A Pakistani has said in a letter to leading English daily at Karachi to recall the “10 million Muslim refugees who made immense sacrifices to make the country a reality, besides nearly one million who got massacred” at the time of the partition. He has taken exception to the words that Tahira Mazar Ali Khan, a well-respected left activist used in a letter to the same paper:  “I now realize with ample pa

in that our land was butchered and aimlessly cut into pieces. We cannot reach out to those we love in times of stress and grief.” One of her old friends had died in Mumbai and Tahira had found herself helpless in contacting her friend’s relations.

I too feel like Tahira, cut off from those with whom I have spent early years of my life. I am from Sialkot city where I was born and brought up. I love my friends in Pakistan, not many left now, and their children in the same way as I do my friends and their children in India. I am at home in their company as much as on this side. I do not find any contradiction. It does not make me less Indian.

Maybe, it is an emotional baggage of history. Maybe, it is nostalgia. But persons of my generation cannot efface the memories of youth spent in each other’s country. We represent the culture which transcends borders and religions. I have no doubt that one day the wall of hatred between the two countries will come down. While retaining our sovereignty, we shall be moving from one country to the other as people do in Europe.

In fact, Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, wanted India and Pakistan to be like America and Canada, with facilities to travel without any fuss. Since the writer of the letter mentioned Jinnah, I thought he or she should know the Qaide-e-Azam’s vision.

Yet I want to remove the impression given in the letter that the Muslims who went from India were alone in undergoing sacrifices and losing their dear ones. We, Hindus and Sikhs, too were victims of a similar type of frenzy, verging on fanaticism. The number of the killed on one side would probably tally with those on the other. The uprooted from both the countries totaled nearly 20 million; half of them were from India and half from Pakistan.

I have seen murder and worse while traveling from Sialkot to the Amritsar border. I can assure you that it was the same drama of blood and butchery, force and ferocity, on both sides. The only difference was that the victims up to the Amritsar border were non-Muslims and from then onward Muslims. There were similar types of atrocities-- the killing of passengers in trains, raping of women and kidnapping of young girls and children. When I migrated to India on Sept 13, 1947, one month after the partition, most of killings in both Punjabs had subsided. I still saw piles of bodies on both sides of the road, the half burnt vehicles, strewn luggage and empty trucks which bore testimony to the murder and looting that had taken place.

If some one were to tell me that Hinduism showed more tolerance or that Islam more compassion, I would beg to differ. I have seen their followers becoming murderers in the name of religion. Perhaps, what it teaches them is noble and sublime. But when it comes to putting them into practice, one community is no different from the other. Resounding in my ears are still the deafening slogans of Allah ho Akbar and Har, Har Mahadev. I saw how unashamed were people on both sides in brandishing weapons to kill.

Yet I cannot forget one touching scene while crossing into India. It was still daylight when I passed the white-washed drums with India’s flag atop a pole that demarcated the border. Some of us stopped to see a group of people-- just to see-- going to Pakistan. None spoke neither they, nor we. Both had left behind their homes and hearths, their friends and neighbours and the relationship of living together for centuries. We could relate to each other. It was a spontaneous kinship. It was that of pain and loss. Both had been broken on the rack of history. Both were refugees.

 What exacerbated the situation was the complication of two things: one, the announcement by Britain that it would withdraw on August 15, 1947, instead of June 6, 1948 as declared earlier; two, the failure of the boundary force which was constituted to curb the rioting. Many years later, when I was writing my book, Distant Neighbours, I asked Lord Mountbatten at his residence at Broadlands, near London, why did he change the date because that resulted in the massacre of two million people?

He did not contradict me. He argued that he had to advance the date because he could not hold the country together. “Things were slipping from my hands.” Mountbatten explained: “The Sikhs were up in arms in the Punjab. The Great Calcutta Killing had taken place and communal tension prevailed all over. On top of it, there had been the announcement that the British were leaving. Therefore, I myself decided to quit sooner.”

The Boundary Force, formed on 1 August, did little to stop ruthless and well-armed persons from killing innocent men, women and children. It merely recorded what it saw. It said in a report: “Throughout the killing was pre-medieval in its ferocity. Neither age nor sex was spared: mothers with babies in the arms were cut down, speared or shot…Both sides were equally merciless.”

In terms of men, the Boundary Force had a strength of 55, 000 men, including Brigadier Mohammed Ayub Khan who later became Pakistan’s President. The force had a high proportion of British officers. In fact, this proved to be its undoing because they were interested in repatriation to Britain, not in an operation which might tie them down to the subcontinent for some more time. The British Commander of the Force, General Rees, had instructions to protect only “European lives.”

Looking back, however, one cannot but blame Mountbatten for doing so little to ensure protection of the minorities on both sides despite his assurance. When rivers of blood flowed in Punjab and other parts of the sub-continent, when destruction engulfed habitations, and when, on the one hand, Jinnah begged Mountbatten (23 June) to “shoot Muslims” if necessary and, on the other, Nehru suggested handing over the cities to the military, Mountbatten’s response was feeble. He appeared more interested in becoming the common Governor General of India and Pakistan—an office which Jinnah did not let him have—than curbing the lawlessness. He should have been tried.