Legacy of Partition 1947-2009

“…At the Refugee Centres, I spoke with some hundreds of the refugees, and in hospitals I met Hindu, Sikh and Muslim patients who had been victims of the riots and were still undergoing treatment. I heard harrowing descriptions of atrocities that had been committed and of damage to property. In the areas visited, the larger proportion of the victims were Hindus and Sikhs, but Muslims and Muslim property had also suffered in the mad disturbances…“

“... yesterday they were landlords, they had their own big houses, and today they were in a tent and sometimes they had to share with other people they don't know…Yesterday he was a very wealthy person and today he had to have a ration card and he had a limited supply for himself or his family.” On conditions in the Ambala Refugee Camp organized by the Indian Government,July–September 1947 Mr. Kartar Singh Sandhu MBE

Most of the Sikh and Hindu refugees were farmers. Together they had abandoned 2.7 million hectares of land in Western Punjab but across the border in India where they now had to make a living only 1.9 million hectares had been left behind by Muslim farmers who had fled the opposite way.

“We were allotted land which Muslims left … they had fled before we came. On land, there was some trouble.  The people who used to live there …the farmers and the agricultural people, they were jealous of our land...  They owned little holdings, but our share was very, very [much] bigger than those people so some of them made trouble to get that land from us.” Mrs Gurdev Kaur Saini

“Can anyone answer this, did they plan this torture in Punjab? Or division of Punjab, killing innocent people, making them homeless beggars, destroying their identity? My father used to say when he was in England ‘what was the point of all this? I have left Punjab in Pakistan, I have left Punjab in India, and now in England, amongst the British, happy and working in a factory, making my living and what was the point of all this?’“ Mrs. Harbins Kaur Thiaray

“[My grandfather] owned about 90 acres of land [in what became Pakistan]. We were quite a well off family in the village … [ when we moved] we never regained … The lost ground was never regained … [For my grandfather] Partition was devastating…  in his lifetime he had to come back as a settler, after sixty or seventy years, with nothing.” Councillor Culdipp S. Bhatti