Dividing Divided States. Gregory F. Treverton

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СКАЧАТЬ 5.5 million Muslims went the opposite direction.⁸

      In the eastern part of the subcontinent, reactions immediately after independence were calmer. Indeed, while Calcutta experienced some unrest, the two-way population movements were relatively minor and more voluntary, with people moving for socioeconomic reasons rather than fleeing religious persecution. However, in late 1949, riots in East Pakistan led masses of Hindus to migrate from East Pakistan into India. Similarly, communal riots in West Bengal led more than one million Muslim refugees to flee to Pakistan.

      The flow of East Pakistani Hindus into West Bengal continued over the next five years as border quarrels between Pakistan and India in the west (in Kashmir) intensified. Uncertainty over proposals to make Urdu the official language of Pakistan (to the detriment of Bengali) and to adopt an Islamic constitution led to increased unease among Hindus living in East Pakistan. This flow was stopped only briefly between 1959 and 1964 when the government of India decided to close all the refugee camps in West Bengal and not provide any assistance to refugees from East Pakistan. It had to reopen them in 1964 when tensions arose in East Pakistan, which eventually led to its secession from Pakistan in 1971, which again resulted in more refugees flocking into India.⁹

      At independence, the governments of India and Pakistan did not expect the level of violence and the mass population exodus that the partition induced. As a result, they were ill prepared to deal with the crisis, especially in the western part of the subcontinent, where the bulk of the population movements happened in the first three months. And given that the pace of the movements was so different between the western part (i.e., between East Punjab in India and West Punjab in Pakistan) and the eastern part (i.e., West Bengal in India and East Pakistan), the arrangements that the two governments established to deal with the crises in the west and in the east differed substantially.

      In the west, the pressure on the civil administration was such that the military had to take over the evacuation of the endangered religious minorities and to provide them with humanitarian aid. On August 1, 1947, the Boundary Force, an Indian military force of about twenty-five thousand men of “mixed class composition” under the British command, was created as a neutral entity to ensure civil order and protect the religious minorities. However, while the force supported some of the evacuation efforts, it largely failed to prevent the riots and the atrocities that followed. In the end, the Boundary Force was disbanded just a month after it was created.¹⁰

      As the crisis intensified, the two countries formed ministries to handle refugee evacuation and rehabilitation. Both recognized the need to secure the paths of the refugees during their journey to the border and to protect them from attacks from opposing groups, so MEO was formed in September 1947 as a joint endeavor to organize the flow of migrants and secure evacuations by rail, road, and foot. For those traveling by foot, the MEO prepared a Joint Evacuation Movement Plan to schedule the movement of large convoys of refugees in order to avoid clashes. In addition, the MEO acted to secure trains and reduce attacks on them, and was able to organize sixty mass evacuations by rail in November 1947. The Joint Refugee Council was also set up by the two governments to provide emergency medical supplies and food at rest stops for the migrating refugees.¹¹

      Very little by way of resettlement occurred in either country, as authorities in both expected the refugees to go back to their original homes once the situation stabilized. In India, refugees were accommodated in transit camps, which were run by provincial governments with financial help from the central government. In Pakistan, where the situation was more urgent (one in ten people was a refugee), the new administration had less state infrastructure and experience than its Indian counterpart to deal with the refugee crisis. The Pakistani government did not come up with a coherent strategy to deal with refugee settlement until late September 1947. At that point, refugee camps were set up in West Punjab and an Emergency Committee of the Cabinet was created to manage the distribution of food and emergency aid to refugees, in conjunction with the Joint Refugee Council.¹²

      The rising number of refugees in transit and refugee camps signaled that the situation was unsustainable and that more needed to be done to rehabilitate and integrate refugee populations. In India, the Ministry for Relief and Rehabilitation was renamed the Ministry of Rehabilitation in 1948 and took on the mission of preparing the refugees to be resettled in newly constructed townships. Refugees were relocated to more permanent camps, where they were provided with vocational and technical training; some were given remunerative employment,¹³ and were then gradually dispersed into the new townships.

      In its resettlement strategy, the Pakistani government was more draconian: in August 1948, it declared a state of emergency that gave it the right to resettle refugees from Punjab in other provinces. There, provisions were made to provide housing for urban refugees and loans for agricultural land and inputs for the rural refugees. However, Pakistan tended to be more generous to the relatively more prosperous—and thus influential—Punjabis than to the Bengalis, most of whom were poor farmers.

      In the eastern part, given the lesser hostility between Hindus and Muslims, the two countries’ strategy was to prevent major population movements across the border through bilateral negotiations of rights for religious minorities. In the 1948 Inter-Dominion Conference, the two governments agreed that both would be responsible for protecting the religious minorities who resided in their respective states.

      In 1950 the two countries negotiated to remove administrative burdens for those seeking citizenship, and provide guarantees for the rights of religious minorities in their chosen residence. These negotiations culminated in the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, which provided religious minorities in both India and Pakistan “with complete equality of citizenship irrespective of religion; a full sense of security in respect of life, culture, property and personal honor and also guaranteed fundamental human rights of the minorities, such as freedom of movement, speech, occupation and worship.”¹⁴ Both countries subsequently established minority commissions to implement the pact.¹⁵

      However, these agreements and negotiations were not enough to prevent some sporadic migration, and the governments had to respond accordingly. For example, as the result of unrest in late 1949, the Indian government was forced to set up refugee camps in West Bengal. It used the same model applied in the Punjab, but because the refugees were mostly rural, the government arranged for loans or grants to enable them to purchase land. Yet the steady stream of refugees arriving from Pakistan was putting more pressure on land, and starting in 1955 the government of India actively sought, albeit unsuccessfully, gradually to close the camps in West Bengal.¹⁶

      Assessment and Possible Lessons

      Several important lessons emerge from the India-Pakistan partition:

      The case underscores the importance of educating the most affected local communities about the implications of a partition or secession before it happens and giving them plenty of time to digest the new borders. Neither happened in this case, creating fear and panic.

      When tensions between different groups are high before partition, it is important to have key institutions, especially law enforcement, in place and functioning well in order to be able to maintain order if tensions escalate. In India and Pakistan, these institutions were barely functional at partition; had they been, many deaths and displacements could have been avoided.

      In a secession, the parties can fashion joint solutions to help evacuate refugee populations even if relations between the two states are acrimonious. The establishment of MEO is a good example.

      An assessment of the refugees’ intentions can help countries carve more coherent and long-term strategies to quickly integrate them if they so wish. Both India and Pakistan simply assumed initially that most of the refugees were there only temporarily and so came late to the need for resettlement.

      Transparency in resettlement benefits is key, as the Pakistani case showed. Indeed, СКАЧАТЬ