by Nisid Hajari
Nehru sounded more determined and focused than he had in weeks. There could be no two views about the task at hand, he declared: “This must be put down and suppressed.”36 India was responsible for protecting Muslims on its side of the border and would do so. His government’s first challenge, Nehru told a huge crowd from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Old Delhi, would be to “ruthlessly suppress” all sectarian killings.37
Nehru convinced Liaquat—Pakistan’s first prime minister, who had flown in from Karachi to receive the official boundary award that day—to come with him to the Punjab. In the city of Ambala, in the new Indian province of East Punjab, they met with the two new governors, Sir Francis Mudie and Sir Chandulal Trivedi, as well as several of their ministers and top Sikh leaders. Nehru took charge immediately. First he sat the Sikhs down privately and laid into them.38 Tara Singh did not deny that Sikh leaders had for weeks been “openly inciting their followers to violence and had approved of most of what they had done up-to-date,” Nehru later reported to Mountbatten. Still, Singh acknowledged that matters “now had gone too far.”39 The Akali leader promised Nehru that he would travel through Amritsar and the surrounding countryside with Giani Kartar Singh to call off the jathas.
Mudie, the West Punjab governor, believed that the first order of business should have been to evacuate minorities from Amritsar and Lahore as quickly as possible—to reduce the possibility of friction. Nehru thought this a counsel of despair. He wanted to discourage the idea that Hindus and Muslims could not live together, and as in Bihar, he was convinced of his ability to make his countrymen see reason. Against Mudie’s objections, he toured Lahore the next day with Liaquat and chastised local Muslim leaders. Later, the two prime ministers did the same with Sikhs in Amritsar.
Remarkably, within a few days, shops began to reopen in the Punjab’s two principal cities. His tour had “produced good results,” Nehru wrote confidently to Gandhi on 22 August, one week after the independence celebrations.40 The killings in Amritsar and Lahore appeared to have slowed.
The few hours that Nehru and Liaquat had spent on the ground, however, probably had little to do with the improvement. More importantly, Auchinleck had dispatched two more infantry brigades and one mixed squadron of armored troops to the Punjab. Concentrated in relatively compact urban areas, they were able to shunt aside the biased police and overwhelm any potential opposition. At the same time, minorities in the two cities ignored Nehru’s advice and abandoned their homes as quickly as they could, choking the 35 miles of road between Lahore and Amritsar with their cars, trucks, and horse- and bullock-carts. By 19 August, only a couple thousand Sikhs remained in Lahore. The real lesson of these first battles in the Punjab’s civil war was a bleak one: the killings stopped when there was no one left to kill.
“Sounds like a loose rail there,” murmured D. G. Harington-Hawes. On 18 August, the Briton was crammed into a train engine with the driver and a Hindu soldier as they crossed a canal bridge in the Ferozepore district.41 They had left the other cars of the Calcutta-Lahore Mail behind at the previous station while they tried to discover why no signals were coming from the posts ahead. It turned out that someone had removed two joints from the rails on the bridge; a pickaxe lay nearby. In this part of Ferozepore, the countryside was mostly flat and open, but at intervals, great clumps of a coarse, reedlike grass grew as much as 10 feet high. Harington-Hawes saw three Sikhs dodging through the grass about 200 yards away. He fired his revolver once in their direction.
Returning to the rest of the train, the men decided to reattach the passenger cars and proceed before the line was sabotaged further. Although they didn’t realize it at the time, most of the Hindu and Sikh passengers had mysteriously disembarked. When the train reached the canal bridge again, the wooden ties were charred—the Sikhs had tried to set the bridge on fire—and an entire rail had been removed. The three men were able to reattach the rail, and the train hurtled forward. But a mile before the next station, the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes and shouted, “My God, the track’s gone!” Harington-Hawes remembered thinking, “Now we’re for it,” and “with squealing brakes, escaping steam, and a roaring and a crashing, the heavy locomotive plunged off the track . . . dragging the tender and the first three coaches after it.”
At the spot where they had derailed, the grass grew high and close to the tracks. Harington-Hawes could see the outlines of a large body of Sikhs hiding there, and more rushing to join them. It was dusk; knowing that the train carried a small escort, the fighters seemed content to wait for nightfall before attacking. Soon there were hundreds of them. From the reeds came a chilling, triumphant cry: “Wah Guruji ki fateh!” (Victory to the Guru!).
A day earlier, All-India Radio had broadcast the details of Radcliffe’s boundary award. In that morning’s papers, maps showed Punjabis precisely how their province would be sliced up. The details of the border should not have come as a great surprise, other than the transfer of parts of Gurdaspur and Ferozepore to India. But Sikhs now had to abandon any hope of a more generous allotment from the Boundary Commission or a last-minute intervention by Mountbatten. It was official: Jinnah’s Pakistan had split their community in two.
That year, the end of Ramadan and the holiest day in the Muslim calendar, Eid, fell on 18 August. For Muslims living in the eastern Punjab, that was also the day when “the whole countryside seemed to have gone up . . . as if on a prearranged signal,” as Harington-Hawes later wrote. Not just in Ferozepore but in the districts of Hoshiarpur, Gurdaspur, and Jullundur—all in the now-Indian half of the Punjab—large, well-armed jathas swept down on Muslim villages and swarmed into Muslim neighborhoods in cities to begin methodically massacring their inhabitants. The Sikhs were merciless and single-minded; some cried “Rawalpindi” as they struck to invoke the March slaughter. This was revenge.
When Boundary Force brigadier R. C. B. Bristow visited the city of Jullundur the next morning, the streets were deserted, except for the armed Sikhs who had poured in overnight. Corpses filled Muslim homes. The police had vanished. Sikhs used long poles with burning rags at the tips to set fire to buildings where other Muslims still cowered. A Muslim magistrate later told Bristow that at the end of the first day’s assault in Hoshiarpur city, “blood was pouring from the upper storeys into the streets below.”42
The Sikh war bands appeared to be “working under some centralised control,” General Rees reported, with orders delivered by messengers on foot, on horseback, and in jeeps.43 They employed “sound and enterprising tactics”—almost military in their precision.44 After surrounding a Muslim village, the Sikhs would often attack in waves. A vanguard would hurl grenades over the walls while others set fire to the thatch huts and swordsmen hacked down those trying to flee.45 Rees himself interrupted an attack that more closely resembled a War College exercise than a riot. A distinguished-looking Sikh stood by his car beside the road, “with a little staff round him, and two messengers with bicycles.” In the fields, his men had torched a Muslim village. As victims ran screaming from the flames, the jatha commander kept an eye out for stragglers and calmly repositioned his fighters to intercept them.46
Hardcore militants traveled in groups as small as a couple dozen and as large as five hundred men. Where they appeared, they would rally Sikh villagers to join in their assaults, often swelling the size of mobs into the thousands. In some cases, Boundary Force troops tolerated attacks. In Jullundur, Bristow came across a tank unit manned by Hindus from the Jat peasant caste firing harmlessly in the air above a gang of Sikh marauders. When he demanded to know why they were shooting high, the Jat officer told him innocently that their guns had been set for anti-aircraft fire and couldn’t be lowered. “The Jat soldiers were not unfriendly, but conveyed by their demeanor that the Raj had ended, and the conflict should be left to them to settle in their own way,” Bristow recalled.47
This was not “civil war” as it is normally imagined, with Hindu and Muslim peasants suddenly and inexplicably picking up
whatever sharp implements happened to be closest to hand and slashing away at one another. (In fact, Hindus hardly seem to have participated in these initial attacks.) Instead, the Sikhs appeared to have launched the concerted assault jatha leader Mohan Singh had predicted over the summer—an ethnic-cleansing campaign to denude India’s half of the Punjab of its Muslims. Years later, Faridkot’s constitutional adviser Ajit Singh Sarhadi admitted there was at least some design behind the jathas’ rampages. “The main effort of . . . the Akali High Command was to somehow get the East Punjab vacated from the Muslims, who [w]ould be made to migrate to Pakistan,” he wrote. The maharajah, he added, had done “a great service” by helping to arm the Sikh war bands.48
The Pakistan government would eventually produce a series of pamphlets with titles like The Sikh Plan that claimed to prove a conspiracy lay behind the attacks. The case for this is circumstantial at best, and it ignores the fact that mobs—smaller and less organized, admittedly—had also sprung up on Pakistan’s side of the border. Many British accounts are biased by stereotypes of the Sikhs as a turbulent, hot-tempered community—a people who had, as Jenkins put it, “not lost the nuisance value which they have possessed through the centuries.”49 And of course, even if some Sikhs did have a “plan,” their many leaders were too divided and inconstant to coalesce behind a single strategy.
What seems incontrovertible is that of all the Punjab’s militias, the Sikhs were the best organized, best trained, and best armed. As the BBC’s Robert Stimson put it after touring the Punjab extensively in August, they “were therefore more effective and behaved worse.”50 Sikhs had clearly been “the aggressors,” Nehru declared without hesitation in his 22 August letter to Gandhi, estimating that twice as many Muslims had been killed in East Punjab to that point as Hindus and Sikhs in the West. When he wrote to the Mahatma again three days later, Nehru said he believed that some Akali leaders were hoping to provoke a war between India and Pakistan, so they could launch an invasion to recapture the western half of the Punjab.51
The patchwork of Sikh kingdoms laid across the eastern Punjab gave the jathas another deadly advantage. Boundary Force troops could not legally pursue guerrillas across the borders of states like Faridkot and Patiala; gangs would lurk there until the troops had moved on, then reemerge to seek out targets. Muslims who lived within the states met a grim fate: thousands were killed or driven out over the ensuing weeks, often with the help, or at least the acquiescence, of royal troops.52 Faridkot later claimed that “when he had told Patel that all Muslims had been evacuated from his state, Patel expressed satisfaction.”53 A British report indicated that guillotines had been employed in the massacres there.54
Civil administration in the Indian half of the Punjab collapsed almost immediately. Over the summer, Hindu and Sikh officials had put off leaving Lahore as long as they could, hoping that the Punjab capital might be assigned to India. They had barely had time to get established in East Punjab. Trivedi’s ministers found themselves without offices, secretariats, or communications. For a while provincial ministries were scattered across four different cities. As late as mid-October, Trivedi could not even place a direct call to Delhi—all the phone and telegraph lines in the Punjab were routed through Lahore, now part of Pakistan.55 “They . . . are living on rumours,” one of Mountbatten’s stunned aides reported after visiting the governor and his ministers.56
Orders from the top were routinely ignored at the local level. In both East and West Punjab, party hacks had been promoted to positions that were often beyond their experience and capabilities. Partisan officials displayed, as one Sikh deputy commissioner lamented of his new brethren, “almost a tendency to extol the misdeeds of miscreants and justify the ill luck that had befallen the [victims].”57
To outsiders, it looked as though the jathas had been given the run of East Punjab. About a week after independence, Penderel Moon traveled through the province on his way back to Bahawalpur from a short break in Simla:
So far as I could make out, the villages of the Eastern Punjab were just being allowed to run amuck as they pleased. From the Grand Trunk Road, particularly on the stretch from Ambala to Ludhiana, murderous-looking gangs of Sikhs, armed with guns and spears, could be seen prowling about or standing under the trees, often within fifty yards of the road itself. Military patrols in jeeps and trucks were passing up and down the road, yet taking not the slightest notice of these gangs, as though they were natural and normal features of the countryside.58
Whether due to a conspiracy or not, the eastern Punjab did indeed begin to empty of minorities. After an attack, or often out of fear of one, whole villages of Muslims decided that they could no longer live in India. They took to the roads in a panic, bringing only their livestock and what few ragged possessions they could carry, sometimes even leaving behind the little food they possessed. They were “cowed and tired and miserable,” observed I. L. Potter, an American employee of Caltex India—and terribly vulnerable.59
This flood of refugees, more than anything else, sent the Punjab spinning out of control. The Boundary Force was already too thinly spread to handle the metastasizing jatha raids; now the roads became fertile hunting grounds, too. Traveling across the Indian East Punjab on 25 August, Potter witnessed several horrible, flailing ambushes unfold: Sikhs charged out of the tall grasses lining the road, slashing away furiously with spears and swords as terrified peasants scattered pell-mell across the fields to try and escape. Young women were trussed up and hauled off to be raped. Boundary Force troops tried to organize escorts for the caravans and collected refugees in small, guarded keeps before transporting them en masse to Pakistan. But during these frenzied melees, the soldiers could hardly tell attacker from victim, and more often than not, killed equal numbers of both.
Unending waves of refugees washed over the East Punjab. They left grim reminders of their passage—trees stripped of bark, which they peeled off in great chunks to use as fuel; dead and dying bullocks, cattle, and sheep; and thousands upon thousands of corpses lying alongside the road or buried shallowly.60 Vultures feasted so extravagantly that they could no longer fly.
Once the migrants crossed the border, their stories and their scars spread hate like an oil slick. “Corpse trains” rolled into Lahore station dripping blood, their carriages filled with hacked-off limbs, women without breasts or noses, disemboweled children. Provocateurs made sure that even those who did not witness these atrocities heard about them in graphic, often exaggerated detail. Muslim villagers who had initially pledged to protect their Sikh and Hindu neighbors in Pakistan now took up crude arms and joined the ranks of the mobs.
The spiraling chaos threatened to paralyze Pakistan’s economy. Rail drivers and engineers refused to work unless their families were given military guards, which meant some thirteen thousand rail wagons lay idle on both sides of the border. Coal, cloth, and gasoline—all imported from India—began running short. All that seemed to be coming from across the border were hollow-eyed refugees. Within ten days, over 150,000 migrants had flooded into Lahore. Within a month, more than ten times that number had arrived.61
Pakistanis berated their government for not forcing a halt to the massacres. A furious crowd of Muslim refugees stoned Mamdot’s house in Lahore. Within a week of his inauguration, Jinnah himself was the target of an assassination attempt when five masked men, most likely dispossessed Muslims from the Punjab, broke into the grounds of Government House in Karachi.62
On Sunday, 24 August, the Quaid took to the airwaves to address his wobbly nation. His suspicions about Tara Singh and the Sikhs had, it seemed, been confirmed. His address was aggrieved and one-sided. He gravely condemned “the orgies of violence in Eastern Punjab, [which] have taken such a heavy toll of Muslim lives and inflicted indescribable tragedies.”63 Dawn had probably captured his feelings in an editorial a couple days earlier, when the paper claimed, “It was well-known that all the violence, crime and arson had been in East Punjab only.”64 Ignoring the not inconsider
able number of attacks on Hindus and Sikhs that had already taken place in West Punjab, Jinnah simply cautioned his new citizens: “It is of the utmost importance that Pakistan should be kept absolutely free from disorder, because the outbreak of lawlessness at this initial stage is bound to shake its newly laid foundations.”65
The Quaid’s paranoia had returned in full force. There were dark elements at work, he told his people, “enemies who do not wish well to Pakistan and would not like it to grow strong and powerful. In fact, they would like to see it destroyed at its very inception.”66 In the prevailing atmosphere, Jinnah’s bitter tone would have undercut any good his words might otherwise have done. Already, Penderel Moon noted, “to kill a Sikh had become almost a duty; to kill a Hindu was hardly a crime.” The day after the Quaid’s address, a battalion of Bahawalpur state troops watched impassively as Muslims in the town of Bahawalnagar went on a rampage. A trainload of mutilated Punjab refugees had pulled in that night, enraging locals. The next morning’s casualty figures made it clear just how diligent the soldiers had been in restoring order: 409 Hindus had been killed in the mayhem—and 1 Muslim.67