AFVOA Newletter August 2020

Section 5 - Memoirs CV 2 No. 02 / 2020 Page 125 of 237 Battalion led the march-past of the troops in the first ever ceremonial parade held at the free India’s capital on 22 March 1948. Even as the Madras Regiment fought to keep the capital in one piece, the Madras Sappers were out in Punjab, providing succour to the multitude of refugees moving both ways across the border. As Sialkot went up in flames with the fury of the riots, 14 and 15 Field Companies were the two main units to provide security to the thousands of people seeking refuge at the Sialkot Cantonment. The Punjab Boundary Force, entrusted with the task of maintaining law and order in Punjab, was finding itself too inadequate for the job. Denied military protection, the Sikhs of Narowal and Shakargarh burned down their villages and marched to India; 40,000-odd people plodding along with their cattle and belongings in a huge column. Heading in the opposite direction was an equally big column of Muslims bound for Pakistan. A clash which was inevitable was averted due to the sheer vigilance of 14 Field Company escorting the Sikhs. The saga of the railway sappers was equally heroic during the carnage. 101 Railway Construction Company, along with a Railway Operating Company, braved the odds of terror and sabotage to run a number of shuttle trains between India and Pakistan. scale of the task involved in rail movement was unprecedented. Nearly ten million people – 30 lakhs Hindus and Sikhs from West to East Punjab, and over 50 lakh Muslims the other way – had to be shifted in three months’ time, to meet the deadline for the completion of history’s most unnatural relocation of population. The contribution of the sapper companies to the effort was stupendous. Barely two months after independence, even as the embers of partition riots were still smouldering, India found itself engaged in a war to counter the inglorious ‘Tribal Invasion’ of Kashmir. The first contingent of Indian troops air-landed in Srinagar by dawn on 27 October; a miniscule installment – 329 men of the 1st Battalion, the Sikh Regiment – of over a lakh Indian soldiers who would fight in the snowy highlands of Kashmir for more than a year, first to stem the tide of the invasion, and later after their tanks had fetched up, to rout the raiders and drive them back up the valley they had come from in disarray. In an ironical twist of fate, 1st Madras, a veteran, battle-hardened unit of World War II Burma Campaign, which was in Delhi at that time and was initially earmarked for the task, was denied the honour, because it was commanded by a British officer. Nevertheless, joining the fray soon