Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Contemporary South Asia) by Gyanendra Pandey

Author:Gyanendra Pandey [Pandey, Gyanendra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-05-09T07:29:00+00:00

The colonial account

Nothing fits the colonial view of India better than the more extreme of these right-wing Muslim (and Hindu) statements. `Primitive' and `bestial' are the adjectives that surface again and again in colonial reports on Garhmukhteshwar. In the words of the military intelligence, `Gruesome atrocities appear to have been perpetrated but the news has been amazingly hushed up and although accounts appeared in the local press, it was not made out to be half the immensity that it actually was.'53

The colonial account does not understate the cycle of revenge, or the `definite organization and planning' that went into the attacks. It notes the presence of criminal - goonda - elements, and emphasises the fact that the administration had in some senses collapsed (as collapse it must on the departure of the British). However - another reason why the British withdrawal from India was premature - such violence was also, in this view, the inevitable product of age-old animosities and of deep-seated savagery: it was a boiling over, the periodic expression of peoples unable to help their own barbarity. This was what accounted for the gruesome quality of so much of what happened - at Garhmukhteshwar and elsewhere. Let me briefly elaborate these points.

According to British Indian military sources, `the Gurhmekhtesar [sic] incident was carefully planned and organised'. Large numbers of people knew about the plans, the military authorities averred: among those in the know was a Hindu lieutenant-colonel from Meerut who later said that `so many people knew about it that it never occurred to him that he should report it'.54 `The indications are that it was organised and preconceived', wrote the commissioner of Meerut division.55

The Punjab Jats, more especially those of Rohtak and one or two other districts, emerge as the undoubted villains of the piece. The massacre was `almost entirely the work of Jats from the Punjab', declared one official. The Rohtak Jats first massacred all the Muslims they could find in the Fair. Next day they massacred all the Muslims they could find in Garhmukhteshwar Town. When they left the Fair, they massacred Muslims on the various roads leading from the Fair towards Bulandshahr, Delhi etc., and even in villages near the roads. They started trouble in Delhi when they got there, and finally indulged in communal rioting in their own home district of Rohtak.56

However, while the Jats loom large in this story, the local (Indian) administrators are part of the network responsible for the crime. `The massacres were committed by Jats, without provocation. Jaitly, the Superintendent of Police ... had a Jat Sub-Inspector in charge of the Mela Kotwali, and another Jat Sub-Inspector in charge of Garhmukhteshwar Town Thana. When the trouble broke out, the Military sent down two Companies of Jats ... [sic!]'S7 Unfortunately, wrote Tuker, `there was not a single British 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.'S8 In making the charge, Tuker conveniently overlooked

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