The Duel by Tariq Ali Read Free Book Online Page B

irrational mood gripped parts of India. There was a great deal of bloodshed as Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in northern and eastern India— Punjab and Bengal—slaughtered each other in preparation for the big day: August 14, 1947, when India would hurriedly be partitioned by a collapsing empire. There was little joy as people on both sides in northern and eastern India, still in a daze, counted their dead and thought of the homes they had left behind. A flood of refugees swamped cities on both sides of the divide. Some Muslims from Delhi and elsewhere who had fled to Pakistan were already disappointed and wanted to go back, only to find their homes and shops had been occupied by others. Old railway stations in new Pakistan were packed with men and women dead to the world, lying on the ground, their makeshift bedding often dyed with blood, soiled with urine and excrement. All were hungry. Some had contracted cholera. Others were desperate for water. There were not enough refugee camps, let alone other facilities. Those who made the decisions had not foreseen the scale of the disaster. It was difficult to predict what might happen next.

    It was the same on the other side. Most Sikhs and Hindus from what was now Western Pakistan had fled to India. Mass rapes were common. Men from all three communities regularly targeted younggirls between the ages of ten and sixteen. How many died? How many children disappeared? How many women were abducted? The estimates of the dead vary between a million and 2 million. Nobody knows. One grave can contain a whole family, and cremations conceal the numbers. These days they would call it ethnic cleansing or genocide. In 1947–48 they spoke of “an outbreak of communal violence.”
    Partitions along ethnic or religious lines usually result in mutually inflicted violence, but the politicians of that time had no understanding of the magnitude of what they had prepared. Astonishingly, given the shrewd and effective barrister that he was, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, or the Quaid-i-Azam, * the leader of the new country, seemed unaware of the logic of his own arguments. As late as May 1946, Jinnah had not believed that the creation of a Muslim state separated from India would lead to the partition of Bengal or the Punjab, where the three communities lived in roughly equal numbers, with Muslims more predominant in western Punjab. He had argued that splitting these two provinces “would lead to disastrous results.” This was certainly true, but it was pure fantasy to imagine that this could be avoided once a partition along religious lines had been agreed to. The Great Leader thought of Pakistan as a smaller version of India with one small difference: the Muslims would be a majority. He had not thought of asking himself why Hindus and Sikhs should now accept what he had refused to countenance: living under a majority composed of another religious group.
    Confronted with a mass influx of refugees, a panic-stricken Muslim League leadership in Karachi now told Indian Muslims that the new state was not intended for all Muslims but only those from east Punjab. The Muslims in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh (UP) should stay where they were. This was bluntly asserted by Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, himself a scion of the UP gentry. What he really meant was that there was no place for middle- and lower-middle-class Muslims from the named regions. Nobody paid any attention. Muslim refugees from Delhi and other areas continued to pour into the new country. The creation of a “separate homeland” for India’sMuslims had been taken seriously by the lower orders. They had no idea that it was a state for landlords alone. It’s not that many Muslims wished to leave their ancestral villages and towns in search of an uncertain future. The pogroms, real and threatened, left them no alternative.
    The Muslim League, a creation of Muslim conservatives, was founded in 1906 when a Muslim delegation sought and