Forgotten Wars (50 page)

Yet India did not win hands down. Radcliffe’s rapid draughtsmanship assigned the Hindu-majority district of Khulna to East Pakistan. This was close enough to Calcutta to loose a further surge of the Hindu population to the west and further poison the relationship between the emerging dominions. If Chittagong was only joined to East Pakistan by a thread of land, India’s great northeastern provinces of Assam and Manipur were equally tenuously linked to West Bengal by a thin strip squeezed between East Pakistan to the south and the independent Himalayan states of Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan to the north. The populous district of Sylhet, formerly part of Assam, also opted for Pakistan after a plebiscite. The importance of all this was that India’s northeastern section of the old British crescent was distanced even further physically and psychologically from the rest of the country. Unsurprisingly, this encouraged some local leaders, particularly among the Naga peoples, to think in terms of total independence from India. It also ensured that the Indian authorities and the Indian army became even more concerned to make their presence felt in Assam and Manipur for fear of Pakistani and, later, Chinese interference in these distant provinces. As elsewhere down the crescent, partition and the creation of new independent states sparked many small wars of secession.

In part this was because the British and Christian missionaries had always treated peoples such as the Nagas and Garos, or equally the Kachin and the Chin in Burma, differently from the Indians and Burmese of the ‘plains’. Most local leaders felt that they had been
conquered by the British, not by the Indians or Burmese, and they therefore saw nothing automatic about their incorporation in the post-British states. Roving British anthropologists had sought to protect their culture from ‘pollution’ by mainstream Hindu or Muslim society. In the case of the Nagas, American Baptist missionaries had protected them against the British civil administration and encouraged them to evolve an identity as a chosen people of God, distinct from the pagans of the Assam valley.
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By 1947 probably a majority of Nagas were Christian. This sense of separate identity had been strengthened during the war when many of them had fought against the Japanese on the Allied side. British officers had armed them and taught them that they were independent people and owed nothing to the seditious nationalists of the plains. Naga political associations gradually came into being, some pressing for local autonomy, some for outright independence. In July 1947, just as Radcliffe was passing through Delhi en route to Calcutta, a delegation came to meet the Congress leadership and seek guarantees for an independent Nagaland. Initially Gandhi seemed to accept this, stating that Congress wanted no one to be forced into the Indian Union. But by August the Congress leaders were rattled by the prospect that riot and secession would fragment the whole subcontinent. Their position hardened, provoking some Naga leaders to issue their own declaration of independence on 14 August. In contrast to the wild celebrations elsewhere in India, very few attended the flag hoisting in Nagaland. According to Mildred Archer, art historian and wife of W. G. Archer, a local official and anthropologist, ‘not a single Naga was anywhere in sight’.
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The messianic prophetess Gaidiliu, who had led a Naga rebellion against the British in 1930, remained in prison until 1948 at the behest of the suspicious Indian authorities. Decades of conflict, sabotage and insurrection were to follow in the northeast.

The haste to partition Bengal might have made it look as if the eastern part of the province were being abandoned, but some preparations had at least to be seen to be made. The middling-sized town of Dacca was designated the capital of East Pakistan. In the eighteenth century Dacca had been a major city in the Moghul province of Bengal, but with the rise of Calcutta it had lost its importance and become an undistinguished district headquarters noted mainly for its university
and periodic flooding. Already tense from minor communal incidents, the town was sadly lacking in facilities for the large number of Muslim clerks and officials who were congregating there from all over Bengal. The residence of the former Nawab of Dacca was commandeered as Government House while a British army barracks became the secretariat building and dormitory home for 3,500 disgruntled clerks.

Independence in Bengal was an even more shambolic affair than it was in Delhi. A few days before 15 August the Calcutta Corporation renamed three streets in the city centre ‘Netaji Subhas Bose Street’, souring the occasion for the British. C. Rajagopalachari, the moderate Madras Congressman who had been nominated governor of West Bengal, also showed little inclination to respect British traditions. He entered the splendour of the throne room of Government House for his swearing-in dressed simply in homespun
dhoti
and cap. Perhaps it was just as well. On 15 August a huge crowd waving Congress flags and shouting ‘
Jai Hind!
’ invaded the building, stirred to action, it was rumoured, by Sarat Bose. They swarmed through the governor’s quarters seizing everything from door handles to table ornaments as mementos. The police removed them only after several hours by throwing tear-gas canisters into the building. In the meantime, the outgoing governor and his family beat a hasty and ignominious retreat. As Arthur Dash recalled it, ‘someone who recognised him jammed a Gandhi cap on his head and the last British Governor went out of Government House by a side door so crowned and with his wife waving the new Dominion (late Congress Party) flag. They were glad to get away.’ Dash also noted that the governor’s escape route was a stairway traditionally used by the low-caste sweepers who cleaned the building.
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As the two new dominions were born, Gandhi and Suhrawardy fasted together and prayed for communal peace.
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Years later the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri related that out in the district town of Barishal his father had kept awake throughout the night of 14 August with a gun in his hand. The disturbances he feared did not come that night, but they came soon enough.
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The Calcutta, Noakhali and Bihar killings had already begun the slow tide of migration across the borders of the new states. Sensing that the partition would strand them in hostile territory, hundreds of thousands more had begun to move in July and August. By 4 August
Mookherjee, the Hindu leader, was deprecating ‘the mass evacuation of Hindus from the Pakistan zone’.
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Independence and the disclosure of the Radcliffe award speeded the exchange of populations and the atrocities that accompanied it. Despite the best efforts of the Muslim League, Calcutta remained in India, so thousands of its Muslim population moved eastwards while Hindus began to stream westwards. Quite apart from the fact that many of them already had relatives and patrons in the west, the option of remaining in what Tyson called ‘a rural slum’ which, at one stroke of Radcliffe’s pen, had been made a food deficit area did not appeal to them. The government of East Pakistan almost immediately started to beg for rice from neighbouring Arakan, but this seemed a fragile lifeline as the Burmese province was itself wracked by civil war.
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One of the biggest problems was that the police and subordinate civil servants almost unanimously opted for the dominion where their co-religionists were in a majority because ‘a Muslim who elects to serve in West Bengal tends to be looked on, at the moment, as a traitor to his religion and community’, and vice versa. Poorer people threatened with minority status therefore felt that they would have no patrons who would protect their interests in the apparatus of the state and they too began to migrate. Though there was nothing on the scale of the events in the Punjab, minor communal incidents continued throughout the autumn, climaxing in late October and November as Hindus celebrated Durga Puja, the festival of Bengal’s patron deity, and Muslims began their own more sombre celebration of Mohurrum. At this time tension was especially high in Dacca and Chittagong, the latter the division in which Noakhali and Tippera were situated. In Dacca religious animal sacrifice by Hindus was banned for the first time, at least in public. This was a sensible measure but it made the minority community fear for its future and only speeded the exodus. The new prime ministers of West Bengal and East Pakistan, P. C. Ghosh and Khwaja Nizamuddin, respectively, tried to stem the flow with speeches and tours across both territories. Ghosh pronounced the flight of upper-class Hindus from Pakistan ‘a betrayal of the interests of poorer people’. Speaking in Comila, a district town in East Pakistan, he revealed that Muslims in Calcutta had come to him vowing to end the annual sacrifice of cows, which was deeply offensive to the Hindus, in order to ease the
situation: ‘I dissuaded them from doing so’, he recalled, ‘as I did not want the Muslims to live their lives as cowards nor do I want the Hindus in East Bengal to behave as cowards.’
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But politicians had acted too little and too late. Rumours, especially of the abduction and rape of women, proved just as deadly as the sporadic burnings. Neighbours turned to killers. One old villager mused: ‘We were under British rule for 200 years. Will Muslims prove more foreign than the British?’ Arthur Dash served in East Pakistan for several months after partition. He remembered the strange world of Dacca, the new capital choked with refugees, lacking basic commodities, its schools crippled by the loss of their Hindu staff. He grew almost accustomed to the cycle of revenge killings: ‘One day, for instance, you would find on your morning walk on the golf course the body of an old woman stabbed to death, lying near the sixth green. Or you are held up in your car at Nawabganj level crossing at 8am… Just before you arrive 28 Hindu passengers had their throats cut by a gang of Muslims who had passed along the whole length of the train.’
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Even those who tried to stay eventually lost heart and hundreds of thousands of migrants crossed the borders again in 1948, 1950–51 and 1973.

In 1946 the poet Samar Sen wrote, in Bengali:

In Bengal, Bihar, Garmukteshwar,
People go to the graveyard or burning ghat
With limbless corpses on shoulders.
Perhaps death brings amity:
Everyone is equal after death–
Bihar’s Hindu and Noakhali’s Muslim
Noakhali’s Hindu and Bihar’s Muslim.
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Burma too was poised on a knife edge. The alarming events in India weighed on the minds of Burmese politicians who had always felt a sense of inferiority as junior partners to Indians in the British Empire. Given the bull-headedness of much of the Karen leadership and the
long history of frontier areas’ autonomy, they feared a series of mini-partitions in their own country. There was even greater mistrust of British intentions than there was among Indian leaders. It was not entirely unjustified. The British were unable to throw off their patronizing attitude to the Burmese. Attlee wrote to Nehru: ‘I like Aung San and his colleagues very much, but of course they don’t have the same resources of experienced personnel as you have in India.’
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Attlee had decided the British must leave the country, but he was concerned that the Burmese should stay in the Commonwealth and be firmly tied to Britain by defence and trade agreements. As it turned out, Burma did leave the Commonwealth, but resigned itself to commercial and defence links for some years further. The early bitterly cold weeks of January 1947 in London witnessed the denouement of the long struggle.

It had been mid December 1946 before the AFPFL accepted the invitation to attend talks on Burmese independence in London. The delegation the party sent was supposed to represent all shades of opinion but it was almost inevitably biased towards the AFPFL, now purged of communists, which dominated the governor’s executive council. Aung San was there – the British government insisted on this – but so too was Tin Tut, nominally an independent, as he was the only financial expert in Burmese politics. U Saw also went, along with representatives of other small nationalist parties. Many on both the right and left of Burma’s politics expected the talks to fail and the country to be plunged into full-scale civil disobedience or armed revolt in the new year of 1947. Aung San flew on ahead of the delegation to meet Indian leaders and stayed at Nehru’s house in Delhi between 2 and 6 January. Nehru and Aung San had struck up a friendship when the RAF ‘reds’ had flown the Indian leader into Rangoon on his way to meet Mountbatten. Nehru eulogized Aung San to the Indian press. Wavell, now in his final weeks as viceroy, invited him to lunch. He was less complimentary: ‘He struck me as a suspicious, ignorant but determined little tough.’
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This underestimated Aung San’s growing political sophistication. Passing through Karachi, he had arranged to meet Jinnah. Whatever deal the Muslim League leader managed to wring from independence, a large Muslim majority population would abut the northern frontier of Burma in Arakan. But when he arrived
at Karachi airport, Aung San was faced with a diplomatic dilemma. Members of the Congress had arrived in a separate car from the Muslim League leaders and they both tried to whisk him off to their respective accommodations. In a Solomonic gesture, Aung San put his staff in the Congress car with half his luggage and went himself in the League car to find a neutral hotel in which to stay.
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Aung San’s speeches during his stay in India also reflected a dawning consciousness of the outside world. He remained suspicious of British intentions, replying in a non-committal way to Indian journalists’ questions about whether he would resort to non-violent or armed rebellion should the London talks fail. He also alluded to the contemporary situation in Indo-China, where Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese republic was fighting for its life against French reaction.
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European imperialism was far from dead and this informed Aung San’s demeanour at the London meetings. It was not that the Indians and Burmese saw eye to eye on everything. The end of the war had revived the Burmese fear of being ‘swarmed’ by Indian immigrants, as one of their delegates later put it. At his press conference, Aung San declared that ‘Indian vested interests – like any vested interests – are not in favour of independence.’
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This might easily have soured relations but for the fact that Nehru took an almost equally jaundiced view of Indian business interests and ignored the widespread clamour from those who wanted untrammelled entry to Burma again.