Punjab Quotes

“launching a satyagraha before training a cadre to keep it non-violent was ‘a Himalayan miscalculation’ on his part.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Though the Mongols stopped (or were stopped) before reaching Delhi, they destroyed much of Punjab.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Punjabi political leaders who finally joined the Muslim League’ apparently ‘hoped that that the concession of Pakistan in name’ would somehow preserve ‘a united India in fact’.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Punjab’s Muslim leaders did not necessarily believe that Pakistan would bring benefits.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“elections held during the winter of 1945-46 accelerated polarization across India around the INC and the League,”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“stooges of the Raj, this well-entrenched, Raj-preferred party of landlords and landowners—Muslims in the province’s west, Sikhs in the centre, and Hindu Jats in the east”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“stooges of the Raj, this well-entrenched, Raj-preferred party of landlords and landowners—Muslims in the province’s west,”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“In Punjab’s 175-strong legislature, Muslims were given 48 per cent of the seats, Hindus 24 per cent and Sikhs 18 per cent.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Churchill in London and men like Hailey in India were troubled by the success of the Salt March of 1930, a Gandhi-Irwin Pact that followed in March 1931, and Gandhi being invited to London later that year.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“the Empire was naturally attracted towards the foes of its chief Indian foe, the Congress”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Congress charged that the Empire was practising divide-and-rule, its Indian and British opponents countered that the INC did not represent all of India.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“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).”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Lahore Conspiracy Case, as it was called, contains no Muslim name and only one Sikh name, that of Bhagat Singh.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Tilak had complained that Gandhi was asking too much of the Indian people. He was proved right. Non-violence, not harming the hated British, embracing jails, Hindu-Muslim unity, giving up titles, contributing money, the abolition of untouchability—each item on the long list was desirable, but also costly.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Muslim preponderance in the police and the army’ would be hit.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Though Dyer and O’Dwyer had destroyed love for the Empire, desire for its titles and positions survived in Punjab.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“In 1919, when loyalist Sikhs were willing, even after the Amritsar massacre, to honour Dyer, other Sikhs formed a new pro-independence body, the Sikh League, with the Sialkot-born Baba Kharak Singh (1868-1963), who had been galvanized by the massacre, as its chief.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Beginning with 1 August 1920, titles were returned, thousands of students across India left the Raj’s colleges, hundreds of lawyers turned their backs on the Raj’s courts and, in November, prominent politicians boycotted the elections to the new provincial councils.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Dyer was held guilty of ‘a grave error of judgment’, the report offered weak recommendations and exonerated O’Dwyer.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“If it came to a fight with the Empire—Gandhi had smelt that possibility—he wanted Indians to hold the moral high ground, yielding which had been part of the folly of 1857.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Losing self-control, some in Punjab, he said, had taken to violence; losing self-respect, others had obeyed the Crawling Order.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“the Raj could also dangle jobs before the educated unemployed, councils before the ambitious, and titles before the rich and the vain.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Soon both O’Dwyer and Dyer were obliged to return to Britain, but they remained unrepentant, and the honours they received from supporters at home—including Rudyard Kipling, a major contributor to a purse presented to Dyer—added to Indian revulsion.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“A non-existent revolutionary plot was crushed by the Raj. Punjab, including Amritsar and Lahore, returned to ‘normal’. And Gandhi halted his satyagraha. But the Empire’s reputation was in tatters.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Jallianwala Bagh’s dead and dying spent the 13th night with dogs and vultures.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“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.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“am I inferior simply because I am not English born? Am I to be a slave because I am an Indian?”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Iqbal seemed reluctant to defy the Raj over Turkey.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“Iqbal, using Urdu and also Persian, would be the poet of Islam rather than of India.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab

“when World War I started, and Turkey aligned itself with the Empire’s foe, Germany, India’s Muslims felt even more conflicted.”
― Rajmohan Gandhi, Punjab