REMEMBER Garhmukhteshwar? A small town in the Meerut district of the then United Provinces? And the ghastly unprovoked aggression in it by Hindus against Muslims in November, 1946?
On November 8, 1946, Sir F. Wylie, the UP governor, sent telegram to Pethick-Lawrence, the Secretary of State for India, in London, “Communal rioting broke out on November 6 at Garhmuktesar Fair, a Hindu bathing festival on the Ganges, in the Meerut district. A small incident in an amusement side show led to overwhelming attack with arms and looting on Muslim stallholders ... resulting in 46 dead. On November 7, mobs from the fair, mostly Punjabis, proceeded to Garhmuktesar town, three miles away, and attacked Muslim residents, and burnt Muslim houses. Casualties feared heavy ...”
“Some 250 people were killed in the town ... majority of them ... Moslems,” the governor informed Pethick-Lawrence on November 8.
On November 21, the governor submitted a detailed report to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell: “I arrived in Meerut yesterday morning, saw all the principal officials ... I was not able to take a Minister with me ... for the Congress Working Committee failed to finish its deliberations on the 19th and Pant and Kidwai had both to go to Delhi again yesterday .... The Garhmuktesar affair was horrible ... Whole families have in some cases been wiped out and this all done with the most hideous cruelty. The little town is just stunned. A considerable number of people are still left there, but there is no sound of life, and an awful stillness has settled over the place ... All the existing wells are either choked with corpses or have been polluted.”
But Wavell was forthright, candid and blunt. His reports to Pethick-Lawrence revealed the machinations of the Hindus. On November 22, Wavell wrote: “Everything else in India is overshadowed by the savage outbreaks of communal violence in ... and the United Provinces. I doubt whether anyone in England yet quite realizes the extent and bestiality of the attacks on the Muslims in ... and the United Provinces ... On the scale of numbers and degree of brutality, far beyond anything that I think has yet happened in India since the British rule began. And they were undoubtedly organized, and organized very thoroughly ...
“... in the UP ... there was a big Hindu fair attended by two to three hundred thousand Hindus; ... from the evidence available ... a certain section made a deliberate attack, on a trivial pretext or no pretext at all, on the local Muslims and practically wiped them out and destroyed all their property. The numbers killed ... may be 500 or they may be 1,000, but they were practically all the Muslims available on the spot ... I do not think that there were sudden outbreaks of excitable people as have often occurred previously ... but was deliberately planned by the worst political elements .... Secondly ... this is the worst factor, the events showed that neither the Police nor the Indian officials can now be relied on thoroughly to act impartially.
“It is a tragic ending of our rule in India. It is of course the natural consequence of the policy ... you have probably never realized the hate and filth which the smaller newspapers distribute, and the release of large numbers of dangerous criminals from jail under the cloak of their being political offenders ... to end this disgrace to India ... and the strengthening of the private armies ... Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh are developing Hindu forces.”
In his later report of November 27, Wavell wrote: “... There were vile offences against women ... if the two communities go on attacking the women of the other side, the whole country may go mad.”
Fifty-five years after the event, Gyanendra Pandey, Professor of Anthropology and History at Johns Hopkins University, after examining government documents, newspaper reports, (Dawn was, in November 1946, already under attack by Nehru and Patel, who had separately written to Wavell), Congress and Muslim League papers, Lt-Gen Francis Tuker’s book, While Memory Serves, etc, has carried out a critical anthropological and academic assessment of the Garhmukhteshwar ‘holocaust’, in a chapter, spread over twenty-eight pages, in his book Remembering Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Pandey has discussed the ‘bare facts’ of the violence; the ‘Congress position’ (the UP was then governed by the Congress, and the Indian National Congress was to hold its annual session in Meerut in the third week of November); the ‘Muslim League response’; ‘the colonial account’; press reports; and statements of two prominent Congress members, who went to the small town on a fact-finding mission.
One of the first reports on the Garhmukhteshwar massacre, in the Hindustan Times, a pro-Congress Delhi newspaper, had a misleading and wrong headline in its issue of November 10: ‘Pilgrim Train Attacked Near Meerut. 50 Butchered, Over 100 Injured. Another Forty-Five Perish in Neighbouring Village’ (it was about fifty miles away from Delhi!!) The report further said that, “following a riot in Garhmukhteshwar on 7th in which about 200 people lost their lives, hooligans had attacked a passenger train, mostly full of pilgrims returning from Garhmukhteshwar ...” (There was no such official report.) The UP Congress ministry underplayed the scale of violence and casualties — Hindus and Muslims were equally blamed! The Congress ministry had to put up its best face during the annual session of the Indian National Congress in the third week of November in Meerut. Gen Tuker, in his While Memory Serves writes: “The provincial government ... soft-pedalled those outrages committed by Hindus and the Hindu papers purposely emphasized the far smaller acts of retaliation by Muslims ...”
More important is the finding of the team of Shah Nawaz Khan, formerly of the ‘Indian National Army’, and Mridula Sarabhai, who toured the affected areas in Meerut. They came to the conclusion that, “the police had been seriously negligent in their duty”. The police did not disarm the returning pilgrims, who were carrying lethal weapons. More, the two leaders saw mounted police directing the attacking crowd!
As Pandey put it, “Important nationalist commentators argued that there was some conspiracy or organization behind these incidents”. The Khan-Sarabhai team’s finding was that the disturbances were created mainly by Hindu pilgrims from the Rohtak and Hissar districts of the Punjab. Khan observed: “The returning pilgrims systematically destroyed villages that lay in their path — far exceeding any of the atrocities and cruelties committed by the Japanese in the three years of their occupation of East Asia.” The pilgrims, according to the Khan-Sarabhai team, were incited by extreme right-wing communalists — members of the Rashtriya Svayansevak Sangh.
The RSS is as active in Ahmedabad in 2002 as it was in Garhmukhteshwar in 1946. Their game plan has not altered. Their line of action has not deviated even by a fraction of a degree.
REMEMBER Garhmukhteshwar? A small town in the Meerut district of the then United Provinces? And the ghastly unprovoked aggression in it by Hindus against Muslims in November, 1946?
