What Radicals Were Killing Muslims On The Train?

In August, 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was partitioned into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction. Many hundreds of thousands never made it.

Across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of sectarian violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. In Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured or dismembered.

It is not said in so many words (or if it was I missed it), but they were presumably Hindus, as the target of their attacks were Muslims. On the other hand, another possible theory is that the target of the whole attack was Ahmed Kasim and the other Muslims were killed merely so that the assassins could disguise their motives, namely that it was a politically motivated attack in retribution for Kasim's father refusing to leave the Congress Party and join the Muslim League in calling for the partition of India. If this second theory is true that perhaps the attack was actually carried out by Muslims. But, I think that, as with so many things in this series, it is left unexplained.