As we approached the built-up area, we overtook a military lorry in the back of which there was a soldier with a rifle and two or three bloodstained corpses bouncing about on the floor. A little farther on five or six men were lined up along the side of the road with their hands up and a soldier covering them with his rifle. Two hundred yards beyond there was a corpse lying on a charpoy … and to the left, from the city proper, numerous dense columns of smoke were rising into the air.9
Lahore, in short, was not celebrating. It was burning. Over lunch at Faletti’s Hotel, Moon learned that the city’s largely Muslim police, in a pattern that would be emulated by both sides, were siding with the killers and even affording them covering fire. Under the circumstances he was strongly discouraged from proceeding to Simla by car. Instead he sallied forth for the railway station and a non-existent train.
At exactly the same time, Nehru and the Mountbattens were forcing their way through the flag-waving crowds along Delhi’s Rajpath. They had just attended the Independence Day ceremonies at India Gate. King George VI had assured India that freedom-loving people everywhere would want to share in their celebrations, but such was the press of freedom-savouring Indians that the formalities had had to be curtailed. Mountbatten could barely salute the Indian tricolour from the safety of his carriage. His daughter had managed to reach the podium only after removing her high heels and clambering over the densely packed masses, helped by, among others, Nehru. ‘An enormous picnic of almost a million people, all of them having more fun than they’d ever had in their lives’ was how Mountbatten described the gathering.10 It was fun all round. The bandsmen couldn’t reach their bandstand, and the gun salutes were drowned out by the cheering. Nehru found himself thrust into the viceregal carriage by well-wishers, there to be joined by some sari-ed matrons scooped up by Lady Edwina Mountbatten lest they be trampled underfoot. ‘The rest of the day was taken up with parties, speeches and almost impossible progressions through the undiminishing throngs in the streets.’11
Lahore, on the other hand, was silent. Even the railway station, reportedly ‘a veritable death trap’ at the time, indeed ‘a scene of wholesale carnage … under a continuous rain of bullets’, was in fact almost deserted.12 Penderel Moon found only twenty Sikh policemen, all cowering behind a barbed-wire barricade for their own protection, plus a displaced and distraught stationmaster. The stationmaster had just arrived, having escaped from his charge at the nearby Mughalpura depot by requisitioning a locomotive. Two days previously forty-three non-Muslims, many of them Sikhs, had been massacred there; now their brethren were retaliating. ‘We were attacked by 8,000 Sikhs,’ he reported. ‘They have killed several hundred. I have been telephoning for help for thirteen hours.’13
Moon, a goggle-eyed administrator with progressive views, supposed this estimate of the carnage an exaggeration, but he admitted that cross-border trains were already being targeted. A week earlier one carrying Muslim clerks to staff the new Pakistan government in Karachi had been scheduled to pass through Bahawalpur en route from Delhi. It never arrived; a bomb had derailed it near Ferozepur, leaving three dead and numerous wounded. ‘This was one of the first train outrages and the first incident to make any noticeable impression on the Muslims of Bahawalpur.’ In the same week several hundred terrified refugees had detrained in the state unannounced. They claimed to have been driven out of their homes in the Indian princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur (near Delhi). Lucky to be escaping imminent genocide, they were in fact the first of a mass migration of Meos. But as refugees they were no more welcome in Bahawalpur than in Bharatpur. The authorities ‘told them that if they were seeking the promised land of Pakistan they had come to the wrong place and better go on to Punjab or Sind. Gradually they drifted away.’14 Educated Muslims were badly needed in Pakistan; threadbare peasants with lax ideas about Islam it could do without.
Giving up on the trains, Moon travelled on to Simla in a military convoy that was escorting members of the British administration in the Punjab on the first leg of their long journey home. They were leaving the province, he noted, in much the same state as they had found it a hundred years earlier, blood-soaked and in chaos. Yet this was only the beginning. Within hours the situation would dramatically worsen. Partition, in principle so reasonable, was in practice anything but.
At the time, much of the precise border between the two new nations was still uncertain. While the flags of the successor states were being saluted all over the subcontinent, in the vicinity of the expected border it was unclear which flag should be flying. The broad terms of one partition, that of India and Pakistan, had been agreed, but the precise alignment of the subsidiary partitions in Bengal and the Punjab had been entrusted to a third party and then kept under wraps. Several millions thus greeted Independence, if they greeted it at all, not knowing for sure to which country they belonged. Only when the boundary award was announced and published would they discover their fate, make plans accordingly, and so open the floodgates to the twentieth century’s greatest transfer of population.
In the hectic last days of British rule, boundary commissions for both Bengal and the Punjab had been set up. Maps had been hastily consulted, opinions sought and red lines drawn. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British judge who had never before visited the subcontinent, had been entrusted with this heavy responsibility and assured of complete independence. He had also been told to finish his work ahead of the transfer of power. This he did, but without the luxury of being able to inspect the actual terrain, acquaint himself with its peculiarities (like those errant rivers in Bengal) or derive much support from his commissioners: two Muslim League and two Congress nominees, these commissioners invariably upheld the interests of their political patrons and divided accordingly. It was Radcliffe’s casting vote that was decisive.
‘Nobody in India will love me for my award,’ he wrote. They would not. The sealed documents were delivered to Mountbatten two days before Independence, but were only made public two days after. By then Radcliffe had emplaned for London, never to set foot in South Asia again. All parties had agreed to respect his findings, and it was accepted that implementation would be the responsibility of the successor governments. Mountbatten, heading for the hills like Moon, considered his work done. British hands, already washed and ready for congratulatory shaking, were not to be soiled by any last-minute bloodletting.
The only exception was a British-commanded Boundary Force, supposedly 50,000 strong, that was to keep the peace in the Punjab and oversee its partition. Though active enough, it failed to do either. No more than about 25,000 troops materialised; ‘this meant there were fewer than two men to a square mile’.15 And instead of operating under a unified command, the Force was itself quickly partitioned. Suspicious of its impartiality, on 29 August, at the height of the massacres, the successor governments opted to exercise distinct commands, disband the Force and deploy the troops intended for peacekeeping to protect and succour their co-religionists.
The mutual suspicion was made worse by the terms of Radcliffe’s actual award. Dividing erstwhile India into its Muslim- and non-Muslim-majority provinces had been comparatively straightforward, but the lesser territorial units to be parcelled out when dividing up the Punjab and Bengal posed a trickier challenge. These lesser elements had been specified merely as ‘areas’; they might be districts, sub-districts or even smaller units. And although the twin principles of partition – division on the basis of the religious majority plus contiguity to ‘areas’ of a like complexion – were generally paramount, ‘other factors’ (like local traditions, irrigation networks and strategic necessity) might be taken into account. There was thus scope for exceptions, and still greater scope for suspicions about exceptions. Well-founded rumours would circulate that Radcliffe had indeed been ‘influenced’. India’s expectations in respect of the Punjab border, especially where it afforded an access route to Kashmir, seem to have found favour with him. So did Indian demands in respect of a northern corridor, or ‘chicken-neck’, linking West Bengal and Assam; concessions to Pakistan in the Chittagong