Just sharing an article from Dawn.**
By Lahori
I am not yet done with Muhammad Saeed’s book, Lahore: A Memoir. It has a chapter, “In Memory of Martyrs”. It begins thus: Just across the road, in the triangular grassy plot, people started gathering for congregational prayers in the 50’s. It was a humble beginning.
On a Friday in August, 1960, I stepped across the road to offer my Juma prayer. It was an extremely sultry day: people were sweating and the trees overhead stood motionless, not a leaf stirred. Lahore’s summer was at its worst.
Some years later, I again happened to visit the mosque. It was now a marble structure – soft, cool and soothing to touch – dedicated to the martyrs of 1965 war. I felt inclined to stay a little longer after the prayers were over and the faithful had gone.
In an atmosphere like this one’s mind is liable to fall into another train of thoughts. I had returned from Pasrur after burying a relative. Near his grave I had noticed a group of identical graves situated perilously on the sandy, sunken country pathway.
It was a “martyrs enclosure”. A nephew who had witnessed the burial told me that these graves contained as much flesh and bones as the Indian cannon – balls could not carry with them.
The scattered remains were gathered from the battlefield of Chawinda, nearby. There was hardly a grave among them that contained a complete human frame. Such was Chawinda’s war – harvest for us: for the enemy, it was a disaster.
Undoubtedly the valour of these martyrs saved that town – virtually a watch-tower of Lahore alongwith Kasur – from the catastrophe that had almost overtaken it. Though perilously close to the battle-field, Lahore kept its nerve splendidly.
I remember a relative suddenly breaking off my distant call from Rawalpindi saying: “Ring you back presently. I am watching a dog-fight overhead.” Recalling the Chawinda encounter, moment by moment, a cousin said:
"Somewhat perturbed by the night-long rumblings of heavy vehicles around my town, I went upstairs early in the morning on September 8, to see what it was all about. Presently, a cloud of dust was seen rolling upon the town from the north.
It halted on the periphery of the town only to reveal the presence of a large number of Indian tanks. Having drawn up perilously close to the outskirts of the town, these monsters were tidying up for the final assault like beasts of prey. The unsuspecting town that had gone to a peaceful sleep the previous evening, woke up face to face with death.
It was a grim prospect. I ran downstairs to find people blissfully ignorant of the peril that was preparing to overtake them in a moment. I again ran upstairs. The Indians seemed to be grouping and re-forming themselves with an ease begotten of a triumphal march.
Down into the street I rushed with a sense that everything was lost. But now fortune turned. Round the corner I saw a soldier with an apparatus tied to his back. He said: “Don’t worry. We are in complete control of the situation. Just see what happens”.
Scarcely had he uttered these words than an aircraft with the sweep of a hawk appeared in the sky and let a dart fly from its underbelly. The dart tearing its way through the dusty atmosphere plunged straight into a tank with the skill of a consummate diver.
Instantaneously, the tank went up in flames. The aircraft was gone. In a moment it returned to repeat the performance. Another tank was left crippled and blazing. The whole assembly was thrown into utter disarray.
Hot on the heels of these darts, whistled something more terrible. It was a gigantic ball of fire and smoke that flew past our roof parapets to land in the midst of the tanks.
With this, the combat deepened. Our batteries were in action. Panic gripped the Indian tanks and they turned tail and were seen hurriedly disappearing beyond the horizon. Thus the valour and skill of a few saved the life and honour of many."
This incident related to me by one of my relations signified the initiation of Chawinda into the fraternity of world’s great battle-fields. Chawinda was not unfamiliar to me. I, too, had some memories of it which years later, quite surprisingly, neathy fit into its September role.
I do not remember exactly when I first saw Chawinda. It must have been before World War-I when as an infant I toddled down its dusty streets. Ever since then, I have often wandered through its tortuous, narrow lanes, bathed in its placid ponds, sat under its shady banyan trees and enjoyed the sedative drone of Persian wheels working in its fields.
From the days it passed into British hands in 1849 along with other sister Sikh principalities of Pasrur and Kalaswala, Chawinda had little to offer to the outside world, except to the surveyor of the Narowal railway line, who, in 1916, swung a loop to encompass it in order to connect it with Sialkot and through it with the world beyond.
Over the past half century it had continued to be just a sleepy little town. The few educationists and administrators which it produced bade farewell to it to flourish in better environs.
With the constant process of its cream overflowing the edges, the town remained by and large obscure and backward. At any rate it was seldom mentioned beyond its immediate confines.
In the late Twenties, it attained some fame for being the centre of Islamic activities in this region.In the wake of the notorious Saghatan-Shuddi campaign there arose a frantic scramble among various religious communities for the pagan Batwals and Sansis.
The Arya Samaj-a revivalist movement among the Hindus-was the most provocatively aggressive in “reclaiming” them to the Vedic faith. The Muslim platform, consequently, attracted people like Ataullah Shah Bukhari and Zafar Ali Khan-the unparalleled orators of the day.
In the mid-Thirties I happened to visit Chawinda again. I saw amidst a knot of social workers a venerable old man, waiting for the train at the station, now riddled with bullets.
As a zealous autograph-hunter I immediately slipped pen and paper into his hand. After a thoughtful pause he put down: And in Allah should the Believers put their trust= xiv; 12-and signed ‘Sir Rahim Bakhsh’.
Little did I realise then that Chawinda one day would have to live up to this great motto, for only a few furlongs from where these words were written a treacherous and titanic force was to clash with a people who, though less in number and lighter in arms, where determined not to yield an inch of their sacred land.
The dusty road leading to Badiana, along which had rolled down over the ages rickety village vehicles would turn into a vital artery of war and the mounds where gleeful bunches of children played down the generations far deep into moon-lit nights would come to serve as vantage points for complex military operations.
Standing alongside the mosque, where a dozen helmeted soldiers offered one of the sublimest prayers during the war, I heard, 58 years ago, Maulana Zafar Ali Khan telling the Muslims of Chawinda how the ravines and valleys of the Danube once reverberated to the clatter of Muslim cavalries.
The speaker and his enchanted audience didn’t know that Chawinda, too, was destined to become one day a battlefield as proud as those of Hungary and Austria. Chawinda, in fact, stands now among the galaxy of Yermuk, Panipat and Gallipoli.
How valiantly Lahore, Chawinda- and particularly Sialkot-stood up to the Indian aggression was evident from the telegram which our friend Abdul Akhyar sent from Karachi to Mr Majid: 'I wish I were born in Sialkot."