The Punjab government's own Court of Inquiry documented roughly twenty three deaths from military and police action, a figure drawn from official operational reports rather than a citywide casualty survey. Later accounts of the riots commonly cite a far higher toll approaching two thousand, but no version of that figure traced here names the study, archive or method behind it, and no historian has reconciled the two.
What would resolve this A systematic reconstruction working from Lahore and Punjab hospital, police and municipal burial records for February to May 1953, of the kind that would let a historian check the widely repeated higher estimate against a documented count rather than against the Court of Inquiry's own operational figures alone.
OpenModern South Asian and Pakistani history; historical demographySadia Saeed, Politics of Desecularization: Law and the Minority Question in Pakistan