The Partition of India – Part 4: Unholy Rush
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. You are listening to part four of a multi-part series on the partition of India. As you may have guessed by now, this is a long series. In fact, it'll probably end up being the longest one I've ever done.

Up until now, that distinction belonged to our four-part exploration of the Soviet-Afghan War. But this partition series will have one, maybe two more installments. The end is certainly near, but there's a lot more story left to tell. After all, this is just one of those topics that if you're gonna do it, you've gotta take the time to do it right. But as always, before we jump into the next chapter of the story, let's take a moment to recap what happened last time. And I'll do my best to keep it brief, because we have quite a bit of ground to cover today.

In Part 3, A Tryst with Destiny, we chronicled the turbulent spring and summer months that preceded the partition of August 15, 1947. It began with the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee's decision to officially grant independence to the Indian subcontinent, with an initial deadline of June 1948, and

And it was a long time coming. The Raj had been on the ropes for years, and with bigger headaches back home, the British were desperate to abandon ship. As the writer Declan Walsh puts it, World War II had beggared Britain and shattered the mystique of empire. Saddled with enormous debts, London scrambled to quit its colonies. First among them, British India, a sprawling mini-continent once prized as the, quote, jewel in the crown...

now a burdensome and querulous possession of some 400 million people. And to guide the British Empire across this treacherous historical Rubicon, the UK sent one of its best, if not brightest, representatives, Lord Louis Mountbatten, a.k.a. Dickie. In March of 1947, the last Viceroy of India arrived in Delhi to lay the Raj to rest.

As one historian put it, quote, Mountbatten's historic mission was to transfer power to the Indians as peacefully and swiftly as possible. The British could then say with pride that they had ruled India for a full century and had been able to hand back India honorably and efficiently.

End quote. Well, that was easier said than done. To get the British out of India, the Viceroy would have to leap and sprint across a minefield of competing interests, communal tensions, and political tripwires. Mountbatten quickly realized that he'd been given what his predecessor called a, quote, impossible task. The two main political factions in India, the Muslim League and

and the Congress Party had failed time and time and time again to reconcile their visions for South Asia. A united India was just not in the cards, and a messy divorce seemed to be the only way forward. No one really wanted partition, yet there were few practical alternatives. As Mountbatten reflected in a tortured letter to London, quote,

quote,

immeasurably. No one would ever induce me to agree to it were it not for this fantastic communal madness that has seized everybody and leaves no other course open. The most we can hope to do, as I have said before, is to put the responsibility for any of these mad decisions fairly and squarely on the Indian shoulders in the eyes of the world. For one day, they will bitterly regret the decision that they are about to make.

And after a long summer of herding cats and sweating bullets, the beleaguered Viceroy managed to hammer out a deal between the Muslim League and the Congress Party, and more specifically between our old friends Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru.

It satisfied no one, of course, but the deal gave everybody at least a fragment of what they wanted. Muhammad Ali Jinnah would get his Pakistan and Jawaharlal Nehru would get his centralized Indian government. It was a bitter compromise, but a compromise nonetheless.

But just as the machinery began to purr, Mountbatten threw a wrench in the gears. On June 3, 1947, he announced that he was accelerating the timeline for the transfer of power. India and Pakistan would gain independence a full 10 months sooner than originally planned. Clearly, the Viceroy was eager to sign the divorce papers, wash his hands, and never look back.

As Shashi Tharoor writes, quote, London wanted to cut and run, and if the British could not leave behind a united India, they were prepared to cut the country quite literally before running.

As the future leaders of India and Pakistan scrambled to prepare for the fast-approaching deadline, London sent a 48-year-old judge named Lord Cyril Radcliffe to pore over the maps and decide where exactly the borders of the new countries would fall. And of all the things that he had to deal with, Lord Radcliffe's most pressing mandate was dividing the hotly contested regions of Punjab and Bengal between Pakistan and India.

Somehow, he had to draw a boundary, a magical line that would keep as many Hindus and Sikhs in India and as many Muslims in Pakistan as possible. But in a region as mixed and heterogeneous as the Punjab, that was a bit like asking someone to unbake a cake. As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote,

Religiously speaking, the populations in those central tracts were far too integrated and too complex for a straight partition of their land. The economic case was labyrinthine. There would be conflicting interests over the divisions of holy shrines, railways, defensive frontiers, and water supplies. End quote. With

With less than two months to complete his work, Lord Radcliffe had been set up to fail. He had never been to India before in his life and it showed. His pencil became a scalpel and the result of his blind slashing was a mangled, botched operation that trampled over complex demographic concentrations and geographic realities.

As Yasmin Khan writes, "...the line zigzagged precariously across agricultural land, cut off communities from their sacred pilgrimage sites, paid no heed to railway lines or the integrity of forests, divorced industrial plants from the agricultural hinterlands where raw materials were grown."

The Pakistani writer Ahmed Akbar described one small but striking example of the Boundary Commission's failure. In East Pakistan, the platform of a railway station fell in one country and the ticket office in another.

It was a job that should have taken years, not weeks. Maybe it never could have succeeded at all. As one historian observed, "...no amount of creative penmanship could achieve a complete separation of the communities."

End quote. Lord Cyril Radcliffe returned to his comfy estate in England that very summer. For him, India was little more than a bad dream, an uncomfortable and inconvenient business trip. It would be the Indians and Pakistanis who would have to live with the consequences of

of the hack job he'd left behind. But Radcliffe's border bombshell was on a delayed fuse. Even though Radcliffe had submitted his conclusions on August 13th, 48 hours before independence, Lord Mountbatten had chosen to withhold the information from the public until after the Independence Day celebrations. His motives for doing this were obvious and cynical and self-serving. As he confided in a report back to London, quote,

The later we postpone publication, the less would the inevitable odium react upon the British.

But for millions of people in the Punjab and Bengal, it would mean celebrating independence from the British Empire without knowing for sure which country they were actually living in. And that uncertainty, inflamed by religious tensions and communal hatred, sparked a refugee crisis that displaced some 12 million people. As Yasmin Khan writes, quote,

Everywhere, minorities were feeling deeply insecure about their physical safety and their citizenship rights. It was these fears that drove people from their homes and started one of the greatest mass migrations in history. End quote.

All summer long, big men with big titles had sat in comfortable drawing rooms, fiddling over maps and bickering over borders. And not just British men, but Indian politicians as well. And now, the human cost was going to be paid. For many average Indians and Pakistanis, all the high-minded talk of independence was

was cold comfort as they packed up and fled their homes. As the Punjabi poet Prabhjot Kaur remarked, "...and what was the rush to divide us, I ask, to separate us from our land and loved ones? And if we were going to be divided anyway, then there should have been a better compromise. It was an unholy rush. Mountbatten and Edwina and Nehru and Jenna, they were all responsible for the crumbling of India."

And so, in today's episode, we will confront, at long last, the true horror of partition and what it meant for everyday people on the ground. And the things that happened in those months following August 1947 have left scars that span generations. According to one historian, quote, as the curtain began to fall on British India, in

Indians fell upon one another, and a thousand years of simmering antipathy exploded in an orgy of communal violence. End quote. And in time, the memory of that violence became an heirloom, a corrosive inheritance, passed down from those who had seen the worst in the other side. As a common slogan in Pakistan went, quote, What is our relationship with India but that of hatred and revenge? End quote.

One Pakistani writer recalled, "...I was often told by my schoolteachers and even my own grandmother that Hindus were treacherous and mischievous people." On the other side of the fence, an Indian man named Som Amand recalled, "...my mother wouldn't allow Muslims to enter her kitchen."

And a Pakistani writer named Anam Zakaria said of her countrymen, "...for many of them, to contemplate being friends with or even writing a letter to an Indian was nothing less than a sin. Indians had murdered Muslims, tortured their ancestors, and snatched away their homes. What need was there to talk to such an enemy? They detested the Indians their own grandparents had grown up amongst. There was no room for dialogue."

No need to cross over. End quote. But despite all the ill-feeling and historical baggage, blame could be found on all sides. As the writer Malhatra Ancal put it, quote, We cannot say with certainty that it was the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, or even the British who were responsible. For ultimately, everyone suffered in one way or another. Welcome to The Partition of India, Part 4.

Unholy Rush It's August 14th, 1947. We're about 5,000 feet in the air, in a private airplane soaring over northern India. Sinking into her seat, Lady Edwina Mountbatten stares out the window, thinking about the very long day she just had. After five months in India, the viceroy was no stranger to long days.

Her short time in the subcontinent had been an exhausting whirlwind of 18-hour working sessions, armed bodyguards, and multiple dinner parties a week. And while she smiled and chatted and put on a friendly face, on the inside, she was screaming. The symptoms of her menopause had been grinding her down. She couldn't sleep, she was anxious all the time, and her fights with Dickie were getting worse and worse.

Edwina felt like a social butterfly with lead wings. Her only respite, the one oasis in this endless desert, had been Javahirlal. Neru had started out as a friend, as most lovers do. He was funny and kind and...

intelligent and introspective, he could unlock that part of her that she didn't often show to other people. And in their time together, Edwina and Nehru had quickly developed what one historian called a quote, extraordinary intimacy. Many a long day had been tempered by the soft touch and sharp wit of Jawaharlal Nehru. But still, India was not England. As Edwina told her daughter Pamela, quote, It's a great adventure, it is.

and I love the work and the Indians and a lot of the interest, but how I long for lovely broadlands and sweet little Chester Street and the cozy and simple life.

End quote. Edwina was tired, and she wanted to go home. Thankfully, home seemed closer than ever on August 14th, 1947. Her husband, Dickie, had been sent to India as the last Viceroy of the British Raj. His mission had been to hand power back to the Indians, and he had achieved that goal with remarkable, and some would say ruthless, speed. As the writer Declan Walsh put it, Mountbatten had, quote, a ship-breaker's charter to

to dismember the property and dispose of it within 15 months. He did it in five.

The resulting independence would be, as the photographer Margaret Burke White put it, "...an extremely rare event in the history of nations, the birth of twins." The subcontinent would be fractured into two new states, India and Pakistan. As Alex von Tunzelman writes, "...by the morning of August 15th, India was by population the second largest country in the world. On its eastern and western edges, the

the two chunks of Pakistan comprised the sixth largest country in the world. And of the two twins, Pakistan would be delivered first. Its Independence Day was August 14th, and India would follow the next day, on August 15th. And when you are closing up shop on a 300-year-old empire, part of your job description is attending every farewell party, even with people you don't like very much.

And so, on August 13th, 48 hours before partition, the Mountbatten's flew to Karachi, the new capital of Pakistan, to attend the state banquet marking the occasion. Their host would be Mountbatten's favorite frenemy, the one, the only, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The great leader, the Qaid-e-Assam,

had been a thorn in Mountbatten's side all summer, an insufferable stumbling block, making things difficult as only a lawyer could. As Dickie vented to the King of England himself, quote, the only advisor that Jenna listened to...

is Jinnah. But eventually, a deal had been struck. Jinnah got his Pakistan, diminished though it was, and Mountbatten could claim to be the greatest negotiator in the esteemed history of the British Empire. And here, in Karachi, it was time for both men to say goodbye and good riddance.

The true depth of Jinnah's animosity towards the Viceroy had been encapsulated in an exchange he'd had with an army officer earlier that summer. At a party the Mountbatten's had thrown in Delhi to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, Jinnah had shown up 30 minutes late and when asked about it in private by the army officer, Jinnah had smirked, "...my boy, do you think I would come to this damn man's party on time? I purposefully came late, to show him I despise him."

But now the tables were turned. August 14th was Jinnah's party, Pakistan's party, and the Viceroy had to dutifully show up like the guest that he was. The banquet itself was uneventful, speeches and applause, soft drinks and ice cream, fake smiles and forced photo ops, and after gritting their teeth for hours, Jinnah and Mountbatten could finally be rid of each other,

Forever. But over the course of the evening, Edwina couldn't help but notice how sick Jinnah looked. The kaiti-assam had always been thin, emaciated even, but there was a strength to him, an edge.

He was, quote, a spear of ice with hypnotic, smoldering eyes, as one contemporary phrased it. But on Independence Day, Jinnah was beginning to look like the dying man that he was underneath. As a journalist named Mildred Talbot recalled in a haunting report, quote, his appearance so shocked me that little else registered on my mind during the evening. He looked like a walking, talking corpse. And

and the nightmare that I had that night was directly attributable to that vivid impression.

But whatever the true state of Jinnah's health, the new country of Pakistan was very much alive and kicking. And the next day, Lord and Lady Mountbatten boarded their plane to fly back to the Viceroy's house in the Indian capital of Delhi. A large leg of their flight path would cross over the Punjab, one of the regions that had been callously carved up by Lord Radcliffe. Home to 33 million people, Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims, the Punjab was an ancient place, brimming with religious significance. It was

It was also, in its own way, beautiful. A, quote, great sweep of plain laced with rivers, as Alex von Tunzelman put it. But as Edwina Mountbatten looked out the window on their flight back to Delhi, she noticed something odd about the countryside below. She could see dark shapes twisting and bending like rivers through the landscape. It took a few seconds to register, but Edwina realized the shapes were people –

Thousands upon thousands of people marching in long refugee columns, and all around them were huge fires, villages ablaze sending dark pillars of smoke into the air. The horrors of partition were already starting.

For months, fear had been rising. It began with small things, little things. In the city of Lahore, a 16-year-old Hindu girl named Nirmal remembered her Muslim classmate, Ashraf, raising a clenched fist in the air and saying, quote,

There had always, always been religious tensions in the Punjab, but under the British Raj, those sharp edges had been sanded down a bit by a shared sense of culture, a Punjabi culture. As one woman remembered, Without any problems. Those were our values.

One man named Mohindra Dahl explained further, "...you see, the culture, the language, the food, the habits, even the rituals, for example weddings, are all common. If you see a Muslim wedding or a Hindu wedding, there are loads of rituals which I can tell you are all common. It has nothing to do with religion, because they belong to that particular land, the particular place that you come from."

In theory, the goal of Indian independence should have been a uniting force. And for some, it was. According to a woman named Khurshid Sultana, There was nothing like Pakistan or India in the beginning. We wanted independence. India. There was nothing like partition or being separate. All Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christians, everybody. We used to be together. And we used to all say that we wanted independence. India.

India is ours. But not everybody had such a rosy outlook. One man named Nazir Adami, who was about 16 years old at the time and a passionate member of the Muslim League, recalled, quote,

Our diet, our prayers, our clothes, our language, everything was different. Even though we considered ourselves equal to the Hindus in every way, there was no denying the inherent differences. Though Muslims had been a dominant power in India for centuries, and we were the only people apart from the British who ever gave India a semblance of unity, that was all in the past.

We were certain, given the way the political situation was unfolding, that with the dissipation of the Raj and the dawn of independence, there would be no intention to give equal rights and representation to both communities. End quote. And the more time went on, the more strain that was placed on the British, the more the bonds of fellowship between the religions seemed to buckle, to snap like ropes.

As a Muslim man named Nazmuddin Khan described, quote, We were like brothers, Hindus and Muslims. But then we began to hear talk on the street of the British finally leaving India, of complete independence, and these were followed by rumors of a possible partition, Hindus on one side and Muslims on the other.

End quote. All the fear and anxiety that had been bubbling up for years crystallized with Mountbatten's announcement. Overnight, a switch seemed to flip. Decades of steady political polarization, combined with the sobering reality of a hard deadline, pushed things over a cliff. A man named Harun Ahmed, who was 11 years old and living in Delhi at the time, observed, quote,

Now, they were enemies. They meaning Hindus. It wasn't that gradually we became less friendly or moved away from people, nothing like that. It was so sudden. But for some, this bifurcation was a long time coming. Inevitable, even. As a Sikh man named Aridaman Singh Dhillon observed, "...distrust was already there. It had been there for centuries."

In places like the Punjab, things were getting worse with every passing day. The right-wing militias and fanatical paramilitary groups that had been simmering on the sidelines for years became louder, bolder, and more violent. A Sikh woman named Prabhjot Kaur recalled, "...on one side we could hear cries of Allahu Akbar, and from the other, chants of Bole Sonni Khal resounding in the air all day and night."

like battle cries. Lahore, a city that had been the nucleus of culture and amity, became the site of bloodbath in the months leading up to independence. Our hearts would sink with fear. We would lock our houses and climb up to the roofs with bricks and stones in case there were riots in the neighborhood.

End quote. The fast-approaching partition date that Dickie Mountbatten had set transformed cities like Lahore and Emiratesar into literal bonfires.

For people like Professor Satpal Kohli in Lahore, the worst part was the fact that the violence and intimidation was coming from people he'd known all his life. Quote, Our house was the first to be looted, and it shocks me to say this, but it was the neighbors. Mob mentality. There was no justifiable explanation for it. The violence that unfurled after the announcement of the partition was terrifying, and Lahore burnt in its wake.

Gone was the beautiful city of my childhood, and what remained was a city entirely unrecognizable, coated in fire, blood, and destruction. The relationships that had been fostered over years, a life, were forgotten. I speak proudly of kinship, but even that was not enough to keep the peace.

And then, on August 15th, independence finally arrived. In the capital cities of Delhi and Karachi, soaring speeches were given, flags were hoisted, and constitutions were enshrined. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke about trysts with destiny. Muhammad Ali Jinnah promised peace, love, and harmony within the borders of Pakistan. And for millions, it was a happy moment. As the

As Yasmin Khan writes, "...euphoria, an unprecedented collective feeling, marks many of the recollections of those who stood in the vast crowds, dazzled by the fireworks and illuminated buildings, not only in New Delhi but in the major cities throughout South Asia." After all the long years of activism, independence brought closure –

If nothing else, as one government worker in Delhi admitted, "...we were so tired and fed up with the to-ing and the fro-ing that we were grateful some decision had been taken at last. We thought, here's a solution, finally, and now we can relax." End quote.

But for millions more, especially in the freshly partitioned areas of Punjab and Bengal, independence didn't bring euphoria or relief at all. It brought confusion, anger, fear, and resentment. And when the boundary was finally revealed on the 16th of August, a grim realization came crashing down on their heads.

They were not in the right country. Many people found themselves on the quote-unquote wrong side of the border, surrounded by people who wanted them out, or dead, whichever was easiest. The Sikh poet Prabhjot Kaur remembered, quote, "...independence had been declared, but we felt anything but free. Rather, we became strangers to the city we called home."

End quote. For people on the quote-unquote right side of the border, it meant a sudden recruitment into nationalist causes. As the Punjabi journalist Amjad Hussain remembered, quote, End quote.

Across the subcontinent, fires were burning, mobs were chanting, and gunshots were cracking. Hindus living in Pakistan and Muslims living in India were faced with a choice: leave now, right now, or risk it all. You could take your chances on the road or gamble on the hospitality of the majority populations. Many people decided it was time to leave, and leave fast.

As a partition survivor named Nazmuddin Khan told a journalist years later, "...one after another, great cities fell to a vast and violent tragedy, the unthinkable, the unimaginable. And then we saw a great exodus, Hindus arriving on unfamiliar soil, and Muslims leaving in vast numbers for the quote-unquote promised land that was Pakistan. We saw them leave their homes, their belongings, their lives."

For the Hindu professor Satpal Kohli in Lahore, the flight was sudden, disorienting, and panicked.

Quote, "'Before we left that night, my mother went around the house, packing up her jewelry and collecting items of value, things that had been mortgaged with us. There was no time to pack clothes or other belongings. The streets were burning. The slogans could be heard in the distance. "'Only items of value,' she told me. And so one by one, we picked those things, small and discreet enough to be put in a small box that we brought with us, and still valuable enough to be sold later.'"

A Muslim man, the aforementioned Nasmuddin Khan, remembered the day he left Delhi. We realized it might actually be unsafe for us to continue living in Delhi, and so we ran away as fast as we could. I knew we had no choice, but it was a heartbreaking move nonetheless. That day we fled from our home in a way that felt so cowardly. Yes, we had no choice, but the weight of that action bore down on us all.

End quote. Others took precautions to cover their escape. One journalist told a story about a particularly cautious refugee, quote, She told me that one night she lit the kerosene lamp that usually illuminated the rooms and left a coal stove burning so that the chimney would keep emitting smoke and make it seem as though someone was still in the house and food was being cooked. Then, in the middle of the night, the couple fled their hometown by bullock cart. End quote.

But while millions fled their homes and communities for fear of being persecuted as a minority, some maintained hope that they might return. In her book Remnants of Partition, the writer Anshal Mahatra tells a story about a woman who was, quote, "...so convinced that they would return to their home in Layalpur, now in Pakistan, that before leaving she locked every single cupboard in every single room, including the kitchen, making sure the house was secure and safe."

51 locks for 51 keys. In fact, she even made arrangements with a local woman to make sure the house would be cleaned before they returned. End quote. But that woman, like millions of others, never returned to the home she left behind.

Leaving your home forever is not an easy thing. And it wasn't easy for a 15-year-old boy named Raj Daswani. Raj was a Hindu living in the city of Karachi. And prior to partition, that wasn't a problem. Karachi was a Muslim-majority city with a small population of Hindus that lived peacefully. Everyone coexisted more or less fine. More than fine, actually. Because Raj was in love with the Muslim girl next door, named Yasmin.

Raj and Yasmin lived in the same apartment block, and they would meet at night to hold hands and whisper to each other by the light of a small candle. And like most teenagers in love, they made grand plans for the future. They talked about getting married and having kids. Of course, marriages between Hindu boys and Muslim girls were frowned upon, but they didn't care. As Raj recalled, quote,

We used to talk about it and be very hopeful that since we were in real love, we'll definitely be able to come through and cross that bridge of religious difference. End quote. And then, partition happened. Muslim refugees flooded into Karachi, bringing with them terrible stories of atrocity, murder, and rape at the hands of Hindus. Hindus just like Raj. And Raj soon realized that it was not safe for him in Karachi anymore.

and he had to leave. His Muslim neighbors begged him not to go. According to Raj, quote, they told us, you are safe here. We'll safeguard you. Don't leave. But Raj's grandparents decided that they and their 15-year-old charge could not stay. And on the day he left, Raj said goodbye to Yasmin and promised to return. Quote, that parting of each other was almost unbearable. She was crying. I was crying.

End quote. Like the old woman with the 51 keys, Raj thought he might come back to his home and marry Yasmin one day. Quote, End quote.

But Raj never saw Yasmin again. He did return to Karachi many decades later, in 1992, and he looked up Yasmin in the directory, found the place where she lived. He walked to the building, stood in front of the door, and...

and stopped. He was unable to work up the courage to knock on that door. Too much had happened. Too much had changed. And so he walked away from the neighborhood, preserving Yasmin as a teenage memory rather than face the reality of what time had wrought. Raj and Yasmin were just two of millions of people whose lives were irrevocably altered by partition. And believe it or not, they were some of the lucky ones.

Many more did not survive the ordeal. In the summer of 1947, all across northern India, people were leaving their homes and running for their lives. And that sense of loss and anguish is beautifully captured in a poem from a woman named Veena Dhillon Wilkes. She called it The Night Before the Flight. Quote, The night before the flight, from ancestral home, we lay face to face under the blue dome.

And drank from the moon its milky moonlight. In it we watched many stars twinkling in our eyes, Yours and mine. We watched and watched all night with such delight, Unslept the whole night, and crack of dawn the message arrived, Be ready, we are going. Going? Where? Why? Questions nobody answered, Hush on lips, anxiety in mind. Breakfast, packing, nobody bothered, Hurtful.

Hurry, hurry, quick. Trucks are moving. No time for leaving message for the left behind. Nears and dears, mothers, fathers. Trucks were moving. Military trucks. Evacuating dwellers of stately homes. Women and children and some men. Their guardians. Refugees.

Yes, leaving home was hard enough, but that was only the beginning. The millions of refugees pouring into the countryside that summer had a bigger problem than homelessness. They were being hunted.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

It's August 9th, 1947, about one week before partition. We're on a train traveling west across India toward the city of Karachi, the future capital of Pakistan. When the train had pulled out of the station in Delhi earlier that day, its shears had gone up from every compartment. Pakistan Zindabad, they yelled.

Long live Pakistan. Every passenger on board this train was a Muslim, and they were traveling to a home that technically did not exist yet. As Hajari Naseed writes, The men and some of the women were clerks and officials who had been laboring in the British-run government of India in New Delhi. With them were their families and their ribbon-tied files, their photo albums, toys, china, and prayer rugs. The

The gold jewelry that represented much of their savings and their equally prized bottles of illicit whiskey many drank despite the strictures of their religion. On August 9th, 1947, they were moving en masse to Karachi, 800 miles away, to take part in a great experiment. In six days, the sweltering city on the shores of the Arabian Sea would become the capital of the world's first modern Muslim nation, Pakistan. End quote.

As the train rumbled out of Delhi and disappeared into the countryside, it belched a trail of oily smoke into the air. The passengers settled in for a long journey, all 800 miles of it, and eventually the excitement faded into a kind of bored contentment. People started to doze off or read or quietly chat, and as the train crossed the Punjab, the sun dipped beneath the horizon. That night, many passengers were enjoying the gentle, rhythmic rocking of the train.

of the train. And that is when the bomb exploded. As the train engine passed over a lonely stretch of rail, blasting charges on the tracks detonated in an ear-splitting explosion.

When the carefully placed explosives were triggered, they twisted seven feet of rail into a charred helix. The lead train car flipped on its side, sending sparks into the air as metal grinded against metal. The two passenger compartments behind it were turned over as well, sending people flying from their seats, smashing heads and arms and limbs into hard surfaces. The four carriages behind those violently jumped the track, and the train slid to a stop in a cloud of dust.

For a moment, there was silence, and then the screaming started. The armed guards and train conductors stumbled out of the wreckage to see a handful of silhouettes crouching in the tall grass. This was not an accident. It had been an attack.

The guards managed to get a few shots off at the mysterious assailants, but the saboteurs vanished like smoke and roared off into the night in a jeep. A quick inspection of the passenger cars gave some small relief. Many were injured and bleeding, but only two people were dead, a woman and a child. All things considered, it could have been much, much worse. They'd gotten lucky. Of course, some passengers wanted to know who had attacked them, who would dare, but

But many already knew. The guards couldn't make out the faces of the men in the tall grass, but the turbans they wore were a telltale sign. The train had been attacked by Sikhs. Up until this point in the story, we haven't spent much time with the Sikhs at all. In fact, it would not be unfair to say that we've all but ignored them.

So far, I've included a few isolated anecdotes, peppered in a couple of first-hand accounts, but as a political force, the Sikhs have been mostly absent from our story. And in some ways, that makes sense as a kind of meta-commentary. Because that's very much how the Sikhs felt in 1947. Overlooked. Ignorant.

ignored, neglected, and unseen. While Jinnah and Nehru dueled over the destiny of the subcontinent, while Dickie Mountbatten threw garden parties and wooed politicians, while Cyril Radcliffe dragged his pencil like a scalpel over the face of the Punjab, the Sikhs had been forgotten.

sidelined and forced to watch their future being decided by other people. But who are the Sikhs exactly? You might be asking. Well, if the religions of India were siblings or brothers, Hinduism was the oldest brother, stretching back about 4,000 years.

Islam was the middle brother, having only come on the scene in the 7th century, and Sikhism was the baby brother, the youngest by far, at only about 400 years old. But the Sikhs did not come from nowhere. The very first Sikhs had been Hindus, disenchanted with the caste system and Hinduism's sprawling pantheon of gods.

Beginning in the 16th century or so, Sikhism blossomed into its own unique belief system under a series of gurus or religious leaders. But unlike Islam, which had followers all over the world, and Hinduism, which had followers all over India, Sikhism was narrowly confined to the Punjab region. It was the only home that they had ever known.

And although Sikhism valued humanism, compassion, and truth, it was not a pacifist faith. Over the years, the religion developed a distinct martial tradition, a heavy focus on combat ability and military prowess.

Saints were soldiers and soldiers were saints and in time the Sikhs became famous as fierce and cunning warriors. But that was not enough to save them when the East India Company came calling and eventually the Sikhs found themselves on the wrong end of British bayonets just like everybody else.

But the English always had an eye for talent in their native subjects, and they realized that this proud pocket of soldier saints living in the Northwest might come in handy during, say, a world war. And so, recruited into the British army, Sikh soldiers fought the enemies of the empire in places as far away as Italy, North Africa, and France. They received weapons training, drill practice, and invaluable combat experience.

And by the early 20th century, Sikhs made up more than 20% of the British Indian Army, even though they only comprised about 2-3% of India's population. But despite that disproportionate level of service to the Raj, when the independence movement started to gain traction and the negotiations for partition were underway, the Sikhs were left out in the cold. Everyone seemed to be getting their own country. The Muslims would get Pakistan.

The Hindus would get India. From the Sikhs' perspective, it stood to reason that they should get their own nation as well. But at the time, no one really took the Sikhs seriously. They were an inconvenience at best. Muhammad Ali Jinnah himself sniffed that the Sikhs, "...unfortunately lacked leadership of a high order and while they were successful in small ways of business, seldom produced outstanding men in law, science, or politics."

As the fate of India was being decided, the Sikhs never really got a seat at the table. In

And they resented being dismissed as pawns in a post-colonial auction house. For decades, they had fought and bled for the empire. Weren't they owed a homeland of their own? Jinnah was getting his Pakistan. Why couldn't they have a Sikhistan? As Ahmed Akbar writes, quote, For the Sikhs, the Punjab was the only home that they had ever had. And the Sikh sense of nationalism and identity was

was linked to the Punjab. They had once ruled the area, however briefly, and their holy places were in it. Their sacred book had been formed here, and their great capital had been Lahore. All of this would be lost to them if the Punjab were to be divided.

One Lahore newspaper put it slightly more colorfully at the time, "...to seek solidarity, the Mountbatten scheme will be what a knife is to a cheese piece. It will cut through it easily and definitively."

For many Sikhs, the nightmare scenario was falling on the Pakistan side of the partition boundary. Muslims and Sikhs had a lot of historical baggage dating all the way back to the founding days of the faith. As Hajari Nasid writes, History remained a potent force among Sikhs who adhered to a martial faith. Many of their founding myths centered on the astoundingly nasty tortures suffered by their founding gurus at

at the hands of Muslims. End quote. And in 1947, history seemed to be repeating. Back in March, just before the last Viceroy had arrived to negotiate the transfer of power, Muslim mobs had massacred Sikh villages in the northern areas of the Punjab. Terrible and true stories of mass murder, mass suicide, and gang rape spread like wildfire through Sikh communities. According to Hajar-e-Nasid, quote,

Incendiary images from the riots seared themselves into Sikh mines. In the village of Toa Khalsa, dozens of Sikh women had hurled themselves into a well to save themselves from being captured and raped by a Muslim mob. A dishonor to their minds worse than death. Elsewhere, Muslim attackers left terrible totems for the survivors to find. As one man recalled, "...I saw scores of corpses hanging from trees by their hair."

The result of all this was terror and outrage. Many Sikhs were asking themselves, is this what we can expect, living under majority Muslim rule in Pakistan? As Hajar-e-Nasid writes, "...a terrified and isolated Sikh peasant had to assume that this was what Pakistan meant, a thousand-strong rabble pounding drums and howling, their forest of spear tips glinting in the torchlight."

End quote. For Sikhs, the outcome of partition appeared to be life or death. A prominent Sikh activist named Tara Singh warned, quote, If the Muslim League wants to establish Pakistan, they will have to pass through an ocean of Sikh blood. End quote. And it was not a bluff. A British intelligence report summed up the situation, quote, History suggests that the Sikhs to a man would fight literally to the death rather than submit to Muslim domination. End quote.

And the Sikh leadership told Mountbatten pretty much the exact same thing when he met with them in the spring. As Dickey reported, "...in the Punjab all parties are seriously preparing for civil war, and of these by far the most businesslike are the Sikhs. They made it quite clear that they would fight to the last man if put under Muslim domination."

The Sikhs were scared and angry and their need to prepare was hardening into a thirst for revenge. As one British official commented, quote, A readiness for defense too easily passes into a desire for attack. End quote. And Hajari Naseed describes a particularly vivid anecdote in his book, Midnight Furies. Quote,

The ranks of Sikh militants had swelled from a few thousand at the beginning of the summer to nearly 20,000 by the end of July. Many of the fighters were ex-military, well-trained and battle-tested in the deserts of North Africa and the jungles of Burma. Late that summer, British historian Michael Edwards, then a young soldier, stumbled across nearly 300 Sikhs drilling with rifles and Tommy guns in a village just a few miles from Amritsar. They eagerly put on a shooting contest for him, in

in which the targets were dummies of Muslim men, women, and children. The fighters vowed that, quote, there would not be a Muslim throat or a Muslim maidenhead unripped in the Punjab when their work was done.

The Punjab was a powder keg, and in August of 1947, it finally exploded, becoming the quote, site of the largest communal carnage in the history of South Asia, according to the writer Yasser Latif Hamdani. It was, as Ahmed Akbar writes, quote, a community in the throes of self-destruction. End quote. Sikh militias were out for revenge against Muslims for the March massacres, and in their holy city of Amritsar...

They took it. According to Alex von Tunzelman, "...in Emirate Saar, on the Indian side of the border, a large group of Muslim women was stripped naked, paraded through the streets, and raped by a Sikh mob. Some Sikhs were able to rescue a few of the women and hide them in the Golden Temple until the army could arrive. The rest of the women were burned alive."

And so, the major cities in the Punjab became sites of carnage, forcing millions of people to run for their lives. Muslims in India were fleeing to Pakistan. Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan were fleeing to India. It was less of a migration than a hostage exchange. Earlier that summer, when he was asked if he foresaw any mass transfer of populations, Lord Dickie Mountbatten flippantly answered, quote,

End quote.

He could not have been more wrong. By give or take 12 million people. The sheer numbers of the migration were astonishing. As Yasmin Khan writes, quote, "...it had been unthinkable that 12 million people would move. Absolutely impossible to conceive, even if anyone had believed it to be desirable. The mass migrations were the sting in the scorpion's tail, the unknown face of the partition plan."

The tides of people flowing out of Pakistan and India were so fantastical, so vast, and so thorough that they unbalanced the entire substructure on which Pakistan had been built.

The great columns of refugees that Edwina Mountbatten had been able to see from her window on the flight back to Delhi were so immense that they stretched for 20 miles in either direction. In her book on partition, the journalist Urvashi Bhutalia claims that you could stand in a single spot for eight days and not see the end of some of these passing refugee columns. They were rivers of hardship and

and misery. According to Yasmin Khan, quote, "...luggage was very often confiscated or looted along the way or simply abandoned as people became too weak to carry it. Sores developed on bare feet. Women gave birth to babies en route, and people died of starvation, exhaustion, cholera, and grief. It must have seemed as if all the fates were conspiring against the refugees."

Because to make matters worse, the infernal temperatures on the Punjabi plains in June were followed by dust storms. A thick pall of dust caked the refugees and the flies were omnipresent. End quote. For a little Muslim girl named Nargis Khatun, it was a turbulent, scary, and yet oddly exhilarating experience. Quote, I was 10. I

I had some understanding of it, I knew where we were going and was so happy about it. We were on our way to Pakistan.

to safety. At the time, the main aim was to reach Pakistan any way we could. But when we got on the train, its conditions were worse than we could imagine. People were crammed and pressed against each other with no space to move or even breathe. There were people hanging onto the doors and windows, and then there were people sitting on top of the train with their luggage and children and even small animals like goats or dogs. But the strangest thing was that

was that we never realized when it happened. When one country ended and another began. When India stopped and Pakistan started. There were no obvious differences between a land and its conjoined neighbor. And so I suspect that we gained our new citizenship in a moment curiously lost on us. Tucked away in a corner of an overcrowded train, we had quietly become Pakistani.

For people like Nargis, the abrupt change was jarring and destabilizing. As the writer Anshal Malhotra describes, quote, Apart from a physical displacement, there would have been a traumatic mental displacement, a sudden uprootedness, an unlearning and relearning of identity. 1947 would have created an involuntary distance between where one was born before the partition and where one moved to after it, stretching out people's identity unnoticed.

over the expanse of this distance. End quote. But for most refugees on the run, a sense of belonging was a secondary consideration. The primary concern was staying alive. The journey to the safe side of the border could take days, even weeks, depending on the circumstances. And the entire time, these refugees were exposed and unprotected, easy prey for people who wanted them dead. As one haunted survivor recalled, quote,

End quote. The things that happened on the road left deep impressions. One survivor named Karam Singh, nearly 70 years later, could still feel the fear. Quote,

When I remember, my body shakes." The communal violence in the Punjab during August and September was ubiquitous, ruthless, and worst of all, organized. As Yasmin Khan writes, "Much evidence points not to the crazy and inexplicable actions of mad, uneducated peasants with sticks and stones, but to well-organized and well-motivated groups of young men who went out, particularly in Punjab, to carry out ethnic cleansing."

Historian Andrew Whitehead agrees, "...this was not a civil war with battle lines and rival armies, but nor was it simply spontaneous violence. On all sides, local militias and armed gangs planned how to inflict the greatest harm on those they had come to see as their enemies."

End quote. For the British, who were in the process of packing up and leaving, the hatred between the religious communities was almost incomprehensible. In a baffling twist of irony, after 300 long years of British occupation, India's communities had more pent-up rage for each other than their colonial oppressors. Barely any British people were harmed during partition. But the British were not.

but they had a front row seat to the awful spectacle. We have account after account after account of British army officers and civil servants encountering things on the road that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Here's one story from Hajari Naseed's book. Quote,

A Briton traveling through Alwar by rail in early September was horrified to find a barely alive Muslim girl atop a pile of corpses on a train platform. When he tried to give her some water, a bearded Hindu brushed him aside, saying, quote, He then produced a bottle of petrol, oil, and forced some of it into the girl's mouth and set her alight.

And here's another story from Nasid. The British wife of another officer said her train had been stopped at dawn before reaching the city, and she awoke to blood-curdling shrieks and groans. Raising the blinds of her compartment, she was horrified to see Sikhs being dragged out of carriages and hacked to pieces alongside the tracks. One of the blood-spattered killers, a Muslim, had tried to calm her. Quote,

Don't be frightened, Mim Sahib, no one will harm you, he said gently. We've just got this job to do, and then the train will go on. End quote. Muslim and Hindu militias were proficient and creative when it came to murdering each other, but the most talented killers in the Punjab by far were the

were the Sikhs. Their extensive experience, drilling, training, and fighting abroad in the British army came in handy. They had the tactics, the weapons, and the willpower. The writer Alex von Tunzelman describes a typical Sikh attack on a Muslim village. They were well-armed with machine guns, rifles, and shotguns, as well as grenades, spears, axes,

axes, and kirpans, the ceremonial blade carried by all Sikhs. Usually, their Muslim adversaries only had staves. The pattern of attack was well established. When Muslim villagers saw a Sikh warband coming, they would climb onto the roofs and beat the gongs to alert neighboring villages. The

End quote.

And when you read about this stuff, you cannot help but wonder what was going through the heads of some of these young men as they descended upon villages and butchered innocent men, women, and children so callously. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, we do not have to guess.

Here's one Sikh militiaman in his own words describing his state of mind at the time of a raid: "We went off raising war cries, even leaving our food. We'd go off in high spirits. I ran after this fucking Muslim with my sword and killed him. My sword was a curved one. It used to look magnificent. It used to feel good. They had killed so many of our people. We used to shout war cries and then chop people's heads off.

End quote.

Now, it's very tempting to listen to an account like that and reflexively, instantly recoil. To write that person off as a sociopath, or a monster, or some outlier from the normal spectrum of human experience. But sad to say, in the context of partition, he is not an outlier. At all.

And it raises an uncomfortable question. Why did so many people from so many communities behave in the exact same way? After all, this was not a phenomenon unique to Sikhs or Hindus or Muslims. Everyone was culpable. There were no clean hands that summer. It is a very hard thing to wrestle with, and many have tried. In his book on the subject, the writer Ahmed Akbar attempts to peel back the psychology of this reciprocal style of

of ethnic cleansing. Quote, When a person has lost their family home, when friends and neighbors have become enemies, it creates an internal state of terror that quickly becomes external terror. If you want to abolish terror, you try to obliterate what you see as its source. Then the victim wants to turn on the perpetrator of the crime, not just wishing to kill, but to cut them up, torture them, torch their house and make sure they are utterly and

They are burning with desire to avenge what they see as palpable and gross injustice. This is what gripped the main communities in 1947. End quote. To observers at the time, it seemed like the basic fabric of civil society had been turned inside out. A British administrator named Penderel Moon remembered with a kind of dazed incredulity, quote,

End quote. End quote.

And those who took part in this violence, or at least those who will admit they did, often express a deep sense of guilt and confusion in interviews. Even they aren't quite sure why they did what they did. As a Sikh man named Harjeet told a journalist years after the fact, quote,

End quote.

Another man, a Muslim farmer named Nasir Hussain, expressed a similar kind of dazed regret. Quote,

But for every murder, every rape, every terrible crime, there were plenty of people who refused to take part in the violence, who saw past these simplistic religious labels and behaved with incredible compassion and courage.

As Yasmin Khan writes, quote, "...against this bleak backdrop, many people carried out unusually brave, heroic, and humanitarian acts. Some individuals saved the lives of neighbors, friends, and strangers of different communities, even by risking their own lives."

Others gave word of impending attacks to their neighbors, sheltered large numbers of people, smuggled food to the stranded, and helped secretly move them from danger in the dead of night by lending transport or arranging disguises or armed protection.

The civil surgeon of Shikpura, a survivor of the atrocities in the district, noted, "...in the end, I feel honor-bound to record that the lives of my children and those of about 600 educated Hindus and Sikhs, male and female, of the civil lines were saved by the efforts of some God-fearing Muslims who gave them shelter in their houses, even at the risk of their lives."

One Sikh man named Kushdiva Singh, who was the superintendent of a hospital, secretly evacuated hundreds of Muslim patients who would have been slaughtered in their beds by vengeful mobs. After partition, he received 317 letters of gratitude from people he had saved or their family members. One elderly woman in Lahore single-handedly defused a Muslim mob who had come to kill a Hindu doctor that she had been sheltering in her home,

saying, quote, I am a Muslim mother. If you want to get past me, you will have to kill me first.

Both she and the Hindu doctor survived the ordeal. But other good Samaritans were not so lucky. A Hindu politician named Narinjan Das Baga tried to save an injured Muslim from an angry mob and was killed in the process. Another Muslim policeman, whose name has unfortunately been lost to history, saved over 200 Sikhs by fending off a gang of killers with little more than a stick.

Meanwhile, far away in Great Britain, the reactions to the violence ranged from mild disgust to total apathy. One 43-year-old housewife from Sheffield, England named Edie Rutherford wrote about partition in her diary, "...I swear most folk could not care less, and I resent the inference that we have had them enslaved up to now. Most folk are just simply glad to be rid of them, to put it vulgarly yet truthfully." End quote.

But for some British politicians who were mourning the abdication of the Indian jewel in the crown, the violence seemed like a vindication of all their bigoted assumptions. Well, well, well. Who'd have thought? The second we step away, the moment we stop babysitting these children, it all goes to hell. As the former Prime Minister Winston Churchill commented, quote,

Look at these horrors and butcheries perpetrated upon one another with the ferocity of cannibals, by races gifted with capacities for the highest culture, who had for generations dwelt side by side in general peace under the broad, tolerant, and impartial rule of the British crown.

End quote. Across the world, no one could deny just how bad things were in India. And already, the accusatory fingers were seeking a scapegoat. Who?

Whose fault was this, ultimately? Was it Mountbatten who had rushed the transfer of power? Was it Muhammad Ali Jinnah who had stirred up religious animus with his divisive rhetoric? Maybe it was Jawaharlal Nehru who had underestimated the importance of religious identity in Indian politics. Or maybe it was Mohandas Gandhi who had insisted that the British leave in the first place.

Well, there would be plenty of time to assign blame, but that would have to come later. As the bodies mounted and the blood flowed, the most important thing was stopping the violence. India had only been free for a month, and it was already on the brink of complete anarchy. Someone had to do something.

It's September 7th, 1947. We're in Delhi, the capital of India. Three weeks earlier, on Independence Day, the city had been the epicenter of a great celebration. Delhi was a very old city, saturated in historical and cultural significance. For a thousand years, it had been a key hub of human activity on the subcontinent.

An ancestral seat for kings and emperors. And the ripples of that past could be seen and felt in every alley, every alcove, and every avenue. You could smell it in the street food sizzling in the stalls.

You could hear it in the music echoing from open windows, and you could see it in the breathtaking architecture, like the famous Red Fort in the heart of the old city. In the old days, the Red Fort had been a monument to the power of the Mughal emperors. Its iconic red sandstone walls were vivid reminders of a time when India had been free and proud and independent. Before the East India Company. Before the Raj.

And so it seemed like a fitting place to raise the tricolor flag of the new Indian nation on August 15, 1947. As fireworks popped in the sky and speeches rang out from the parapets, it felt like a fresh start, a new beginning. Thousands upon thousands of people had gathered in the capital to celebrate the inauguration

of a new era, the triumphant culmination of what their prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, called, quote, a tryst with destiny. A Muslim man named Iftikhar Ahmed was 17 years old at the time, and he remembered the sights and sounds of Independence Day vividly. The city was lit up, quote, just like Christmas time. When the Mughals had built the Red Fort three centuries earlier, they had carved a phrase into the sandstone above one of the archways in Persian, quote,

If there is a paradise on earth, it is this. To the thousands of spectators celebrating independence, it felt like paradise, once lost,

had been found again. The joy in the streets was so palpable that all the animus and rancor against the British seemed to be forgotten, the way the aftertaste of a bad dream starts to fade in the glow of morning. And when Lord Dickie Mountbatten, the Viceroy, paraded down Delhi streets in his lavish open-top car, he could hear shouts of, quote,

Hail Mountbatten! Ironically, by leaving India, the Brits had finally earned the love of their former subjects. And that irony was not lost on one photographer who quipped, quote, After 200 years, the British have finally conquered India.

But all that champagne exuberance in the capital quickly went flat as reports started to come in from the countryside, from the Punjab, and from Bengal. Rumors started trickling into the city. Horror stories of ethnic cleansing, murder, mass suicide, gang rape, things so horrible they seemed beyond belief. Maybe, some hoped, it was just that. Rumor. Baseless political scaremongering and market gossip.

But then came the refugees, the flesh and blood proof that all the rumors were true. Sikhs and Hindus from the Punjab flooded into the city. They came on trains, on planes, and by foot. Hundreds of thousands of people running for their lives, and like shipwrecked passengers swarming a lifeboat, they surged and stumbled into the safe haven of Delhi, bleeding, exhausted, and traumatized.

Many of them had seen their friends murdered and their children butchered. They were homeless, adrift, powerless, and angry.

Many of these Sikh and Hindu refugees had lost everything, and in their rage and despair, they were desperate for an outlet for that anger. They wanted someone to punish, and the one million Muslims living in the city of Delhi became the object of that craving for revenge. In the faces of Delhi Muslims, they saw the reflection of their tormentors on the other side of the border, the same people who had burned their homes and chased them out. It didn't

It didn't matter that these Muslims had never done anything to them. They were Muslims all the same. As Hajari Naseed writes, "...once the migrants crossed the border, their stories and their scars spread hate like an oil slick." By mid-September, the only pops to be heard in Delhi were gunshots, not fireworks. The chaos and genocidal fury that had consumed cities like Lahore and Amritsar had come home to Delhi itself.

There may have been a brand new government in charge, but it was fear that ruled in the capital. As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote, The citizens of Delhi began to mark themselves out with visible signs that they were not Muslim. Hindus shaved their hair to leave a traditional tuft on the crown and left shirts unbuttoned to show the white sacred thread worn across the chest. Indian Christians began to sew large red crosses onto their shirts.

and all the shops in central Delhi displayed placards saying, quote, Hindu shop, regardless of their ownership. These public displays of religious identity only made the conflict more tribal, end quote. On September 6th, a bomb exploded in a crowd of Muslims at a train station. Riots flared up like open sores all over the city. When the police arrived, they panicked.

firing into the crowds and killing over 450 people. And that carelessness only fueled the anarchy. The next day, gangs and looters converged on Muslim shops and businesses. Broken glass glittered on the ground and tear gas congealed in the air.

But later that day, on September 7th, something extraordinary happened. As the rioters attempted to break into a famous movie theater, the Odeon Cinema, they caught sight of a man walking towards them. No, running towards them. He was shouting and angry, brandishing a wooden stick as a club. But he wasn't a rioter or a gangster. He was well-dressed and clean-shaven. His normally calm eyes stretched into a wild, frightening expression.

And this man, this lone vigilante, jumped into the mob and began beating them, shouting at them, shaming them. How dare they do this? How could they do this to their people, to their city, to their country? The rioters realized who this man was and backed off. Smashing up a window was one thing, but no one wanted to put a bruise on this guy. No one wanted to trade blows with the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.

As it happened, the reserved, jovial Nehru had rediscovered his famous temper. And in the incandescence of his righteous anger, the rioters lost their nerve, at least for a few hours. And this was not the first time Jawaharlal Nehru had flung himself into the middle of a riot in the last few weeks. It was just the latest example in a pattern of what Mountbatten's chief of staff, Pug Ismay, called, quote, "...appalling personal risk."

As the battle for Delhi raged around him, Nehru's classic angry idealism roared back to life. The Prime Minister of India was acting like a one-man police department in a reckless, flailing desperation to stop the killing. As Hajar-e-Nasid writes, quote, Nehru angrily faced down mobs himself, rushing from trouble spot to trouble spot.

At night, he drove around the city, unable to rest, once even picking up a terrified Muslim couple and bringing them to his own home for safety.

When he wasn't in his office fighting through administrative fatigue or arguing with his cabinet members, Nehru was out in the city confronting armed mobs, sometimes completely alone. The Viceroy's Chief of Staff, Pug Yizmei, said that Nehru, quote, went on the prowl whenever he could escape from the cabinet table. I had, with my own eyes, seen him charge into a rioting Hindu mob and slap the faces of the

of the ringleaders. He seemed to have no thought whatsoever for his personal safety.

End quote. It was only a matter of time, some believed, before Nehru got himself killed. Before he confronted the wrong mob, the wrong person, and found the wrong end of a knife or a gun or a club. But his courage was undeniable. According to Shashi Tharoor, quote, The American editor Norman Cousins recounted how one night in August, Hindu rioters in New Delhi, quote, inflamed by stories of Muslim terror,

smashed their way into Muslim stores, destroying and looting and ready to kill. Even before the police arrived, Jawaharlal Nehru was on the scene, trying to bring people to their senses. He spied a Muslim who had just been seized by Hindus, and he interposed himself between the man and his attackers. Suddenly a cry went up. Jawaharlal is here. It had a magical effect. People stood still. Looted merchandise was dropped.

and the mob's psychology disintegrated. By the time the police arrived, people were dispersing. The riot was over. The fact that Nehru had risked his life to save a single Muslim had a profound effect far beyond New Delhi. Many thousands of Muslims who had intended to flee to Pakistan now stayed in India, staking their lives on Nehru's ability to protect them and assure them justice.

People like Pug Ismay could not understand why Nehru, who should have been spending his nights making administrative decisions, was leaping into danger every night and putting his own life at risk. But the answer, of course, was obvious. The kindling that fed Nehru's temper was guilt. This was on him. This was his fault. Who was it?

Who else's could it be? Nehru could not help but think, back to what he had said just weeks before partition, when someone had raised concerns about keeping the British army in India just a little bit longer to ensure order. Nehru had said, quote, "...I would rather have every village in India go up in flames than keep a single British soldier in India a moment longer than necessary."

Nehru had meant it rhetorically, hyperbolically, but instead it had become a prophecy fulfilled. Thirty years earlier, as a young man, Javaharlal Nehru had traced his fingers over the bullet holes in the wall after the Amritsar massacre. It was, as we've discussed, a formative moment. These

These European colonialists seemed capable of such inhumanity and wanton cruelty. But now, in 1947, it shattered him to confront the idea that his countrymen were capable of the same kind of atrocity. And nowhere was that atrocity more pungent than in the Punjab. Since Independence Day, Nehru had visited the Punjab multiple times, and every visit had rocked him to his core. The trips made him, quote, sick with horror, and, quote, putrid.

peculiarly helpless. On one occasion, Nehru's car was stopped by a crowd, demanding he stop what they called, quote-unquote, the war. But the Prime Minister shouted back, quote, Are you not ashamed of yourselves? Have you no conscience left? What do these houses and these dead bodies show? Who is conducting this war? End quote. But the reality of the situation spoke for itself. After

After spending one especially terrible day talking to columns of refugees, hearing their stories, seeing their hardships, Nehru seemed overwhelmed with grief. As his secretary remembered, "...I cannot imagine another day when he could have felt more strongly that all his hopes, his dreams, his faith in human nature were crashing down in pieces."

A journalist named Shorish Kashmiri wrote about a heated moment between one refugee and Nehru, quote,

Some young people, whose parents had been butchered and whose sisters and daughters had been left in Pakistan, surrounded Nehru. One young man lost his temper and gave Nehru a resounding slap. A slap on the face of the Prime Minister of India. But Nehru said nothing to him. He just placed his hand on the young man's shoulder. The young man shouted, quote, "'Give my mother back to me. Bring my sisters to me.' And Nehru's eyes filled with tears."

He said, It was all beginning to take a toll on the new Prime Minister. As Nehru admitted at the time, quote,

ever since i assumed charge of my office i have done nothing but tried to keep people from killing each other or visited refugee camps and hospitals and all the plans which i had drawn up for making india a prosperous and progressive country have had to be relegated to the background

Depression and self-doubt began to smother Nehru. He admitted in a candid letter to Dickie Mountbatten, I suppose I am not directly responsible for what is taking place in the Punjab. I do not quite know who is responsible.

But in any event, I cannot and do not wish to shed my responsibility for my people. If I cannot discharge that responsibility effectively, then I begin to doubt whether I have any business to be where I am." In the capital city of Delhi, things continued to deteriorate. The city became a war zone. As Alex von Tunzelman writes, "All flights from Bombay and other cities into Delhi were cancelled.

Reports suggested that 600,000 were involved in rioting in the city, and Muslim estimates put their death toll at 10,000. The telephone, telegraph, and mail systems shut down, as did all public transport. A shoot-to-kill order was issued to Delhi police and armed forces.

By October, there were thought to be around 400,000 Hindu and Sikh refugees from the Punjab in Delhi. Delhi's own population had been devastated. 330,000 Muslims had left.

representing about one-third of the city's population. Still, Nehru did his best to project confidence and instill determination in a rattled and terrified public. As he announced on All India Radio, And he told a friend privately, There are only two options left for us now.

to go under, or to overcome our difficulties. And we are not going under. But the British who remained in India had their doubts, as Mountbatten's chief of staff intoned, quote, there is a possibility, and most keen a possibility, that orderly government may collapse. Even Dickey had doubts, as he told a room full of Indian government ministers, quote, if we go down in Delhi, we are finished.

But even at this crucial moment, the Indian government was divided in how to respond to the violence. Many of the politicians in Nehru's own party, the Congress Party, were displaying a shocking level of moral cowardice in the face of this ethnic cleansing.

As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote, "...many in Congress conspicuously refrained from condemning Hindu atrocities in the fear that they would lose the support of the Hindu majority. Now its politicians refuse to criticize murder, rape, and communal hatred. I have no stomach for this leadership," Nehru wrote in disgust. "...unless we keep to some standards, freedom has little meaning."

End quote. Some of these Congress politicians were flirting with religious fundamentalism, bending to the implications that India should abandon notions of pluralism altogether to become a Hindu nation exclusively governed by and for Hindus.

It was the exact kind of ethno-state that Muhammad Ali Jinnah had always warned India could and would become. The specter of fear that had driven the communities apart in the first place. Nehru, of course, would have none of it. Always the outspoken secularist, he snapped in a defiant public speech, quote, "...as long as I am at the helm of affairs, India will not become a Hindu state. The very idea of a theocratic state is not only medieval, but also stupid."

Yes, in those turbulent months, Nehru was short on friends. But he did have one important ally in the battle for Delhi.

Lady Mountbatten. Edwina. For Nehru and Edwina, the spring of 1947 had been a dizzying, surreal fairy tale. They had fallen hard for each other, and although they could never express it in public or be together officially, their bond was very real, all the same. As Nehru's niece recalled, quote, It was a very deep emotional attachment, there's no doubt about that. I

End quote. End quote.

And when the fairy tale became a nightmare and Delhi began to burn around them, Edwina joined Nehru in a Herculean effort to mitigate the human suffering. As von Tunzelman writes, quote, "...at the suggestion of Nehru, Edwina Mountbatten was put in charge of the emergency committee's refugee group. While Dickey was fiddling in his map room, Edwina established and chaired the United Council for Relief and Welfare. It was a swift, effective, and hands-on attempt to deal with the reality of the situation."

Edwina coordinated 15 separate relief organizations, two government ministries,

and one Mahatma into a single targeted team with clear instructions and purpose. She began touring the worst areas of trouble, mobilizing volunteers and personally directing the Red Cross to improve water, sanitation, and medical supplies. Through the United Council, she suggested initiatives ranging from the establishment of a sister organization in Pakistan all the way down to the setting up of girl guide knitting circles to provide pullovers for refugees.

And just like Nehru, Edwina had no hesitation about flinging herself into churning pits of physical danger. Nehru's daughter Indira remembered Lady Mountbatten's response to reports of violence at a local train station. Described here by Tunzelman, Edwina turned up at Javaharlal's door and changed her high heels for sensible shoes. "'I am just going to the station,' she announced. "'And of course there was no security, no arrangements,' said Indira. "'She just went.'"

End quote. Edwina's conviction was clear, as Ahmed Akbar writes, quote, There was no denying in Edwina the humanity, the energy, and the frantic desperation to do something about the suffering as thousands and thousands of refugees poured into Delhi in 1947. End quote. And it

And it was often ugly work, according to one historian, quote, Anyone required to serve with Edwina would have to help with a variety of gruesome tasks in unpleasant locations. She stopped her car when she saw injured or dead people, got out, dodged bullets, and retrieved their bodies to take them to hospitals or morgues. She also ordered her husband's personal bodyguards to forget about him and patrol the hospitals, following a number of unspeakable attacks on helpless patients as they lay in their wards.

Nehru's sister was particularly struck by Edwina's tenderness to victims of partition violence. It was amazing to see her in those terrible places, neither patronizing nor over-sympathetic, but just talking naturally to the inmates. This is the hardest thing of all to do when people are desperate, hopeless, or dying. On more than one occasion, Nehru and Edwina found themselves in the thick of a mob together.

together. Edwina with her words of reason and Javaharlal with his fists and righteous anger. One time, Nehru arrived at the site of an attack and found Edwina had already gotten there first. According to von Tunzelman, quote, "...without waiting to organize a bodyguard for himself, Javaharlal got into a taxi and drove alone through the treacherous countryside straight there, only to find Edwina already on the site, without guards, trying to pacify the would-be raiders."

Did we get our freedom so that you could kill each other? Javaharlal shouted at the mob. He was, noted one observer, a man who had no fear. End quote. They were brave, they were reckless, but most importantly, they were together. As one historian wrote, quote, In at least one photograph of the two of them visiting a refugee camp, Javaharlal's hand can be seen clasped protectively around Edwina's.

But Nehru and Edwina were not the only ones displaying incredible bravery in Delhi. There were tons of ordinary people without the armor of political importance or name recognition that risked their lives to make a difference. People like a 28-year-old government worker named Manek Dalal. Manek worked at the Delhi airport as a manager for Air India Airlines.

As the capital descended into anarchy, it was his job to safely evacuate Muslims from the city. Manek was not a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Sikh. He was a Parsi, a small sect of Zoroastrianism. But his job at the airline made him a target for extremist mobs.

Manek remembered receiving anonymous phone calls to his house late at night. As one journalist described, quote, Manek Dalal picked up the receiver to hear a voice say, We're coming to kill you. Manek thought it was a friend playing a prank. Look, I'm very tired. Please don't fool around. But the man repeated the threat. We're coming to kill you.

But Manek was undeterred. He would, quote, Manek did his best, but he could not save everyone. As Kavita Puri describes in her book Partition Voices, quote,

Muslims would come to his office begging him to take their families, offering huge sums of money. They were desperate to leave quickly. And Manek remembers they were not all rich people. He was never tempted to take the bags of money. Instead, he would patiently explain the government rules of prioritization. "Often they would get furious and abuse me and swear at me," he said. "They would say things like, 'Have you ever seen your mother killed? Have you ever seen your sister raped?' This was a very tough period."

Manek, along with his wife Kay, helped hundreds of people escape Delhi, not only by plane but by train as well. And in some cases, they were very close to home. According to Kavita Puri, A colleague of Manek's, a man named Bradshaw, who was the English managing director of Air India, had eight Muslim servants. The Dalals helped them to safely leave the country to get to Pakistan. Quote,

The last person we took, that's what I remember very clearly, was a very smart, young chap in his early 20s. The couple dressed him in Manek's best clothes and tie and took him by car to Delhi station, sitting in between Kay and Manek. They walked from the car to the station, the servant in the middle of the couple, and they watched him board the train as it pulled away from the platform. Manek remembers to this day how the young servant stood out of the train to look at them,

Quote, I was quite touched by that because this was his farewell. End quote. The violence in Delhi eventually did subside. The government did not collapse. But the scars left by the riots and the killing were undeniable. A Muslim man named Nazmuddin Khan remembered returning to his neighborhood in Delhi and seeing burned bodies scattered on the street. Quote,

No matter how hard I try, no matter how many years pass, I can still smell it. I can feel it surrounding me as vividly as I could when I first experienced it. In the first few years, I would even wake up in the middle of the night, as if from a bad dream, and imagine that I, my body, my hands, were soaked in the smell. Tell me, can one touch the smell? Can one feel it? Can it seem physical and alive?

I didn't think so, but there it was. My deathly companion. My silent, invisible, looming reminder.

All across northern India, homes had been lost, lives had been broken, possessions had been stolen. For many, all that remained was memory and anger. One survivor named Harchet Singh Bains, who was 11 years old at the time, said bitterly, They say we are independent now, but what good is it when you have lost everything? We

End quote. Others, like a woman named Preet Singh, could barely make sense of it all. Quote, End quote.

I promise you, we never imagined it. From a distance, it looked simply like communal riots that would fizzle out after a while. No one ever even considered that they would go on and on and would destroy the lives of so many people. On an individual level, it didn't make any sense. Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs had all lived in harmony once. So what had changed? It seemed in some ways completely removed from reality." End quote.

And some survivors, in their grief, came to regret the entire independence movement. According to a man named Karam Singh, "...we were better off during the British time, because everybody was in peace. Nobody had any fear or anything, and the general public thought that after independence we could speak freely and do what we want freely and everything. But that did not happen."

the entire partition experience seemed so surreal and unexpected. According to a professor named Satpal Kohli, quote, "...we had demanded independence, and we had received it, though the consequence of that independence was unimaginable. Despite all the systematic negotiations with the British Crown so that Indians could gain independence, we found ourselves supremely underprepared for the sheer loss and displacement that accompanied this freedom."

After all, one is not raised with the knowledge that perhaps one day, in the distant future, everything familiar will be irretrievably lost forever.

It's estimated that about a million people died in the months following partition, most of them in the Punjab. Twelve million people were displaced, and the effects of that mass population transfer, as well as the ethnic cleansing that accompanied it, can still be felt to this day. As Kavita Puri writes, quote, Punjab today is almost completely segregated. The existence of communities that had lived together for centuries with

with a shared language and culture can only now be learned of in history books. End quote. One million dead. Twelve million displaced. The numbers should be shocking. But as Alex von Tunzelman writes, those figures are so astronomically huge that they begin to lose their meaning.

Quote, What does it matter to the readers of history today whether there were 200,000 deaths, or a million, or two million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at a million deaths than at 200,000? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burned alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, and

Their daughters torn away, raped and branded. Their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them. Not just once, but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate the monstrous savagery and suffering.

That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947. One of the vilest episodes in the whole of history. A devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number. End quote.

In 1946, about a year before partition, Jawaharlal Nehru had sat down for an interview with a journalist named Jacques Marcuse. In that interview, Nehru had made a number of confident, borderline arrogant predictions about the future independence of the subcontinent. He had said, "...there will never be a Pakistan, and when the British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India."

A year later, in 1947, right in the midst of the partition violence, that same journalist was back in Delhi to interview Nehru again. The journalist chose to politely not bring up the new prime minister's catastrophically incorrect predictions. But Nehru did it for him. Do you remember, Marcus, what I told you? No, Pakistan, no...

He trailed off, and both of them were silent for a few seconds, until Nehru said, quote, Wasn't I wrong? Well, folks, that is all the time we have for today. At the beginning of this series, I said that I would try and refrain from committing to an exact number of episodes for this series, but I think at this stage, I can confidently say that we have two more to go. This will be a six-part series.

Now, dedicating half a calendar year to a single topic is not how we normally do things on Conflicted, but this is one of those subjects that deserves to be fully explored in all its fascinating and horrifying complexity. Next time, we will continue our story, and we will hone in on a very specific dimension of partition violence, and that is violence towards women. Across northern India, women's bodies became battlegrounds.

parcels of territory to be fought over and conquered, claimed and reclaimed. And for decades, many of those women's stories existed in a sheath of silence. And very recently, in the past few decades, that veil has been lifted, not only on the women who were taken, attacked, and abducted, but those who fought to get them back. Next time in Part 5, we will explore the unique struggle of women during partition.

And then, in the sixth and final episode of this series, we will end where we began, with Mohandas Gandhi.

The Mahatma has been largely absent from our story since way back in episode 2, and that is very much intentional. I wanted to create space for other, less well-known figures to shine, but we cannot land this thing, we cannot finish this story without addressing Gandhi. After all, he started this fight, and in a way, he will end it too.

And so, goodbye for now. As always, thank you for spending your very valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening. We often hear about the individuals who took the oath of office to become the chief executive.

But what about the other people who play a role in each administration or the events that may not be as well known, but that contribute to the reshaping of the office of the American presidency? On the Presidencies of the United States, we explore each administration beyond just the person holding the highest elected office in order to better understand the history that brought us to the modern day presidency. I hope you'll join me on this journey through the annals of presidential history. Presidencies can be found anywhere fine podcasts can be found.

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