Where are the Questioning Minds?

#345 by Urstruly on February 12, 2006 10:56am PT

while you`re busy pounding away at the keyboard, foreign governments are bombing paki civilians on paki soil..

Pakistanis `killed in US strike`

Two Pakistani nomad women have been killed after a rocket fired across the border from Afghanistan landed on their tent, Pakistani officials say.

Four children were hurt in the attack late on Saturday in North Waziristan.

Locals say US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan fired four rockets into Pakistan`s tribal area after coming under fire from unknown attackers.

A US spokesman confirmed coalition forces had returned fire into Pakistan, but was not aware of casualties.

Post `attacked`

The incident is the third this year in which civilians have been killed inside Pakistani territory in apparent missile strikes by US-led forces who are hunting al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects in the mountainous border area.

Re: # 343

Dost Sahib:

There is a book on riots during partition that was published in 1949. The book is called ``Stern Reckoning``. The british had asked G.D. Khosla, the Chief Justice of Punjab to investigate the riots during partition. I have this book in my library and could not stop reading it, once I started. As I recall reading that before March 1946, there used to be minor and sporadic riots in Lahore and elsewhere which used to die down. The real incidence started in March 1946, after Master Tara Singh had isssued an ultimatum that the Sikhs had organized jathas to take up arms. According to Stern Reckoning, the Sikhs were not prepared with their jathas at that time. This statement started the rioting in the West Punjab, that never stopped. Stern Reckoning blames master Tara Singh to issue the ultimatum with no preparation.

Khosla and his team went to each village and recorded the accounts and determined the population from previous census, and from their own investigation how many had been killed, and how many moved. The british use Khosla report as the official numbers, I believe. Some of the descriptions written in 1949 are clearly out of Sheindlers List kind of movie.

Anil

Dost mitter

I don`t think that this characterization of me and my work will deter me from doing it. Truth be told. What is done is done in the past. If we did not have the Kashmir issue, which is an unfinished business from the Partition and to some extent the naked aggression by India during 1971, we both could join hand and come to terms with the past. But in the current situation I understand the anguish of you and your people.

Meanwhile, there is concerted and directed effort in Pakistani establishment, especially Military and their Kaffir (secular) cohorts to re-write the history so that Pakistan fits into the grand design of American empire. WE cannot just sit idly by and let them get away with this. We have to be on our heels.

Urstruly:

The issue of timeline was brought up by you, not me. My point was simple and it was that the kind of demonisation of the Hindus by the Pakistani Ministry of Education, even if true, was just as bad if not worse than the cartoon by a German student that you had produced in your post.

And before the Umpire tahmed intervenes, let me add that the same thing could be said about the demonisation of Muslims by Modi and his friends in India.

Mantolives:

No, ``Freedom at Midnight`` was not the only source. The Rawalpindi riots of March 1947 are fairly well established.

If anyone is seriously interested in looking at the human, especially Women`s side of that real holocaust, the best research work that I have seen so far is by Urvashi Butalia`s ``The Other Side of Silence``. Butalia, a feminist and a trained researcher, wrote this book after 70 interviews with mostly women victims of those events - both Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. She even visited Pakistan to do her research and had Muslims and Pakistani collaborators in that project. As Nasah says,Isis hammaam mein sab nange thay. This is not to deny that there were good people on both sides who sometimes risked their own lives to protect their friends and neighbours.

Dost

At this stage, the discussion that who started it would be a chicken-egg discussion since timelines and motives are not clear. One would argue that the first shots were fired during the Direct Action Day in Calcutta, as you mentioned; these riots spread to bihar and then to Punjab. As an end result of my research we may be able to pin point the event precisely what triggered it all. But as I said, my objective is to establish the evidence that the violence in East Punjab was concerted, and uni-directional with the intended objective to keep Gordaspur and hence Kashmir from Pakistan. One cannot ignore the role of two princely punjabi states in all the debacle, even when it was absolutely without any doubt that their fate had been sealed as their union with India was confirmed. Then what motivated them to cause the Tsunami that resulted in one of the greatest human tragedies of all.

In the end the result of my research might conclusively prove that more Hindus/sikhs died at the hands of Muslims, but that would be irrelevant.

Nasah ...

That indeed might have been the case... but the government that brought it up first and called a spade a spade... was the government of Pakistan ... Sir Zafrullah Khan lodged a complaint internationally with the UN... calling for an intervention since the Governor General of India Lord Mountbatten had refused to deploy the boundary commission force...

Meanwhile V P Menon ... Angraizon ka pithu as ever... was declaring that there were no communal massacres .. merely disturbances.

Dear D-M...

It saddens me greatly that you choose to quote a book that is neither historical nor considered balanced. Dominique-Lapierre`s book ``Freedom at Midnight``, which is more of a novel than a book of history, is entirely based on Mountbatten`s interviews and no other sources... if that is your source then I am afraid I will have to side with Urstruly. Mountbatten, as Kuldip Nayyar and others exposed, was the real culprit behind why the boundary commission force was never brought into force...

On the Pakistani side the two people in charge of the refugee issues were Sir Francis Mudie and Mian Iftikharuddin, the latter being a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru... their efforts are on the record and you can verify the facts yourself. It must be recalled that they took over after 14th August and not before it....

While it is wrong to suggest that Muslims of Pakistan provided all the facilities, the government of Pakistan certainly did make a gigantic effort to help Hindus and Sikhs.

atrocities were committed on both sides of the divide EQUALLY -- in West Punjab Sikhs families were herded in houses door locked and burnt alive -- the stench of burning human flesh stayed for months in the area -- even the Muslims could not stay in theri homes becasue of the smell -- where did I hear this -- from my relatives who migrated to Pakistan....

so the claims to piety in those sordid days of subcontinent barbarism are self-delusional bullshit -- for the Muslims, for the Hindus or for the Sikhs..

in that hammam of mass murder and mayhem everybody got bloody naked...

who started it -- Mujeeburrahman -- Mujeeburrahman the `Father` of Bengladesh -- in Khulna district.....from there the FIRE took the Grand Trunk Road....

Urstruly:

I think that you are wasting your time in proving something that I already said was true, namely, that there were a lot of atrocities in East Panjab. The falsehood in your Ministry of Education`s statement was that ``The Muslims of Pakistan provided all facilities to the Hindus and the Sikhs who left for India.`` This is a blatant lie and I am sure you have read several personal accounts of the horrors on the other side. And I had already said that the riots started in March in Rawalpindi in March and not in August in Patiala-Kapurthala; you could check that in Dominique-Lappierr`s famous ``Freedom at Midnight``.

#336 by Urstruly


[Over the period at Chowk I have been called a lot of things whenever I have challenged people`s pre-concieved notions. It does not make any difference to me.]


You have challenged nothing.

You have just selectively cut and pasted a line from a 74-page article that`s freely available on the web while claiming that you have been doing heavy-duty research.


[I will sure answer your two questions (though I have answered them already in my previous posts) if...]


No ifs and buts.

You have NOT shown where you got the percentage you quoted, as well as how you found out that ``the violence was almost one-sided``.


No trying to wriggle out of this one.

Everybody`s watching.

( By the way, they KNOW already :) )

Ramnujan


Over the period at Chowk I have been called a lot of things whenever I have challenged people`s pre-concieved notions. It does not make any difference to me.

I will sure answer your two questions (though I have answered them already in my previous posts) if you either prove from the web that the statement in question is that of Auchinleck`s or it is not and Ch. Mohammad Ali made it up. Logically, if you are unable to prove that then it would mean that I did not just cut and paste from web.

Re: 334 by Urstruly


I`m not sure which line in my post indicated to you that I am frothing at the mouth, but as you will find out gradually, ad-hominems against me would only take you so far.

I am nothing if not persistent when I see fraud, and unlike some other people on Chowk, am not likely to go away before I expose it.


Here is your post #317:


[Personally, I consider myself a pathological skeptic and I do not believe anything that is hurled towards me until and unless I verify it through several sources. For quite sometime I have been trying to write an essay, in a readable and concise fashion, to find out about the pattern of carnage during the Partition. The core reason for this research is to verify my theory that Congress and Sikhs deliberately started the genocide of Muslims in Gordaspur to keep Kashmir and a bigger chunk of Punjab to themselves. I am also of the opinion that Congress considered Sikhs as unreliable allies and saw the communication between Master Tara Singh and Jinnah with skepticism. So the planned carnage was started with the idea to thwart the potential of any Sikh-Muslim alliance at that time or even later.

So in order to verify my theory I assumed that Western newspapares of that time, especially, from US, Canada, Austrailia, and Newzealand or from any other English speaking part of the world would be realiable sources because they did not have any stake in the carnage during partition and they would just describe the events just as they would have unfolded. So I approaced several respectable libraries in US and Canada and requested the Microfiche records of the newspapers with in the timeframe of January 1, 1947 and Dec. 1951 when the migration between the countries stopped.

As I said my focus was not only to chronicle the carnage but also find out their geographic progression as well. At present this project has proved to be overwhelming when I can only dedicate one saturday in a month. But my findings so far have proved that the violence during Partition was almost one sided and about 85-90% of it occured in the areas that are now in India. ]



Sounds like a non-biased scholarly guy doing some honest research seeking out the truth, eh?

As it turns out, you have been lying about all your scholarly work, and have been cutting and pasting selected pieces from an article freely available on the web.


ANYBODY reading the full article would find out that the author`s perspective about this issue is a far cry from what you say.

You have no self respect. Otherwise you would not have tried to pose as something you are not - that is - someone researching earnestly about a subject.


Show us how you arrived at the following two scholarly conclusions:


1) ``my findings so far have proved that the violence during Partition was almost one sided``

2) ``about 85-90% of it occured in the areas that are now in India.``



Otherwise I`ll be forced to call you a fraud.

Re: # 333

I think you should calm down and think what you are saying. In the article, Ishtiaq Ahmad the writer is quoting ``He (Ch. Mohammad Ali) quotes another British Official: ``On August 15 the day of liberation was strangely celebrated in the Punjab. During the afternoon a sikh mob paraded a number of Muslim women naked through the streets of Amritsar, raped them and then hacked some of them to pieces with kirpans and burned the others alive``

Now the article does not elaborate on who that British Official was, who made that statement, the references at the end of the article do not show the name of that official. Could it be that Ch. Mohammad Ali made it up? My post explains that Ch. Mohammad Ali was actually quoting Field Marshal Auchinlek who was the C-in-C of the British Indian Army at the time of partition. And I also told you which page of Auchinlek`s memoir would you find that statement.

Now if you look at the case calmly you see that Auchinlek`s statement is being verified by two extra sources - Ahmad Ishtiaq and Ch. Mohammad Ali. Well of course you can always say that all three of them lying - and that is my research is about i.e. to establish truth that cannot be denied anyway.

Re: #331 by Urstruly

It`s good that you retracted your statement.

So now that we are on square one, I would like to find out where you got the 85-90% figure.

I don`t know what ``research`` you did, but a brief amount of googling revealed the FULL ARTICLE from which you have selectively quoted that inflammatory section:


Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947:
Some First Person Accounts
by Ishtiaq Ahmed (June 2004)


The line you quoted was at the bottom of Page 7 of 74 pages.


It is typical of fanatical ``believers`` to selectively take what they want, and discard the rest. This is the principal method employed by Chowk luminaries like Mantolives.

If this was the approach in any court, every serial killer would be acquitted.


I would suggest that you be less ``pathological`` and more circumspect and measured in your approach. But then that won`t go very well with your faith, would it?

At least read the whole article.

Re: # 331

I think I made it very clear that my research is underway and no where it is complete, however, so far my findings have proven that .......


may be I shouldn`t have used the word ``proven``, so let me retract my statement and say that ``so far my findings have painted a picture that shows that the violence during Partition was almost one sided and about 85-90% of it occured in the areas that are now in India.``

In my opinion, the principalities of Patiala and Kapoorthalla patronized the sikh & hindu thugs in the hopes that, in the coming days when the fate of principalities would be decided, these thugs would help them bargain a better position with respect to the central government. I think Nehru realized that and acted in haste to take over principalities and abolish large land holdings, thus sowing the seeds for sikh/punjabi discontent and for what lead up to the tragedy of 1984 during operation blue star. Master Tara singh was hoping for a confederation of Punjab with India. In case of Pakistan Jinnah actually promised him a relative autonomy but Master chose his sides at the eleventh hour.