Partition

by Barney White-Spunner

  One strong unifying force for all Pakistanis, whether in Karachi or Dacca, was a growing antipathy to India. The Indians were seen as exploiting their vulnerabilities and abetting the murder of their fellow Muslims as they tried to flee. India that October was, however, in just as desperate a situation as Pakistan. ‘Life here continues to be nightmarish’, lamented Nehru, ‘everything seems to have gone away’.26 Santdas Kirpalani was finding establishing the Ministry of Refugees challenging. In early October his minister, Neogy, had met Liaquat in Lahore to see whether it would be possible to establish a Joint Refugee Committee but the talks ended without agreement. However, the military liaison through a joint Movement Control Office, also in Lahore, did seem to be working after a fashion and both Trivedi, the Indian Governor of the East Punjab, and Mudie, the British Pakistani Governor of West Punjab, thought things were improving. However much the senior politicians might hurl insults at each other, and however savage local communities were, in mid-October official level cooperation remained workable.

  Like many officials in the new government in Delhi, Kirpalani was now exposed to just how thin the Raj’s administration had become in its final years. With the exodus of British ICS officers, the migration of many Muslim officers to Pakistan, and the lack of recruitment of Indian officers in recent months, he, like many of his colleagues, found they simply did not have the basic machinery of government they had assumed existed. He could not even find a secretary for himself and his minister. His old friend, Sir Narasima Sarma, editor of a Calcutta paper, Whip, appeared in his office one day and said he had found the perfect person. He then put the CV of a twenty-five-year-old Punjabi girl on Kirpalani’s desk. Kirpalani immediately retorted that it would be absolutely impossible. How could a girl stand up to the volume and nature of the work? Sarma persisted; Kirpalani was desperate. He finally gave in and Kamla Jaspal became his most efficient and hard-working assistant.

  Their task, Kirpalani noted with fortitude, seemed to be never-ending. The finance ministry wanted an estimate of the overall number of refugees and how long it would take to rehabilitate them all. But by the middle of October

  the end of the problem was nowhere in sight. In the third week of the month 570,000 Muslims moved east and 471,000 non-Muslims moved west.27 It was abundantly clear that non-Muslims all over West Punjab, the North West Frontier Province, Baluchistan and Bahawalpur were in a state of panic, beleaguered as they were in groups big and small, under constant threat of attack.28

  As the refugee organisation slowly got itself in order, and as the Military Evacuation Organisation began to bring some control to the refugee columns, so, horribly, the killing squads on both sides refined their techniques and tactics. Some of the very worst massacres would happen that month.

  A train carrying over two thousand Hindus and Sikhs from Mianwali in north-west Punjab was deliberately misrouted. It was stopped twenty miles before it reached Lahore and a well-prepared group of Muslim goondas attacked and massacred everyone on it, including its small Gurkha escort. On 23 October, at Jassar near Sialkot, 1,500 ‘non-Muslims’, having de-trained, were hacked to pieces as they were walking towards the border.

  There were also massacres in Bahawalpur. One of Kirpalani’s ‘beleaguered pockets’ was the Sikh population of Rahim Yar Khan. In September they had been subject to several attacks. Gurmani, the nawab’s conscientious prime minister, had been investigating one report when he had come across a bullock cart standing on a bridge over a canal. There seemed to be some knobbly things sticking out of it. On closer investigation he discovered these were arms and legs and that the cart was full of corpses. Two men who were with it ran off; Gurmani’s small escort from the Bahawalpur state forces fired at them but missed. They followed them into a village where they found 200 bodies lying in the open. Their crime had been to be Labana Sikhs who had been settled there by the nawab’s family in the last century.

  After that the remaining 2,000 to 3,000 Sikhs in the area were gathered together in two centres and demanded, with good reason, to be transported to India as soon as possible. The railway had, after Moon’s earlier successful organisation of Hindu refugee trains, now got too dangerous to use so the problem was how to move them out safely. Gurmani decided the best method was to put people into a protected column and march them through the desert to the border with Jaisalmer, adjoining the south-eastern part of Bahawalpur and which seemed to offer the most direct route to Indian territory. It was a two-day trek but the route was well used and with camels and donkeys provided to carry water and the women and children, it should be perfectly possible. The only problem was that the escort would have to be from the Bahawalpur state forces who by this stage neither Gurmani nor Moon trusted. Gurmani’s answer was to personally select a senior officer to command.

  The column of about 2,000 Sikhs left Rahim Yar Khan on 26 September. Moon was relieved to receive a report a week later that they had all reached the border in safety and the Sikhs had expressed their deep gratitude to the Bahawalpur troops. Yet something did not quite ring true. He went to Rahim Yar Khan to investigate. Slowly the truth came out. Before they started the Sikhs had been told to surrender what weapons they had. They refused but had eventually been talked into doing so. On the first night Bahawalpur soldiers had begun to search the Sikhs and take their property. There was a fight and several Sikhs were shot dead. The commanding officer, no doubt aware that they were still close enough to Rahim Yar Khan for people to slip away and report what had happened, was conciliatory and promised it would not happen again. The next day the column marched on and by that evening it was well into the desert, far away from any help. The commanding officer then announced that all the refugees’ belongings would be ‘confiscated’. Unarmed, the Sikhs could do nothing but acquiesce as their animals and valuables were systematically stolen. The loot was loaded onto military lorries and driven away. On 30 September the column stopped just short of the Indian border, which they expected to cross the next day. In the middle of the night the two Sikh leaders, Bakhtawar Singh and Bhag Singh, were woken and told the column must start to move immediately. They protested and were instantly bayoneted. The column was roused and started off again.

  They had not gone far when they heard the sound of firing ahead. They were told it was armed Hurs, the Hurs being a fanatical group of bandits who were known to operate along the border. The women needed to be separated for safety. They were then taken away to be divided up among the escort while the men, older women and children were told to make a run for it to the border. As they set off they were mown down by half the escort who had gone on ahead to ambush them and who had been responsible for the earlier alleged Hur firing. Running, terrified, through the desert, they were nearly all killed. Some did survive to reach Jaisalmer. Camels and search parties were sent out and managed to recover any wounded who were treated in hospital in Jodhpur but most of the 2,000 who had set off died in the desert.

  Inevitably the arrival of truckloads of loot and abducted women caused a stir when the escort returned. Moon and Gurmani managed to extract the whole story from an assistant police commissioner who had been present. The commanding officer was immediately arrested but within a couple of days he had escaped and made his way to Multan where he was beyond their reach.29

  News of such massacres caused an inevitable reaction on the Indian side of the border, making Kirpalani’s task all the more urgent. After the Jassar massacre, a crowd of 10,000 Sikhs tried to storm the Muslim refugee staging camp at the cattle ground outside Amritsar. The Indian troops on duty behaved well and turned them away.

  Slowly the refugee ministry began to produce results. The Military Evacuation Organisation was now beginning to work better but one unforeseen consequence was that the refugee columns were becoming unmanageably large. One group, which originated around Lyallpur, was ninety miles long and contained over one million people by the time it reached Lahore. Kirpalani went to see it. ‘It was a seething mass of humanity interspersed with bul
lock-carts, cattle, horses, camels, donkeys and bicycles. At night the convoy halted for refreshment and rest. The peasants had brought along quantities of grain and flour. They collected brushwood, lit fires and cooked camp rations. Wayside pools, puddles and ponds provided water for cooking and drinking.’ Kirpalani became very concerned about cholera. A call went out across India for vaccine and ‘Operation Needle’ produced an amazing response, not enough to vaccinate that whole column but a vaccination programme was in place in Indian camps by October.

  The convoy marched for five days without mishap; there were sporadic attacks but they were beaten off by the accompanying Indian escort. On the sixth day, by which time they had covered about half the distance to the border, the heavens opened. The rain was at first welcome but then it became torrential. The refugees couldn’t light fires and so could not cook. They were already on a subsistence diet and now there was no food.

  A call went out on the radio. Indians should make chapattis by the million and deliver them to Palam airfield in Delhi. The response was overwhelming. The air force was holding planes in waiting and the plan was to air-drop sacks of these flat loaves to the waiting refugees. But the plan hit an unforeseen snag in that, as the military pointed out, sacks of chapattis dropped from a height would be lethal and, with so many people around, it would be impossible to find clear space. One of the new Indian Air Force’s first experimental missions thus became how to deliver chapattis safely by air. When they dropped the loaves without sacks from normal parachute height they found they had disintegrated by the time they reached the ground. The ingenious method they ultimately arrived at was to open the sacks, then fly low over the column dispensing them so that the chapattis arrived in a widespread shower. The convoy duly arrived safely in Ferozepore, where it took over a week for all the refugees to cross the border and disperse to camps.

  Another huge column, over 1.5 million strong, was organised to take Muslims from Gurgaon, where there had been so much violence in May and June, and the surrounding areas near Delhi, into Pakistan. With so many people on the move there was always the danger of columns meeting. One evening a signal came through that two huge columns, one of Hindus from Sargodha in Pakistan and the other of Muslims from Hoshiarpur in India were, due to an error in coordinating timing, going to meet head on. The authorities braced themselves for a bloodbath. Kirpalani lay awake all night, dreading the news the next day. To his amazement, although both columns did meet, the refugees greeted each other and asked their opposite numbers to take care of property and animals left behind.

  Other measures were also slowly beginning to help. The United Provinces had taken on the task of providing lorries for the Military Evacuation Organisation. By October the redoubtable Pandit Pant had sent 2,000, making a significant difference to escorting refugees to the staging camps. Later that month the Indian government approached the British Overseas Airways Corporation, BOAC, one of the forerunners of today’s British Airways, asking whether they could help collect the scattered Hindu groups from deep inside Pakistan. They agreed to provide twenty-five Dakota DC3s. The seats were stripped out so that an aircraft that was designed to take twenty-two passengers could take over a hundred. They were dispatched, in close cooperation with the Pakistani authorities, to remote airfields. There were pathetic scenes as there was never enough room to take everyone who was waiting, with people clinging onto wings and tailplanes rather as they had done to trains, arguing that they were not taking up any space. The air operation continued for ten weeks, rescuing close to 200,000 refugees.

  Distribution of refugee property was itself becoming a major political issue. There was a supposition among refugees, given that most had lost everything when they fled, that the new governments would compensate them by allocating property that had belonged to families who had fled the other way. Nehru, backed by Maulana Azad as the leading Congress Muslim voice, had, however, decreed that property should remain under the protection of a Custodian of Refugee Property until it could be determined whether the owners were ever coming back. Nehru remained determined that Congress should speak for all Indians, and he still saw Pakistan as a temporary aberration. Moveable property was considered too difficult to monitor and police but the custodian took over the care of Muslim houses in Delhi, many of which were very valuable. The custodian could allocate empty property but only if he was sure that the government’s condition had been met and there was no chance that the owner might return, obviously a very difficult fact to establish. Secondly, there was not nearly enough property to go round and there was the inevitable corruption with people trying to get possession. Outside Delhi it was more of a free for all, with Muslim property in the Punjab villages looted and occupied, with a very similar situation in Pakistan. Commandeering of the best houses in cities like Karachi and Dacca left many Hindus badly affected and was one of the most contentious issues in trying to establish Jinnah’s society where all people enjoyed equal rights.

  The Pakistani refugee organisation more or less mirrored Neogy and Kirpalani’s Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation. On 11 September West Punjab had established a Rehabilitation Commissioner; by mid-October his office had become a Refugee Council, presided over by Liaquat in person. Similar councils were then set up in Sind and the North West Frontier Province. Jinnah led the public appeal for support much as Nehru was doing in India. ‘Let every man and woman resolve from this day to live henceforth strictly on an austerity basis in respect of foodstuffs, clothing.’ What they saved should be ‘Brought to the common pool for the relief of the stricken’,30 he announced as he launched the Quaid-i-Azam Relief Fund. Refugee camps were set up initially across the Punjab; the first was in Lahore Boy Scout camp and the scout staff were drafted in to run it. Each camp held 42,000 people in six blocks of 7,000 each, and soon there were more operating across the country. An appeal for quilts to be knitted as some protection against the coming cold produced 35,000 in Lahore alone. Liaquat received a huge response to his calls to Muslim countries to donate clothes and to his appeal in London for volunteers to help run the camps.

  Local cooperation remained good for the first three weeks of the month. Mohindar Singh Chopra, now promoted to brigadier, was posted to Amritsar in October to assume command of an infantry brigade. His daughter sat in the front of the army truck carrying their possessions as they travelled to their new home. She had been through quite a lot in the last few months, moving from Ambala to Assam, then back to Delhi lying on the floor of the train to avoid being shot, and now was on the move again. As they crossed the River Beas, nearing Amritsar, the first thing she noticed was the ‘awful stench – that of the dead, both human and animal, with trees devoid of leaves, no grass, only a terrible stillness. A slowly moving snake of humanity was going towards Amritsar, carrying children and the infirm, slowly trudging through the dust and haze’. As they crossed the bridge over the Beas they saw a large and agitated crowd. An old man had been thrown into the river as he was too slow to keep up. Beyond the Beas the scenes became even worse, with ‘mile upon mile of devastation, a desolate and arid vista of animal carcasses and leafless trees, bringing to mind just what hell must look like’.31

  In Amritsar, Singh Chopra, who knew the city of old, was horrified. It was a ‘shambles and overrun by refugees’. What upset his daughter most was the ‘Recovered Women’s’ camp. Their situation was particularly pathetic. They had, they said, been abandoned by their men and left to the Muslims. ‘Now that we have been ravaged and allocated places in their homes, you want to once again uproot us and for what . . . will our families accept us after all this?’ Many would not. Some of the women were defiant and angry but others just seemed ‘dejected and mentally disturbed. They sat in the corner with their faces covered and shrieked or fainted whenever the shadow of a man fell on them.’ One day she also saw a train at Amritsar station that had crossed the recently reopened border full of dead. It had ‘Qatil Karna Hamse Seeko’ (which roughly translates as ‘Learn to kill Sikhs!’) scra
wled all over it. A few days later she saw a train full of massacred Muslims being dispatched to Pakistan with ‘Qatil Karna Seekhliya’ (roughly ‘The Sikhs have learned to kill’) scrawled on it in return.32

  There was still an occasional act of mercy to lighten the overall sense of gloom, albeit few happy endings. Singh Chopra received a letter from Kehar Singh, an elderly Sikh from Tarn Taran, a small town just south of Amritsar with an important gurdwara. He had taken pity on a Muslim girl who was about to be killed by a jatha. Her husband and all her family had been killed and she had nothing left. Kehar Singh paid the jatha leader 350 rupees for her. He fell in love with her, she converted to Sikhism, became known as Pritam Kaur, and they duly married. She was happy and did not want to go to Pakistan. One day, walking through the town, the police seized her to send her off to a refugee camp. She broke down in tears, insisting that she wanted to stay with Kehar, but the police ignored her. Could the brigadier please help? Kehar pleaded but it was too late.