Freedom at Midnight (55 page)

There, in a sudden burst of lucidity, its terrified Hindu and Sikh inmates begged their custodians to send them to India. The Moslems, they reasoned, would slaughter them if they remained in Pakistan. Their plea was rejected. Far less prescient than the patients for whom they were responsible, the asylum's doctors foresaw no such danger. They condescendingly assured their patients that "their fears were imaginary."

"OUR PEOPLE HAVE GONE MAD"

The Punjab, August-September 1947

It would be unique, a cataclysm without precedent, unforeseen in magnitude, unordered in pattern, unreasoned in savagery. For six terrible weeks, like the mysterious ravages of a medieval plague, a mania for murder would sweep across the face of northern India. There would be no sanctuary from its scourge, no corner free from the contagion of its terrible virus. Half as many Indians would lose their lives in that slaughter as Americans in four years of combat in World War II.

Everywhere the many and the strong assaulted the weak and the few. In the stately homes of New Delhi's Au-rangzeb Road, the silver souks of Old Delhi's Chandi Chowk, in the mahallas of Amritsar, in the elegant suburbs of Lahore, the bazaar of Rawalpindi, the walled city of Peshawar; in shops, stalls, mud huts, village alleyways; in brick kilns, factories and fields; in railroad stations and teahouses, communities that had lived side by side for generations fell upon one another in an orgy of hate. It was not a war; it was not a civil war; it was not a guerrilla campaign. It was a convulsion, the sudden, shattering collapse of a society. One act provoked another, one horror fed another, each slaughter begot its successor, each rumor its imitator, each atrocity its counterpart, until, like the slow-motion images of a building disintegrating under the impact of an explosion, the walls of the Punjab's society crumbled in upon each other.

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The disaster was easily explained. Radcliffe's line had left five million Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan's half of the Punjab, over five million Moslems in India's half. Prodded by the demagoguery of Jinnah and the leaders of the Moslem League, the Punjab's exploited Moslems had convinced themselves that, somehow, in Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, Hindu moneylenders, shopkeepers and zamindars (aggressive Sikh landlords) would disappear. Yet, there they were on the aftermath of independence, still ready to collect their rents, still occupying their shops and farms. Inevitably, a simple thought swept the Moslem masses: if Pakistan is ours, so too are shops, farms, houses and factories of the Hindus and Sikhs. Across the border, the militant Sikhs prepared to drive the Moslems from their midst so that they could gather onto their abandoned lands their brothers whom Radcliffe's scalpel had left in Pakistan.

And so, in a bewildering frenzy, Hindus, Sikhs and Moslems turned on one another. India was ever a land of extravagant dimensions, and the horror of the Punjab's killings, the abundance of human anguish and suffering that they would produce would not fail that ancient tradition. Europe's people had slaughtered one another with V-bombs, howitzers, and the calculated horrors of the gas chambers; the people of the Punjab set out to destroy themselves with bamboo staves, field-hockey sticks, ice picks, knives, clubs, swords, hammers, bricks and clawing fingers. Theirs was a spontaneous, irrational, unpredictable slaughter. Appalled at the emotions that they had inadvertently unleashed, their desperate leaders tried to call them back to reason. It was a hopeless cry. There was no reason in that brief and cruel season when India went mad.

Captain R. E. Atkins of the Gurkhas gasped in horror at the sight at his feet. A figure of speech he had often heard but had never believed had become reality under his eyes. The gutters of Lahore were running red with blood. The beautiful Paris of the Orient was a vista of desolation and destruction. Whole streets of Hindu homes were ablaze while Moslem police and troops stood by watching. At night, the sounds of looters ransacking those homes seemed to Atkins like the crunch of termites boring into logs. At his headquarters at Braganza's Hotel, Atkins had been besieged by a horde of pathetic, half-hysterical Hindu

businessmen ready to offer him anything, twenty-five, thirty, fifty thousand rupees, their daughters, their wives' jewelry, if only he would let them flee in his jeep the hell Lahore had become.

In nearby Amritsar, broad sections of the city, its Moslem sections, were nothing but heaps of brick and debris, twisting curls of smoke drifting above them into the sky, vultures keeping their vigil on their shattered walls, the pungent aroma of decomposing corpses permeating the ruins. Everywhere the face of the Punjab was disfigured by similar scenes. In Lyallpur the Moslem workers in a textile factory turned on the Sikhs who shared the misery of their looms, and slaughtered every one of them. There, the image that had horrified Captain Atkins was magnified to an almost unbelievable dimension; this time it was an entire irrigation canal that was filled with hundreds of Sikh and Hindu corpses.

In Simla, Fay Johnson, wife of Lord Mountbatten's press attache, gaped in horror at the spectacle she beheld from the veranda of Cecil's Hotel, where the raj's summering rulers had sipped their tea. Sikhs on bicycles, waving their kirpans, were swooping down the Mall chasing fleeing Moslems like hunters pursuing a fox. They would ride up behind a gasping victim and behead him with one terrible slash of the sword. Another Englishman saw the head of one of their victims, a fez still fixed firmly to it, rolling along the street, while the Sikh assassin furiously pursued his next victim, waving his bloody sword and shrieking, "I'll kill more! I'll kill more!"

A man's executioner could be a friend, or a stranger. Every day for fifteen years, Niranjan Singh, a Sikh tea merchant in the Montgomery bazaar, had served a pot of Assam tea to the Moslem leatherworker who came rushing to his shop one August morning. He was setting the man's ration on his little brass balance when he looked up to see his customer, his face contorted in hate, pointing at him and screaming, "Kill him! Kill him!"

A dozen Moslem hoodlums raced out of the alley. One severed Singh's leg at the knee with a sword. In an instant they had killed his ninety-year-old father and his only son. The last sight he saw as he lost consciousness was his eighteen-year-old daughter, screaming in fright, being carried off on the shoulders of the man to whom he had been serving tea for fifteen years.

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There were districts in which not a single village went unharmed, not a single bazaar was left standing. Everywhere the minority community was gripped by fear and terror. In Ukarna, a Moslem-dominated mill town on the Lahore-Karachi railroad line, Madanlal Pahwa, a stocky twenty-year-old Indian Navy veteran, cowered inside the home of his aunt after August 15. Through the windows he could see the town's jubilant Moslems dancing, singing, waving flags, chanting their newest slogan: "Hamkelya Pakistan; Larkelinge Hindustan" ("We got Pakistan by laughing; we'll get India by fighting"). Madanlal hated Moslems. In his khaki uniform with a black stripe of the R.S.S.S., he had helped to terrorize them. Now it was his turn to be terrorized. We are all frightened, he thought; we are like sheep waiting for slaughter.

Where they were in the majority the Sikhs were the best-organized, most vicious killers of all. Ahmed Zarullah was a Moslem tenant farmer in a little village near Ferozepore assaulted one night by a Sikh jattha. "We knew we were going to be killed like rats," he recalled. "We hid behind our charpoys, behind our piles of cow dung. The Sikhs broke down the door with axes. I was hit by a bullet in my left arm. As I tried to stand, I saw my wife get four bullets. Blood was coming from her thigh and back. My three-year-old son was hit in the abdomen. He did not cry. He fell down. He was dead.

"I took hold of my wife and my second son. We left the dead child and crawled out to the street. I saw Sikhs shooting down the Moslems coming from the other huts. Some were carrying away girls on their shoulders. There were shrieks and wailings and shoutings. The Sikhs jumped on me and dragged my dead wife from my arms. They killed the second boy and left me to die in the dust. I had no strength to weep or tears to drop. My eyes were as dry as the rivers of the Sind before the monsoon. I fell down

unconscious."

In Sheikhpura, a trading town north of Lahore, the entire Hindu and Sikh community was herded into an enormous godown, a huge warehouse used by the town bank to store the sacks of grain held as collateral for its loans. Once inside, the helpless Hindus were machine-gunned by Moslem police and army deserters. There were no survivors.

One constant refrain sprang from the lips of the British

officers who had stayed on to serve in the Indian or Pakistan army: "It was far worse than anything we saw in World War II."

Robert Trumbull, a veteran correspondent of The New York Times, noted: "I have never been as shaken by anything, even by the piled-up bodies on the beachhead of Tarawa. In India today blood flows oftener than rain falls. I have seen dead by the hundreds and, worst of all, thousands of Indians without eyes, feet or hands. Death by shooting is merciful and uncommon. Men, women and children are commonly beaten to death with clubs and stones and left to die, their death agony intensified by heat and flies."

The warring communities seemed to rival one another in savagery. One British officer of the Punjab Boundary Force discovered four Moslem babies "roasted like piglets on spits in a village raided by Sikhs." Another found a group of Hindu women, their breasts methodically mutilated by Moslem zealots, being headed for slaughter."

In Moslem areas, Hindus were sometimes offered the choice of converting to Islam or fleeing Pakistan. Bagh Das, a Hindu farmer in a hamlet west of Lyallpur, was marched with three hundred fellow Hindus to a mosque set by a small pond in a neighboring village. Their feet were washed in the pond, then they were herded into the mosque and ordered to sit cross-legged on the floor. The maulvi read a few verses of the Koran. "Now," he told them, "you have the choice of becoming Moslems and living happily or being killed."

"We preferred the former," acknowledged Das. Each convert was given a new Moslem name and made to recite a verse from the Koran. Then, they were herded into the mosque's courtyard where a cow was roasting. One by one the Hindus were made to eat a piece of its flesh. Das, a vegetarian until that instant, "had a vomiting sensation," but he controlled it because, he thought, I will be killed if I do not obey their command.

His neighbor, a Brahman, asked permission to take his wife and three children back to his hut to get his special wedding plates and forks, in view of the importance of the moment. Flattered, his Moslem captors agreed. "The Brahman had a knife hidden in his house," Das remembered. "When he got home, he took it from its hiding place. He cut his wife's throat then the throats of his three children.

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Then he stabbed his own heart. None of them returned to eat the meat."

A motive that had nothing to do with religious fervor was more often behind the Moslems' attacks on Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. It was greed, a simple, often carefully orchestrated effort to grab the lands, shops and wealth of their neighbors.

Sardar Prem Singh, a Sikh, exercised the occupation the Moslems detested more than any other in a village near Si-alkot. He was a moneylender. "I belonged to a very rich family/' Prem Singh noted. "I had a big house, double-storied, with strong iron gates in front. Everyone in the village knew I was the richest. Many Moslems mortgaged their jewels with me. I kept them in a big iron safe. At some time in his life almost every Moslem in the village had pledged his ornaments with me."

One morning just after independence, Prem Singh saw a milling mob of Moslems, streaming toward his house brandishing clubs, crowbars, knives. He recognized almost every male in the crowd. They had all at one time or another been his debtors. "The safe, the safe," they screamed.

"They expected to reap a rich harvest," Prem Singh knew. His safe, however, contained something more than Moslem jewels. Locked inside was a double-barreled shotgun and twenty-five cartridges. Prem Singh opened the safe, grabbed the gun and rushed to the second floor. For an hour, he ran from window to window defending his home from the mob trying to beat in his gate. As he was doing that, an appalling scene was taking place on the floor below. Certain the Moslem mob was about to break into the house, his wife summoned Prem Singh's six daughters to his office. She took a huge drum of cooking kerosene and drenched herself in its contents. After beseeching the mercy of the Sikhs' guru Nanak and urging her daughters to follow her example, she set herself ablaze.

On the floor above, still fighting desperately, her husband was mystified by the sickening burning odor drifting up the staircase. Finally, when he had only five cartridges left, the mob withdrew and the exhausted Sikh staggered downstairs. There the horrified moneylender discovered the reason for the acrid stench that had haunted him. Stretched in front of his open safe were the charred

corpses of his wife and three of his daughters who had preferred, as his wife had, self-immolation to the risk of rape at Moslem hands.

Not all the Sikhs and Hindus driven from their homes were wealthy by any means. Guldip Singh was a fourteen-year-old boy, the son of a Sikh sharecropper, one of fifty Hindus and Sikhs in a village of six hundred Moslems north of Lahore. He shared the misery of his two-room hut with his parents, two buffaloes and a cow. One day their Moslem neighbors surrounded their quarter, shouting, "Leave Pakistan or we will kill you."

They all fled to the home of the most important Sikh in the village. "The Moslems came with swords, knives, long iron pikes with kerosene cloths tied on them to burn us. We threw bricks and stones at them, but they were able to set fire to our house. They caught hold of one Sikh and set fire to his beard. Even though his beard was burning, he still killed one Moslem by throwing a big brick at his head. Then he fell down dead muttering the name of the Sikh guru Nanak.

"They dragged the men outside and killed them in the streets. I ran to the roof. The women were there watching. They knew they would be captured and raped. Some of them had babies in their arms. They made a big fire on the roof. They fed their babies their breast milk, crying of the fate overtaking them. Then they threw the babies in the fire and jumped in after them."