Veteran recalls Partition horrors, travelling with bodies; finding money on corpses

New Delhi: He was six years old when his family moved from Peshawar to India after Partition in 1947. They travelled for almost three days in a train with dead bodies, witnessing bloodshed and massacre across the new border that was created between India and the new-formed Pakistan. Now in 2023, Peshawari Lal Bhatia, who retired from the Indian army as a colonel and lives in Noida, recalls the horrors of the Partition and how he became a refugee seven decades ago in his own country.

Bhatia was felicitated during the 'Vibhajan Vibhishika Smriti Diwas' by Uttar Pradesh PWD minister Brijesh Singh and Noida MLA Pankaj Singh on the eve of the 77th Independence Day here. "I was five or six years old when I was put in a school there (Peshawar) with Urdu as the medium of teaching. I could not learn full Urdu because of what happened later. I can only read Urdu, not write it," he says, adding he still remembers many things but some memories have faded. He said when they started from Peshawar, he was with his mother, siblings and some other relatives and carried whatever little luggage they could at the time.

"The trains in those days had a box-type design with benches all around it in the inside. We sat on the floor of the train. It took us between two-and-a-half to three days to reach from Peshawar to Amritsar," he said. The trains in those days were very slow and Bhatia said he does not remember what the family ate or drank during the long journey, but he recalls being offered food at a station.

"There were two stations – Miyawali, which is a defence base of Pakistan, and Sialkot, where we were provided with hot food. Some local people had also turned up at the railway stations to see us, which included some Sardars who got us langar to feed," Bhatia said. He has not forgotten how the train was sprayed with bullets when they were on board the train. "At times people would get hit by those bullets. Some of the bodies were thrown out of the train. I don't know how I lost all fear. En dead bodies did not frighten me,” he said. When the train reached Amritsar the passengers were allowed to stay for around eight hours at the station where the Jana Sangha had set up relief camps. he said. "I remember we were given meals and also some biscuits which are long and have sugar coated on it.

We still get those biscuits. We were also given some clothes by them. After the short halt in Amritsar, the train resumed journey and dropped us at Nabha, near Patiala, where all passengers alighted," the Army veteran recalled. He said during Partition, all displaced people who came to this side of the border settled wherever the train would stop as its final destination. Some settled in Punjab, some trains went to Bombay (now Mumbai), some to Calcutta (now Kolkata) and some to Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. Many also reached and settled in South India