There were similar attacks on trains on both sides of India and Pakistan. On both sides the gender of man became his identity. Sikhs and Hindus in India killed every train passenger who was male and who had been circumcised. In Pakistan also the invaders would check the gender of every male traveller. No circumcision, no life. There were times when every train arriving at the stations of Lahore and Amritsar was found laden with dead bodies and wounded.
The people of both the countries were paying the price of freedom, a real example of this was seen by a colonel named Ashwini Dubey in Lahore, where he was sent from India as a peacekeeping officer. A train laden with injured and dead bodies came to a halt on the platform of Lahore. There was silence in every compartment. Blood seeped out from under each door and onto the tracks, like ice from a refrigerator melting away from the extreme heat.
Armed soldiers used to go along to protect the trains, but when there was an attack by the Hindus, the Hindu soldiers could not fire at them. Similarly Muslim soldiers were not able to stop the attacks of Muslims.
Robert Trumbull, a correspondent for the New York Times, wrote- 'Even the horrific scenes haven't hurt me as much as these scenes from India. In India, the amount of rain these days is not falling, so much rain is falling. While corpses are seen at the rate of hundreds, who has counted the thousands of Indians who are wandering like cursed ghosts without eyes, or nose, limbs or sex organs?
The chance of dying from a bullet is rarely given to a lucky person. Generally men, women and children are also beaten to such an extent that their death is assured, but they are released without being completely killed. What a terrible death, how slowly they must have died because of the scorching heat and the swarming flies, can it even be imagined?
No caste was less than anyone in Rakshaseepne. When an officer of the Punjab Boundary Force entered a village after an attack by the Sikhs, he found that four Muslim infants were roasted on open fires in the same way as pigs would be roasted. Another officer saw Hindu women who were being taken to be slaughtered in jumbo and whose breasts had been cut off by Muslim fanatics.'
Not even forty-eight hours would have passed when reports of fierce communal riots started pouring in from East-Punjab to West-Punjab, and from Delhi to Karachi no one was left untouched by their fire. In both India and Pakistan, the fire of these riots started burning with smoke. The result of the division of the army was that communalism itself entered into it. The soldiers, instead of quelling the commotion, themselves joined it. The officers of the army and administration tried to increase these uproar.
Sir Francis Moody, the British Governor of Punjab, wrote a letter to the Governor General of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah on 5 September 1947, in which it was said- I am telling everyone that I am not worried about this How Sikhs are crossing the border. The great thing is to get rid of them as soon as possible.'
It is not possible for anyone to give a correct account of how many men were killed in these communal riots both in Pakistan and India, how many refugees were made, how many girls were kidnapped and auctioned.
The following was the account of such incidents in Punjab alone- 'Six lakhs were killed. 1,40,00,000 were made refugees. 100,000 young women were kidnapped, forcibly converted and auctioned off by both sides. Considering Punjab and Bengal and then the two countries together, the number of such incidents would not be less than two times.'