Whole villages, clans, sub-castes and kinship groups upped sticks, sometimes literally as they detached the roof joists of their homes to cart them away in the hope of re-using them. In early September, Penderel Moon, back in Bahawalpur after curtailing his holiday, recorded the arrival there of a dishevelled and unwashed gentleman called Bagh Ali. ‘He arrived on foot … along with 5,000 members of the Sakhera tribe, many of whom were his tenants’; after a week on the road ‘one could hardly imagine that he was a wealthy Muslim landowner and a MLA [Member of the Punjab Legislative Assembly]’, recalled Moon. Bagh Ali and his people hailed from Ferozepur, a place expected to go to Pakistan but which had in fact been awarded to India. But what most distressed Moon was the news that this throng, along with their bullocks, carts and farm implements, had been officially ordered to migrate. It was not the feared Sikh paramilitaries who had forced them out, but a government directive from Ferozepur’s Sub-Divisional Officer. Unbeknown to Moon, Delhi and Karachi had just agreed on an exchange of population between the two halves of the partitioned Punjab. The arrangement was intended to reduce the violence, which both governments roundly condemned. But forcible migration was a different matter. In the Punjab it was state-sponsored.
Over the long border between western India and the western wing of Pakistan some ten to twenty million people are thought to have crossed, some going east, others west, during the months of August, September and October. Additionally, anything between 200,000 and one million were massacred – in their homes, in their fields, on the road, in the trains – or left to die by the wayside. In a sandy tract near Fazilpur in Bahawalpur, Penderel Moon spied what he thought were some piles of manure. Closer inspection revealed them as heaps of bodies.
In two and threes and sixes and tens, more and more came into view as we rounded the curve of the village … till they lay ‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the vale of Vallambrosa’. Men, women and children, there they all were jumbled up together, their arms and legs akimbo in all sorts of attitudes and postures, some of them so life-like that one could hardly believe that they were really dead.16
It reminded Moon of pictures he remembered from his childhood of the Napoleonic battlefields. Three hundred and fifty Hindus had been mown down by Pathan rifle fire in this one incident.
Hundreds of thousands more were plundered of their chattels, a term that was taken to include their womenfolk and children. Girls and young mothers were perceived as embodiments of all that the other community held most sacred and were picked off accordingly. Abducted, exposed, traded, raped, mutilated or forcibly appropriated, most would never know justice and many would prefer suicide. Those who would later be ‘recovered’ and repatriated fared little better. Dishonoured, they might find themselves unwanted by their former loved ones; traumatised or not, they might be locked away by them.
The horror lay as much in the obscenity of the atrocities as the scale; and to these atrocities, as to all the other massacres and burnings, there was often a pattern. Though characterised as ‘lunacy’, the mayhem was a madness with method. On both sides the perpetrators were invariably male, well armed and often ex-soldiers or paramilitaries. Incitement came in the form of pamphlets, partisan press reports and pronouncements from political and religious leaders; premeditation was evident in both the planning and the execution of the attacks; and guns as much as knives were the weapons of choice.
This was not haphazard, frantic killing but, at its worst, routine, timetabled and systematic ethnic cleansing. Large groups of men, with their own codes of honour and often with a sense of warlike righteousness, set out day after day in August and September to eliminate the other.17
Of the few things that disqualified the conflict as ‘war’, the near absence of battles was the most obvious; for the aggressors, instead of engaging one another – something which respect for the border largely precluded – directed their attacks exclusively at the innocent and the defenceless. Conversion was occasionally an option for the victims, mere surrender rarely so. For the assailants, the objectives were simply expropriation and maximum slaughter.
Most refugees travelled on foot, with or without livestock and sometimes accompanied by wagons bearing their possessions. The caravans stretched as far as the eye could see where they converged at river crossings. An airborne Nehru following the line of a cross-border road in east Punjab would recall overflying the same massed column for all of sixteen kilometres. He put its human component at over 100,000 souls. Another caravan, tracked in west Punjab, was thought to number 400,000. In September Penderel Moon recorded an influx into Bahawalpur of 40,000–50,000 Muslims from Rohtak and Hissar (west of Delhi); they were so severely undernourished that ‘some two thousand of them died within a few days of their arrival’.18 As late as November an official from the British High Commission in Delhi, while driving through Mewat, encountered a ten-mile column of Meos still on the move.19
Exposure, debilitation, dehydration, starvation, disease and drownings (the monsoon had returned with a fury in September) may have claimed as many fatalities as the knife and the bullet. Yet the subsequent figures would seldom distinguish deaths from natural causes, nor would they attempt to define what causes might be considered ‘natural’. All that can be said with confidence is that the scale of the tragedy was such as to frustrate accurate assessment at the time – and ever since.
‘Estimates of casualties are largely a matter of guesswork,’ noted Moon, who nevertheless gave his own calculation of the number killed: it was ‘unlikely to have been more than two hundred thousand’, and was probably rather less. This was based on ‘fairly precise figures for about half the districts of West Punjab and … intelligent guesses regarding the remainder’; in this total, on the basis of reports from across the border, he had included twice as many fatalities for India’s east Punjab, plus much fewer for the neighbouring states of Rajasthan, Sind and Balochistan.20 Moon was writing only of the border between India and West Pakistan; he did not include fatalities in Bengal or elsewhere in India, nor apparently those in the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. But his ‘guesswork’ deserves some respect. As a one-time member of the British Indian Civil Service, a current member of the Pakistan Administrative Service (Bahawalpur formally joined Pakistan in early October) and a soon-to-be member of the Indian Administrative Service, he straddled the divide and had no particular axe to grind.
Nor, having witnessed some of the attacks and collected descriptions of many more – indeed having accepted responsibility for not having prevented some of them – could Moon be accused of generalising about them. It has been suggested that any consensus around higher estimates of half a million to a million, or even two million, fatalities may be a means of ‘distancing ourselves from the specificity and details of those killings even as we seek to underline their enormity and consequence’.21 This recourse to rounded-up figures is thought to be especially common practice in respect of the atrocities suffered by those classed as ‘others’ rather than ‘ours’; ‘their’ losses could be approximately quantified, ‘ours’ tended to be recorded in gruesome and specific detail.
Into this error falls the account produced by Gopal Das Khosla in 1989. An avuncular figure, Cambridge-educated, Justice Khosla was much respected in Indian government circles as ‘a safe pair of hands’, and would head several government-sponsored investigations. By the 1980s he was semi-retired and often in Manali (Himachal Pradesh), there with walking stick to pace the hill paths and write his Stern Reckoning. Using the records of a 1948 Government of India ‘Fact Finding Organisation’, he came up with a total for non-Muslim fatalities of ‘between 200,000 and 250,000’, to which he ‘believed’ that an equal number of Muslims who ‘perished in the riots in India’ might be added. Hence the ‘half a million’,