All these happenings occurred at a time when in India, Mahatma Gandhi undertook his last fast to get better treatment for the Indian Muslims. That wa… - Gurbachan Singh Talib

They had perhaps a long-range plan as well, of which we got hints from the way the Muslims prepared for an attack on the Hindus and Sikhs of Delhi on the Punjab scale. That plan evidently was to create centres of Muslim disaffection and rebellion against the future Government of the Indian Dominion, and to prepare the way for occupation of the East Punjab, Delhi and whatever else might come into the bag, by Pakistan. With Kashmir thrown in, the empire of Pakistan on the western side would stretch from at least the Jumna westward. This was the ambitious Pakistan Plan. In order to make such a plan a success, it was very essential that Hindus and Sikhs must be thoroughly beaten down and driven, as far as possible, from the Muslim zone, which was designed to spread as far cast as the Jumna.

Muslim League propaganda has sought to blame the Punjab happenings of 1947 on the Sikhs and in a secondary degree on the Hindus. A distorted and fragmentary picture, drawn up with completely bare-faced lying, has been presented to the world of a Sikh “Plan” to attack and drive out Muslims from the Punjab. And for a time a part of the world swallowed the lie, and the Sikhs got an unenviable reputation. But the pendulum of opinion slowly swung round in the right direction, and the Sikh name now has been fairly cleared of the supposed crime of a “Plan” against Muslims. That the Sikh (and Hindu) attack on the Muslims in East Punjab was retaliation under terrible and unbearable provocation is now admitted to be a fact by all impartial people; though it is not known everywhere of what horrible nature, of what prolonged duration and diabolical character was the provocation offered to Sikhs by Muslims over a period of several agonizing months-beginning from December, 1946. There was a war unleashed by the Muslim population of the Punjab to cow down Sikhs, and as a means to that, to carry on among them a total campaign of murder, arson, loot and abduction of women. Sikhs passed through the experience of this war as a people for months; and not thousands, but millions of them were forced to quit their homes for safety in the process. Without a clear knowledge of this part of the story a just and balanced view of the situation cannot be formed.

The Punjab continued to be tense all through the latter part of 1946 and early 1947. The Muslim League wanted to capture power in the Province, but its intentions were now known to be so fascist, so totalitarian, and its programme and policy so completely to be the enslavement, nay elimination of minorities, that the League Party in the Punjab Assembly although the largest single party in the House, could not get even a single Hindu or Sikh M. L. A. to give it support. (56)