(5 of 9)
"Even so, he is much too shallowly accountable, and there are extenuating circumstances. He is only a portion of Islam, and today all Islam stirs. In India, moreover, his people are a minority, largely an impoverished minority, and could by no means fully trust in the majority's will; Congress Party leaders consistently ignored his Moslem League in favor of Moslems he regarded as Congress puppets; Nehru himself, Gandhi himself, must be held as sorely responsible for underestimating the force that Jinnah tapped, just as Western leaders for so long underestimated the evil wellspring that Hitler opened up."
The Orphans. A witness who had seen the Punjab border between Pakistan and India testified:
"At Wagah, a little town on the grand trunk highway between Amritsar and Lahore on the Pakistan side of the border, armed Baluchi troops, all certified Moslems from the frontier territory of Baluchistan, called a loud halt to travelers trying to go through the border. A mile down the road, at Atari, armed Dogras, who are a Punjabi Hindu tribe, searched and checked all Pakistan-bound vehicles. The mile between the two posts was no man's land. On the Pakistan side, just behind an improvised guardhouse, a bulldozer was digging graves for Moslem bodies which arrived from the India side of the frontier."
Another witness had been to the map room in New Delhi where the riots had been spotted in the neatest Pentagon tradition, and where now, still more incongruously, the tidy pins show columns of humanity passing in opposite directions to escape their tormentors. Each column has its thousands of unspeakable histories, yet on the map each exodus is a mere number.
The Prosecutor summed up the evidence behind the maps:
"Men, women and children and bullocks and groaning carts were plodding eastward and westward beneath the autumn skies and nights of the cloven Punjab; past unharvested fields, past empty villages and eviscerated villages and villages which resemble rained-out brush fires. Huge, forlorn concentrations of Sikhs and Hindus labored forward to leave the West Punjab forever. On one day last week, columns No. 8 and 9 moved across the famous Balloki headworks between Amritsar and Lahore and passed into the Indian Dominion; not far behind, foot columns No. 10, 11 and 12 lumbered steadfastly eastward. Carefully feeling its way around Amritsar, a foot convoy of perhaps 100,000 Moslems made towards Lahore and Jinnah's Promised Land, at a rate of ten miles a day.
"One madly ironic note was furnished by a group of Jainist monks who alighted from an airplane at New Delhi, their mouths and nostrils scrupulously masked. Fleeing for their own lives, they had not neglected a strange precaution of their sect. The Jains believe that the air is a living thing and that they protect the air from injury by filtering it through the masks as they breathe.
"At one village, on foot, a wretched gaggle of perhaps 100 refugees arrived. One of them, a woman, was stripped of everything save a clutched newspaper. Her companions were so stupefied by woe that it had occurred to none of them to share their clothing with her.
"From Dasuya in Hoshiarpur district came a mass of 114,000 Moslems, which branched into lesser columns and slowly diminished in the direction of Bahawalpur State.