One of the repeated charges against Gandhi is that he enfeebled Hindus, making them incapable of defending themselves against the more belligerent and martial Muslims. Hindu nationalism still appeals to many because it calls for the renewal of ‘Kshatriyahood’, of strong and militant Hindus who are able to retaliate against aggressive and warlike Muslims. Memories of Hindu defeats at the hands of Muslim invaders and fears of a repetition of those horrors also trigger anti-Gandhian diatribes. Perhaps the most traumatic and disturbing issue in such narratives is the plight of Hindu women, captured, abducted, defiled and eventually lost by weak Hindu men, who could not protect them. These women were not only dishonoured themselves, but brought shame to the community from which they came; even worse, they now belonged to the Muslim enemies, bearing and rearing the latter’s children, thus increasing the strength of the Hindu-killers. During the terrors of the Partition, as is now quite well-documented, the women from both sides of the religious and national divide suffered the worst.1 As Urvashi Butalia puts it: ‘The story of partition, the uprooting and dislocation of people, was accompanied by the story of the rape, abduction and widowhood of thousands of women on both sides of the newly formed borders’ (1997: 92). National histories are uniformly silent about this shameful but real aspect of the Partition. Literally hundreds of thousands of women were forcibly ‘exchanged’, not once but sometimes multiple times, during this process. Many of these were then tracked down by government agencies from both sides and persuaded or coerced to return to their ‘original’, but now displaced families. The latter did not always welcome back these ‘soiled’ women, many of whom ended up in camps, shelters and other state-supported institutions. Several thousands were widowed and pensioned off by the government of India. But many who settled with their abductors, rapists, or with families of the other religious community became mothers of children who grew up in two hostile countries, suspecting and hating their own cousins on the other side of the border. The Partition thus not only divided the two communities but also made them re-mingle with one another in sordid and traumatic ways.
The women who were reported missing on both sides were designated ‘abducted’. This, as Butalia explains, was ‘a catchall description that has come to be used for all women (and some men) who disappeared during the confusion of partition’ (1997: 92). Though most of the missing women might have actually been abducted, some would have stayed back willingly. This was never officially acknowledged. As to the numbers, estimates vary and are not entirely trustworthy, but as Butalia, relying of government records and secondary sources, reckons
the number of Hindu and Sikh women abducted in Pakistan was roughly 33,000 – although some estimates put this figure at 50,000 – (this did not include women from Kashmir and it was felt that if these were added the figure could well have reached 50,000). Lists received from Pakistan showed the figure of Muslim women abducted in India to be around 21,000.
(Ibid.: 92–93)
What was Gandhi’s attitude to these women, who constituted an inflammatory and unresolved area of friction between the two communities?
Soon after his arrival in Delhi on 9 September 1947, Gandhi starts receiving reports about missing Hindu and Sikh women. Three days later, he refers to this problem in his prayer meeting of 12 September 1947. He starts by mentioning reports from the north-west Frontier Province (henceforth NWFP) of Pakistan, where Hindus and Sikhs are being driven out. He says that the government of Pakistan is responsible; in fact, he names Jinnah himself: ‘The Government of Pakistan has forgotten its duty. I shall appeal to the Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah who is the Governor-General of Pakistan to desist from such policies’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 362). Why, he asks, are Hindus and Sikhs fleeing from Pakistan? ‘Because’, he continues, ‘they are afraid that they and their wives would have to die and that their wives would be abducted. They are in danger and so they are fleeing’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 362). While beseeching Hindus and Sikhs not to retaliate because it would be ‘barbaric’ and not to punish innocent Muslims in India for what their co-religionists were doing in Pakistan because it would be against all norms of natural justice (ibid.), Gandhi squarely blames the state of Pakistan for not doing its duty.
In his speech at a Daryaganj mosque on 18 September 1947, Gandhi tells the Muslims of Delhi assembled there that he will work for their safety and security, but he also wants them to condemn the happenings in Pakistan. He urges his audience to exert pressure on the Pakistani state and on their co-religionists across the border so that the lives and properties of Hindus and Sikhs there can be guaranteed. He specifically speaks against the abduction of women and forcible conversions:
Abducted women had to be returned, forcible conversions considered null and void. The Hindus and Sikhs of Pakistan and the Muslims of East Punjab had to be reinstalled in their own homes. In Pakistan and the Union they should produce conditions that not even a little girl, whatever her religion, should feel insecure.
(Ibid.: 382)
This is the stance Gandhi takes, though in retrospect it seems somewhat unrealistic. He wants the transfer of populations to stop and all abducted women to be restored to their homes and families, thus reversing the wrongs that were going on instead of accepting them as fait accompli.
The ethnic cleansing in NWFP was repeated in other parts of Pakistan. In his discussion with Gandhi on 25 September 1947, J. B. Kripalani, the prominent Congress leader and former president of the party, who was from Sind, apprised Gandhi of the deteriorating situation there. When Kripalani had met Jinnah in Karachi, the latter had absolved himself and the state of all responsibility, saying that Pakistan was merely a victim of the propaganda of the Indian press. As reported in Gandhi’s Collected Works:
Towards the close of September, Acharya Kripalani, the Congress President, had met Jinnah at Karachi and drawn his attention to the rapidly deteriorating position of the minority community in Sind. In reply, he got only a long tirade against the Indian Government. The minority community in Sind, Jinnah maintained, had nothing to complain of. … The Pakistan Government, he said, had nothing to answer for; on the contrary, it was the innocent victim of wanton and malicious exaggeration by the Indian Press.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 423)
While Kripalani urged an orderly exodus of Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh, with special trains and armed protection, rather than a distressed and disorderly scramble after they had been squeezed to destitution and desperation, Gandhi maintained that all Sindh leaders had to go to Pakistan to resist the atrocities even unto their own deaths. So incensed was Gandhi by the happenings in Sind that he even said India should go war, if necessary:
I totally disapprove of the exchange of populations. Let us declare war. We shall fight and die fighting if we are destined to. They have abducted and molested 12-year-old girls.
(Ibid.: 423)
Of course, Gandhi was proved wrong; the exchange of populations did happen. Perhaps his refusal to accept what was unfolding before his eyes is an instance of the stubbornness characteristic of Gandhi that some of his critics have harped on.2 Yet to Gandhi, to accept that Pakistan was only for Muslims and India only for Hindus would be tantamount to both countries signing their own death warrants.
In a significant development, during his prayer meeting of 26 November 1947, Gandhi shifts his focus to the consequences of the abductions rather than dwelling only on the causes. He now deals with the human problem of the acceptance of these women. In a culture where even Sita, Rama’s wife and veritable paragon of virtue, had to undergo a trial by fire to prove that she was chaste and where she was banished to the forest anyway because of a washerman’s gossip, what chance would ordinary women, raped and abused by Muslims, have to be welcomed back to their husbands and families? But Gandhi, the votary of Rama and saintly Father of the Nation, takes a clearly pro-woman and most humane position on such sexually exploited and violated women:
Many of our women are in Pakistan. They are being molested. Those unfortunate women are made to feel ashamed. In my view, they have no reason to feel ashamed. It would be gross injustice if any woman is considered worthless by society and abandoned by her brothers, parents, and husband because she had been abducted by the Muslims.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 399)
But Gandhi also adds that no woman who is really pure can be raped. How does he arrive at this conclusion? He says that a really chaste woman would die before she is molested. How true such a statement is can only be guessed at. It implies a belief that is religious, like Gandhi’s advocacy of the almost miraculous powers of brahmacharya, or sexual self-control. No feminist would agree with Gandhi, but it is interesting to see how, speaking of Sita, in her controversial novel The Rape of Sita, Lindsay Collen’s eponymous protagonist actually consents to be raped by Rowan because she does not want to be beaten up and broken in addition to being raped.
Not submitting but withholding consent, on the other hand, was a major part of the Gandhian praxis; would it work in situations of extreme violence when gangs of men held, abused and passed around abducted women? Gandhi maintains, almost as an article of faith, ‘It is my belief that any woman who has the purity of Sita cannot be touched by anyone’ (ibid.). However, rather than expecting such high standards of his contemporaries, he quickly adds, ‘But where can we find women like Sita these days? And not all women can be like Sita’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 399). Therefore, he asks:
Should we show contempt for the woman who had been forcibly abducted and tyrannized? She is not a woman of loose character. My daughter or wife too could be abducted and raped. But I would not hate her for that reason.
(Ibid.)
Once again, Gandhi collapses the difference between himself and others. Their daughters and wives are like his own kith and kin. Indeed, in an incident which several biographers have found callous and shocking, Gandhi endangered the life of little Manu when he asked her to walk back in the evening along a deserted path in riot-affected Noakhali to retrieve a pumice stone which she had dropped and which was used to massage his feet. When she returned unharmed, he said that there was no point singing ekla chalo re – Tagore’s famous song, ‘Walk on alone’ – if his own companion were too afraid to do so (Manubehn 1957: 75–77). Gandhi did not hide behind his Mahatmahood but subjected himself and his kin to the same kind of dangers that the ordinary people whom he was trying to transform had also undergone. Was this a way to make Manu a fellow-participant in his hardest experiments with truth and non-violence?
A few days later, Gandhi, quite matter of fact, returns to the issue of abducted women:
Muslims in Pakistan have abducted our young girls. Attempts are being made and must be made to rescue them. Let us try to get back every abducted girl who is still alive there. If these girls have been raped, have they lost everything by it? At least, I do not think so.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 414)
He acknowledges that Hindu and Sikh girls have been abducted; he announces the steps taken to rescue them; finally, he urges their families to accept them honourably. The sin is not upon the victim but upon the perpetrators of the evil, Gandhi, reminds us. But when it comes to women, how many would have the courage to live up to such a precept? Women’s honour was equated with their sexuality remaining under patriarchal control; and a family or even a nation’s honour was equated with the honour of its women. Thus innocent girls were made to bear the brunt of the pathologies and insecurities of a whole society.
In his prayer meeting of 29 November 1947 Gandhi alludes to the attempts to extort money from the families of missing girls in order to release them. Such ransom-seeking was utterly obnoxious to him:
I had said yesterday that we should not give even a cowrie to get back the abducted girls. Those who have committed the crime of abducting our girls should restore them to us, and also do penance at the same time. It would not do to give any money to claim the girls back.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 420)
But what are the means of prevailing upon the culprits to give up the girls they have held in custody? That Gandhi does not spell out. No vigilantism or non-state action is endorsed. Retaliation is of course out of the question:
But there is a very alarming report. It is reported that in the East Punjab we are ill-treating the Muslim girls, whom we have forcibly kept. I just cannot understand how we could have stooped so low. I must admit that I cannot bear to see this. We should regard those girls as our mothers or daughters.
(Ibid.)
It is not clear if an exchange of abducted women on both sides occurred because Hindus and Sikhs had also resorted to the same measure. Was this the bargaining tool that ensured the cooperation of the Pakistan authorities who, otherwise, would have simply washed their hands off any responsibility? Trading in one another’s daughters, however, to Gandhi was most abhorrent: ‘Those Muslim girls are like my own daughters. How can I indulge in pleasures, be alive and eat and drink while somebody ill-treats my daughters?’ (ibid.). Instead he insists on collective, even universal responsibility:
But when someone commits a crime anywhere I feel I am the culprit. You too should feel the same. If I were to commit any crime you should also think that you too were guilty of it. Let us all merge in each other like drops of ocean. If the drops of ocean remain apart they would dry up. But when they mingle together in the ocean they can carry huge ships across their expanse. As with the ocean so with us. After all we also are an ocean of human beings. If one person commits a crime, it amounts to all of us committing it.
(Ibid.)
This lofty doctrine, however, fails to assuage the wounds of the afflicted. These wounds they will not regard as collective but as individual, uniquely their own, in which others cannot share nor mitigate their trauma. Thus, locked into their own private hells, the outraged victims seethe with hatred and thirst for revenge. In the fragment of a letter written on 30 November 1947, Gandhi again lays down the proper way of treating abducted girls: ‘Girls forcibly abducted are not to be treated as defiled. And does defilement only apply to women and not to men?’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 425), but he also despairs of others understanding him: ‘How long must I go on writing? What can I write? My heart is crying’ (ibid.).
What is important, however, is Gandhi’s consistency. If he tells Hindus and Sikhs not to retaliate, he also tells the same thing to the Muslims. It is the charge that he was partial to the latter and against the former that is untrue. It is this canard of chicanery and favouritism that Hindu fanatics levelled against Gandhi to justify his murder that is shown repeatedly to be untrue. As Gandhi said to a Muslim delegation at Panipat, which he visited on 2 December 1947:
In Pakistan many Hindu girls have been forcibly converted and subjected to extreme barbarities. Hindus too have done similar things. But I am telling you how you should behave like true Muslims. You should seek help from the Pakistan Government and persuade your brethren there to console the young women who have been abducted. You should tell them: ‘Sisters, you have been cruelly treated. We forgot that we were human. From now on you are our mothers, our sisters, our daughters.’ If you work in this spirit you can make Pakistan really pak – really pure.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 443)
It is not only Hindus and Sikhs who ought not to retaliate; Gandhi also urges Muslims to behave as true Muslims, by honouring the daughters and sisters of Hindus and Sikhs. That, to Gandhi, is the only way to make Pakistan pure or holy. But it begs the question of whether that was the real reason for the Partition, to create a pure state where citizens could practice the highest form of Islam?
In the same address, it is interesting to see the gradual shift in his position about the transfer of populations. He tells the Muslims, ‘If, of course, you want to go of your own will, no one can stop you’ (ibid.: 442), but he would never ask them to do so: ‘you will never hear Gandhi utter the words that you should leave India. Gandhi can only tell you that you should stay, for India is your home’ (ibid.: 442–443). What if their lives are threatened in India? Gandhi doesn’t hesitate to add, ‘And if your brethren should kill you, you should bravely meet death. That is the way I am made. That is the way I would have people behave’ (ibid.: 443). Hearing such impossible advice, should the Muslims of that period have accused Gandhi of being partial to Hindus for asking them to stay back in a hostile India to die, if necessary? Gandhi asks Muslims to behave in an exemplary way, safeguarding only their dignity and, careless of their lives and property, devoting themselves ‘wholly to service’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 96: 443). If they did so, Gandhi assures them, ‘Hindus will worship you and you will be able to serve not only Pakistan but also the Muslims living in India’ (ibid.). Such impossibly high standards of the common Hindus and Muslims of his time are not at all unreasonable as far as Gandhi is concerned. In fact, that is the only way to prevent the ‘undoing of the country’ and to save ‘the independence … gained without shedding a drop of blood’ (ibid.). Otherwise, he tells his audience, ‘You are cutting off your own feet’ (ibid.). Even so, despite all the harm done, it is not too late: ‘If even now you take up the work of service without asking where and by whom the present tide of violence was started, you can still taste the nectar of freedom’ (ibid.: 443–444). Gandhi comes back to his fundamental premise to justify his argument: ‘If my brother has become mad and wants to kill me, does it mean that I should also go mad? To return evil for evil makes for the fall of both parties’ (ibid.: 444). But suppose the one who has gone mad is not my brother, but my enemy? Wouldn’t I be justified in killing him? Gandhi would say that all men are brothers; there are no enemies, therefore none deserves to be killed, least of all Hindus or Muslims, who have lived together in the same country for centuries.
In the prayer meeting of 7 December 1947, Gandhi returns to the question of the abducted women, actually offering numbers: ‘Some say that about 12,000 women had been abducted by Hindus and Sikhs and twice that number had been abducted by Muslims in Pakistan’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 8). These figures do not include the women abducted from Kashmir by the Pakistani raiders who had crossed over. Gandhi will come to them later. At this time he is concerned with how to restore them to their families. He admits that many of the women themselves do not wish to come back: It is said that the women concerned do not now want to return, but still they have to be brought back. Muslim women similarly have to be taken back to Pakistan. It is also said that the Sikh and Hindu women concerned have embraced Islam and married their Muslim abductors. It could be true. But I do not admit that they are not willing to return. Similar is the case of Muslim women in India.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 9)
I do not believe that Gandhi wanted the women to be abducted twice over, forced to cross over into India or Pakistan against their wishes. Instead, what he implies is that if they were to be welcomed back with true love and warmth, why would they, who were taken against their will, raped and brutalized, not wish to join their own families? That is why he insists that those who have lost the women should be ready to take them back with kindness and love. If not they would be as barbaric as those who abducted and assaulted the women in the first place:
It would be a barbarian husband or a barbarian parent who would say that he would not take back his wife or daughter. I do not think the women concerned had done anything wrong. They had been subjected to violence. To put a blot on them and to say that they are no longer fit to be accepted in society is unjust.
(Ibid.: 10)
Once again, Gandhi places the burden of rehabilitating the women upon the governments of the two new nations: ‘The Governments should trace all these women. They should be traced and restored to their families’ (ibid.). While blaming Pakistan for starting the madness, ‘In my view Pakistan is responsible for spreading this poison’, he also wonders, ‘what good can come from apportioning responsibility?’ (ibid.) when both sides have been barbaric, regardless of who started it or which side abducted more women than the other?
On 26 December 1947, Gandhi again appeals to the men whose female relatives have been abducted: ‘If my daughter has been violated by a rascal and made pregnant, must I cast her and her child away?’ (ibid.: 118). He does not insist any more that a pure woman cannot be raped against her will, he is rather more practical, willing even to extend his support to the children born of such violation: ‘Nor can I take the position that the child so born is Muslim by faith. Its faith can only be the faith of the mother who bore it’ (Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 118). Here Gandhi again departs from the patriarchal norm which insists that a child takes on the religion of its father. He wants to empower the women, who though raped, have every right to raise their children as they deem fit. He adds the rider, ‘After the child grows up he or she will be free to take up any religion’ (ibid.), thus totally undo ing the competitive politics of the warring faiths, each trying to increase its numbers by stealing and impregnating women from the other side not just to insult them but to increase its own power. He also admits that it is very difficult to convince the abducted girls to come back: ‘Today we are in such an unfortunate situation that some girls say that they do not want to come back, for they know that if they return they will only face disgrace and humiliation’ (ibid.). Again we see Gandhi’s idealism tempered, albeit reluctantly, by realism. Faced with an uncomfortable or disagreeable truth, Gandhi does not back off but faces it without accepting the defeat of the ideal that he wishes to cherish and uphold.
The following month, January 1948, Gandhi addressed the Pakistan-sponsored invaders who had tried to take the state by storm. By precipitating a crisis, they impelled Hari Singh, the Dogra ruler of Jammu and Kashmir, to accede to the Indian union. Thereafter, the protection of the territory and its people became the responsibility of the government of India. Eventually, troops were airlifted to the valley and the tide of invasion stemmed before it engulfed the whole state. It was the first military action of the newly formed nation of India, and against its own neighbour, Pakistan, an erstwhile part of the same state. In his prayer meeting on 27 January 1948, just three days before he was killed, Gandhi directly addressed the raiders in Mirpur, Kashmir: I must ask the raiders and the Government of Pakistan, for the sake of humanity and for the sake of God, to return all the abducted women with due respect and without waiting to be asked. It is their duty. I have enough knowledge of Islam about which I have read a good deal. Nowhere does Islam bid people to carry away women and keep them in such a disreputable condition. It is irreligion, not religion. It is worship of Satan, not of God.
(Gandhi 1999, Vol. 97: 317)
That most of these women were also Muslims only proved Gandhi’s point that these acts again women were totally irreligious and barbarous. No matter in the name of which religion, they could not be condoned.
Along with other leaders, so insistent is he that abducted women from both sides be restored, that both governments form official agencies to recover and repatriate such women. But not to take such measures would have meant that the two sides simply left these women to their fate, rendering them not just abducted but abandoned too. Again, the principle that Gandhi adopts is to force the two new states to be accountable for the life and safety of their citizens even as he exhorts private citizens to abjure violence and desist from taking the law into their own hands. Gandhi’s key strategy is to restore the rule of law in a state of chaos and lawlessness. Much of the violence and disorder had erupted in the interregnum when the colonial state had been summarily dismantled with minimum regard to how its erstwhile subjects might suffer such a sudden removal of authority. The two new nations would take a while to insert their own state machinery into this vacuum and to take charge of the situation.
In all of this confusion and uncertainty, however, women suffered very badly, as did the old, the infirm and children. The plight of women was far worse because they were not only abducted and sexually abused, but were also fought over by both communities and the two newly independent states. It would seem that no one cared or was able to attend to what they themselves wanted. Their sufferings were too gruesome to be spoken of or acknowledged and their voices were silenced in the national histories. Gandhi helped greatly to shape the state policy towards these victims. As Butalia concludes,
Clearly, while the State instituted what was a major humanitarian operation, and one which, with all its faults, was also beneficial to large numbers of women, it none the less constructed women differentially from men. Not citizens in their own right – and this at a time when citizenship and the question of rights were key questions being debated – but mothers, sisters, wives who had both to be rehabilitated, and protected, who had to be brought into the mainstream economically, but retained within the family, whether ‘real’ or simulated, and whose sexuality had to be kept in check. Not surprisingly, no such concern was reflected for men.
(Butalia 1997: 105)
The abduction, rape and degradation of women was a shameful and disgusting part of the Partition violence. Again, during the struggle for Bangladesh, the Pakistani army carried out large-scale atrocities on the East Bengalis, which included genocide and rape. This form of deliberate sexual terror shows the deeply misogynistic streak in the campaign for religious self-assertion in the subcontinent. The aim is not merely to dominate over the other community but to brutalize and terrorize them into utter subjection and humiliation. The fruits of such actions, however, sow the seeds of deep-seated hatred, as Gandhi warned, that lead to repeated cycles of counter-violence and retribution. Gandhi bore witness to this terribly traumatic aspect of the Partition, but he did not remain silent. He spoke out loud and clear not only against retributive sexual violence and rape, but also for the honour and safety of the women. He was one of the few who said again and again that the women who were raped were not defiled or tainted but only victims of the brutality of men. He repeatedly urged their families to treat them kindly and take them back honourably. In many respects, Gandhi also goes counter to patriarchal values in these pronouncements, a fact often overlooked by his critics.
Notes
1 A key resource is Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition edited by Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998). Also see ‘Women and Partition’ (CWDS 2012) in the CWDS Library Reading Lists Series 6 (2012) for a more extensive bibliography.
2 See, for instance, Anderson’s The Indian Ideology (2013), Joseph Lelyveld’s The Great Soul (2011), or Kathryn Tidrick’s Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (2006).
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