While the orchestra at Lahore's Falett's Hotel
played quietly for dancing, European guests drank cocktails on the
moonlit terrace. Beyond earshot of the music, whole blocks of buildings
lay gutted. Streets were bare and silent. Over the deserted railroad
station the smell of corpses hung.One-seventh of Lahore, capital of the Punjab, had been destroyed. Scores
of nearby towns and villages had been razed. War—or rather,
competitive massacre—between Moslems and Sikhs had reached a pitch of
horror that made the Indian Mutiny of 1857 look like a mere street
brawl. In two weeks, between 40,000 and 150,000 people had been killed
in the Punjab. Most of the bodies were too hacked and charred to be
recognized. At least a million were homeless.”Never during two wars have I seen such sights as I have seen these last
two days,” said a middle-aged British colonel at Lahore airport. “All
those atrocity yarns we used to hear, such as Germans cutting Belgian
children's hands off and raping and then killing women, have suddenly
come true in the Punjab during the last week.””The Joy of Fraternization.” For months the Punjab's communal hatred had
been boiling up into slaughter. A previous climax came last spring when
hundreds were killed in riots there . In mid-August the
partition of the Punjab between India and Pakistan left 1.6 of the 3.8
million Sikhs in the province under Moslem rule; at least twice as many
Moslems remained on the Indian side of the border in a new East Punjab
state.The Sikhs are an offshoot of the Hindu religion; they organized 300
years ago to resist militantly Moslem oppression. The British had used
the warlike Sikhs extensively, giving them land and offices, especially
in the fertile, predominantly Moslem West Punjab. In consequence, the
Moslems hate Sikhs far more than they do Hindus.The rest of India was relatively quiet. In once turbulent Calcutta,
Mohandas K. Gandhi, still striving for Hindu-Moslem unity, was able to
write of the situation there: “One might almost say the joy of
fraternization is leaping up from hour to hour.”There was no fraternization in the Punjab. At Amritsar, on the Indian
side of the border, organized gangs of Sikhs had exterminated or driven
out the Moslem minority population . Moslems in Lahore and
other Pakistan border regions retaliated against the Hindus and Sikhs
there.Mohamed Ali Jinnah, who had conceived Pakistan in hatred and was now its
president and undisputed boss, sent to the
West Punjab as governor his faithful follower, the Khan of Momdot. The
bland, moonfaced Khan had served four years in the Punjab Legislative
Assembly without opening his mouth. When he got to the West Punjab, he
acted. With his province literally in flames, the Khan of Momdot
relaxed regulations that had restricted the carrying of firearms; he
also decreed that every man could wear a sword, provided it was
covered.Some of his subordinates went further. The Moslem deputy commissioner of
one of the Western Punjab districts mourned a son killed on the Indian
side of the border. Said he to the young Moslems: “You have full
liberty to go the limit.Take revenge as you like, but if there is one Hindu or Sikh left alive
in my district after you are through, I swear to kill them myself.”
