In August 1947, The rainy season brought the long awaited showers of liberty and independence
to India. The whole country was in the mood of celebration and revelry until a train arrived
at the Old Delhi Railway Station. The train looked ghostly, and reeked of death. Welcome
to Nutty History and today we bring you the shocking tale of one of the bloodiest upheavals
in human history. The Ghost Trains of India. Just like the great US of A, India too was
a victim of the nefarious British Colonialism. The British Raj ruled and exploited India
and its people for two hundred years. But when the second world war declared the pillars
of the empire too fragile to hold on to the subcontinent, the empire pulled out one last
parting gift. Pitting Muslims and the rest of the religions against each other, they
encouraged the voice of religious extremists demanding a separate nation for Indian Muslims.
The end result … was the All Indian Muslim League. An elitist party until 1937, The Muslim
League all of a sudden proclaimed itself as the voice of all Islamic population of India
and demanded the partition of India into two states, one of them exclusive to a certain
religion. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League insisted that India’s
name should be dissolved as well and the other state must be named ‘Hindostan’ which
translates to --- Land of Hindus, making it a religion exclusive state like Pakistan.
However, the rest of India declined that suggestion and chose to be a secular state where Muslims
were welcome to stay if they desired. On the contrary, Pakistan founders, asked Hindus
and Sikhs of new born Pakistan to convert to Islam or leave the land they were living
in for generations. The riots began on March 8th, 1947 when Jinnah had the bill of partition
approved from British overseers.. States were entirely assigned to India or Pakistan. The
land of Punjab and Bengal were to be divided between the two nations. The argument for
such a hostile decision was based on these states having the same number of Muslim and
non-Muslim populations. Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims of Punjab were living peacefully,
oblivious of the approaching blood-storm. In Pakistan, the alloted side of Punjab, All
India Muslim League leaders began to instigate native Muslims to round up any and every person
of any other religion and force them to convert to Islam. For the next four months, West Punjab
was stained with murders, looting, and rapes of innocent civilians by Muslim League financed
mobsters. Shell-shocked to see their own neighbors turning on them, Hindus,
and Sikhs were forced to leave Pakistan. Thirty trains were arranged to carry refugees from
one side of the border to the other. However, as these trains were preparing to depart with
refugees stuffed like cattle, religious extremists arrived at the stations and charged at the
trains. According to Pakistani-American historian, Ayesha Jalal, these mobs were monetarily subsidized
by the Muslim League and carried out one of the most horrendous massacres in human history.
Helpless passengers were cornered in train coaches as the zealous mobs invaded and started
reaping people with swords and sickles like ripe crops. Corpses fell on top of other corpses,
creating heaps of dead bodies. Women witnessed their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers
slaughtered. Men were forced to spectate their mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters defiled
and then killed or abducted. The only passengers who survived this barbarism were those who
hid successfully or just pretended to be dead. When the trains arrived in India, a lot of
them were too scared to come out and ask for help or water. Some of these massacres were
committed by delaying the departure of trains, while some trains were obstructed before they
could cross the borders, others were looted and mowed while moving through Pakistani territories.
Most passengers didn’t just lose their home, wealth and relatives; they also lost their
lives and dignity. The first ghost train was enough to mark the celebrations of independence
only to be turned into tragedy, but it did not stop there. Soon more ghost trains full
of corpses arrived at Amritsar, Ambala, and Ferozepur. The very trains that were supposed
to unite families and friends, turned New India’s morning into mourning. Some historians
believe that the massacres on the trains were meant to provoke the other communities in
India so that Muslims who were opting to stay in India would feel unsafe and migrate to
Pakistan. The strategy worked as the ghost trains created enough religious tensions to
initiate a reaction from other communities in India. Some Muslim families migrated because
of losing relatives in the riots, while some migrated because some of their family members
participated in the riots. India before independence was a union of small princely states. When
British Imperials receded from India, these states were forced to choose to merge with
Pakistan or India. All princely states in the region of Punjab had Sikh rulers and they
were inclined to join the Indian Union except King Hari Singh of Kashmir. Hari Singh didn’t
want to join either side and desired to maintain his regality and Kashmir’s sovereignty.
While India reluctantly respected that, Pakistan responded with an invasion. Cornered, with
no army to defend his kingdom, King Hari Singh pleaded with India to help remove Pakistani
militia. India’s newly appointed prime minister Sardar Patel agreed to help. In return, Hari
Singh agreed to make Kashmir a part of India. This resulted in the first Indo-Pak war. The
Muslim League tried to bully other Punjab Princely states to join Pakistan and threatened
them with invasion if they did not cooperate to convert to Islam. Miffed by the arm-bending
tactics and sponsored communal discord, these princely states united amongst themselves
and armed their own militias. In September of 1947, these militias massacred twenty thousand
Muslim refugees in New Delhi and East Punjab before the Indian army restored peace. The
flare of religious violence in Bengal had spread to states of Assam and Bihar and soon
reached Delhi. India was on fire; flooded with riots from the Western border to the
Eastern Border. As millions of people lost their homes and loved ones, the British regime
spectated while waiting for their return to the United Kingdom. United India had a population
of 30 million on the eve of Independence. In the 1947 riots, a total of 3 million people
lost their lives, city, and country. More than 1 million people were killed. Heavy civilian
casualties followed by a war sowed the seeds of animosity and dispute between two neighboring
countries. Despite all this, those who survived yearn to go back to their ancestral homes.
But they are forbidden aliens to the country they were born in. The bond of humanity among
these Punjabis transcends beyond religions. Our own staff writer, who wrote the script
of this video would not have been able to write it if rioters would have found his grandparents
on one such ghost train. His grandparents survived the ordeal by pretending to be dead
and hiding under the corpses of their fellow refugee passengers. They travelled in a train
full of dead people while holding their breaths for 400 kilometers only to break down and
collapse on Delhi’s railway station. They still had the challenge of restarting their
lives with nothing but a lifelong trauma ahead of them. Do you think the India-Pakistan partition
was avoidable? or was it really necessary? Tell us in the comments. And thanks for watching
Nutty History.