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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.
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.)
Three years later, another Punjabi, Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a Gujjar born in 1895 in the town of Balachaur in eastern Punjab’s Hoshiarpur district, offered a more precise picture of a Muslim homeland. 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).
In his riposte, Jinnah spoke of Jawaharlal as the Peter Pan who refused to grow up, ‘the busybody [Congress] President’ who ‘must poke his nose in everything except his own business’. Rejoining the slanging match, Jawaharlal declared that there were Muslims in the Congress ‘who could provide inspiration to a thousand Jinnahs’.33 An announcement by Nehru that the Congress would promote ‘mass contact’ with ordinary Muslims was denounced by the League as a bid to influence the ordinary Muslim’s beliefs and practices.
Gandhi said in response that ‘it was worse than anarchy to partition a poor country… whose every corner is populated by Hindus and Muslims living side by side’. ‘A Bengali Muslim,’ he added, ‘speaks the same tongue that a Bengali Hindu does, eats the same food, has the same amusements as his Hindu neighbour. They dress alike.’
Uneasily present himself at the League rally, Sikander was henceforth forced to speak in two tongues. He was for Pakistan (the name was soon attached to the Lahore resolution) but also against it. ‘We do not ask for freedom,’ he would say in 1941, ‘that there may be a Muslim raj here and a Hindu raj elsewhere. If this is what Pakistan means, I will have nothing to do with it.’53 He belonged to the League but was not part of it. He was for a sovereign Pakistan but also for a loose confederation. And so forth.
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.
exhorted
Winston Churchill role in India partition.
He also knew about Jews killing in Germany but kept quite
At Simla in July, Congress leaders agreed to the Viceroy’s proposal of a national government consisting of an equal number of caste Hindus and Muslims, all but one of the former from the INC, all but one of the latter from the ML, one non-League non-Congress Muslim, one Scheduled Caste Hindu, and two or three from other minorities.
Wavell said his intention was to nominate Khizr or another Unionist as the sole non-League Muslim, but Jinnah (who refused to shake hands with Azad, the Congress president) not only flatly opposed the idea of a Unionist member; he also said that the League would stay out unless he, Jinnah, was allowed to choose every Muslim name.
Dirty politics for self gain
Issued to protest British ‘complicity’ in Congress ‘duplicity’, Jinnah’s ‘direct action’ call provoked serious violence in Calcutta in August (where early Hindu deaths were soon outnumbered by Muslim deaths),
partisan
As long as we two brothers are alive and our rifles have bullets we will never let you touch the Muslim patients in this hospital.48 Addressed to assailants storming (and, soon afterwards, leaving) their Amritsar hospital, these words spoken by Dr Parshottam Dutt on his behalf and that of his brother Dr Narain Das reflected the gallant spirit of many unknown Punjabis, Sikh, Muslim and Hindu, of March 1947. Yet, the frenzied spirit that was also abroad destroyed around 2,500 lives in Punjab in that month, including that of one of Multan’s most-respected men, Kalyan Das, a prosperous Hindu
...more
but two thousand or more Sikhs and Hindus were killed between 5 and 8 March in villages near Rawalpindi and Attock, and tens of thousands fled from their homes.
In some villages—in the words of Lt.-Gen. Frank Messervy, the northern command chief and a future head of the Pakistan army—‘savagery was carried out to an extreme degree’. Messervy admitted that the army’s ‘ex-soldiers and pensioners [had] been heavily involved’ in the violence.52
prescient.
cogitation
Muhammad Ghani Cheema,
Saifuddin Kitchlew and a few other Muslims who for years had stood against India’s division, as well as Choithram Gidwani, a Hindu delegate from Sindh.
On the night of 13 August, the police station chief of Lahore’s Mozang quarter evidently masterminded an attack on a historic gurdwara built by Guru Arjan Dev. All the score or so Sikh men and women inside this gurdwara, which stood only fifteen yards from the Mozang police station, were killed and the shrine burnt down. The attack was carried out by about thirty Muslim youths led by ‘a devout Khaksar’, as Taj Din, the leader, called himself while admitting his involvement in an interview with a contemporary scholar in the year 2000.100
Probably between half a million and eight hundred thousand in all were killed in Punjab in 1947. About ten to twelve million people were forced to leave their homes and cross the new border.102
feeble
delineated.
Yes
The Sikhs similarly dismissed suggestions that Lahore, Lyallpur and Nankana Sahib should or could belong to Pakistan.
Our survey suggests that the Punjabi individual on the ground—Sikh, Muslim or Hindu—was more tolerant than elites and elected politicians. If some Punjabis were willing to be caught up in the frenzies of 1947, many more were willing to quietly protect the threatened.
Punjabi Muslims, on their part, showed inadequate awareness of the problems that Hindus and Sikhs saw in majority rule.
As in earlier history, most Punjabis were able, during the 1940s, to adjust, survive, and assist others to survive, but their leaders were unable to lead.
Research and read this. Todo for me
Army officers governed Punjab during Zia’s years at Pakistan’s helm, which saw a proliferation of guns and drugs in the Frontier province (now Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) and new nationwide regulations in the name of Islam. Laws or ordinances penalized eating and drinking in public during Ramazan, required women TV anchors to cover their heads, raised to death the punishment for blasphemy, and imposed other codes of behaviour.
With the state under Zia championing religious orthodoxy, male government employees exchanged Western-style trousers-and-shirts for shalwar kameezes, new mosques multiplied, and Sunni-Shia controversies as well as attacks on Ahmadiyyas became sharper. Before Zia was killed in 1988 in an air crash near Bahawalpur (along with the American ambassador, the chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff, and others on his plane), his policies had made Pakistan and its Punjab province more hospitable for extremists.
blasphemy
Nostalgia and enthusiasm mark diaspora gatherings in the US, the UK, Europe, Canada and Australia. Thus the website of the Academy of the Punjab in North America, or APNA, offers access to books and articles in Punjabi (in Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), Urdu and English, and to albums of Punjabi music (Sufi, folk, film, pop, and Bhangra). APNA describes itself as ‘a non-religious, non-political organization of all Punjabis for the promotion of Punjabi language, literature and culture’.
