Partition Of India To India/pakistan In 1947

[acharya]

Unmasking Jinnah’s Communalism: Sieving Facts from Fiction
By Dr. Vijay Rana
http://www.samachar.com/features/270605-middle.html

How can Jinnah, the lifelong campaigner for separate communal electorate, the advocate of two-nations theory, the opponent of 'Hindu Tyranny' and the initiator of India’s first mass violence campaign, the Direct Action Day, be described as a secular leader? Dr Vijay Rana tells you the true story of Jinnah, what many eminent historians and leading editors have assiduously tried to hide from you.

Even if the Aryans come out of their graves to tell us about their place of origin, some of our historians will refuse to listen to them. Blinded by their own ideologies, both the leftists and rightist historians have a long history of disputing the simplest facts such as the grass was green or sky was blue. Now Advani, though unwittingly, has given us an opportunity to debate the question that has haunted India since its partition in 1947. Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah a secular leader or a Muslim communalist?

In the last few days we have seen a blatant parody of facts and unashamed distortion of truth, that the most effective protagonist of Two-Nations Theory was a secular leader. Partition didn’t happen a thousand years ago. The eyewitnesses are around. Publications, audios and video films of Jinnah’s speeches are available. Yet India’s leading politicians, historians, journalists and commentators are engaged in a free for all history.

Some have accused Gandhi of introducing communalism in Indian politics. Others have blamed Nehru for wrecking the Cabinet Mission plan for a united India. They have argued that Jinnha was only responding to Hindu communalists of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha, thus accepting Jinnahs’s logic of an oppressive Hindu raj determined to ‘annihilation’ the Muslims and their culture in a free India. Others have come to the conclusion had the Congress accepted Jinnah’s demand of separate communal electorates and his sole right to represent Muslims, India could have been saved from the partition. They have been in effect arguing in favour of an internal communal separation of Hindus and Muslims in the independent India.

How interesting? Had we accepted Jinnah’s demands and saved India from partition imagine what kind of India we would have been living in? Muslims only voting for Muslim candidates and Hindus voting for only Hindus. And Congress or any other party could not have a Muslim minister because in Jinnah’s India only Muslim League could have appointed Muslim ministers.

Yet many of India’s secular stalwarts are not prepared to call Jinnah a communal leader. In a recent television programme India’s two leading historians made astonishing assertions. Presenter Karan Thaper asked a simple question, “was Jinnah communal?” Professor Mushirul Haq, the Vice Chancellor of Jamil Milia University, Delhi would only go as far as calling Jinnah ‘a Muslim sectarian’. Whereas the veteran historian Prof Bimal Prasad would only describe Jinnah as ‘a Muslim nationalist’. Both of them, despite being repeatedly questioned, refused to call Jinnah a communal leader.

The scholarly lawyer AG Noorani writing in the Frontline, went a step further arguing that Jinnah was ‘truly a great man. His political record from 1906 to 1939 reveals a spirit of conciliation and statesmanship, which Congress leaders did not reciprocate.’ ‘Indians must begin to acknowledge, advised Noorani, ‘his greatness and the grave injustice the Congress leaders did to him.’ In this article, Noorani conveniently skipped any mention of Jinnah’s words or actions relating to his most active years, 1940-47. Because it was during these years Jinnah was hawking his favoured theory that ‘Hindus and Muslims are two nations and they cannot exist together’.

But the most ingenious distortion of history came from the Indian media’s darling, the British author Patrick French. He wrote in the Outlook that ‘Gandhi was a wily politician and Jinnah remained a secularist till his death.’ He argued that partition occurred because the Congress refused to accept Jinnah’s ‘justifiable demands’.

Then Ayasha Jalal, the Pakistani professor of history at the Tufts University, USA, wrote in the Outlook: ‘It was the Congress backed by the extreme right wing Hindu Mahasabha which plumped for a partition of the two main Muslim-majority provinces of India, the Punjab and Bengal, opposed by Jinnah and the League.’

Prof. Jalal must be at the forefront of the ‘Fictional school of History’. Imagine Nehru and Patel working in harmony with Hindu Mahasabha to achieve partition. Can you really believe it? Perhaps the Outlook can.

Interestingly, none of these protectors of Jinnah’s secularism mentioned, for once, Jinnah’s call for Direct Action on 16 August 1946 that unleashed an unprecedented wave of communal killings in the human history.

There is a mountain of evidence, surprisingly invisible to these eminent historians, proving that Jinnah began his political career as a secular leader but as the years passed by he was increasingly obsessed by and progressively dedicated to communal politics.

Whereas Gandhi lived and died for communal harmony, mutual tolerance, non-violence and peaceful resolution of disputes, Jinnah, always scornful of Gandhi, thrived on Hindu-Muslim strife, subscribing to the historically mislaid fear of the Hindu tyranny over Muslims in an independent India, a theory originally propounded by Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan as early as in 1888.

Jinnah’s conversion from a secularist to communalist was quick and continuous. After finishing his studies in England, Jinnah returned to India in 1896. In December 1906, he joined the Congress party as the personal secretary of the party president Dadabhai Naoroji.

He believed in the national unity and vigorously opposed the Muslim League demand of separate Muslim electorate as divisive, soon winning praise from poetess Sarojini Naidu as ‘the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. Ironically, four years later in 1910, it was under this system of separate electorate, where only Muslims could vote for a Muslim candidate, that Jinnah was elected to the central legislative assembly as a Muslim member. This was the first step he unwittingly took on the long road to communalism.

Jinnah’s belief in Congress secularism soon began to waver. In 1913, he joined the Muslim League. A glance at the speeches, pamphlets and propaganda would reveal that the League leadership was avowedly communal, staunchly anti-Congress and openly anti-Hindu. Have a look at the speech of Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk, one of the founders of the Muslim League: ‘God forbid, if the British rule disappeared from India, Hindus will lord over it, and we will be in the constant danger of our life, property and honour.’ The question must be asked what was our ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity doing in the company of these rabid communalists. Within seven years of his entry into politics, a secular Jinnah has become, as Prof Bipin Chandra puts it, ‘a communal nationalist’.

Yet not all was lost. Despite sharing Muslim League’s communalist ideology and following it’s separate electorate agenda, Jinnah still talked about Hindu-Muslim unity. He was one of the driving forces behind the Congress-League pact of 1916.

But we must also look at the price our ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity was demanding. Jinnah was able to persuade the Congress party, now led by Tilak, to accept separate communal electorate and also a provision of communal reservations in the legislature.

Pakistani sources (Story of Pakistan) describe Lucknow Pact as a major milestone on the road to Pakistan. ‘As Congress agreed to separate electorates, it in fact agreed to consider the Muslims as a separate nation. They thus accepted the concept of the Two-Nation Theory.’

Later in 1936, Jinnah himself cited Lucknow Pact as the Congress admission of Hindu-Muslim separation: “When the Hindus accepted a separate identity for the Muslims through the Lucknow Pact in 1916, how can they now object to Pakistan?”

Interestingly, most of our history books still tell us that Lucknow Pact was a major triumph of Hindu-Muslim unity.

Many of our historians could be found blaming Gandhi for introducing communalism in the Indian national movement. In 1920, Gandhi made one more attempt for Hindu-Muslim unity by supporting the Muslim demand of retaining the pre-war status of the Ottoman Caliph. Jinnah opposed this Khilafat movement. His opposition was primarily focused on Gandhi, whom he considered a pseudo-religious upstart.

When Gandhi launched non-cooperation movement in 1920, Jinnah walked out of the Congress party, telling his friend, journalist Durga Das that in Gandhi’s Congress there was no place for him as ‘Gandhi worships cow and I eat it’, a argument he later repeated in his public speeches.

Despite clear and unequivocal communal rhetoric he was still given the benefit of doubt. He had transformed ‘from a nationalist into communal nationalist and then into liberal communalist,’ wrote Prof. Vipin Chandra. Whatever the fudging one thing was clear that by 1920 his belief in secularism, as preached by the Congress, had completely evaporated.

For next ten years as the President of the Muslim League Jinnah dedicated himself to strengthen the League, a party that claimed the exclusive right to represent the Muslims of India. In 1929, Jinnah came up with another plan demanding 33 percent representation for Muslims in the federal and provincial assemblies and ministries. A community could, Jinnah proposed, abandon its right of separate electorate if it wished. The plan was rejected by the Congress.

Between 1931-35 Jinnah left Indian politics and decided to set up his legal practice in London. But then in 1935 he moved back to Bombay. In the 1937 elections the Muslim League performed poorly, only getting 4.6 percent of the Muslim votes, whereas the Congress was able to form governments in seven of the eleven British Indian provinces. In 1939, when the Congress ministries resigned protesting against the British decision to push India in the War, Jinnah, by now a fierce opponent of the Congress rule, asked Muslim to observe a nationwide ‘Day of Deliverance’.

Another powerful influence that inspired Jinnha’s communal politics was poet Iqbal, the author of Tatana-e-Hindi - ‘Saare Jahan se Achcha Hindustan hamaara.’ Iqbal, another ex-ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, in his later years dreaded the prospects of democracy in India. Like Jinnah, he too believed that Muslims must be rescued from the imminent Hindu domination. Later, he wrote Tarana-e-Milli, anthem for the Muslim community, invoking the memories of Muslims conquerors of India.

He wrote eight letters to Jinnah telling him that he was the ‘only Muslim in India’ who could ‘safely guide the community through the storm’. He advised Jinnah to turn the League ‘into a body representing the Muslim masses’ and to demand the creation of ‘a free Muslim state or states’. Iqbal died shortly after writing these letters in 1937.

If Iqbal was the Mazini of Pakistan, laying the intellectual and ideological foundations, Jinnah took upon the role of Garibaldi, to execute that vision by all possible means with complete disregard to consequences, moral and human. As the Pakistani Prof. Akbar Ahmed writes: ‘Until now, Jinnah had spoken of separate electorates, minority representation and constitutional safeguards. Now he would use Islamic symbolism to represent Pakistan. The moon of Pakistan is rising, he would say. He would choose the crescent for the flag of Pakistan. Something had clearly changed in the way Jinnah was looking at the world.’

Over the years a great myth had been created that Jinnah really didn’t ask for Pakistan. That the word ‘Pakistan’ does not figure in the famous 1940 Lahore resolution.

But let’s look at the speech Jinnah made accompanying the resolution. He traced the history of ‘mutually separate’ cultural and religious traditions of Hindus and Muslims. ‘The cow that Hindus worship, Jinnah says, Muslims eat, the villains that Hindus malign, Muslims idolize and so on … The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, literatures,’ Jinnah concluded. (Akbar Ahmed)

During the 1940s his tone, language and argument, while opposing Gandhi, Congress and Hindus, was brimming with hate and even abuse. His speeches were remarkably similar to the speeches of Hindu fundamentalists like Savarkar and Golwalkar. If Jinnah’s Islam was in danger of Hindu raj, so was Golwalkar’s Hindutva in danger of Islam. The only difference was that Jinnah drew crowds much bigger than Golwalkar or Savarkar ever did. A rational historical assessment would suggest that Golwalkar and Sarvarkar, despite substantial potential to vitiate the communal relations, always remained on the margins of Hindu society, but Jinnah, to the great anguish of leaders like Maulana Azad, was successfully poisioning the Muslim minds, openly provoking them for communal bloodshed.

In March 1940, Jinnah in a speech at Aligarh Muslim University accused Gandhi ‘to subjugate and vassalize the Muslims under a Hindu Raj’. Similarly, in a scathing attack on Gandhi, the RSS chief MS Golwalkar said: “Those who declare ‘no Swaraj without Hindu-Muslim unity’ have thus perpetrated the greatest treason on our society.’

While Golwalkar blamed Gandhi for asking ‘Hindus to submit meekly to the vandalism and atrocities of the Muslims’, Jinnah in his presidential address to the League, in April 1941, said, in a united India ‘Muslims will be absolutely wiped out of existence.’ He said Pakistan was essential ‘to save Islam from complete annihilation in this country.’ During the 1946 elections, he often described Congress as ‘caste Hindu Fascist Congress’.

In March 1944, addressing the students of the Ailgarh Muslim University Jinnah declared: <span style='color:red'>“Pakistan was born when the first Muslim landed in India in 712 A. D.” He asked the students to be prepared to shed their blood, if necessary, for achieving Pakistan. </span>This was an ominous pre-warning to what he was going to do next, to launch a murderous campaign to achieve Pakistan.

While preparing for ‘shedding the blood’ Jinnah was still officially negotiating with the Congress. Though the British pretended to be the honest brokers, every time they put forward a proposal for India’s independence, Jinnah’s goal of Pakistan looked increasingly probable.

In the August offer of 1939, the British came up with the idea of ‘communal veto’. They resolved not to leave India unless the minorities approved of any future constitutional arrangement. So Indian freedom was now subjected to Jinnah’s endorsement.

The 1942 Cripps proposals offered ‘provincial option’, allowing provinces to opt out of the future Indian federation. That’s what exactly Jinnah was fighting for, the Muslim provinces’ right to opt out of India.

In the 1945 Simla Conference, Jinnah fought for Hindu-Muslim parity in any future government. He also insisted that in any interim government all the Muslim ministers would have to be nominated by the League. He was in effect asking Congress to renounce its national and secular character and reduce itself merely to be a Hindu party.

In 1946, the British government sent a mission of three cabinet ministers for a final rapprochement between the Congress and the League. The Cabinet Mission plan provided for a loose center controlling only defense, foreign affairs and communications. Provinces were to be divided in three groups. Group A comprised of Hindu majority provinces of UP, Bihar, CP, Orissa, Madras and Bombay. Group B included the Muslim majority Punjab, Sind and NWFP and Group C consisted of the Muslim majority Bengal and Assam. The provinces were allowed to opt out of these groups after the first election.

The Congress accepted the plan and so did the League. Many believed, and some still rather deludingly believe, that Jinnah had thus abandoned the idea of Pakistan. But let’s not fool ourselves and have a look at the League’s acceptance document drafted by Jinnah. The League had accepted the plan with its own spin, ‘inasmuch as the basis of and the foundation of Pakistan are inherent in the Mission’s plan by virtue of the compulsory grouping.’

Even this acceptance was hastily withdrawn after Nehru pointed out that it would be the newly formed constituent assembly that would finally decide the composition of provincial groups.

In his autobiography ‘India Wins Freedom’ Maulana Azad blamed Nehru for wrecking this final bid to save India from partition. It’s sad that Azad, the greatest Indian Muslim who fought against the communalism of the League, who devoted his life to the creation of a secular and democratic India and who often suffered Jinnah’s humiliating jibes as ‘the Congress show-boy’, did a great disservice to the understanding of the partition.

The theory of ‘bargaining counter’ is supported by many, from Azad to the Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal and the eminent jurist M. C. Chagla, who wrote in his autobiography, ‘Roses in December’: “To him (Jinnah) it was more of a bargaining counter, and if we had bargained properly, he would have given up the idea of Pakistan and accepted a united India.”<b>

If we go by this thesis of Jinnah’s demand of Pakistan just being a bargaining counter, than one must ask why Jinnah was provoking his own people to fight for Pakistan. Why was he frightening millions of Muslims of the impending specter of Hindu tyranny? If the bargaining counter theory is to be believed then Jinnah comes out as a diabolical figure fooling his own community and building up false hopes.</b> He was provoking Muslims to ‘shed blood’ at one hand and negotiating power sharing deals with the Hindu leaders on the other hand.

In August 1946, Jinnah breached another boundary of sober and sensible politics. The one time advocate of constitutional propriety now espoused violence and even terror.

How would the defenders of Jinnah’s secularism support his call for Direct Action: ‘This day we bid good-bye to constitutional methods,” he declared. “ We have forged a pistol and we are prepared to use it,” he declared.

On 16 August 1946, the frenzied League mobs rampaged Hindu neighbourhoods in Calcutta. Hindu communal groups retaliated with equal brutality. Ten thousand innocent lives were lost in just five days in the Great Calcutta Killings. Quickly the fires of communal hatred spread from Bengal to Punjab consuming millions of lives. They burnt until Jinnah got his precious ‘Muslim homeland’.

As soon as he became Governor-General, Jinnah in a dramatic u-turn advised Muslims in Pakistan to live peacefully with their Hindu neighbours. His followers wondered if it was not possible for them to live with Hindus in India, how could they live with Hindus in Pakistan. They refused to listen to him. <span style='color:red'>When Pakistan was born in August 1947, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians formed 26 percent of its population. Today less then three percent of them are left in Pakistan.</span>

This is not ancient history buried under the multiple layers of unexcavated earth. Any historian, true to his/her profession, with elementary knowledge of Jinnah’s beliefs, actions and legacy could easily conclude that he used and abused Muslim faith and consciousness for his political ends. For a historian such a man cannot be secular. Flight of imagination is the exclusive preserve of fiction writers.

Journalist and broadcaster Vijay Rana, after doing his D Phil on India’s transfer of power from Allahabad University, moved on to the BBC in London in the early eighties. He now edits www.historytalking.com, a web-radio dedicated to South Asian oral history and heritage. Email: editor@historytalking.com

[acharya]

Sunday, March 26, 2006

New book by Lord Mountbatten’s ADC:

‘Pakistan was created as part of the great game’

Staff Report

LAHORE: A controversial new book by Lord Mountbatten’s ADC claims that the British nurtured the idea of Pakistan as a sort of pro-West “forward defensive glacis” against the USSR and a potentially pro-Communist Congress dominated India.

The “Untold Story of India’s Partition: The Shadow of the Great Game”, by Narendra Singh Sarila, is a gripping narrative on the basis of the new material he was able to study. Lord Wavell, being a military commander with a global perspective, thought that the Soviet Union would threaten the British empire and the All India Congress would be more prone than the All India Muslim League to side with the Communists.

Wavell was thinking of the Middle East and its oil wealth. Linked to this feeling was the strategic “possibility” that a region within India could be separated to act as the forward defensive glacis against Communism. By 1946, more and more British military leaders were thinking of the threat of “Russia” and anticipating that the next imperial war would be fought in the region.

When the British entered the war against Germany in September 1939, the Congress was ruling in eight out of 11 provinces. It then inexplicably decided to resign from these governments, awarding a walkover to the Muslim League and forcing Wavell to further refine his policy of supporting the Muslim League as a political makeweight. Sarila argues that this Congress resignation not only brought the Muslim League to power through the backdoor, it made partition possible by loosening from the Congress hold the Muslim-majority province of the NWFP.

In the event, says Sarila, Congress could not set foot in Punjab where men were enlisting for war 200,000-a-month, and Congress supporters from big business were producing overtime for the war effort and making profits hand over fist. Jinnah was more pragmatic. Raj politics was not black and white, it did not lend itself to principles, and that is the way it had to be played. Jinnah became sole spokesman under the Conservative Party, and when the Labour Party came to power its efforts to right the political balance in favour of Congress came up against the “precedents” set by the earlier administration.

In 1942, with the Japanese threatening to invade India, it was Gandhi’s turn to do something inscrutable: he tabled a resolution asking the British to “quit forthwith” and told the Japanese India had no quarrel with them. Almost all the Congress high command disagreed but passed it, only to change it overnight when Nehru threatened to quit Congress instead if it went public.

If Wavell thought of withdrawing the British army from what was to become India and locating it in what was to become Pakistan in order to defend the Middle East from Communism, he was disabused by the lack of support his favourite Jinnah enjoyed in Sindh, the NWFP and Punjab. Sarila captures the weak moments of the leaders that let India be divided. When Partition came, Nehru was “tired, worried and unhappy”.

[acharya]

Was Pakistan a British Creation?


The furore in the BJP camp in India, triggered by L K Advani's recent remarks about Jinnah being a secular person and yet the founder of Pakistan, seems to have subsided. What is the real, historical truth? Recently unsealed British top-secret archives provide a stunningly different version of what really happened during the cataclysmic partition, in 1947, of India into three separate and distinct entities.
<span style='color:red'>
Prior to India's independence, it was widely believed that India was not likely to survive as an independent nation. The Muslim League dreamt of restoring Muslim political dominance in India and did not originally envisage a partition of the country into independent Muslim states. The Leaguers, in fact, felt that Partition would mean that Muslim power would get withdrawn to two distant corners of the subcontinent?considered by many an embarrassing retreat for Islam, which enjoyed 800 years of conquest. </span>Since Muslims were nearly 40 per cent of the population of pre-partition British India and the non-Muslims were fragmented into innumerable faiths and castes, the concept of re-establishing some degree of Muslim dominance and control over the entire subcontinent seemed enticingly possible.

According to widely accepted notions, in India and Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah was the architect of Pakistan. Actually, it was the British who threatened to conduct a referendum in every province of the subcontinent and it was Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhai Patel who surrendered to the pressure, setting the stage for Lord Mountbatten, the British Viceroy of India, to formally propose the Partition Plan and get the Congress and Muslim League to accept it. On February 20, 1947, the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, announced that "Britain might have to consider handing over power to the existing provincial governments". This left the Congress with no choice but to accept partition.

At that time, very few persons imagined that India would not only survive but actually flourish as one of the world's strongest and longest lasting democracies and that Sardar Patel, the "Iron Man of India" would succeed in orchestrating the almost unimaginable task of so swiftly and decisively integrating over 600 former princely states into the Indian Union, at the time of Independence, in 1947.
<b>
According to Narendra Singh Sarila, the ADC to Lord Mountbatten in 1947, whose forthcoming book exposes the truth, the Partition of India was actually decided in February, 1946. This means that it was not Sir Cyril Radcliffe, the British Chairman of the two Boundary Commissions which partitioned India and created East and West Pakistan, who masterminded the plan. He arrived in India, for the first time only on July 8, 1947. By August 17, 1947, just two days after India's day of independence, Mountbatten had presented the Boundary Commission Awards to Indian leaders.
</b>
In fact, Jinnah, the "Quaid-i-Azam" could do no more than to console his countrymen?"we have been squeezed in as much as was possible and the latest blow that we have received is the Award of the Boundary Commission. It is an unjust, incomprehensible and even perverse Award. It may be wrong, unjust and perverse; and it may not be a judicial but a political Award, but we have agreed to abide by it and it is binding upon us. As honorable people we must abide by it. It may be our misfortune but we must bear up this one more blow with fortitude, courage and hope." Lord Wavell, then the Viceroy of India, had all along encouraged the concept of partition, and recommended, as far back as February 1946, a truncated Pakistan - excluding from it one-third of the Punjab, half of Bengal and almost the whole of Assam - which thereafter became the final blue-print for the Award which enforced the partition of India.

Jinnah may actually have been just a tactical instrument for the British to use against the Congress. In the Cold War that ensued later between the West and the Soviet Union, it came as no surprise to enlightened political leaders, worldwide, when Pakistan became a much-used base for the West's overt and covert confrontations with the Soviets and their allies or victims.

References:

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/empire/before.html

http://www.mail-archive.com/hsc@mit.edu/msg00005.html

http://www.pakistan.gov.pk/Quaid/leader18.htm

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/mp/2003/03/0...30301380200.htm

http://www.mail-archive.com/hsc@mit.edu/msg00005.html

http://www.hvk.org/articles/0301/126.html

http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=48969

http://esamskriti.com/html/new_inside.asp?...unt1=10&cid=324

url: www.ranjithira.blogspot.com

Ranjit Hira
Writer, Editor, Journalist, Photographer, Digital Artist
Based in Mumbai, India

http://www.worldnews24.com/politics/40103.php

[acharya]

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

COMMENT: The partition of India and the Hindu Right —Ishtiaq Ahmed

Individual Hindus as well as Muslims had talked of separate nationhood since the late 19th century but the first notable demand for the division of India on a religious basis was made by Hindus in the Punjab in the 1920s. Among prominent Muslims the first to demand a separate Muslim state was Allama Iqbal

Historians and social scientists continue to debate the causes that led to the partition of India. Not surprisingly, the blame game has focused upon the two main antagonists — the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League. A clash-of-personalities theory has also been offered by scholars emphasising the ambitions of Nehru and Jinnah coupled with Gandhi’s inability to take a clear stand on important issues as the core reasons for the subcontinent’s division. Some other writers identify the British imperial policy of divide-and-rule as the crucial factor behind the partition. In this article, I shall assess the role the Hindu Right played in deepening divisions between Hindus and Muslims, thus setting the stage for the partition drama.

It is impossible to fix a particular date when the Hindu Right made its political debut, but it surely began to organise in reaction to Gandhi’s support of the Khilafat Movement, which the Indian Muslims had launched to protest the dismemberment of the Ottoman Caliphate after World War I.

In 1923 the Hindu Mahasabha (founded 1915) leader Vinayak Damodar Sarvarkar threw up the idea of “Hindutva” — an ethno-cultural concept purporting to bring all Hindus into a “communitarian” fold. Non-Hindu Indians were urged to accept a Hindu cultural identity and declare that their prime loyalty was to India.

Individual Hindus as well as Muslims had talked of separate nationhood since the late 19th century but the first notable demand for the division of India on a religious basis was made by Hindus in the Punjab in the 1920s. Among prominent Muslims the first to demand a separate Muslim state was Allama Iqbal, who took up the issue at the annual session of the Muslim League in Allahabad in 1930. Only a year earlier, the Indian National Congress at Lahore had demanded independence for an undivided India.

It is important to point out that until the mid-1930s separatist ideas from both Hindu and Muslim sources remained marginal and nobody took much notice of them. The 1930 (Allahabad) session of the Muslim League, for example, was so poorly attended that the organisers had to run around town to bring people to meet the quorum requirement (75) to adopt the resolutions.

The stage for broad-based electoral politics was set by the Government of India Act of 1935. The 1936 elections resulted in a victory for Congress in six provinces and for regional parties elsewhere. The Muslim League did very poorly in the Muslim-majority provinces. The Congress then blundered by not extending a generous hand towards the Muslim League.

It was in these circumstances that Madhav Saashiv Gowalkar, the leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, founded in 1925) made a most provocative statement in 1938: “The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language — [they] must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of the glorification of the Hindu race and culture... or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment not — even citizen’s rights (We. Our Nationhood Defined, Delhi, 1993, pp 55-56).

The RSS adopted a semi-military style of organisation to instil “martial arts” among Hindus. Both the Hindu Mahasabha and RSS looked upon Muslims as the main threat to Indian unity. Conversions to Islam — as well as Christianity — were viewed with dismay. The Hindu Right held in admiration Hilter’s Nazi ideology and particularly liked the idea of purging Germany of Jews. It wanted to similarly rid India of the Muslim and Christian menace. Gowalkar writes:

“To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of the Semitic races — the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.” (Ibid, p 43)

Fascistic ideas gained ground among some Muslim groups too. Military drill and strict discipline were introduced by the militant Khaksar movement founded in the Punjab by Allama Inayatullah Khan Mashraqi in 1931. Ideologically, the Khaksars wanted to establish an Islamic state all over India. In practice, they remained anti-British rather than anti-Hindu or -Sikh.

Another radical Islamic movement, the Majlis-e-Ahrar, founded in 1929 in the Punjab was loudly anti-British and a close ally of the Congress. It had a fairly large membership throughout the Punjab. The Ahrar never supported the division of India. Also, the Deoband ulema remained loyal to the Congress.

The Muslim League’s demand for a separate state assumed a mass character only in 1940 when the Lahore resolution was passed in an open public meeting. Thereafter the march towards a separate state became the main goal of the Muslim League which till 1936 had been no more than a party of the Muslim gentry seeking protection of their interests in a decentralised but united India.

The only party that remained committed to a secular, democratic and united India was the Congress. When India did break up finally in mid-August 1947 the Hindu Right started blaming not only the Muslims but also Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru for the “vivisection of the motherland”. It wanted to drive all Muslims out of India. The near anarchy prevailing in those days made possible a genocide or ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minority in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and southern India where their presence was limited to very small numbers.

At that historical juncture, Gandhi, Nehru and other decent leaders of the Congress and the Communist Party became a bulwark against the Hindu fascists so that the latter’s wish to inflict on the Muslims of India the fate Hitler had imposed on the Jews did not materialise. During the partition riots the RSS was complicit in terrorism against Muslims all over India.

Mahatma Gandhi went on a fast-unto-death in Delhi to protest attacks on Muslims. This had a magic effect and a bloodbath was avoided. However, the Hindu Right did not forgive Gandhiji. He was assassinated by Nathuram Godse on January 30, 1948.

The author is an associate professor of political science at Stockholm University. He is the author of two books. His email address is Ishtiaq.Ahmed@statsvet.su.se

[Bharatvarsh]

hehe the same worn out nonsense, by the time Gowalkar said those words Muslims were getting vocal about partition, so naturally he said that and it is fully justified even today, after partition they should have either gone to their so called homeland or converted back to Hinduism, anyone can see who imitated Hitler the best by comparing the statistics of minority population in both the countries before and after partition.

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Direct Action

Posted Monday, Aug. 26, 1946

India suffered the biggest Moslem-Hindu riot in its history. Moslem League Boss Mohamed Ali Jinnah had picked the 18th day of Ramadan for "Direct Action Day" against Britain's plan for Indian independence (which does not satisfy the Moslems' old demand for a separate Pakistan). Though direct, the action was supposed to be peaceful. But before the disastrous day was over, blood soaked the melting asphalt of sweltering Calcutta's streets.

Rioting Moslems went after Hindus with guns, knives and clubs, looted shops, stoned newspaper offices, set fire to Calcutta's British business district. Hindus retaliated by firing Moslem mosques and miles of Moslem slums. Thousands of homeless families roamed the city in search of safety and food (most markets had been pilfered or closed). Police blotters were filled with stories of women raped, mutilated and burned alive. Indian police, backed by British Spitfire scouting planes and armored cars, battled mobs of both factions. Cried Hindu Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (who is trying to form an interim government despite the Moslems' refusal to enter it): "Either direct action knocks the Government over, or the Government knocks direct action over."

By the 21st day of Ramadan, direct action had killed some 3,000 people and wounded thousands more. Said one weary police officer: "All we can do is move the bodies to one side of the street." Vultures tore into the rapidly putrefying corpses (among them, the bodies of many women & children).

Like other Indian leaders, Jinnah denounced the "fratricidal war." But most observers wondered how Jinnah could fail to know what would happen when he called for "direct action." Shortly before the riots broke out, his own news agency (Orient Press) reported that Jinnah, anticipating violence, was sleeping on the floor these nights—to toughen up for a possible sojourn in jail.

From the Aug. 26, 1946 issue of TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,933559,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Written in Blood

Posted Monday, Oct. 28, 1946

What was Mohamed Ali Jinnah up to? In a sharp reversal of his policy of last July the lean, leathery Moslem League leader agreed last week to nominate five men to the All-India Congress presided over by his archrival, Pandit Nehru. But he had named third-raters: in New Delhi, prominent Moslems boasted that the League had joined the coalition with the idea of breaking it up.

That peace had not accompanied coalition soon became evident. In an ill-timed visit to North-West Frontier Province, Nehru was met at Peshawar airdrome by 5,000 Moslem sympathizers, armed with spears and guns. His caravan of armored cars was stoned. Tribesmen insulted him by walking out on his speeches. Enraged, the Pandit called them "pitiful pensioners," an allusion to the fact that Britain pays them annual tribal subsidies to be nice. Gleefully, the League's newspaper Dawn editorialized that the Pandit should be made "honorary propaganda secretary of the Moslem League."

Meanwhile, saber-swinging mobs in the Noakhali district of east Bengal, where Moslems outnumber Hindus 5-to-1, burned, looted and massacred on a scale surpassing even the recent Calcutta riots. In eight days an estimated 5,000 were killed, with scores of Hindu girls abducted.

An alarmed Mohandas K. Gandhi offered advice to the women which, for a vegetarian, seemed surprising: the only way they could avoid dishonor, he said, was to bite their tongues or hold their breath until they died.* If that would not work, he snapped, let them take poison. He was feeling crotchety, anyway, and "thoroughly ashamed" of an error he had made in a letter, calling the Moslem League "the authoritative representative" (of an overwhelming majority of Indian Moslems), instead of "the most authoritative representative." Peevishly, he muttered that a man who made such mistakes probably would not live to be 125, after all.

*In Chicago, the American Medical Association's quidnunctious Dr. Morris Fishbein doubted the efficacy of the Gandhi suicide technique.

From the Oct. 28, 1946 issue of TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,804007,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
This is what Goel refers to when he talks about the coward Nehru getting stoned by his Pathan friends.

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Cows in Clive Street

Posted Monday, Sep. 2, 1946

Except for an occasional murder, quiet returned to stricken Calcutta last week, but fear lingered. The death toll of last fortnight's Hindu-Moslem rioting, which may never be finally totaled, exceeded 4,000. While the city's poor went hungry, food rotted on loading platforms. Both Hindus and Moslems, afraid of hostile neighbors, jammed the huge Howrah railway station, mobbed the trains.

TIME Correspondent Dave Richardson cabled: "Calcutta's three millions will take some time to be convinced that terrorism is really over. They act as though they had been through a terrific bombing and expect another soon. Nine out of ten business houses and shops which survived plundering are still closed tightly.

"The drivers of the few taxis which have returned to the streets cast furtive looks at the countless charred, gutted vehicles, and will not go near the recently dangerous areas for any price. Even though most of the bodies have been taken away, the unholy sweet stench of death lingers in many neighborhoods. Streets are still stained with blood. Cows wander aimlessly through Clive Street—the Wall Street of India—stopping in the shadow of its high buildings to munch at scattered garbage."

"Direct Action Day," proclaimed by Moslem League Boss Mohamed Ali Jinnah, touched off the disaster. But much blame for what actually happened was shifted to Huseyn Shabad Suhrawardy, head of the Bengal provincial government. Chief Minister Suhrawardy, 52, is a slick, Oxford-educated Moslem who has a bad reputation for black-marketeering in his hunger-ridden province. Instead of warning against violence on "Direct Action Day," Suhrawardy proclaimed a holiday in Bengal, which had the effect of putting his followers on the streets; and he threatened Bengal's secession from India if the Moslems were not placated by the British.

Meanwhile the Viceroy, Viscount Wavell, appointed the Executive Council which is to take over next month from the present "caretaker" government, pending India's full dominion status. Five of the 14 seats were reserved for Moslems, but since Jinnah's Moslem League has refused to participate, Wavell appointed nonLeague Moslems. One of these, Sir Shafa'at Ahmad Khan, who clung to his British title and resigned from the League three weeks ago, was attacked apparently by co-religionists at Simla at week's end, stabbed seven times, hospitalized.

From the Sep. 2, 1946 issue of TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,803920,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Zindabad & Murdabad

Posted Monday, Mar. 17, 1947

The Punjab, athwart the historic northern invasion route, has long been India's political thermometer. Last week it read "high fever." In Lahore, Amritsar, Rawalpindi and over the intervening countryside, Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus slew and burned in wholesale lawlessness unsurpassed in British India in 90 years.

The Punjab riots ended a period of peace that has been jittery ever since the Moslem League's Mohamed Ali Jinnah spurned participation with the All-India Congress in the Constituent Assembly (TIME, Feb. 10). The bearded, sword-carrying Sikhs sided with the Hindus, eventually exceeded them in uncompromising denunciation of the Moslem cry for Pakistan (a separate Moslem state).

Not until the British last week proclaimed "Governor's Rule," and flew in substantial troop reinforcements, did the carnage begin to abate in the Punjab. By then, uncountable hundreds were dead, hundreds more were injured, and thousands of buildings had been smashed or burned. The riots came in a moment of governmental vacuum, after the resignation of Malik Khizar Hayat Khan Tiwana's coalition government. The issue was purely and simply Pakistan. The Moslems shouted "Pakistan Zindabad!" (Up with Pakistan!). The Hindus and Sikhs answered back: "Pakistan Murdabad!" (Death to Pakistan!). Then the knives began to flash.

The fighting began in Lahore, capital of the Punjab, but it was at fabled Amritsar, the Sikh holy city, that the greatest damage was done. TIME Correspondent Robert Neville, who visited Amritsar and later toured the troubled areas between Lahore and Rawalpindi, cabled:

"Coming up the grand trunk highway from New Delhi, you could see as far away as 14 miles clouds of smoke hanging over Amritsar. Now & then the high golden cupola of the Sikh's Golden Temple would glint through the pall. After three days of rioting, Amritsar's streets were barricaded, piled with debris. Whole rows of shops were gutted. Amritsar's famous hide bazaar was still burning, and its textile row, where merchants from all India came for cloth, was in smoking ruins.

"After three days & nights of terror, in Rawalpindi proper the situation is now fairly quiet, but in the surrounding countryside there is a reign of lawlessness on a scale not known in British India since the Mutiny of 1857. Every village is prey to roving gangs. Groups of scared refugees flee through the fields as gangs of 15 to 30 men trudge the highways, armed with long, dangerous-looking clubs. From the crest of one hill, I could see five villages burning. At Mandra junction at dawn on March 9, 2,000 Moslems swooped down on Hindu and Sikh quarters, looted and fired every building. Gangs stopped two trains outside Rawalpindi and hauled Sikhs, easily recognized by beards and turbans, out of the coaches and beat them to death on the platforms."

From the Mar. 17, 1947 issue of TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,793406,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Anti-Vivisection

Posted Monday, Jun 2, 1947

Hindu holy men were alarmed. Holy India was going to be divided. Worse, the Indian Government had taken steps to break down untouchability and other extreme outgrowths of Hinduism. So, from all over India, the holy men trudged to Delhi, set up camp along the bank of the Jumna River. There the sadhus huddled around holy fires and chanted appeals to the Universal Force "to save earth's children from destruction." In groups they picketed the Parliamentary Rotunda (where the Constituent Assembly was meeting), Cabinet ministers' homes, the Government Secretariat. They shouted slogans: "Absolute Good unto All," "Cow Slaughter Must Be Banned," "Woe unto Evil."

They also cried the chief demand in their five-point program for a revival of Hindu orthodoxy: "Stop the vivisection of India."

Agreement to Disunite. Far away from the Jumna's banks, in the quiet atmosphere of London's No. 10 Downing St., a Briton who had striven desperately to save Mother India from vivisection reluctantly prepared the operating table. Rear Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, Viceroy of India, laid before the full British Cabinet his plan for handing over British power to Indians. The knotty question was, what power to which Indians? Every Indian leader except Mohandas Gandhi had agreed that they could not unite, but could not agree how to disunite.

"Dickie" Mountbatten was for a quick showdown. India's leaders would meet in Delhi June 2. Mountbatten would give them one more chance to accept or reject, once & for all, Britain's 1946 plan for India—a loose federation of states. If they rejected it (and Mohamed Ali Jinnah, the Moslem leader, almost certainly would), then Mountbatten would suggest an alternative. Under it, each province could decide for itself whether 1) to join Hindustan, 2) to join Pakistan, 3) to set itself up as an independent nation.

In both the Punjab and Bengal, provincial assemblymen from each side of tentative dividing lines would meet separately to pick an electoral college which would register its choice. Punjab Sikhs would be split if the Punjab split. In the North-West Frontier Province, where the Congress Party controls the Government but 93% of the population is Moslem, a popular referendum would be held. The likely choice: Pakistan. Bengal, with its rich industrial nucleus of Calcutta, might choose to stand apart as a separate nation, part Moslem, part Hindu.

Who Gets the Army? Not one British Cabinet member liked this melancholy geometry. Even if it had to be accepted, the British hoped there would be one strong mold to bind the pieces—the Indian Army (present strength: 400,000, with 9,000 Indian officers, 4,000 British officers). The Hindus (56%), Moslems (34%), Sikhs and Christians in its ranks have worked together with minimum friction. In recent communal riots local police proved ineffective, while the Army's Hindu and Moslem troops obeyed orders, often succeeded in checking disturbances. But a purely Moslem army could not be expected to protect Hindu minorities in Pakistan, nor a Hindu army to protect Moslems in Hindustan. That did not bother Jinnah. Last week he pontificated: "All the armed forces must be divided. . . ."

Typically, Jinnah wanted to eat the cake of Moslem separatism, and have the cake of Hindu manpower. Pakistan, said his mouthpiece Dawn, should have all troops now stationed in the northern and eastern commands (most of the troops, including Hindus and Sikhs, are in those areas). Even a division along communal lines, which Jinnah might consistently have asked for, would wreck the Army at a crucial time when Britons are pulling out, leaving many half-trained reserves in lower echelons, a drastic shortage of officers at the top.

If the Indian Army could be broken into two efficient parts, the main mission of each would be to watch the other. This cancellation would leave India defenseless, invite the evolution of Pakistan and Hindustan into Stalinistan.

A Martyr's Grave. By week's end, the 600 sadhus who had gathered on the Jumna's banks had a martyr,* if not a program for India. Swami Krishnanandji, like many another holy picketer, had been taken to jail. The police took away his trishool (5-ft. wooden staff with three points, known as the "stick of righteousness"), without which no sadhu can take food. So Krishnanandji went on a hunger strike. The police released him, but too late. He trudged wearily back to the sadhu camp. The next day, while a score of fellow ascetics chanted prayers and slogans ("Victory unto the Lord who alone destroys all Evil"), Krishnanandji quietly died. His friends dug a grave, 6 ft. deep, in the sandy banks of the Jumna. There, in a sitting position, banked on all sides with cakes of salt, Krishnanandji was buried.

Thereafter the police were reluctant to jail the holy men. Instead they piled demonstrators into a van (although many holy men had vowed always to walk and never to ride on wheels), drove them 20 or 30 miles out into the country. Some wondered if even a Jinnah would show the single-minded stubbornness of the sadhus; many of them plodded back to Delhi through the blistering heat (113°), chanting "Good understanding among all living beings."

*They also had an unofficial pressagent. No sadhu, Nandlal Sharma, like pressagents the world over, stated his case in soaring sentences. "I am proud that I can trace my dynasty back a thousand years," he said, "even back to the Creator. That is because of the chastity of our women. The ground has always been pure and the seed has been good. We believe Hinduism has existed for so many thousands of years because of the purity of our blood. The world today is threatened with imminent destruction, mainly because of the unchastity of women all over the world. . . ."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,934535,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->No Better Yet. In India last week progress toward unity seemed to be in reverse. The Moslem League rejected overtures from the Hindu-dominated Congress Party to dicker over their differences. In the Punjab a Sikh army was being organized, just in case the Moslems tried to lay the cornerstone of a separate Pakistan in that province. In Sind, the League-dominated provincial government talked about arming a Moslem militia, just in case a Hindu army invaded Pakistan after the British withdrawal.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,886389,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Flight to Nowhere?

In the four-engined York monoplane, London-bound, the "No Smoking" sign stayed on for an hour out of Karachi. When it went out, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, in a front-row seat, chain-smoked State Express 555 cigarets, buried his hawk's head in a book pointedly titled A Nation Betrayed. Behind him sat Pandit Jawar-halal Nehru, chain-smoking Chesterfields, wearing Western-style clothes for the first time in eight years. Between Karachi and Malta, Nehru breezed through Rosamond Lehmann's The Ballad and the Source and Sinclair Lewis' Cass Timberlane, chatted with his good friend, Sikh leader

Sardar Balder Singh. In the plane's third row sat Viscount Wavell, Viceroy of India. For three years he had been trying to bring Nehru and Jinnah into agreement, now, with the peace of India hanging by a thread, they were a yard apart in space, politically as remote as ever.

At Malta, where they had to wait for another plane, the rival leaders spoke for the first time. Their conversation, in toto:

Jinnah: "Well, what have you been doing all day?"

Nehru: "Partly reading, partly sleeping, partly walking."

Who Gets Pushed? At the London Airport, where they were greeted by Britain's aging, able Lord Pethick-Lawrence, local Indians were out before dawn in coal trucks, bicycles and buses. A policeman grumbled: "You can't tell by looking at these Indians who are the VIPs and who are the riffraff. One day you're arresting a fellow and the next he turns up as an important bloke. . . . You never can tell who to push around."

Nehru moved about at receptions with high good humor and grace. At India House, he shook hands with the Dowager Marchioness of Willingdon, whose husband had jailed him; at Buckingham Palace, he ate from His Majesty's gold plate, a delightful change from the tin service he had known as a nine-year guest in H. M.'s prisons. Jinnah was socially crusty, giving the impression of a man deeply aggrieved. When the travelers got down to cases, however, it was the smiling Nehru who proved most stubborn.

The point at issue was one of those legal technicalities on which the fate of whole nations sometimes depends. The British Cabinet Mission had divided India's provinces, for purposes of writing the provincial constitutions, into three groups. In Group A, which comprised the bulk of British India, the Hindus would have a huge majority. Group B was the predominantly Moslem Northwest. The trouble narrowed down to Group C in the East, consisting of Bengal and Assam. Nehru said that the vote in the Assembly should be cast by provinces, which would let him take advantage of the 7-to-3 Hindu majority in Assam. Jinnah said that the vote should be cast for Group C as a whole. In this way his 33to-27 majority in Bengal would wipe out the Hindu margin in Assam and give the Moslems a 36-to-34 edge (in effect, a limited Pakistan) in Group C. The British agreed with Jinnah.

On this interpretation of the rules, Nehru would not play. Jinnah said that unless he got his way, the 75 Moslem League seats would be vacant when the Constituent Assembly met in New Delhi to draft free India's constitution.

Silly? Finally Clement Attlee tired of this variation of musical chairs, in which one seat was always empty. He warned the Indians that if "a large section of the Indian population" (i.e., the 92,000,000 Moslems) were not represented in the framing of a constitution, His Majesty's Government would not turn over power to a Congress Party government. It looked like a win on points for Jinnah. Said Nehru: "It was silly to expect to solve in three days problems which have been under discussion for many months."

Off he flew to New Delhi, where he found Congress Hindus in a belligerent mood: fierce-eyed Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel thought Nehru had been "tricked" into going to London. Cried Patel: "So long as the Moslems insist on their demand of Pakistan, there shall never be peace in India. We will resist the sword with the sword."

The Assembly that was to make India a nation quietly convened in New Delhi's Central Assembly Library. Pictures of former British Viceroys had been removed from their gilded frames. Special police were standing by with tear gas.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...,934710,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Hauma Hamiddha]

One can see that the subtly anti-Hindu and pro-proto-Pakistan/Mohammedan attitudes of the Americans have a long history. These old articles are interesting read.

[Bharatvarsh]

How the Meo problem was solved:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The further shores of Partition: ethnic cleansing in Rajasthan 1947
Past & Present,  August, 1998  by Ian Copland

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m227...i_21224125/pg_4<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The article is too long to be posted here, anyway take it with a pinch of salt, what the author does not mention is that the Hindus and Sikh refugees did not just move to Punjab and Delhi, some of them went to Bharatpur and Alwar also (both of them Hindu states and were naturally expected to care for Hindus and Sikhs), this naturally pissed off the local Hindus who saw what Muslims did to Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab and decided that Hindu and Sikh deaths should be avenged, that was the beginning of the end for these Meos (who were also doing subversive activities in the princely states). As for the author's allegations of discrimination against Muslims in these 2 princely states, don't know if its true, someone who is more knowledgable about Bharatpur and Rajasthan's history in general should know.

The author also claims on page 11 that Maharaja Brijendra Singh of Bharatpur had indiscreet homosexual affairs with members of the household infantry but does not bother to give any reference for these allegations.

Evidently Gandhi also intervened here and brought back Pakis into India:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Then with the personal intervention of Mahatma Gandhi and a Tablighi Jama’at leader Yasin Khan, the Meos returned as late as 1950 and 1960. In Pakistan they were not welcomed because they were poor.

http://www.pakistanlink.com/Letters/2000/Dec/22/07.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Now if I personally intervene and start bringing back all the Mohajirs would I also be called a Mahatma?

[acharya]

A policeman grumbled: "You can't tell by looking at these Indians who are the VIPs and who are the riffraff. One day you're arresting a fellow and the next he turns up as an important bloke. . . . You never can tell who to push around."



This is the reason British chose to deal with Jinnah than with the Hindus.

[G.Subramaniam]

How the Meo problem was solved:

The further shores of Partition: ethnic cleansing in Rajasthan 1947
Past & Present,  August, 1998  by Ian Copland


Evidently Gandhi also intervened here and brought back Pakis into India:
[quote]Then with the personal intervention of Mahatma Gandhi and a Tablighi Jama’at leader Yasin Khan, the Meos returned as late as 1950 and 1960. In Pakistan they were not welcomed because they were poor.

http://www.pakistanlink.com/Letters/2000/Dec/22/07.html

Now if I personally intervene and start bringing back all the Mohajirs would I also be called a Mahatma?
[right][snapback]57099[/snapback][/right]

In alwar and bharatpur in 1947, the Meos formed a Lashkar of 30000 and marched to Delhi to massacre hindus
On the way, they were defeated by a Jat caste sena and expelled to pakistan
Source = Organiser, V.P.Bhatia

The meo incident is one more reason to thank Nathuram Godse
Gandhi would definitely have brought back the Mohajirs to India

[G.Subramaniam]

The eventual radcliff line was same as Ambedkar line offered in 1940
I wonder why the congress did not accept the Ambedkar line of 1940 and save the blood shed and peacefully transfer muslims

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Comeback

Again, Gandhi fasted. Princes and untouchables gathered in New Delhi to glimpse the dozing little man in a loin cloth, and to hear the latest medical bulletins. This time, however, a jarring note sounded. A small crowd of unsympathetic Hindus and Sikhs began to shout: "Let Gandhi die!" From an automobile lunged Premier Jawaharlal Nehru, who is India's Johnny-on-the-spot as Fiorello LaGuardia was Manhattan's. Cried Nehru: "How dare you say that? Kill me first!" Nehru chased the dissidents down the street. Inside, Gandhi dozed on.

Downhill. Things had gone from bad to worse for Gandhi, the pacifist, in recent months. India and Pakistan drifted toward war in Kashmir. Religious feelings still ran high from the autumn massacres in the Punjab; Sikh and Hindu refugees demanded revenge against Pakistan, and were forcing Moslems out of their homes. War fever caught on in Pakistan, whose Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan hopefully exclaimed: "Every Pakistani is an atom bomb in himself."

Like many another Indian, Gandhi felt that a new cycle of mass riots was approaching. But his once loyal disciples, distracted by new political power, paid less & less attention to his struggle for peace.

Gandhi thought he knew where to place at least part of the blame: on Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, his longtime friend and boss of the Congress Party.

In the Indian government, Patel led the "war party" which insisted on a "get-tough" policy toward Pakistan. He seemed inclined also to crack down on Moslems within India: "Mere declarations of loyalty to the Indian Union will not help Moslems at this critical juncture," said Patel. Later he became bolder, and darkly hinted at open war with Pakistan. Most Sikhs and many Hindus applauded Patel. Obliquely, Gandhi observed that Patel had "thorns on his tongue." Without warning, one day last week the Mahatma began to fast.

At 79, Gandhi was in no condition to fast for long. (His longest heretofore: three weeks. His most recent fast, last September, lasted only 73 hours.) Worried doctors who hovered over him thought he might not live beyond two weeks.

Not many Indians knew exactly why he was fasting, or what they should do to dissuade him. Some did not seem to care.

But crowds increased daily about the home of wealthy C. D. Birla, where Gandhi lay. Attendance boomed at his evening prayer services. On the third day, he was too weak to walk the 100 yards from the palatial Birla House to his prayer service, and he addressed the meeting through a loudspeaker from his bed. Physicians reported that he was weakening, hour by hour; his kidneys were not functioning properly. He sipped hot water apathetically.

Upgrade. At this point, when it seemed that Gandhi might die defeated in his battle against hatred, a wave of emotion swept India. With newspapers and radios carrying hourly bulletins of his sinking condition, Delhi's frayed citizens began to organize meetings and processions around the single motto: "Save Gandhi's life." Post-office employees stamped on every letter mailed in New Delhi the message: "Keep communal peace and save Mahatma Gandhi."

Vallabhbhai Patel left town for a few days. During his absence, the Indian government agreed to reinstate a financial agreement with Pakistan, a step which Patel had blocked only 48 hours before.

Not until the fifth day of his fast did Gandhi list the specific conditions under which he would break his fast. Moslems, he said, should be guaranteed freedom to worship, travel, earn a livelihood, keep their own houses. After Gandhi had gone without food for 121 hours, 50 Hindu, Moslem and Sikh leaders gathered at Birla House, to pledge themselves to meet his conditions. Pakistan's high commissioner in New Delhi brought an inquiry from his government asking what Pakistan could do. Gandhi, cheerful again, addressed the conference for ten minutes. Then he agreed to break his fast.

A Moslem politician handed Gandhi a glass of orange juice mixed with dextrasol; the Mahatma took it. As he held it, he gave a low chuckle. Said the Mahatma: "If today's solemn pledge is fulfilled, it will revive with doubled force my intense wish to live a full span of life—at least 125 years."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...79617-1,00.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->From New Era , Mauritius , 25/09/1947, p1.
Quoting Noel Buckley, R.S.C., 24/09/1947:
'600 hundred survivors including 400 wounded from refugee train attacked on Monday night near Amristar, East Punjab (India) reached Lahore, West Punjab (Pakistan) by road today.
I talked with some of the less seriously wounded who said that Sikh troops took part in the attack.
These survivors, still wearing their blood-stained clothes said they were saved through being hidden under bodies of dead and dying fellow passengers. Survivors said [the] train which left Delhi on Sunday was first attacked at Beas about 30 miles east of Amritsar . This attack was beaten off.
Later [a] train carrying Sikh troops passed [the] refugee train. When it reached Amritsar and pulled [a] short distance beyond the platform survivors said Sikh troops and [a] crowd of armed Sikhs joined and fired on [the] train from [the] other side of the track. They added that escorting troops (said to be Hindu jats) only fired over the heads of attackers but [the] British Officer commanding [the] escort fired machine guns until he was shot. [The] Sergeant of escort was also reported to have been killed and 4 others ranks wounded. Survivors said attack began at 1800 GMT and went on for three hours. Towards dawn [the] train was shunted back to [the]platform. Unconfirmed reports reaching here from Amritsar said that dead numbered 1,200 and there were 400 wounded in Amritsar hospitals.'
From New Era , Mauritius , 25/09/1947, p1.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/history/cours...minars/nine.htm<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Bharatvarsh]

Notice how the author takes a pro Jihadi line and completely underestimates Hindu casualties and Muslim barabarism:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->'The Garhmukteswar Massacre'


Sir Francis Tuker

Courtesy: While Memory Serves
(London: Cassell, 1950), pp. 195-202



The tale of horror now takes us northwards into the United Provinces.

This terrible deed is marked by the savagery of the Jat men who did the brutal work and, some say, by the cold-blooded fact that the affair was previously planned. I am not certain if the latter fact is true but there may be others who know better than I. I think that Jat men did go to the fair all ready for trouble and particularly ready because this was the time of the Muslim Bakr Id when cows are killed and sacrificed, but I do not think that they came in organized bands or with a complete scheme for their dreadful work. Let it be remembered that this massacre was in the main the crime of Jats from about Rohtak and Hissar. These Jats are the same Hindu men from whom we have for years enlisted sepoys into Indian regiments. It seems that beneath the discipline which has been the cause of their good behaviour in the Army there yet remains a horrid vein of inhuman, merciless ferocity.

Eagerly enough the local Hindus joined in where they could, even to guiding them to and singling out the poor huts in which Muslim families dwelt, unsuspecting little families with whom these treacherous guides had but yesterday jested and held friendly intercourse.

In the days of British administration supervision of the Garhmukteswar1 fair was regarded as a test for a young police officer, but the test was mainly to see that the simple and devout pilgrims did not in their zeal succeed in drowning themselves in their own Ganges.

One festival had passed quietly by, the Hindu Dewali, and the third day of the Bakr Id had come, seemingly with peace. But communal relations were becoming increasingly bad, the result of all the tales, oral and newspaper, coming upwards along the valley of the Ganges from Calcutta and Noakhali, through Bihar to the United Provinces and to Garhmukteswar where the annual Hindu fair is held. The Calcutta killing had been heavy but even for both sides: in East Bengal the Hindu casualties had been far heavier than the Muslim but the affair, judged by our now accustomed eyes, had been a small one, the Hindu killed numbering some two hundred over a wide expanse of country.

In Bihar the Hindu legions descended on the few Muslims and wiped them out, leaving about seven thousand dead. Hitherto the game had mostly gone in favour of the Hindus: it was hardly to be expected that they would seek for any further revenge and it seemed that perhaps their thirst for blood might by now have been assuaged.

Here at Garhmukteswar there was no provocation.

I have been told that it was strange how few of the facts of this orgy leaked out then or later. There was, of course, the Government of India's ban on news which was likely to exacerbate communal feeling: any sort of abuse could be flung at the British who were not prone to object or to become any less cordial towards the abuser's party, but nothing could be written that was irritating to either community.

Despite this 'stop' on atrocity stories it has yet seemed to us that someone quickly clamped down on this massacre a strong, impenetrable screen of censorship through which nothing could reach the outside world. The provincial government, willingly helped by its Indian administrators, soft-pedalled these outrages committed by Hindus, and the Hindu papers purposely emphasised the far smaller acts of retaliation by Muslims in the area of the disturbances, in order to cover up the misdeeds of their Hindu co-religionists. I am told that editions of the Delhi Muslim newspaper Dawn containing stories of the outbreak were completely bought up by wealthy Hindu party men as the newspapers came off the train at .Meerut, and that this paper disappeared from the tables of British officials at Lucknow for a period of ten days. So here at last is some account of this holocaust to the gods, to the cow, of the Hindu. Even now it is not easy to glean all the details of the thing that was done in the autumn sunshine and under the bright stars of those October days and nights by the banks of Mother Ganges.

During the early days of November the platforms of Delhi Junction were littered day by day with an ever increasing medley of eager Hindu pilgrims coming in to Garhmukteswar for the annual fair and for their ritual immersion in the Ganges. There they lay, men, women and delighted children, nodding on the dappled, sun-drowsy platform with no intent but to reach their bourne and to be shriven for another year. Not far short of a million of the devout came in from the United Provinces and the Punjab, among them large numbers of Jat peasants.

To cater for their needs and to profit themselves numbers of Muslims, men, women and children, came into the mela (fair) from Muradabad and Bareilly to set up stalls and to peddle their wares through the ten-mile long fair grounds speckling the sandy islands in the midst of Gangaji (Holy Ganges). In Garhmukteswar itself there lived some two to three thousand Muslims while about the neighbourhood their communities were scattered in different localities. It is unbelievable that living in Garhmukteswar today there are still Muslims, even after the happenings of which they were the wretched martyrs and of which I shall now tell.

On the evening of the 6th November 1946, at a side-show run by Muslims, there was a motor-cycling display called 'The Wall of Death'. There was a fair crowd watching when a Muslim performer threw a jest to a Jatni2 woman spectator, probably one from Rohtak. A sudden shout went up that a Muslim had insulted a Hindu woman. At once on this alarm a number of small bands of Jats rushed out and, in concerted fashion, set to work to massacre the Muslim stallholders at the mela, spattered all about the fair grounds quietly plying their trade. Practically every Muslim man, woman and child was murdered with appalling cruelty. Either here or later even pregnant women were ripped up, their unborn babies torn out and the infants' brains bashed out on walls and on the ground. There was rape, and women and children were seized by the legs by burly fiends and torn apart. These hellions looted and burnt the show, casting the dead and dying into the flames. Most were killed wjth spears but some of the killings were by strangulation which, it will be recalled, was the ritual method of the Thugs. The murderers' women stood about, laughing with glee at the burning booths, egging on their menfolk.

Throughout these days the Hindus of Garhmukteswar town never lifted a hand to stop the savagery against Muslims nor raised a voice in protest against Jat excesses. The killing, let it be said now, stopped solely because the Muslim men, women and children were either dead or had run away. There were police present in sufficient numbers to put up a stout resistance to the rioters, if not to stop them altogether. Nevertheless only on the mela ground, and that half-heartedly, did the police make any effort to interfere. They were afraid rather than apathetic. Unfortunately there was not a single British police officer in control of the area of the trouble. The Senior Superintendent of Police, the District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police were all Hindus. It was generally remarked in the Bihar massacre that wherever there was a British District Magistrate the rioting was quickly controlled or never occurred at all.

The next day a large body of these same Rohtak Jats, mingling with pilgrims on the traffic-choked, two-mile long road, led by local Hindus, left the fair grounds and entered Garhmukteswar town. All of a sudden they fell upon the Muslim quarter of the town, slaughtering with disgusting brutality all Muslim men, women and children. Women were raped and murdered and the houses burnt. The rest of the terrified inhabitants fled.

Through the high-walled, narrow streets the mob rushed, howling like beasts for blood, past the tall crumbling red brick walls and up the hill into the hospital compound. The Muslim District Medical Officer was killed, his Assistant and his wife. All Muslims attending for treatment they slaughtered on the spot. A Muslim doctor was murdered and his wife raped there and then. Thereafter she was paraded naked in triumph through the town. Somehow she escaped and with one arm broken waded the now desecrated Ganges and collapsed in safety on the far side.

Official estimates of dead sought later to minimise the slaughter. Besides the dead there were many who escaped with more or less terrible injuries.

The police, of whom there were some two dozen fully-armed men within a hundred yards of this latest scene, did nothing, apart from four policemen entering the town, firing over the heads of the mob and then again subsiding into inaction. The carnage went on despite their cowardly and ineffective effort.

The mob, tired out, quitted Garhmukteswar but returned that night. The police, probably for self-preservation only, opened fire and the mob retired. The Hindu Station Officer with the main force of police at the police station on the road, lifted not one finger throughout: the police at the mela outpost were informed of the killing but said that it was not in their responsibility, so they too did nothing. The only intervention was by four policemen and those were too timid to affect the situation.

News of this disturbance soon spread to the villages and to Meerut. In the latter place isolated stabbings started and went on in desultory fashion for the next fortnight. Out in the countryside trouble came with the dispersal of the pilgrims from the fair. At one place, Shahjehanpur, Muslims set to work to exact retribution by stopping some of the returning bullock carts, killing thirty Hindus-men, women and children. It was a dastardly act but at least they were all killed outright with no attendant atrocity such as their opponents had committed. It is a fact that the Muslims, for some reason or other, showed unexpected restraint in the extent of their retaliation. It may have been that they were dazed by the speed with which peace and amity had been turned into conflict and hatred, or else that they held back from provoking the majority community to further atrocities against themselves.

One of the most cruel of all these widespread horrors was the smaller Jat attack of the 10th November on the village of Harson near Ghaziabad where about forty Muslims-men, women, and as now seemed so horribly usual, children were atrociously massacred.

The isolated stabbings continued in Meerut and thence disturbances spread to Rohtak in the Punjab.

By the 15th November the pilgrims had passed on their locust-stricken way leaving devastation behind them and the peace of the desert reigned on smoking village and bereaved children.

I was never able to find out the casualties. The Indian administration minimised them and the whole affair. It is certain that one thousand Muslims died, perhaps two thousand.

Why did the few living not flee for ever from their smouldering homes? There was nowhere for them to go. All around were these same blood-thirsty enemies. They returned to await in the Devil's good time their inevitable end, death at the hands of their enemies or the eternal slavery of a scheduled caste. There seemed no hope for them nor for others of their co-religionists in the United Provinces and in Eastern Punjab.

Little of this terrible story ever reached the ears of the public outside-none went to England or to America. There was good reason why it should not.

Later on, bit by bit, we discovered that a good many Hindus knew of the impending tragedy. A certain Hindu officer-not under Eastern Command at the time-whose home is in Meerut, told one of my officers that he had known that the massacre was planned and had advised his friends not to attend the fair. He had not reported this warning to the military authorities as he thought all others knew of the plan. He then mentioned the name of a certain Indian provincial official who, he said, was fully aware of the coming horror. However, I am not certain that this was not a general local project of which he had heard and not one prepared by the Rohtak Jats.

Pandit Pant, Prime Minister of the United Provinces, later announced in Council that there would be a judicial enquiry into the affair. None was held.

On the 11Ith November the Regimental Centre of the Royal Garhwal Rifles, responding to a call from the civil authorities, despatched into Bijnor a column 15° strong with a band, to keep the peace in the districts abutting on Garhmukteswar. The column toured the district, their attentions being greatly appreciated by the local inhabitants, as these two letters, copied as written, testify:

Collector.

Sir,

The superintendent of Police visited the town Dhampur with Military forces yesterday on 15/11/46. All Military officers along with their forces marched throughout the town with band. Their demonstration was very much appreciated by the public. It proved very effective for suppressing the communal tension, which spread in the town due to the recent dispute at Garhmukteswar. Both Hindus and Muslims took part in the demonstration and welcomed -the S.P. and the Military forces. The S.D.O. also joined the demonstration on his way to Sherkot from Nehtor. Tehsildar, N. Tehsildar and S. a. Dhampur helped me at all times for making the demonstration successful. This visit gave a good influence over the Gundas, and I am glad to inform you that there was not the least panic in the town since the visit of the Military. Ion behalf of public am thankful for the arrangements you have made for our sake.

I am also thankful to the Superintendent of Police, and the Military Officers who took pains in moving about throughout the city, on foot with the forces.

Sd.-

Chairman
N. B. Dhampur
16/11/46



Collector.

Sir,

The Superintendent of Police came in the town with a large number of Military forces, and made a round throughout the town. The Military officers along with the Military Forces marched in the town of Dhampur, with band on 15/11/46. The marching was very much appreciated by the public, and crowds of people co-operated in demonstration. Gentry of Dhampur welcomed the arrival of the Military, and they made their party at Ejaz hall Dhampur. The visit of Military effected (sic) the panic tension which was spreading in the town due to the recent dispute at Garhmukteswar and the Gundas have been influenced. The situation has been turned since their arrival and there was not the least panic last night.

Submitted for information.

Sd.-

Tehsildar
Dhampur
16/11/46



So the people were glad to have been saved from themselves. On the 5th December the Garhwalis were out again, this time making in haste for Chandpur where a fierce riot had broken out. Muslims, towing Taziyas3 in their Muharram procession, clambered over the roofs of houses, whether Hindu or Muslim. Hindus at once took strong objection and fighting started. Three Hindus were killed and forty-five others,  mostly Hindus, injured. The police had acted promptly and twice opened fire, dispersing the crowds. But there was every sign that neither side had yet had enough when the soldiers accompanied by some armed police drove into the town and spread out on patrol through the streets.

On the 7th December they were cordoning off a nearby village for police to search, seize looted articles and make arrests, thereafter flag-marching through the countryside.

Their watch and ward continued by night and day until the 18th December when a company of the Indian Grenadiers relieved them.

We heard no more of Garhmukteswar .

Notes:

See Map No.5, p. 197.

Of the Jat race

Tall ornamented emblems.


http://www.globalwebpost.com/farooqm/study...m_massacre.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It is astonishing that he has the audacity to claim that Hindu casualties in East Bengal numbered 200 hundred, in reality they numbered in the thousands, according to some estimates 120,000 Hindus were slaughtered in Noakhali alone (the slaughter was on such a scale that the normally Pro Muslim Gandhi went to Noakhali), add in the Tipperah estimates and you will get the true picture, so there goes ben ami's myths about East Bengali Hindus leaving peacefully.

The whole article is in line with British whitewashing of Muslim deeds under their rule and blaming Hindus and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Of course the great white man (British officer) would have saved the day but funnily enough the same British officers never lifted a finger when Hindus and Sikhs were being slaughtered by the millions in Pakiland.

If you ever read these partition articles you will notice that 3 or 4 communities are conveniently made the scapegoats, Sikhs, Hindu Jats, Biharis and UP people.