movements of population that followed the June 3, 1947, London announcement of imminent independence and partition. The most conservative estimates of the casualties were 250,000 dead and 12 million to 24 million refugees. The actual boundaries of the two new states were not even known until August 17, when they were announced by a commission headed by a British judge. The boundaries-- unacceptable to both India and Pakistan--have remained.
West Pakistan lost Hindus and Sikhs. These communities had managed much of the commercial activity of West Pakistan. The Sikhs were especially prominent in agricultural colonies. They were replaced largely by Muslims from India, mostly Urdu speakers from the United Provinces. Although some people, especially Muslims from eastern Punjab (in India), settled in western Punjab (in Pakistan), many headed for Karachi and other cities in Sindh, where they took the jobs vacated by departing Hindus. In 1951 close to half of the population of Pakistan's major cities were immigrants (muhajirs--refugees from India and their descendants).
The aspirations for Pakistan that had been so important to Muslims in Muslim-minority provinces and the goals for the new state these urban refugees had fled to were not always compatible with those of the traditional rural people already inhabiting Pakistan, whose support for the concept of Pakistan came much later. Pakistani society was polarized from its inception.
The land and people west of the Indus River continued to pose problems. The most immediate problem was the continued presence of a Congress government in the North-West Frontier Province, a government effective at the grassroots level and popular despite the loss of the plebiscite. Led by Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai-i-Khitmagar (Servants of God, a Congress faction), this group was often referred to as the Red Shirts after its members' attire. Ghaffar Khan asked his followers not to participate in the July 1947 plebiscite.
Pakistan also had to establish its legitimacy against a possible challenge from Afghanistan. Irredentist claims from Kabul were based on the ethnic unity of tribes straddling the border; the emotional appeal of "Pakhtunistan," homeland of the Pakhtuns, was undeniable. However, Pakistan upheld the treaties Britain had signed with Afghanistan and refused to discuss the validity of the Durand Line as the international border (see The Forward Policy , this ch.). Relations with Afghanistan were hostile, resulting in the rupture of diplomatic and commercial relations and leading Afghanistan to cast the only vote against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations (UN) in 1947.
The India Independence Act left the princes theoretically free to accede to either dominion. The frontier princely states of Dir, Chitral, Amb, and Hunza acceded quickly to Pakistan while retaining substantial autonomy in internal administration and customary law. The khan of Kalat in Balochistan declared independence on August 15, 1947, but offered to negotiate a special relationship with Pakistan. Other Baloch sardar (tribal chiefs) also expressed their preference for a separate identity. Pakistan took military action against them and the khan and brought about their accession in 1948. The state of Bahawalpur, with a Muslim ruler and a Muslim population, acceded to Pakistan, as did Khairpur.
The maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, unpopular among his subjects, was reluctant to decide on accession to either dominion. He first signed agreements with both Pakistan and India that would provide for the continued flow of people and goods to Kashmir--as it is usually called--from both dominions. Alarmed by reports of oppression of fellow Muslims in Kashmir, armed groups from the North-West Frontier Province entered the maharaja's territory. The ruler requested military assistance from India but had to sign documents acceding to India before that country would provide aid in October 1947.
The government of Pakistan refused to recognize the accession and denounced it as a fraud even though the Indian government announced that it would require an expression of the people's will through a plebiscite after the invaders were driven back. Pakistan launched an active military and diplomatic campaign to undo the accession. The UN Security Council eventually brought about a cease-fire between Pakistani and Indian troops, which took place on January 1, 1949, thus ending the first Indo- Pakistani War, and directed that a plebiscite be held. The cease- fire agreement formalized the military status quo, leaving about 30 percent of Kashmir under Pakistani control (see India , ch. 4; The Formation of Pakistan , ch. 5).
Partition and its accompanying confusion also brought severe economic challenges to the two newly created and antagonistic countries. The partition plan ignored the principles of complementarity. West Pakistan, for example, traditionally produced more wheat than it consumed and had supplied the deficit areas in India. Cotton grown in West Pakistan was used in mills in Bombay and other west Indian cities. Commodities such as coal and sugar were in short supply in Pakistan--they had traditionally come from areas now part of India. Furthermore, Pakistan faced logistic problems for its commercial transportation because of the four major ports in British India, it was awarded only Karachi. But the problem that proved most intractable was defining relations between the two wings of Pakistan, which had had little economic exchange before partition.
The two dominions decided to allow free movement of goods, persons, and capital for one year after independence, but this agreement broke down. In November 1947, Pakistan levied export duties on jute; India retaliated with export duties of its own. The trade war reached a crisis in September 1949 when Britain devalued the pound, to which both the Pakistani rupee and the Indian rupee were pegged. India followed Britain's lead, but Pakistan did not, so India severed trade relations with Pakistan. The outbreak of the Korean War (1950-53) and the consequent price rises in jute, leather, cotton, and wool as a result of wartime needs, saved the economy of Pakistan. New trading relationships were formed, and the construction of cotton and jute mills in Pakistan was quickly undertaken. Although India and Pakistan resumed trade in 1951, both the volume and the value of trade steadily declined; the two countries ignored bilateral trade for the most part and developed the new international trade links they had made.
The assets of British India were divided in the ratio of seventeen for India to five for Pakistan by decision of the Viceroy's Council in June 1947. Division was difficult to implement, however, and Pakistan complained of nondeliveries. A financial agreement was reached in December 1948, but the actual settlement of financial and other disputes continued until 1960 (see Structure of the Economy , ch. 3).
Division of the all-India services of the Indian Civil Service and the Indian Police Service was also difficult. Only 101 out of a total of 1,157 Indian officers were Muslim. Among these Muslim officers, ninety-five officers opted for Pakistan; they were joined by one Christian, eleven Muslim military officers transferring to civilian service, and fifty Britons, for a total of 157. But only twenty of them had had more than fifteen years of service, and more than half had had fewer than ten years. These men formed the core of the Civil Service of Pakistan, which became one of the most elite and privileged bureaucracies in the world. Members of the Civil Service of Pakistan were the architects of the administrative, judicial, and diplomatic services. They proved indispensable in running the government machinery during Pakistan's first two decades, and their contributions to government policy and economics were profound during the era of Mohammad Ayub Khan. The Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto government in the 1970s precipitated a major reorganization and reorientation of the bureaucracy, however, which resulted in a noticeable decline in both the morale and the standards of the bureaucracy (see Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and a New Constitutional System; Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, 1971-77 , ch. 4).
Data as of April 1994
Partition of India
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Partition of India led to the creation on 14 August 1947 and 15 August 1947, respectively, of two sovereign states, upon the granting of independence to British India by the United Kingdom: the Dominion of Pakistan (later Islamic Republic of Pakistan); and the Union of India (later Republic of India). 'Partition' here refers also to the division of the Bengal province of British India into the Pakistani state of East Bengal (later East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) and the Indian state of West Bengal, as well as the similar partition of the Punjab region of British India into the Punjab province of West Pakistan and the Indian state of Punjab, in addition to the division of the British Indian Army, the Indian Civil Service and other administrative services, the railways, and the central treasury, and other assets.
The secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War is not covered by the term Partition of India, nor are the earlier separations of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar) from the administration of British India. Ceylon, part of the Madras Presidency of British India from 1795 until 1798, became a separate Crown Colony in 1798. Burma, gradually annexed by the British during 1826 – 86 and governed as a part of the British Indian administration until 1937, was directly administered thereafter. [1] Burma was granted independence on January 4, 1948 and Ceylon on February 4, 1948. (See History of Sri Lanka and History of Burma.)
The remaining countries of present-day South Asia include: Nepal; Bhutan; and the Maldives. The first two, Nepal and Bhutan, having signed treaties with the British designating them as independent states, were never a part of British India, and therefore their borders were not affected by the partition. The Maldives, which became a protectorate of the British crown in 1887 and gained its independence in 1965, was also unaffected by the partition.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Pakistan and India
Two self governing countries legally came into existence at the stroke of midnight on 15 August 1947. The ceremonies for the transfer of power were held a day earlier in Karachi, at the time the capital of the new state of Pakistan, to allow the last British Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, to attend both the ceremony in Karachi and the ceremony in Delhi. Pakistan celebrates Independence Day on 14 August, while India celebrates it on 15 August.
[edit] Background
[edit] Late 19th and early 20th century
 1909 Prevailing Religions, Map of British Indian Empire, 1909, showing the prevailing majority religions of the population for different districts.
|  1909 Percentage of Muslims, Map of British Indian Empire, 1909, showing percentage of Muslims in different districts.
|  1909 Percentage of Hindus, Map of British Indian Empire, 1909, showing percentage of Hindus in different districts.
|  1909 Percentage of Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains. Map of British Indian Empire, 1909, showing percentages in different districts.
|
 1909 Prevailing Languages (Northern Region), Map of British Indian Empire, 1909, showing the prevailing (Aryan) languages of the population for different districts.
|  1901 Population Density, Map of British Indian Empire, 1909, showing the population density in 1901.
|
[edit] 1920–1932
The All India Muslim League (AIML) was formed in Dhaka in 1906 by Muslims who were suspicious of the mainstream, secular but Hindu-majority Indian National Congress. A number of different scenarios were proposed at various times. Among the first to make the demand for a separate state was the writer/philosopher Allama Iqbal, who, in his presidential address to the 1930 convention of the Muslim League said that he felt a separate nation for Muslims was essential in an otherwise Hindu-dominated subcontinent. The Sindh Assembly passed a resolution making it a demand in 1935. Iqbal, Jouhar and others then worked hard to draft Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who had till then worked for Hindu-Muslim unity, to lead the movement for this new nation. By 1930, Jinnah had begun to despair of the fate of minority communities in a united India and had begun to argue that mainstream parties such as the Congress, of which he was once a member, were insensitive to Muslim interests. At the 1940 AIML conference in Lahore, Jinnah made clear his commitment to two separate states, a position from which the League never again wavered:
| " | The Hindus and the Muslims belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs and literature… To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state. | " |
[edit] 1932–1942
However, Hindu organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha, though against the division of the country, were also insisting on the same chasm between Hindus and Muslims. In 1937 at the 19th session of the Hindu Mahasabha held at Ahmedabad, Veer Savarkar in his presidential address asserted:[2]
| " | India cannot be assumed today to be Unitarian and homogeneous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main — the Hindus and the Muslims. | " |
Most of the Congress leaders were secularists and resolutely opposed the division of India on the lines of religion. Mohandas Gandhi was both religious and irenic, believing that Hindus and Muslims could and should live in amity. He opposed the partition, saying,
| " | My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God. | " |
For years, Gandhi and his adherents struggled to keep Muslims in the Congress Party (a major exit of many Muslim activists began in the 1930s), in the process enraging both Hindu Nationalists and Indian Muslim Nationalists. (Gandhi was assassinated soon after Partition by Hindu Nationalist Nathuram Godse, who believed that Gandhi was appeasing Muslims at the cost of Hindus.) Politicians and community leaders on both sides whipped up mutual suspicion and fear, culminating in dreadful events such as the riots during the Muslim League's Direct Action Day of August 1946 in Calcutta, in which more than 5,000 people were killed and many more injured. As public order broke down all across northern India and Bengal, the pressure increased to seek a political partition of territories as a way to avoid a full-scale civil war.
[edit] 1942–1946
Until 1946, the definition of Pakistan as demanded by the League was so flexible that it could have been interpreted as a sovereign nation Pakistan, or as a member of a confederated India.
Some historians believe Jinnah (whose catch-phrase was that India would be "divided or destroyed") intended to use the threat of partition as a bargaining chip in order to gain more independence for the Muslim dominated provinces in the west from the Hindu dominated center.[3]
Other historians claim that Jinnah's real vision was for a Pakistan that extended into Hindu-majority areas of India, by demanding the inclusion of the East of Punjab and West of Bengal, including Assam, all Hindu-majority country. Jinnah also fought hard for the annexation of Kashmir, a Muslim majority state with Hindu ruler; and the accession of Hyderabad and Junagadh, Hindu-majority states with Muslim rulers.[citation needed]
The British colonial administration did not directly rule all of "India". There were several different political arrangements in existence: Provinces were ruled directly and the Princely States with varying legal arrangements, like paramountcy.
The British Colonial Administration consisted of Secretary of State for India, the India Office, the Governor-General of India, and the Indian Civil Service.
The Indian Political Parties were (alphabetically) All India Muslim League, Communist Party of India, Hindu Mahasabha, Indian National Congress, and the Unionist Muslim League (mainly in the Punjab).
[edit] The Partition: 1947
[edit] Mountbatten Plan
The actual division between the two new dominions was done according to what has come to be known as the 3rd June Plan or Mountbatten Plan.
The border between India and Pakistan was determined by a British Government-commissioned report usually referred to as the Radcliffe Award after the London lawyer, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who wrote it. Pakistan came into being with two non-contiguous enclaves, East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and West Pakistan, separated geographically by India. India was formed out of the majority Hindu regions of the colony, and Pakistan from the majority Muslim areas.
On July 18, 1947, the British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act that finalized the partition arrangement. The Government of India Act 1935 was adapted to provide a legal framework for the two new dominions. Following partition, Pakistan was added as a new member of the United Nations, The union formed from the combination of the Hindu states assumed the name India which automatically granted it the seat of British India as a successor state.[4]
The 565 Princely States were given a choice of which country to join.
[edit] Geography of the partition: the Radcliffe Line
The Punjab — the region of the five rivers east of Indus: Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej — consists of interfluvial doabs, or tracts of land lying between two confluent rivers. These are the Sind-Sagar doab (between Indus and Jhelum), the Jech doab (Jhelum/Chenab), the Rechna doab (Chenab/Ravi), the Bari doab (Ravi/Beas), and the Bist doab (Beas/Sutlej) (see map on the right). In early 1947, in the months leading up to the deliberations of the Punjab Boundary Commission, the main disputed areas appeared to be in the Bari and Bist doabs, although some areas in the Rechna doab were claimed by the Congress and Sikhs. In the Bari doab, the districts of Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Lahore, and Montgomery were all disputed.[5] All districts (other than Amritsar, which was 46.5% Muslim) had Muslim majorities; albeit, in Gurdaspur, the Muslim majority, at 51.1%, was slender. At a smaller area-scale, only three tehsils (sub-units of a district) in the Bari doab had non-Muslim majorities. These were: Pathankot (in the extreme north of Gurdaspur, which was not in dispute), and Amritsar and Tarn Taran in Amritsar district. In addition, there were four Muslim-majority tehsils east of Beas-Sutlej (with two where Muslims outnumbered Hindus and Sikhs together).[5]
Before the Boundary Commission began formal hearings, governments were set up for the East and the West Punjab regions. Their territories were provisionally divided by "notional division" based on simple district majorities. In both the Punjab and Bengal, the Boundary Commission consisted of two Muslim and two non-Muslim judges with Sir Cyril Radcliffe as a common chairman.[5] The mission of the Punjab commission was worded generally as: "To demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab, on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims. In doing so, it will take into account other factors." Each side (the Muslims and the Congress/Sikhs) presented its claim through counsel with no liberty to bargain. The judges too had no mandate to compromise and on all major issues they "divided two and two, leaving Sir Cyril Radcliffe the invidious task of making the actual decisions."[5]
[edit] Independence and population exchanges
Massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly-formed states in the months immediately following Partition. Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. Based on 1951 Census of displaced persons, 7,226,000 Muslims went to Pakistan from India while 7,249,000 Hindus and Sikhs moved to India from Pakistan immediately after partition. About 11.2 million or 78% of the population transfer took place in the west, with Punjab accounting for most of it; 5.3 million Muslims moved from India to West Punjab in Pakistan, 3.4 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan to East Punjab in India; elsewhere in the west 1.2 million moved in each direction to and from Sind.[citation needed]
The newly formed governments were completely unequipped to deal with migrations of such staggering magnitude, and massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides of the border. Estimates of the number of deaths range around roughly 500,000, with low estimates at 200,000 and high estimates at 1,000,000.[6]
[edit] Punjab
The Indian state of Punjab was created in 1947, when the Partition of India split the former Raj province of Punjab between India and Pakistan. The mostly Muslim western part of the province became Pakistan's Punjab Province; the mostly Sikh and Hindu eastern part became India's Punjab state. Many Hindus and Sikhs lived in the west, and many Muslims lived in the east, and so the partition saw many people displaced and much intercommunal violence.
[edit] Bengal
The province of Bengal was divided into the two separate entities of West Bengal belonging to India, and East Bengal belonging to Pakistan. East Bengal was renamed East Pakistan in 1955, and later became the independent nation of Bangladesh after the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971.
[edit] Sindh
| Please help improve this article or section by expanding it. Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (November 2007) |
At the time of Partition there were 1,400,000 Hindu Sindhis; in a space of less than a year approximately 1,200,000 of them had left for India, leaving their property behind[citation needed].
[edit] Perspectives
The Partition was a highly controversial arrangement, and remains a cause of much tension on the subcontinent today. British Viceroy Louis Mountbatten has not only been accused of rushing the process through, but also is alleged to have influenced the Radcliffe Awards in India's favor since everyone agreed India would be a more desirable country for most.[7] [8] However, the commission took so long to decide on a final boundary that the two nations were granted their independence even before there was a defined boundary between them. Even then, the members were so distraught at their handiwork (and its results) that they refused compensation for their time on the commission.
Some critics allege that British haste led to the cruelties of the Partition.[9] Because independence was declared prior to the actual Partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep public order. No large population movements were contemplated; the plan called for safeguards for minorities on both sides of the new state line. It was an impossible task, at which both states failed. There was a complete breakdown of law and order; many died in riots, massacre, or just from the hardships of their flight to safety. What ensued was one of the largest population movements in recorded history. According to Richard Symonds[10]
| " | at the lowest estimate, half a million people perished and twelve million became homeless | " |
However, some argue that the British were forced to expedite the Partition by events on the ground.[11], Law and order had broken down many times before Partition, with much bloodshed on both sides. A massive civil war was looming by the time Mountbatten became Viceroy. After World War II, Britain had limited resources[12], perhaps insufficient to the task of keeping order. Another view point is that while Mountbatten may have been too hasty he had no real options left and he achieved the best he could under difficult circumstances[13]. Historian Lawrence James concurs that in 1947 Mounbatten was left with no option but to cut and run. The alternative being getting involved in a potentially bloody civil war from which it would be difficult to get out[14]
Some have argued that much of the blame for the massacres lies with Indian nationalists such as Gandhi[15] and/or Jinnah[16].
[edit] Delhi Punjabi refugees
An estimated 20 million people - Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs - crossed the newly carved borders to reach their new homelands. These estimates are based on comparisons of decadel censuses from 1941 and 1951 with adjustments for normal population growth in the areas of migration. In northern India - undivided Punjab and North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) - nearly 12 million were forced to move from as early as March 1947 following the Rawalpindi violence. Delhi received the highest number of refugees for a single city - the population of Delhi grew rapidly in 1947 from under 1 million (917.939) to a little less than 2 million (1.744.072) between the period 1941-1951.(Census of India, 1941 and 1951). The refugees were housed in various historical and military locations such as the Old Fort Purana Qila), Red Fort (Red Fort), and military barracks in Kingsway (around the present Delhi university). The latter became the site of one of the largest refugee camps in northern India with more than 35,000 refugees at any given time besides Kurukshetra camp near Panipat. The camp sites were later converted into permanent housing through extensive building projects undertaken by the Government of India from 1948 onwards. A number of housing colonies in Delhi came up around this period like Lajpat Nagar, Rajinder Nagar, Nizamuddin, Punjabi Bagh, Rehgar Pura, Jungpura and Kingsway. A number of schemes such as provision of education, employment opportunities, easy loans to start businesses etc. were provided for the refugees at all-India level. The Delhi refugees, however, able to make use of these facilities much better than their counterparts elsewehere.[17]
[edit] Refugees settled in India
Many Sikhs and Hindu Punjabis settled in the Indian parts of Punjab and Delhi. Hindus migrating from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) settled across Eastern India and Northeastern India, many ending up in close-by states like West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura. Some migrants were sent to the Andaman islands.
Hindu Sindhis found themselves without a homeland. The responsibility of rehabilitating them was borne by their government. Refugee camps were set up for Hindu Sindhis.
Many refugees overcame the trauma of poverty. The loss of a homeland has had a deeper and lasting effect on their Sindhi culture,it may be in decline in India.
In late 2004, the Sindhi diaspora vociferously opposed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court of India which asked the government of India to delete the word "Sindh" from the Indian National Anthem (written by Rabindranath Tagore prior the partition) on the grounds that it infringed upon the sovereignty of Pakistan.
[edit] Refugees settled in Pakistan
Refugees or Muhajirs in Pakistan came from various parts of India. There was a large influx of Punjabi Muslims from East Punjab fleeing the riots. Despite severe physical and economic hardships, East Punjabi refugees to Pakistan did not face problems of cultural and linguistic assimilation after partition. However, there were many Muslim refugees who migrated to Pakistan from other Indian states. These refugees came from many different ethnic groups and regions in India, including Uttar Pradesh (then known as "United Provinces of Agra and Awadh", or UP), Madhya Pradesh (then Central Province or "CP"), Gujarat, Bihar, what was then the princely state of Hyderabad and so on. The descendants of these non-Punjabi refugees in Pakistan often refer to themselves as Muhajir whereas the assimilated Punjabi refugees no longer make that political distinction. Large numbers of non-Punjabi refugees settled in Sindh, particularly in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad. They are united by their refugee status and their native Urdu language and are a strong political force in Sindh.
[edit] Artistic depictions of the Partition
In addition to the enormous historical literature on the Partition, there is also an extensive body of artistic work (novels, short stories, poetry, films, plays, paintings, etc.) that deals imaginatively with the pain and horror of the event. See artistic depictions of the partition of India for further discussion and a list of relevant works.
[edit] See also
- British East India Company
- British Empire
- British India
- List of Indian Princely States
- Indian independence movement
- Pakistan Movement
- East Bengal
- History of Bangladesh
- History of India
- History of Pakistan
- Indo-Pakistani War of 1947
- Artistic depictions of the partition of India
- India (disambiguation)
[edit] References
- ^ Sword For Pen, TIME Magazine, April 12, 1937
- ^ V.D.Savarkar, Samagra Savarkar Wangmaya Hindu Rasthra Darshan (Collected works of V.D.Savarkar) Vol VI, Maharashtra Prantik Hindusabha, Poona, 1963, p 296
- ^ Jalal, Ayesha Jalal (1985). The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, The Muslim League and the Demand Pakistan. Cambridge University Press.
- ^ Thomas RGC, Nations, States, and Secession: Lessons from the Former Yugoslavia, Mediterranean Quarterly, Volume 5 Number 4 Fall 1994, pp. 40–65, Duke University Press
- ^ a b c d (Spate 1947, pp. 126-137)
- ^ Death toll in the partition
- ^ K. Z. Islam, 2002, The Punjab Boundary Award, Inretrospect
- ^ Partitioning India over lunch, Memoirs of a British civil servant Christopher Beaumont
- ^ Stanley Wolpert, 2006, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515198-4
- ^ Richard Symonds, 1950, The Making of Pakistan, London, ASIN B0000CHMB1, p 74
- ^ "Once in office, Mountbatten quickly became aware if Britain were to avoid involvement in a civil war, which seemed increasingly likely, there was no alternative to partition and a hasty exit from India" Lawrence J. Butler, 2002, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World, p 72
- ^ Lawrence J. Butler, 2002, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World, p 72
- ^ Ronald Hyam, Britain's Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-1968, page 113; Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521866499, 2007
- ^ Lawrence James, Rise and Fall of the British Empire
- ^ See Peter Clarke's The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire for this view
- ^ Dennis Judd, in The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600-1947 notes some of the ways Jinnah exacerbated the situation
- ^ [See an ethnographic account of Delhi refugees in Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi" http://oup.co.in/search_detail.php?id=144071]
[edit] Further reading
[edit] Popularizations
- Collins, Larry and Dominique Lapierre: Freedom at Midnight. London: Collins, 1975. ISBN 0-00-638851-5
- Zubrzycki, John. (2006) The Last Nizam: An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback. Pan Macmillan, Australia. ISBN 978-0-3304-2321-2.
[edit] Memoir
- Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam: India Wins Freedom, Orient Longman, 1988. ISBN 81-250-0514-5
[edit] Academic monographs
- Ansari, Sarah. 2005. Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh: 1947—1962. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 256 pages. ISBN 019597834X.
- Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 308 pages. ISBN 0822324946
- Chatterji, Joya. 2002. Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932—1947. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 323 pages. ISBN 0521523281.
- Gilmartin, David. 1988. Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press. 258 pages. ISBN 0520062493.
- Gossman, Partricia. 1999. Riots and Victims: Violence and the Construction of Communal Identity Among Bengali Muslims, 1905-1947. Westview Press. 224 pages. ISBN 0813336252
- Hansen, Anders Bjørn. 2004. "Partition and Genocide: Manifestation of Violence in Punjab 1937-1947", India Research Press. ISBN 9788187943259.
http://www.ipgbook.com/showbook.cfm?bookid=8187943254&userid=34B857EC-803F-2B7A-0AB0EB5C597EBC4
- Hasan, Mushirul (2001), written at Oxford and Delhi, India's Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, Oxford University Press, 444 pages, ISBN 0195635043.
- Ikram, S. M. 1995. Indian Muslims and Partition of India. Delhi: Atlantic. ISBN 8171563740
- Jalal, Ayesha (1993), written at Cambridge, UK, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, 334 pages, ISBN 0521458501
- Kaur, Ravinder. 2007. "Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi". Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195683776. http://oup.co.in/search_detail.php?id=144071
- Khan, Yasmin (September 18, 2007), written at New Haven and London, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, Yale University Press, 250 pages (published 2007), ISBN 0300120788
- Page, David, Anita Inder Singh, Penderel Moon, G. D. Khosla, and Mushirul Hasan. 2001. The Partition Omnibus: Prelude to Partition/the Origins of the Partition of India 1936-1947/Divide and Quit/Stern Reckoning. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195658507
- Pandey, Gyanendra. 2002. Remembering Partition:: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambride, UK: Cambridge University Press. 232 pages. ISBN 0521002508
- Raza, Hashim S. 1989. Mountbatten and the partition of India. New Delhi: Atlantic. ISBN 81-7156-059-8
- Shaikh, Farzana. 1989. Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860—1947. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 272 pages. ISBN 0521363284.
- Talbot, Ian and Gurharpal Singh (eds). 1999. Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the Subcontinent. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 420 pages. ISBN 0195790510.
- Talbot, Ian. 2002. Khizr Tiwana: The Punjab Unionist Party and the Partition of India. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 216 pages. ISBN 0195795512.
- Talbot, Ian. 2006. Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar. Oxford and Karachi: Oxford University Press. 350 pages. ISBN 0195472268.
- Wolpert, Stanley. 2006. Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 272 pages. ISBN 0195151984.
- J. Butler, Lawrence. 2002. Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World. London: I.B.Tauris. 256 pages. ISBN 186064449X
[edit] Articles
- Gilmartin, David. 1998. "Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative." The Journal of Asian Studies, 57(4):1068-1095.
- Jeffrey, Robin. 1974. "The Punjab Boundary Force and the Problem of Order, August 1947" - Modern Asian Studies 8(4):491-520.
- Kaur Ravinder. 2007. "India and Pakistan: Partition Lessons". Open Democracy. [1]
- Kaur, Ravinder. 2006. "The Last Journey: Social Class in the Partition of India". Economic and Political Weekly, June 2006. www.epw.org.in
- Mookerjea-Leonard, Debali. 2005. "Divided Homelands, Hostile Homes: Partition, Women and Homelessness". Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 40(2):141-154.
- Morris-Jones. 1983. "Thirty-Six Years Later: The Mixed Legacies of Mountbatten's Transfer of Power". International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs), 59(4):621-628.
- Spate, O. H. K. (1947), "The Partition of the Punjab and of Bengal", The Geographical Journal 110 (4/6): 201-218
- Spear, Percival. 1958. "Britain's Transfer of Power in India." Pacific Affairs, 31(2):173-180.
- Talbot, Ian. 1994. "Planning for Pakistan: The Planning Committee of the All-India Muslim League, 1943-46". Modern Asian Studies, 28(4):875-889.
- Visaria, Pravin M. 1969. "Migration Between India and Pakistan, 1951-61" Demography, 6(3):323-334.
[edit] External links
[edit] Bibliographies
- Select Research Bibliography on the Partition of India, Compiled by Vinay Lal, Department of History, UCLA; University of California at Los Angeles list
- A select list of Indian Publications on the Partition of India (Punjab & Bengal); University of Virginia list
- South Asian History: Colonial India — University of California, Berkeley Collection of documents on colonial India, Independence, and Partition]
- Indian Nationalism — Fordham University archive of relevant public-domain documents]
[edit] Other links
- The Partition of India : Impact and Aftermath
- Partition of India by A. G. Noorani.
- The Story of Pakistan
- Clip from 1947 newsreel showing Indian independence ceremony
- Partition of Bengal, 1947, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh
- Sindhi Exodus - Some personal accounts of Hindu Sindhis
- The 1947 Attacks on Hindus and Sikhs
- Migration and Nostalgia
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