Penderel Moon

Sir Edward Penderel Moon was a British officer of the Indian Civil Service. Wikipedia, drawing on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, gives his birth as 13 November 1905 and his death as 1987, and says he joined the service in 1929 and was posted to the Punjab. In 1941 he became Deputy Commissioner of Amritsar, the district that holds Sri Harmandir Sahib (Divide and Quit, p. 31).

Gurmit Singh names him as Secretary of the Development Board, Government of India, in 1946 and 1947. Moon's own book says that in April 1947 he moved from Delhi to Bahawalpur State as its Revenue and Public Works Minister, at the request of his friend Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani, the Nawab's Prime Minister (p. 83).

Key moments

• June 1947: after the Mountbatten Plan of 3 June, Moon writes to an Akali friend and then to another Sikh friend, proposing that the Sikhs settle with the Muslim League and take a place in Pakistan, with East Punjab as a separate unit, and consults Lord Ismay, the Viceroy's Chief of Staff. The attempt collapses within weeks: the Akali leader he was to meet in Lahore does not come, and Gurmani tells him that Jinnah will offer the Sikhs nothing (pp. 83 to 87).
• 27 June 1947: in a letter to Lord Ismay, as Gurmit Singh quotes it (vol. I, p. 98), he asks that the new East Punjab have the strongest possible Sikh complexion, without Gurgaon, Hissar, Rohtak and Karnal, and suggests telling the Sikhs that their East Punjab may join either dominion. Gurmit Singh adds that Moon also suggested planned migration; Lord Mountbatten wrote about it to Jinnah, who did not reply, and to Nehru, who declined because time was short.
• 1961: Moon publishes Divide and Quit (Chatto and Windus, London). In the same year Master Tara Singh, wanting mediators beyond the influence of Nehru's government, proposes Evan Jenkins, Moon and Major Short, and the Government refuses to consider foreigners (Gurmit Singh, vol. I, p. 147).

What he is remembered for. Two accounts of 1947 carry his name. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism's entry on the Partition of the Punjab is credited to him: it says estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to 1,000,000, with the lower figure the likeliest, and that about 3.5 million Hindus and Sikhs moved to East Punjab and about 5 million Muslims to West Punjab. Divide and Quit is his own account, from his recollections, of the massacres and migrations of 1947. In its introduction he says he was conscious of no bias for or against Sikhs, Hindus or Muslims except perhaps "a sneaking sympathy for the Sikhs", but also that in East Punjab Sikhs and Hindus were guilty of excesses against Muslims that, in his judgement, equalled and exceeded in scale and atrocity those of Muslims in West Punjab, and that Sikhs would probably repudiate his reading of their part (p. 9). Those are his judgements, not findings of a court or commission.