Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  Edward Behr was also finding that the violence between regiments in Peshawar was not finished. News of the fighting between the Punjabis and the 19th Lancers had spread. Pathans started to converge on the town, thinking that their fellow Muslims were in danger. There was a general and justifiable panic among the town’s Hindu and Sikh community. As Behr drove around the army lines he was flagged down by a policeman who showed him the bodies of thirty-three Hindus in a government compound; the men had been shot. The women had had their breasts cut off. Next the Pathan mob attacked the hospital and started butchering the largely Hindu hospital staff. Behr gathered what troops he could find in the brigade headquarters and rushed over. As they arrived he saw bodies in the hospital yard. There was shooting and screaming everywhere and the only way they could get in safely was through the back. They made their way to the roof and emerged to look down on Pathans dragging out hospital orderlies and nurses and murdering them in the yard. He took the Bren gun from the man carrying it and shot three Pathans in succession. Two things then happened. The Pathans down below rushed for cover and started to return fire and the man who had been holding the Bren gun grabbed it off Behr, shouting at him in Pashtu; only then did Behr realise that the soldiers he had so hurriedly got together were themselves Pathans. He thought he was about to ‘relive the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny and that he was going to kill me for shooting his fellow Pathans’. In fact the man had said, ‘Let me have a go too!’ and he and the rest of Behr’s small group now actively engaged the murderers in the courtyard below. Eventually Behr managed to extricate himself and bring in an infantry company; the remaining Pathans duly surrendered. That night another Pathan mob set fire to a large area of Sikh tenements. The army’s engineers blew up houses in the immediate path of the fire, thus stopping it spreading.

  The next evening Behr was called to the house of Qayum Khan, the newly appointed chief minister who had just taken over from Dr Khan Sahib. On his lawn were hundreds of Sikhs and Hindus, nearly all well-off Congress Party officials, judges, barristers and civil servants. They were people Qayum Khan had known all his life but, Behr noticed, ‘he had not even offered them a glass of water’. He now demanded Behr take these people away.

  Later that night, standing on a verandah, he saw a bearded Hindu suddenly come into view, running apparently for his life. ‘Pursuing him, a short distance away, was a Pakistan Air Force enlisted man, on a big black bicycle, firing a Sten Gun at him over the handlebars.’ Behr rushed at the cyclist and kicked the bicycle hard, knocking him over. His driver, who was with him, grabbed the Sten and removed the magazine. Eventually, after sorting out what quickly became a tangled mass of arms, legs, bicycle and gun, they extricated themselves and apprehended the PAF man. They couldn’t make him understand that he had done anything wrong – ‘ “but he was a Hindu”, he kept saying’.14

  The troops that had been rushed into Delhi on 6 September were British soldiers, a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. Congress said they were there to ‘protect British lives’15 although no British lives were threatened. Why could British soldiers be used in Delhi but not in the Punjab where the situation was worsening daily? The Manchester Guardian was asking the same question. ‘If the Indian Regiments could not have been relied upon to take action against their co-religionists, there were Gurkhas, and as long as British troops are in the country who can deny that they should have been used? A sufficiency of troops with jeeps and tanks and aeroplanes could have prevented the atrocities.’16 Now, with the demise of the PBF, it was too late.

  Much more had gone with the PBF than just the limited policing ability it possessed. Without it there was no automatic cross-border liaison and refugee operations had to be coordinated through a small control cell in Lahore. More seriously for the long term, the mechanisms established in June, the Joint Defence Council and the Supreme Command, were seen as ineffective. The first joint operation staged between the two new dominions had failed. The implications of this for the future relations between India and Pakistan would take some time to sink in.

  The first week of September in the Punjab was the most violent yet. The BBC journalist Wynford Vaughan-Thomas described:

  A long line of bullock carts stuck in the middle of the drenching rain. Each cart carried a desperate, rain soaked family. The carts staggered on. There was no hope left amongst them. As we go on the rain lifted and the sun beat down. The whole countryside sparkled but in each village we passed we could see the reason the refugees were on the move. We could see armed gangs chasing their victims across the fields. By the time we interfered it was too late. Another family had been wiped out.17

  What was so difficult to understand about the Punjab killings was their ferocity and vindictiveness. ‘Sikh savagery was appalling’, Tuker wrote. ‘Long after the victim was dead they would slash and slash away at the body, carving it up. They were just like dogs that had taken to killing sheep – just an insensate, devilish lust to wallow in the blood of helpless creatures.’18 A group of unarmed British soldiers waiting for a train in Delhi on 8 September saw a Sikh soldier in uniform butchering Muslims. The last man he killed was a very old Muslim with no chance of protecting himself. He ran towards the soldiers for protection but being unarmed they could do nothing and the Sikh cut him to pieces a few yards from where they were sitting. They remonstrated with the Sikh, asking if he had gone mad. He replied in English ‘smothered with bad language’ that they had better mind their own business or they would be next.19

  Certainly communal madness does seem to have seized some Sikh communities. Aridaman Singh Dhillon recalled that his grandfather initially tried to protect his Muslim neighbours but received death threats and then news started to come through of Muslim atrocities against Sikhs in Pakistan. His mood changed. He remembered one man in his village saying how much he revelled in the killing. When a raid was proposed he joined in, getting ready immediately.

  We went off raising war-cries even leaving our food. We’d go off in high spirits. I ran after this fucking Muslim with my sword and killed him. My sword was a curved one. It used to look magnificent. It used to feel good. They had killed so many of our people. We used to shout war cries and then chop people’s heads off. We would cheer each other up and shout ‘Be Strong’! I was very successful. The old and young would talk about me. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve killed – there were so many. Whoever came in front of me lost his head. Why should I feel bad? They kept killing our people. They wouldn’t stop. Half our people had been killed. They said it was a good thing to kill us.20

  The massacre of Sikhs and Hindus in West Punjab, in what was now Pakistan, was progressing with equal savagery. At 9 p.m. on 15 September a bomb went off outside the principal mosque in Bahawalpur. This was a prearranged signal for a riot and for the killing of Hindus and a general looting of Hindu property. One mob torched the main bazaar, killing any Hindu they came across. A second mob, led by a ‘lame man on a white horse’, moved into the city from the outlying villages, again massacring all Hindus and Sikhs they saw. Penderel Moon tried to restore order with the nawab’s troops. There were so many bodies that the municipal lorries could not clear them all off the street. One Hindu corpse, stripped completely naked, lay across the road down to the Hindu shrine of Gosain. It stayed there for days, a grisly landmark of the violence. ‘There was’, Moon reflected, ‘a complete breakdown, or rather reversal of the ordinary moral values. To kill a Sikh became almost a duty; to kill a Hindu hardly a crime. To rob them was an innocent pleasure, carrying no moral stigma; to refrain was a mark not of virtue but a lack of enterprise.’21

  Moon and Gurmani, the nawab’s chief minister, had been trying to evacuate the Hindus and Sikhs. The main Bahawalpur to Lahore railway line was too dangerous to be used. The only way they could be moved was by gathering them in the city, commandeering what lorries they could find, and escorting them to the small local station at Baghdad al Jadid where a branch line ran east to Bhatinda. But already one train had be
en attacked even on this route and all the Hindus murdered. They needed a train escort but they were not sure they could trust the Bahawalpur state troops. The Hindu community leaders refused to leave without a Gurkha escort. Earlier the state troops had captured eight Sikhs who they said had been firing at them with revolvers. Moon instructed that they were to be held securely. Later that night, walking through the main bazaar, he came across the bodies of two women and three children lying in the road. They had tried to commit suicide by jumping off a nearby building. One of the children was still alive. It transpired that they were the families of two of the detained Sikhs. Moon became suspicious and went to find the prisoners but there was no trace. All eight had, he subsequently discovered, been murdered and their bodies dumped in the river. One of them, Amar Singh, was the cashier at the local branch of the Imperial Bank where the state treasury kept its deposits. He had the safe keys in his pocket; for days Bahawalpur was without money.

  The next day Moon succeeded in getting nearly one thousand Hindus to Baghdad al Jadid. The train arrived but none of them would get on it, terrified of a journey that would surely mean their deaths. Finally persuaded, they made a mad rush for it. Then the Muslim railway staff complained that they were being sent off in too much comfort and more should be packed in despite the fact that the train was already jammed and ‘men, women and children crowded round, shouting, yelling and weeping, pushing and jostling and banging one another with their luggage without distinction of age or sex’. Moon had made a plan with Professor Mehta, a respected community leader, that he would bravely travel not only into India but return to say how safe this route was. In the event the train did get through safely but Moon never saw Mehta again.

  Villagers across the Punjab said that one of the worst things about those weeks was that they had no information. There were no telephones. Gurdeep Singh, who would later become a major in the Indian Army, was seventeen in 1947. He found the indecision terrible.22 No one really knew what was going on, often until it was too late. In areas that had not yet been attacked it was difficult to know whether to leave or risk staying put. Some Hindus did decide to stay in Bahawalpur. Most were moved to a camp outside the city but a few remained under the protection of a shrine in the city centre. On 17 September, Moon heard shots coming from the precinct. Rushing over he found Bahawalpur state forces with their rifles trained on a terrified group of huddled Hindus who were being systematically robbed before their inevitable murder.

  Much as in India, violence in Pakistan spread well beyond the immediate area that Radcliffe’s pencil had divided. The splendidly named Maynard Hastings Pockson was at the Indian Army Staff College at Quetta, now well inside Pakistan. One day he noticed a black pall of smoke hanging over the bazaar. All the students were called in, given a revolver and twelve rounds of ammunition and told to patrol the city. A refugee train had come in from India and every man, woman and child on board had been found dead. The Quetta Muslims had subsequently turned on the Hindus. Pockson met a party of Pathans with axes on long poles, usually kept to cut branches for fodder. He asked them what they were doing. ‘Just looking around’, they said, unconvincingly. The massacre in the bazaar was terrible. Later Pockson was put in charge of a group clearing up the corpses. He told his men to separate Muslim from Hindu so that they could be accorded proper rites. His men looked perplexed. How could they tell? Pockson, surprised, said by seeing if the men were circumcised. His soldiers explained that every body they found had its private parts cut off.23

  Alongside the violence, the murders and the terror, the authorities in both India and Pakistan were also beginning to confront the enormous refugee problem. There was to be a macabre balance in weighing this human misery. Some 6.5 million Muslims were to flee India for West Pakistan and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs to leave West Pakistan for India. Looking after them would present both new governments with a major problem for years to come but the immediate issue that September was to gather them together in what were loosely known as camps, to protect them, get them food and water, prevent the outbreak of disease and then resettle them. In many ways they were the lucky ones in that they had at least survived but the conditions they had to endure could have persuaded them otherwise.

  The problem was that, with the demise of the PBF, there was no structure to manage the required organisation. On 3 September, Liaquat and Nehru toured the Punjab and then held a summit in Lahore. They agreed to make every effort to restore abducted women to their families, not to recognise forced conversions and to ensure the safety of respective places of worship in both East and West Punjab. Both governments would become custodians of all refugee property in an attempt to stop expropriation and looting. But the decision that had most immediate impact was confirmation that their respective armies would assume control of refugees and that some Indian troops could be stationed in Pakistan to escort Hindus and Sikhs east and vice versa for Pakistani troops to escort Muslims west. Yet all that was more easily agreed than actually done and the next weeks would be consumed with trying to put the policy into effect.

  The Indian government formed an Emergency Committee, which Patel asked Mountbatten, at his best in managing crises, to head. It was in some ways a strange request for the new administration to ask the last representative of the colonial power and it shows how much Congress both trusted Mountbatten and feared the consequences if they did not fix a situation that could have crippled the new nation in its infancy. Sandtas Kirpalani was drafted in to be its secretary. He was slightly surprised to be summoned to a Cabinet meeting in what was now the governor general’s house and even more surprised to find Mountbatten in the chair. Patel was beside him, his ‘usual dourly grim’ self. Sitting between Nehru and Baldev Singh was a new face, K. C. Neogy, whom Kirpalani recognised from the papers and who was, he was told, to be Minister of Refugees (soon changed to Relief and Rehabilitation). It was Kshitish Chandra Neogy who, as a member of the Bengal Assembly, had been so outspoken about the mismanagement of the 1942 Bengal famine. Kirpalani was to be his senior civil servant. It was an appointment that would expose him ‘to human tragedy on a colossal scale’ but he had ‘admiration akin to hero-worship’ for Nehru and it never entered his head to refuse. He would soon feel the same way about Neogy.

  After the meeting Neogy and he walked across to their new offices in North Block, one of the two monolithic administrative buildings that flank the approach to the governor general’s house. They were allocated six rooms without a stick of furniture. They found another room full of dusty desks and chairs awaiting division between India and Pakistan. They dragged out a table and two chairs. Kirpalani sat one end, Neogy at the other. Kirpalani stood up and said, ‘Sir, I am reporting that the Ministry of Refugees is officially open for business’.24

  In East Punjab the 4th Infantry Division of the Indian Army, under Brigadier Chimni, became the Military Evacuation Organisation that Rees had been demanding for the past weeks. Its job was to coordinate the movement of the remaining roughly three million Hindu and Sikh refugees in Pakistan; they estimated there were twenty big ‘camps’ or gatherings with over forty thousand each and then a further forty camps with five to ten thousand plus numerous small pockets spread over the countryside. They divided West Punjab into the ‘Near West’, being the area within 150 miles of the border and which they thought they could evacuate by foot and lorries while the ‘Far West’, lying beyond that, would have to be by train. They could deploy soldiers into Pakistan to achieve this but they had to work closely with the Pakistan Army who, although they had all been serving in the same regiments only weeks before, they were now beginning to distrust.

  The length and condition of the foot columns from the ‘Near West’ were, Mohindar Singh Chopra, recalled,

  incredible. Stretching for scores of miles, divided into scores of blocks with twenty to thirty thousand evacuees in each block. Every block was twenty to twenty five miles long, moving along the road with bullock carts, loaded to the brim with household go
ods, on which were perched children while the elders walked alongside. Sides of the roads had cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys and camels, their backs bent with heavy loads and raising a cloud of dust. Protecting this mass of the poor and wretched were a thin screen of troops. At ad hoc staging camps were positioned dumps of food consisting of gur, rice, atta and parched grain.25

  A similar plan was put in place to improve the evacuation of Muslims from East Punjab. There was, however, a marked difference of approach. The Sikh discipline and genius for organisation meant that their columns were becoming ‘carefully planned and executed with military precision. There was little or no interval between the bullock carts, in which the women and young children and goods and chattels were loaded, and all the men who were capable of bearing arms moved in front and on the flanks of the column’. Muslim columns were less well organised. They seemed ‘unpremeditated’. Columns ‘straggled hopelessly over fifty miles of road. From the air they looked like a pathetic stream of ants’.26

  An attempt was made to improve the security of trains but train massacres would continue until November. The attackers’ technique was either to tear up track to force the train to stop or to wait until it stopped in a station. The attacks were ferocious on both sides of the border. A train that left Lahore with Hindus and Sikhs on 21 September was ambushed by a Muslim mob at Harbanspura; 1500 people were massacred. A Dogra officer passing on the following train, which was moving men of his regiment from Rawalpindi to join the Indian Army, saw bodies all over the track. The smell in the area was dreadful. They arrived just over the border at Attari and were given a rousing welcome by the local Sikhs. The only topic of conversation was what had happened to the refugee train and they declared that not a single Muslim refugee train would be allowed through to Pakistan. Every one would be attacked and its occupants killed. A few miles further on towards Amritsar, at Khalsa, where there was a well-known Sikh college, the troop train was delayed. The line had been tampered with to create an ambush spot. This was where the Muslims were to be butchered.