Abstract

On the Sikh-Moslem Frontier

The article focuses on the recent Sikh-Moslem community riots in the border areas of India and Pakistan. Murder, arson, and rape are insuring that the line running through the Punjab dividing Western Pakistan from the Indian Dominion will not be a mere boundary line but an angry scar which for years will hinder the well-being of the two regions. Lahore, Pakistan and Amritsar, India, the two chief cities on either side of the border, have the crumbling, burnt-over look of blitzed London or Rotterdam. The latest authoritative estimates give more than 50,000 dead in the last six months, most of them Moslems of eastern Punjab. The boundary commission's report, leaving minorities of some four million on each side of the border, has caused one of the greatest exchanges of population in modern history. The present round of killings was occasioned by the division of the Punjab, on which the Indian Congress insisted before it would agree to the secession of Pakistan.