An elephant lurched down the Grand Trunk Road through Gurugram, the occupants firing at their victims from the armoured howdah mounted on its back. From nearby rooftops, villagers fought off the assault by using mortar forged from the rear axle-casing of cars. “There were swords and spears by the thousand,” Superintendent of Police William Pearce recalled, “and even some homemade Sten guns.”
“Every village started a gunpowder factory.”
Erased from our memory by high-rise buildings and malls, Gurugram, and the Mewat region that sprawled to its south, imploded into a macabre carnival of killing during Partition. “Whole villages were razed; scores of mosques desecrated; thousands killed or forced on pain of death to convert to Hinduism”, historian Ian Copland writes, “and many more thousands were forced to flee.”
For months afterwards, scholar Yasmin Khan records, corpses from Gurgaon washed up in the irrigation canal in Mathura. Each of those bodies told the story of how communal politics set fire to a largely peaceful region, turning it into a stage for one of the largest ethnic-cleaning campaigns in recorded history.
The story warns us that the incendiary politics that led to Gurugram—an icon of India’s economic ambitions—could easily set off larger fires, with serious consequences for the entire country.
Also read: Nuh violence got India’s attention, but Mewat wasn’t always communal
An unquiet peace
Even though Haryana has earned a reputation for enabling the growth of violent Hindu-nationalist gangs, the state has long had an excellent record of ensuring tensions do not spiral into killings. In 2015, the first full year of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s time in office, National Crime Records Bureau data states that Haryana had no murders attributed to religious reasons. The number remained the same in 2020, the year Delhi saw 53. Then, in 2021, there was just a single communalism-related killing.
These low numbers are remarkable because of a context of endemic violence: Haryana registered 3.8 murders per 100,000 population in 2021, the highest across states and Union territories after Jharkhand.
Likely, the low level of communal killing is an outcome of firm police action. Haryana registered 40 cases for religious and communal rioting in 2021, the fourth-highest among states and Union territories. The state, notably, registered 2,253 cases of all kinds of rioting that year, or 7.6 per 100,000 population, the highest across states and Union territories.
The neighbouring Mewat belt regions of Alwar and Bharatpur have also been relatively peaceful. Ten people, all Muslims, were killed in Bharatpur—nine at the hands of police—after communal violence broke out in 2011. Even though lynchings of Muslims have been reported in Mewat for years, they have not exploded into generalised communal rioting.
From the history of 1947, though, we know how little it takes to ignite warfare in fractured societies. Large populations of Meo Muslims had coexisted with Hindus across Mewat for centuries, historian Shail Mayaram has written, often sharing religious and cultural practices. Like the region’s Jats, the Meos had repeatedly rebelled against the authority of Delhi.
Early in the twentieth century, though, the Arya Samaj movement and the Tablighi Jama’at had initiated competing proselytising movements across the region, hardening the frontiers of Hindu and Muslim consciousness—setting the stage for Partition.
Also read: Gurugram-Nuh violence shows how our approach to Hindu Rashtra is wrong. Violence not the way
The Maharajas versus the Raj
Evidence of the strains in Mewat began to emerge as early as 1932 when a Muslim procession led by the Anjuman-i-Khadim-ul-Islam clashed with Dalits headed to inaugurate a new caste temple. Three people were killed, and large numbers of Meo fled across the borders of the state of Alwar into then Gurgaon, part of British Imperial Punjab. Later that year, tax officers were beaten by a mob of Meo in Tijara. The Maharaja of Alwar responded by burning down the village.
Alwar’s harsh response sparked off an insurrection: Meo villages erected fortifications, cut off roads, and began raising funds to purchase weapons. The British, fearing the consequences of Hindu-Muslim warfare across India, agreed to helped Alwar. There were, however, terms: the houses of Alwar and Bharatpur were forced to hand power to British administrators.
Even though Imperial administration brought some level of development to the region, the communal problem continued. In 1937, Muharram processions refused to accept police-decreed routes. In one case, Muslims insisted on marching past a disused mosque which had been converted into a Bhairon temple, with official permission. Hindu groups also fanned the flames, insisting on holding a Bhairon fair during Muharram.
Fanatical in their personal caste and religious observances, the new reagents of Alwar and Bharatpur cultivated ties to the Hindutva movement in an effort to expand their power, and push back against imperial domination.
Educated at an élite boarding school in England, just eleven years old when he became king, Maharaja Brijendra Singh of Bharatpur was possessed of arrogance matched only by his indolence. “I must have committed some very slight sin in my previous incarnation,” Copeland records him saying, “for instead of remaining a God I have been sent back a Maharaja.”
The Maharaja “treated his subordinates like an oversized prep-school bully and had indiscreet homosexual affairs with members of the household infantry.”
Francis Wylie, a senior colonial civil servant, described Tej Singh of Alwar as “petty-minded, greedy both for money and power and a prig.” The opinion was shared, across the political chasm, by to-be Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed Tej Singh was a “paranoiac.”
As imperial authority waned in the 1940s, the British drew back—and the rulers of Alwar and Bharatpur made their faith a tool to seize back power.
Also read: What happened to ‘Hinduism is tolerant, secular’? Difficult question for an Indian today
The Final Act
Former Congress chief minister of the central provinces, and Hindu Mahsabha Leader Narayan Khare arrived in Alwar early in the summer of 1947, to direct the final act of this tragedy. Since 1946, British intelligence had been warning that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was holding military training camps across Alwar and Bharatpur, with the patronage of the Maharajas. Leaders of the Muslim League had also made an appearance, arguing for a Meo state which would ally with Pakistan.
Like cow-protection vigilantes operating in Mewat today, the militia operating under the flags of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh appear to have attracted significant numbers of lumpenised youth, using their new-found power to loot and rape.
Khare’s memoirs suggest that the massacres began with a series of small communal skirmishes, which escalated into fighting between Alwar state forces and the Meo. Later, Mayaram’s interviews with survivors show, state forces engaged in large-scale massacres of Muslims. In other cases, Meo were spared in return for embracing Hinduism.
From census data gathered by Copeland, it is clear an epic ethnic cleansing took place: Alwar’s Muslim population, which had been 26.2 per cent in 1941 and 19.2 per cent of Bharatpur, dropped after the pogroms, conversions and flight, to 6 per cent in both states.
Tens of thousands of survivors limped across the border into British India, beginning the long and dangerous journey to Bahawalpur in Pakistan. Tens of thousands more congregated in what was then the Punjab district of Gurgaon, and its Muslim-majority town of Nuh. Large numbers of Nuh families are descendants of the survivors of the 1947 carnage.
Khare would be investigated by the British Imperial States Ministry for his role in ordering Alwar forces to engage in genocide, and ordering the destruction of mosques. The allegations against him, followed by claims of his involvement in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Neither allegation was proved, and the investigation into the Partition violence went nowhere. Later, in 1952, Khare was elected to the Lok Sabha from Bharatpur.
For his part, Maharaja Brijendra Singh was also elected to the Lok Sabha, as an independent candidate. Tej Singh of Alwar retired to his palace in Delhi, Alwar House, in 1948, and was rarely seen in public thereafter. The Maharajas never got the Hindu state they hoped for, nor wielded significant power in independent India.
Among the greatest achievements of the states which have governed the Mewat region was healing the wounds of 1947 and ensuring that tensions did not flare into large-scale violence. The prosperity of the Gurugram-Delhi belt, as well as the emergence of towns like Behror and Bharatpur as industrial hubs, can be traced to this hard-won stability. That triumph is now in peril.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Anurag Chaubey)