Chapter 124: Sindh

Karachi

June 14-19, 1949

The siege of Karachi lasted thirty-six days, which was six days longer than Cariappa had told the Cabinet and four days shorter than Brigadier Shaw had promised Akbar Khan.

For a month the city lived under the sound of guns. The Indian 4th Infantry Division had come down from Mirpur Khas and taken Hyderabad, Sindh, on the second of June, then Kotri and its barrage, and by the tenth it stood on the Malir River, nine miles from the cantonment. Behind it the Navy had closed the harbour.

Katari’s cruisers lay beyond the horizon, and at night their shells came in on a long, high trajectory and fell on the oil depots at Keamari and the airfield at Drigh Road. The Air Force worked the city by night. The Pakistan Navy, a handful of frigates and minesweepers, sailed out on the twenty-first of May to break the blockade, and by dawn there were only oil slicks to mark where they had gone.

Inside the city, the Pakistani 8th Division and a hastily raised militia held a ring of old British cantonment defences, concrete pillboxes and anti-tank ditches. They fought hard. The assault on the Malir line cost the 4th Division six hundred men in two days, and Major General Chaudhuri, who had taken Hyderabad State the year before and now commanded the Sindh corps, sat in a captured railway office with a map and a cup of cold tea and did not hurry.

"Prime Minister’s orders," he told his brigadiers on the thirteenth. "Troop safety first. We do not take Karachi house by house. We take its water, its power, and its roads, and wait for it to understand."

On the fourteenth, the engineers cut the Pipri waterworks. On the fifteenth, the power station at Korangi went dark under a night bombardment. On the sixteenth, a column of Shermans and half-tracks swung wide through the salt flats to the north and cut the Super Highway and the railway to Hyderabad. By the seventeenth, the city had no water, no electricity, and no outward road.

On the evening of the eighteenth, Brigadier Tahir Hussain, the garrison commander, a quiet, spectacled officer who had taught at the Staff College in Quetta, sat in his dugout under the Sind Club. A signals officer brought him the last message from Rawalpindi. It said: Hold to the last man.

"There are no rations for the last man," Tahir said.

"Sir?"

"Nothing, Captain." He folded the signal and put it in his pocket. "How many men do we have with ammunition for more than a day?"

"Perhaps four thousand, sir."

"And civilians in the city?"

"Over two million, sir, with the refugees. There are cholera cases in the Lyari camp. Some civilians have begun to flee; they saw the future better than Pindi did."

Tahir took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He had received General Cariappa’s offer that morning, delivered under a white flag at the Malir bridge by a Gorkha major who had saluted him as one soldier salutes another. It was a single paragraph. The garrison might march out with its sidearms and its colours. The city would be occupied without a shot fired in it.

Wounded of both armies would be treated alike. Food, water, and medicine would begin entering the city within hours of the surrender, and the civilian population would be protected by the Indian Army. It had ended: I am instructed to say that the Prime Minister of India regards the defence of Karachi as having been conducted with honour.

"Honour," Tahir said aloud. He looked at the captain. "Is the Governor still in the city?"

"He left for Rawalpindi on the twelfth, sir. By car, before the road closed."

"Then I am the senior officer."

At nine the next morning, Brigadier Tahir Hussain drove to the Malir bridge in a staff car with a white sheet tied to its aerial and signed the instrument of surrender in the back of a command truck. General Chaudhuri accepted his sword and handed it back.

"Keep it, Brigadier. A man should be buried with his sword."

"You are generous, General."

"I am obeying orders. The Prime Minister said that a defeated army should not be humiliated unnecessarily. He said that it makes it harder for the peace to hold."

"He sounds a wiser man than the ones I serve," Tahir said, and for a moment his voice shook.

By noon, the lead battalion of the 2nd Gorkhas was marching down Bunder Road with its rifles slung. Behind it came water tankers, field kitchens, medical trucks, and engineers with pipes. In the Lyari camp, the first tanker drew up beside a crowd of two thousand people, and an old man in a skullcap filled a brass lota and drank, and wept, and did not speak.

At Mauripur Airfield, the Indian tricolour went up. On the harbour front, two sailors from the cruiser Delhi climbed the old Customs House and unfurled a naval ensign. Nobody cheered. The streets of Karachi, which had been choked with hunger and rumour for a month, were silent in the white noon heat.

South Block

June 19, 1949

The news reached Ram at ten past one. Shaktidas brought the cable in himself.

"Karachi has surrendered, Ram. General Chaudhuri reports some riots, and some reports of looting, which were dealt with. The city is in a watchful silence. The harbour is mined, but the minesweepers will clear it in a week."

Ram read the cable, then laid it face down on the desk. For a moment he did not speak.

"What are the conditions in the city?"

"Water restored in the central districts. Cholera in two camps. We have sent a hundred nurses by air."

"Seva Vahini?"

"No, other sources. There is enough resentment in the populace to risk sending Seva Vahini."

"Good. Send a thousand sacks of rice from the Bombay reserve by sea tonight. I want every Karachi family to know within the week that the Indian Army has fed them." He turned in his chair. "And the Sindh question?"

"General Chaudhuri asks for instructions."

Ram stood and went to the wall map. Sindh lay painted pale pink on the western edge of the subcontinent, a long strip of river and desert running up the Indus toward the Punjab, and he laid his hand flat over it.

"Tell him this. He will not just occupy Sindh; he will secure it. Every bridge, every barrage, every railway junction. Sukkur, Rohri, Kotri, Hyderabad, Mirpur Khas. The irrigation canals are the life of the province, and I want them intact and staffed by our engineers within the month. While they did their duty for Karachi, we cannot risk fundamentalists sabotaging the lifeblood of the city and inventing a crisis" He paused. "And the transfer protocol. Any civilian who wishes to leave may go free, with proper precautions in place. Should they try anything, deal with them as you see fit. Any who wishes to remain is a citizen of this Republic and will have to follow its laws."

"And Shaktidas, bring me the Sindh refugee figures. I want to know how many mouths we must feed."

Shaktidas hesitated. "The harvest in lower Sindh is fine this year. But the upper province, around Sukkur and Larkana, has stood idle since the fighting began."

"Then we begin with the ploughs. I will not have a hungry province on my hands the day after I have fed a city."

Nankana Sahib

June 22-24, 1949

The Sikh battalions came to Nankana Sahib along the Lahore-Sheikhupura road, thirty-five miles through a country that had been fought over for three weeks.

There was no easy way to reach it. Lahore was invested but unfallen, and the Pakistani 10th Division held the ground between the Ravi and the canal in a dozen strongpoints. General Cariappa had sent the 1st Armoured Division and the 2nd Sikh Light Infantry round the north in a wide sweep, with the Air Force pounding every culvert and crossroads ahead of them. It took four days, and a hundred and ninety Indian soldiers died on the way.

On the morning of the twenty-second, the lead squadron of the 7th Light Cavalry came over a low rise and saw the town, a cluster of brick houses and a great white-domed gurdwara, standing in a field of green wheat.

"There," said Risaldar Major Harbans Singh in the hatch of the leading Sherman. He was a grey-haired man of fifty-three, who had joined the cavalry in 1917, fought in Palestine and Italy, and had never seen the place of his Guru’s birth. He did not say anything else.

The Pakistani garrison, a company of the Frontier Force dug in around the railway station, fought for an hour and a half. The Indian artillery was held back. Cariappa had given the order in a single terse line: Nankana Sahib is not to be shelled. The infantry went in with grenades and bayonets, house to house, and the company fell back along the railway under the guns of the cavalry. By half past ten, it was over.

A lone figure was waiting at the gurdwara’s gate.

He was a Muslim of about seventy, in a faded turban, with a long white beard, and he had stood there since the morning the guns began. He was the keeper of the keys. The Sikhs of the town had left in 1947, and for two years, he had swept the courtyard and trimmed the lamps, because his father had done the same, and his father’s father.

Subedar Major Gurcharan Singh, who had held the gurdwara at Kartarpur a month before, walked toward him. He took off his steel helmet, and the men behind him took theirs off.

"Baba-ji," Gurcharan Singh said. "I am a Sikh. This is our Guru’s birthplace. May we enter?"

The old man looked at him for a long time. He looked at the tall, bearded soldiers with their rifles and their dust-covered boots.

"I kept it for you," he said, in Punjabi. "I always said they would come."

"You kept it?"

"The lamps were lit every evening. The floor was washed every morning. I am not a Sikh, but my family has lived here for six generations, and my grandfather said that a house of God is a house of God. I only hoped that someone would come and tell me it had been worth it."

Gurcharan Singh did not trust himself to speak. He took the keys from the old man’s hand, kissed them, and handed them back.

"Keep them, Baba-ji. We will need a keeper. You will be paid by the Republic, and your sons after you."

"I do not need payment."

"You will take it anyway," Gurcharan Singh said, and the old man, for the first time, smiled.

That evening, in the courtyard of the gurdwara, the soldiers of the 2nd Sikh Light Infantry sat in rows on the cool stone and sang the Kirtan Sohila, the evening prayer. It was heard a mile away, and it rose in the dusk above a field of burned tanks and cooling gun barrels, and the Pakistani civilians who had hidden in their cellars came to their doors to listen. No one stopped them from listening.

Hasan Abdal

June 28-July 2, 1949

Panja Sahib was the harder prize.

It lay a hundred and seventy miles north of Nankana Sahib, in the foothills near Rawalpindi, at the shrine where Guru Nanak had, by Sikh tradition, stopped a falling boulder with his palm. The mark of the hand was still in the rock. The Pakistani Army had held the town since the Partition and had turned the nearby ridges into fortified positions. An overland advance would take months.

Cariappa’s staff had come up with another plan. Colonel Anant Singh Dhillon of the Parachute Regiment briefed it in Ambala on the twenty-fifth. The 50th Parachute Brigade, barely a year in existence, would drop in the pre-dawn of the twenty-eighth at three locations north and west of Hasan Abdal, take the road junctions, and hold until an armoured column from the south linked up. Dakotas from Ambala and Jammu would carry them, with Tempests and Wellingtons suppressing the anti-aircraft positions.

"It is a gamble," said Dhillon. "We drop eighteen hundred men into the territory of a division. If the armour is late, we will be cut to pieces."

"How late?" asked a young major.

"If it reaches us in forty-eight hours, we hold. In seventy-two, we hold with difficulty. After that, I would not like to say."

They dropped at 0340 hours on the twenty-eighth, under a half-moon, and the sky over the Punjab foothills filled with parachutes. One battalion landed east of the shrine, where a stream cut the road to Rawalpindi. One landed in the hills to the north. The third, which carried most of the brigade’s Sikh troops, came down in wheat fields a mile and a half south of Panja Sahib itself, almost in sight of its dome.

The Pakistani garrison, a battalion of the Frontier Force and a few hundred police, never fully understood what had happened. Eleven aircraft dropped heavy machine guns and mortars in canisters, and by dawn the paratroopers held all three road junctions. The Pakistani counter-attack from Rawalpindi came at nine, a brigade of infantry with armoured cars. It was broken at the stream by the Indian mortars. The second came at two in the afternoon, and the third at dusk.

Major Ajit Singh Randhawa commanded the company that took the shrine. He was twenty-seven and had been a schoolteacher in Ludhiana before the war. At half past seven, under a hail of rifle fire from the surrounding houses, his men fought their way through the bazaar and into the courtyard of the gurdwara. A handful of Pakistani police held the pool at its centre, and when the paratroopers rushed it, the last of them threw down their rifles and raised their hands.

Randhawa walked to the rock. In the dim light, he saw the faint depression in the stone, the imprint of a hand. He laid his own palm over it, and it did not fit. It was larger than his, or his hand was smaller than he remembered, and he stood for a moment with his eyes closed.

"Sir," said his sergeant. "The Pakistanis are coming back."

"I know," Randhawa said, and took his hand away. "Man the walls."

They held for sixty-one hours. The third and fourth counter-attacks were more vicious than the first, and the paratroopers’ ammunition ran low on the second night. A Pakistani sniper in the minaret of a nearby mosque killed eleven men before a mortar round brought it down.

On the morning of the thirtieth, the Indian armoured column from Nankana Sahib, which had fought its way across two rivers and a hundred and forty miles of ruined road, rolled into the south of the town, and the Pakistani brigade fell back in disorder toward Rawalpindi.

Dhillon walked into the gurdwara at noon on the thirtieth with a bandaged arm. The courtyard was full of exhausted men sleeping against the walls. He found Randhawa sitting on the step with a blanket round his shoulders.

"You held the position, well done, Major."

"Thank you, sir. We lost some good men holding."

Randhawa stood and took off his steel helmet. After a moment, the men sleeping against the walls stirred, saw the Colonel, and woke. One by one, they stood.

Hasan Abdal, the next evening

A doctor from the town came to the gurdwara with a bag of dressings and offered his services. He had stayed through the fighting, sheltering a dozen families in his cellar. He worked through the night beside the Indian medical officers, and in the morning, a Sikh havildar, a farm boy from Hoshiarpur, brought him tea.

"You have treated our wounded."

"I have treated the wounded."

"You could have been shot for it."

"I am a doctor, Havildar." The man smiled, tired and a little ashamed. "It was the only thing I knew how to do."

The havildar said nothing for a while. Then he said, in a low voice, "My sister was taken in 1947, at Rawalpindi. I have never learned where."

The doctor put down his cup. "I am very sorry."

"I thought you should know that we do not hate you," the havildar said. "I thought that someone should say it."

Karachi, the Governor’s House

July 8, 1949

A fortnight after the fall of the city, Ram flew to Karachi.

He spent two days there. He visited the Lyari camp, where thirty thousand refugees were queuing for rice. He sat on a bench in a naval hospital beside a wounded Pakistani sailor and asked him in halting Urdu where he came from. He walked the harbour front with General Chaudhuri and Admiral Katari and looked at the wrecks in the harbour mouth, two Pakistani frigates and a sunken oil tanker, and at the Indian ships already moving through the cleared channel.

On the evening of the eighth, in the former Governor’s House, he addressed a gathering of Sindhi landlords, merchants, and municipal officers, who had been summoned by the army and were prepared for the worst. Ram spoke in English, through a Sindhi interpreter.

"Gentlemen. You were told that the Indian Army would burn your houses. You were told that it would take your land. I am here to tell you that it will do neither. The land is yours. The canals are yours. The Indus is the property of everyone who lives beside it, and it is the oldest river in the history of this country.

"You are citizens of the Republic of India. You are free to worship as you wish and to teach your children in your own language. Those who cannot bear to live under our flag may go; those who stay will find that the law protects them as it protects me."

A white-bearded Sindhi in a pink turban rose slowly, a landowner from Larkana named Mir Ghulam Ali Talpur. "Prime Minister. May I ask a question?"

"Of course."

"For two years, Pakistan told us that the Hindus would take our lands. That the Muslims of Sindh would be made servants. Why should we believe that you will not?"

"Because you can watch me," Ram said. "For one year, two years, five. Measure what I do against what I have said. If you find me false, you will have every right to say so, and I shall deserve it." He paused. "I do not ask for your trust, Mir Sahib. I ask for the time to earn it."

The landlord looked at him for a long time. Then he sat down and said nothing more.

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