INTRODUCTION:

India was divided on the 14th and 15th of August, 1947 into the sovereign states of the union of India (latter republic of India) and the dominion of Pakistan (latter renamed as Islamic Republic of Pakistan and Peoples Republic of Bangladesh). The partition was broadcasted in the Indian Independence act 1947 and resulted in the dissolution of Punjab was divided into two, the west side for Punjab of Pakistan and the east side for Punjab of India. The major districts affected were Jallunder, Gurdespur and Hoslipur. Sadly the people of this area knew not until almost the last minute whether they were to put as part of India or Pakistan. Apart from this, Bengal province was divided into East Pakistan (Bangladesh after 1971), far from the rest of the country (West Pakistan).

The Partition resulted in the relocation of around eight million Muslims, and somewhat the same numbers of Sikhs and Hindus, across the Indo-Pakistan borders in the in 1947. This has been recorded as the largest refugee movement of the 20th century, and was accompanied by communal violence and atrocities committed on all sides of the religious spectrum, with a death toll calculated at approximately 1 million.

People were moving from east Punjab to west Punjab and vice versa, west Bengal to east and people from the mainland India, United Province /Central Province/Delhi mainly migrated to urban area of Pakistan especially Karachi and Hyderabad.

Kurushetra occupies a special place in Indian history. It was the venue for the bloody battles described in the epic Mahabharata.

Several thousand years after the Mahabharata was composed the place of its enactment became the temporary home of the victims of another war. This too was fought between closely related kin: India and Pakistan. Many of the Hindus and Sikhs fleeing West Punjab were directed by the Government of India to a refugee camp in Kurushetra. A vast city of tents had grown ups on the plain to house waves of migrants, sometimes up to 20,000 a day. The camp was initially planned for 100,000 refugees, but it came to accommodate three times that number. Helping the state in their effort was a network of Indian and foreign social workers, the United Council for Relief and Welfare(UCRW).

The refugees had to be housed and fed, also clothed and entertained. With winter approaching the Government soon recognized that the evenings and nights were hardest to bear. So UCRW commandeered a bunch of film projectors from Delhi and set them up in Kurukshetra. The refugees forgot their shock experiences and misery for two golden hours of laughter. They who had been bruised and beaten, were homeless and wounded, could laugh. Here was hope, Kurukshetra was the largest of the nearly 200 camps set up to house refugees from West Punjab. Some refugees had arrived before the date of transfer of power. Among them prominent businessmen who had sold their properties in advance and migrated with the proceeds. But the vast majority came after 15^th August 1947. These were the farmers who had stayed behind till the last moment, firmly resolved to remain in Pakistan if they could be assured of an honourable living. But when in September and October, the violence escalated in the Punjab, they had to abandon that idea. The Hindus and Sikhs who were lucky enough to escape the mobs fled to India by road, rail, sea and on foot.

As it happened a massive migration had also taken place the other way into Pakistan from India. Thus the first place to resettle the refugees was on land vacated by Muslims in the eastern part of the Punjab. If the transfer of population had been the greatest mass migration in history, now commenced ‘the biggest land resettlement operation in the world. As against 2.7 million hectares abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab, there were only 1.9 million hectares left behind by Muslims in the East Punjab. The shortfall was made more acute by the fact that the areas in the west of the province had richer soils, and were more abundantly irrigated. In the late nineteenth century, hundreds of Sikh villages had migrated emensse to the west to cultivate land in the newly created ‘canal colonies’. There they had made the desert flourish but one fine day in 1947 they were told that their garden now lay in Pakistan. So, in bare two generations these dispossessed Sikhs found themselves back in their original homes.

In the beginning each family of refugee farmers was given an allotment of four hectares regardless of its holding in Pakistan. Each family was asked to submit evidence of how much land it had left behind. Applications were received from 10^th March 1948, within a month more than half a million claims had been filed. There were many officials working in this regard. By November 1949 Tarlok Singh and his men had made 250,000 allotments of land. In exchange for their well watered lands in the west, these refugees were given impoverished holdings in the east. The economy could be rebuilt but the cultural wrongs of Partition could never be undone-not in or by either side.

The bulk of migrants from West Punjab were farmers but there were also many who were artisans, traders and labourers. To accommodate them the government built brand- new townships. One Faridabad, lay twenty miles south of the nation’s capital, Delhi. Among the groups active here was the Indian Cooperative Union, an organization headed by Kamladevi Chattapadhya, a socialist and feminist who had been closely associated with Mahatma Gandhi. The residents of Faridabad were mostly Hindu refugees from the North West Frontier Province. However thousands of refugees had made their homes in Delhi itself. Almost half a million refugees came to settle in Delhi after Partition. They flooded the city, ‘spreading themselves out wherever they could. They thronged in camps, schools, colleges, temples, gurudwaras, dharamshalas, military barracks and gardens. They squatted on railway platforms, streets, pavements and every conceivable placed. In time, these squatters built houses on land allotted to them to the west and south of Lutyen’s Delhi. Here rose colonies that to this day are dominated by Punjabis: nagars or townships named after Patel, Rajendra (Prasad) and Lajpat (Rai), Congress leaders they admired. Like their counterparts settled on the farms of East Punjab, the refugees in Delhi displayed much thrift and drive. In time they came to gain commanding influence in Delhi, dominating its trade and commerce. Indeed, a city that was once a Mughal city, then a British city, had by the 1950’s emphatically become a Punjabi city.

Like Delhi, the city of Bombay also had its culture and social geography transformed by Partition. By July 1948 there were half a million refugees in the city, these arriving from Sindh, Punjab and the Frontier. The refugees further intensified what was already the most acute of Bombay’s problems, the housing shortage. Slums were growing apace. In crowded tenements, people lived fifteen or twenty to a room. There were five refugee camps in Bombay. Their condition left much to be desired. The Kolwada camp had 10,400 people living in barracks. In April 1950 a minor riot broke out when some tenants refused to pay rent, protesting their living conditions. The refugees from Sindh spread themselves across the towns and cities of western India. Apart from Bombay, there were substantial communities in Pune and Ahemdabad. A social psychologist visiting them in the autumn of 1950 found the Sindh is deeply dissatisfied. The complaints of crowded, filthy quarters, inadequate water, insufficient rations and above all, insufficient support from the government were almost universal.

The influx of refugees also transformed the landscape of India’s third great metropolis, Calcutta. Before partition the more prosperous Hindu families of eastern Bengal had begun moving with their assets to the city. After partition the immigration was chiefly of working class and farming families. Unlike in the Punjab, where the exodus happened in one big rush, in Bengal it was spread out. However, in the winter of 1949-50 there was a wave of communal riots in East Pakistan which forced many more Hindus across the border. In previous years about 400,000 refugees came into West Bengal, in 1950 the number jumped to 1.7 million. These people made home on city’s railway stations, where their beds, boxes and other accessories lay spread out on the platform. Still others lived on the street. Earlier in 1948, a large number of refugees disgusted with their miserable existence at Sealdah station, occupied the Lake military barracks, Jodhpur military barracks, the Mysore House and other large unoccupied houses and military barracks at Shahpur, Durgapur, Ballygunge Circular Road and Dharmatala. Almost overnight these deserted houses swarmed with refugee, men women and children.

It was the Government of West Bengal that willy-nilly forced the refugees to take the law into their own hands. For one thing, there had been no massive migration in the other direction –as there had been in Punjab- leaving untended fields and farms for the refugees to be settled in. These refugees found support for their views in the person of the historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar. Addressing a mammoth public meeting of refugees held on 16 August 1948, Sir Jadunath compared the migration of East Bengal Hindus to the flight of French Huguenots in the time of Louis XIV. He urged the people of West Bengal to absorb and integrate the migrants, thus to nourish their culture and economy. In September 1948 an All –Bengal Refugee Council of Action was formed. Marches and demonstrations were organized demanding that the refugees be given fair compensation and citizenship rights.

Displaced from their homes by forces outside their control refugees everywhere are potential fodder for extremist movements. In Delhi and the Punjab it was the radical Hindu organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, that very early on got good foothold among the migrants. In Bengal Hindu Mahasabha worked at giving a religious colour to the problem. The invocation of medieval Hindu warriors who had fought Muslim kings found more takers in Delhi and Punjab. In Bengal however it was the communists who most successfully mobilized the refugees. It was they who organized the processions to government offices, and it was they who orchestrated the forcible occupation of fallow land in Calcutta, land to which the refugees ‘ had no sanction other than organized strength and dire necessity. Thus in different parts of the city grew numerous impromptu settlements, ‘clusters of huts with thatch, tile or corrugated –iron roofs, bamboo-mat walls and mud floors, built in the East Bengal style.’ By early 1950 there were about 200, 000 refugees in these squatter colonies. In the absence of state support, the refugees ‘formed committees of their own, framed rules for the administration of the colonies and organized themselves into a vast united body’. A South Calcutta Refugee Rehabilitation Committee claimed to represent 40,000 families who, in their respective colonies, had constructed a total of 500 miles of road, sunk 700 tube wells and started 45 high schools as well as 100 primary schools – all at their own expense and through their own initiative. The Committee demanded that the government make these colonies legal by formally bringing them under the Calcutta Municipality, that is similarly regularized plots and school buildings, and help develop markets and arrange loans”. A team of Bengali social workers visiting north India found the camps there ‘of a superior kind’. On the whole, the resettlement process was far less painful in the Punjab. By the early 1950’s the refugees in the north had found new homes and new jobs. But in the east the insecurity persisted.

No doubt the main victims of Partition were women, Hindu, Sikh and Muslim. Women were killed, maimed, violated and abandoned. Women were killed, maimed, violated and abandoned. After Independence the brothels of Delhi and Bombay came to be filled with refugee women, who had been thrown out by their families after what someone else had done to them against their will. Many women belonging to all communities too were kidnapped. Later the governments of India and Pakistan agreed that these captured women must be returned to their original families. On the Indian side, the operation to recover abducted women was led by Mridula Sarabhai and Rameshwari Nehru. Their work was encouraged and aided by Jawaharlal Nehru, who took a deep personal interest in the process. By May 1948 some 12, 500 women had been found and restored to their families.

There was also serious shortages of food. After the end of the war imports of grain were steadily on the rise, increasing from 0.8 million tons (mt) in 1944 to 2.8 mt four years later. In some places farmers were starving, in other places they were restive. In the uncertainty following the Indian takeover of Hyderabad, the communists moved swiftly to assume control of the Telengana region. Their success in Hyderabad had encouraged the communists to think of a countrywide peasant revolution, Telangana they hoped would be the beginning of a Red India. The party unveiled its new line at a secret conference held in Calcutta in February 1948. At its Calcutta meeting, the party elected a new general secretary with P.C.Joshi giving way to B.T.Ranadive. The new line of the Communist Party of India held that Nehru’s government had joined the Anglo-American alliance in an irreconcilable conflict with the democratic camp led by the Soviet Union. The scattered disillusionment with the Congress was taken by B.T.Ranadive as a sign of a ‘mounting revolutionary upsurge’. Ranadive and his men took heart from the victory of the communists in China. The Indian communists were also egged on by Russian theoreticians, who believed that the ‘political regime established in India is similar in many respects to the anti-popular, reactionary regime which existed in Kuomintang China. The Communists had declared war on the Indian state. The government responded with all the force at its command. As many as 50,000 party men and sympathizers were arrested and detained. In Hyderabad the police arrested important leaders of communist dalams, although Ravi Narayan Reddy was not arrested.

The propaganda and repression of the party had its effect. The membership of the party dropped from 89,000 in 1948 to a mere 20,000 two years later. The government’s counter-offensive had exposed the lack of popular empathy it experienced for its unbridled revolutionism. It appeared the party had grossly underestimated the hold of the Congress over the Indian people. Even as the communists were losing their influence, a band of extremists was gathering strength on the right. This was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. After the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948, the RSS was banned by the government. Although not directly involved in the assassination, the organization had much support among disaffected refugees. The RSS was banned and its cadres arrested. However after a year the government decided to make the organization legal once more. Its head M.S Golwalkar had now agreed to ask his men to profess loyalty to the Constitution of India and the national flag and to restrict the Sangh’s activities ‘to the cultural sphere abjuring violence or secrecy’. After the RSS was made legal, Golwalkar made a ‘triumphal’ speaking tour across the country, drawing mammoth crowds.

Like the communist B.T.Ranadive, Golwalkar was an upper caste Maharashtrian. Both men were relatively young- in their early forties-and both commanded the loyalty of hundreds of cadres a good deal younger than themselves. The RSS and the communists likewise drew upon the energy and idealism of youth, and upon its fanaticism too. In the early years of Indian independence, these two groups were the most motivated opponents of the ruling Congress Party. At the helm of the Congress was the Prime Minister who had to confront the radicals.

Like the integration of the princely states the rehabilitation of refugees was a political problem unprecedented in nature and scope. The refugees who came into India after Independence numbered close to 8 million. This was greater than the populations of small European countries such as Austria and Norway, and as many as lived in the colossal continent of Australia. These people were resettled with time, cash, effort, and, not least, idealism.

There were indeed much heroism and grandeur in the building of new India. There were also errors and mistakes, loose ends that remained untied. There were also errors and mistakes, loose ends that remained untied. There was pain and suffering in the extinguishing of princely order, and there was pain and suffering in the resettlement of the refugees. Yet both tasks were, in the end, accomplished. Notably, the actors in this complicated and tortuous process were all Indian. This at least on the British side, was completely unanticipated. In the event, that helps behind a set of functioning institutions, the civil service and the police, the judiciary and the railways, among others. At independence, the government of India invited British members of the ICS to stay on, with but the odd exception, they all left for home, along with their colleagues in the other services. Thus it came to be that the heroes remembered were all Indians- whether politicians like Nehru and Patel, bureaucrats like Tarlok Singh and V.P.Menon, or social workers like Kamladevi Chattopadhya and Mridula Sarabhai. So too were the countless others who were unnamed then and continue to be unknown now, the officials who took in and acted upon applications for land allotment, the officials who built the houses and ran the hospitals and schools, the officials who sat in courts and secretariats. Also overwhelmingly Indian were the social workers who cajoled, consoled and cared for the refugees.

In the history of nation building only the Soviet experiment bears comparison with the Indian. There too, a sense of unity had to be forged between an diverse ethnic groups, religions, linguistic communities and social classes. The scale- geographic as well as demographic- was comparably massive. The raw material the state had to work with was equally unpropitious a people divided by faith and driven by debt and disease. A nation was being built out of its fragments.

REFERENCES:

1. V.V.Prasad, ‘New Delhi Diary’, Swantrata, 25, December, 1947

2. Anon, ‘A Glimpse into Crowded Bombay’, Swantrata, 7 August 1948.

3. ‘Squatters Colonies’, Economic Weekly, 5^th June 1954.

4. R.M. Lala, ‘ Kolwada Landmark of Swaraj’ the Current, 3 May 1950.

5. V.N.Dutta, ‘ Punjabi Refugees and the Urban Development of Greater Delhi’ in R.E Frykenberg, ed., Delhi through the Ages (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993).

6. Dorothy Jane Ward, ‘India for the Indians( London: Arthur Barker Ltd, 1949).

7. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’ Partition, New Delhi, 1998.

8. G.S Bhargava, ‘Balchandra Triambak Ranadive’, Swatantra, 22 April 1950.

9. Amit Kumar Gupta, The Agrarian Drama, The Leftists and the Rural Poor in India, 1934-51( New Delhi:Manohar), 1996.

10. Donald F. Ebright, Free India the First Five Years: An Account of the 1947 Riots, Refugees, Relief and Rehabilitation ( Nashhville Parthenon Press, 1954).

11. A.N Bali, Now it Can be Told (Jullundur : Kashmir Prakashan Ltd, 1949).

12. Aparna Basu , Mridula Sarabhai:Rebel with a Cause(Delhi : Oxford University Press, 1996).

13. Clair and Harris Wofford, India Afire ( New York: The John Day Co. 1951)

14. Ram Chandra Guha, India after Gandhi, Macmillan, London, 2007.

Received on 11.03.2013 Modified on 01.04.2013

Int. J. Rev. & Res. Social Sci. 1(1): July –Sept. 2013; Page 01-04