Brigadier Saleem Zia was working at the Islamia College on Lahore’s Railway Road as a coordinator at the time of partition. He had established a telephone communication system at the college to enable those affected in a possible riot to seek help.
He recalls facing several cases of attempted riots within the college premises during those days.
Armed men, mostly from Sikh families in the neighbourhood, would often devise methods to break into the college but would be chased out by Brigadier Zia. He says he would chase them out with using just a weapon he had made out of a two-to-three foot long bamboo stick with a large nut attached to its head.
Other colleges in the city had also prepared plans to deal with riot situations. Brigadier Zia says that residents in the vicinity of Northern Dharam College would gather stones and rocks and climb up the rooftop. This would give them an aerial view of the premises.
Brigadier Zia says he had earlier been residing in his village. Most Hindus and Sikhs had left the village already, he says. When he came to Lahore, he was sent to take charge of a team of 20 students at Wagha Border. The students were taught first aid including administration of injectable medicines to injured refugees arriving in trains from across the border. “The refugees [arriving at Wagha] were in misery, most of them thought they were still in India, and would writhe and scream at the sight of the needle fearing that it was poison being fed to them by Indians,” he recalls.
Brigadier Zia remembers an incident about the arrival of a special train from Delhi to Lahore. He says he was convinced that his brother, Ikram, was on that train so he went to the station to receive him. When the train arrived and his brother appeared, he was covered in gunshot wounds and had his arm in a sling. Except for his four-year-old son Tanvir, Ikram had lost all other members of his family to the slaughter on the train. “Ikram carried the scars and marks of the attack by Sikhs until the day he died,” he says. Army trucks were being used to escort the wounded to Mayo Hospital during those days. Brigadier Zia says that with the influx of injured refugees, the hospital soon ran out of space. Many of the injured had to be treated in the lawns of the compound, he says.
Published in Daily Times, July 22nd , 2017.
