by Nisid Hajari
He decided to force matters. A week after Attlee’s announcement, the Punjab premier released all of the detained League protesters and lifted the ban on processions. (He had previously reversed his prohibition against militias like the League’s Guards.) Then, just before midnight on Sunday night, 2 March, Khizar phoned the League’s local chief, Khan Iftikhar Hussain Khan Mamdot, and announced he was stepping down.
The forty-year-old Mamdot was a landowning aristocrat, the son of a former Unionist luminary. By some accounts he was not the most sophisticated politician—the “dumb wrestler” was one of his nicknames—but he was thoroughly loyal to Jinnah and a hard-liner on Pakistan.7 As leader of the biggest party in the Punjab legislature, he should have been in line to replace Khizar. He needed only a few Hindu or Sikh votes to gain a workable majority.
Just as Khizar had predicted, though, the mere prospect of the League taking over the Punjab incensed non-Muslims. The next day, as news of the resignation spread and jubilant Leaguers filled the streets of Lahore, Congress and Akali legislators rushed to confer. They pledged formally not to join any Mamdot-led government so long as the Muslim League persisted in its demand for an independent Pakistan. Long-bearded Master Tara Singh shaded his eyes from the sun as he emerged from the legislature building. A crowd of Leaguers had gathered outside to heckle the Hindu and Sikh politicians, shouting “Quaid-i-Azam Zindabad!” and “Pakistan Zindabad!” Tara Singh whipped his kirpan out of his scabbard and waved it above his head. “Pakistan Murdabad!” he roared. Death to Pakistan!8
Throughout the city and beyond, Hindus and Sikhs took up the cry. At a huge rally in Lahore that evening, their leaders vowed to resist Muslim domination of the Punjab by any means necessary. These were not empty threats; with nearly fifty thousand local members, the RSSS was even better established in the Punjab than the League’s Guards.9 The next morning, mobs assaulted Muslims wearing green League badges and trampled on League flags. A rowdy procession of Hindu students overran a Lahore police outpost, killing two constables. In Amritsar, Sikhs set fire to Muslim homes and bazaars.
The Punjab tinderbox had its match. That year, Holi, the springtime festival where participants celebrate by dancing and flinging colored powder at one another, fell on 5 March. In the western Punjab city of Multan, a “local Sikh fanatic” called on his followers to celebrate the holiday “with blood” instead of paint.10 Muslims struck first, killing close to two hundred Hindus and Sikhs in various parts of the city in less than three hours. Muslims also went on the offensive in the garrison town of Rawalpindi, home to the Indian Army’s Northern Command, and in several smaller cities. In Amritsar, as Muslims retaliated for the previous day’s attacks, “most of the population seem to have produced arms,” Sir Evan Jenkins reported.11 Detachments of the League’s National Guards from Sind and Delhi—their movements “well-organised and arranged,” according to the Intelligence Bureau—headed for the Punjab.12
As with the Calcutta Killing, India’s national politicians appeared to underestimate the chaos they had unleashed. Jinnah, now recovered and back home at his Bombay mansion, watched the tumult in the distant Punjab with equanimity. With no coalition in sight, Jenkins had assumed control over the disturbed province himself under so-called Section 93, which allowed the British governor to override the legislature. The Quaid demanded that Jenkins install a League ministry in Lahore instead. On 5 March, as the Holi riots were raging, a pair of U.S. diplomats had tea with Jinnah and urged him to seek a compromise with Congress before the violence spread even further. The Quaid dismissed their advice. “We have made sacrifices,” Jinnah curtly reminded the Americans. “We are willing to . . . die for Pakistan. Why talk of compromise when there is no basis for compromise?”13
In Delhi, Nehru and the rest of the Congress high command met the following day. Hindu and Sikh legislators from the Punjab besieged them, begging for help. They described the awful stillness that had settled over once-raucous Lahore. Jenkins had imposed a curfew and temporarily banned the sale of gasoline, to thwart the wave of arson attacks. Only a few bullock carts and horse-drawn tongas now trundled down the Mall, as if it were a village road. The phone lines had gone dead. Piles of still-smoking rubble littered the streets. In Lahore’s old quarter, where behind ancient stone walls houses piled atop one another in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, slapped-together barricades divided Hindu from Muslim lanes. Rumors claimed the city’s water supply had been poisoned.14
The visitors pressed an interim solution on the Congress leaders, one that Nehru had been mulling for weeks himself. They suggested dividing the Punjab immediately, creating separate ministries for East and West Punjab. The move would effectively surrender the Muslim-dominated western districts of the province to the League. But at least this way, Jinnah would never muster the numbers he needed to seize the rest.
Nehru later admitted that “when Congress referred to the partition of the Punjab, they had not gone into the question in any great detail.”15 He and the rest of the high command never looked at a map of the province, never calculated—even roughly—where a border dividing the Punjab would run. Wavell had produced just such a map over a year earlier, one that foreshadowed the eventual border almost exactly, but he had shared it only with the India Office in London, not with any of the Indian leaders.16
Nehru, who had almost no experience in actual administration, could not have explained how the civil service would be divided so that each of the new Punjabs would run properly. How would budgets for education and health be split? What about Muslim officials serving in the East and Hindu officials serving in the West? Would they be allowed to switch sides? What would happen to the middle of the province, where the Sikh holy places were concentrated and all three communities had an important presence? The fates of Lahore—a Muslim city whose economy was dominated by non-Muslims—and of the hundreds of thousands of Sikhs whose lands lay in the fertile, well-irrigated “canal colonies” of the western Punjab were not discussed. The Congress leaders approved the idea on 8 March after only a day’s deliberation.
The Congress resolution was more a threat than a serious proposal. Jinnah had enticed his followers with the grand vision of a Pakistan that would stretch across much of northern India. Dividing the Punjab would bring home the less-rosy reality. Congress still controlled the Northwest Frontier Province and Assam, as well as all the “Hindu” provinces. If the British decided to hand power over to the existing provincial governments in June 1948, Muslims could not count on getting more than Sind, useless Baluchistan, and now a crippled Punjab and Bengal. “The truncated Pakistan that remains will hardly be a gift worth having,” Nehru wrote to a friend in London.17
For the first time, the Congress resolution implicitly accepted the idea that India might be divided into two nations. But, Nehru assured Gandhi, such a weak and misbegotten Pakistan could “never succeed economically or otherwise.”18 Even if formed, it would soon have to reunite with the rest of India.
The message to the League was clear: if they wanted their full Pakistan, they would have to fight for every inch of ground. News of the resolution appeared in newspapers on Sunday morning, 9 March. Jenkins feared it “would almost certainly be treated by the Muslims as a challenge,” he wrote to the viceroy that afternoon. Already attacks were spreading out of the Punjab’s cities and main population centers—where troops and police could easily be concentrated—and into surrounding villages. “We will do our best to keep the trouble out of the rural areas,” Jenkins concluded, without tremendous conviction. “But if we fail,” he warned, “widespread massacres are inevitable.”19
It was already too late.
In the western Punjab’s villages, Muslims outnumbered Hindus and Sikhs more than four to one. Huge Muslim mobs started to form, armed with lathis, scythes, and spears. The head of Northern Command, Lt.-Gen. Sir Frank Messervy, was throwing a coming out party for his daughter at Command House in Rawalpindi when the first reports of trouble flooded in.
The next morning, he flew over nearby hamlets in a light plane. “It was a horrible sight,” he recounted. The mobs had swept through the area like locusts. “You could see corpses laid out in the fields just outside a village, like rabbits after a shoot.”20
Messervy was a lifelong Indian Army officer who had battled Rommel’s forces in the Western Desert and chased the Japanese through the jungles of Burma. The Nazis had overrun his headquarters in Africa—he had escaped by disguising himself as a valet—and he had lost two whole brigades to the Japanese at Imphal.21 Yet even he was unsettled by the one-sidedness of the Muslim assault. As far as he could tell, the countryside massacres “seemed to be almost entirely anti-Sikh.”22
Messervy’s own intelligence officer had gone to the Rawalpindi rail station to buy a ticket; he returned ashen. While standing in line he had suddenly felt a weight against his back. A Sikh slumped against him, “stabbed in the back and dead.” No one around would admit to seeing anything. The British wife of another officer said her train had been stopped at dawn before reaching the city, and she awoke to bloodcurdling shrieks and groans. Raising the blinds of her compartment, she was horrified to see Sikhs being dragged out of carriages and hacked to pieces alongside the tracks. One of the blood-spattered killers—a Muslim—had tried to calm her. “Don’t be frightened, memsahib. No one will harm you,” he said gently. “We’ve just got this job to do and then the train will go on.”23
Unlike the initial riots in Lahore and Amritsar, these attacks were not random and spontaneous. In rural mosques, ringleaders warned Muslim villagers that huge Sikh jathas had formed and were marching on their homes. Speakers tearfully evoked the devastated streets of cities like Amritsar, which they claimed were littered with corpses of Muslims, slaughtered by Sikhs.
Some of the instigators were League Guards, others were local officials or even policemen; several were Muslim ex-soldiers inspired by the call for Pakistan.24 They were not necessarily operating under direct orders from above: no evidence has emerged that implicates the League’s top Punjab leaders like Mamdot in the slaughter, let alone Jinnah himself. Nonetheless, a terrified and isolated Sikh peasant had to assume this was what “Pakistan” meant—a thousands-strong rabble, pounding drums and howling, their forest of spear tips glinting in the torchlight.
On Sunday afternoon, as Jenkins was dictating his letter to Wavell, a crowd of hundreds of Muslims gathered on the edges of the western Punjab village of Qazian. As darkness fell they advanced to the sound of drums, setting fire to Sikh homes, shops, and a gurdwara, or temple. A local Sikh, Sant Singh, fired at the attackers, killing one and driving off the rest. The next day, the mob returned at twice the size. Dozens of Sikhs who had taken shelter at the home of the Muslim village headman were hauled out, stripped of their crude weapons, and killed. Three Sikh girls were raped out in the open. The mob threw a rope around Sant Singh’s neck, dragged him to a firewood stall, and hacked him to death with axes before lighting his corpse on fire.25
Similar scenes were repeated in village after village. Refugees fleeing eastward could see long columns of smoke rising across the flat countryside, each marking another hamlet aflame. “If communal trouble developed in the rural parts of a large number of districts,” Messervy had warned Jenkins in Rawalpindi, “it would be virtually uncontrollable.”26 Troops were already spread thin, the bulk of their reserves committed to riot work in the cities and towns. As in Bihar, many villages were only accessible by dirt tracks or bridle paths. The Muslim mobs roamed unchecked day after day for almost two full weeks.
Jenkins estimated that something like four thousand Punjabis, almost all of them Sikhs and Hindus, lost their lives in that fortnight of violence.27 The true toll of the riots went beyond the casualty count, though. The attacks seemed designed to humiliate and terrorize Sikhs, to drive them out of the western Punjab entirely. Razed homes were plowed up immediately so that their former inhabitants could not return and rebuild. A mob descended on Tara Singh’s ancestral village, killing one of his uncles and making a point of burning his childhood home to the ground. Muslim goondas in Amritsar reportedly sent sacks of glass bangles to their counterparts in Lahore, to mock them for fighting like women and not killing enough Sikhs.
Despite the weight of their common history, Muslims and Sikhs were not necessarily doomed to fight. The two communities shared many similarities. Both religions emphasized the equality of all men, unlike caste-ridden Hinduism, and both worshipped according to a holy book. Both were deeply attached to their martial traditions. Each had cherished memories of its time ruling over the Punjab, yet also knew the anxiety of living as a minority in a Hindu sea.
Jinnah was not the only one who believed that Sikhs would be better off casting their lot with the League. If the Punjab remained whole, with perhaps its easternmost, Hindu-dominated tip lopped off, the province’s 5 million Sikhs would form a substantial and influential minority within Pakistan and especially within its army. On the other hand, if the province—and hence their community—were split in half as the Congress was now demanding, Sikhs would be reduced to an even smaller and less-powerful presence in both countries.
To Jinnah the logician, that prospect seemed self-evidently foolish. At the London talks in December, while he had snubbed Nehru, the League leader had “most indefatigably” wooed Sikh defense minister Baldev Singh, who had accompanied Nehru on the trip.28 Years later, Singh recalled the Quaid flourishing a matchbox in front of him. “Even if Pakistan of this size is offered to me, I will accept it,” Jinnah had declared. “But . . . if you persuade the Sikhs to join hands with the Muslim League, we will have a glorious Pakistan, the gates of which will be . . . in Delhi itself.”29
The problem was that Jinnah never backed up his grand statements with real, concrete assurances. At one meeting with Master Tara Singh and other Akali Dal leaders, he offered to give the Sikhs a blank sheet of paper on which to list their demands, which he pledged to sign without a glance. Yet the Quaid wouldn’t commit to incorporating those concessions into a future Pakistani constitution. No need to worry, he had said breezily: “My word in Pakistan will be like the word of God. No one will go back on it.”30 The Sikh leaders had been unimpressed.
Any chance of compromise was lost after the March massacres. The slaughter traumatized the proud and close-knit Sikh community: “Our mustaches have been lowered” became a common refrain.31 Incendiary images from the riots seared themselves into Sikh minds. In the village of Thoa Khalsa, dozens of Sikh women had hurled themselves into a well to save themselves from being captured and raped by a Muslim mob—a dishonor to their minds worse than death. Months later, Attlee himself received a set of black-and-white photographs from a friend visiting the Punjab that included gruesome images from the scene.32 In the pictures, shot from above, bloated and waterlogged bodies curl up next to one another almost tenderly. Their silk scarves, or dupattas, billow around them like clouds.
Sikh leaders did not wait to start planning their answer to the attacks. On 19 March, Tara Singh secretly dispatched letters to the two most powerful Sikh princes in the Punjab: Maharajah Yadavindra Singh of Patiala and Rajah Harinder Singh of Faridkot. Independent Sikh kingdoms like theirs lay scattered across the central and eastern Punjab, running up into the foothills of the Himalayas. The biggest fielded their own British-trained armies, with mortars, armored cars, and sometimes even aircraft. Tara Singh hoped to enlist those forces in the task of revenge.
In his letter, the Akali leader proposed a byzantine scheme.33 Rather than depend on the British or the Congress to protect their interests, Sikhs would seize the Punjab for themselves. Faridkot’s battalions were to occupy the British-run districts that surrounded his territory; Patiala was to do the same further east. Tara Singh and his deputy, Giani Kartar Singh, would meanwhile raise an irregular force of blue-turbaned Akalis, many of them ex-servicemen, to seize Lahore, Amritsar, and the Sikh holy places in the central Punjab. Jinnah could have the far western reaches of the province. T
he rest would unite in an independent Sikhistan.
The plot sounded crazy, like some seventeenth-century intrigue—“all very reminiscent of de Boigne, Dupleix, and the rest,” a British general dryly remarked, recalling the buccaneering era when the British and French schemed and fought for territory along the coasts of India.34 The Sikhs were deadly serious, however. Muslims had “made a dead set” at their community, in Jenkins’s words, and they did not plan to surrender the initiative again. Quietly Tara Singh began crisscrossing the province, visiting Patiala and Faridkot to argue the merits of his proposal personally. In Faridkot, he and Giani Kartar Singh borrowed a military jeep and bumped along from village to village, warning Sikh farmers “that the time was coming when they would have to settle with the Muslims.”35
Separately, the Giani met with three hundred Akali cadres and exhorted them to prepare for war. He handed each a five-page pamphlet listing the supposed Sikh casualty counts from the recent riots. The entries for each village were short and lurid. “Domel: none out of the 1,500 Sikhs is alive. Women murdered in cold blood. 70 young girls forcibly converted to Islam.” One Lahore newspaper ran an ad calling on Sikhs to contribute to a 5-million-rupee war chest to buy arms. Sardar Baldev Singh, the defense minister in New Delhi, was listed as treasurer.36
Jenkins’s judgment was unsparing. Borrowing the viceroy’s plane, he had spent the past two weeks racing from one hot spot to another, trying to tamp down the riots. The Indian politicians hadn’t proved much help. Mamdot and the local Leaguers awaited instructions from Jinnah, who neither visited the Punjab nor expressed sympathy for Sikh victims. A procession of Delhi ministers, starting with Nehru, did arrive to survey the carnage. But the governor found most of these flyby visits worse than useless. “These [national] politicians have no contacts with anyone but their own followers and allies,” he complained.37 Often communal tensions rose after they showed up, rather than easing.