Peggy Noonan explains that elites should listen to What Nobodies Know. The leaders partitioning India didn’t:
On Aug. 15, 1947, independence day, in the Punjab, in the city of Amritsar, as local authorities performed the jolly rituals of the transfer of power, a group of local Sikhs went on a rampage in a Muslim neighborhood, killing its male inhabitants. That night, Amritsar’s railroad station became a refugee camp for thousands of Hindus who’d fled what was now Pakistan’s part of the Punjab. As trains arrived, huge crowds scanned the cars for relatives and friends, for children left behind in the flight. Suddenly a train came in but there seemed no one aboard, which was odd. The stationmaster, Chani Singh, waved the train to a halt. The teeming crowd on the platform froze into “an eerie silence.”
From Freedom at Midnight:
Singh stared down the line of eight carriages. All the windows of the compartments were wide open but there was not a single human being standing at any of them. . . . [He] strode to the first carriage, snatched open the door and stepped inside. In one horrible instant he understood why no one was getting off the Ten Down Express in Amritsar that night. It was a trainful of corpses. The floor of the compartment before him was a tangled jumble of human bodies, throats cut, skulls smashed, bowels eviscerated. Arms, legs, trunks of bodies were strewn along the corridors of compartments.
Her conclusion:
The leaders of the day did not know that terrible violence was coming because of what I think is a classic and structural problem of leadership: It distances. Each of these men was to varying degrees detached from facts on the ground. They were by virtue of their position and accomplishments an elite. They no longer knew what was beating within the hearts of those who lived quite literally on the ground. Nehru, Mountbatten, Jinnah — they well knew that Muslims feared living under the rule of the Hindus, that Hindus feared living under Muslims, that Sikhs feared both. But the leaders did not know the fear that was felt was so deep, so constitutional, so passionate. They did not know it would find its expression in a savagery so wild and widespread.