As part of the Fact-Finding Organisation, G. D. Khosla interviewed 1,500 women. Writing shortly after the incidents, he provides many accounts of women who were subjected to rape, abduction, mutilation and had their bodies completely violated both mentally and physically. Some had to endure public humiliation, others in the presence of their own family members. Khosla states, ‘One of the kidnapped girls, relating her experience, said that she had been raped in a most inhuman manner and passed on from man to man till [sic] she completely lost all sense of feeling’. Khosla's objective was to document the violations by Muslims against Hindus and Sikhs, but these crimes did not have a religion. They were crimes against humanity, but society at the same time allowed these to happen as they were happening openly. Indeed, Ayesha Kidwai argues that rather than the perpetrators being rustic simple folk, this was a ‘systematic elite patriarchal consensus’. People with the power and means to carry out these crimes and then cover their tracks led to the systematic exploitation of innocent lives. Ganda Singh in his journal account of the partition days also notes that Shaukat Hyat Khan, who was the revenue minister in West Punjab, suspended the official of Lyallpur district due to ‘neglect of duty’ and ‘instances of molestation of young girls by volunteers’. Our national histories barely touch upon these national crimes which remain largely hidden and obscured behind the patriotic and nationalistic agenda. Collective, individual and community memories have little space in this, as it has the potential to subvert the meta-narratives weaved around a narrow nationalistic agenda.

Debating the Crimes

Gandhi's response to these crimes was - ‘We must cleanse our hearts. But even if our hearts have not been cleansed, we can still do what is clearly our duty. Self-purification means that we purge our hearts’. Indeed, following on from the violence that was unleashed after independence, there were attempts by the political leadership to quash and condemn the actions of the perpetrators. Prominent Sikh leaders such as Master Tara Singh (Akali Dal leader) and Udham Singh Nagoke (member of Punjab Legislative Assembly) issued a joint statement, appealing to both Hindus and the Sikhs to stop all retaliatory violence.