The refugee problem started to become critical from 18 August. That week there would be 1.5 million already in the makeshift camps around Lahore, tying down the troops guarding them and presenting an ever-increasing humanitarian problem. In East Punjab there were roughly the same number. Nehru visited one of the camps on 22 August. ‘I vividly recall the refugees wanted to kill him’, Ashoka Gupta, a disciple of Gandhi’s remembered.
The man who grew up as the darling of the people was going to be killed by the same people. I had been a pro Nehru fellow. But that evening I did not feel because I thought the leaders of our country are truly responsible for all this havoc. I thought he was only harvesting what he had sown. So for the first time I felt no reverence towards him.58
Later Nehru attended a conference in Jullundur with Trivedi, the new Governor of East Punjab and Mumtaz Daultana, the new Pakistani Premier of West Punjab. They concluded that each government should be responsible for their own refugees but that the policy should be to encourage people to stay where they were. The camps should be centralised into a few big ones, which would be easier to protect. But sensible as these decisions undoubtedly were there was no practical hope of persuading people to stay put when to do so would probably mean that they would be murdered and who was to protect the refugees in the larger camps?
At the end of that first terrible week Pete Rees laid out the problems the PBF faced in his notebook. His first, urgent requirement was for more troops. The ‘paramount problem is to produce bodies. If the Sikhs get more determined, the army will have to rely on bigger detachments’ and so cover fewer villages. In East Punjab the refugee problem was ‘assuming gigantic proportions’. All his existing PBF units were tied down. He desperately needed another two brigades, so about 10,000 men, for the south-east, Hoshiarpur and Jullundur, alone. His men were exhausted and had ‘been going flat out for over three weeks’ in the mud and stifling, humid heat. Liaison with the fledgling East Punjab was weak; he needed a deputy commander, was desperate for transport, for an intelligence staff to give him some notification of the movements of the jathas and goondas, needed a separate headquarters to plan for refugees, a press team to deal with the horde of international journalists all desperate to get front-page stories, and was frantic for more aircraft.59
Above all he was beginning to understand the reality, so hard for a professional British Indian Army officer like him to face, that ‘class’-based units were not trustworthy. What Bristow had witnessed in Jullundur was becoming a widespread problem. Some troops, like the Nawab of Bahawalpur’s state forces, were actively working with the mobs but now even his own battalions were siding according to communal affiliation. This was happening on both sides of the border. Liaquat had complained of Hindu units in the East Punjab attacking Muslims and there had been three occasions when the Dogras and Baluchs had actually attacked each other.60 What Rees now wanted, and wanted urgently, was Gurkhas and, although he couldn’t say it given Attlee’s policy that they should not be used to save Indian lives, those six well-equipped, mobile British brigades, one of whose regiments Mountbatten had travelled to Bombay to bid farewell to after the Independence celebrations on 15 August.
Nehru, conferring with Rees’s senior Indian adviser, Brigadier Thimayya, ‘an ancient patriot with high ambitions for India’,61 was coming to the same conclusion. Mixed troops were ‘generally speaking not successful’ and he had a ‘grave disquiet that raids had been led by men in uniform’.62 But Nehru’s deduction, encouraged by Thimayya, was different. If the PBF was not working because of its ‘class’ units then, rather than bring in non-class formations – interestingly there was no problem at all with Indian battalions like the Mahars, generally made up of low-caste Hindus and who treated the Muslims with respect – the solution was to end the PBF and Indianise the force, with Pakistan doing the same thing in West Punjab. Nehru had never liked the Joint Defence Council anyway, and he was growing to dislike Auchinleck even more. Auchinleck himself remained solidly opposed to the PBF. ‘The sooner I can break it up the better from my point of view’, he told the Joint Defence Council on 30 August.63 But without it, and with Indian troops now supporting Hindus and Sikhs in opposition to the new national Pakistan forces supporting the Muslims, liaison and joint working would go, and with that would go so many of the aspirations for a cooperative relationship between the new nations. It was a sad prelude to the coming catastrophe in October.
But Rees, denied support from Auchinleck, and with no civil government structures to support him, realised that ‘the possibility of even attempting to maintain the present PBF as a neutral force for very much longer is dismissed as impossible. Two alternatives suggest themselves. Both dominions to be responsible with their own forces right up to their own frontiers for a strictly limited period with some kind of neutral HC [High Command] or a “Neutral Ship” ’, but he never developed that alternative further.64
On 29 August the full Joint Defence Council met in Lahore. They decided that from midnight on 1 September the PBF would disband. Its units would then join their respective armies. The Lahore area, in Pakistan, would be the responsibility of General Gane, one of the many British officers retained by Jinnah, while the East Punjab area, in India, would come initially under Rees but later under Thimayya. Separate Military Evacuation Organisations would be set up either side of the border to handle refugees and it was planned that each country would station some of their own troops across each other’s border to escort refugees.
Far from calming people, once news of these changes got out it led to panic. Communities now thought they risked being trapped in hostile territory. One of the blackest days so far was 31 August. ‘From north, south, east and west came reports of attacks, arson and abduction.’ There was a huge increase in Hindu and Sikh refugees from Montgomery Bazaar. There had also been very heavy casualties in the south-east where the Sikhs were carrying out the systematic extermination of villages along the River Sutlej belt. In one attack 400 Muslims were killed. Hundreds of corpses started floating down the flooded River Ravi and on the River Sutlej stranded groups were left clinging to mudbanks as the waters rose.65 The events of August were to prove just the beginning. The Punjab’s suffering would only deepen in September.
9. SEPTEMBER
A HEAP OF ASHES
‘How could any civilised government permit such a state of affairs?’
(JINNAH)
By some miracle, Calcutta had remained peaceful during those last two weeks of August. Unlike the Punjab, the Boundary award seemed to have calmed people, at least temporarily, and given them a ‘new found feeling of security’.1 Gandhi’s presence and his public prayer meetings undoubtedly helped, the Mahatma having refused to give in to the extreme Hindu threats he faced when he had first arrived. Would it last? Outside Calcutta, across rural Bengal, millions of refugees were on the move; overall 3.6 million Hindus from East Bengal would move into West Bengal, into India. Far fewer, only 700,000, West Bengali Muslims would make the corresponding journey east. So far the migration had progressed without serious violence and in Assam all remained quiet.
On the night of 31 August, four Hindu youths paid 4 annas to go to the cinema in Calcutta. ‘The film was bad, the projector faulty and the picture jumped and sidled on the screen.’ They complained to the Muslim attendant who told them, unhelpfully, that was all they could expect for 4 annas. One of the youths, enraged, drew a knife and attempted to stab him. An onlooker grabbed the boy’s arm to deflect the blow and in doing so the blade just nicked the boy’s face. A crowd gathered, bandaged the boy up and took him off to see Gandhi to demand satisfaction. The Mahatma sensibly saw the incident for what it was and refused to address the now swelling ranks of militant Hindus gathering outside, supporters of the ‘Mahasabha-ites and Mr. Sarat Chandra Bose’s Forward Bloc’.2 Instead he said he was tired and wanted to go to bed.
By 10.30 a.m. the next day, 1 September, Calcutta had dissolved into violence once again. Hindu and Muslim mobs st
arted fighting with stones and sticks but by early afternoon shooting had started. A young Hindu RSS supporter got into the Muslim area near Harrison Road with a Sten gun and indiscriminately slaughtered Muslims in their homes. The Muslims retaliated, the police panicked, poking ‘their rifles up in the air and shooting down the road without taking aim’. A Hindu threw a bomb in Balliaghata, killing Muslim women and children and the riot entered a new phase of savagery. Shops and homes were, as always, looted with their contents spilt all over the roads.
By early morning on 2 September there were over five hundred people dead. It seemed as if the Great Calcutta Killings of just over a year ago would be repeated and they probably would have been had three things not happened. First, at 5.00 a.m. that morning the heavens opened and by 7.00 a.m. the streets were under three feet of water. Secondly, Gandhi sent out courageous Hindu volunteers, posting them in Muslim areas to tell Hindu rioters that the old man would hold them personally responsible for any further attacks. He then announced he was fasting until he was guaranteed of peace. He sent out ‘Peace Processions’, which were initially attacked, and the leader of one badly stabbed, but the Mahatma’s involvement undoubtedly calmed the Hindu mobs, much to the disappointment of their more extreme elements. Gandhi was once again, they grumbled, siding with the Muslims. However, many did obey his demand that they surrender their weapons. Gopal Mukherjee would not, despite a direct plea from some of Gandhi’s disciples. ‘With these arms I have saved the women of my area. I saved the people. Where was Gandhiji during The Great Calcutta Killing? Where was he then? I’ve used a nail to kill someone. I won’t surrender even that nail.’ He also thought that the weapons that were laid at Gandhi’s feet were ‘of no use to anyone – out of order pistols and that sort of thing’.3
Thirdly, Gurkha troops were brought back into the city from Murshidabad; the new West Bengal government imposed a fifty-nine-hour curfew and gave the soldiers permission to shoot curfew-breakers on sight. They were tough measures, short of martial law, which the military had wanted, but still showed a resolve that people noticed. Gradually calm returned. Gandhi fasted for three days and then relented, much to the relief of the authorities. He was old and frail and there was increasing concern that if he actually died on one of these fasts the resulting holocaust against the Muslims would have been terrible. On 6 September he felt well enough to leave for the Punjab. He took Suhrawardy with him. Gandhi ‘travelled third class by train, Mr. Suhrawardy by air’.4
Yet any optimism about Bengal was quickly dissipated by the deteriorating position in the Punjab. The violence had now spread east and south from the area immediately affected by Radcliffe’s line so that there was widespread killing even in Delhi and Simla. In the first week of September, Lieutenant Colonel Mohindar Singh Chopra was reassigned from Assam to the Punjab and gathered his family for the long return journey. Crossing the ‘mighty Brahmaputra’ was more frightening for his children this time, the ferry tossing through the monsoon floodwaters. Joining a train at Pandu, his daughter noticed ‘a section of troops with sten-guns and grenades were in a bogey for our protection’. They frequently had to lie on the floor in case of shooting. As they approached Delhi there was
a kind of silence that comes out of abject fear. When the train steamed slowly into Delhi Station late at night, there was not a soul to be seen. The scene around was one of utter chaos, with piles of rotting vegetables and mounds of charred mail, letters and parcels scattered on the platform. We could hear occasional gun-fire in the distance.5
The city that had only two weeks previously been thronged with the huge crowds that celebrated Independence was now on the ‘verge of collapse’.6 It was flooded with Hindu refugees and its large Muslim population had gathered in camps awaiting some form of transport into Pakistan. On 3 September a Hindu mob had butchered Muslim refugees at the same station where Singh Chopra and his family were now arriving. The platforms were covered in the telltale rust-coloured stain of blood.
The lack of effective police meant that much of the violence took place in daylight and with the connivance of the authorities. Major Paddy Massey’s wife was still going for her accustomed early morning ride from the bodyguard stables. One morning she returned complaining that as she had crossed the airport road she had ‘come across thirteen corpses whose heads had been cut off and placed in a neat pile’. Massey duly told his Sikh risaldar-major, his senior Indian officer, to investigate. The man apologised, said it was a government-placed ambush site but that he would see what he could do to get it moved further up the road so that it did not upset Mrs Massey’s routine.7
Nehru, shocked by what he had seen in the Punjab camps, furious and saddened by how the first weeks of the new India were being wrecked, would wade in himself when he saw incidents on the street. Santdas Kirpalani was staying with his brother-in-law in his flat overlooking Connaught Circus, the circular shopping centre in the middle of New Delhi, and was enjoying his early morning tea on 7 September when he saw a Hindu mob of young men armed with knives and sticks attack the well-known Muslim saddlery shop Abdul Ghani & Co; saddlers in India tended to be Muslim due to Hindu inhibition at working with leather.
An old, bearded Muslim dashed out, trying to make a run for it but one of the rascals plunged a long knife in his back. The old man collapsed in a pool of blood, wriggled for a minute and lay still. The marauders entered and looted the place. Meanwhile at the other end of the block, other hooligans were looting Muslim establishments and running away with sewing machines, bicycles, tables and chairs.
Ten minutes later a jeep turned up with an army driver and Kirpalani recognised Nehru in the back dressed in his habitual white khadi sherwani and cap. As they turned the corner, ‘Nehru jumped from the running vehicle and lustily clouted a young hoodlum who had collected a saddle. The looters in Abdul Ghani’s shop scattered with speed’. Nehru’s sudden chance appearance had worked ‘like a charm’ but he could not be everywhere.8
That night, around 10 p.m., Delhi was disturbed by the roar of flames from the poor Muslim area of Paharganj. Hindu mobs had set fire to the houses, burning down an area about a mile long and half a mile wide. The refugees from the fire swarmed onto their Prayer Ground, where luckily a military escort prevented further slaughter. That week Delhi ‘became like an armed camp’9 with troops rushed in but the violence continued and movement remained dangerous especially at night. Faiz Bazaar, linking Old and New Delhi, became a particularly perilous spot as Muslim militias set up a machine gun in the upper storey of a printing press.
Ismay, still serving with Mountbatten, frequently saw Muslims ‘being systematically hunted down and butchered. In some places the dead lay rotting in the streets. The hospitals were choked with wounded. Arson and looting were widespread. Food supplies were disrupted. The Moslem policemen had deserted or been disarmed; many of the Hindu police were afraid to do their duty’. Ismay’s daughter, Sarah, had suffered a horrible experience trying to get back to Delhi from Simla with her fiancé, Wenty Beaumont. Beaumont’s Muslim servant had asked to travel in their carriage for his own protection. All went well until they were twenty miles from Delhi when a bomb exploded on the platform of Sonepat Station. ‘This was apparently the pre-concerted signal for a general attack on all Moslem passengers. Men, women and children were pulled out of the train by their Hindu fellow-travellers and butchered in the most brutal manner.’ Beaumont hid his servant under the seat and piled suitcases on top of him but ‘two well-dressed and seemingly well-educated Hindus presented themselves at the door of the carriage and demanded the right to search for a Moslem who was believed to be with them’. Beaumont and Sarah were both armed. Flourishing their revolvers they refused and the Hindus backed off. Their servant, silent and shaking, was the only Muslim on that train who made it to Delhi alive. The Hindu armed police, in an adjoining carriage, made no attempt to intervene.10
Major General John Dalison was not so lucky. He was travelling with his Muslim bearer in a train with no escort. O
utside Delhi they were attacked by a well-organised gang of five hundred Nihang Sikhs dressed in dark-blue and yellow uniforms. They broke open the window of his compartment, dragged his bearer out and hacked him to pieces in front of him. Every other Muslim on the train was similarly butchered. Dalison was spared; the Sikh leader said he had orders not to harm the British ‘this time’.11 James Cameron, a British major, who was travelling across the Punjab with his family, had a similar experience but his train had a small escort. The train was duly attacked by a Sikh jatha in a local station. He and the escort managed to get his family and most of the Muslims into the station buildings. Some Muslims refused to leave their property on the train and were slaughtered. One of his soldiers shot a Sikh. ‘He killed him at 200 yards – a very good shot’, Cameron elaborated. ‘This had a very good effect’ and gave them a breathing space. They realised though that they were trapped, surrounded by angry Sikhs and in the middle of nowhere. They decided they would be safer on the roofs. Cameron divided the group up into sectors, each led by someone armed. His wife and daughter both took charge of sectors, armed with shotguns. All night the Sikhs harassed them but they managed to hold them off. ‘At every moment I thought I would have to shoot my wife and daughter’, Cameron continued, ‘and all the Muslim wives and children would certainly have been slaughtered’. With dawn another train brought relief.12
Ismay received a further shock when an old friend of his, Ali Sher Khan, who had won a Distinguished Service Medal serving with his regiment in France during the First World War, and who had finished his career as a senior officer in his regiment, turned up in rags at his door. A Punjabi Muslim, his village had been attacked by Sikhs, his family massacred and he had only just managed to escape. His house had been burned and he had lost everything. A while later a senior Sikh officer of the same regiment found Ismay to tell him that his home in Pakistan had likewise been burned to the ground although thankfully he had managed to get his family out.13
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