Pakistan came into being at the stroke of midnight on 14th August , 1947 the dream of the Muslims of India came true . The British Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act on July 18, 1947. The Act created two dominions, Indian Union and Pakistan. It also provided for the complete end of British control over Indian affairs from August 15, 1947.
The Muslims of the Sub-continent had finally achieved their goal to have an independent state for themselves, but only after a long and relentless struggle We owe it to the people who devoted their lives for Pakistan’s freedom movement and made sacrifices to attain Pakistan’s independence. The Two Nation Theory was the ideology that became the basis for Pakistan’s creation , it was the spark that created Pakistan .
As independence was announced, migration started at an amazing scale .Muslims started arriving in packed trains at Lahore railway station while more migrants landed at Karachi port arriving on ships. The most affected area was the Punjab province since it was divided into two halves. Very soon pandemonium resulted due to the violence of Hindu nationalists, they started looting the trains bound for Lahore from Amritsar robbing the poor migrants of their life savings and belongings. Most were leaving behind their properties, lands and businesses for the sake of the promised land . There were people that lost their entire families to these atrocities and they still kept heading for Pakistan. I salute them for their passion and their love for this country.
On a slightly personal note , my grandparents also decided to leave India , they lived in Karnal , East Punjab . They boarded one of these deadly trains bound for Lahore with their kids and belongings. My father was a little boy and wandered off when the train stopped at Amritsar . He simply got lost at the station and my Dadi noticed he was missing as soon as the train left Amritsar , she wailed and cried and asked for the train to stop but the safety of all the passengers was at stake . My father wandered around for some hours , a Hindu friend of my grandfather found him and took him home , hid him for a few days and then sent him off to Lahore with a Muslim family he knew . There are good people too even amongst evil.
When the train arrived in Lahore he only knew his fathers name and was sent to the refugee camps. Finally he was reunited with his parents and siblings who thought he must be dead, killed by the Hindu mobs . My grandmother almost fainted when she set eyes on him. Today my father lives in England where he has worked as a doctor in the NHS for 40 years plus. I loved this story from his childhood and shared it with you all today so people know about the risks of migration to a new country .
The journey from India to Pakistan was so dangerous that only love for the new country kept bringing in more and more Muslims. It required guts to start a new life from scratch with ones family .
I guess my grandfather believed in Pakistan, this is what made him take the risk like so many others .
Pakistan never came easily nor is it to be taken lightly , we owe our freedom to the millions that persevered to attain a state where they could practise Islam freely . Pakistan is the only state created in the name of Islam and this gives this state religious significance too. Rape was used as a weapon of war against women on these trains , some were brutally mutilated and entire trains started arriving in Pakistan full of dead people and cut- up body parts , fetuses had been cut out of stomachs of pregnant women even.
Sharing this personal account from Nawaz Shahzad
“50000 young Muslim girls taken away forcibly by armed Sikh & Hindu men in East Punjab in 1947?. These girls were brutally raped. Most were murdered and dumped in Mosques wells. Thousands were whisked to Calcutta and even to Malaysia and never heard of them again. I have no stomach to give details. Just one incident is enough and that is of New Delhi, the capital of Free India.’ Frightened Muslims were packed at the New Delhi railway station to leave India for Pakistan were attacked by Hindu mobs (on 6th September 1947) and 450 were killed. But the worst was still to come. The following day, more arson, burning alive, looting, murders and by evening 6000 Muslims fled from their homes in the middle-class Lodhi Colony…. and fled to Pak Embassy compound.’ Quoted from Book: Indian Summer by Alex Von Tunzelmann. I will not tell you what these bastards did to a train full of fleeing Muslims which arrived from Amritsar to Lahore on 17th August 1947. Out of 2500 only two were found alive ( pregnant women bellies were slit open and unborn babies were cut ) My younger brother Arshad and I saw that fateful train.. What happened in villages in East Punjab, that is a different horrible story which never got much coverage in the media. ”
More trains arrived that were set on fire, Hindu nationalists were determined to make Muslims pay with their blood for Pakistan .
In Jammu, ethnic cleansing was carried out and 1 million Kashmiri Muslim refugees were uprooted and arrived in Gujranwala and Sialkot , an estimated 2,500,00-300,000 were massacred in the Jammu region alone in August-October 1947. Violence was perpetrated the Dogra Hindu state .
The 1951 Census of Pakistan identified the number of displaced persons in Pakistan at 7,226,600.
Treason . Treason is not only those people that are paid by foreign agencies to work against Pakistan . Traitors are also those soft and friendly people who earn from this very land and get their recognition from here YET question the very foundations of Pakistan …be it Jinnah , Pakistan Resolution ,Pakistan Constitution or Pakistan Army . Today Pakistanis need to learn from their history and live up to the ideals that Pakistan was created for , do take a minute to remember those men , women , children and unborn babies who lost their lives in the creation of Pakistan. Pakistan is a passion and it is a symbol of human struggle and sacrifice .
By: Sabena Siddiqi
Tags: article, Burning Train, History page, India, Pakistan
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very nice work dear Sabena
Dear Sabena it is not a easy Job in today s age to write the truth with your own pen ? God Bless you