Humans - Are We ?

 Humans - Are We ?

Independent India was born on August 15, 1947. On the death bed of thousands of 

innocent citizens who were slaughtered mercilessly on both sides of the newly devised 

border. Their only fault – their Gods were different. Gandhi’s chanting _ “Iswar Allah tere 

nam” was rendered meaningless by the fanaties. The religions which preached brotherhood 

gave rise to hostility and hatred towards each other. Never did the country witness such a 

barbarism and cruelty between two ‘brothers’ – and the irony is that both killed each other in 

the name of their respective Gods. ‘Allah-ho-Akbar’ and ‘Her-Her-Mahadev’ were the slogans 

often heard when one group attacked the other. Humanity was at its lowest ebb – in fact there 

was no humanity left – God who created humans had slept. Even the goats and buffalos 

whose heads were severed by the two communities on special religious occasions, did not 

suffer pangs of such cruelty as the homosepians inflicted on each other. It was a saga of worst 

kind of atrocities committed on men, women and children of all hues, who had nothing to do 

with the Partition or for that matter even the religion which they practiced – for name sake 

most of them.

Such a spectre was witnessed in one of the erstwhile princely states in the country. 

The capital of the state was a Hindu dominated city, greately outnumbering the others; so 

also was the situation in other smaller towns and the rural areas. The drama was however, 

enacted in the capital city largely. The Maharaja was a Rajput, a gentleman unlike the 

aggressive and chivalrous people of his clan. The Prime Minister of the state subscribed to a 

particular ideology. The chief of the police was a burly sikh. The latter two along with a 

Rajput Home Minister were governing the state, the Maharaja quietly remained out of the 

picture. 

Soon after the Partition was announced, hell let loose in the city. Apprehending the 

situation the rich of the minority community had left the city a few days earlier. The middle 

class and the lower class were still there to bear the brunt. To begin with it was vandalism, 

their places of worship in the town were raged to ground overnight and shops and property 

targeted. An exodus of the minority people started, leaving everything to the looters. But even 

their life was not safe - in fact often eliminated . Some managed to escaped but most 

perished. There was no mode of transportation those days other than the rail. So those who

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could not escape from the city took shelter in the railway station which was for them a 

comparatively safe heaven for sometime until they boarded the train. On the rail platform 

nothing would happen because the police at the station was keeping a vigil. But once the train 

moved out of the station, it would be stopped on the way side; the community people would 

be spotted and disembarked and then murdered in cold blood. Very few who could manage 

avoiding the identification, sometimes with the help of sympathetic fellow passengers or 

hiding, escaped the man hunt. 

As usual for a couple of days, when run away families of the community used to take 

shelter in the railway station and feel protected there; a large family and their close 

acquaintances of about 50 people, men and women, old, young and children had huddled 

together in the ‘musafirkhana’. It was an annexe of the railway station, an old pillered building 

open on all sides, separated from the station on the opposite side with an intervening road. On 

the back of it were railway staff quarters at some distance, not too far. At the time of the trains 

arrival and departure, it was a busy place with incoming and outgoing passengers and the 

‘tongas’ ferrying the passengers all along the road. The interval between the trains made it a 

fairly desolate place. That day the train which this family was waiting to board was late by a 

couple of hours, so there was a lull at the station for quite sometime. This was the time when 

hell broke. News was trickling from the other side of the border about the atrocities committed 

on the fleeing population from that end. A strong feeling of revenge for what was happening 

across the border aroused passion, a kind of frenzy and madness which propelled the lower 

staff at the station, coolies etc who had perhaps never indulged in the violence before, with a 

couple of city miscreants, to go berserk and perform a kind of “Tandava Nytra” of which 

even Lord Shiva world be ashamed of. The repercussion which it was said to be not only 

matched, but out did them.

About a dozen men arrived with ‘lathis’ mainly, attacked mercilessly the family in the 

‘musafirkhana”. Seeing the onslaught, the ladies and children, scared to death, held each other 

tight, wailed and cried for help until a blow of lathi on their head silenced them – for ever. 

The menfolk ran here and there on the road, but life was separated from their death only by 

few minutes. The ‘lathi’ welding dehumanized humans chased them and struck blow after 

blow until they fell. The road was littered with some dead, others gasping for their last breath, 

blood drenched faces, blood oozing out from the heads, broken shoulders, torn muscles,

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lying in pools of blood spluttered all along the road. The battle fields of bye gone days 

with dead bodies scattered around would look pale before the blood drenched site of the road – a mute observer to the ghastly massacre committed over it. An old man in his late seventies 

with large bulging tummy and a shining bald head was running faster than he would have run 

in his younger days – last spurt of energy drives a man to amazing feats. A menacing burly 

young man was chasing him like a tiger closing on his shikar, the moment he got close 

enough, his lathi struck a heavy blow on the bald head, causing a fountain of blood from his 

head, drenching him red within seconds. He fell straight horizontal on the ground with his 

protruding tummy pointing towards sky as if asking the Lord above – look what is happening 

– but who listens ?

When the women were done with, a child about a your old was left out crying before 

his dead mother to whose breast he was clinging a short while ago, unaware of the drama of 

life and death enacted around him. An agent of the Lord of death spotted him – held him 

cluching both of his tinny legs, hurled him high in the air and then smashed him on the road, 

the soft head instantly got converted into a pulp – life which was yet to blossom vaporized in 

a second.. There was no one left to cry for him. He lay unattended in a pool of blood – a 

curled up tinny thing – a life shortly before. The killer looked at him disdainfully with no 

remorse whatsoever but with intense hatred and a sense of jubilation on eliminating a deadly 

enemy. He turned his head away, wiped perspiration on his forehead which trickled out 

presumably from the human in him, that he was a short while ago, and walked away 

nonchalantly hunting for yet another prey.

This drama of the evil lasted barely an hour. Everyone vanished from the site leaving 

the desolate road to cry for itself. It was a deadly silence. No chirping of the birds on the trees, 

even the leaves did not flutter, the air stopped flowing, the sun was blinking, hiding behind 

a cloud, it had lost it’s radiance, it’s glow and warmth.