Dispossession through violence and the creation of Muslim zones

On the night between 14 and 15 August 1947, when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru delivered his riveting independence speech, ‘Tryst with Destiny’, at the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi, the city was already on the verge of crisis, packed with Hindu and Sikh refugees from Punjab. The movement of refugees from Punjab into the city had begun several months earlier, triggered by the Muslim League's campaign to topple the coalition government in this province and by the communal riots that followed. As partition drew near, the number of Punjabi refugees in Delhi had increased significantly. By 5 August, there were already 80,000 refugees in the capitalFootnote ³ and, by later August, between 4,000 and 5,000 refugees arrived in Delhi every day.Footnote ⁴ Delhi was confronted with unprecedented demands on its resources and faced a food and housing crisis. This was accompanied by horrifying news of the violence Hindus and Sikhs suffered in West Pakistan. There were also tales of Muslim occupation of Hindu and Sikh houses—tales that further fuelled people's anger and served to justify the forceful occupation of Muslim houses in Delhi.Footnote ⁵ A serious outbreak of violence was in the air.

Friday 5 September marked a shift from the sporadic incidents that had taken place over the previous couple of days to organized attacks on Muslim life and property.Footnote ⁶ The violence, albeit unevenly, reached all four areas of the city: the old walled city of Shahjahanabad, the localities west of it, Civil Lines north of it, and the posh areas of New Delhi to its south.Footnote ⁷ The localities struck by the bloodiest violence in early September 1947 were the three ‘mixed localities’ of Karol Bagh, Subzimandi, and Paharganj, located outside the walled city, to its west. The mixed nature of their inhabitants rendered their Muslim populations especially vulnerable, since they could not set up gates and other forms of protection, as did Muslims in Muslim-majority neighbourhoods.

An estimated 100,000 refugees occupied Muslim houses in these three areas.Footnote ⁸ The Muslim inhabitants of these localities escaped either to the predominantly Muslim areas or to the camps set up for Muslim refugees in Purana Qila and Humayun's Tomb. These latter served as temporary places of refuge and as transit camps for Muslims waiting to board the trains to Pakistan. A massive exodus took place within less than two months, as indicated by the demographic data for the two Muslim camps: at their peak in mid-September, Purana Qila and Humayun's Tomb jointly hosted roughly 164,000 Muslim refugees.Footnote ⁹ A month and a half later, on 22 October, Purana Qila closed down, and the remaining 2,000 refugees were shifted to Humayun's Tomb, whose population had also drastically declined to 4,000.Footnote ¹⁰

It appears that most of the occupants of these camps left for Pakistan. But thousands returned to the city. Their return was the fruit of intense efforts by nationalist Muslim and Gandhian leaders and volunteers to convince the Muslims that they belonged, and would be safe, in Delhi. Congress Muslim leader and Education Minister Maulana Azad's speech at the Jama Masjid after the Friday prayer on 24 October was reportedly a key moment that convinced many Muslims to return from the camps.Footnote ¹¹

In his correspondence with Home Minister Sardar Patel, Prime Minister Nehru initially entertained the idea that some portion of the Muslims returning from the camps would be rehabilitated in the previously mixed localities from which they had been driven out. In early October, he anticipated that half of the 120,000 Muslim refugees in the camps would go to Pakistan, while half would return to the city. He asked Patel:

But the houses were already occupied by refugees, and the localities were dangerous for Muslims. Muslims who tried to return to, or merely visit, their old neighbourhoods risked their lives.Footnote ¹³ That the consequences of the riots could not be undone, and that Muslims could not return to their homes or to any other part of these formerly mixed localities, soon became a shared premise of the central government and the Delhi Administration. This is a point worth emphasizing, because it was an important juncture at which the initial dispossession of Delhi's Muslims through the outbreak of violence was routinized by the state. The key state institution responsible for regularizing Muslims’ dispossession was the Custodian of Evacuee Property. This position was established simultaneously in West Punjab (Pakistan) and East Punjab (India) following a Joint Defence Council meeting in Lahore on 29 August 1947, attended by the prime ministers of both dominions and by Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of colonial India. The official communiqué issued after the meeting stated that illegal seizure of property would not be recognized.Footnote ¹⁴ Accordingly, the West Punjab Evacuee Property Ordinance and the East Punjab Evacuee Property Ordinance, issued in Pakistan and India on 9 and 14 September, respectively, entrusted the abandoned property of the displaced to newly appointed Custodians, whose role was to protect and preserve the property until peace was restored and the original owners could return.Footnote ¹⁵

These ordinances reflect the great bewilderment in government circles in the face of the massive exodus that took place, and their hope that the unforeseeable demographic transformation was still reversible. At the same time, both governments faced an acute refugee crisis and forcible occupations of houses on a large scale. Beyond these initial seizures, refugees kept pouring into cities and villages in desperate search of accommodation. As a result, the function of the Custodians transformed rather quickly from preserving houses for their original owners to dispossessing them. This shift was so rapid that it happened almost simultaneously with the appointment of the Custodians, beginning with a new ordinance issued in Pakistan, which authorized the Rehabilitation Commissioners (counterparts to India's Custodians) to utilize abandoned properties for rehabilitating refugees for a limited period of one year. This violated the declared principle of protecting and restoring the properties to the original owners. India soon issued a similar ordinance and, over time, the two governments continued drafting retaliatory legislation that further restricted owners’ rights to their property.Footnote ¹⁶

In the meantime, as the partition riots spread to Delhi, the East Punjab Evacuee Property Ordinance was extended to Delhi, and a Custodian was appointed there on 20 September. As J. M. Lobo Prabhu, the first Custodian of Delhi, explained in a press note, Delhi was divided into 13 sectors, each under the charge of an Assistant Custodian. The Assistant Custodian was assisted by an advisory committee, whose role was, first, to examine the eligibility of those already in possession of houses and, second, to find eligible tenants among the refugees for vacant (Muslim) houses.Footnote ¹⁷ Lobo Prabhu estimated immovable evacuee property in urban Delhi at the end of October at 8,000 residential houses and 2,000 businesses and industrial premises. He considered that about two-thirds of this immovable property was already under occupation and one-tenth uninhabitable.Footnote ¹⁸

On 25 October, the Custodian decided to launch a drive to evict unauthorized occupants of houses abandoned by evacuees. Eviction targeted three groups, estimated by the Custodian to amount to about 2,000 peopleFootnote ¹⁹ : (1) those who first occupied Muslim houses after 1 October; (2) those who may have occupied houses prior to 1 October but had failed to report to the Custodian; and (3) those who were not refugees but rather local residents of Delhi who had taken advantage of the mayhem to seize Muslims’ property.Footnote ²⁰ This, of course, meant that the state recognized illegal occupations effected during the September riots, so long as the occupiers were refugees and reported to the Custodian. In addition to legitimizing such occupations, the Custodian allotted more vacant houses from November 1947 onward.Footnote ²¹

To be clear, such allotment did not amount to transfer of ownership. Rather, it granted the right to occupy a house on a temporary basis. Ownership of the properties was still nominally vested in the Muslim evacuees, and the Custodian's possession of the houses was considered temporary, extending only until the original owners would return or until an overall compensation settlement would be reached between the two dominions. In the meantime, refugees occupied these houses as tenants and paid rent to the Custodian. From early December 1947, the Custodian collected rent from the roughly 32,000 tenants who occupied the houses and business premises in its possession.Footnote ²² According to the declared policy, this rent was not used, but was rather ‘lying to the credit of the Custodians in the name of evacuee owners’.Footnote ²³

It should be emphasized that some of the Muslims whose houses were declared evacuee property—which were allotted, or whose occupation was confirmed, by the Custodian—had never left Delhi, or had left and returned. In other words, their houses were declared evacuee property although they themselves lived in the city. Where did they go? Most of them flocked to the Muslim-majority localities, now considered the only safe place for Muslims in the city.Footnote ²⁴ This spontaneous internal displacement was subsequently encouraged and systematized by the state. On 11 October, Delhi's Chief Commissioner Khurshid Ahmad Khan noted that ‘Muslims no longer feel safe in mixed localities of Qarol Bagh, Subzimandi and Paharganj, and it is suggested that they should be rehabilitated in predominantly Muslim areas’.Footnote ²⁵ By late November, Nehru reluctantly admitted ‘Very few Muslims can find houses or any security in predominantly non-Muslim areas’Footnote ²⁶ and became a chief advocate of turning the Muslim-majority areas into ‘Muslim zones’ that could provide safe haven for the city's Muslims. Hence, it was in these areas that the more secular and leftist forces in the central cabinet, the local administration, and society concentrated their efforts to rehabilitate Muslims. The All India Congress Committee published a resolution in favour of Muslim zones. The resolution was endorsed by the nationalist Muslim organization the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, which pressed that Muslim zones be excluded from the project of rehabilitating Hindu and Sikh refugees.Footnote ²⁷ So did the secularist members of non-official organizations in the city which occupied a peculiar space between state and society, and which played a major role in this period of mayhem. These included the socialist wing of the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee, the new volunteer organization Shanti Dal (Peace Corps) headed by female Congress leader Mridula Sarabhai, and parts of the Special Police Force—a body of volunteer citizens, recruited during the riots into an additional police force to work alongside the regular police.Footnote ²⁸

The rationale underlying their support of the Muslim zones was explained by Shanti Dal member Anis Kidwai, sister-in-law of cabinet member Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, who participated in the rehabilitation efforts in Delhi and put her recollections of this period in writing:

Rehabilitation policy for Muslims thus concentrated in the Muslim zones, and Muslims who accordingly settled in the empty houses left behind by other Muslims became, just like the refugees, tenants of the Custodian.Footnote ³⁰

A factionalized political landscape and the controversy over Muslim zones

The correspondence between Nehru and Patel—the two most powerful political leaders in this period—during the months following partition discloses an emotionally charged relationship, fraught with tensions and profound ideological differences. The debate about the Muslim zones in Delhi was part of a fundamental disagreement between the two about their vision for independent India and the place of the Muslim minority in it. While Nehru advocated a secularist vision of the Indian nation as pluralistic and inclusive, Patel represented the right-leaning wing of the Congress Party, closer in spirit to the Hindu right. In the aftermath of partition, he famously demanded that Muslims provide ‘practical proof’ of their loyalty to the Indian Dominion: ‘You cannot ride on two horses. You select one horse, whichever you like best.’Footnote ³¹ It was a critical period in which two political visions battled over the question: Can a Muslim be an Indian?Footnote ³²

Nehru and Patel's correspondence reveals that Delhi was an important battleground for their conflicting visions. The two constantly intervened in, and had conflicts over, Delhi's governance. Delhi, it should be kept in mind, was a central charge governed by the Home Ministry through a non-elected bureaucrat, the Chief Commissioner. It was thus governed de facto by Home Minister Patel, who resented what he saw as Nehru's uncalled-for meddling in the business of Delhi's Administration, giving direct orders that contradicted Patel's instructions or simply bypassed them.Footnote ³³ Their ongoing dispute about the proper division of labour between the home minister and prime minister resulted in confused procedures, as the bureaucratic and policing forces down the line tried to carry out the orders of one or the other.Footnote ³⁴

This effect was clearly visible at the top level of the Delhi Administration in the ongoing frictions between Chief Commissioner Khurshid Ahmad Khan and Deputy Commissioner and District Magistrate M. S. Randhawa. The Chief Commissioner's Muslim identity came to eclipse all other aspects of his identity and totally undermined his ability to operate with authority.Footnote ³⁵ He was constantly sidestepped by Randhawa, a highly controversial figure who functioned as the ‘real sheriff’ in town. It is also noteworthy that Randhawa was (at least nominally) a Punjabi refugee, since he originated from Lyallpur in West Punjab. The relationship between the two represents, in a nutshell, the broader trend of the ‘Punjabization’ of Delhi at the expense of its Muslim population. Significantly, Nehru and Patel were deeply implicated in the troubled relationship between the two, particularly as the former held Randhawa responsible for anti-Muslim violence, while Patel vehemently protected him.Footnote ³⁶

Documents from these years, including petitions by Muslim residents and internal correspondences of the Home Ministry, the Chief Commissioner, and Deputy Commissioner, make it clear that bureaucrats and citizens were cognizant of the factionalized structure of the cabinet and Delhi secretariat and acted accordingly, turning directly to one faction in the government while bypassing another in order to pursue their interests, or simply to survive.Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, the archives disclose that unofficial and semi-official organizations—the Shanti Dal, the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee, the Special Police, and, later, the Home Guards—participated in the emergency tasks of law and order operations and refugee rehabilitation. These were highly politicized bodies, with members strongly aligned with either the ‘Nehruvian camp’ or the ‘Patel camp’.

For example, the Special Police Force, recruited during the riots to help the regular police curb the violence, was divided between Hindu-right members aligned with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and those affiliated with the socialist wing of the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee. The reports prepared by these latter contain repeated complaints alleging that other special policemen, as well as regular policemen, were often complicit in anti-Muslim violence. Their detailed accounts of such encounters demonstrate the chaos and confusion on the streets. They show how, in numerous violent incidents, policing forces did not respond to the situation in an orchestrated manner according to a proper chain of command, but rather reacted in opposing ways while questioning each other's authority. Such friction was directly linked to conflict at the top levels of governance—while Patel and Randhawa supported the right wing of the Special Police, Nehru and Khurshid Ahmad Khan supported the socialist Congress group.Footnote ³⁸ Similar ambivalence existed in the government's and Administration's responses to Mridula Sarabhai and the Shanti Dal's activities in the city—while Nehru and Chief Commissioner Khurshid Ahmad Khan supported them, Patel, Deputy Commissioner Randhawa, and other officers saw Sarabhai as a great nuisance and the Shanti Dal as a parallel force circumventing official administration that should be closed down. Patel was especially upset by Sarabhai's suspicion of the local police, which led her to put up tented camps in nearly all police stations as a check on the regular police.Footnote ³⁹

The picture that emerges from the records is thus of ideological divisions and power struggles permeating all levels of political command, bureaucracy, and the police—from tensions between Prime Minister Nehru and Home Minister Patel, through to the conflict between Delhi's Chief Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, to struggles between competing forces operating on the ground in contravention of each other. Such divisions fed the enduring violence on the streets, which lasted long after the riots ended according to standard narratives. In putting forward this factionalized political and bureaucratic landscape, I diverge from Zamindar's overriding emphasis on the great power of bureaucratic discourse as the main catalyst of Muslim dispossession. In her discussion of the Constitutional Assembly Debates on regularizing the return of Muslims, for example, she portrays bureaucratic discourse as shaping national politics, and gives as evidence the shift from Nehru's speech in the assembly in March 1948 to Patel's speech a few months later in August.Footnote ⁴⁰ In contrast, I suggest that the political and bureaucratic were intertwined to begin with, each marked by extreme polarization between Nehru's and Patel's positions.

The friction between Nehru and Patel bore upon the contradictory and incomplete manner in which the policy of Muslim zones was implemented. While Nehru wished to protect the zones solely for Delhi's Muslims, Patel supported the refugees’ demand that these spaces be opened up for their rehabilitation. Patel claimed that exclusively Muslim zones would only entrench communal suspicion and enmity between ‘miniature Pakistans and Hindustans in the whole city’ and pose security risks.Footnote ⁴¹ This latter stance was echoed by a faction of the Administration and police, from Randhawa down the ladder. While Chief Commissioner Khurshid Ahmad Khan saw the Muslim zones as the only option for Muslim existence in Delhi, Randhawa described the Muslim zones as ‘miniature Pakistans’ in the city's midst, and pressed to open them up.Footnote ⁴² Similarly divided were the police, the Special Police Force, and the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee. And, while the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Hindu Mahasabha organizations supported the refugees’ demands, the Shanti Dal and Jamiat Ulema members tried to exclude the Muslim zones from refugees’ rehabilitation.

In December, Jamiat Ulema complained about the Administration's policy of settling government employees in Muslim zones, indicating that Randhawa was not merely making suggestions, but also creating facts on the ground. Muslim zones turned out to be a highly divisive policy, characterized by contradictions and zigzagging, applied only partially and reluctantly, and contingent upon changing local circumstances. As Shanti Dal member Anis Kidwai put it, ‘Muslim zones had no legal status and remained an operational principle expected to be implemented by local governments. So, it was entirely up to local government officials to communicate the reality and necessity of the Muslim zone to its functionaries’.Footnote ⁴³ This is a revealing testament to the atmosphere that sustained the persistent intrusion on the Muslim zones—a process to which I now turn.

Encroachment on Muslim zones

Exactly which localities formed the Muslim zones? There is no simple answer to this question, since different sources at different times list different localities. This uncertainty and instability is not coincidental, but rather intrinsic to the status of Muslim zones. Because of gradual encroachment, what was considered a Muslim zone in 1948 was not necessarily so a few years later. Yet, before we look into this history, it is safe enough to generalize and state that Muslim zones ranged from a couple of hundred to several thousand people, and were located in three main areas within the walled city of Shahjahanabad—Faiz Bazar, Kotwali, and Hauz Qazi—and in the adjacent area of Sadar Bazar, just outside the walled city.

We may recall that, on 28 October, the Delhi Custodian estimated that the evacuee property pool in urban Delhi included 8,000 houses and 2,000 business premises. Less than a month afterward, the estimate had increased to 32,000 premises. To date, there is no definite number for Muslim houses occupied in Delhi by non-Muslims after partition. Subhadra Joshi, an important local Congress politician and member of the Shanti Dal, later estimated 44,000 houses in the old city alone.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, although there is no official estimate, it is quite evident that the number of premises occupied in Delhi eventually was much larger than the Custodian's estimate of 10,000 in October 1947. A major shift in property ownership took place, and it extended far beyond the initial forcible occupations of the September violence.

Long after the partition riots formally ended, violence continued in Delhi, concentrated in the Muslim zones. The refugee crisis was such that, even after the mixed localities were ‘cleansed’ of Muslims and occupied by 100,000 refugees, the pressure for housing did not ease. By early November, the population in these localities had increased by 50 per cent, and refugees kept pouring into the city.Footnote ⁴⁵ Under these conditions, the next waves of violence—in late 1947 and throughout 1948—expanded to target the Muslim zones. Attacks were launched on vacant houses, whose residents had left in September, as well as on inhabited houses, with the intention of driving more residents out.Footnote ⁴⁶

As the influx of refugees continued throughout December, congestion in the city became unbearable, and another wave of violence erupted in the winter months, as refugees expanded the circle of violence and encroached on more and more parts of the city, especially in various localities in Sadar Bazar—Bahadurgarh Road, Pul Bangash, Bara Hindu Rao, Qutab RoadFootnote ⁴⁷ —and, in early January, in the Muslim locality of Qasabpura.Footnote ⁴⁸ Some localities in the old city were also targeted, specifically Sita Ram Bazar, Lal Kuan, and Phatak Habash Khan.Footnote ⁴⁹ Pressures on the Muslim zones increased by the day, producing a domino effect: growing attacks drove more Muslims out of these localities into the refugee camps and to Pakistan. The empty houses they left behind drew more attacks, causing more residents to flee.

It is no surprise that the population of Muslim refugees in the Humayun's Tomb camp, which had dwindled to 4,000 by the end of October, swelled again to 25,000 by mid-November.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Criminal Investigation Department's fortnightly reports indicate that about 30,500 Muslims left Delhi for Pakistan via the camp during January and February.Footnote ⁵¹ While this is not stated explicitly in the reports, it is quite clear that most of them left the Muslim zones, whether they were originally inhabitants of these areas or had settled there after having been uprooted from the mixed localities in earlier waves of violence.

That later occupations extended to, and encroached upon, the Muslim zones is evident upon comparing two lists of Muslim pockets in the city produced by the Delhi Criminal Investigation Department.Footnote ⁵² The first list, from October 1948, names five main areas in which the Muslim urban population was concentrated, as well as the smaller units, or ‘pockets’, of Muslim habitations in each of them: Faiz Bazar (with a population of 42,600 in 32 localities), Sadar Bazar (39,500 in 17 localities), Hauz Qazi (57,310 in 31 localities), Kotwali (5,250 in six localities), and Kashmere Gate (120 in two localities).Footnote ⁵³ Taken together, the Muslim urban population in October 1948 was estimated to be 92,480 in 88 localities.Footnote ⁵⁴ The second list, from 1952, does not include a population estimate, but does provide a breakdown of Muslim localities, showing a significant reduction in their number: Faiz Bazar (19 localities, as against 32 in the previous list), Sadar Bazar (six localities, as against 17), Hauz Qazi (seven localities, as against 31), and Kotwali (three as against six)—a total of 35 localities.

This spatial shrinking was the product of the physical violence described above. But the dynamics involved in this process were multifaceted. Another factor was the state itself, specifically the evacuee property legislation and its implementation by the Custodian Department. A year after partition, the Group for the Reform of the Custodian (Jamaat-e Islah-e Custodian) was established by veteran local Congress leaders—the Muslim Imdad Sabri and the Hindu Lal Shankar Lal. It had become sadly evident, they claimed, that, rather than a source of relief and rehabilitation for the displaced, the Custodian was the enemy of the poor and weak, both Muslim and refugee. They called on the public to register their complaints at their office in the Jama Masjid locality, and published the complaints accumulated during a period of 15 days—from 3 to 18 September 1948—in a printed Urdu report.Footnote ⁵⁵ The report includes 35 complaints, mostly by Muslims. All of them depict interaction with the Custodian Department as an ongoing harassment, the result of bureaucratic obtuseness, delay, and corruption.

What becomes clear is that the Custodian was confiscating properties and declaring them ‘evacuee property’ even when the Muslim owners were still in Delhi. The Muslim complainants in this report can be divided into two main categories. First, there were those who used to own houses in localities that were attacked and occupied during the initial phases of the violence, in early September 1947 or a bit later—Paharganj, Karol Bagh, Kucha Chelan in Daryaganj, and Ajmeri Gate. During the riots, these people fled to Muslim-majority areas. Their houses were either occupied by refugees or taken possession of by the Custodian, and they could neither reoccupy them nor realize rent from them. Many of the complainants, in fact, once owned several houses or rooms, which they rented out for a steady income. In cases in which the house was seized forcibly by refugees, the latter did not acknowledge the Muslim landlord's right to rent. And, even in cases where forcible occupation had not taken place, the Custodian notified the tenants—whether Hindus or Muslims—that the landlord had ‘left for Pakistan’ and that rent should henceforth be paid to the Custodian. The Muslim owners of places like these depict a series of tireless petitions and applications through which they presented elaborate documentation, including ration cards, pension receipts, and income-tax receipts, as well as Hindu witnesses to prove that they had never left Delhi and thus had the right at least to realize rent from their properties. Their cases were postponed endlessly and remained undecided a year after the outbreak of riots. This first group of petitioners is the human face of the government decision to succumb to the fact that Muslims who escaped from the ‘mixed localities’ could not return in any foreseeable future. In effect, the decision transferred their properties to the Custodian even though they were still in Delhi, albeit in a different neighbourhood. Forced to relocate to demarcated Muslim zones as renters, they were held hostage to the informal pressures of the real estate economy.Footnote ⁵⁶

The second category of Muslim petitioners in this report is residents of the Muslim zones that came within the circle of violence in 1948. A group of Muslims from Nawab Ganj (Sadar Bazar) complained, not about the Custodian seizing houses that had already been abandoned, but about the Custodian actually evicting Muslim inhabitants, both owners and tenants. Indeed, in early December 1947, the Custodian informed the public that the East Punjab Evacuee Property Ordinance (extended to Delhi) empowered the Custodian to take possession of immovable property. The parties concerned had only two days from the publication of an eviction notice to file their objections, together with the necessary documentation.Footnote ⁵⁷ Thus, the group of petitioners from Nawab Ganj includes nine people whose houses were declared evacuee property, sealed by the Custodian, and in some cases allotted to refugees. Some of these houses were sealed while the owners were away on a trip; others were forcibly vacated.

Nawab Ganj was included in the first Criminal Investigation Department list of Muslim pockets produced in 1948.Footnote ⁵⁸ By 1952, however, it was omitted from the list, like many other localities. The complaints of the Muslims from Nawab Ganj provide a clue as to how this change came about—that is, how the physical pressure put on Muslim houses by refugees combined with the Custodian's intervention in opening up this locality for refugees’ entry.Footnote ⁵⁹ One of the complainants, for example, claims that the house where he and his family once resided was forcibly taken from him in order to clear space for the local Custodian's office. If a Custodian office was opened in the mohalla, we can infer that the Custodian was systematically confiscating houses in this ‘Muslim zone’, contrary to the prevalent perception, then and now, that Muslim zones were ‘outside the jurisdiction of the Custodian’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Pul Bangash, another Muslim-majority neighbourhood in Sadar Bazar, was a contested area and a focal point of violence during the winter months of 1947.Footnote ⁶¹ By synthesizing several sources, we can reconstruct how the impact of such physical violence was deepened and regularized by the Custodian. The report has two complementary complaints concerning this mohalla. The first is by a refugee who describes his futile applications to the Custodian for a house in Pul Bangash, where, he argues, the Custodian had started allotting vacant Muslim houses in mid-1948.Footnote ⁶² The other complaint is by a Muslim who once lived in a house in Pul Bangash while renting out several others. The Custodian officers wanted to settle in his house and, while he succumbed, he now begs that at least the upper floor be left for his family. His daughters, who live with their husbands and children in two of his other houses, have been asked to start paying rent to the Custodian, and so was a Muslim family uprooted from Karol Bagh, who is so poor that the owner lets them stay in one of his houses for free. His other two tenants have received notices of eviction, and one has already been evicted.

The report also includes a statement by Mr Sultan Yarkhan, a lawyer appointed by the Muslim Relief Committee of Jamiat Ulema to provide legal representation to Delhi's Muslim residents. His statement puts the complaints in context, as part of a wide trend: from 2 December 1947 until September 1948, more than 3,000 cases came before the courts of the Custodian. Of these cases, only six were decided in support of Muslim applicants, 566 were decided against Muslim applicants, and about 2,500 cases remained pending—the result of repeated delays by the Custodian.

The eviction of people still living in their houses was made possible both by draconian evacuee property legislation and by the way it was implemented by the Custodian's officials, who had a wide scope of discretionary powers. The evacuee property legislation, first introduced in Pakistan and India in September 1947, underwent changes throughout the years, with more and more restrictions placed on the original owners’ ability to reoccupy, rent out, sell, or exchange their properties.Footnote ⁶³ The legislation had a retaliatory character—every restriction enacted by Pakistan was introduced into the Indian legislation, and vice versa.Footnote ⁶⁴ Such retaliatory legislation reflected the unresolved negotiations between India and Pakistan over the question of abandoned evacuee property. India claimed that the aggregate property left behind by non-Muslims in Pakistan was much larger than the property left by Muslims in India and, accordingly, compensation should be settled at the inter-governmental level and should involve Pakistan paying the difference to India.Footnote ⁶⁵ Pakistan, on its part, never acknowledged this gap, and insisted that, since the property on both sides was more or less equal in value, compensation should be arranged privately by individuals selling or exchanging their properties.Footnote ⁶⁶

Prolonged negotiations led to a dead end. Even when the two dominions reached agreements, they soon violated them by enacting contradictory legislation, leading to further allegations and counter-allegations. Against the background of these protracted, failed negotiations, complicated evacuee property legislation developed, which, in the broadest sense, was geared to maximize the pool of evacuee property that the Custodian could claim and that the nation-state could utilize to rehabilitate its refugees. The law also worked to prevent individuals from disposing of their property and thus narrowing the pool of evacuee property available for compensation.

Accordingly, in the evacuee property laws, the definition of an evacuee was broad and open-ended, both spatially and temporally. When India amended its ordinance in January 1948, it extended the definition of evacuee ‘to include not only those who on account of civil disturbances or the fear of such disturbances or the partition of the country, have left India since March 1 1947, but also those who cannot personally occupy or supervise their property or business’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This, in effect, enabled the Custodian to take possession of Muslims’ property as ‘evacuee property’ even when they had moved only to another neighbourhood in Delhi.Footnote ⁶⁸

This spatially expansive definition of an evacuee was made even broader by the temporally encompassing idea that every Muslim was potentially an evacuee. For example, in correspondence between Delhi's Chief Commissioner and the Registrar of property transactions during March and April 1948, the Chief Commissioner informed the latter of restrictions that applied to transactions in which one of the parties was an evacuee, or was likely to become an evacuee.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Registrar replied with the million-dollar question: ‘Who is to decide whether a person is a prospective evacuee or not?’Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus, the concept of a potential evacuee was in operation from the beginning, at least in the way in which bureaucrats interpreted the law. The concept was later formalized through the introduction of the category of ‘intending evacuee’ into the new Evacuee Property Ordinance of October 1949.Footnote ⁷¹ As Zamindar notes, this language turned all of Delhi's Muslims into evacuees in potentia. Moreover, if the Custodian declared a Muslim an ‘intending evacuee’, the burden to prove otherwise lay on the person himself.Footnote ⁷²

There were many shifts and amendments in the legislation and its attendant policies. Restrictions on sales and exchanges of property were placed, lifted, and placed again, leaving the people involved bewildered and unsettled. There were also discrepancies between the declared policy and its implementation, which was sometimes conducted via confidential and non-transparent instructions.Footnote ⁷³ The great confusion and internal contradiction rendered ordinary people's interface with the Custodian truly Kafkaesque.

What complicated matters further was that the Custodian and civil courts disagreed over their respective fields of operation and over when, exactly, the civil courts were authorized to intervene in the Custodian's decisions.Footnote ⁷⁴ This chaotic field of legislation and directives left a wide scope for interpretation and discretion to the Custodians, whose powers were vast to begin with. Taken together, the main pillars of the evacuee property legislation and its implementation—the expansive and vague definition of an evacuee, the severe restrictions on sales, exchanges, or mortgages of these properties, and the discretionary power of the Custodian—meant that every member of the minority community was considered a potential evacuee and that the Custodian took effective control of many properties of Muslims in Delhi.

Citizenship in the making: the city as a space of suspicion

As Zamindar convincingly demonstrates, confiscation of property was bound up with uncertainty over citizenship.Footnote ⁷⁵ The religious categories of Hindu and Muslim did not correlate neatly with the new national definitions of Indian and Pakistani. Many Muslims were still undecided about where they belonged and moved back and forth across the border, escaping violence in Delhi and an extreme shortage of housing in Pakistan.Footnote ⁷⁶ Starting in March 1948, thousands of Muslims who had fled to Pakistan returned to DelhiFootnote ⁷⁷ and either reoccupied their old houses in the Muslim zones or occupied other vacant houses in these areas.

This return caused great frustration and anger among the homeless refugees. The refugee papers published panicky reports on the arrival of Pakistani spies.Footnote ⁷⁸ Violent incidents were again on the rise, and rumours spread in June 1948 that another serious wave of communal riots was imminent. The Administration and police were also alarmed and reported on the infiltration of Pakistani spies and other ‘undesirable elements’ sent from Pakistan to create trouble in Delhi. From April 1948 onward, the Criminal Investigation Department sent regular reports on arrests of Muslims in Delhi under the Punjab Public Safety Act for reasons as vague as loitering suspiciously, ‘cutting pranks with Hindu girls’, impersonating Hindus, or engaging in subversive activities.Footnote ⁷⁹

In response to these tensions, India introduced a permit system in July 1948. Muslims now had to apply to the Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan for a permit to enter India. Because a permit for permanent return was hardly attainable, Muslims tried to circumvent the new system by applying for a temporary permit, which they destroyed upon arriving in Delhi.Footnote ⁸⁰ Many were arrested or detained for overstaying their permits. The civil courts often had to decide whether the defendant had left permanently for Pakistan, had gone for just a short family visit, or had never left at all.

The question of national belonging and allegiance stood at the heart of such court cases, and the Muslim component of people's identities came to override their birth and long-term residence in Delhi. Significantly, as Zamindar claims, the permit system and, following it, the passport system were coordinated and bound up with the evacuee property legislation that also began to fix citizenship through its categories of ‘evacuee’ and ‘intending evacuee’. Given that the permit system made returning much more difficult, every trip to Pakistan, even for a family visit or under the pressure of violence, could render a person an ‘evacuee’ and result in the confiscation of his property. Zamindar shows that the permit system became so enmeshed with evacuee property that applications for permits included long questionnaires about one's property in India and Pakistan.

Interestingly, I find that the connection between the two was explicitly acknowledged in official correspondence. The new 1949 Evacuee Property Ordinance granted the Custodian special powers to obtain information from the income-tax authorities and from banks on Muslims’ financial activities, to review all transactions registered by the Registrar, and to cancel those that appeared to have involved evacuee property.Footnote ⁸¹ When this law was promulgated, the Ministry of Rehabilitation sent a confidential note explaining it to the various states. It includes the following:

Thus, the permit system was integral to a network of surveillance over Muslims, geared to trace intending evacuees and seize their properties.

A hub of surveillance over Muslims was the Delhi Criminal Investigation Department, which received inquiries about Muslim organizations and individuals from various bodies, including the Custodian Department. In one case from January 1952, the Custodian Department asked the Criminal Investigation Department to make confidential investigations about a Muslim woman who had appeared in the Custodian's court and testified that she had never left Delhi. The Assistant Custodian wrote that he had ‘strong reasons to believe that the lady who gave the statement was not in reality . . . [the woman whose property was at stake]’.Footnote ⁸³ The Criminal Investigation Department frankly admitted that it had no way to verify who had given the statement in court and whether the property owner had left for Pakistan or not, since there were many people who crossed through the eastern border, where there was no permit system or any control. This is an important reminder that the aspiration for complete knowledge was more often than not a fantasy. But it was exactly this aspiration for total surveillance—and its constant failure—that perpetuated the Criminal Investigation Department's and Custodian's suspicions. The semi-porous condition of the borders, together with the vague definition of an evacuee, fed the uncertainty about Muslim belonging, which in turn propelled the Criminal Investigation Department's efforts to draw clear lines between Indians and Pakistanis, non-evacuees and evacuees, in accordance with the emerging taxonomy of the new nation-state.

Surveillance over Muslims combined the imperatives of security and property. The permit system was geared to prevent the infiltration of Pakistani spies, as well as of Muslims who wished to come and dispose of their property or reoccupy it. The two imperatives were also prominent in the Custodian's and Criminal Investigation Department's use of informants to trace intending evacuees and Muslims engaged in subversive activities. It is remarkable that almost every complaint concerning evacuee property frames the accusation in a political-ideological context, describing the Muslim involved as either a ‘Muslim Leagui’—that is, a bad Muslim whose real allegiance is with Pakistan—or ‘a nationalist Muslim’—that is, a good Muslim who is loyal to India.Footnote ⁸⁴ While the former are intending evacuees in disguise, the latter belong in Delhi and have a right to their property. A prevailing suspicion, which arose from the indeterminacy of Muslims’ allegiance, was reflected in the Custodian's operative assumption that all Muslims were evacuees until proven otherwise, as well as in the layers of surveillance and the widespread arrests of Muslims.

A variety of documents reveals that the sweeping suspicion was internalized by Muslims themselves and permeated life in Muslim zones. In some cases, it was Muslims who informed on other Muslims in order to settle scores. One Mohd Yusuf from Churiwalan (Faiz Bazar) wrote to Delhi's Deputy Commissioner in 1952 against one Haji Imamuddin, arguing that the latter had a printing press in Chawri Bazar, but—because he printed insidious propaganda that he wished to hide from the authorities—had shifted his press from the open bazaar to a back alley, into an evacuee house that he had illegally broken into.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Deputy Commissioner forwarded the complaint to the Criminal Investigation Department, which found that Haji Imamuddin occupied the place legally, and that he had duly paid rent to the landlord and, since the latter's departure for Pakistan in 1949, to the Custodian. Another piece of information indicates that there was a business dispute between the informant and the accused regarding the purchase of a printing machine. The Criminal Investigation Department found that the allegation concerning evacuee property was false, yet the complaint clearly harmed the accused, drawing attention to his printing press and to the fact that he had not reported the relocation of his business and the purchase of a second machine, as required. Loose surveillance over him continued, as indicated by further Criminal Investigation Department correspondence from 1959 and 1965.

Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi, a scion to an old Dilliwallah intellectual family, who left Delhi in the aftermath of the riots, published his reportage of the riots soon afterward. He visited his old mohalla in April 1948, eight months after his departure for Pakistan, and found that the area south of Jama Masjid had become a Muslim zone, packed with all those who were uprooted from other neighbourhoods. The Muslim traders and shopkeepers from Chandni Chowk had all moved to this area. It was so congested that one could not cross the street. Moreover, the old social fabric of the neighbourhood was torn asunder with this demographic transformation. Dehlvi writes:

The story of Phatak Habash Khan: informal economy and the Custodian's discretionary power

As my point of entry into this complex structural dynamic, I will start with a case study of one mohalla in Delhi: Phatak Habash Khan. I utilize various sources to trace the process whereby this locality, which was included in the Criminal Investigation Department list of Muslim pockets in October 1948, disappeared from the list by 1952. Phatak Habash Khan was a predominantly Muslim locality in old Delhi, adjacent to the famous Fatehpuri Mosque. It was an affluent neighbourhood of the Muslim Punjabi community, whose members owned shops and business firms in Chandni Chowk and Sadar Bazar.Footnote ⁹² Phatak Habash Khan was apparently attacked in the third week of September 1947, during curfew hours. The residents fled to the Muslim locality of Ballimaran:

The next time Phatak Habash Khan resurfaces in the records is three and a half months later, in early January 1948, when the locality was at the heart of violent struggles over empty houses. It became a site of ongoing struggles between the police, which guarded vacant houses, and groups of refugees, who tried to break in.Footnote ⁹⁴ The refugees would send women to try to occupy the houses and, when the women were stopped by the police, to gather a crowd of about 1,000 people, pushing and shouting slogans against Gandhi, the Muslims, and Pakistan. On some occasions, the police used tear gas, shot in the air, and arrested people. This scene repeated itself several days in a row. The daily reports of Superintendent of Police (City) Jagan Nath place these incidents within the broader context of a flare-up of violence in the city, which culminated in Gandhi's assassination at the end of the month.

Jagan Nath's reports reveal that some Muslims of the locality played a role in the refugees’ occupation of vacant houses:

The following day, he reports that the same Mohammed Hussain was arrested for receiving a pugree of Rs. 2,300; he notes that Hussain gave Rs. 360 of the pugree to another Muslim of the locality, Sadiq Karachiwala. Also arrested was Mohammed Hassan—‘a property broker who is making bargains in the locality thus inviting refugees to settle in Phatak Habash Khan’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The Hindustan Times likewise notes that pressures in Phatak Habash Khan made some Muslims dispose of their properties, but that some were demanding pugrees, resulting in two arrests.

Eight months later, Phatak Habash Khan emerges again as a site of conflict. The Muslims of Katra Shafi, an economically poor locality adjacent to Phatak Habash Khan, were evicted from their houses, and the houses were sealed by the Custodian in order to settle refugees there. This was the fruit of a settlement between the Assistant Custodian in charge of this area and the affluent Muslim residents of Phatak Habash Khan, led by Sadiq Karachiwala—the same person mentioned a few months earlier as the one who received a share of the pugree given to Mohd Hussain. The eviction of the poor Muslims from Katra Shafi was meant to save a few houses owned by rich Muslims inside Phatak Habash Khan that had been sealed by the Custodian.

The Chief Commissioner's and Criminal Investigation Department's files include four versions of the event—statements signed by Subhadra Joshi and Sikandar Bakht, who belonged to the socialist wing of the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee and were members of the Shanti Dal, a Criminal Investigation Department report, and a report sent by Superintendent of Police (City) Jagan Nath. The versions do not add up to one coherent narrative, yet they agree on the central facts.Footnote ⁹⁸ According to Joshi and Bakht, this was a shady deal in which the rich Muslims bribed the Assistant Custodian to restore to them some big houses that he had seized and planned to allot to Hindu refugees. They describe Sadiq Karachiwala as ‘formerly a notorious Muslim Leaguer’. Joshi states that the houses in question belonged to evacuees. She also argues that the Custodian is legally obligated to give a notice of 24 or 48 hours before eviction and to enable the occupants to present their objections. The poor Muslims of Katra Shafi were evicted without any prior notice. Their evictions were arranged illegally by some ‘interested and irresponsible people of the locality’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The Superintendent of Police explains that the rich Muslims of the mohalla objected to the prospect of having Hindu refugees in the interior of a Muslim pocket and, as an alternative to this, they offered the whole of Katra Mohd Shafi for use as residential quarters for the refugees.

Subhadra Joshi removed the seals from the Katra Shafi houses and allowed the Muslims who had been evicted to return. The controversy reached Nehru, who complained to Mridula Sarabhai, head of the Shanti Dal:

Nehru wrote this note at a time when he had to defend the Shanti Dal from the growing criticism of Home Minister Sardar Patel and many members of the Delhi Administration and police. Mounting resentment towards the Shanti Dal threatened its existence, as Patel sought to dissolve the organization. Unsurprisingly, many of the Shanti Dal's controversial interventions dealt with evacuee property and the scramble for houses.

One might ask why the Custodian was evicting Muslim residents and sealing their houses in a Muslim zone to begin with—a Muslim zone, moreover, that just a few months earlier was defended vehemently from refugees’ attempts to intrude. If we put together scattered pieces of information, it emerges that, sometime around August 1948, the Rehabilitation Ministry decided to allot a large number of empty houses in some Muslim zones. What led to this decision, and which neighbourhoods were included, is not clear, but apparently Phatak Habash Khan was one of them.

Pressures on Phatak Habash Khan persisted. In June 1949, an urgent telegram from the General Secretary of Jamiat Ulema reports that ‘C.I.D. instigated by mischief mongers’ surveyed the locality and tried to drive Muslims out.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Three months later, the Criminal Investigation Department reported that 25–30 refugees had forcibly occupied a vacant Muslim house in a certain alley, earmarked by the Jamiat Ulema for a school. The police arrived, evicted the intruders, and sealed the house again.Footnote ¹⁰² Nevertheless, as mentioned earlier, Phatak Habash Khan disappeared from the list of Muslim zones. Later, even the locality's name was renamed after Tilak, further suppressing its Muslim history.Footnote ¹⁰³

In this case study, we see the different forces involved in opening up a Muslim locality for refugees—the physical pressure by crowds of refugees, the transfer of houses through the illegal practice of pugree, and the allotment of houses by the Custodian in contravention of previously declared policy. We see the messy and politically saturated dynamic of Muslim ghettoization, from corruption and economic class to the Shanti Dal's defiance. I turn first to the institute of pugree.

Political scientist Philip Oldenburg defines pugree thus:

Thomas Krafft also argues that the property and housing market in old Delhi today is ‘characterized by fairly low rents, but immense sums to be paid as transfer fees. They have to be paid “illicitly” on an informal level and amount to as much as several lakh rupees’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ According to Zamindar, pugree ‘was a practice of circumventing urban rent restrictions under colonial rule, and here [after partition] became an important means for circumventing restrictions on transfers imposed by evacuee property laws’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Intriguingly, I find an upsurge in the practice of pugree before the evacuee property legislation and even before the partition riots. By the time the September riots broke out, 150,000 Punjabi refugees were already present in Delhi, many of them belonging to Lahore's middle and upper-middle classes. As Ian Talbot demonstrates, wealthy Hindu and Sikh businessmen engaged in anticipatory migration to Delhi from June onward. They transferred bank accounts, registered Punjabi companies, and opened offices in Connaught Place. By independence, the upscale locality of Model Town had been emptied of its non-Muslim residents.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Thus, it was before partition that private transactions began and property prices spiralled upward. A Hindustan Times article of 21 August states:

The same dynamic is described by Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi, who details the case of a Muslim friend from Karol Bagh who decided to sell his house, which he had bought before the war for Rs. 8,000. When the refugees started to come to the city, he decided to sell the house and leave for Pakistan. He initially asked Rs. 25,000 but, as prices kept rising, he could not resist the temptation and increased his demand to Rs. 40,000 and then to Rs. 50,000. When the potential buyer agreed to pay Rs. 50,000, he subsequently requested that they pay Rs. 60,000. He soon raised the price to Rs. 75,000 and then Rs. 80,000. At this point, the riots in Karol Bagh broke out, and he lost everything apart from the clothes on his body.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The scramble for Muslim houses set in motion a black economy based on transfers of pugrees. A month after the outbreak of riots, Nehru wrote to Patel that empty houses were occupied not only by refugees, but also by residents of Delhi who were making a profit at the expense of both the original owners and the Punjabi refugees by charging ‘heavy premia [sic] apart from rent’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Most pugrees were demanded by Muslims, and, as evident in the case study of Phatak Habash Khan, this added yet another obstacle to the protection of Muslim zones.

Shanti Dal member Anis Kidwai mentions in her reportage that pugrees were often taken by the servant, relative, or neighbour entrusted with the property when the Muslim owner left for Pakistan. While some of these agents were honest, others were tempted by the opportunity to earn money by bringing in refugees in exchange for high pugrees of Rs. 5,000–10,000. Others who took pugrees were rich Muslims who could not hope to sell their houses and so took thousands of rupees as pugree and left for Pakistan, hoping to come back and sell the property when things calmed down.Footnote ¹¹¹ No doubt, the numerous restrictions on sales and exchanges of property opened a space for the illegal economy of pugree to flourish. In many cases, asking for pugrees was the only means Muslims had to realize some money from their properties.Footnote ¹¹²

Kidwai, who took part in the Shanti Dal's Sisyphean endeavours to keep Muslim zones protected, discusses the unfortunate results of this practice. Overnight, an affluent family would take thousands of rupees as pugree and vanish, leaving poorer Muslims at the mercy of their new refugee neighbours.Footnote ¹¹³ This was clearly the situation in Phatak Habash Khan, where refugees’ pressures on the locality worked in tandem with the transfers of premises for pugrees. This illegal economy reflected and brought to the fore the opposing interests of diverse socioeconomic classes in predominantly Muslim localities.

A December 1948 letter from Muslim residents of Kalan Masjid (Faiz Bazar) to Delhi's Chief Commissioner provides a glimpse into the tensions surrounding pugree in Muslim neighbourhoods.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The letter includes various accusations against one Muslim of the locality, Ghulam Muhammad, and his associates. The petitioners claim that Ghulam Muhammad was a Muslim Leagui with links to the National Guards, and that he was arrested a few months previously under the Punjab Public Safety Act and detained for three months. Upon his return, he took revenge on the locality's people (who apparently had brought about his arrest) by making false allegations that led to the arrest of several innocent people. In their absence, he demanded Rs. 100 from their wives and threatened those who failed to pay. He put a lot of pressure on his Muslim tenants to vacate their homes so that he could settle refugees, who were paying four-fold rents and high pugrees. He broke the locks of two tenants while they were away and settled in refugees for pugree. Three more tenants were harassed by Ghulam Muhammad until they vacated their houses. The letter reveals how the economy of pugree got embroiled in internal disputes within the Muslim locality that resulted from, or were at least exacerbated by, the pressures faced by Muslims and Muslim localities in this period. It is against the background of numerous arrests of Muslims from the neighbourhood in mid-1948 that this internal dispute developed.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The petitioners conclude their letter by emphasizing that Ghulam Muhammad and his associates are involved in illegal activities, adding that Ghulam Muhammad has recently started to dress like a Hindu and keeps a choti (braid) on his head (like a Hindu). He socializes with Hindus and presents himself as one. This last piece of information is apparently meant to arouse the authorities’ suspicions of Ghulam Muhammad at a time when Muslims got arrested for roaming Hindu localities dressed like Hindus. In reality, the petitioners assert, not only is Ghulam Mohd a Muslim Leagui, but his whole family has already left for Pakistan and only he has stayed in Delhi to take care of the family's property. They thus tie together allegations about his Muslim Leagui leanings prior to partition with insinuations that he is an intending evacuee. This move mirrors the ways in which Muslim property and (dis)loyalty were interconnected in the evacuee property bureaucracy, the permit system, and the discourse of the police and the Criminal Investigation Department. The discourse was internalized and utilized by the city's Muslims and those acting on their behalf. We saw earlier how, in a similar vein, Subhadra Joshi of the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee and Shanti Dal framed her statement against Sadiq Karachiwala with the insinuation that he was ‘a formerly notorious Muslim Leaguer’.

Just as the practice of pugree brought to the fore class divisions within the Muslim public, it also greatly affected the ability of refugees to compete in the scramble for houses. Economic differences among refugees were already apparent in March 1947, as well-off refugees started to buy up property in Delhi, and they became all the more overt through the practice of pugree. As Kidwai noted, ‘those who could give pagdi always found a house in the Muslim zone, as did those who could vault walls and capture buildings’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Caught in the middle were refugees of lesser means and gentler character.

The refugee petitioners who presented their case in the Urdu report on the Custodian describe exactly this predicament. One applicant, the head of a family from Peshawar in North-West Frontier Province, describes the family's life in Delhi since their arrival in November 1947 as endless misery. At first, they were cramped into the tiny room of a friend from Subzimandi, who after four months was fed up and threw them out to the street. They left the place in great shame and set up a hutment on the rooftop of a Muslim on Qutab Road. Later, when the hutment collapsed under the heavy monsoons, the Muslim landlord did not allow them to set it up again. They found a place in a dharamshala but are under threat of eviction every day. In the meantime, one child died of heat and two others had been injured. They have sent numerous requests to the Custodian Department to get allotted a vacant house in Pul Bangash, but to no avail. They cannot even get a place in the refugee camps. During these long months of hardship, they have seen more and more refugees who arrived in Delhi after them getting houses. Some got a house from the Custodian through bribes, while others paid pugrees or occupied a house forcibly.

‘What should people like us do?’ asks the applicant. ‘Those who don't have enough money to bribe the Custodian, or pay pugree, and who are law-abiding people who would not use force?’ All routes seem closed off and the only option, concludes the applicant, is ‘to take my five-member family and drown ourselves in the Yamuna’. He adds bitterly: ‘What can we do if the Pakistanis who attacked us did not have the courtesy to leave us some money so we could, like our brothers, get houses through bribes or pugree?’Footnote ¹¹⁷

As the complaint demonstrates, socioeconomic differences played a role not only in the informal economy of pugree, but also in the work of the Custodian. Those who had means would get a house allotted to them. Indeed, allegations of corruption surrounded the Custodians from early days. The first Custodian of Delhi, Lobo Prabhu, was dismissed in 1948 and charged with connivance with bribery and lack of control over his subordinates.Footnote ¹¹⁸ It is noteworthy that G. D. Khosla, the Punjab High Court Justice who was appointed to inquire into the allegations, wrote later that Lobo Prabhu himself was honest, but ‘unfamiliar with Punjabi character and ignorant of the social and professional standing of the claimants’, and had allotted houses to some undeserving refugees.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But allegations of corruption continued.

Some Muslims, too, complained that they had to bribe the Custodian to unseal houses that had been seized and sealed unjustly.Footnote ¹²⁰ In the case of Phatak Habash Khan, the Custodian was apparently bribed to save rich Muslims’ houses at the expense of a poorer locality. Thus, socioeconomic divisions among the Muslims could influence the specific ways in which the process of dispossession unfolded.

More broadly, such corruption was part and parcel of the wide scope of operation given to the Custodian, and it functioned alongside local factors—such as the relative strength or vulnerability of the people involved—in determining who was allotted a house, whose house was seized, and where. In practice, the Custodian Department was far from an impersonal and impartial bureaucracy, but rather very personal and influenced by specific persons and pressures in each locality. Beyond the hardships experienced by individuals who got caught in this Kafkaesque bureaucracy, there was a great deal of built-in uncertainty and contingency underlying the Custodian's intervention in the Muslim zones.

After all, the protection of the Muslim zones remained a stated policy that had no real legal sanction and that was highly controversial. Protecting these zones depended upon the good will of police officers and other officials, notably the Custodian Department, and on the intervention of non-governmental bodies such as the Shanti Dal, the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee, and the Special Police. These non-governmental bodies operated in the contingent space of fights over houses in Muslim zones. For example, in January 1948, Special Police officers, aided by local police, allegedly launched an offensive against the Muslim residents in the Muslim zone of Qasabpura in order to drive them out of their homes.Footnote ¹²¹ On the other hand, we have seen how members of the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee and Shanti Dal unsealed houses sealed by the Custodian. In some cases, Khalil-ur-Rahman—another Shanti Dal member and vice president of the Delhi Provincial Congress Committee—objected to Hindus renting houses and businesses in Muslim localities, and reportedly replaced the locks of the premises in the police's absence.Footnote ¹²² In one case, he was aided by B. D. Joshi—Subhadra Joshi's husband, who was part of the socialist wing of Special Police.

Interestingly, however, the Shanti Dal's intervention in the Muslim zones was not all heroic and ideologically motivated. While some members worked tirelessly for the protection of Muslim zones, the Criminal Investigation Department reported that some members joined hands with the Custodian Department's employees in opening up houses for refugees in exchange for pugrees.Footnote ¹²³ Anis Kidwai explained that many of the Shanti Dal volunteers were themselves refugees. Some got tired of standing guard at the gates of a Muslim enclave whose residents did not seem to care for them at all, and they would open the gates and let a refugee family sneak in. Others were simply tempted by the pugree offered to them to open the gates.Footnote ¹²⁴ When houses in the now-reclassified localities were opened up for allotment, many of the Shanti Dal's volunteers thought they deserved priority in allotment, given their service, and assumed that the Shanti Dal leaders would support them. ‘When things didn't go as they wished, many of these volunteers lapsed completely, took pagdi, and arranged for houses to be allotted to persons whose names were not on the original lists.’Footnote ¹²⁵

Rehabilitation Minister Saxena complained to Mridula Sarabhai in August 1948 that, while the Rehabilitation Ministry (and Custodian Department) had thought the Shanti Dal would ‘peacefully get possession of a large number of Muslim evacuee houses within a couple of weeks’, it was now clear that the Shanti Dal could not keep out undesirable elements.Footnote ¹²⁶ This letter revealing the collaboration between the Custodian and the Shanti Dal in sealing and allotting evacuee houses fits with Kidwai's claim that some of the Muslim zones were disbanded in August 1948. These accounts help explain why this period was characterized by a fierce scramble for empty houses—including in Phatak Habash Khan.

Kidwai admits that, when the Muslim zones opened up, ‘we made huge mistakes, mountainous ones. We scrambled to ensure that our own people were given the houses first—socialists for socialists, Congressis for Congressis, Shanti Dal for its volunteers—and the truly needy were left homeless’.Footnote ¹²⁷ This picture is corroborated in a Criminal Investigation Department report on the Delhi Socialist Party, claiming that it sought the Jamiat Ulema's support in getting houses allotted to socialist leaders among the Punjabi refugees of Kingsway Camp.Footnote ¹²⁸ Similarly, refugees frequently alleged that the Jamiat Ulema had a hold over vacant houses, which it sealed and allotted to whomever it wanted.

At this time, when Muslim houses were perhaps the most important resource and many competed for them, parties sought to advance their political influence through houses, and refugees took advantage of their political connections or economic means to get access to them. Thus, alongside the ideological clash between the secular-leaning Shanti Dal leaders and the more Hindu right-wing volunteer forces, more mundane imperatives were at work—and these two levels often worked in tandem.

1950: unfinished violence

In 1949, Anis Kidwai described her efforts, and those of Muslim students from Jamia Millia University, to protect the locality of Bara Hindu Rao (Sadar Bazar) in the winter of 1947–48. Kidwai and her allies tried to halt the ongoing departure of Muslims from the locality. They set up their base in the large Rehmaniya School building, which was emptied during the disturbances and drew crowds of refugees, who circled the place and tried to break in. Even a bomb was thrown, but the students, determined, stayed put.Footnote ¹²⁹ Kidwai celebrated their triumph but, less than three years later, the Intelligence Bureau reported that disturbances had pushed many Muslims out of Bara Hindu Rao and that 35 houses were now occupied by refugees, including the very same Rehmaniya School building.Footnote ¹³⁰

The occupation took place against the background of renewed violence in 1950 in East and West Bengal that spilled over into Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, setting off another massive migration from North India to West Pakistan.Footnote ¹³¹ This again triggered the all-too-familiar dynamic of pressure on Muslim zones in Delhi, as thousands of Muslims left the city, leaving behind empty houses, which refugees occupied, either through pugree or by force. At the same time, vacant houses in Kucha Pandit (Hauz Qazi), Gali Shahtara (Ajmeri Gate), and Kalan Mahal were occupied by local Muslims—probably those who fled localities such as Bara Hindu Rao. The Deputy Commissioner issued an order declaring illegal all such occupations, and the police started evicting both refugees and Muslims. The Custodian sealed 2,000 vacant houses, increasing tension in the city. The Muslims were upset because, so far, ‘the intending Muslim migrants used to make over the possession of their houses to the Hindu refugees by accepting “pugrees”’ and refugees became so furious and aggressive that they started assaulting Muslim passers-by.Footnote ¹³²

Thus, the violence that swept across North India and East Pakistan in 1950 set in motion another cycle of dispossession that brought thousands more Muslim houses into the pool of evacuee property. Here again, physical force and the illegal economy of pugree were joined by the Custodian Department, which operated with a vengeance in this period. During these months, Muslims’ complaints against the Custodian were on the rise. The advocate Sultan Yar Khan discloses that not a single case was decided in favour of a Muslim appellant.Footnote ¹³³

Al Jamiat published an editorial arguing that one of the main causes for the departure of Delhi's Muslims was the Custodian's excesses. The editorial claims that the Custodian moved extremely fast in taking possession of houses, and that ‘this department plays a dangerous role in uprooting the Muslim population’. Even after 30 hearings, people's situation remained unresolved. The writer reports a disturbing fact—that people whose status had already been cleared as ‘non-evacuee’ numerous times were again called upon to appear and explain why they should not be declared evacuees. Recently, continued the editorialist, several Muslims who had got desperate and fed up had just thrown their properties’ keys and papers on the table at the Custodian court, saying ‘Since you have decided to seize all the Muslim houses, just take our keys. At least we'll be freed from the daily humiliation and insult at your court.’ Many such people, argues the editorialist, left for Pakistan.Footnote ¹³⁴

The grave conditions across North India and East Pakistan led to negotiations between the prime ministers of the two countries, resulting in the Nehru-Liaquat Ali (Delhi) Pact of 8 April 1950. The agreement was meant to bring a halt to the exodus of people and ensure the security of minorities in both countries. It was indeed in this context that Nehru sent several letters to the Minister of Rehabilitation, insisting that the evacuee property legislation and its implementation by the Custodians should be reformed. ‘There can be no doubt that the Agreement calls upon us to create conditions which will give perfect security to minorities. This security must obviously include security of property.’Footnote ¹³⁵

Nehru was critical of the new Evacuee Bill, which was prepared by Saxena and was under discussions in parliament.Footnote ¹³⁶ He chastised Saxena that the Evacuee Property Bill would exacerbate the situation just at the moment when renewed violence was pushing many Muslims to leave India, and when India had undertaken, in its agreement with Pakistan, to prevent such fears. The bill included:

Nehru also doubted the validity of some of the provisions of the Evacuee Property Act in view of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution. His other main concern was the way in which the law was interpreted and implemented. ‘In effect, so much vagueness has crept in that the Custodian or his representative can exercise his discretion in a large number of matters.’Footnote ¹³⁸

Nehru further developed this point in his next letter to Saxena, which used stronger language. Nehru's harsh evaluation of the Custodian Department was now based on numerous complaints by Muslims that had accumulated on his desk. He and his private secretary had carefully gone over these files and reached the conclusion that the complaints were overwhelmingly justified, and that the evacuee property laws had become ‘an engine of oppression’ in the hands of the Custodian, leading to ‘continuous victimization’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Nehru gave details, buttressing the complaints we see in Al Jamiat’s editorials. The Assistant Custodians, he claimed, functioned more like prosecutors than judges and were at pains to prove the person guilty of some offence. There were tremendous delays, and cases went on intermittently without a final decision. The burden of proof lay on the persons accused of violating the evacuee laws, in violation of all canons of justice. People who were proven to be non-evacuees numerous times were again asked to show cause why they should not be declared evacuees. There were cases where people were declared non-evacuee and yet their property was seized, or where the district judge had ordered the Custodian to restore the property to its rightful owner yet the Custodian had failed to do so. Nehru reached the conclusion that ‘there is seldom any finality in the proceedings and they are sometimes inquisitorial. . . . Although the evacuee property laws deal with property as such, the effect of their application may well be the deprivation of citizenship or nationality and this is a serious matter.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The tension spreading across North India was seen through a different lens—the lens of security—by officials of the police and the Intelligence Bureau, which asked the Delhi Criminal Investigation Department to provide a list of Muslims who should be detained in case of communal trouble, as well as of Muslim pockets in city. Referring to the arms race between Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods in the months preceding partition, the Intelligence Bureau enquired about rumours that Muslim pockets were again building up their arsenals.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In his reply, Criminal Investigation Department Superintendent Rikhi Kesh sent a list of Muslim pockets, noting:

The Intelligence Bureau was alarmed by the Criminal Investigation Department Superintendent's disclosure, and asked for more information. Rikhi Kesh reported that some of the Muslim pockets contained factories that ‘could be easily converted into weapon manufacturing factories if and when needed’, turning these pockets into small fortresses. He concluded:

Protection of Muslim zones, we can see, remained a debated policy, reflecting the equivocal attitude toward the Muslims of India. As Nehru put it in his letter to Saxena, ‘We try to punish people who in law and effect are our citizens, but who we suspect might perhaps transfer their allegiance.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴

It seems, however, that this was hardly avoidable—that is, the prevailing suspicion was built into the situation. It emerged out of the increasingly poisonous atmosphere prior to partition, the painful violence, and the sudden need to distinguish between Indians and Pakistanis in the midst of mass exodus. Even Nehru's letters, which confirm time and again his commitment to protecting Muslim life and property, show suspicions creeping in. In the letter quoted above, for instance, he submits that, under the unusual circumstances, the government needed to prevent large-scale transfer of property—that is, to prevent Muslims leaving for Pakistan from disposing of their properties. In another note, he asks for a comprehensive report on the number of Muslims returning from Pakistan under the Nehru-Liaquat Pact of April 1950, saying that he has been informed that Pakistan was sending some troublemakers among these people. There is no need to open up this issue with Pakistan, but the people returning on permits should be better scrutinized.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In another letter from 1954, he refers to information given to him by the Muslim socialist leader of Delhi, Mir Mushtaq Ahmed, that Pakistan was sending goondas to create disturbances in Delhi.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The point is that, up to 1954, the question of who was a Muslim citizen of India and who was a Pakistani remained unclear. And it was precisely this indeterminacy that the evacuee property laws reflected and reproduced.

Toward winding up the evacuee property legislation

After the passport system was introduced in 1952 and the borders gradually stabilized, Nehru was prepared to close this chapter of the evacuee property legislation. The appointment of a new Rehabilitation Minister—A. P. Jain—who appears to have been more sympathetic to Muslims’ hardships, marked the beginning of a shift in the government's policy. In August 1952, Jain pushed for the omission of the ‘intending evacuee’ category from the legislation and supported this stance against strong opposition in parliament.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

In November 1953, Nehru wrote to Jain that it was time to rethink their position on evacuee property. These laws were the result of very unusual circumstances and reflected an emergency situation that could not be prolonged forever. It was high time that India lift the sword of Damocles hanging over its Muslim citizens, which prevented them from conducting normal business and life. The worst that could happen, submitted Nehru, was that some money would be shifted to Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In a cabinet meeting and his letters, Nehru reiterated that there was no longer any justification for denying Muslim citizens what was granted to foreign nationals. Every citizen should be free to deal with his property as he wished.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Throughout 1952–54, India made several attempts to resolve the evacuee property deadlock with Pakistan. It sent a detailed offer in October 1952, according to which both countries would take over evacuee properties and compensate the evacuee owners accordingly.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Pakistan turned the offer down, insisting on solving the problem through private transactions. In May 1954, Nehru informed Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammad Ali that, since six years had passed and no progress had been made, India could not let matters slide any longer, and that it had decided to take two unilateral steps. First, it abrogated the legislation with regard to future cases that may arise—that is, no more properties could be declared evacuee. Second, India would permanently acquire the rights and titles of evacuee owners in properties that the Custodian had already taken possession of, and would utilize them to compensate displaced persons. Evacuee owners would get credit for the value of these properties.Footnote ¹⁵¹ In October of that year, India enacted the Administration of Evacuee Property (Amendment) Act 1954 and the Displaced Persons (Compensation and Rehabilitation) Act,Footnote ¹⁵² providing for just these terms. The amount and manner of compensation would be based on a settlement with Pakistan, should one be reached.

In a subsequent letter to Mohammad Ali in November 1954, Nehru again expressed India's willingness to arrive at an agreement on how to compensate the evacuees.Footnote ¹⁵³ But, since no mutual agreement was reached, the new laws, in effect, meant that Muslim evacuee property was seized permanently without paying compensation to its owners, whether they had left for Pakistan or remained citizens of India. And so, seven months later, in May 1955, Nehru was astonished that over 130,000 judicial cases of evacuee property were still pending or under adjudication. ‘These are staggering figures and, whatever the legal merits might be, these very figures indicate the terrible pressure on the Muslims of India. I had absolutely no idea that so many months after the ending of the Evacuee Property Law, we shall be pursued by this nightmare.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Some cases remain unresolved, even today.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

In addition, and to no one's surprise, there was a discrepancy between the legislation and declared policy on the one hand and the Custodian bureaucracy on the other. People were still required to prove their continuous presence in India over several years and to bring documentary evidence in order to keep their properties. Nehru noted in December 1954 that ‘the law has been amended this year, but it seems that our Custodian Departments have not quite caught up with this. We must pull them up and put an end to this continuous harassment’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶

Moreover, the tenants who lived in the houses declared evacuee in the Muslim zones continued to experience the pressures of refugees. As late as 1954, a local Hindu Mahasabha leader, Professor Ram Singh, appealed to refugees to drive out Muslim tenants in evacuee properties, claiming that this could make room for 40,000 refugees.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The tenants were also continually subjected to the draconian rent-collecting methods of the Custodian—especially the habit of collecting all instalments at once, leading to evictions. Complaints in this respect were still voiced in 1956.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

These tenants were also badly affected by the October 1954 unilateral decision to transfer the property rights of evacuees permanently to the Indian government. In a note to the Home Minister in September 1955, Nehru mentioned large-scale evictions of unauthorized occupants taking place in Delhi at the time. Among those evicted were tenants of evacuee properties that were about to be auctioned by the Rehabilitation Ministry.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The fortnightly reports of the following year (July–August 1956) make clear that the auctioning off of evacuee houses resulted in evictions of Muslim tenants, leading to protests by the Jamaat-e Islah-e Custodian and the Jamiat Ulema.