3 days ago
Partition, 79 years: ‘I have seen India broken — & remade'
The stench hit him first. In August 1947, twenty-two-year-old Wazir Singh Choudhary stood on the Amritsar platform, clutching a letter summoning him for an Indian Military Academy interview in Delhi. The station master had warned him there were no safe trains. The only one scheduled to leave was carrying the corpses of Muslim refugees massacred the night before, bound for Beas to be consigned to the river.
It was a choice between danger and despair. He climbed aboard. It seemed like eternity as the train rattled through the scorched Punjab countryside, past villages in flames, the silence broken only by the creak of the wheels and the muffled sobs of the living who travelled alongside the dead. At Beas, the bodies were unloaded, and Choudhary and a friend found a way onwards to Delhi. With no place to stay, he spent the night in an abandoned first-class railway compartment before walking into the Cantonment the next morning.
That grim journey was just one of many turning points in a life shaped by Partition, war, and service.
Born on April 20, 1925 (his military records made him two years younger), in Gujranwala, undivided Punjab, Choudhary had been studying engineering in Delhi when riots swept through Punjab. He returned home to find a changed Gujranwala — fear in the streets, mistrust between neighbours, and whispers of worse to come. His family moved to Arbang, a village five kilometres away, to his brother-in-law's home.
Sensing the storm, the villagers armed themselves, set up pickets, and organised defences under the guidance of ex-servicemen and the local police. By early August, villages were falling to marauding mobs, their homes reduced to ash. From Arbang's outskirts, they could see the orange glow of burning houses.
On the night of August 14, 1947, as India awoke to freedom, Arbang braced for an attack. Fate intervened when a military jeep from the Sikh Regiment, out on routine reconnaissance, passed through. They had not been sent for rescue, but the desperate pleas of the villagers moved them to act. Residents were ferried to a refugee camp in Gujranwala, saving them from certain slaughter.
From there, the Choudhary family was moved to Amritsar, housed in homes left empty by Muslims fleeing to Pakistan. It was a bitter reminder of the human cost of the subcontinent's division. Violence still raged. 'Religious hatred was tearing Punjab apart,' Brig Choudhary remembers. 'It was a mass exodus. Every day, more people left. More homes were burned.'
His determination to join the Army did not waver. The IMA letter had arrived amid the chaos, and he was willing to risk everything to reach Delhi. That resolve would define his career. Selected for the technical graduate course, he passed out of IMA in December 1949 and was commissioned into the Corps of Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (EME).
