Chapter 121: Rescue

South Block, New Delhi

May 12, 1949

The three plans lay on the long teak table, each in a different coloured folder. Ram read them in the order the chiefs had submitted them while the ceiling fans turned and the afternoon heat pressed against the windows.

Admiral Katari went first, which was itself a change. "Prime Minister, the war will be decided in the south. The 17th Infantry Brigade lands at Pasni and Ormara, then moves on to Turbat and Panjgur. The 4th Infantry Division crosses from Jodhpur into Sindh through Umarkot and Mirpur Khas, toward Hyderabad. The Navy takes the sea off Karachi from the fourteenth. When Karachi falls, Sindh has no capital, no port and no reason to resist."

"Baluchistan?" Ram asked.

Mullick answered. "Pakistan annexed Kalat by force fourteen months ago, Prime Minister. The Khan signed at the point of a bayonet. His brother, Prince Abdul Karim, has been in the hills with a rebel force since. The sardars of Makran and Jhalawan have sent us word that they will not fight for Rawalpindi. Pakistan holds the province with two brigades, and half the men are Punjabi conscripts who do not speak the language."

"So, the west falls quickly," Ram said. "Sindh will not."

"No, sir," Cariappa said. "Sindh has the Indus, the barrages at Sukkur and Kotri, and a population that has been told for two years what we are. Karachi has a garrison of two divisions and the old British cantonment defences. It will take weeks, perhaps a month, even. Once Karachi falls, the rest follows."

Mukherjee was brief. "Night strikes on Karachi’s airfields, Mauripur and Drigh Road, and a sustained campaign against the Punjab: Sargodha, Chaklala, Attock, Jhelum, the rail junctions. I expect to pound the Punjab for the whole war, Prime Minister."

"And on the ground in the Punjab?"

Cariappa hesitated. "Limited, sir. Hold our line, advance where the artillery has cleared the way, and use the Punjab to tie down their reserves. You asked me last month for a plan that did not cost us the Republic’s best divisions."

"I did." Ram laid his hand on the third folder. "Here is what the Punjab operation is for. It is not for Lahore. It is for three places. Kartarpur, where Guru Nanak died. Nankana Sahib, where he was born. Panja Sahib, at Hasan Abdal. I want them in our hands, with Sikh troops at the gates, before the monsoon."

The room was quiet. Cariappa, himself a Coorgi and no Sikh, said slowly, "It is a political objective, Prime Minister."

"It is a promise. The Sikhs lost their holiest places in the Partition. They have waited two years without reproach. They will not wait longer, and I will not ask them to." Ram looked round the table. "Pakistan will end this war landlocked. It will have lost its coast, its capital port, much of its best farmland, and Baluchistan’s minerals. It will have a hundred million people on a fraction of the land that fed them. That is not a victory we have to win in Lahore."

Ram closed the third folder. "Gentlemen. First, troop safety. We do not buy ground with lives when artillery and aircraft can buy it. And the priority of the first night is not a city. It is fourteen women."

He looked down at Rameshwar Nath Kao, who sat with a single sheet in front of him.

"Mr. Kao will brief you separately. It moves under your night attack, General, and will not wait for the offensive to reach it."

A bungalow on the Sialkot-Daska road

May 13-16, 1949

The house stood at the end of a lane behind a brick wall, a squat building with a tin roof and a courtyard where a cow stood tied. In the cantonment records, it was the property of a retired contractor. For eleven months it had been something else.

Kao’s men had taken three weeks to find it. They were not soldiers. A cobbler, a tonga driver, a woman who sold bangles at the railway halt, a clerk in the Sialkot post office, all of them Punjabis with relatives across the line and all paid in rupees carried over the border. None knew what the others had seen. Kao had assembled the pieces in a rented room in Amritsar with a pencil and a sheet of foolscap: the lights that burned late, the closed lorry that came on the first Thursday of each month, the food carried in and never out.

The team numbered twenty-two. Eight were Kao’s, four from the National Security Guard, two from the Rajputana Rifles who had trained in house clearance in Italy. Subedar Ram Avtar led the last eight, ex-servicemen of the Gurdaspur cooperative, because Teja Singh had asked and Ram Avtar could not refuse. They crossed the Ravi at midnight in two country boats. A hundred miles north, aircraft were already over Attock, and the flashes lit the horizon like summer lightning.

They lay up in the cane and watched the house through binoculars. The cobbler had marked the guards: four, two at the gate and two inside, with a lorry in the lane under a tarpaulin. At three in the morning the first bombs fell on Sialkot cantonment, a mile and a half away, and the district turned its face toward the sound.

"Now," Ram Avtar said.

A silenced Sten took the gate guards before they turned their heads. The inner guards came out toward the explosions with rifles slung, and the NSG men took them from the shadow of the wall. In a back room with barred windows, they found nine women.

Nine, not fourteen. Ram Avtar counted twice. They sat on a rope bed with their arms around each other, and when the door opened on a dust-caked soldier, none of them spoke.

"Beti," Ram Avtar said, and his voice cracked. "We are from India. Your people sent us. Can you walk?"

A girl of sixteen, hair hacked short, a bruise down one cheek, studied him a long time. "Are you really from Gurdaspur?"

"From Kot Mehrban’s cooperative. Teja Singh is waiting for you."

She began to cry without sound. The room came apart behind her.

"Where are the other five?" Kao asked from the doorway.

"Taken north four days ago. In the lorry. To Peshawar. They said the buyers were waiting."

The way back was not clean. A patrol pulled from the cantonment defences caught them at the edge of a village, and the fight lasted twenty minutes in the dark. A naik of the Rajputana Rifles was shot through the chest and died in the reeds. At the last hamlet before the river, the villagers stood in their doorways with lathis and hatchets, watching soldiers and women go by. Nobody raised the alarm. An old woman pressed a lota of water into the nearest girl’s hands. Kao would learn later that the headman had been beaten by military police for not reporting them.

By dawn they were across. The nine slept in the courtyard of the gurdwara at Dera Baba Nanak, and Teja Singh held his granddaughter and did not speak.

On the second night Kao stood outside under the stars with Ram Avtar. "Peshawar is three hundred miles north. A lorry with five women, four days gone. The Air Force has bombed the trunk road for two nights. If the convoy is not destroyed, it has stopped."

"Where?"

"A halfway house near Kharian. My cobbler has heard of it."

"With what? No Indian infantry will reach Kharian for a month."

"With what we have," Kao said. "A captured lorry, Pakistani uniforms, and a driver who speaks Punjabi."

They went on the third night, ten men in a stolen army truck, down roads cratered by the Air Force and choked with refugees. They were stopped twice at checkpoints. The first sentry waved them through when Kao handed him a carton of cigarettes. At the second, a military police sergeant looked at the truck’s papers for a long time, looked at the faces in the back, and let them pass without a word. Kao never learned why.

The convoy had been strafed on the second night by a pair of Tempests, and every lorry in it was burning or abandoned. The five women were in a farmhouse a mile off the road, locked in a grain store by drivers who had fled into the fields. Ram Avtar broke the lock with a rifle butt. The youngest was fifteen. She did not believe it was real until he carried her out into the dawn.

Fourteen women. Four days. One man dead, a second wounded.

The courtyard of the Gurdwara, Dera Baba Nanak

May 17, 1949

The women were not told to speak, and for two days they did not. Nurses of the Seva Vahini moved among them with blankets and warm milk and asked nothing. It was the girl with the short hair, Santosh, who finally asked to speak to the correspondent from the Tribune, because she wished it recorded.

She spoke for an hour, sitting upright on a charpoy with her hands folded. She did not describe everything, and the correspondent, a grey-haired man named Lal Chand who had covered Partition from Lahore to Delhi, did not ask her to. She told of the march by night. She told of the house, the locked room, the men who came and went. She told of the contractor’s wife who never looked at them, and of the old guard who left bread by the door and was dismissed for it.

"They talked in front of us as if we were not there," she said. "They were counting. One said the girls from the Kashmir raid last year had fetched a good price in Peshawar, and the older ones went cheaper. They said it was a business. That the buyers asked for Sikh girls first." She looked at her hands. "They said we were from the country of the infidel, and God would not mind."

Lal Chand put down his pencil. For a moment he could not write.

"I want it known that fourteen of us were in that house," Santosh said. "That others were taken last year from the valley, and nobody came for them. I want the Prime Minister to know, if he is listening."

"He is listening, child."

The report appeared on the front page of the Tribune on the nineteenth. Within a day the Hindustan Times, The Hindu, and Amrita Bazar Patrika had carried it, and by the end of the week every radio in India had heard her words, read in flat, careful voice by an All India Radio announcer who stopped twice and was allowed to.

The country did not riot, and that surprised many observers. It went quiet instead. In Jullundur, the refugee colonies fell silent for a day. Crowds stood in long lines outside the recruiting offices in Amritsar, Ambala, and Ludhiana, and the recruiters ran out of forms by noon. In Bombay, the mill hands sent a day’s wages to the Army Relief Fund. In Madras, schoolchildren collected rice for the families at Kot Mehrban. At a meeting in Calcutta, a cloth merchant named John Das stood on the platform beside a priest and said that anyone who did such a thing in the name of any faith had no faith.

In the capital, Ram and Patel read the cuttings Shaktidas laid on his desk each morning. The population’s response was calm and determined.

Patel had ensured an increased police presence in the markets. Though limited, there were reports of hoarding and profiteering in some areas, which were dealt with harshly.

The Makran coast

May 14-June 5, 1949

The sea off Pasni was flat and black before dawn, and the Indian ships came in without lights.

Rear Admiral Katari watched from the bridge of the destroyer Rajput as the coast came up out of the dark: low cliffs, a pale wedge of beach, and behind it a flat desert running to the horizon. The three landing ships lay a mile astern, each carrying a squadron of Shermans, a battalion of infantry, and fuel and ammunition for a week.

Wellingtons from Jamnagar had bombed the radar post at Ormara at midnight. Tempests from Jodhpur had strafed the airstrip at Pasni, which held a hangar and two Harvard trainers. The trainers burned for an hour. At 0415 the destroyer’s guns opened on the beach defences, a company of the Baluch Regiment and four old British field guns. The bombardment lasted ten minutes.

Major Gurbux Singh of the 17th Brigade crouched in the leading boat with a wireless on his back. He had fought at Imphal and in Italy and had never seen a shore so quiet.

"Slow. Keep your intervals."

The ramp dropped on the sand. Nothing fired. A gun pit smoked beside the road, and a handful of men in khaki ran away along the coast.

By seven the beachhead was secure, and the first Sherman rolled down the ramp under the gaze of three hundred fishermen who had come down from their huts to see the flag run up outside the post office. A white-bearded Baluch elder, barefoot, said something Gurbux Singh did not understand.

"He says welcome," the interpreter said. "He says the men from Karachi never did anything for the coast but take the fish."

At Ormara, a platoon with two Vickers held a headland for six hours and killed eleven Indian infantry before the four-inch guns silenced it. The war was not entirely a welcome.

Gwadar lay in the Sultan of Oman’s possession. At noon on the sixteenth, two hundred paratroopers dropped south of the town, and an Indian political officer walked into the Wali’s fort with a letter from the Prime Minister proposing friendship, a ten-year lease for a million pounds a year. The Wali read it twice, called for tea, and agreed.

The real fight was inland. On the nineteenth, the 17th Brigade turned north from Pasni toward Turbat and Panjgur, and on the second day a column in the Kech valley found itself under fire from the hills. They were Baluch tribesmen, armed with Lee-Enfields and a few mortars, and they were not fighting for Pakistan. A sardar’s son, a boy of eighteen, was brought in wounded.

"Why did you shoot at us?" the brigade commander asked through an interpreter.

"We did not know who you were," the boy said. "Men have come down this road before and burned villages. We have been told for a year that anyone who comes from the sea is a Pakistani soldier in disguise."

"The Pakistanis burned your villages?"

"After Kalat. When the Khan’s men resisted, the Punjab regiments came." The boy’s face was set. "My uncle is with Prince Karim in the hills. He says if the Indians come, we should wait and watch."

"And what do you say?"

"I say you look different from the others." He looked at the Sikh soldiers around him. "You gave my brother water."

Within a week, the sardars had begun to come down from the hills. A column of Prince Karim’s irregulars, four hundred men in rags with rifles older than the Indian Army, met the 17th Brigade at Turbat on the twenty-second. Karim, thin and unshaven, kissed the brigade commander on both cheeks in the market square and said, in careful Urdu, that Baluchistan had waited fourteen months for someone to come.

The rest was marching. A mobile column of Shermans and jeeps ran up the Kolwa road to Panjgur against two Pakistani platoons, who surrendered. The 4th Infantry Division, advancing from the Sindh border, took Lasbela and then Khuzdar on June 1, where the Khan of Kalat’s old palace had been used as a Pakistani barracks.

The Khan himself, a heavy man of forty-five who had been kept in Karachi under guard since the annexation, had been freed by Baluch tribesmen on the twenty-eighth and was escorted to Khuzdar in a captured jeep. He stood on the palace steps that afternoon, the Indian tricolour behind him, and declared that the Treaty of Annexation had been signed under duress and was void. A day later he signed an instrument of accession to India.

"It is a small war at sea, Admiral," a young lieutenant said that night on the Rajput.

"It is the kind that ends the large ones," Katari said. "Without Makran, Pakistan has one port, and we are sitting off it."

A/N: Let me know your thoughts in the comments and reviews. Add the story to your library/collection to receive update notifications. Power stones are welcome as always.