Soldiers on the Side lines
Nothing
could have prepared the British soldier for the death and suffering he
was to witness in India during 1946 and 47. The riots in Calcutta
in 1946 were stamped out by British and Indian troops but the rioting then
spread to other cities. During the Calcutta riots, the main offenders
were the Sikhs, who were aided by members of the local criminal fraternity,
towards the Muslims. They killed and looted until the British Army came
on the streets to restore order. In September Bombay went up
in flames. By March 1947, when Rawalpindi also went up in flames,
the death toll from communal rioting ran into tens of thousands.
This rioting was not anti-British or anti-Government, but between Hindus
and Sikhs on the one side and Muslims the other. By the time independence
came in 1947 the rioting, death and destruction had reached its peak and
the British soldier could only stand on the sidelines and witness the suffering
of both Muslims and Hindus.
The
Indian Army was the heart and soul of the old Indian Empire and now it
had to be divided between the two national armies. Depots, tanks,
guns, fuel, ammunition, forms and typewriters, uniforms, the regimental
silver, sporting trophies- everything had to go. It says a great
deal for the discipline of the old Indian Army and the goodwill that existed
between the regiments, that this difficult and often emotional task, was
carried out swiftly and with little fuss. Eventually the men and
regiments had to be divided. The main division was fairly simple-Sikhs
and Hindus to India, Muslim troops to Pakistan, but many regiments contained
a mixture of religions and the situation was more complicated. Above
all there was the question of what to do with the Gurkhas .
At this time Britain had her eyes on the famous fighting men from Nepal. There were 27 Gurkha Battalion's in the Indian Army, all of which the Indians wanted to retain, but eight battalions of Gurkhas, the 2nd, 6th, 7th and 10th Gurkha Rifles were transferred from the Indian to the British Army and all but one were shipped to Malaya . The other Gurkha battalions were transferred to the Indian Army where they remain today and still flourish. For some of the British Gurkha officers, the thought of being separated from their beloved Gurkhas was too much and many tears were shed before the British left India.
As
a result of the partition, millions of people, Muslims and Hindus were
forced to leave their homes. It is estimated that about five and
a half million people were traveling in each direction. Muslims
heading north to Pakistan , Hindus were heading south to the new India.
Within days of the announcement of partition the Moslems, Sikhs and Hindus
were attacking each other's refugee columns and trains, and massacring
their former fellow citizens by the tens of thousands. The massacres
were at their worst in the Punjab where trains were sent across the
border into India filled with dead bodies. The carriages were marked "
A present from Pakistan" and a train carrying dead Muslims in the other
direction to Pakistan, was marked " Presents to Pakistan ".
While this was going on , the British Army, with no role left to play and
forbidden to interfere, stood by and watched the bitter fruits of independence.
Estimates vary but it is thought that about 2 million people lost their lives in the immediate aftermath of independence, especially during the migrations from India and Pakistan . One British officer of the 9th Gurkhas remembers having to rush his company to try and stop a huge massacre on a train in the Punjab. They arrived too late and found nothing but the mutilated corpses of men, women and children. Placing rocks on the line had halted a trainload of people, about 2000 in all. Then a horde of Sikhs, hiding in the nearby fields, had swarmed on to the train and slaughtered everyone on board.
In
Lucknow, on the evening before independence, as soon as it got dark, a
small party of British soldiers went quietly to the ruins of the British
Residency in Lucknow, the place held by a small British garrison against
all odds during the Indian mutiny 90 years before. To commemorate
the famous stand, the ruined Residency was the one place in the British
Empire where the Union Jack flew day and night and was not
pulled down at sunset. Now that the Raj was over the British
flag finally had to come down, but they would do this themselves.
The flag was lowered but that was still not enough. The flagpole
was dismantled and sawn off close to the ground and the hollow where it
had stood for nearly 100 years was filled in with concrete. Next
morning, Independence Day, a jubilant crowd of Indians arrived to haul
down the Union Jack, but they found that it had already gone and all traces
of where it had once flown completely vanished.
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