The tumultuous road that led to the Nehru-Liaquat Pact

In the history of every nation, there are events that continue to shape its destiny. For Germany it is Nazism, for America it is the Civil War, for Russia it is the Russian Revolution and for India it is Partition.

A major event that shaped the destiny of post-Partition India was the Nehru-Liaquat pact, signed nearly 70 years ago by former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Liaquat Ali Khan, one of the founders of Pakistan, to preserve minority rights in both the countries following a riotous Partition.

India’s Home Minister Amit Shah recently cited the pact and its failure in ensuring the rights of minorities, to defend his government’s contentious Citizenship (Amendment) Act. But, the situations leading up to the pact and after it was signed are not as black and white as they have been portrayed.

The bilateral agreement, as Nehru justly claimed, pulled India and Pakistan from a precipice of war. But what drove both the countries to such brinkmanship, what choices did they have, why did these two leaders decide to compromise and what did the pact accomplish?

Also read: In Amit Shah’s Partition story, fantasy as fact, villains as heroes

Paucity of good academic writing on Partition has masked the complexity of that tumultuous era, reducing it to a few dramatic pictures depicting mile-long caravans of impoverished refugees and vultures feeding off carcasses.

The tragedy ran much deeper. Brief recounting of some lesser known aspects will help us understand the Nehru-Liaquat pact better.

Partition, a tragedy that ran deeper

Nearly 12 million (1.2 crore) Hindus and Muslims crossed the borders and nearly a million perished in riots and the migration itself. The two countries “had to resettle, feed and house a group as large as the total population of Australia,” wrote British India historian Yasmin Khan in The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan.

“This was not simply an ‘exchange’ of population. In the months following Independence, Pakistan lost its bankers, merchants, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs,” Khan observed.

In Indian cities, Muslim craftsmen and shop owners, now ostracised by Hindus, migrated. Cash outflow from banks across borders in an already impoverished economy plunged the countries into poverty. The plan to partition the assets was based on 80:20 basis with 80% going to India. In Indian government offices, trays, chairs and paper weights were split; in libraries, books were torn to adhere to the 80:20 rule. India had to jump civil servants three grades up to fill vacancies in secretariat while Pakistan had to advance them to five grades.

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Post-partition Pakistan, compared to India, had “fewer bankers, fewer traders, fewer mechanics,” wrote American journalist and diplomat Phillips Talbot in his book An American Witness to India’s Partition. Pakistan “inherited less than 10% of the sub-continent’s steel output and manufacturing capability” (Paul M McGarr, The Cold War in South Asia: Britain, the United States and the Indian Subcontinent).

Refugees crossing borders carried stories of massacres to their new homelands and inflamed local population.

“Partition was a modern event, the technology of the press was fully utilised to promote killing and pressmen and propagandists played their part in partition violence behind typewriters as bureaucratic killers in word if not in deed,” Khan wrote.

Dealing with refugees, economy

All this carnage was unfolding as Europe and the West were barely coming out of a devastating World War (II). The tragedy in India barely registered in the conscience of the world. The International Red Cross had left India already and a UN covenant to protect refugees would not come about until 1951. Pimps, brothel owners and pedophiles plagued refugee camps even as governments, with scarce resources, struggled to cope with the scale of efforts.

Refugees, in any era, destabilise local economy, treasuries are taxed, labour market gets skewed and it never matters that the person who arrives speaks the same language and worships the same God. India’s largest state Uttar Pradesh refused to take in refugees from Pakistan, presumably Hindus. When non-Muslim Sindhis landed in Mumbai, the local government was not thrilled.

A constant criticism of Nehru was the centralisation of the economy. A key determinant factor was the role the government had to play in rehabilitating the lives of refugees. Creation of jobs, welfare centers for women and children and orphanages were all organised by governments. But, this is often forgotten in analysing the economics of the Nehru era.

The complexity of the era is best exemplified by the decision of India, in September 1949, to devalue its currency to be in lockstep with the Pound Sterling while Pakistan did not do so. To Pakistanis, it was the most popular decision when the country demonstrated strength against India. “Indians need to give ₹144 for ₹100 in Pakistani currency” (Talbot) was a popular retort. Currency devaluation and halting of trade brought conferences related to evacuee properties also to a halt.

Bengal’s forgotten blaze

Ever since Gandhi’s ‘Calcutta Miracle’, the violence during partition was largely concentrated in the western front of the Punjab region. Military historian Steven Wilkinson identified a causal relationship between high incidence of riots and presence of military ex-servicemen in a region. Punjab had lots of them.

On December 20, 1949 policemen, reportedly in search of communists, entered Khulna, a village in East Pakistan and killed a Hindu, triggering violence against Hindus. Now, the East started exploding.

Military historian Srinath Raghavan calls the violence in Bengal, The Forgotten Conflagration, because of its relative lack of significance compared to Kashmir, the integration of Hyderabad and violence in Punjab.

Following the Khulna episode, reprisals began in West Bengal and Muslims left for East Pakistan by the thousands. A cycle of violent reprisals set in as Hindus were in turn massacred in the East and they started streaming into West Bengal.

Nehru’s pitch against war Vs Liaquat’s complacency

Historian Pallavi Raghavan adds an interesting backdrop to the Nehru-Liaquat pact. By January 1950, Nehru started floating the idea of a ‘non-war pact’ with Pakistan and started with Liaquat a flurry of communications totalling over 200 telegrams a year. The surprising part is that while the attempt for a non-war pact eventually floundered, the Nehru-Liaquat pact for Bengal crises happened. Popular understanding of that era is that the two nations were implacable foes, but Pallavi establishes that the idea for a non-war pact was actually seriously considered in both countries and not dismissed outright.

Disappointed with the sanguine approach of Liaquat to escalating tensions in Bengal, Nehru issued orders to mobilise the army and turned down a request to disallow refugees from East Pakistan into India.

Nehru’s proposal to Liaquat to jointly tour afflicted areas and his call for declaration to condemn the atrocities on refugees was turned down. Both Liaquat and Nehru were increasingly facing domestic pressures to go to war. Nehru steadfastly refused to consider that the only choices were war or population exchange. By now many in India, including Sardar Patel, were demanding that India, in retaliation to Hindus being chased from East Pakistan, send Muslims from Bengal. The very idea was abhorrent to Nehru.

Also read: Where is the Bengal, which once swore by non-violence to decry injustice?

Nehru instead pursued the diplomatic track. Sardar Patel and others also pushed the idea of demanding territory from Pakistan in response to the tens of thousands that were streaming into India. To Nehru, this was fantasy because, as he correctly cautioned, it would mean all-out war in Eastern and Western fronts with Pakistan. No one other than Nehru worried about the cost of war. But Nehru had his limits too.

Addressing the nation on March 3, 1950, Nehru said, “Anyone who knows me should know that I hate war…But to talk complacently of peace, when there is no peace and when something worse than war is possible is to be blind to facts.” He also added that the crisis was “outcome of the very nature of Pakistan: minorities in a religious state were bound to lack full sense of citizenship and security”. Concerns that echo eerily in today’s situation in India. Later, Nehru in a letter to C Rajagopalachari, wrote, “Even I, with all my abhorrence of war and my appreciation of its consequences cannot rule it out completely”.

Nehru, not one to crumble under pressure

Even as Nehru was signalling the seriousness of military action by moving troops, the press in Bengal fuelled war-mongering. The Amrita Bazar Patrika led the charge in editorials and even conducting an opinion poll asking if readers favored war: 82.7% responded in ‘yes’. Nehru fumed and asked the administration to clamp down on press reports. The crises continued to spiral and pressure Nehru.

On March 17, 1950, Nehru addressed Parliament and was roundly criticised. Opposition to Nehru mounted within Congress party led by Sardar Patel. Nehru had earlier offered to resign and go to Pakistan as an individual, akin to Gandhi’s idea before he was assassinated. Now, Nehru renewed his threat to resign. An aging and sick Patel turned him down and, once again, became an ally. Nehru had a competitive spirit of standing up to challenges and knew well that the party would not countenance his resignation. Second only to Gandhi, the most popular pan-Indian leader was Nehru. There was a time when India loved Nehru.

Although Liaquat exuded confidence in public about meeting India’s military challenge, the reality of India’s military superiority compelled him to negotiate and he took up yet another offer from Nehru to negotiate a pact. Liaquat arrived in New Delhi and on April 8, 1950, after a week of negotiations and 11 drafts later, the Nehru-Liaquat pact was signed.

The pact and its after-effects

The key provisions of the pact were that minorities commission will be setup in each country, cabinets in East and West Bengal and Assam would include representatives from minorities, evacuees returning by December 30 would get back the homes they left behind, forced conversions will not be recognised, adult refugees can carry cash up to ₹150 each and a child could carry ₹75.