How great the loss of life was has never been even
roughly established; it was on a huge scale.
During August and September, between
200,000 and half a million Muslims fleeing the
Indian half of east Punjab lost their lives. No
mercy was shown to unarmed men, women and
children. Even trains overcrowded with refugees
were halted and the passengers murdered in cold
blood. The local authorities either looked on or
were powerless to stop the massacres. Pakistan
never forgave. It was evident that the onslaught
had been planned, the Pakistanis believed, with
the foreknowledge of Delhi. Gandhi and Nehru,
now India’s prime minister, were horrified. There
were killings too on the Pakistan side on a smaller
scale. Certainly the Muslim League was also anx-
ious to drive out the Sikhs and Hindus from what
became Pakistan by organising riots. Millions of
refugees crossed the frontier in opposite directions
to India and Pakistan with nothing but what they
stood up in. Communal riots spread to Delhi,
where more killings of the Muslim minority
occurred. Gandhi hastened to Calcutta to stop the
riots in Bengal. There he announced a fast to the
death, and so great was his moral stature that
large-scale killings did cease. But in the Punjab the
Sikhs were deliberately expelling their Muslim
neighbours so that they might at last gain power.
It is obvious that force and organised terror
were required to drive people despairingly from
their homes, their farms and their plots of land
where they had lived for generations. They did
not move willingly before the Independence
Days. In West Pakistan only a small minority of
Hindus remained. In East Pakistan (Bengal) a
substantial number of the 30 million Hindus
stayed. From India some 9 to 10 million Muslim
refugees had crossed over to West or East
Pakistan, yet millions of Muslims stayed, remain-
ing the largest minority among 340 million
Indians. Communal rioting and killings recurred
in later years, but never again on the horrific scale
of 1947. Nor did Sikhs and Hindus in the eastern
Punjab peacefully coexist. While Sikh hatred of
Pakistan secured the Indian frontier from any
danger of internal subversion in any conflict with
Pakistan, Sikh militants – because they consti-
tuted only a minority of some 10 million – have
stridently and at times violently sought autonomy
and independence. This stems from their fears of
losing their identity, their way of life.
In an atmosphere of bitterness Pakistan and
India only a few weeks after independence became
embroiled in conflict over the future of a princely
state bordering on both northern India and
Pakistan – Kashmir and Jammu. The ruling
Maharaja vacillated, refusing to opt for either
Pakistan or India. He was a Hindu, though the
majority of the population was Muslim. The key
figure in Kashmir was not the Maharaja but Sheikh
Mohammed Abdullah, the leader of a party not
divided on religious lines and in agreement with
the Congress leaders in India. Pakistan attempted
to force the issue and encouraged Pathan tribes-
men to invade Kashmir, which they almost suc-
ceeded in occupying. The Maharaja fled to India,
where in return for a promise of Indian military
assistance he agreed, without consulting his people
or the political leaders, that his state should accede
to India. Nehru sent in troops and promised to
allow the people to choose their own future in a
referendum. In Kashmir both Hindus and Muslims
looking to Sheikh Abdullah resisted the Pathans
and the idea of absorption by Pakistan, which
claimed Kashmir on the ground that it had a
Muslim majority. Abdullah was after all a close
friend and admirer of Nehru, sharing with him the
Indian ideal of a secular state in which Muslim and
Hindu could live peaceably together. The Indians
and Kashmiris now pushed the Pathans back, only
for Pakistan to intervene with its own regular
troops. Nehru, meanwhile, weakened his case by
not implementing his promise to hold a plebiscite.
With the two new states on the brink of war, the
United Nations intervened, and on 1 January 1949
a truce line was established which left two-thirds of
Kashmir in Indian hands and one-third with
Pakistan. Nehru was deeply disappointed by this
injustice. It was not the end of the Kashmir prob-
lem, nor did it settle Indian–Pakistani hostilities.
Basic to these was the suspicion for decades of the
Islamic Pakistani leadership that secular India
would, one day, seek to reunite the subcontinent
and destroy Pakistan’s hard-won independence
and religious culture.
1
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