Memoir of the Career of Thomas Edward Rogers [‎53r] (105/118)

restoration of the city to normal working. I think the Brigadier agreed with
my view but in any case he took it as the order it in fact was and promptly
brought his charges back from the racecourse.
It is interesting that up to the actual outbreak of violence no Hindu or
Sikh community leader had expressed to the Superintendent of Police or myself any
fear of an anticipated attack on them or had asked for any special measures of
protection. In some ways this was strange since knowledge was common of reported
communal killings in the Punjab. But it suggests that the minority communities
had been taken by surprise at the sudden, vicious onslaught upon them. Seventy-
two hours had passed since the celebration of Pakistan's independence on the
racecourse. If community leaders and we the authorities could have foreseen the
sudden onset of a riot which spread with such speed and ferocity in a city spared
the goad of vicious mass communal killings and counter-killings as in the tragic
transborder clashes of uprooted families and whole communities in the Punjab,
some countermeasures might possibly have been taken, though without hindsight it
is not easy to see what these might have been. One could speculate only rather
fruitlessly about steps that might have been difficult to justify, and even to
devise, without knowledge of how events would take their course.
I think that Quetta's sudden outburst of violence in anxious but relatively
peaceful local conditions is to be attributed to a slow process of combustion
suddenly speeded up. There were old Muslim resentments, suppressed or contained,
against Hindus for their very difference and their many real or supposed advantages
including their money power. Independence coming suddenly after long subjection
was an even headier draught for Muslims than for Hindus because they saw themselves
as escaping a double yoke and harking back to their old superiority under the
Mughals. News of fellow Muslims being cut down by Hindus and Sikhs in the Punjab
and elsewhere seemed a rude denial of their new status and roused strong desires to