Circa 1947. It was first Eid in the newly independent sovereign Pakistan. Air was rich with hopes and expectations. But as the people were returning to their homes after Eid prayers a rumour swept streets of the village – a man on horseback was harking that the Sikhs were coming and that they had massacred all members of the Muslim community in village Tarikha and were on their way to Shadiwal, a township just a mile away from my village, Hariawala.
Panic gripped the people. They set aside their plans to enjoy the Eid festivities. For them, now, it was a question of life and death.
After Shadiwal our village must be the Sikhs’ obvious target. The people decided to head off the Sikh swarm before it reached Shadiwal.
But they had no weapons to match the lethally-armed Sikhs. All that they had were simple axes and sickles. They came to our haveli to seek my father’s advice. ‘’Offence is the best defence’’, my father told them. ‘’You go and meet them before they reach Shadiwal.’’ But they had nothing to engage the fully armed invaders. My father instantly left for home and returned with a clutch of cutlasses and scimitars. These were the vintage swords he had collected over the years. Even as some of these were old and rusted, they had sharp blades.
In no time something like two dozen of them were on way to Shadiwal. On reaching there they were told that the Sikhs were still at Tarikha. But the Sikhs were not there either. Their dreaded massacre in Tarikha and march to Shadiwal were only rumours. But by then the local people in Shadiwal had burnt many Hindu houses and looted their shops.
Similar rumors were order of the day. The people of Gujrat district had pledged to ensure that non-Muslims should feel safe and secure. Quite a few of them in Gujrat city and adjoining areas had taken oath that irrespective of religious differences the Sikhs and Hindus would be protected. But for how long? According to an account in Tehreek-e-Azadi and Gujrat, coincidental to what happened in Hariawala the residents of Jalalpur too met the man on the horseback. They were on the road to protect Hindus and Sikhs in the area.
‘’Don’t you know that in the village of Tanda Karrianwala the Hindus were on a looting spree and you are on a peace march for them,” he said and disappeared. His words acted as fuel to the fire. In no time did the mood of the marchers change. They set about burning houses of Hindus and looting their shops in Jalalpur. The entire Main Bazaar was on fire. The rampage remained out of control for many days.
What happened in District Gujrat – and more of it was on the way – was already order of the day on both sides of the partitioned Punjab, and in other parts of India. According to Nisid Hajari, ‘’houses were burnt and looted, women were raped, children were killed in front of their siblings, trains carrying refugees between the two nations arrived full of corpses, the passengers were killed en route’’.
There is no exact figure of the partition massacres in 1946 and 1947; the estimates range between 200,000 and one and a half million. Of about 13 million refugees who crossed over to their new countries in the wake of partition 10 million were from Punjab – and the number of Muslim refugees from East Punjab has been estimated to be double of those who migrated from West Punjab. Approximately 75,000 women were raped and/or abducted across the two sides of the new border.
Who would have felt the pain of this cataclysm more than Sadat Hasan Manto? He wrote: ‘’In this land, once called India, such rivers of blood flowed over the past few months that even the heavens are bewildered. Blood and steel, war and musket are not new to history.
Adam’s children have always taken interest in these games. But there is no example anywhere in the colorful stories of mankind of the game that was played most recently… Now before our eyes lie dried tracks of blood, cut up human parts, charred faces, mangled necks, terrified people, looted houses, burned fields, mountains of ruble and overflowing hospitals. We are free. Hindustan is fee. Pakistan is free. And we are walking desolate streets naked without any possessions in utter distress’’.
And, Gujranwala-born Amrita Pritim called upon Punjab’s folklore legend Waris Shah: ‘’ Aaj aakkhan Waris Shah nu kiton kabraan vicchon bol/ Tay kitb-e-ishaq da koi agla varka phol/ Ik roi see dhi Panjan dee toun likh likh maray wian/ Aaj lakhan dhian roundian tay Waris Shah noo kehn/ Uth dard mandaan dia dardia uth takk apna Panjab’’. (Speak up from the depths of your grave, you Waris Shah, and add a new page to your saga of love.
Once a daughter of Punjab cried and your pen unleashed a million cries. A million daughters cry today, and to Waris Shah they turn. Get up you the pains-taker of the pained and see what is happening to your Punjab).
The communal violence first erupted in Calcatta in August 1946. Then it spread to Noakhali and East Bengal and in Bihar. In Patna, a large number of Muslim men were put to the sword and women were paraded stripped of their clothes. The Calcatta killings on both sides were 5,000 dead and 15,000 injured.
Almost same number of deaths and killings were at Noakhali, the fatalities being mostly Hindus. In Bihar, the death toll of anti-Muslim riots was also in the thousands. Then there was a sort of lull, but this routine of loot and killing erupted again in March 1947, with Punjab now being its epicenter. Though the British had not yet left, their government was now only on paper, and so for a year were the new states of India and Pakistan. They too were only on paper. On the ground were communal forces that relentlessly shed human blood.
The main theatres of their gladiatorial pastime were the East Punjab districts close to its border with Pakistan and the princely state of Patiala. On the Pakistan side violence seized most of the upper districts of the Punjab and parts of Kashmir. The trains carrying refugees from both sides were waylaid and passengers butchered. Those who tried reaching the other side on foot were waylaid by blood-thirsty communal bands. While men were killed the women were abducted and raped.
A train carrying Muslim refugees was derailed near Amritsar and about 3,000 of them were put to sword. A large number of Muslim women were stripped and raped by a Sikh mob on the streets of Amritsar. Some of them were later rescued but the majority of them were burnt alive. Similar anti-Muslim pogroms were carried out in the Sikh-majority districts.
There were no governments on either side having the wherewithal to stop the killings. The British could only offer trains for carriage, but their safely reaching the other side was no guarantee. It is believed that 80 percent of Muslim killings were in East Punjab. In Kashmir the state ruler Maharaja Hari Singh encouraged the RSS activists, who committed 20,000 killings of Muslims.
How insecure Muslims were in India’s capital and elsewhere in that country, an account by Aslam Siddiqui merits reproduction. At the time of partition, he was the manager of the Chandni Chowk branch of Habib Bank. “In July 1947, rumblings of communal riots in the Punjab were suddenly felt in Delhi like a world-shaking earthquake. Everyone was caught napping by the avalanche of violence.
The political leaders had failed miserably to anticipate the seriousness of disastrous impact of their fateful decisions on the future of the sub-continent. None of the wise men in Indian National Congress or the All India Muslim League thought that events following partition would force on them exchange of population. Consequently, they had no plans to meet such a contingency’’.
The repercussions of atrocities in East Punjab were no less horrendous in West Punjab. Unlike the accounts about the horrors of partition narrated by sources familiar with Indian take on it, there are vivid narratives of what happened to Hindus and Sikhs in the Pakistani Punjab. Massacres of non-Muslims reportedly took place in Sheikhupura, Rawalpindi, Chakwal and Mianwali.
How grim and tragic was the scenario, a report in Dawn sketches a graphic picture of the horror. Its correspondent Nabeel Anwar Dhakhu gives his take on the situation that had developed at Vahali state , which was Vahali Sardars’ home. They were owners of the Khewra salt mine. ‘’Frightened Hindus rushed into Marrai (a grand house), owned by Sardar Hari Singh. Muslims set it on fire, burning more than two hundred Hindus including women and children’’.
Then he quotes his talk with 107-year-old Resham Bee and equally old Mulla Bukhsh. Quoting them, he writes about a Hindu man who showed tough resistance to Muslims in village Gugh. ‘’More than 30 Hindu women asked this brave man what they should do? He ordered them to plunge into fire, rather than getting raped and killed. So, all the women obliged him. Later this Hindu man also jumped into the fire’’.
What triggered a deadly second surge in communal violence; a former prime minister of Pakistan Chaudhri Muhammad Ali explains at some length in his book
The Emergence of Pakistan. By the middle of April, 1947, Lord Mountbatten had worked out a partition plan, the principles of which were that if partition came, it should be the responsibility of the Indians; provinces should have the right to determine their future and Bengal and the Punjab should be partitioned. But the time required for implementation of this dictate was cut short by his intention to depart from the sub-continent as early as possible.
And to this plan the main support came from the Sikh extremists who had planned to establish a Sikh state, spreading between rivers Chenab and Jumna, by force. ‘’The Shiromani Akali Dal reorganized jathas or bands with instruction that each Sikh man should carry a sword. The Maharaja of Patiala and other Sikh states in the Punjab were in close touch with Akali leaders. The Hindus were in close alliance with the Sikhs and the Hindu militant organizations such as RSS cooperated with them in acts of violence.’’
“During this period the Quaid-i-Azam and Liaquat Ali Khan repeatedly drew Mountbatten’s attention to the danger. Mountbatten promised to take sternest action against Sikh leaders … But what was needed and what was demanded by the Quaid-i-Azam, was coming with words, with loathe to take any effective action’’, says Chaudhri Muhammad Ali.
‘’About this time, unknown to the Pakistan government a storm was brewing in the tribal areas. News of atrocities committed by the Maharaja’s government on Muslims of Kashmir had reached tribal areas from refugees and ex-soldiers from Poonch, who had gone there to purchase arms …Now they felt a call for Jihad, or holy war in Kashmir … On October 21, Liaquat Ali Khan told me in a state of unusual excitement that a tribal lashkar, some thousands strong, was on the way to Kashmir. I asked him if he had informed the Quaid-i-Azam and he said ‘’Not yet”.”
The Eid day episode had seriously eroded the sense of security of seven Hindu families of our village. And that sense was growing with every passing day. One day one of their seniors, Sohan Lal, approached my father, and asked what they should do to save their lives.
My father asked leave for a day to think over the problem. Next day he called Sohan Lal and said “you people convert to Islam”. And that they did almost instantly. They went to the mosque and recited Kalama and became Muslims. Among them was Inder Raj, my class fellow in the village school, who lived next door. In the wake of that development a kind of security returned to the village. But for how long, no one knew.
Like many other unpredicted events, we had no inkling whatsoever of what awaited us. One day I was in school sitting next to Inder Raj, popularly called Indri, his father came in and after a short talk with the teacher took away Inder Raj. Everyone was surprised. We came out of the school to see where Indri went. There were four army trucks, and Hindu men, women and children were boarding them. The next moment they were gone – forever.
In 2013, I was in Ottawa, Canada, on a private visit. My daily routine included a cup of coffee at a restaurant owned by a Lahore-origin Hindu family.
On learning that I was from Pakistan they developed some sort of rapport with me. They liked to know how Lahore was now. Was Anarkali still the queen bazaar of the city? Does the Ravi still flow full and fast? And what was the new name of Santnagar where they had lived before partition? On one afternoon I saw only a few customers in the restaurant. I took a table near the window and ordered coffee. As I was sipping it a stranger came over and sat in front of me. For a minute or so we looked at each other. Then he extended his hand and said “Indri”. “Sikandera,” I replied.
Sikander Hayat
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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