Pak Studies (Term Paper)

The Migration between Pakistan and India

Maham Shahzad

F2019101023

Section A

The migration that took place in the wake of communal riots and partition of British India into
independent states of India and Pakistan – on 14–15 August 1947 – was sudden, swift, and on a
mass scale. Described as ‘genocidal partition’, the partition was one of the most traumatizing,
violent and daunting events of human history “which not only tore a human population into two
and now three distinct political entities, but also tore many human lives into halves”. The
division of Bengal and specially Punjab resulted in mob violence and mass–killing. According to
an estimate, approximately 1.3 million were killed and about 15 million were forcibly displaced.
Among the displaced, approximately “8 million Hindus and Sikhs were forced to leave their
home in Pakistan and migrate to India and nearly seven million Muslims were uprooted from
their homes in India and forced to migrate to Pakistan”.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium
attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one
side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In
Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan,
respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions,
mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped,
and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered. Partition is central to modern identity in
the Indian subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded painfully onto the
regional consciousness by memories of almost unimaginable violence. The acclaimed Pakistani
historian Ayesha Jalal has called Partition “the central historical event in twentieth century South
Asia.” She writes, “A defining moment that is neither a beginning, nor an end partition continues
to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present
and future.”

After the Second World War, Britain simply no longer had the resources with which to control
its greatest imperial asset, and its exit from India was messy, hasty, and clumsily improvised.
From the vantage point of the retreating colonizers, however, it was in one way fairly successful.
Whereas British rule in India had long been marked by violent revolts and brutal suppressions,
the British Army was able to march out of the country with barely a shot fired and only seven
casualties. Equally unexpected was the ferocity of the ensuing bloodbath.

The question of how India’s deeply intermixed and profoundly syncretic culture unraveled so
quickly has spawned a vast literature. The polarization of Hindus and Muslims occurred during
just a couple of decades of the twentieth century, but by the middle of the century it was so
complete that many on both sides believed that it was impossible for adherents of the two
religions to live together peacefully. Recently, a spate of new work has challenged seventy years
of nationalist mythmaking. There has also been a widespread attempt to record oral memories of
Partition before the dwindling generation that experienced it takes its memories to the grave.

The Cabinet Mission of 1946 sent by the post-war Labour Government of Clement
Atlee failed to convince the two rival parties to agree upon a formula of power sharing
within a united India. The factor that sealed the fate of unity was the eruption of large-scale
communal violence following Jawaharlal Nehru’s ill-considered press statement of 10 July
1946 in Bombay declaring that Congress would enter the Constituent Assembly ‘completely
unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise’. On 29 July 1946, Jinnah
gave the call to direct action to Muslims to protest the alleged anti-minority attitude of Nehru.
On 16 August 1946, communal massacres, initiated by hotheads despatched by the Muslim
League chief minister of Bengal, Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, took place in Calcutta.

Thus, sparking the first series of widespread religious massacres. Von Tunzelmann’s history
relays atrocities witnessed there by the writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Chaudhuri described a man
tied to the connector box of the tramlines with a small hole drilled in his skull, so that he would
bleed to death as slowly as possible. He also wrote about a Hindu mob stripping a fourteen-year-
old boy naked to confirm that he was circumcised, and therefore Muslim. The boy was then
thrown into a pond and held down with bamboo poles—“a Bengali engineer educated in England
noting the time he took to die on his Rolex wristwatch, and wondering how tough the life of a
Muslim bastard was.” Five thousand people were killed. The American photojournalist Margaret
Bourke-White, who had witnessed the opening of the gates of a Nazi concentration camp a year
earlier, wrote that Calcutta’s streets “looked like Buchenwald.”

Recounting Horrors

There is no given solid account of what happened throughout the migration between the two
newly independent nations. However many people have recounted the horror they faced while
migrating, here are the accounts of immigrants who survived the bloody massacre and lived to
tell the tale:
Born in 1911 at the headworks of Balloki Dam on the river Ravi in Pakistani Punjab and
educated at Government College, Lahore, Prakash Tandon gives an account of the bloody
partition times:

“One day, a train crammed with two thousand refugees came from the more predominantly
Muslim areas of Jhelum and beyond. At Gujrat station the train was stopped, and Muslims from
the neighborhood excited by the news of violence in East Punjab, began to attack and loot. There
was indescribable carnage. Several hours later the train moved on, filled with a bloody mess of
corpses, without a soul alive. At Amritsar, when the train with its load of dead arrived, they took
revenge on a trainload of Muslim refugees. There was also great killing at Sheikhupura, and on
the other side in Jullandhur. The whole Punjab was in conflagration. Six million Hindus and
Sikhs from the West Punjab began to move in one dense mass towards safety, and from the east
of the border a similar mass movement was under way in the opposite direction”.

‘I was the only one of my family to survive’ – Nasim Fatima Zubairi, 82, retired foster carer,
UK

My last memory before seven members of my immediate family were killed is looking through a
keyhole in our house and seeing my father praying, with my two-year-old brother crying in the
background. I was hit over the head and I still have a scar from the attack. My father, mother,
grandmother and four brothers and sisters were all killed. I was the only one of my family to
survive.

Before the partition I had a very happy childhood in Karol Bagh, in Delhi. It was a Hindu area,
so as Muslims we couldn’t leave the house. Our neighbours were Sikh and they had said they
would protect us. But that didn’t happen … in fact, it was the Sikh neighbours who attacked us.

‘Dad hid us in bed rolls as they started shooting everyone on the train’ – Patricia, 75, retired
nurse, UK

I come from three generations of the British Raj in India. At the time of partition we were cut off
in a new development surrounded by jungle. It was quite vulnerable and there were terrible
troubles such as burning houses and fighting.

We were stranded there for a week. I was five years old but remember it vividly. All we had left
to eat was okra, which I remember my mum force-feeding us. Dad would go on the back veranda
and mum at the front with the few weapons they had.

Later, we went to Pakistan. I remember getting on a train in a crowd. There was this British man
and his son. They were absolutely silent. I was much older when mother said his wife and
daughter had been raped and killed in front of them.

Then somewhere, it must have been not far from the border, the train was stopped and men
started shooting everyone on the train. Dad had rolled us in our bed rolls to hide us. Everybody
on the roof died. There were a lot of babies crying. When we got to Pakistan we were taken to a
transit camp. We lived in Rawalpindi in Punjab, where there were more British families we knew
from India, but it got increasingly uncomfortable. Eventually we got passage to England.

‘My family occupied the house of a Muslim family’ – Surinder Shani, 81, retired architect, UK

In Rawalpindi, my family ran a grain store in the centre of the city which was predominantly
Muslim. We are Sikh but my father was friends with the Muslims. They used to talk about poetry
together.

We moved to Jalandhar in India because of partition. There were riots forcing the Muslims to go
to Pakistan. My uncle said we should go and occupy the Muslims’ houses as people were
leaving. My father was reluctant but he was forced to do it by his brother.

As the Muslim family was leaving the house - I remember because I was there, about 12 at the
time - my father apologized to the owner, an elderly gentleman, saying how sorry he was that
this was happening. My father promised to look after the house. And the man said, please just
look after my books they are more important to me than the house. Then a day later we heard
that they were all killed by a Sikh mob on the way to Pakistan. They didn’t reach the border.

‘I went from sneaking into the maharajah’s durbar to being homeless and hungry’ – Tariq
Malik, 80, doctor, USA

My father was killed in 1947 when he was on his way from Kashmir to Pakistan. A Hindu
paramilitary organization that still exists to this day, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, planned to
kill all the Muslim population in Jammu.

Malik Fazal Haq, Tariq Malik’s father. Photograph: Tariq Malik

I still get bad dreams about my father. Now that I am a physician, I think about how he died and
I worry about whether he was in pain.

I remember that every year the maharajah used to have a durbar (a reception) and my father
would be in a golden achkan, the long coat, with a sword on the side. From my very privileged
childhood in Jammu, we were left with no roof over our head and no source of income. We
became refugees in Pakistan, staying with different relatives. There were six of us and our
mother, but our family was split up.

One thing that haunts me is that my feet grew and my shoes didn’t fit, so I walked barefoot on the
hot ground in Pakistan. That feeling still comes to me, of the heat under my feet.

‘My father was assassinated before I was born’ – Rami Ranger, 70, businessman, UK
“This is not a shop that can be divided between brothers,” my father used to say in his speeches
before partition. “This is a motherland and no will ever be happy dividing their mother.” But he
was a marked man as he was not liked by the fundamentalists. I was born two months after his
assassination in 1947.

The British were ruling with divide-and-rule policies. At that time they offered Sikhs – I’m a Sikh
– a separate country also, but I’m glad the Sikhs didn’t fall for it, otherwise there would have
been even more chaos.

We became refugees in India. Sometimes we didn’t have enough food on the table. Sometimes we
didn’t have enough money to pay for exam fees; we would say ‘OK, I’ll skip this year, you go
this year’. People should know that real families are affected when you break up countries.

Many of artifacts, recovered from the migration or passed down the generations tell the personal
story of a family or individual’s unique connection to the events.

A man who was helping with the last rites of unclaimed bodies recognized Pandit Devi Daas
among the dead, and removed his watch. Daas was separated from his family while crossing
from Pakistan to India and no one knew his whereabouts, until they came across an unusual
advertisement in the newspaper. The man who removed the pocket watch had placed an ad in the
paper describing the family heirloom, in hopes the man’s family would claim it. They did, but it
was only when they went to collect the item that they learned about his death.

This coat was among the few possessions that Pritam Kaur, then 22 years old, carried with her
when she took a train from Pakistan to India along with her brother. There she was to marry
Bhagwan Singh Maini, then 30 years old, whom she had been introduced to earlier in the year.
But in the chaos following the Partition, their two families lost contact. She met Maini again
while waiting in line for food at a refugee camp in Amritsar, India. The couple eventually got
married and treasured this coat as a testimony to the life they lost in Pakistan and found again in
India.

Salahuddin Khalid was a young boy living in New Delhi when life as he knew it erupted in a
cataclysm of violence and bloodshed.

It was 1947, and the border between the new nations of India and Pakistan had just been
created. Salahuddin and his family found themselves on the Indian side of the border. They were
Muslims in a land dominated by Hindus and Sikhs.

"I heard a shriek. I turned and I saw a Sikh with a sword in hand and my sister was running," he
recalls.

"First, they entered the room of my mother, killed her, then they ran towards us."
Salahuddin fled in fear. When he returned, his mother lay mutilated.

"It was just like … a slaughterhouse," he says.

Sardar Joginder Singh Kholi, a Sikh teenager at the time of partition, recalls a woman named
Veerawaali who lived in his village in Pakistan's Punjab province.

"She was a very beautiful woman. But during the unrest … Muslims were chasing after her," he
says.

"There was a Sikh temple in our village, so she ran inside the temple to take refuge. She paid her
respects to the holy book … doused her body in kerosene and set herself on fire."

She wasn't the only one of Sardar's neighbours who died. He recalls what happened to the men
of the village when the attackers arrived.

"Out of the 25 men who were there, they murdered 18," says Sardar, now 86.

"I cried a lot. Now I think of it, I feel that something happened to all of us. It's as if humanity had
died. Everybody became a devil."

"We wanted to stay, we wanted to remain where we were. Partition happened, even then we
still remained," says Khanna, now 92 and with failing eyesight and hearing. His family was
Hindu, and their home was now in West Pakistan.

"Then the [Pakistani] military came and beat us out of our neighbourhoods. There was a
'poison' spreading then. People who had become Muslim refugees arrived [in the
neighbourhood] as well, and questioned why these Hindus were still here."

The killings had started.

"Outside my uncle's house, I saw seven bodies, covered in blood," he says. "Their blood was
flowing into the street, and I stepped over it to get into the house. I still remember that blood
today. The blood touched my feet and, as I was walking down the street, a man said to me: 'Is
this the freedom that you wanted?'"

Khanna could not comprehend the scale of the violence. For centuries, he says, Hindu, Muslim
and Sikh communities had lived in harmony in his town. "We were a symbol of unity," he
reflects, ruefully.

"But there was a strange atmosphere then, and people fell into it. Men did not have the will to
kill people ... but when the 'poison' spread. It happened, and we had to flee."
Muhammad Muslehuddin Malik was a teenage schoolboy from a well-to-do Muslim
household in Delhi when partition happened. His family was uprooted from their ancestral
home and survived the partition riots as they made their way to Pakistan. In the newly built
Muslim nation, Malik became his family's main breadwinner for a time. Malik, who is today a
leading banker in Pakistan, recounts living through partition and its immediate aftermath.

We boarded an overcrowded train and set off for Lahore at sunset. We had heard reports of
brutal attacks on trains carrying Muslims to Pakistan, so we began the 12-hour journey with
great trepidation but also with excitement for our new homeland.

The train began to slow down as it approached Amritsar just before sunrise. As it got closer to
the station, Sikh men brandishing brazen swords, spears and daggers began climbing on the
train in hordes. Luckily, the doors of the cabins were locked and the glass windows shut. I was
sitting by the window and could see men raging with anger banging on the door and the
windows.

We were sure the train would pull up at the platform and the mob would enter the cabins. Inside
the train, it was a scene of great horror. People were crying, screaming and chanting Quranic
verses. We were staring death in the face and feared we would be butchered like the thousands
who undertook this journey before us.

The train picked up speed again just as it reached the platform, making it difficult for the
attackers to keep holding on to the doors. They either hurriedly climbed off or were thrown off by
the speeding train. It was a miracle. We couldn't believe our luck. How our fate changed within
minutes remained a mystery. However, some people believed that a British man was guarding
the train's engine and that there were some British soldiers aboard the train, so the driver was
urged to keep going.

In the dozens of trains transporting Muslim migrants before and after ours, everyone was killed.
Slain. Slaughtered. Muslims were also killing non-Muslims leaving Pakistan. It was a grave
attack on all of humanity.

Resettlement of Refugees in India

According to the 1951 Census of India, 2% of India's population was refugees (1.3% from West
Pakistan and 0.7% from East Pakistan). Delhi received the largest 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) during the period 1941–1951. The refugees were housed in
various historical and military locations such as the Purana Qila, Red Fort, and military barracks
in Kingsway Camp. 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 campsites were later converted into permanent housing through extensive building projects
undertaken by the Government of India from 1948 onwards. Many housing colonies in Delhi
came up around this period, like Lajpat Nagar, Rajinder Nagar, Nizamuddin East, Punjabi Bagh,
Rehgar Pura, Jangpura and Kingsway Camp. Several 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

The 1951 Census of Pakistan recorded that the most significant number of Muslim refugees
came from the East Punjab and nearby Rajputana states (Alwar and Bharatpur). They were
several 5,783,100 and constituted 80.1% of Pakistan's total refugee population. This was the
effect of the retributive ethnic cleansing on both sides of the Punjab where the Muslim
population of East Punjab was forcibly expelled like the Hindu/Sikh population in West Punjab.
Migration from other regions in India was as follows: Bihar, West Bengal and Orissa, 700,300 or
9.8%; UP and Delhi 464,200 or 6.4%; Gujarat and Bombay, 160,400 or 2.2%; Bhopal and
Hyderabad 95,200 or 1.2%; and Madras and Mysore 18,000 or 0.2%.