Punjab

by Rajmohan Gandhi

Born in Qadian in the Bari doab, eleven miles northeast of Batala, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder, in 1889, of the Ahmadiyya sect, was a talented proselytizer on Islam’s behalf. A forebear of his had settled in Qadian in the sixteenth century. In 1834, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s father apparently submitted to Ranjit Singh, who confirmed the family’s title to Qadian and five adjoining villages. Aimed at proving Islam’s superiority over Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad’s writings and utterances won him fame across Punjab during the 1870s and 1880s. He also attracted a wide following in the province, aided no doubt by the fact that he was an authentic Bari doab Punjabi. However, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad invited hostility when he claimed in 1890 that that he was the messiah of whom the Prophet had spoken. An admired champion of Islam was transformed into the leader of a heterodox if not heretical sect.

Others participating in this religio-political debate included Christian missionaries and representatives of the Arya Samaj and the Singh Sabha. Because many new journals had emerged—in English, Urdu and Punjabi—the debate was re-enacted in homes and arenas across Punjab. While Muslim, Arya Samajist, Sikh or Christian debaters strove to establish that theirs was the soundest faith on offer, the Raj took comfort from the fact that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were not thinking of a common platform.

Especially in Bengal, Indians had long asked for such a bill. Unlike in Punjab, districts in the Bengal Presidency contained numerous Europeans who worked in non-governmental jobs in plantations of tea and indigo. Until the Ilbert bill appeared, these Europeans stood above the laws that an Indian magistrate could enforce.

Ripon’s hands were forced and the Ilbert Bill was modified beyond recognition. But one of Ripon’s friends in India, a Scotsman called Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912), who had resigned in 1879 from the Indian Civil Service, soon responded with initiatives that led to the formation, in 1885, of the Indian National Congress.

Hoping to bring India’s varied elements—religious, linguistic and provincial—to a single platform, and resolving to convene annually in different parts of India, the INC met in Calcutta in 1886 and in Madras the following year. In 1893, the body gathered in Lahore, under the presidentship of the Parsi luminary from Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji.

Suspicious of the INC, Sayyid Ahmed opposed its pleas for adding elected members to the Raj’s local or provincial councils and for wider openings for Indians in the civil service. Arguing that the better-educated Hindus would monopolize the service and that any elections would be won by lower ranks among Muslims and Hindus, he asked India’s Muslims to stay clear of the INC. It was better for them to ally with the English.

It is instructive if also ironic to recognize that the Ahmadiyya question faced today by the subcontinent’s Muslims owes its origin to the end-nineteenth-century debates, where for years Mirza Ghulam Ahmad appeared to be the stoutest debater for Islam.

Purity was achieved at unity’s expense. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all pointed to Christian proselytization as the threat. Christianity would not expand as feared, but neither would the unity of Muslims, or Hindus, or Sikhs.

At the end of the nineteenth century, a Sikh intellectual, Bhai Kahn Singh produced a text, Ham Hindu Nahin (Not Hindus We), described later as ‘a classic exposition of a distinct Sikh identity’.49 The thesis was an offspring of the Sikh-Arya debate. As a contemporary historian puts it, ‘[M]ore than the threat of Islam and Christianity, the Singh reformers felt a threat from the Arya Samaj.’50 This was not always the case. Until 1888, when Arya polemic crossed a line by seeming to target the Sikh Gurus, several eminent Sikhs were sympathetic to Swami Dayanand’s message, notwithstanding Satyarth Prakash’s criticisms of Sikhism. On the other hand, a few Sikhs with prestigious connections seemed willing, at the start of the twentieth century, to stand with traditional Hinduism. Worshipping idols, they held, was consistent with Sikh tradition,51 but their position was repudiated by the Singh Sabha.

British officers running into different Punjabi dialects in different parts of Punjab, and, in the frontier districts, into another language altogether (Pashto), longed for a pan-Indian language. To them Urdu seemed the answer. There was also an inclination, bred by unfamiliarity, to dub Punjabi and Pashto ‘barbarous’ in comparison with Urdu.

If, however, script was a problem, why not a Punjabi in Roman letters? The question was asked by the DC of Shahpur district, a man called J. Wilson. With great rationality and equal impracticality, Wilson claimed (in 1894) that primary education and the running of government could both be conducted in Romanized Punjabi.

As for Punjabi, Miss M. Rose Greenfield, a missionary teacher in Ludhiana, had pointed out in 1882 that many Punjabi girls, Muslim and Hindu, were in fact learning Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script in schools, or in the Persian or Nagari scripts in their homes. Let primary village schools, she proposed, teach Punjabi in Gurmukhi to all children, irrespective of gender or religion. Later they could switch to Urdu or Hindi.56 The perspective of people in Lahore, Rawalpindi and Multan differed from that of the Ludhiana teacher. Even so, ‘for the most part’, Punjabi women who could write at this time, including Muslims, evidently ‘wrote Punjabi in the Gurmukhi character’. As a contemporary historian points out, ‘[W]omen’s education in the Punjab owed a great deal to the Gurmukhi script.’57 Apparently the process had begun in Ranjit Singh’s time.

A study found that local officers were often weak, or slow to react to an imminent clash, but the Raj as a whole, while ‘aware of… the utility of communal differences… did not create or deliberately fan or excite religious animosities or prejudices’. Generally taking ‘a non-partisan attitude’, the administration seemed ‘mainly concerned with the maintenance of peace and order’.

We may note here that the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (or DAV) College in Lahore was started in 1888, with Arya Samaj backing. An Islamia College followed in Lahore in 1892, while the Khalsa College opened in Amritsar, also in 1892.

The ferment over Bengal was not confined to Bengal. The INC asked for the division to be annulled. Lala Lajpat Rai, who had participated in the Congress’s 1900 session in Lahore and helped create Bradlaugh Hall as the INC’s space in Lahore, entered the fray, as did the INC leader from Poona, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920). With the orator Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) sharing the stir’s leadership in Bengal, newspapers spoke of a pan-Indian ‘Lal-Bal-Pal’ trio.

Not only were most of Bengal’s Muslims happy with a Muslim-majority province in the east (there were exceptions), Muslims across India were troubled by the Hindus’ opposition to it. Those who remembered that the 1882 novel Anandamath, where Bankim’s Bande Mataram first appeared, had an unmistakable anti-Muslim tinge, became especially pessimistic.

Articulated on 1 October 1906, this historic commitment for separate electorates had evidently been thought through and decided upon by the Viceroy and his advisors a few days before that date.86 Even as the INC and most politically-conscious Hindus across India were busy demanding Bengal’s reunification, the Empire had enabled Sayyid Ahmed’s ideological successors to walk off with the prize of a separate Muslim electorate in India as a whole. Writing right away to the Viceroy, an unnamed British official said: ‘I must send Your Excellency a line to say that a very, very big thing has happened today. A work of statesmanship that will affect India and Indian history for many a long year. It is nothing less than the pulling back of 62 millions of people (India’s Muslim population at the time) from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition (the Congress).’87

Since consistent support to Muslim demands violated divide-and-rule, the Empire played an opposite card within two years. Despite what Minto had told the deputation in Simla, the Bengal partition was annulled in 1911. Bengali-speaking areas were reunified—if only for thirty-six years—but Bihar, Orissa and Assam became separate provinces. In another significant policy decision, the Empire moved its Indian headquarters from Calcutta to Delhi, which was detached from Punjab.

The undoing of partition shocked Muslims in Bengal and elsewhere in India. It was alleged that terror had been appeased. Already restive over European attacks on portions of the empire of the world’s premier Muslim power, Turkey, Indian Muslims now harboured a powerful new grievance.

One talented Muslim who had joined the INC in 1906 and stuck to it was Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), born in Karachi to Gujarati-speaking Ismaili parents and trained in law in London. He was not part of the deputation in Simla. About three months after Minto’s announcement there, Jinnah attended the end-1906 INC session in Calcutta where the president-elect, Dadabhai Naoroji, asked for Swaraj, using the Hindi word. Jinnah served as Naoroji’s private secretary during the session.

He has true stuff in him, and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.

This 1913 decision was linked to the turmoil in India’s Muslim community over what was happening to Turkey and its possessions. In 1911, when Italy attacked Libya’s Tripoli, then part of the Turkish empire, the British had barred Turkey from crossing Egypt to defend its territory. In the Balkan wars of 1912-13, Greeks, Bulgars and Serbs routed the Turks. Joined to Turkey’s humiliation was the possibility of Europe’s non-Muslims controlling the sacred sites located in the Turkish empire’s territory, including Mecca, Medina, Najaf, Karbala and Jerusalem. India’s Sunni Muslims, some of them inclined to think of the distant Turkish Sultan as their religious head, were disquieted, and Muslims who were not Sunnis seemed to share the unease. The Muslim League took up Turkey’s cause, and Jinnah, who had not only stayed aloof from it thus far but also questioned separate electorates, joined the League, while not relinquishing his Congress connection.

At the end of 1916, thanks to the efforts of several including Tilak, Besant and Jinnah, who was now forty-one, the Congress and the League, meeting in Lucknow at the same time for their annual sessions, agreed to ask for ‘early self-government’ based on direct elections, separate electorates for Muslims and Sikhs and weightage for minorities, e.g. for Muslims in UP and for Hindus and Sikhs in Punjab. For the first time since 1857, Muslims and Hindus had jointly asked for the same thing.

One man who seemed unwilling to be caught up in the excitement over Turkey, though he helped stimulate it, was Punjab’s celebrated poet, Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938). Born in Sialkot in a tailor’s family of Kashmiri Brahmin origin (a forefather had converted to Islam), Iqbal studied in Lahore’s prestigious Government College, where he was influenced by Thomas Arnold, a British scholar of Islam who had earlier taught at MAO. While in his twenties Iqbal wrote powerful Indian nationalist poetry, lauding, in Saare Jahaan Se Achha, the country of Hindustan, and rebuking, in Naya Shiwala, both the Brahmin and the Mullah for spreading strife. The latter poem called upon Hindus and Muslims to raise a new temple of unity in India. But three years he spent in Europe and England, from 1905 to 1908, changed Iqbal’s thinking.

Composed during a period (1909-13) when Turkey was being humiliated and Bengal’s partition was annulled, his Shikwa (Complaint) and Jawab-e-Shikwa (Reply to the Complaint) spoke of the sufferings of the world’s Muslims despite their unalloyed devotion to the One God, and of the luxuries apparently enjoyed by non-Muslims.

‘Out of a total of 683,149 combatant troops recruited in India between August 1914 and November 1918, 349,688—about sixty percent—came from the Punjab.’109 Also indicating the province’s centrality in India’s war role was the fact that its governor, Michael O’Dwyer, was the only provincial officer on the committee organizing recruitment in India as a whole. Three members of the Viceroy’s executive council, the secretary of the Army Department, and two Indian princes were the others on the committee.

Titles were another inducement. Thus, Shahpur’s Umar Hayat Tiwana (who joined battle himself at the European front) became Sir Umar Hayat Tiwana, Khem Singh Bedi became Sir Khem Singh Bedi, and Chhotu Ram, an influential Jat figure in Rohtak district, was made a Rai Sahib. A slew of new nawabs, Khan Sahibs, Khan Bahadurs and Rai Bahadurs emerged. For other helpers, there were swords of honour and grants of money or land. Given ‘an opportunity to entrench their positions’, many Punjabis ‘responded with alacrity and scrambled to furnish men and material’.

A revolutionary, an Arya Samajist and an academic at different points in his life, Har Dayal (who would die in Philadelphia) founded the Ghadr Party in 1913, while in exile in California. Its members made patriotic and revolutionary appeals, including in the journal Ghadr (for a time printed in Urdu, Gurmukhi and Gujarati), to Indian immigrants in North America.

In the cities, those paying at least 2,000 in income tax or 50 in municipal tax could vote. In the villages, loyalty was made as important a qualification as property. All commissioned and non-commissioned officers in the army, all jagirdars, zaildars, lambardars and sufedposhes, and all farmers who paid 25 or more in annual revenue were given the right to vote. These rules meant that among Punjab’s Sikh voters there would be a 20-to-1 rural-to-urban ratio, among its Muslims 7-to-1, and among Hindus 3-to-1.

In the heart of Amritsar was a ground called Jallianwala Bagh, enclosed on three sides by walls or buildings. On the afternoon of Sunday, 13 April—a day when Hindus and Sikhs were celebrating Baisakhi—around 10,000 people, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs gathered there. They were responding to a call from city leaders; if some were defying a ban on meetings that Dyer had imposed, others were unaware of it. The gathering was listening to a speaker when, at about 4.30 p.m., Dyer arrived with (according to his own report written the next day) fifty rifle-carrying troops (Gurkhas, Sikhs and Muslims) and forty additional Gurkhas armed with khukris. The soldiers occupied the entrance to the ground, which was also its sole exit, and Dyer immediately ordered fire, without demanding dispersal. For ten minutes or so, the Empire’s Indian soldiers obediently pulled their triggers, stopping only when their ammunition ran out. Almost every bullet found a man. Going by Dyer’s report, 1,650 rounds were fired. Curfew was imposed as soon as the firing ended. The city became (in Dyer’s words) ‘absolutely quiet’ with ‘not a soul to be seen’.24 Jallianwala Bagh’s dead and dying spent the 13th night with dogs and vultures.

In Punjab, stories of the massacre passed by word of mouth sparked demonstrations, including violent ones, to which O’Dwyer and his officers reacted in a manner that again recalled 1857. In Gujranwala, for instance, where property had been damaged, three RAF aircraft hit residents—Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus—from the air with bombs and machine guns after demonstrators had dispersed. Twelve were killed and twenty-four injured in these air attacks of 14 and 15 April. On the 16th, Martial Law was imposed in Gujranwala district and elsewhere in Punjab. While Martial Law Notice No. 2 of Gujranwala warned shopkeepers of flogging if they refused to serve policemen or soldiers, Notice No. 7 ordered residents to dismount and salute when an officer appeared.27 In Lahore, Colonel Johnson ordered students of three colleges to report several times a day to military authorities at different venues. Devised to punish presumed sympathy rather than actual offence, the order compelled students to walk up to seventeen miles a day during a hot April.28 In a spate of summary trials held under Martial Law, scores of Punjabis were sentenced to death or long prison terms.

In the middle of May, Europe’s terms for Turkey became known. Not only was Turkey to be deprived of all its colonies and Greek-majority areas, Mecca and Medina were to be placed under a pro-British chieftain. While France would control Syria, Britain was to ‘guard’ Iraq, which contained Karbala and Najaf, as also Palestine, which included Jerusalem. Islam’s key sites were thus all to fall under the authority of Christian countries.

It was at this session, which confirmed Gandhi’s ascendancy, that Jinnah left the Congress. Concerned that mass protests would lead to violence, Jinnah was equally if not more troubled by Nagpur’s decision to alter the Congress’s goal from ‘Swaraj within the Empire’ to just ‘Swaraj’, i.e. whether within or outside the Empire. In 1920, despite Indians’ pervasive distaste for the Empire, Jinnah thought that quarrelling Indian groups needed an external authority as an arbiter of last resort. This, of course, was in line with Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s position in the 1880s and 1890s and a view that some Hindus too shared, like Malaviya in Nagpur. Most Indians in 1920, however, no longer accepted the indispensability of the Empire.

In the new climate, Sikhs objecting to the control of gurdwaras by lax or corrupt mahants created the Akali Dal to free the gurdwaras. To manage the gurdwaras, the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) was formed by these Sikh reformers. Their efforts meet with fierce resistance. When more than a hundred Sikhs attempted to recover the Nankana Sahib gurdwara, all were brutally murdered.

Yet the Raj succeeded—with Indian help—in turning this struggle against the Empire into a Hindu-Muslim or a Muslim-Sikh quarrel. A non-cooperating or prison-going Iqbal could have prevented this from happening, but he stayed out, as did Fazl-i-Husain. Despite energetic efforts, men like Zafar Ali and Kitchlew were unable to enthuse Muslim Punjab for Non-cooperation, which received an early blow in November 1920 when Fazl-i-Husain, who in the previous year had headed the Punjab Congress and the Punjab League, announced his intention to enter the new council.

Skilfully playing his cards, Fazl-i-Husain, a successful city lawyer rather than a landlord or farmer, became the spokesman for Punjab’s landlords and prosperous peasant proprietors (Muslim, Sikh and Hindu), who by imperial design dominated the council. Playing its cards with equal adroitness, and aiming to strengthen opponents of Non-cooperation, the Raj quickly named Fazl-i-Husain and also Lala Harkishen Lal as ministers in Punjab. The men O’Dwyer had scorned—the men who had stood up to Rowlatt—became the Raj’s partners. Luring the politicians was shrewder than obstructing them.

Zafar Ali’s anti-Empire harangues worried the Raj, which responded by mobilizing pro-government Muslims who told fellow-religionists that Khilafat was a political question, not a religious one, and that loyalty to the king—even a king thousands of miles away—was part of India’s tradition.

As a minister, he had ensured in November 1921 that seats in Lahore’s Government College and Medical College would be divided among Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in a 2:2:1 ratio. For Muslims, this 40 per cent presence was a great improvement, for, in 1917-18, their Government College share had been only 15.2 per cent. The Muslim presence in the Medical College had been worse.

In August 1924, Punjab’s chief secretary wrote gratifyingly of ‘the speed’ with which the Montford Scheme’s working had ‘drive[n] the two main communities into open dissension’ and ‘urban and rural interests’ into ‘antagonism’.5 The chief secretary’s appraisal was spectacularly confirmed by Lajpat Rai, by this time a member of the Central Assembly. Writing a series of articles in the Tribune (November and December 1924), Rai argued that since Punjabi Muslims were unwilling to grant weightage to Hindus and Sikhs, Punjab should be partitioned into Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority portions. (He proposed a similar solution for Bengal.)

Hailey gave the ministership vacated by Fazl not to a Muslim but to a distinguished pro-Raj Sikh, Jogendra Singh, who was close to Lahore’s Hindu politicians.

Punjab’s temper was being influenced by all-India developments too. These included campaigns among Hindus for sangathan (organization) and shuddhi (recovery of converts)—Swami Shraddhanand had been a leading proponent of shuddhi—and among Muslims for tabligh (religious preaching) and tanzim (organization); and the formation, in 1925, on the initiative of a Brahmin group from Maharashtra, of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which aimed, through military-style discipline, to protect Hindu interests against perceived Muslim threats.

In 1927 and 1928, Jinnah made a valiant bid for a nationalist accord on the basis of a grand quid pro quo: Muslim acceptance of joint electorates in exchange for three things—acceptance of Muslim majorities in Punjab and Bengal by the INC, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Sikhs; the separation of Sindh from Bombay Presidency to form an additional Muslim-majority province; and a one-third reservation for Muslims in any central legislature.

In a pamphlet he published in 1933 in England (where he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge), Rahmat Ali envisaged a sovereign Muslim state which he called Pakistan, comprising P(unjab), A(fghania—or the Northwest Frontier), K(ashmir), S(indh) and Baluch(stan).

Fazl had created a Muslim-Hindu-Sikh team in Punjab, even if mainly at higher rungs of the social ladder. His long teamwork with Rohtak’s Chhotu Ram was particularly noteworthy. His goal, Fazl had declared, was ‘a non-communal party run on humanitarian lines in the interests of the masses with due regard to the rights of classes’.

The boundaries of a future Muslim state were not specified in Lahore, and there was also a clear suggestion (later dismissed as a typing error) of more than one Muslim state being demanded. Noting that the resolution, which was passed to sustained applause, did not list the provinces constituting the proposed (and as yet unnamed) new state, a delegate at Lahore wondered whether its imprecise wording would not justify partitioning Punjab and Bengal. In his answer, Liaquat Ali Khan, the League’s general secretary, who belonged to Karnal in eastern Punjab, defended vagueness: If we say Punjab that would mean that the boundary of our state would be Gurgaon, whereas we want to include in our proposed dominion Delhi and Aligarh, which are centres of our culture… Rest assured that we will [not] give away any part of the Punjab.

A ‘Khalistan’ was accordingly demanded by some Sikhs in 1940.52 Chhotu Ram and other non-Muslim Unionists as well as Hindu Sabha members supporting Sikander’s ministry were also horrified by the Lahore call.

However, Jinnah’s argument that the Sikhs would be ‘much safer in Pakistan’, where ‘they would form an important community, whereas in united India they would be a drop in the ocean’,57 found few Sikh takers. In different parts of Punjab, volunteer groups began to be trained for ‘defence’, and once more the ordinary Punjabi was forced to look around for ways to survive.

Viceroy Linlithgow asked Governor Craik to advise Sikander not to publicize his differences with Jinnah. At a time when the Congress was carrying out disobedience, the Viceroy said, ‘any fissure in the Muslim ranks’ was best avoided.58 Later in 1941, after Linlithgow learnt that Sikander had sent a private message exploring a Congress-League rapprochement to the Congress leader and recent Madras Premier, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, then in prison in Trichy in southern India, the Raj’s officers in Lahore ensured a termination of the Sikander initiative.

By the start of 1941, the Akali Dal modified its stance towards the Raj and committed itself to the war effort. A year later, after a section of the Sikh leadership entered into a pact with Sikander, overlooking the latter’s inability to stand up to Jinnah, thirty-nine-year-old Baldev Singh, an affluent industrialist, was taken into the Punjab ministry.

Winston Churchill (Britain’s Prime Minister from May 1940) sent Stafford Cripps, a brilliant cabinet minister from the Labour Party, to India with proposals. Churchill did this not out of enthusiasm for Indian self-rule but to mollify Roosevelt, the American President, who was urging the British to win Indian goodwill.