Chapter 122: The Offensive

The Punjab front

May 14-June 2, 1949

In the Punjab, the Indian guns did what they had been placed there to do.

Night after night, Wellingtons and Tempests worked over Sargodha, Chaklala, Attock, and Jhelum, then the rail junctions at Lala Musa and Wazirabad. Artillery pounded Sialkot cantonment and the border posts at Shakargarh and Narowal from positions inside India. The Pakistani army replied with its own guns and sent small sorties across the line, and the Indian line held.

The ground advance was short. On the night of May 20, the 2nd Sikh Light Infantry crossed the Ravi at Dera Baba Nanak, where the lashkars had died a month before, and moved four miles west under a rolling barrage.

Their objective was Kartarpur.

It was a village of mud houses and wheat fields, dominated by a white gurdwara with a gilded dome, where Guru Nanak had spent the last eighteen years of his life and died in 1539. For two years it had been visible from the Indian bank through binoculars, a white shape in the haze, and every Sikh soldier in the border divisions knew exactly where it was.

Subedar Major Gurcharan Singh led the leading company in a silence that was not discipline but something older. The village was held by a platoon of the Frontier Force, who were gone by dawn, retreating before the barrage. By eight in the morning, the Sikh infantry stood outside the gurdwara’s gate.

A granthi, an old man with a white beard who had stayed through the Partition and had been the only Sikh in Kartarpur for two years, came out of the doorway. He had a yellow cloth over his head. He looked at the soldiers, and at the Nishan Sahib flag that one of them was raising above the gate on a bamboo pole.

"I did not leave," he said. "They would not let me stay, and they would not let me go. I fed the Guru’s langar to Muslim neighbours who were kind to me. I thought God had forgotten."

"He has not, Baba-ji," Gurcharan Singh said, and found his voice would not hold. He took off his steel helmet. The company behind him did the same, a hundred men bareheaded in the early sun. One by one, they knelt and touched their foreheads to the dust of the threshold.

A photographer from the Statesman, who had come up with the column, took one picture. It appeared on the front pages of every Indian newspaper on the twenty-fourth, and for two days, Amritsar did not work.

Cariappa had planned for Kartarpur to be held by a single battalion. By the end of the week it was held by a brigade. The Pakistani 7th Division counter-attacked four times in the following days. Each attack was broken by the Indian guns, which had been brought forward in the first hours. In the last, on the night of the twenty-seventh, a Pakistani battalion was caught in the open between two canals and lost more than two hundred men.

Behind the front, the Punjab burned. The Air Force worked the rail line from Lahore to Rawalpindi until the bridges at Kala Shah Kaku and Gujrat were rubble. Convoys of grain bound for the cities rotted at sidings. By the first of June, Lahore was on half rations, and the price of wheat had tripled.

A message went up from Cariappa on the thirtieth, in his usual short style: Kartarpur held. Enemy has stopped probing. Nankana Sahib and Panja Sahib next, when the Sindh front releases airlift. Will not move before.

The roads

Late May 1949

The refugees went north and west.

They came out of Sindh along the Indus, by bullock cart and on foot and on the roofs of trains that had no fuel to leave the stations, and they were Sindhi Muslims and Muhajirs and Punjabi settlers, and many were Baluch families moving the other way. They went up the east bank toward Sukkur and Multan, and the road, which had never been more than a track, carried ten thousand people a day.

From the Punjab front, others came, villagers driven off by the guns, going west and north toward Rawalpindi and Peshawar. From the hills of Baluchistan, whole tribes were crossing the Durand Line into Afghanistan with their flocks and their families, walking across the passes at Chaman and Spin Boldak while the Afghan border guards watched and did nothing.

Near the Sukkur barrage, a Pakistani relief officer named Khalid Mahmood stood on the embankment and watched the carts go by. He had not slept in four days. A woman at the head of a column held a baby and said nothing. Behind her, an old man led a cow.

"Where will you go?" Khalid asked.

"Where is there to go?" the old man said. "Everyone says, Multan."

"There is no food in Multan."

"There is no food here."

A boy of ten, walking alone, looked up at Khalid. "Is it true," the boy said, "that the Indians put people in trains and send them to the sea?"

"Who told you that?"

"A man on the road."

"No," Khalid said. "It is not true." He did not say what was true, because he did not know.

In a supply tent at Rohri, a Hindu doctor who had stayed behind in 1947 and been protected by his neighbours treated Muslim refugees through the night and was given tea by a Pathan he had treated the day before. Neither spoke of it.

Rawalpindi

May 26, 1949

The guns had been audible in Rawalpindi for twelve days, rolling in from the south and east like a train that never reached the platform. The staff officers at Northern Command had stopped looking up at the ceiling when they came.

Major General Akbar Khan stood at the map table with his sleeves rolled. Makran gone. Karachi blockaded and under air attack. Khuzdar threatened. The Punjab holding for now, bleeding. The camps at Attock and Jhelum, which had held eleven thousand tribesmen, were smoking craters. A telegram from Kalat said: Khan has declared against us. Tribes rising. Request instructions.

In a corner, at a folding table with his pipe, sat a man in civilian clothes, Brigadier Edmund Shaw, formally retired, in Pakistan "as a private consultant to the Ministry of Supply." He had commanded a brigade at Kohima and knew what a defence looked like.

"You cannot hold Baluchistan," Shaw said quietly, in English. "You never could. You took it with soldiers, and soldiers are all you have there. The Karachi garrison will hold for three weeks if the shells keep coming. Make Karachi expensive. Then the Indus. You have lost the sea, General. You must not lose the Punjab as well."

"And the shells?"

"Three trainloads through Quetta, if Quetta holds. A Basra consignment on the thirtieth. After that, I would plan for the Indians to take the railway."

In the room next door, behind heavy velvet drapes, a physician bent over the narrow bed and put two fingers to the thin wrist. He stayed there a long time. Then he laid the wrist on the sheet and looked at the man who stood at the foot of the bed, who had waited six hours with his hands folded.

"Prime Minister. He has gone."

Liaquat Ali Khan did not move. He looked at the figure on the bed, skin like parchment, eyes closed at last, the hissing breath silent. The oxygen apparatus ticked once as the last pressure left it.

"When?"

"Four minutes ago. Quietly. He did not wake."

Liaquat bent as an old man bends and laid his hand for a moment on the Quaid’s forehead. Then he straightened and walked into the briefing hall. The generals rose. Shaw rose last.

"Gentlemen. The Quaid-e-Azam is dead."

No one spoke. Through the high windows, the guns rolled on.

"Three months ago, I promised him a victory in his own cantonment," Liaquat said. His voice was hoarse but steady. "And this is what we bring him. His coast in foreign hands. His port blockaded. His Baluchistan, that he fought to bring into the fold, in revolt. His Punjab under the guns."

Akbar Khan opened his mouth. Liaquat raised a hand.

"I will not hear it tonight, General. Tonight I say this. They have taken our founder and our sea, and they will take Karachi. I do not know if they can be stopped. But I will not ask them for terms while Pakistan still has a rifle in a Pathan’s hand. We will fight them at Karachi. We will fight them on the Indus. We will fight them in the Punjab if they come. And if we are to be pushed into the mountains, then we will go into the mountains, and fight there." He looked at the generals one by one. "Let the world see that Pakistan did not die when its father did."

Silence. Then a brigadier at the back said quietly, "Insha’Allah."

"Insha’Allah," the room answered.

It was not a cheer. It was the sound of men who had run out of any alternative.

When the generals dispersed, Shaw lingered at the table. "A fine speech," he said to Akbar Khan. "A hopeless one."

"It is the only one left."

"The hopeless ones are the ones armies fight for longest." Shaw knocked out his pipe. "I would prepare Karachi."

South Block

May 28, 1949

The news of Jinnah’s death reached Delhi by telegram from the Swiss consulate in Karachi at four in the morning. By nine, Ram had read it three times. By ten, he had sent a message through the Swiss Government expressing the condolences of the Republic of India to the people of Pakistan on the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, "a man of formidable will and a lawyer of the first rank, who gave his life to what he believed."

"You are sending condolences?" Nehru said, coming in from the Assembly with his cap in his hand.

"Of course."

"After Kot Mehrban?"

"The man who ordered Kot Mehrban was not Jinnah, no, it was the thinking that something this barbarous is permitted to be done to fellow humans just because their beliefs differ from yours." Ram folded the cable. "A country does not honour itself by refusing to mourn its enemy. And it is useful that the world sees it."

"It is good that you are sending a condolence message; otherwise I was about to suggest it myself," Jawaharlal said with a small smile, "And the war?"

"Will not end because he is dead. If anything, it will go on longer. Pakistan will not surrender just because their founder is dead. It is an existential fight for them, and they will fight it like that; I have no illusions about that." Ram looked at the map. "Liaquat’s broadcast last night was a call to arms. Mullick’s people say the Punjabi villagers are already digging in along the Chenab."

Nehru sat down heavily. "Then it will be a longer war than we thought."

"It will be a longer war than I wished, Jawaharlal. It will not be a longer war than we can fight."

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.