A comprehensive account of what the people of the Punjab went through during the holocaust 

The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts
By Ishtiaq Ahmed. 
Rupa. Pages. 754. Rs 995.

Reviewed by M. Rajivlochan

THE people of South Asia have been particularly ill-served by their political leaders. This judicious work provides a detailed analysis of their misdoings that resulted in the bloody partition of the Punjab.

Self-serving, short-sighted, unmindful of the concerns of the people and quick to cater to the basest of feelings among the people, the political leaders found the withdrawal of the British Empire from India as a great opportunity to grab for themselves as much as they could. In the process they created unprecedented pain for the people. That pain still rankles, and still creates bad blood between the two nations.

There are four unique contributions that Ishtiaq Ahmed makes to the large corpus that studies the Partition of India. One, he provides a theoretical underpinning to understand why people living peacefully for many generations can become so aggressive and hostile to each other all of a sudden. Two, he gleans much important information from official communications. Three, he interviews a large body of people who witnessed the carnage of Partition, evaluates their memories for veracity, provides us with one of the most comprehensive archive of what people went through at the time of Independence. Finally, he brings together all this information to provide us with, perhaps for the first time, a comprehensive account of what the people of the Punjab went through during Partition.

Ahmed brings to bear his skills as a political scientist to explain the politicking that went on during the time of Partition. The elections did not yield a clear majority to any particular political party. The result was that the political parties of Punjab began to posture wildly in order to attract popular support or at least prevent others from forming a stable government. The communal idiom came in handy for all. "Over my dead body" ceased to be a turn of phrase. Matters were not helped by political leaders who took too seriously their belief that they came from a warrior stock and that their so-called lineage compelled them to swing around the sword or worse.

To this was added the almost complete collapse of the administration. What little was left of government presence in those days itself became partial to communalism. The way had been opened for the goondas of all communities to take over the streets and attack people of the other community. Their ferocity easily overwhelmed the good people who tried to help out each other and contain the communal conflagration. Animosities, real or imagined, began to play out in a deadly drama that left over 1 million dead and 17 million displaced. Ahmed records all this in great detail.

By the time the tragedy had played out its first act, many more Muslims had been killed than Hindus and the Hindus and Sikhs had lost much more property than the Muslims. Narratives and analyses of the partition in India usually paper over this detail to portray Hindus as the helpless victims of Muslims with the Sikhs putting up a brave front to defend themselves and their neighbours. Ahmed judiciously sets the record straight by providing a large amount of oral and documentary evidence to the contrary from the district level. Much of it is also about the manner in which the Muslim League employed goondas to crush the "nationalist" Muslims, those who were against the creation of Pakistan and against the violence that was taking place.

The Communists on both sides of the border were confounded with the happenings around them. With a commitment to the idea of "self-determination" by the people of their political future they could merely rub their collective hands in helplessness while people went about creating a nation for themselves on the basis of religion inspired disorder.

Ahmed writes lightly yet manages to remain magisterial. If there is an absence in this book, it is about the gains made by the goondas through Partition. And if there is a flaw, it is of a sloppy proof reading and copy editing. To just point out two: it should have been easy to notice that the language of the Brahmins was not Sanskrit (p.26) and there was no SSP in Lahore in 1946-47 (p.153).

The Tribune: October 9, 2011