Rare books and contemporary records on the bloody Partition of India

Several hundred dead Hindus and Sikhs lying around the platform


Time Magazine, 8th September, 1947

"You have full liberty to go the limit. Take revenge as you like, but if there is one Hindu or Sikh left alive in my district after you are through, I swear to kill them myself." - Deputy Commissioner of a Western Punjab District in Pakistan to young muslims

A member of the U.S. Embassy arrived in Lahore from Delhi with another tale of horror. Reaching the small station of Okara, near Montgomery, he found the station platform utterly deserted except for several hundred dead Hindus and Sikhs lying around the platform, apparently slaughtered only a few hours before while waiting for the train to escape. All these people were workers in a textile mill which had been attacked by Moslems. Their bodies were mostly stripped and in several instances limbs had been torn from the bodies. The wife of a British textile factory manager told how a Moslem mob had attacked the Hindu and Sikh workers in another factory. When Moslems broke into the ground floor, the Sikhs slashed the throats of their own wives, and afterwards tried to fight through themselves. All were killed.

At Lahore's Central Station, Sikh and Hindu refugees from North or West Punjab were mobbed on the platform, often stabbed to death and their few belongings looted. A major incident involved a big convoy carrying perhaps 1,000 from Sialkot to Amritsar. The convoy was stopped and attacked at the Ravi River bridge. Hundreds were stabbed to death and other hundreds wounded.

Refugees from Lyallpur in West Punjab say that so many Sikhs and Hindus were murdered and their bodies thrown into the canal that the canal actually had a pinkish color for a day after.