The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan

Author:Yasmin Khan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780300176391
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-10-26T16:43:13+00:00

7

Blood on the Tracks

By August 1947 all the ingredients were in place for ethnic cleansing in Punjab: a feeble and polarised police force, the steady withdrawal of British troops and their substitution with the limited and undermanned Punjab Boundary Force, and a petrified, well-armed population. The violence which preceded Partition was grave, widespread and lethal. After 15 August 1947, it took on a new ferocity, intensity and callousness. Now militias trawled the countryside for poorly protected villages to raid and raze to the ground, gangs deliberately derailed trains, massacring their passengers one by one or setting the carriages ablaze with petrol. Women and children were carried away like looted chattels.

The British evacuation was in full swing by this stage. Far away in Bombay, British soldiers were parading through the monumental Gateway of India and boarding their troopships, kitbags slung over their shoulders, guns still in hand as crowds cheered from the shore. They were waved on by nationalist leaders and the imperial withdrawal meshed conveniently with the nationalistic stance of the Congress and League leaderships. ‘Foreign armies are the most obvious symbol of foreign rule,’ Nehru allegedly told the first contingent of British troops before they sailed away from the Indian coastline just two days after Independence Day in 1947. ‘They are essentially armies of occupation and, as such, their presence must inevitably be resented.’1 His viewpoint neatly overlapped with the interests of the British establishment which was eager to bring its war-weary and homesick soldiers back to Britain.

The terrorised public in the polarised atmosphere of Punjab might not have agreed. Instead of using these troops to quell the trouble, the British command confined them to barracks and evacuated the men as quickly as they possibly could. Mountbatten's instructions confidentially stated that British army units had no operational functions whatsoever, could not be used for internal security purposes and would not be used on the frontier or in the states. There was only one exception: they could be used in an emergency to save British lives.2 The Punjabi Boundary Force – a toothless and dreadfully inadequate response to Partition's violence – was the alternative British initiative to protect life and limb in Punjab.3 It was in existence for just thirty-two days. At its peak, the Punjab Boundary Force, in which Delhi's administrators had ‘remarkable faith’, covered only the twelve most ‘disturbed’ districts of Punjab and included, at most, 25,000 men. This meant that there were fewer than two men to a square mile. Sharing a train compartment from Delhi to Bahawalpur at the end of July with a young Sikh army major who was about to join the Boundary Force, Penderel Moon recalled that, ‘He was himself about to join it, but was utterly sceptical of its capacity to maintain order.’4 As a cartoon at the time expressed it, showing a goat sliced in two by a knife, ‘You asked for it.’ The message from London seemed to be that this was the price of freedom.

Violence must sit at the core of any history of Partition.

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