The next day, 22 September, a Muslim refugee train was attacked there. Fortunately it had a small escort of sixteen soldiers who managed to hold off the jatha while the track was repaired. After the train had passed, its furious attackers did a more thorough job in destroying the line between the villages of Wagah and Attari. For the coming weeks refugees would have to make the actual crossing of the border on foot, meaning they were more vulnerable.
A second train was then attacked by a huge group of about eight thousand Sikhs. It again had a small escort, one British officer, one of those who was serving on with the Indian Army, and fourteen Hindu soldiers from the artillery. They held the attackers off until they ran out of ammunition. They tried to retreat into the substantial college buildings but were overpowered. The British officer and one of his havildars, a sergeant, were shot; the remaining soldiers were spared because they were Hindus. The butchery of the Muslims on the train then started. A Dogra company, sent out to help from Amritsar, four miles away, arrived too late although they did succeed in driving the mob away. The train was recovered to Amritsar. It had been carrying between 2,000 to 2,500 people. About one hundred were found still alive under the piles of their families’ bodies. It was unusual for British officers to be killed but several did lose their lives.
The Dogra officer’s troop train left Amritsar for Delhi at 3 p.m. on 23 September. The smell from the dead bodies on the platforms on the stations they passed was unbearable. Everywhere were groups of Sikhs with spears and swords and knives. The Dogras saw one large group converging on a stationary train that had been heading up to Amritsar; the train had no engine. Its driver, hearing of the impending attack, had decoupled the engine and gone on to Amritsar on his own. His Muslim passengers, stranded, must have known what would soon happen. They were all butchered.27
Time after time, as bloody day succeeded bloody day, where there were sufficient, adequately armed troops they succeeded in driving the attackers off, whether Muslim or the better-organised Sikhs. Major D. H. Donovan, a Gurkha officer, was preparing the route to evacuate a refugee column with two jeeps each carrying eight men armed with Bren guns. He had paused in a sunken track, observing the ground ahead through his binoculars, when he saw a cloud of dust slowly approaching. ‘After a short while it became clear that the cloud was caused by a large Sikh cavalry jatha for I could see their spears and fluttering pennants as they jogged along. The sun was behind me and it was about four o’clock in the afternoon.’
He realised that the jatha was poised to attack the village he was about to evacuate. He sent one jeep forward about five hundred yards with orders to open fire when he did. He let the jatha approach to within eight hundred yards; he estimated there were about five hundred of them. ‘All were mounted, carrying spears, kirpans and shields and the sight’, he thought, ‘might have been straight out of Arabian Nights.’ He opened fire, his forward jeep following suit. ‘Pandemonium set in among the Sikhs, who did not know which way to go. Then in absolute terror they turned and galloped off.’ The next day Donovan was able to escort 50,000 refugees safely to their staging camp.
The evacuation operations were just beginning to get more organised when they met with a major disaster. The monsoon should have started to ease off by the middle of September but instead, on 24 September, twenty inches of rain fell in three days. The River Beas, which flows east of Amritsar and so now well inside India, widened from half a mile to ten. The River Bein, normally a narrow stream, overnight became half a mile wide and the railway bridge collapsed. There had been a major staging camp beside the Bein. Two thousand people were lost. When the waters subsided the army recovered over five hundred bodies and two hundred dead bullocks, vital for people’s livelihoods. The local Sikh villagers turned out to help. Surprised, Bristow, commanding his brigade in the area, asked why. They said because ‘the floods were an act of God which made a difference’. Three days later they were back to attacking the people, with a jatha killing thirty of the wretched survivors and abducting ten young girls.28
The conditions in the ‘camps’ remained terrible. Ismay visited one of the staging areas for Muslims in East Punjab. There was no order to it, just a chaotic jumble of ‘men, women, children, bullocks, donkeys and carts. A handful of scoundrels in houses overlooking the site were amusing themselves by firing occasional shots into the midst of them. A Moslem woman was killed by a stray bullet shortly after my arrival and her husband and others rushed at me, screaming “Sahib! Help us!”.’ The next camp he saw was in an old fort. ‘Thousands of Moslems were herded within its walls. There was no shelter, no doctor, no sanitary arrangements, no means of communication’. Five women gave birth in the short time he was there, their babies being delivered into filth. He was again mobbed by people desperate for help. Lack of knowing what was happening was as bad in the camps as it was in the villages. There was no means of communication so rumour spread quickly. He gave an impromptu speech, saying that the Indian government was doing its utmost to help and to transfer them to Pakistan as soon as possible. As he was speaking there was a sudden storm of heavy rain. An umbrella was passed through the crowd so he shouldn’t get wet. He was too moved to complete his speech.29 He wrote, sadly, to his wife that he felt after a lifetime in India the British were finishing ‘with all our work destroyed and leaving behind anarchy and misery and measureless slaughter’.30
The refugees found the fear of the future and what would become of them as frightening as the deprivations of the camps themselves. Naffese Chohan, miserable on the platforms of Lahore station, crying bitterly for the life and security she and her family had so suddenly lost, recalled that their biggest problem was lack of money to buy food and clothes. They were there for a week without any proper food, living off scraps. They were moved away from Lahore in a column and temporarily housed in an abandoned farm. They were then transferred to a ‘camp’ but it was little better. Then, a relation, a sergeant in the Pakistan army, sent someone to search for them. After seven days he found them, starving and soaking. He gave them some money. They were able to eat again. But it would take a very long time for Naffese’s life to return to anything like normal.31
South of the Punjab, in the Princely states of Rajasthan, along the new frontier that ran south from Ferozepore, bordering the state of Bahawalpur through the desert, there was a smaller migration taking place. About eight hundred thousand Hindus and Sikhs would leave Karachi and the Sind for the Rajput states or Bombay; rather fewer Muslims would migrate the other way. There was violence in Karachi, and appropriation of property, as the Kirpalani family had discovered so tragically, but on the whole this was a more benign migration with both communities showing consideration for each other’s predicament. In fact the Princely states – Bikaner, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Udaipur and Jaisalmer – handled the issue considerably better than the British/Indian administration in the Punjab. Having finally decided to accede to India, Maharajah Hanwant Singh of Jodhpur declared that he had ‘two eyes’, one Hindu, the other Muslim. If any harm came to members of either community he would feel as if he had lost his sight. His kinsman Narinder Singh, considered very much the family intellectual, was just back from having finished his education at Sherborne School in England. The maharajah seized on him and sent him to manage the Jodhpur state railway terminus at Mirpur Khas, well inside Pakistan. Through his careful planning tens of thousands of Rajput Muslims passed safely into southern Sind while hundreds of thousands of Hindus moved into India. There is still an active Karachi-Jodhpur Friendship Society in Karachi today. Reception arrangements were also much better than in the Punjab, with the Rajput administrations, used to providing famine relief, making proper provision for refugees; there is still an area near the railway station in Jaipur known as Sindhi Camp.
Even in the Punjab there were ‘a few notable cases of humanity and kindness shown to the other community’, Rees noted in his report, ‘but these were very exceptional’.32 In the hamlet of Ajnala, near the village of Issapur, the Musl
im farmers and traders started to agitate against their Sikh landlords when rumours started that the area was to go to Pakistan. Two of the leading Sikhs, Sardar Ujagar Singh, and his nephew, Sardar Sahib Raghbir Singh Randhawa, gathered the local Sikh community together and insisted on no retaliation. To ensure their good behaviour they collected the kirpans. There was consequently no slaughter. Years later grateful Muslims would visit the Sikh family to express their gratitude. Two of the confiscated kirpans are now in the Partition Museum in Amritsar.
There was also very little violence in other parts of India with large Muslim populations, which the recent disturbances in Rampur, Bihar, and the United Provinces had suggested was likely. Once again Pandit Pant had acted swiftly in the United Provinces. He had authorised sweeping powers for the police and local authorities and forbidden the carrying of weapons, including the Sikh kirpans. Working with an effective military commander, General ‘Tiger’ Curtis, they threatened to impose martial law if any community took to the streets. By September the United Provinces were more or less calm.
Even more was to be lost with the demise of the PBF than the lives and homes of the Punjab. As early as 27 August articles started to appear in the Indian press strongly critical of its British officers. The Hindustan Times said they did not ‘rise to the occasion’, something the newspaper ascribed to them having lost interest in their jobs now that India was independent. The article went on to accuse what was left of the British administration of distributing arms among the Muslims in West Punjab and allowing Muslim officers free access to weapons while denying similar freedom to Hindus in Lahore. Rees, the paper asserted, was ‘not a happy choice’ as the PBF’s commander.33 Auchinleck protested, saying that it was articles like that which made it so difficult to get any British officers to stay on. He may have been missing the point. There was a feeling among the British officers that there was a deliberate campaign to marginalise them, driven partly by Congress but also partly by aspiring Indian officers who wanted to take over their jobs. Bristow, commanding the 11th Brigade in Jullundur, was surprised not to be consulted by Nehru when he visited. He met the local Sikh leadership, Hindu politicians and Brigadier K. S. Thimayya, Rees’s senior Indian adviser. Bristow liked and respected Thimayya, but felt he had a different view of the situation. Thimayya was an ‘ardent patriot with high ambitions for India’ while Bristow saw himself as ‘a neutral charged with saving the lives of over a million Muslims’. More significantly he thought that Thimayya had realised that, as communal fighting had started in Jammu, there was inevitably going to be conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir. Thimayya’s advice to Nehru was to disband the PBF as quickly as possible, get on with finalising the division of the army and get rid of the remaining British officers. That way India would be able to protect her interests, which could involve fighting Pakistan. It was a far-sighted, if depressing, analysis, and one that called into question once more the relevance of the elaborate joint machinery that the Partition Council had put in place only three months before.34
In the days after the PBF was disbanded this nationalist feeling in the Indian military, and accompanying criticism of Auchinleck, was to grow. On the same day that Mountbatten was asked to head the Indian Emergency Committee on Refugees, articles started appearing in the press demanding that Auchinleck resign and that the Supreme Headquarters be wound up. Auchinleck was accused of being pro-Pakistan. He had certainly always liked and respected Jinnah, whom he continued to see regularly, but to say that he was biased towards Pakistan at the expense of India was unfair; at that early stage his loyalty remained to the army, whichever side it went to. He did, however, lobby for stronger action against the Sikhs by the Indian government. ‘The present policy of half-measures and appeasement of the Sikhs on religious grounds is in my opinion worse than useless and is fraught with the gravest danger for the future’, he wrote to Mountbatten on 13 September. ‘I do not question the sincerity of the leaders’, he continued, but ‘I am sure that not one single Muslim in Delhi today believes in the smallest degree in the good faith or intentions of this Government’. He went on to say, trespassing more into the realm of rumour, that he believed the Sikhs intended to create a Sikh state, with its capital in Simla, in which there would be ‘very few if any Muslims and possibly not many Hindus either’. The Sikh Maharajah of Faridkot had, he maintained, ‘personally warned British ladies in Simla that it was time they got out as their turn might be coming soon. He told poor Miss Hotz to get rid of all her Muslim servants overnight from Wildflower Hall – which she managed to do though there were six corpses on the road outside her gate next morning’.35
The failure of the PBF was also used to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the Supreme Headquarters and this was a more justified criticism. Jenkins’s and then Rees’s continued and urgent demands for troops and resources had been consistently ignored while large numbers of troops, equipment and aircraft remained idle. Properly resourced, the PBF could have been effective. It could never have eliminated all the violence in the Punjab but it could certainly have contained it enough to suck the poison from India and Pakistan’s early bilateral relations. The British brigades, so near the Punjab at Meerut in the United Provinces, in Calcutta and Bangalore with their excellent rail links, in Deolali, near Bombay (the most unpleasant of Indian postings which British troops particularly hated for its heat and boredom and from which the term ‘going Doolally’ comes), in Karachi and actually in Jullundur in the middle of the Punjab itself, were never deployed. Their eighteen infantry battalions, five artillery regiments and three armoured regiments and well-found logistic support units were never used. The world would pay a heavy price for this failure.
Auchinleck’s position was actually under attack from another, unexpected angle. Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff in London, was also agitating for his removal. He wrote to Mountbatten on 1 September that: ‘It is my opinion that Auchinleck’s usefulness in India is finished. He is sixty-three; he has spent all his life in India under a previous regime; he is too old to re-adjust himself to new ideas which he dislikes in his heart. He is viewed with suspicion by the senior officers of the Indian army.’ He concluded, displaying the sentiment that made him so heartily disliked by his peers, ‘I personally consider that if you want military matters to run smoothly and efficiently you will have to remove Auchinleck’.36 It was a strong censure, even allowing for the two field marshals’ longstanding dislike of one another, which dated back to Montgomery superseding Auchinleck as commander of the 8th Army in North Africa before the battle of El Alamein.
But the final move against Auchinleck came from Nehru who told Mountbatten to get rid of him. Congress’ position was, much as Thimayya had briefed, that having a supreme commander and a supreme headquarters meant that it ‘towered over their own Navy, Army and Air Force commanders’. Criticism of this in the Indian Cabinet had been extensive and persistent. But there was also strong criticism of Auchinleck personally, that he regarded himself ‘as a champion of Pakistani interests’. The Cabinet had therefore decided to abolish the Joint Defence Council and the Supreme Headquarters and, as those British officers who had agreed to stay on serving in the armed forces were now under contract to their new employers, there was no requirement for them to have a command structure. Remaining British troops in India would come under a separate command until they had all been repatriated. The Indian Navy, Army and Air Force would continue to be commanded by British officers, respectively Admiral John Hall, General Sir Robert Lockhart and Air Marshal Sir Thomas Elmhirst, but they would report directly to their Indian ministers.
Mountbatten set all this out to Auchinleck in a long letter on 26 September. He concluded by reminding Auchinleck that he had often told him he ‘would willingly and indeed gladly fade out of the picture if I were at any time to tell you that this would help me personally or the general situation in this country’. That time, Mountbatten said, had now come and he enclosed a draft letter of resignation for Auchinleck to
send to him as chairman of the Joint Defence Council. Mountbatten had already secured Attlee’s agreement to Auchinleck’s removal, but had also obtained for him the offer of a peerage. In the event Auchinleck would decline it, saying that he felt he could not be honoured for having finished his career by dismantling his beloved Indian Army.37
He had never liked Mountbatten. It would not be the first time in British military history that personality issues have worked to prevent the correct application of policy. Auchinleck would later say that Mountbatten had, ‘made many false steps. Kashmir was a lasting disgrace and tragedy. He has a good deal to answer for. His knowledge of India and Indians was practically nil. Also he had some odd advisers’.38 It was strong criticism and partly unfair. Auchinleck himself must shoulder some of the blame for what happened in the Punjab. He became obsessed with the Indian Army as an institution, believing it had a life and importance above its duty to the people it served. It is a mistake many armies have made. In this case it had tragic consequences. Active lobbying by Auchinleck would also have allowed the deployment of those capable and bored British, Gurkha and non-class-based units in August 1947; this was his remit as much as Mountbatten’s. Instead of looking forward to a new India he could only think back to the old one, which had been his life. The flawed 1945 reconstitution of the army along ‘class’ lines, the subsequent reluctance to use it to suppress ‘internal unrest’, despite that being what it was there for, and an obsession dating back to the Mutiny that British troops were in India only to protect British lives were all major contributors to the tragedy of the Punjab.
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