The negotiations between the
Congress and the Muslim League, stumbled over the issue of the partition.
Jinnah proclaimed 16 August 1946, Direct
Action Day, with the stated goal of highlighting, peacefully, the demand for a
Muslim homeland in British India.
However, on the
morning of the 16th armed Muslim gangs gathered in Calcutta and attacked Hindus with the
demand for Pakistan, This was later called the "Great Calcutta Killing of
August 1946".
The next day,
Hindus struck back and the violence continued for three days in which
approximately 4,000 people died (according to official accounts), Hindus and
Muslims in equal numbers.
Although India
had had outbreaks of religious violence between Hindus and Muslims before, the
Calcutta killings was the first to display elements of "ethnic
cleansing," in modern times.
Violence was not
confined to the public sphere, but homes were entered, destroyed, and women and
children attacked. Although the Government of India and the Congress were
both shaken by the course of events, in September, a Congress-led interim
government was installed, with Jawaharlal Nehru as united India's prime
minister.
The communal
violence spread to Bihar (where Muslims were attacked by Hindus),
to Noakhali in Bengal (where Hindus were targeted by Muslims), and
other parts of the country.
Late in 1946,
the Labour government in Britain, bankrupt due to the recently concluded World
War II, decided to end British rule of India, and in early 1947 Britain
announced its intention of transferring power no later than June 1948.
However,
with the British army unprepared for the potential of increased violence, the
new viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, advanced the date for the transfer of power,
allowing less than six months for a mutually agreed plan for independence.
In June 1947,
the nationalist leaders, including Nehru and Abul
Kalam Azad on behalf of the Congress, Jinnah representing the Muslim
League, B. R. Ambedkar representing the Untouchable
community, and Master Tara Singh representing
the Sikhs, agreed to a partition of the country along religious lines in
total opposition to Gandhi's views.
The predominantly
Hindu and Sikh areas were assigned to the new India and predominantly Muslim
areas to the new nation of Pakistan; the plan included a partition of the
Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal. The communal violence that
accompanied the announcement of the Radcliffe Line, the line of partition,
was even more horrific.
On 14 August 1947,
the new Dominion of Pakistan came into being, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in
as its first Governor General in Karachi.
The following
day, 15 August 1947, India became an independent country with Jawaharlal Nehru
assuming the office of the Prime Minister.
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.
Resettlement of refugees in India:
1947–1957
Many Sikhs and
Hindu Punjabis fled Western Punjab and settled in the Indian
parts of Punjab and Delhi. Hindus fleeing from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)
settled across Eastern and Northeastern India, many ending up in neighboring Indian states such as West Bengal ,
Assam, and Tripura.
Some migrants were sent to the Andaman Islands where Bengalis
today form the largest linguistic group.
Delhi received
the largest number of refugees for a single city – the population of Delhi grew
rapidly in 1947. The
refugees were housed in various historical and military locations. 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.
A number of schemes such as the provision of education, employment
opportunities, and easy loans to start businesses were provided for the
refugees at the all-India level.
Resettlement of refugees in
Pakistan: 1947–1957
In the aftermath
of partition, a huge population exchange occurred between the two newly formed
states. Most of those migrants who settled in Punjab, Pakistan came from the
neighbouring Indian regions ofPunjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh while others were from Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan. On the other hand, most of those migrants who arrived in Sindh were primarily
of Urdu-speaking background and came from the northern and central urban centres of India, such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan via the Wahgah and Munabao borders.
Later in 1950s, the majority of Urdu speaking refugees who migrated after the independence were settled in the port city of Karachi in southern Sindh and in the metropolitan cities of Hyderabad, Sukkur, Nawabshah and Mirpurkhas. In addition, some Urdu-speakers settled in the cities of Punjab, mainly in Lahore, Multan, Bahawalpur and Rawalpindi.
.
Rehabilitation of women
Both sides
promised each other that they would try to restore women abducted during the
riots. The Indian government claimed that 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women were
abducted, and the Pakistani government claimed that 50,000 Muslim women were
abducted during riots. By 1949, there were governmental claims that 12,000
women had been recovered in India and 6,000 in Pakistan. (By 1954 there
were 20,728 recovered Muslim women and 9,032 Hindu and Sikh women recovered
from Pakistan.) Most of the Hindu and Sikh women refused to go back to India
fearing that they would never be accepted by their family; similarly, the
families of some Muslim women refused to take back their relatives.
Perspectives
The Partition
was a highly controversial arrangement, and remains a cause of much tension on
the Indian subcontinent today. The two nations
were granted their independence even before there was a defined boundary
between them.
A cross border
student initiative, ‘The History
Project’ was launched in 2014 in order to explore the differences
in perception of the events during the British era which lead to the partition.
The project resulted in a book that explains both interpretations of the shared
history in Pakistan and India.
Artistic depictions of the Partition
The partition of India and the associated bloody riots inspired many creative minds in India and Pakistan to create literary/cinematic depictions of this event. While some creations depicted the massacres during the refugee migration, others concentrated on the aftermath of the partition in terms of difficulties faced by the refugees in both side of the border.
Even now, works of fiction and films are made that relate to the events of partition.
Literature described the human cost of independence and partition. For e.g.
- Bal K. Gupta's memoirs ‘Forgotten Atrocities(2012)’
- Khushwant Singh's ‘Train to Pakistan’ (1956),
- several short stories such as ‘Toba Tek Singh’ (1955) by Saadat Hassan Manto,
- Urdu poems such as ‘Subh-e-Azadi’ (Freedom's Dawn, 1947) by Faiz Ahmad Faiz,
- Bhisham Sahni's ‘Tamas’ (1974)
- Salman Rushdie's novel ‘Midnight's Children’ (1980), which won the Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers, weaved its narrative based on the children born with magical abilities on midnight of 14 August 1947.
- ‘Freedom at Midnight’ (1975) is a non-fiction work by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre
Films:
- Nemai Ghosh's ‘Chinnamul’ (Bengali) (1950)
- Dharmputra (1961,
- Lahore (1948)
- Komal Gandhar (Bengali) (1961)
- Tamas (1987).
- Train to Pakistan (1998) (based on the book),
- Hey Ram (2000),
- Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001),
- Pinjar (2003),
- Partition (2007)
The biographical films Gandhi (1982), Jinnah (1998) and Sardar (1993) also feature independence and partition as significant events in their screenplay.
A Pakistani drama ‘Daastan’, based on the novel Bano, also tells the tale of young Muslim girl during partition.
The 2013 Google India advertisement ‘Reunion’ (about the Partition of India) has had a strong impact in both India and Pakistan, leading to hope for the easing of travel restrictions between the two countries. It went viral and was viewed more than 1.6 million times before officially debuting on television on 15 November 2013.
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