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kdsingh80

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  7. Nihangs and Fish

    in Sikhi | Questions and Answers

    Posted

    On 7/26/2018 at 11:06 PM, dalsingh101 said:

    Just to throw this in the mix too.

    I swear I saw a woodcut print of Harmandir Sahib (from the early colonial period I believe) where there were people spear-fishing from boats in the sarowar. Must try and find it again. 

    Amritsari fish is one of the most popular dish in South Asia.In lahore the dish is known as Sardar ki Machchli because the the sikhs migrated to Lahore from Amritsar bring that dish with them.That must be 19th or early twentieth century 

    So I guess for Amritsari Sikhs fish was never a taboo

    1
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    Nihangs and Fish

    in Sikhi | Questions and Answers

    Posted

    19 hours ago, paapiman said:

    Another reason to avoid fish consumption by Sikhs:

    Quote

    A new study found that couples who ate more fish had sex more frequently than couples who consumed less.

    Unquote[1]

    [1] - http://uk.businessinsider.com/eating-more-fish-increases-sex-drive-fertility-study-2018-5

     

    Bhul chuk maaf

    It is also found that couples that had fish in their diet also likely to become more pregnant and have high fertility.

    When Sikhism is struggling is with low fertility your article support the opposite

    4

  9. Sikhphilosophy.net - rise and fall | rejection of inner journey to Waheguru

    in Meditation | Simran | Bhakti | Jap

    Posted

    On 8/11/2018 at 2:25 AM, chzS1ngh said:

    Sikhphilosophy.net - rise and fall

    Having been a member of the above forum for almost 6 years...do then suddenly get blocked without any notification or reason provided...left me slightly concerned at what has happened to what was one a great forum.

    A few years ago...the forum was full of souls yearning to share experiences...members diving in and taking the journey described by our beloved Guru Ji...
    but one by one, everyone started to disappear...members getting blocked...members being targeted for wanting to discuss Simran...the inner journey...a journey of self transformation and truth realization.

    a Small admin group...Aman Singh, Tejwant Singh, Harry Haller ... latching onto members as soon as they mention the words Simran...or anything even remotely Mystic...
    one by one, sucking the energy out of the member...

    Such a shame for what was once a great forum....a forum that was open to views and discussion...but now just occupied by a small handful...

    i have emailed the admin several times to ask why i was blocked....no reply...

    i created another email address, created a thread asking why i was blocked...only to realize my new account was then blocked, and my thread deleted...

    i contacted by email other members who often share their vision of this inner journey...only to realize they have also been blocked...

     

    That site should be renamed , Tejwant philosophy.net. That guy has weird concept some of Atheistic Sikhism , with no god , no divine power death is the end concept .He just interpret Guru Granth sahib in own way and write pages and pages on it saying that Guru granth sahib our only Guru.Several people including me has asked him Sikhs need to just obey Guru Granth sahib then why to give so much importance to 5 ks , he hardly has any answer

    1

  10. Sikh leaders spur Dr. Ambedkar plan to convert millions of dalits to Sikhism.

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    20 hours ago, paapiman said:

    Why do you say that? So, what exactly happened with Ambedkar saab? When did he convert and why did many dalits not convert along with him?

     

    Bhul chuk maaf

    Ambedkar died natural death , even her second Brahmin wife met him when he was in hospital.His wife died natural death in 2003.She lived her life as widow of Ambedkar.some dalit leaders too saying that he was poisened but no one ever get a single evidence.Please remember any planted agent would had gone to her home after finishing her target , she lived as widow.

    http://www.womensweb.in/2018/05/savita-ambedkar-discredited-caste-woman-may18wk3/

     

    1

  11. Sikh leaders spur Dr. Ambedkar plan to convert millions of dalits to Sikhism.

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    2 hours ago, paapiman said:

    Only a few Dalilts converted.

    Some interesting facts (from the book Was Bhindranwale a Congress Creation by Baldev Singh)?:

    • Ambedkar saab converted to Buddhism in 1956, less than 3 months before his death.  
    • He was ousted from all political power during 1951-52 and remained a non-entity for about 5 years.
    • During the 1940's, when he fell ill, a Hindu Brahmin lady (who he later married) was strategically deputed by Gandhi-Nehru-Patel trio to tone down his anti-Hindu stand. 
    • After the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, he was considered the next target of Hindu activists. Due to this fear, his conversion plan suffered a setback.

     

    Bhul chuk maaf

    These are B.S conspiracy theories with no truth in it

    1

  17. Nearly 10 million Sikhs have lost their religion because of this organisation

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    8 hours ago, chatanga1 said:

     

    Just want to add here that there is a sakhi in Puratan Janam Sakhi that Sant Gurbachan Singh Bhindranwale told of, that spoke of Guru Nanak asking Bhai Mardana to keep his kes. Also there is a sakhi of Baba Sri Chand when visiting Guru Ramdas at Amritsar, asking Guru Sahib why his beard is so long.

    Bhai Gurdas has written defination of sikh in his vaars , There is no mention of keeping kes

    1

  19. The Nepal-Sikh Alliance That Could Have Changed History

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Quote

    https://thewire.in/134944/nepal-sikh-alliance-india-british-raj/

    Although it is not history’s job to dabble in ‘what-ifs’, could an alliance between the Gorkhas, the Sikhs and the Marathas have succeeded in ending the East India Company’s machinations in the subcontinent?

    Screen-Shot-2017-05-12-at-1.jpg?resize=8

    Map of North India and Nepal from 1814. Credit: Geographicus

    In the early part of the 19th century, a small settlement called Sugauli, in modern-day east Champaran, Bihar, was witness to a treaty that would shape the subcontinent’s history, and political boundaries. The House of Gorkha, the ruling Shah dynasty of the kingdom of Nepal, had sued for peace after suffering its heaviest defeat – the loss of its newly conquered territories of Garhwal and Kumaon – despite inflicting heavy damages on the East India Company in four other fronts. Although Nepal had to give up over 40,000 square miles of territory – Garhwal and Kumaon in the west; the kingdom of Sikkim, which the British had promised to return to the Chogyal; and land in the fertile Terai – the subsequent treaty, Jesuit historian Ludwig J. Stiller describes, “was the logical conclusion of the failure of…Kathmandu to insist on restraining the army’s westward march until an adequate and competent administration could be set up in the conquered territories.”

    I came across Stiller’s very readable history of Nepal, The Rise of the House of Gorkha (1973), earlier this year, two years after the infamous Indian blockade of Nepal, at a time when nationalistic pride is the new frenzy both in India and Nepal. As in the British era, Nepal’s kings (and politicians) have always looked south for continued support for their actions in the country. When it wasn’t coming, as witnessed by tacit Indian support to the Madhes movement and the 2015 blockade, Nepali politicians pushed the nationalist agenda, a harkening back to the supposed injustices of the Sugauli treaty (and the subsequent Indo-Nepal Treaty of 1950). A moribund political movement called the Greater Nepal Movement gains ground every time a dispute arises between India and Nepal, the latter accusing the former of not returning the territories it had conquered.

    Stiller’s account, however, points to an intriguing line of enquiry. It begins with a letter that Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh empire, sent to Amar Singh Thapa, commander of the Gorkha military expedition west of the Sutlej, in August 1809.

    Rise-of-Gurkha.jpg?resize=267%2C418&ssl=

    Ludwig F. Stiller 
    The Rise of the House of Gorkha
    Patna Jesuit Society, 1973

    Ranjit Singh had skilfully cut off Gorkha supply lines in their newly conquered territories east of the Sutlej and in Garhwal. The Gorkhas were trapped. “Had the Nepalese succeeded in reducing Kangra, there is little doubt that they would have very shortly after extended their conquest to Cashmere,” a Captain C.P. Kennedy wrote in his Report on the Hill States in 1824.

    Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s intervention in the Gorkhas’ military campaign had put a spanner in the works. The smaller rajahs of the hill states had been subdued by the massive Gorkha war engine that had already swept Kumaon and Garhwal, and was knocking on Kashmir’s door. Kazi Amar Singh Thapa offered to pay Ranjit Singh if he would withdraw his army, but Ranjit Singh himself had designs on Kangra. Instead, he wrote the Nepali general the 1809 letter, where he proposed, if Thapa withdrew from the area, the Lion of Lahore would cooperate with the Gorkhas against the East India Company.

    Amar Singh Thapa refused to entertain Ranjit Singh’s missive, and even imprisoned the messenger, incensed by a treaty Ranjit Singh had previously signed with the Company in April that year. The letter, Stiller writes, struck him as ‘the height of hypocrisy’.

    Thapa withdrew his forces after a fierce round of hostilities with Ranjit Singh’s troops. Five years later, the Gorkha empire would meet its most formidable opponent, the Company, all by itself.

    §

    The Shah king Prithvi Narayan Shah, who spearheaded the Nepali unification campaign, had fought against the Company in Sindhuli, Nepal, in August 1767. Captain George Kinloch led an ill-fated expedition that entered the Terai during the monsoons, when the aulo fever, malaria, was at its worst. Shah’s mastery of the terrain helped him beat back the British, but it was clear an uneasy truce had been struck. The Company would look the other way if the Gorkha war machine stuck to the hills, which it did, expanding relentlessly till Sikkim in the east, before it turned its eyes west from 1789 onwards, thus placing it irrevocably on a course of war with the Company. Stiller writes:

    “The House of Gorkha and the East India Company had been on a collision course from the time that the Gorkhali advance to the west had placed them squarely athwart the trade routes [to] Tibet. Given the economics of the situation, the position of Nepal, and the British sense of their right (emphasis in original) to trade, there was no way of avoiding the war short of a complete and sudden reversal of character on the part of the Nepalese or the British.”

    Joppen1907India1805a.jpg?resize=586%2C83

    Map of British territories in 1907. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

    War was coming, and the powerful Nepali prime minister Bhimsen Thapa knew it. But the Nepali army lacked the long-range cannons needed to besiege the Company, and wedged in by the powerful Ranjit Singh in the west and the Company to the south and the east, Bhimsen Thapa could not acquire “a better grade of steel and greater skill in casting” for his cannons. But there was still a card left to play:

    “One of the key factors in Bhim Sen Thapa’s thinking was the recognition of the real weakness of the British position in India…t was apparent to all that the Indian powers could drive the British out of the subcontinent if they could combine against them. But no one had succeeded in forming the type of confederacy that would be required for such a war.”

    In 1814, Bhimsen Thapa sent out missives, among other princely states, to the Marathas in Gwalior, where, although the Scindia was “impressed [by the Gorkhali courage] in standing up to the British”, he agreed on allying with the Gorkhas only if Ranjit Singh joined the alliance. Amar Singh Thapa was required to send the Kathmandu missive to Ranjit Singh, which offered the Lion of Lahore: “a division of the Gangetic plain from Delhi to Calcutta between the Sikhs, the Gorkhalis and the Marathas…[and] an appeal to Ranjit in the name of Hinduism to drive the British out of India”.

    The tripartite alliance never came to be. One account suggests Ranjit Singh, like other Indian states, preferred to bide his time; also, that he turned “over to the British several letters that had been sent to him by Nepal” and mobilised his army to the Sutlej to take “advantage of any opportunities that might arise”. Stiller suggests the Marquess of Hastings’ movement of over half of all Bengal army, ‘46,629 British troops’, to the Nepal front and ensuring the Marathas were up to no mischief by moving the “whole disposable force of the Madras army” to the northern border of Bhopal, scuttled any plans of such an alliance.

    In any case, the moment was lost. Nepal went to war on five different fronts with the British between 1814-1816 before suing for peace, which resulted in the Sugauli Treaty that inextricably bound Nepal’s fate to the colonists, and after independence, to India. It lost all territory west of the Mahakali (or the Sharda, as it’s known in India), east of the Mechi and over half its territory in the Terai. The Gorkhas were now wedged in on three sides by the British or its protectorates, and on one side lay the impregnable Himalayas, their dream of creating a unified pan-hill state across the Himalayas halted in its tracks by a trading company.

    §

    By all accounts, the Gorkha empire was as opportunist as any other empire of its time, hungry for resources to fuel its massive army. Would it have stuck to its words had the proposed alliance come to be and they’d beaten back the British? We don’t know, considering the Gorkha empire’s sights were set on Kashmir, and so was the Sikh empire’s, but the alliance that could have been encourages a query: what if Amar Singh Thapa had acceded to Ranjit Singh’s initial request?

    Although it is not history’s job to dabble in ‘what-ifs’, a query tickles the imagination – could an alliance between the Gorkhas, the Sikhs and the Marathas have succeeded in ending Company machinations in the subcontinent?

    Amish Raj Mulmi is a Nepali writer and a publishing professional. He’s currently digital editor at Juggernaut Books.

     

    1

  20. Nisid Hajari’s Midnight's Furies:

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    On 7/18/2017 at 2:34 AM, tonyhp32 said:

    Believe it or not but at one stage the Maharajas were more in favour of Sikhistan than the Akalis! The success of  the Sikh mobilisation into Jathas to counter the Muslim aggression was in part due to the participation of the Sikhs states with their manpower and their organisational ability. It was only after the plan to create Sikhistan out of the Sikh owned areas of Punjab failed that both the Akalis and the Maharajas acted like India's greatest desh bhagats! 

    Even if Sikhistan failed they should had secure Kashmir like status for Sikhs.Even Some Hindu kings did not sign accession as fast as sikh maharajah's did

    0

  21. Nisid Hajari’s Midnight's Furies:

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    1 hour ago, chatanga1 said:

    Another major factor to consider is that partition violence only relates to violence post 14th august. That is when the Sikhs actually fought back. Before that date the muslims had the upper hand and were killing Sikhs in western Panjab. In Lahore the muslims had started killing hindus and sikhs from 6th july as that was the day partition was announced. Because there was uncertainty over lahore, the muslims fire-bombed hindu/sikh areas until they left, so there was no chance of Lahore ending up in India. The Sikhs should have done the same with those border villages with historic gurdwaras. It was a great mistake to have left them to pakistan, when the opportuniuty was there.

    I don't think  Radcliffe took such recent data for partition. Even if sikhs had done the same but on papers that area was muslim majority then it was going to awarded to Pakistan

    0

  23. Nisid Hajari’s Midnight's Furies:

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    Quote

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/how_india_and_pakistan_became_enemies_excerpt_from_nisid_hajari_s_midnight.html

    Excerpted from Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition by Nisid Hajari, out now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

    Throughout August 1947, as Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs engaged in one of the most terrible slaughters of the 20th century in next-door Punjab province, lights continued to blaze from New Delhi’s ivory-white Imperial Hotel. On weekends, diners packed the tables in the Grill Room overlooking the lawns, while Indian socialites dripping with gold and jewels filled the dance floor well past midnight. To many of the city’s well-to-do, the bloodshed that had erupted upon the birth of modern India and Pakistan still felt unreal. The Indian women in particular seemed to be “on heat,” one British journalist noted hungrily. “The aphrodisiac was independence.”

    No band played on Saturday, Sept. 6, however. A curfew had emptied the dining room. Anyone standing on the hotel’s veranda would have been bathed in a different light—a rose-colored glow that filled the horizon to the north. The Muslim neighborhoods of Old Delhi were on fire.

    When they imagine the terrible riots that accompanied the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, most people are picturing the bloodshed in the Punjab. On Aug. 15, the new border had split the province in two, leaving millions of Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs in what was now Pakistan, and at least as many Punjabi Muslims in India.

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    Gangs of killers roamed the border districts, slaughtering minorities or driving them across the frontier. Huge, miles-long caravans of refugees took to the dusty roads in terror. They left grim reminders of their passage—trees stripped of bark, which they peeled off in great chunks to use as fuel; dead and dying bullocks, cattle, and sheep; and thousands upon thousands of corpses lying alongside the road or buried shallowly. Vultures feasted so extravagantly that they could no longer fly.

    As awful as the carnage was, though, it was for much of August concentrated in the Punjab. The combatants were mostly peasants, armed with crude weapons. If the two new governments had managed to quell the mayhem quickly, they might in time have found scope to cooperate on issues ranging from economic development to foreign policy. Instead, the infant India and Pakistan would soon be drawn into a rivalry that’s lasted almost 70 years and has cast a nuclear shadow over the subcontinent.

    A few short days in Delhi at the beginning of September 1947 helped to tilt the scales. Most train services across the new border had been suspended because of the spiraling massacres, stranding thousands of Muslim civil servants destined for Pakistan in the Indian capital. Desperately short of staff, the Pakistani government was already struggling to cope with hundreds of thousands of traumatized refugees and a stalled economy. Pakistan’s prickly founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, suspected the Indians of deliberately seeking to sabotage his fragile state.

    Muhammad Ali JinnahMohammad Ali Jinnah at a military march in Karachi, Pakistan, after having been sworn in as the first governor general, on Aug. 17, 1947.

    Photo by Keystone/Getty Images

    His fears weren’t entirely unfounded. For several days running, according to some eyewitness reports, small groups of Sikh and Hindu militants had been roving the broad, manicured avenues of New Delhi, defying the curfew. Some appear to have been marking out the rooms in government dormitories occupied by Muslim clerks and peons, as well as the houses and bungalows where Muslims lived or worked as servants. A British diplomat later reported seeing a lorry full of Sikhs pull up outside the home of the local chairman of British airline BOAC, which had agreed to transport Muslim officials to Pakistan by air until the trains resumed. “That’s the place,” one of the Sikhs confirmed, carefully noting down the address.

    Vultures feasted so extravagantly that they could no longer fly. 

    On the night of Sept. 6, sword-wielding gangs began working their way from target to target, dragging out and killing Muslims. The next morning mobs took to the streets all over the city. One descended on the military airfield at Palam, from where the BOAC charters were taking off; another blocked the runways at the civilian Willingdon Airfield as airline employees fled in terror. Muslims caught out in the open were stabbed and gutted, including five who were killed in front of New Delhi’s cathedral while worshippers celebrated Sunday Mass. Looters broke into Muslim shops in Connaught Place, the colonnaded arcade at the heart of the city. By 10 that night, Delhi hospitals were reporting three times as many Muslim as non-Muslim casualties.

    Rushing to Connaught Place, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was appalled to see a contingent of police standing by idly as Hindu and Sikh rioters carried off ladies’ handbags, cosmetics, and wool scarves—even bottles of fountain-pen ink. Nehru grabbed a baton from one indifferent policeman and flailed away at the crowd himself. The prime minister would learn later that Delhi police had picked up rumors that “two well-known [Sikh] extremists from Amritsar” had organized refugees from the Punjab into makeshift killing squads. Plot or no, Delhi’s police appeared content to let the rioters go about their business unmolested.

    Although they later tried to play down the extent of the chaos, Nehru and his deputy, the tough Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel (known as “Sardar,” or Chief), at least temporarily lost control of their own capital. Ministries sat empty because clerks and officials were too afraid to come to work. Buses, taxis, and horse-drawn tongas—usually driven by Muslims—stopped plying the roads. The phones went dead. Within 48 hours, hospital mortuaries had filled to capacity; dozens of bodies lay unclaimed on the streets for days. With food shipments rotting in abandoned trains, ration shops closed up. At one point the city had only two days’ stock of wheat in reserve.

    Lord Louis Mountbatten, Britain’s last viceroy, had stayed on after independence to serve as India’s first governor-general. Many of his staff members had seen combat with him during World War II; even they were stunned by the whirlwind. “This is more hectic than at any time of the war,” Mountbatten’s chief of staff Lord Hastings Ismay wrote to his wife—a potent statement from a man who had lived through the Blitz. He advised her to cancel her plans to come out to see him: “There is a possibility—and most keen a possibility—that orderly Government may collapse.”

    150604_HIST_1947-MountbattenEdwina Mountbatten, C. Rajagopalachari, and Lord Louis Mountbatten at Darbar Hall of Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi in 1947.

    Courtesy ofWikimedia Commons

    Initially none of the Indian leaders doubted that Sikhs, who had played a central role in the Punjab violence, had spearheaded the Delhi attacks, too. More than 200,000 non-Muslim refugees from the Punjab had squeezed into the capital, and plenty of them thirsted for revenge. Patel called in local Sikh leaders and threatened to toss their followers into concentration camps if the violence did not cease. He also gave the army a “free hand” to go after Sikh troublemakers. Commanders ordered their troops to shoot rioters on sight. Though the military could not admit openly to targeting any particular community, Mountbatten joked grimly, “the object would have been achieved if in 48 hours’ time the local graves and concentration camps were occupied more fully by men with long beards than those without.”

    Very quickly, however, Patel’s assessment of the threat changed. The problem was not just the Sikhs. Earlier police reports had also warned of a brewing Muslim uprising in the capital. Most of the city’s ammunition dealers were Muslim, as were most of its blacksmiths. The latter had supposedly converted their workshops to churn out bombs, mortars, and bullets. Patel had been worried enough about the threat to issue licenses to several new Hindu arms dealers in Delhi. He had “been giving arms liberally to non-Muslim applicants” for self-defense, he reassured a colleague.

    Some Delhi Muslims were indeed armed. They fought back against the police as well as the Hindu and Sikh gangs; among reported gunshot victims on Sunday, non-Muslims actually outnumbered Muslims 45 to 20. Though evidence of any conspiracy is scant, quite a few Delhiites seemed to believe that the city’s Muslims posed as great a threat as the death squads, if not greater.

     

    During the riots, officials trying to rescue Muslims often found the public reluctant to help. Owners of private cars and trucks removed key parts so that the authorities couldn’t requisition the vehicles. Volunteer drivers pretended to get lost or to develop engine trouble when asked to deliver aid to Muslim areas. (Eventually the government enlisted idealistic students to ride along and watch over them.) Even four days into the rioting, the U.S. military attaché witnessed Indian army troops standing by as Muslim women and children were clubbed to death at Delhi’s railway station.

    97k/11/huty/6662/23Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehr asks members of the Constituent Assembly to take a pledge of loyalty to the new state in August 1947.

    Photo by Keystone/Getty Images

    Patel was more in tune with the popular mood than Nehru. While the principle that Hindus and Muslims should be able to live together remained central to Nehru’s vision for India, the Sardar was less sentimental. He did not trust that all of India’s Muslims, many of whom had until recently supported Jinnah, had switched loyalties. If they did not think of themselves as Indians, he believed, then they belonged in Pakistan.

    Nehru would almost certainly have lost an open fight with his deputy. Horrified by the casualty reports, the prime minister tried to ban Sikhs from wearing their ceremonial knives, known as kirpans. Patel pushed back, saying the decree discriminated against the Sikh faith. “Murder is not to be justified in the name of religion,” Nehru protested. Yet after a “violent disagreement” between the two men, the Sardar triumphed. Sikhs regained the right to carry their daggers after a 48-hour pause.

    Nehru seemed to believe he had a better chance of quelling the unrest single-handedly than by working through his own administration. He went “on the prowl whenever he could escape from the [Cabinet] table, and took appalling personal risks,” Ismay recalled. Nehru would angrily face down mobs himself, rushing from trouble spot to trouble spot. A veritable tent city, filled with Muslim refugees, sprouted on the lawns of his York Road bungalow.

    One night a Muslim friend named Badruddin Tyabji showed up at Nehru’s door to alert him to an especially troubled area—the Minto Bridge, which Muslims fleeing their Old Delhi neighborhoods had to cross to reach the safety of refugee camps in New Delhi. Each night, Tyabji said, gangs of Sikhs and Hindus lurked nearby and sprung upon the defenseless Muslims as they trudged past.

    The riots fatally undermined any trust Pakistani leaders had in their Indian counterparts. 

    Nehru immediately bolted from his seat and dashed upstairs. He returned a few minutes later holding a dusty, ungainly revolver. The gun had once belonged to his father, Motilal, and hadn’t been fired in years. He had a plan, he told Tyabji. They would don soiled and torn kurtas and drive up to Minto Bridge themselves that night. Disguised as refugees, they’d cross the bridge, and when the thugs tried to waylay them, “We would shoot them down!” The stunned Tyabji was able to persuade the leader of the world’s second-biggest nation “only with great difficulty” that “some less hazardous and more effective method for putting an end to this kind of crime should not be too difficult to devise.” Mountbatten feared Nehru’s impulsiveness would get him killed and assigned soldiers to watch over him.

    Nehru’s individual heroics evoked great admiration in men like Ismay and Mountbatten. But they did little for Delhi’s Muslims. After the initial wave of attacks, thousands had fled their homes. Authorities almost immediately started evacuating the rest, claiming they could not guarantee the safety of residents if they remained where they were.

    Muslims were dumped in guarded sites by the truckload—places which it would be generous to describe as refugee camps. Within a week, more than 50,000 were crammed into the Purana Qila, a ruined fort. They huddled pitifully on the muddy ground with no lights, no latrines, and hardly any water or food. The Pakistan government flew in shipments of cooked rice and chapatis all the way from Lahore to feed them.

    Muslim refugeesMuslim refugees crowd a train trying to flee India near New Delhi on Sept. 19, 1947.

    Photo by AP

    Ismay melodramatically compared the scene at the Purana Qila to “Belsen—without the gas chambers.” Dignified Muslim professors and lawyers were squashed next to cooks and mechanics, longtime Gandhians next to stranded, would-be Pakistan bureaucrats. Wounded and sick moaned without medical attention; babies were born in the open. Armed Sikhs patrolled the one choked entrance, taking down the license plate numbers of Europeans driving in to deliver food and supplies to their friends and former servants.

    With the help of Gurkha and South Indian troops—who were less vulnerable to the sectarian passions roiling their northern counterparts—authorities managed to control the worst of the violence within a week. Volunteers began to clean up the streets, and ration shops reopened. Nehru asked the governors of other Indian provinces to take in tens of thousands of Punjab refugees, to get them out of the capital.

    But the riots fatally undermined any trust Pakistani leaders may have had in their Indian counterparts. Nehru’s estimate that 1,000 victims had died in the rioting was generally considered “ridiculous,” according to U.S. Ambassador Henry Grady. He figured the true toll to be at least five times higher; others said 20 times.

    Victims of religious conflict, Pakistan 1947Corpses of Muslims slaughtered and left in a river as they were migrating from India to Pakistan on Oct. 3, 1947.

    Photo by Margaret Bourke-White/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

    At the height of the violence, Jinnah was inundated with hysterical reports from the Pakistani ambassador in Delhi, Zakir Hussain. Hundreds of Muslim refugees had carpeted the grounds of his house, Hussain reported, and the embassy’s food supplies were running out. He described the Indian government as either intent upon eliminating the capital’s Muslim population or indifferent to their fate. Army troops were openly gunning down innocent Muslims. In one particularly florid cable Hussain warned, “The entire Muslim population of India is facing total extermination.”

    150604_HIST_1947-Cover

    A conviction was taking hold among Jinnah and his lieutenants that India had launched an “undeclared war” on the weaker Pakistan. The Indian leaders seemed incapable of transferring Pakistan government servants to the new capital Karachi, or of protecting them in their Delhi homes. Cargo trains full of equipment and supplies meant for Pakistan were being derailed and torched in the Punjab. At least some members of the Indian Cabinet appeared to be winking at the Sikhs’ murderous activities. “It is obvious that their orders are not carried out,” one of Hussain’s cables said of the Indian leaders, “or at least different members of the government are following conflicting policies.”

    In mid-September, Ismay spent three days in Karachi trying to convince Jinnah that the Indian government bore Pakistan nothing but goodwill. Jinnah was dismissive. He was convinced that Sikh and Hindu militia leaders had planned the violence in the Punjab as well as Delhi. Though intelligence had given some inkling of their plans over the summer, they had been allowed to walk free. With its vast resources and powerful military, Jinnah believed, India could even now have suppressed the Sikhs if only Nehru had had the necessary “will and guts.” Instead he could not even guarantee the safety of Muslims in his own capital.

    Ismay returned to Delhi profoundly depressed. In a secret codicil to his report, meant for Mountbatten’s eyes only, he warned that Jinnah had begun speaking in dangerously warlike tones. In the very first hour of their talks the Pakistani leader had struck Ismay “as a man who had given up all hope of further cooperation with the Government of India.” All that had happened in the month since independence just “went to prove that they were determined to strangle Pakistan at birth,” Jinnah had told Ismay grimly. “There is nothing for it but to fight it out.”

     

    How stupid Nehru and Mountbatton could have been , why they didn't ask Jinnah to control riots in west punjab first.Everything was started by muslims from Rawalpindi riots to Train attacks in Lahore when deadly retaliation came they started crying

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  25. Nisid Hajari’s Midnight's Furies:

    in General Discussion

    Posted

    10 minutes ago, paapiman said:

    Wasn't Direct Action Day meant for Muslims all across India to show support for a separate Muslim nation?

     

    Bhul chuk maaf

    The  blame of  starting partition violence is on muslims but sikhs are so much blamed for massacres after partition , even random search will land you on British articles newspapers blaming sikhs

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