Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan

Resettlement in Punjab, 1947-1962

Elisabetta Iob

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351395991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Indische & südasiatische Geschichte

The Partition of India in 1947 involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, based on district-wise Hindu or Muslim majorities. The Partition displaced between 10 and 12 million people along religious lines.

This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the resettlement and rehabilitation of Partition refugees in Pakistani Punjab between 1947 and 1962. It weaves a chronological and thematic plot into a single narrative, and focuses on the Punjabi refugee middle and upper-middle class. Emphasising the everyday experience of the state, the author challenges standard interpretations of the resettlement of Partition refugees in the region and calls for a more nuanced understanding of their rehabilitation. The book argues the universality of the so-called 'exercise in human misery', and the heterogeneity of the rehabilitation policies. Refugees' stories and interactions with local institutions reveal the inability of the local bureaucracy to establish its own 'polity' and the viable workability of Pakistan as a state. The use of Pakistani documents, US and British records and a careful survey of both the judicial records and the Urdu and English-language dailies of the time, provides an invaluable window onto the everyday life of a state, its institutions and its citizens.

A carefully researched study of both the state and the everyday lives of refugees as they negotiated resettlement, through both personal and official channels, the book offers an important reinterpretation of the first years of Pakistani history. It will be of interest to academics working in the field of refugee resettlement and South Asian History and Politics.

1
Memories, swords, blood and freedom

When independence came to India and Pakistan

As Jinnah defined it, the Punjab represented the cornerstone of Pakistan. Here his party, the Muslim League, fought one of its most interesting political battles in order to defeat its local competitor, the Unionist Party, in the key 1945–6 elections. Taken as a proof of the League’s power and its declared aspiration to be the sole representative of Indian Muslims, the outcome of this electoral campaign shook the local political arena. It indeed challenged the traditional affiliations that had consolidated in the province over the previous decades. Ideas of religious identity and a lethal overlapping of politics and religion provided the raw ingredients for both the 1945–6 League victory and the different bouts of violence that rocked the Punjab after the withdrawal of Khizr Tiwana’s ministry in February 1947. Partition-related communal clashes relied heavily on the value of the symbols ‘handled’ by social actors during the spring and the summer of 1947. The circumstances involved in the early fluxes of migrants and then in later journeys towards what refugees perceived to be safer places or their new home emphasised the relevance of the meanings that local society attached to the political ideas at stake and violence.

The first section provides an overview of the events and the scholarly informed debate on and around the independence of India and Pakistan. Attitudes, opinions and clashes are treated here as both a medium and a message. It reveals the plot of the deployment of the March to June communal clashes, and accounts for the early flows of refugees. The second and third sections focus on individual experiences of communalism, the indeterminateness of the political ideas at stake during the early summer of 1947, and the subsequent re-negotiation of both the religious and civic identities of local communities in the Punjab. The chapter then concludes with an overview of the legal and political framework of the resettlement and the rehabilitation of refugees in West Punjab.

The 1947 March to May communal violence and the early flows of refugees

The Governor of Punjab, Evan Jenkins, entrusted the Khan of Mamdot with the task of forming a new Cabinet at 11:40 am on 3 March 1947. A single-party ministry that counted on the miscellaneous support of single individuals within the Assembly, would not, Jenkins warned him, last long. Daultana’s only response was to ask the Governor’s blessing in this new Muslim League enterprise.¹ “[You can] count on help from me if […] [you get] into difficulty, but I could do very little unless the Muslim League […] [take] a reasonable line and […] [are] prepared to help themselves”, countered the British official.² As news spread across Lahore, Hindus and Sikhs started tearing down Muslim League flags. Some of them even marched towards local police stations and set them on fire.³ The long spring and summer of 1947 had just begun.

Demonstrations, fires, killings, disrupted communications, assaults on trains and deserted streets crammed with corpses were poised to become a common scenario throughout 1947 Punjab. Violence would, as Brass, Kaur, Khan and Talbot have all argued separately, result from an exceptional political mobilisation around the conflicting demands for an independent India and Pakistan.⁴ The heated debate on Khizr Tiwana’s government and the achievement of two independent states – rather than Hinduism, Islam or Sikhism per se – then pushed growing numbers of people to take up arms. Shortly after Tiwana’s resignation in early March, rioting broke out in the Amritsari suburbs of Chown Nohli, Holi Bazar and Kitra Jamal. Businesses and commercial premises were systematically looted and burnt, and 40,000 persons were made homeless, with total damage assessed at Rs. 5–8 crores.⁵ Although only slightly affected by the destruction of properties, other important Punjabi cities – Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi – experienced similar bouts of communal violence.

All violent conflicts resulting in and from the political and geographical division of a land, Deschaumes and Ivekovic have reminded us, draw on well-rooted socio-historical dynamics. Partition – they warn – restructures “the sources of conflicts around borders, refugees and diasporas”.⁶ Overtly political, the 1947 early spring riots combined Hindu and Sikh opposition to the establishment of a Muslim League raj over the Punjab with some of the elements that had previously featured in conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s. As in the past, religious festivals, processions and recognised symbols were part and parcel of the wider picture of events that was being sketched out in the all-India scenario. In early 1947, a number of Sikh associations were planning to take part in Holi processions in Lahore and across the whole of the Punjab.⁷ In April, a riot broke out in Amritsar after the ritual Friday prayers.⁸ Sikh holy books were burnt in Muzzaffargarh, and cases of Sikhs having their beards and hair forcibly cut were reported in Rawalpindi, Attock and Jhelum Districts.⁹

Mosques, temples and gurdwaras (Sikh temples) thus provided both the target and the starting point for communal violence. Places and symbols were conceived in terms of their fluid and dynamic dimensions: they were far from being static cognitive symbols.¹⁰ No matter if reasserted within a new political context and message, the participation of supposedly ‘enemy’ communities in processions or the desecration of holy books unquestionably aimed at provoking religious identities. Local disturbances and their religious symbols were drawn into a complex process involving the re-elaboration of previous clashes alongside newly created reasons for conflict. In the spring of 1947, the overall religious cosmology still retained the meaning that previous communal clashes had established, albeit reshaped around a new political demand and the consequent reactions of political leaders.

From 1945 onwards, politics and religion had intertwined in an increasingly intricate plot. The call for an independent Pakistan alongside India embodied the porosity of the borders demarcating the two. Likewise, the ambiguities of Indian and Pakistani nationalism themselves became an ordinary ‘thing’. As such, they came to be part of the everyday life of the local people, thereby impacting on their choices and acts. Within this multi-faceted framework, religious groups and leaders read meaning into political events and concocted their counterattacks along these lines. “[Rioting] was communal in its essence and had as its purpose the domination of the Punjab by Muslims”, the Sikh leader Master Tara Singh set down in black and white in February 1947.¹¹ Victims often perceived attacks as a direct religious provocation, and publicly portrayed the religious ‘other’ as the aggressor. Muslims along with League leaders in turn blamed Hindu and Sikhs as the sole instigators of communal clashes.¹² For their part, Sikh leaders similarly claimed that communal outbursts and League agitation were orchestrated as a targeted attack against their community.¹³

Unsurprisingly, the defence of their gurdwaras and the attachment to Guru Gobind Singh became key issues in Sikh public campaigns and publications.

In order to establish Pakistan, the atrocities committed on Sikhs in the Punjab since 5th March 1947 have not come to light because of censorship on news. […] Oh Sikhs! Read this and think yourself. What have you to do under the circumstances? In your veins, there is yet the blood of your beloved Guru Gobind Singh Singhji. Do your duty!

incited a five-sheet pamphlet that, in early April, passed from Sikh hand to Sikh hand.¹⁴ Elsewhere, Sikh leaders linked such feelings to their own claim for territorial sovereignty in any future postcolonial institutional arrangements.¹⁵

Nevertheless, the communal clashes between March and May 1947 possessed their own particular traits that anticipated and, to some extent, even constituted a preparation for the summer Partition-related rioting. A massive militarisation of the everyday got underway across the whole of the Punjab, notably in the Lahore and Amritsar districts.¹⁶ The smuggling of arms and ammunition – mainly imported from the NWFP and the Tribal Areas – grew steadily.¹⁷ Paramilitary associations such as the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Muslim League National Guards (MLNG) doubled their efforts alongside their membership.¹⁸ The province also experienced a further privatisation of the traditional state-held monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Groups of persons as well as single individuals – in some cases not attached to any political or religious group – embarked upon an extensive production and accumulation of ammunition, firearms and bombs.¹⁹

The results could at times be comically tragic. Hundreds of persons died while squeezing homemade incendiary devices into soda water bottles.²⁰ But the scramble for arms formed part of a targeted activity of paramilitary associations and newly created ‘private armies’ as well as a reaction to the growing sense of insecurity and mistrust towards the local police. Retired and employed officers alike took an active part in the disturbances.²¹ For their part, both the League and the Congress had allegedly inaugurated a widespread under-the-table campaign to delegitimise the local police force.²² Local people, in this context, often resorted to self-defence as a way of overcoming the partiality (or rumours of it) of those institutions that were deputed to the maintenance of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• Tables
• Image
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Note on transliterations and translations
• Introduction
• 1 Memories, swords, blood and freedom: when independence came to India and Pakistan
• 2 Camps, homes, towns and villages
• 3 Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness and the resettling of Partition refugees in everyday Pakistani Punjab
• 4 Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes
• 5 Constituent Assembly and neighbours
• Conclusion
• Appendix: note on primary sources
• Index