The success of the Jullundur attacks encouraged the jathas to go on to attack Hoshiarpur and Ludhiana, where the atrocities were repeated. Appalled by what he had seen in Amritsar on 15 August, Rees called a meeting of the Sikh community leaders. He opened by saying that the ‘situation could not be worse’. The police, now disarmed by their new Hindu officers, had lost what little effectiveness they had. There were only about two hundred Sikh and Hindu police left on duty and they were ‘panicky, firing off wildly all night’. They would also not intervene to help Muslims and in fact often assisted the Sikh mobs. Rees gave Tara Singh, the leader of the Sikh political party, a message from Muslim leaders in Lahore offering a ‘reciprocal laying off’. Tara Singh promised there would be no untoward incidents in rural areas and said he would try to stop the violence in Amritsar itself. The problem though was that the Muslim papers like the Nawaiwaqt were taunting Sikhs with headlines saying they were too cowardly to attack mosques. They then discussed starting an escort system to take Muslim refugees to the border. The PBF had twenty-eight lorries available. They would collect Muslim refugees and transport them with a Muslim escort. Tara Singh said the Sikhs would try to help with the safe collection of Muslims but they would not trust working with a Muslim escort. Was there no British escort available? That evening Rees sat down and tried to work out which tasks his ‘class’ troops could perform and which could be performed by any. Bristow’s experience in Jullundur and the reports of Muslim soldiers’ inactivity in Lahore were causing him to reassess his view that his soldiers were unaffected by communalism.48
There were some genuine attempts by the Sikh leadership to persuade their followers to reduce the violence in Amritsar and over the next few days it did slacken off slightly; Rees noticed that by 21 August there were even a few shops open. This was partly because by this time most of the Muslims had left and partly due to there being little Muslim property left to burn. It was also because the PBF had been able to gather scattered groups who had managed to barricade themselves in protected strongholds called kuchabandi. However, it was also because the terror now moved out of the cities into the countryside, into those 17,000-odd hamlets and villages that the PBF could not possibly protect. Neither was there an effective police intelligence system to warn of attacks so that troops could be concentrated. This had evaporated as the officers who had run it had left. With the army’s intelligence still, bizarrely, concentrating on Palestine and the Soviet Union, and the lack of aircraft, the PBF was operating blind while its movements were constantly reported back to the jathas by the locals. Consequently if troops managed to prevent raids it was often just coincidence.
Bristow described the technique of a Sikh attack when he witnessed the aftermath of a jatha raiding the Muslim village of Rahon, near the River Sutlej, from the air. Several thousand Sikhs were milling around the village loading loot onto bullock carts. The only survivors appeared to be about one hundred people standing in a straight line ‘as if on a parade’. On closer inspection they turned out to be all young women and girls being ‘inspected by a group of grey-haired jathedars in what looked like a distribution ceremony’. Several corpses lay around, cut down while they tried to run but most people had been slaughtered in their houses with the Sikh kirpans, presumably in front of the girls now being sized up. Bristow was being flown by a young Sikh officer. ‘I am ashamed of my people,’ he said. Their aircraft, being a reconnaissance plane, was not armed but Bristow had his pistol and they had a signalling pistol. They flew in low, circling the jatha, Bristow firing his pistol and the pilot letting off Very cartridges. The Sikhs promptly scattered. It showed, Bristow noted, how effective some ground-attack aircraft would have been. ‘Surely’, he added, ‘the fiendish mass killing justified such a course?’49
Landing back at their headquarters Bristow immediately dispatched a patrol but it arrived to find only dead bodies. The Sikhs had melted away and protested violently at house searches in their villages, which they said violated the privacy of their women. The fate of the abducted Muslim women was, on the other hand, ‘ghastly. Most were murdered when the Sikhs had no further use for them’. Clifford Williams, an officer in Bristow’s brigade, was driving along the Grand Trunk Road when he came across the naked, mutilated bodies of forty women of whom just one was still alive. Their breasts had been sliced off and ‘the stomachs of the pregnant women slit open with their unborn babies beside them. While I gazed at this gruesome sight, a woman without breasts painfully sat up, saw me and sank back to die, and as she did so she pulled over a piece of clothing to hide her nakedness’.50
Such atrocities were not confined to the Sikhs. In the West Punjab Muslim gangs carried out acts of equal horror on fleeing Hindus and Sikhs. What the Sikhs did have was superior organisation and weaponry. The jathas had recognised leaders, who were often mounted, good communications and worked around a core with modern weapons, which would be reinforced by local villagers for specific operations. The PBF encountered jathas of five or six thousand when there was a raid on a train, for example. The Muslims generally failed to match this in East Punjab. There were exceptions, such as in Qadian, to the east of Amritsar, where the community organised itself to protect the holy Ahmediya shrine. Here they used proper signalling equipment and even two light aircraft from the local flying club until Rees grounded them. The Muslim gangs also had modern weapons but they suffered from not having the Sikh privilege of carrying the kirpan, most of which were more like large cutlasses than the intended ceremonial dagger.
The tactics both sides used were a mixture of attacks on villages, which would then be looted and burned, and ambushes either on trains or on columns of refugees. The crops were high, it being pre-harvest, and concealment was easy. The attackers would remain hidden until the last minute, then pour in a preliminary volley. The refugee column would break and scatter and then be pursued with swords and every sort of handheld weapon from farm implements to home-made hand-grenades. While there was some element of looting in village and train attacks, most attacks on refugee columns were motivated by killing for its own sake.
Moon, accompanied by the Nawab of Bahawalpur’s dewan, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani, drove into Hasilpur, now firmly in Pakistan, a ‘colony’ town, inhabited by people who had been granted reclaimed land, on the edge of the desert watered by the Fordwah Canal. ‘It was a growing and flourishing little market town with a bright future’, Moon recalled. It had a sizeable population of Hindu merchants and, being a colony town, a largish government office and police station. But as they drove in they found it deserted apart from an old man who told them that all the Hindus had gone away. When asked where, he pointed in the direction of ‘old Hasilpur’, about two miles north. As they entered it they saw what looked like a couple of men lying on the ground. ‘They’re corpses’, Gurmani exclaimed, and as they came into the centre of the village what they at first took to be heaps of manure turned out to be pile upon pile of bodies. ‘Men, women and children were all jumbled up together, their arms and legs akimbo in all sorts of attitudes and postures’. Moon was reminded of pictures he had seen as a child of Napoleonic battlefields. Near the top of the village, in a large two-storeyed building, they found the few survivors,
a throng of women and children whose sobbing and whimpering swelled to a deafening crescendo of mingled grief and resentment as soon as they caught sight of us. It was hard to endure. In an open space outside there lay two or three wounded men under an ill-contrived awning of tattered sacking. One of them, almost stark naked, was literally covered in blood and an old woman was pathetically fanning his face trying to keep the flies off him.
They counted three hundred and fifty corpses.51
Many of the atrocities in West Punjab carried a particular pathos. Niranjan Singh, a Sikh tea merchant in Montgomery Bazaar, had served tea to his friend, a Muslim leather worker, for many years. The week after Independence the man came running into his shop one morning shrieking ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ A gang of Muslim thugs rushed
in. One cut Singh’s leg with his sword; others killed his ninety-year-old father and only son. The last thing Singh could recall was his eighteen-year-old daughter being carried off on the shoulders of ‘a man to whom he’d been serving tea for fifteen years’.52
One of the most hateful aspects of the Muslim atrocities in West Punjab was forcible conversion. It was common practice for some goondas to offer captured Sikhs and Hindus their lives if they would become Muslims and many accepted. Moon came across a crowd of Hindus paraded by their Muslim captors on the side of the road near Khairpur. They staged a demonstration for him and Gurmani, one of them ‘holding up a stick with a little green flag, gazing up at it and shouting’. He ‘grinned ingratiatingly and, pointing up to the miserable bit of green cloth, said, “This is our flag. We now have Pakistan and Muslim Raj”.’ Then they noticed the man was wearing earrings. ‘He’s nothing but a Hindu shop-keeper’, exclaimed their accompanying policeman. Closer inspection revealed that they were all Hindus. The four accompanying Muslims were arrested and an escort left in the Hindu’s nearby village. The thanedar here, the community Hindu leader, explained that they had been given the choice of conversion or death when a mob had attacked the day before. Others were more resilient. A Hindu village near Lyallpur was marched en masse to a pond, made to wash and were then sat in a mosque to hear Koranic verses. They were then told that they had ‘the choice of becoming Muslims and living happily or being killed’. Most accepted new Muslim names and converted. They were made to eat meat. One man, a Brahmin, went back to his hut on the pretext of collecting his family. As soon as he entered the house he took out a knife and killed his wife and children before committing suicide.53
There was the very occasional happy ending when humanity and decency overcame sectarian hatred. Sant Singh, a First World War Sikh veteran, had been given a plot of colony land between the Ravi and Sutlej rivers as part of his army resettlement. His life’s work had been clearing it and building the house where he had raised his family. One of his Muslim workers warned him that his settlement would be attacked and it duly was. Singh and five others rounded up the village women and loaded them onto a truck but no sooner had they left than it ran out of petrol. A Muslim neighbour saw them and ran off. They feared the worse, thinking any minute a goonda would appear, slaughter them and carry off their wives and daughters. They took the decision to shoot their womenfolk rather than risk the fate that would inevitably await them. They lined them up alongside the track and blindfolded them. Each loaded their weapons. Singh quoted the Sikh scriptures as he prepared to kill his wife and daughters. Just as they were on the point of firing they saw headlights and heard shouting. They paused. It turned out to be an army patrol. They were Muslim soldiers but ‘The officer was a good man, a major. He said he would save us’.54
Of all the terrible images of the Punjab that August, it is those pictures of trains, either overcrowded with desperate refugees or, more often, as ghost trains full of dead bodies, that have remained most vivid. Protecting trains had long been part of internal security requirements. There was a well-known railway protection scheme, which had regularly been rehearsed on exercises. This had been activated in late July with the early Muslim attacks on trains carrying Sikhs east. However, its problem was that it relied on the Tikka Para system, whereby each village was responsible for the smooth running of the railway through their area. It also relied on train crews not being terrorised and on adequate police being available; by 15 August none of these conditions could be met and protection devolved, as with everything else, to the military. With train attacks becoming increasingly common, and with the railway staff frequently colluding with the attackers by passing on details of routes and timing, train protection became a major task. Various techniques were tried from ‘pilot trains’, where a goods train or coal train would precede a passenger train in an attempt to spring any ambushes prematurely, attaching flat railcars with sandbags and machine guns front and rear and patrolling the lines with the limited aircraft available. Nothing worked very well and the train massacres that continued throughout August and September were among the most bloody and horrific.
John Moores, an officer in the 9th Gurkhas, was in charge of escorting a Muslim refugee train into Pakistan that had to go through Amritsar. It wasn’t, he recalled, a proper train but just a lot of coal wagons. ‘We loaded up these wretched refugees. It was very distressing. The journey from Ambala to Amritsar was usually 4–5 hours. In this case it took four days. There was no water.’ They had their own water for his troops but ‘they had a job to do’. As they came into Amritsar station they found it had been taken over by hundreds of armed Sikhs, not just on the platforms but across the tracks.
They were like sardines. They all had weapons of some sort. Some were fairly modern rifles – some spears, swords. They were shoulder to shoulder, shoving, pushing. You realised you were just going into hell. They would have gone for us before the refugees. We had to look tough and let them know we meant business. We got our grenades out and primed them. Doing that made the crowds pull back. We must have been in the station for four hours . . .
But they managed to hold off an attack and take the train safely on. Later he met a refugee train from Pakistan at Ambala. It was a trainload of
five to six hundred people, most of whom had been slaughtered. Most were elderly people, children, young women and they had been hacked and murdered – shot – I can remember seeing a young woman who had been hacked. Her head was open. We could see her brains but there was nothing we could do. We didn’t have any surgical facilities. This extraordinary cruelty was something we really didn’t know anything about.55
Quite apart from the failure to make anything like adequate security arrangements, neither had there been any planning to deal with what now became a flood of refugees, most of whom had lost everything and who were now destitute. Naffese Chohan, the thirteen-year-old girl who lived north-east of Amritsar and whose cousin had knocked on their door in despair having fled the Calcutta killings the previous year, and who had warned that the same thing would happen in the Punjab, was one of those who now fled. They were a well-off family with a field buffalo and a Hindu worker who looked after the farm. Things had started to go wrong in the spring, after the Rawalpindi killings. Their Hindu worker had started to refuse to come to work. Hindu shopkeepers would not sell them sugar or salt. Then, as Independence was being celebrated in Delhi, her grandparents were murdered. Her parents knew they had to get out quickly. They paid 300 rupees each for places on a truck. ‘We didn’t pick up our things’, she recalled, ‘We just wanted to survive’. After a terrifying journey, dodging Sikh roadblocks, they got across the border. They were directed to Lahore station, among a teeming mass of destitute people. The terror and the awful realisation that as a family they may be alive but had lost everything made Naffese and her sister break down. ‘We just screamed and screamed and cried “We want to go home, we want to go home.” ’ But ‘home’ was now the platforms of Lahore station where they would spend seven days living off scraps.56
Her family was but one of millions who now needed help but, with a total breakdown in government, the only people who could provide help on that scale quickly were, once again, the PBF. They had to escort the refugee columns and also run the makeshift camps as best they could, both for collecting outgoing refugees and as somewhere for the incoming columns to be held. Lieutenant Colonel K. P. Candeth, now serving with his new Indian regiment in Jullundur, remembers an ‘unending stream of people moving both ways. Long convoys and columns on the roads and the trains all packed to the brim’. His problem was to ensure that the columns didn’t meet as this inevitably led to violence, although, pathetically, by the last week of August the refugees were so exhausted and so numbed that they would pass each other in sullen silence. A more serious problem was when a train came in from West Punjab and they opened the doors to find only dead and dying. This enraged local people who would set out to attack the slow-moving column
s of East Punjabi Muslims heading west. Apart from trying to protect those leaving, his men also had to direct those arriving to concentration areas, many of which then became ‘camps’ by default but there were very few supplies. The Punjab was desperately short of petrol, the normal distribution system having broken down. There was no fuel resupply to Lahore from Karachi after 10 August. The Burmah-Shell oil company had 80,000 gallons in reserve, but with high military usage and the demands of the camps demanding 11,000 gallons per day, this was quickly exhausted and had to be rationed.
The general misery of the Punjab was made even worse by the monsoon. Having obstinately refused to break until mid-August, it now did so with unusual violence. Torrential bursts of rain, usually lasting several minutes, quickly turned the ground into a muddy morass and the many Punjab rivers into torrents. In between the showers, the heat and humidity remained terrible so that even the slightest movement left people perspiring and dehydrated. There was little clean drinking water to be had. Punjabis were used to reasonably pure and germ-free canal water but the same could not be said ‘of the puddles and pools on the wayside, generally covered with a layer of green scum. The horrible thought of a mass outbreak of cholera rose like a grim and terrifying spectre’.57
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