Sirajuddin stood outside the hospital for some time, then went in. In one of the rooms, he found a stretcher with someone lying on it.
A light was switched on. It was a young woman with a mole on her left cheek. “Sakina,” Sirajuddin screamed, recognizing his daughter. The doctor, who had switched on the light, stared at him.
“I am her father,” Sirajuddin stammered. The doctor looked at the prostrate body and felt for the pulse. Then he said to the old man: “Open the window. Open up.”
The young woman on the stretcher moved slightly. Her hands groped for the cord which kept her shalwar tied around her waist. With painful slowness, she unfastened it, pulled the garment down and opened her thighs.
“She is alive. My daughter is alive,” Sirajuddin shouted. The doctor broke into a cold sweat.
From Saadat Hasan Manto’s short story Khol do.
As the anniversary of Pakistan’s independence came around, the usual kinds of clichéd celebratory pieces appeared in the media. There’s no doubt that independence is indeed a reason to rejoice. Freedom is a basic condition; without its achievement, our history would simply have continued to be warped and distorted in the imperialist stranglehold. Let us then celebrate this freedom. And value it.
Migration from one Punjab to the other
But let us, at the same time, be quite clear that, if 1947 witnessed this moment of immense triumph, it also saw unparalleled tragedy. What we somewhat bathetically refer to as the ‘Partition riots’ are almost unique in the scale of suffering they brought about and the abysmal depths of human savagery they plumbed.
No less than the joys of the moment of freedom, the appalling tragedy of 1947 must not be forgotten either.
The American photographer Margaret Bourke-White has captured something of the time in her famous photographs. Saadat Hasan Manto, Abdulla Husein, Krishan Chander, Amrita Pritam, and many others, have expressed in their writings the grotesque lineaments of the human tragedy.
What happened, then? What went wrong? Let us attempt a quick summation here. On August 14, 1946, the All-India Muslim League, tired of the duplicity of Nehru’s Congress Party, bade goodbye to ‘parliamentary methods’ and embraced Direct Action. Whether this was a necessary or inevitable course is not an issue here. It happened. On the morning of the 16th, H. S. Suhrawardy, Chief Minister of Bengal addressed the public at the Ochterlony Monument in Calcutta. That very evening, Hindus were attacked by returning Muslim celebrants, who carried pamphlets distributed earlier, implicating the celebration of Direct Action Day with the outbreak of the cycle of violence that would be later called the “Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946”. The next day, incited by their own communal leaders, armed Hindu mobs struck back. The violence continued for three days, in which approximately 4,000 people died. The Calcutta killings were the first to display elements of “ethnic cleansing,” in the dreadful modern sense. Violence was not confined to the public sphere, homes were entered, destroyed, and women and children attacked. The spiralling cycle of killings and counter-killings between Muslims and Hindus had begun.
Horrors of the Indo-Pak partition
Calcutta, for all its horrors, proved to be a mere curtain raiser for what was to follow. Communal riots and killings next broke out in the Noakhali region of East Bengal, followed shortly by the plunge into disorder of the province of Bihar. As the riots spread westward across British India, Viceroy Lord Wavell was sacked, Lord Louis Mountbatten flew in, the Partition Plan was announced and Cyril Radcliffe Q C was commissioned to chop up Punjab and Bengal. What Sir Winston Churchill called “Operation Scuttle” was on.
But the troubles had reached the Punjab even before these larger political developments. During February-March 1947, violence between Muslims and Sikhs broke out in Rawalpindi, sometimes referred to as “the Rape of Rawalpindi”. The Punjab Unionist government of Sir Khizar Hayat Tiwana resigned under popular pressure, Sir Evan Jenkins declaring Governor’s Rule. This administrative hiatus, which prevailed for the next six months, was to prove devastating.
At this time as well, the Sikh issue suddenly erupted. The Punjab Assembly had passed a resolution that, in the event of the partition of India, Punjab would be part of Pakistan. S.P.Singha, a Christian, was the speaker of the Punjab Assembly and it was he whose vote determined the matter in favour of Pakistan.
Angered, Master Tara Singh flaunted his kirpan (dagger) on the steps of the Punjab Assembly and shouted, “Pakistan Murdabad.” He declared, “Anyone who will demand for Pakistan will be killed.” Singha answered Tara Singh: “We will die but will not stop demanding Pakistan.”
But the Akalidal leader’s outburst had already inflamed the situation. Muslims were in a majority on both sides of the Punjab and believed that all of Punjab would be handed to Pakistan, since Muslims had a 51% majority in the population. Suddenly, everywhere, Muslims and Sikhs were violent combatants.
As soon as violence erupted in Lahore between Hindus and Sikhs, east Punjab went up in flames, starting from Amritsar, followed by more violence in Multan and Rawalpindi, and still more in Montgomery and Gurdaspur. The then Maharaja of Patiala, among others, was regarded as being culpable in fostering bands of marauders. The only district that was spared was Malerkotla.
And then, in these heaving waves of violence, Independence brought the unnatural vivisections of the Radcliffe award. The tide of violence became a terrible tsunami of blood. The land experienced the forced dislocation, both ways, of over 14 million people and incredible carnage that left perhaps two million dead. Our greatest poets and writers have written about that Daaghdaar Ujala, none more vividly than Manto who, amongst his other writings, captured the surreal pointlessness of the violence in his Siyah Haashiye [Black Margins].
What did we learn from the horror story of 1947? Sadly, it appears, nothing. We stumbled into yet another massive bloodbath in 1971...and continue to wallow in eruptions of violence that no-one seems disposed to control – indeed, various sides seem to rush to ingratiate themselves with the violent ones. The lessons to learn are only too obvious: Violence is an unending spiral; demagoguery inflames and instigates violence; tolerance is imperative for survival; fanaticism, of any kind at all, is an immeasurable evil. On this Independence Day, let us pledge to value the freedoms we have won – our assemblies, our democracy, our rights – and to defend those freedoms even, or most of all, against our own worst instincts.
