Chapter 119: It was a Diversion?

Ajnala, Amritsar District

April 1949

It was a Tuesday, and the market at Ajnala was full. The town sat a dozen kilometres from the border in the middle of the wheat country, and its main bazaar, a long, covered lane of brick shopfronts with a clock tower at one end, drew buyers from forty villages. Women in bright salwars haggled over green chillies, and boys ran between the stalls with trays of tea. A halwai fried jalebis in a great iron pan, and the smell of hot sugar hung in the sun.

Hari Singh, a grain merchant of fifty with a rolled turban and a crooked back, was weighing out wheat for a farmer’s wife when he saw a man he did not know leave a handcart beside the clock tower. The man was thin, in a dusty kurta. He walked away quickly, not running, with his head down. Hari Singh noticed because the cart held a sack of jaggery, and nobody sold jaggery in that spot.

He had half-turned to say something to his neighbour when the cart went up.

The blast shook the street like a hammer on a drum. Windows shattered along the lane, and a wave of dust and hot air flung him backwards over his scales. For a second he heard nothing at all. Then the sound came back in pieces: a woman screaming, a child, a ringing in his ears, and a long, dreadful clatter of falling brick.

He got to his knees. The clock tower leaned at an angle, its face cracked, and the lane in front of it was a mess of overturned stalls and fire. The halwai’s pan had gone over, and the burning oil ran in a river among the bodies.

"Water!" he heard himself shouting. "Buckets, anyone! Get the women out!"

Within minutes, the whole bazaar was moving. Shopkeepers hauled stunned neighbours out of the debris. Boys ran for the well. Constable Gurbachan Singh of the Ajnala police, who had been on duty at the end of the lane, was dragging a girl of ten from under a collapsed awning, and his uniform was black with soot. Behind him, a tall man in a plain khaki shirt with no badge was already organising a cordon, shoulder to shoulder with the constables, in a clear parade-ground voice.

"Clear the lane! Move the wounded to the courtyard of the gurdwara! You, take the left side! Nobody touches the cart; there may be another!"

The tall man was Subedar Ram Avtar, a veteran of North Africa and Italy who had left the service in the demobilisation of 1946 and now ran the local ex-servicemen’s cooperative. He knew what a second device looked like. There was none. He walked the length of the blast area with his eyes on the ground, checked every cart and every sack, and signalled the all-clear. Then he knelt beside Hari Singh, who had a gash across his scalp, and tied a cloth round it.

"How many?" Hari Singh asked.

"Eleven dead that I have counted. Perhaps thirty hurt." Ram Avtar’s jaw tightened. "A jaggery cart. Someone placed it, and someone paid him."

"Who would do this to a vegetable market?"

"Cowards who could not win on the field of battle."

By evening the toll stood at fourteen. Two of the dead were schoolchildren. Hari Singh sat on the steps of the gurdwara with a bandage round his head and watched the stretchers go by and did not speak. A police inspector from Amritsar came and took statements. There was no trace of the man in the dusty kurta.

Within the week, similar incidents were reported at Khem Karan, at Fazilka, at a railway halt near Ferozepur, and across the line in Jammu at Samba and RS Pura. A parcel left in a third-class carriage. A bicycle at a bus stand. Always a small blast, always in a crowd, always timed for a market day. The local people did what they had done at Ajnala, which was to carry the wounded and clear the rubble and turn out in the morning to sell again, and the district police, reinforced with veterans from Ram’s old network, began to pick up the handlers one by one. But there were too many roads, and the border was a thousand miles long.

Village of Kot Mehrban, on the Ravi bank, Gurdaspur District

The village headman came to the police post at dawn on foot, with his turban in his hand.

He was a man of sixty-five named Teja Singh, and he stood in the doorway of the station house and could not speak. The sub-inspector, a young man named Surjit who had been on the job eleven months, brought him water.

"Take your time, Baba."

"They came at night," Teja Singh said. "Twenty of them, perhaps more. From the river side. They had rifles. They said they were looking for a smuggler. They went from house to house." He stopped. His hands were shaking so badly that the water spilled. "They took the women. The girls first. Daughters, daughters-in-law, the young wives. Some who were hiding in the cattle sheds. My own granddaughter. She is fourteen."

Surjit was already on his feet. "How many?"

"Twenty-six that we know of. Perhaps more. We have not counted the dead."

"Dead?"

"Three men tried to stop them. A boy of sixteen. They were shot in the lane." Teja Singh’s voice broke. "The raiders left before dawn. Back toward the river. They took the women with them on foot."

The village lay barely four kilometres from the line. Within the hour, a pursuit was in the field. Surjit, six constables, and a dozen men of the local ex-servicemen’s cooperative under Subedar Ram Avtar followed the trail to the riverbank, where the marks of many feet led into the reeds and out again toward the Pakistani side. By noon an Army patrol of the 3rd Rajputana Rifles had joined them, and by afternoon an air reconnaissance Auster was circling over the border strip.

They found the first of the women at dusk, in a sugarcane field two miles from the village. Eleven of them, most past forty, sat huddled at the edge of the standing cane, wrapped in torn dupattas. They had been marched through the night and abandoned when the raiders had no further use for them. One was a grandmother who had walked two miles barefoot with a broken ankle. Two were dying of exposure. The oldest was seventy-one, and she held Ram Avtar’s hand and said, over and over, that she had not wanted to be a burden.

"You are not a burden, Mataji," Ram Avtar said. His voice was steady, but his eyes were not. "You are home."

Three more bodies were found in a drainage ditch farther on. The women had not survived what had been done to them, and Surjit stood over them with his cap in his hand until the Army medical officer gently covered them with a tarpaulin. He did not trust himself to speak, and no one asked him to.

The rest, fourteen of them, mostly young, were gone. The Auster’s pilot reported a column of riders moving west across the dry riverbed beyond the Indian lines.

One raider had been left behind. A boy of nineteen with a bullet in his thigh, he had been abandoned in the reeds by his own party and was found at nightfall by Ram Avtar’s men. He was brought to the police post, and before the Army medical officer had finished dressing his wound, he was weeping and talking.

He was a Punjabi, not a tribesman, a former constable from Sialkot recruited with promises of pay. He named his instructors, a camp near Attock, and a house in a Sialkot Lane where the women taken on such raids were held until a convoy took them north to the markets at Peshawar.

Teja Singh sat in the headman’s courtyard that night with the surviving women and the men of the village. He had not eaten for thirty hours.

"Fourteen," he said. "My granddaughter is among them."

"We will bring her back," Ram Avtar said.

"How?"

Ram Avtar looked at the stars above the village. He had seen the Italian campaign and the burning of the Po valley, and in all that time he had not felt the cold, dry fury he felt tonight.

"By making them pay for everyone," he said.

South Block, New Delhi

April 1949

The war room was full. Cariappa and Mukherjee sat to Ram’s right, Katari and Mullick to his left, and at the far end of the table, newly seated, was Rameshwar Nath Kao with a single file in front of him. Patel sat beside Ram with a blanket over his knees, which he had refused until Dr. Roy’s "secretary," Mullick’s man, placed it there without comment.

On the table lay two maps. One showed the Punjab and Jammu border, with red dots clustered thickly along its length, each a bombing, an abduction, or an ambush. The other was the delta of East Bengal.

"Let me summarise where we stand," Ram said, his voice level. "The Ravi crossing has been defeated. Their thrust at Chhamb has been defeated. Their regular army cannot now cross our lines in any strength. The only weapon left is the one on this map. Small teams, at the weakest points of a border two thousand miles long."

"Forty-one incidents in two weeks," Mullick said. "Bombings, abductions, ambushes on police posts. Eighty-seven civilians dead, most in the last ten days. Two hundred and nineteen wounded. And the women taken from Kot Mehrban."

"They cannot beat us, so they bleed us," Cariappa said. His voice was low and hard. "A thousand-mile frontier. I have six divisions in Punjab, three in Kashmir, and two in reserve. I cannot place a company every two miles."

"Nor should you," Katari said. "The Navy can hold the coast. But the land borders..."

"Are the problem," Patel said. He rested his hands on his cane. "Three weeks ago, I sat in this room and listened to the arithmetic of a war. Our industry against theirs, our armour against theirs. They have lost the arithmetic. So, they have turned to something that arithmetic cannot answer."

"Mr. Kao?" Ram gestured to the clean-shaven man who had proposed setting an external intelligence agency, earlier than anyone else.

Kao stood, he did not use notes. "The raiders are not tribal levies, Prime Minister. They are special teams of the regular army, recruited largely from Punjabis, perhaps two thousand men, trained at a camp near Attock and others near Jhelum. My sources are relatives of refugees on both sides of the line, the letters that still cross, the traders who still cross.

They cross in groups of ten to twenty, usually at night, through the riverine gaps where there is no fence, no post, and no patrol. The boy captured at Kot Mehrban confirmed the camp, the instructors, and a transit house in Sialkot where the women are held before the convoy north. My Sialkot sources place the house in the same lane. I will have more by the end of the week."

"And Colonel Zaman?"

"He knew the plan for the Ravi, Prime Minister, the structure of the lashkars, the purge in the ranks, the diversion in Jammu. He knew nothing of these teams. It is a separate programme, and its men do not mix with the lashkars. Whoever designed it designed it so that no one captured on one side could expose the other."

"A professional," Ram said.

"A very good one, Prime Minister."

Ram looked round the table. "I will not conceal my own view. For more than a year, we have held the line. I have told this room restraint would buy time for our foundries, and it has. We have the guns. We have the tanks coming. And in the same year, Pakistan has not changed. It has only learned to use the dark."

"They are forcing us to guard two thousand miles," Patel said, "to guard every market, every well, every village along the border. We cannot guard them all. The time for restraint is gone, Ram. They do not strike our army; they strike our mothers. If we do not punish the hand that does this, we are only waiting for the next market."

"Then we are agreed on the principle. The method follows. First, the border, suggestions?"

Patel straightened in his chair. He had clearly been waiting for this, and some of the old iron returned to his voice.

"I propose a new force. A dedicated border guard, paramilitary, answering to the Home Ministry. Armed, trained, and posted along the whole perimeter, the western frontier from Kutch to Kashmir, the northern passes, the eastern boundary with East Pakistan. A force that does nothing else. It lives on the border, it knows every village, and it takes the burden of the watch from the Army."

"A Border Security Force," Kao murmured.

"A good name. Let us use it."

Cariappa did not respond at once. His jaw had hardened.

"Sardar-sahib, I understand the thinking. But this is a new force built outside the Army, under a different ministry. My concerns are of two kinds. The first is practical. Who trains them? Who commands them in wartime? A border post under fire needs a single chain of command. If half the men on the line answer to the Home Ministry and half to Army Headquarters, there will be confusion at the exact moment we can least afford it."

"And the second?" Patel asked quietly.

"The second is that I have fifty thousand men of the Army on that border, Sardar-sahib. Good men, and proud. They will see a second uniform appear beside theirs and take it as an insult to their honour." Cariappa paused. "I am an Army man. I will say it plainly. I do not like it."

"I would not trust you if you liked it, General," Patel said. A faint, dry smile touched his lips. "But hear me. You do not have enough men to hold a thousand miles and to fight a war. Every battalion you place on the border is one you cannot use for the offensive. If you want to strike deep, you will need your divisions concentrated. Someone else must hold the line."

"Then let the new force come under Army operational control in wartime," Ram said. "Raised under the Home Ministry, officered in part by the Army, trained by Army instructors, and under your command from the day the offensive begins. They hold the shield. You hold the sword."

Cariappa turned the idea over. "It would work, Prime Minister. If the training is under us."

"It will be."

"And how long to raise it?"

"Mullick?"

"Two years for a force of any size, Prime Minister. Recruitment, training, posts, wireless nets. We can have perhaps five thousand men in the field by the end of the year, drawn from the veterans already in the CISF pool. Fifty thousand by 1951. We will need to train and maintain a significant number of reserves. It is a long-term plan, Prime Minister"

"Then it will not help us in this war," Katari observed.

"No," Ram said. "It will help us in the next. We build it now, and fight this one with what we have."

"And the eastern sector?" Mukherjee asked from the end of the table, tapping the second map. "I have flown the East Bengal border. It cannot be said to be a border, it is a lattice. The Padma, the Meghna, the Brahmaputra, a thousand channels that change course every monsoon.

Villages straddle both banks. Fishermen, jute traders, smugglers, families who have crossed the water for generations. A patrol boat cannot hold it. A fence cannot be built, because half of it would be underwater by August."

"The same problem will exist there for the next fifty years, I suspect," Ram said quietly, and for a moment his eyes looked a long way off. "No fence will hold it. No patrol will seal it completely. We must accept that and work around it."

"How?" Patel asked.

"Kao, you will build a network of informants in the delta villages, from families on our side who have relatives on theirs. They see everything. Katari, I want a flotilla of shallow-draft river craft built at Calcutta and Khulna, thirty boats in the first six months, armed, and manned by the new force when it exists. Mukherjee, the Air Force will run low-level patrols over the delta, with the river channels photographed monthly so we can read them. It will not seal the border. It will make crossing costly and dangerous."

"Costly and dangerous is not impenetrable," Cariappa said.

"No. Nothing there will be." Ram looked at him. "I will not pretend to you that a perfect border is possible, General. I want the best border possible, and a response so costly that no general in Rawalpindi can afford the price."

He rose and walked to the wall map of the subcontinent and laid his palm flat on the Pakistani side.

"Sardar-ji, gentlemen. The Cabinet meets tomorrow. On the following day, I shall go to Parliament. A state of war has existed since October 1947. We have fought it on our side of the line. I will ask the House to authorise us to end it."

No one spoke. Cariappa stood slowly, and his hands, at his sides, closed.

"General Cariappa. You will submit within seventy-two hours a plan for a counter-offensive. Not a limited strike. The Pakistan Army, wherever it stands. Admiral Katari, Air Marshal Mukherjee, the same."

"And Sialkot, Prime Minister?" Kao asked softly.

"If your sources are right, the women will be brought home," Ram said. "That I promise."

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