Forced migration a blessing

BB Mahajan

AT the time of Partition, I was 15 years old and living with my parents at Peshawar Cantonment. I was to appear in the board matriculation examination in March 1947. Riots against Hindus and Sikhs erupted in the region, the North West Frontier Province, at that time. The exams could not be held. When the situation did not improve, the exams were cancelled. The schools were closed and there appeared to be no prospect of exams being held in the near future. We decided to go to our ancestral home in Chhamal village in Shakargarh tehsil, then part of Gurdaspur district, till conditions improved. The conditions, however, continued to worsen and there was no question of returning to Peshawar.

There was uncertainty whether Gurdaspur district would come to India or Pakistan. Therefore, although mass migration of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan and Muslims from India had started, we stayed put in our village. Radcliffe gave his award in June, under which Shakargarh tehsil went to Pakistan and the rest of Gurdaspur district came to India. Newspapers did not reach the village; we remained glued to All India Radio in the only house in the village which had a radio. Even after it became known that the tehsil had been awarded to Pakistan, the Hindus still stayed back, hoping that violence would subside and we may be able to stay in our village, although under Pakistan’s rule.

In September, we heard a rumour that a big Muslim mob helped by the Baloch army was going to attack the village. All Hindu men, women and children took whatever luggage they could carry on their heads and started walking towards the J&K border, which was about 20 km from the village. Most thought that they were only moving temporarily and would soon return. Punjab had seen many invaders in the past; people would run away and then return after the conditions stabilised. There was no known instance of the entire population having permanently left their homes. So, many buried their valuables and money beneath the mud floors for subsequently retrieving these. We did not because we did not have any.

Fortunately, no mob attacked on the way. My parents, along with their aged parents and five children that included me, my three sisters and a five-year-old younger brother, entered J&K by the evening and halted in the border town of Samba. We had no money or food with us. We partook of the langar organised by local Hindus and spent the night under the open sky. In the morning, we again started on foot towards India (J&K had not yet acceded to India). On the way, we came across convoys of Muslims going from India to Pakistan. Fortunately, there was no violent encounter between the convoys.

We reached the banks of Ravi near Madhopur by the evening. There was only a narrow footbridge on the river at that time, which could not be crossed at night. So we slept on the river bank. The pebbles did not allow us to have much sleep. But father said, “Thank God the Muslims did not allow us to stay in the village. We might have stayed as second-rate citizens of Pakistan. Now we will be free citizens of India.”

In the morning, the whole crowd moved in a queue over the bridge and crossed over to India. We all rushed to Pathankot, which was the nearest city. The refugees were free to occupy any house that the Muslims had vacated. There were, however, not enough houses left by the Muslims in Pathankot. We got into a small house. There we saw hair of the previous Muslim occupants who had apparently been killed. We were not inclined to stay in it. Then we learnt that a number of houses were vacant in a small town, Sujanpur, about 5 km away. We rushed there and found a house which was reasonably spacious (on about 300 square yards), although it was a kutcha house with mud flooring, roofs made of old wooden logs which leaked profusely during rains and no bathroom or toilet. We occupied it. Subsequently, the house was allotted to us in lieu of our property left in Pakistan when the records were received from Pakistan.

In order to make ends meet, father started running a small shop in one of the khokhas (wooden structures) built on railway land along the railway line. I took the special matriculation examination conducted by Panjab University for students who had migrated from Pakistan and could not take the exam there. Father wanted me to study in a college in Delhi. We went to Amritsar by travelling in a truck (no buses were at that time plying in the state). We went to the railway station daily for a number of days but no train would run for Delhi. At long last, we heard that one train was leaving for Delhi. It was fully packed and we travelled on its roof with hundreds of other passengers. (Rooftop travel was quite common at that time).

At Jalandhar, the train stopped. We were told that it would not proceed further. The government was not permitting people from Punjab to go to Delhi for fear of angry Punjabi refugees aggravating the killing of Muslims in the capital. We got down and I joined college at Jalandhar.

We were lucky that none of our family members died in the violence and we only lost whatever little property we had. Millions of Hindus and Sikhs in areas which became part of Pakistan were killed, as also Muslims who lived in the part which remained in India. My wife Urmilla, who was living with her parents in Amritsar, narrates a harrowing incident. One day women from the neighbourhood went to the railway station with cooked food to feed the refugees coming by train from Pakistan. There were only bodies of passengers in the train. Next day, in retaliation, all the Muslims travelling by train to Pakistan were killed and their bodies sent to Pakistan. Newspapers were full of stories of such barbaric killings and of mass rapes, arson and looting which occurred on a large scale on both sides of the border. There was naturally strong bitterness against Muslims among the Hindus and Sikhs, who after large-scale migration of population between the two countries constituted 86 per cent of the population in India, as per the 1951 census. It is to the immense credit of the political leadership at that time that they still adopted a secular Constitution that conferred equal rights on all people, irrespective of their religion.

Post script: After graduation, due to the need for providing financial support to the family, I had to take up the job of a clerk in the Audit Department. I prepared outside office hours without any coaching (which I could not afford) and appeared as a private candidate in MA (Economics) from Panjab University, where I topped. I took up a lecturer’s job in a college, appeared in the civil services examination, got selected for the IAS, and after serving on various senior administrative posts in the state and at the Centre, retired as Secretary to Government of India. The forced migration to India, with all its hardships, eventually proved to be a blessing!

— The writer retired as the Union Food Secretary

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.