PARTITION

Whereas the British had earlier indicated 1948 as the date of their departure from India, their plans were accelerated in the aftermath of the Conservative Party’s defeat at the polls and the coming to power of a Labour Government under Clement Attlee in Britain.

The last imperial Viceroy was dispatched by London to Delhi and on 3 June 1947, he announced an early deadline of 15 August for British withdrawal. Although the Muslim League rejected the notion of their partition, Congress and the British sought assembly votes on whether the provinces of Bengal and Punjab would be divided. Both the assemblies returned a vote favouring such a division. What remained thereafter was for the Viceroy to announce an award on the territorial division of the subcontinent. To do this he established the Boundary Commission, headed by the British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe.

Much of the official justification that would attend the creation of law and order states after Partition was furnished by the disorder of Partition. People faced aggravated uncertainty when confronted with a territorial division that was the product of a secret act by a man who knew nothing of the topography of the regions that he would divide. The need for a policing apparatus to monitor population flows was anticipated, but at the same time the high command of the Muslim League and Congress were imploring their own constituencies to stay where they were and were later to admit that there was no ‘policy with regard to exchange of population’.^[67] Given the uncertainty about the location of the new border until the last minute ‘people in the divided provinces of Punjab and Bengal did not know until the fact whether their village was part of Pakistan or India’.^[68]

It is accepted that more than 15 million people became migrants and refugees and probably close to two million people lost their lives in the violence that ensued from these disorders.

The elections of 1946 had returned a Congress Ministry in the Frontier province under the leadership of Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan. Brother of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the two together had requested inclu­sion of the option to declare an independent ‘Pakhtunistari when resi­dents of the province were asked to vote on the question of whether to join India or Pakistan. Of the total voting population, only 55% went to the ballot but amongst them an overwhelming majority chose Pakistan. For the tribal regions of the province, the terms of acces­sion were set with tribal elders and no attempt was made to gauge the popular will in these areas.

Ahmad Yar Khan, the ‘last’ Khan of Kalat, in the lead-up to Parti­tion lent some moral support to the Muslim League and to the promise of Muslim nationhood. A close friend of Jinnah’s, he signed a stand-by agreement shortly after Partition to decide at a later date the terms, if there were to be any, for complete accession to Pakistan. While Jinnah established a council to ensure some representation for the Baloch in the management of their affairs, considerable pressure was simultane­ously being exerted upon the Khan of Kalat to accede unconditionally at this time.^[70] Then, cutting through such complications unilater­ally, the Governor-General invoked the ‘Extra-Provincial Jurisdiction Order’ of April 1949 to establish central control in large pockets of Balochistan.^[71]

The other territorial acquisitions of Pakistan included a number of princely states that were called upon to accede to either Pakistan or India by the terms of the Indian Independence Act 1947.

When, after first signing a standby agreement with Pakistan, the Maharaja of Kashmir State then signed an instrument of accession with India, this was a highly contentious act. Kashmir state had a 78 per cent Muslim population, much of which was agitating against this possibility. The fact that the Radcliffe line had been drawn to keep certain districts in the Punjab on the Indian side, and thereby maintain a land-link for India to Kashmir led to heavy speculation that Britain was on side with the Indians to deny the wishes of the Muslim major­ity. As will be discussed in the next chapter, this created the conditions for a continuing territorial battle between the two states of India and Pakistan.