BURNING AND PILLAGING BY LARGE BANDS IN INDIAN STATE OF ALWAR

Evening Star, Issue 26185, 21 August 1947, Page 7

BURNING AND PILLAGING BY LARGE BANDS IN INDIAN STATE OF ALWAR

(Rec! 9 a.m.) LONDON, August 2U. The ‘ Daily Mail’s ’ New Delhi correspondent says Dacoit bands, up to 20,000 strong, are buring and pillaging villages on the borders of Alwar State, less than 100 miles south of Delhi. State forces have so far prevented deep penetration, bnt are -reported, to have requested Indian military assistance. Until August 11 British troops were stationed there. A message from Lahore states that the first whife victims of the communal rioting which began on August 16 were two young British Army subalterns, who were shot in Amritsar a few hours hefore a raid on the Mohammedan village near Amritsar, where 24 bodies of men and women were found slashed with knives. The Associated Press correspondent at Lahore says the military authorities blame forces playing their own political game and defying orders of Mr .Jinnah and Mr Nehru for keeping alive the rioting in the Punjab.. They assert that massacres and individual killings occur daily under programmes evolved by underground leaders. The correspondent adds that -Mohammedans, have killed or driven away most of the Hindu and Sikh population of Lahore. Sikhs and Hindus similarly treated ' Amritsar’s Mohammedan population. Both citiesMook like battlegrounds with the streets choked with debris and buildings with tottering walls. , Mr Nehru; broadcasting, declared that communal troubles would not be permitted in the new Dominion of India-, “ Our State is not a communal State,”, lie said, “but. a democratic State in which every ditizen has equal rights. The Government is determined to protect these rights.” He said he had been assured by Liaquat Ali Khan that this was also the policy of the Pakistan Government.