India After Gandhi - pg. 31

The clinical even-handedness of the violence was described by the Punjab correspondent of the respected Madras-based weekly, Swatantra. He wrote of seeing

an empty refugee special steaming into Ferozepur Station late one afternoon. The driver was incoherent with terror, the guard was lying dead in his van, and the stoker was missing. I walked down the platform -- all but two bogies [carriages] were bespattered with blood inside and out; three dead bodies lay in pools of bloood in a third class carriage. An armed Muslim mob had stopped the train between Lahore and Ferozepur and done this neat job of butchery in broad daylight.

There is another sight I am not likely to easily forget. A five-mile long caravan of Muslim refugees crawling at a snail's pace into Pakistan over the Sutlej Bridge. Bulock-carts piled high with pitiful chattels, cattle being driven alongside. Women with babies in their arms and wwretched little tin-trunks on their heads. Twenty thoussand men, women and children trekking into the promised land -- not because it is the promised land, but because bands of Hindus and Sikhs in Faridkot Staate and the interior of Ferozepur district had hacked hundreds of Muslims to death and maade life impossible for the rest.