The Migration of sorrow.

In August 1947, the former Indian subcontinent gained independence from the British Empire. From this independence came the countries, now known as, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Despite emerging from the same land, Pakistan and India have had a well-documented history of hostility which persists to this day.

This hostility can be traced back to when India and Pakistan were united under the British Empire. The British were able to keep tight control of over 360 million people via the policy of "divide et impera" (divide and rule). This strategy aimed to put the different religious groups: Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, at odds with each other so they would fight each other instead of the British imperial rule.

This policy was put in place due to the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, commonly known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The Sepoy Mutiny was an ultimately unsuccessful revolt by Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, collectively, against the British occupiers. The British vowed to never allow this to happen again and thus started to use divide and rule to engineer animosity between the different religious groups. Divide and rule was an old Roman maxim which Lord Elphinstone, a colonial administrator and MP, said that the British would make their own in the Indian subcontinent.

Via the Government of India Act, systematic policies were created to engineer rifts between Muslims and Hindus. One such policy gave Indian provinces a new political structure by creating a system of communal elections. This meant that Muslims could vote for Muslims candidates for Muslim seats and Hindis could vote for Hindu candidates in Hindu seats. Whilst on face value this does not seem to be bad, in reality, it was a seed of division.

Firstly, it got rid of the prospects of a nationalist movement that could overthrow the British. It achieved this by narrowing the vision of Muslim and Hindu politicians to fight over regional control instead of coming together and collectively taking control of the country. This suited the British agenda as the Indian sub-continent was rich in natural resources and was often referred to as the “Jewel in the British empire’s crown”.

Secondly, it got rid of the chance of an all-important bipartisan system of government. By creating designated Muslim and Hindu seats this policy stopped any bipartisan support for candidates by creating a ‘you vs us’ feeling between the religious groups. It also meant that if the British were overthrown, the government that followed would be ineffective. This is as there would be very little compromise between the groups as both religions follow different values. This meant that one part of the government would be strongly opposed to the other side and vice versa meaning that no substantial laws could be made. This is an issue that we see in the UK parliament and the American Congress today.

No one in the British Empire had previously given any real thought to the prospect of giving India independence before. However, due to World War II, the British were bankrupt and could no longer afford to rule over the Indian sub-continent. Thus, came the realisation that it would have to grant independence to its dominions. Seeing this weakness were three politicians that become leaders for the independence of the Indian subcontinent: Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi.

At first, these three leaders shared the same vision: one country, one people, regardless of religion. Gandhi was responsible for mobilising public support for independence. He taught the people about civil disobedience and non-violent campaigns via his speeches and quickly became the Spiritual leader of the Indian National Congress. The Indian National Congress was a political party made up of the elite in Hindu and Muslim society who had been pushing for independence since the early 1900s. With the help of Gandhi, the movement gained traction and became a populist movement. Due to Gandhi’s ability to mobilise the masses and the public ambition for an independent state, the party attracted esteemed politicians such as Jawaharlal Nehru.

The third member of the trio was Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah was the only Muslim of the trio but was an ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity. Jinnah started his career inside the Hindu dominated Indian National Congress. He later joined the Muslim League, a political group which aimed to protect the interests of the Muslim minority. Both the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League wanted the same thing, an independent Indian state. The trio were all strongly opposed to any separation and wanted the sub-continent to stay as one. The narrative-driven by the trio was that their different religions must work together for a shared independent state. They aimed for unity by pointing out that the growing rift between Muslims and Hindus was due to British Divide and Rule and that becoming separate was the aim of the then occupying forces.

However, relationships between Jinnah and Nehru started to fall apart. Jinnah believed that Nehru was aiming for the dominance of Hindus in India and had not considered the interests of the Muslim minority. With British rule weakening, Nehru and the Indian National Congress gained significant support. Nehru wanted a strong centralised government whilst Jinnah wanted a devolution style system where Muslim majority states would have more control in their own regions. However, due to the now religion-based support for each group, and with Muslims being a minority, Jinnah realised that the only way to ensure that the Muslim population would have representation was to have their own state.

Jinnah and Nehru had initially come to unite the country but were now fighting each other due to personal mistrust. By 1946 the hope of a united India was no longer viable. The tension between Nehru and Jinnah was not only being played out in politics but spilt over into violence on the streets. Against the backdrop of the breakdown of political relationships was a massive riot in Calcutta. More than 4,000 people were killed, and 100,000 people were left homeless within 72 hours. This violence sparked off further religious riots in the surrounding regions of Noakhali, Bihar, United Provinces, Punjab, and the North-Western Frontier Province. After seeing the violence Nehru and Jinnah agreed that there would be two countries, Pakistan which would be Muslim majority and India which would be Hindu majority, whilst officially being a secular state.

Due to financial difficulty, the British had their hand forced to grant independence to India. Charged with overseeing the British withdrawal was a royal officer called Louis Mountbatten. Mountbatten became the Viceroy of India despite his lack of knowledge of the region. One of Mountbatten’s first moves was to change the time scale of India’s Independence. He decided that it should be done in 1947, a year earlier than originally planned. Experts believed that the process would take up to 5 years to be done properly, however, by speeding up the timeline Mountbatten reduced the already tight timeline to only 4 months.

Mountbatten wasn’t the only person that oversaw the ill-thought-out partition. Cyril Radcliff was the person responsible for drawing the new borders between Pakistan, India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Radcliff was a lawyer who was brought to India just a month before the British were supposed to leave. He had never been to British India before and was underprepared in accounts to his knowledge of the sub-continents culture, politics or geography, yet Radcliff would be the man to draw the borders that would affect the lives of millions.

The method that Radcliff used to draw the border was to split the districts, within the subcontinent, on a religious basis. Any district that had a Muslim majority population would be put into Pakistan whilst Sikh and Hindu majority regions would be kept in India. Radcliff was only given 5 weeks to draw the new borders.

The method that Radcliff used was arbitrary and seemed to forget that even were one religious group had a majority in a district it did not detach from the sizable communities of other religions in those same regions. Provinces such as Punjab, which to this day are very similar, were split between India and Pakistan. Radcliff even left the Muslim leagues political base, not in Pakistan but India. The economic centre points of the former subcontinent were left in India, leaving Pakistan and Bangladesh at economic disadvantages from the start.

The whole process was illogical. On the day that partition was announced, a border was not released. This meant that nobody knew if they were on the correct side of the border or not. The borders were released two days later which prompted more than 14 million people to leave their homes for what would become their side of the border.

Whilst there had been unrest between the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs before, due to British divide and rule, partition lit a fire of unimaginable violence. People were forced to leave everything that they had worked towards their entire lives and move to another country. It was one of the largest forced movements of people in the history of mankind. Over a million people were killed, there were entire villages on fire, there were massacres, kidnappings and rapes. Entire train platforms were literally washed with blood and pregnant women were found dead with their stomachs ripped open.

The British had lost control of the region long before the transition, however, the severity of this power loss was only seen after the violence started. The National Archive shows telegraphs from the foreign office at the time which suggest that the British leaders were aware, months before, that these horrors would unfold. The telegraphs state that the British expected “an organised and spontaneous civil war” but failed to take any action to suppress the violence which was only exacerbated by the sped-up timeline and ill-thought-out borders.

Most of the bloodshed was in Punjab and Bengal where Radcliff’s border cut through provinces which were home to Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus. The ill drawn border can still be seen today by the conflict in Kashmir. This is a region in the North of Pakistan and India which both countries lay claim to as Radcliff failed to draw a definitive border. The conflict over Kashmir is extremely complex and has left two nuclear powers on the verge of war for over 70 years.

The division between the countries today is driven by politicians that use the conflict in Kashmir and the old tensions from partition to further their political agenda by stoking up nationalism for support in elections. The shadow of partition continues to divide families, cut trade, cut connections, stop co-operation, instils fear and promote hatred by a superimposed division on people with a history of deep connections.

Whilst history paints partition as a war between religious, the deep-rooted ties between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs should not be forgotten. Before divide and rule, these communities lived very closely. They worked together, lived together and even attended each other’s social functions. These are memories that the survivors of the partition still remember from both sides. Markandey Katju was able to epitomise this in a paragraph from The Nation where he stated:

“even before 1857, there were differences between Hindus and Muslims, the Hindus going to temples and the Muslims going to mosques, but there was no animosity. In fact, the Hindus and Muslims used to help each other; Hindus used to participate in Eid celebrations and Muslims in Holi and Diwali. The Muslim rulers like the Mughals, Nawab of Awadh and Murshidabad, Tipu Sultan, etc were totally secular; they organised Ramlilas, participated in Holi, Diwali, etc. Ghalib’s (a prominent Indian Muslim poet) affectionate letters to his Hindu friends like Munshi Shiv Naraln Aram, Har Gopal Tofta, etc attest to the affection between Hindus and Muslims at that time.”

There are countless stories from the survivors of partition of members of each religion helping each other. There are stories of Hindus helping Muslims escape from mobs and Muslims helping Hindus and Sikhs escape mobs. There are memories of members of each religious group helping each other when there was mass starvation. The divisions that were engineered to tear these communities apart, which are now being used by the countries’ own politicians, should not be allowed to continue.

The events of 1947 are best described not as the migration of people or partition of assets but as the collective migration of sorrow of one people.