In my previous column, I tried, based on the findings of two objective and professional scholars of the history of Punjab, to point out the fact that millions of acres of  ‘new’ land was brought under cultivation, roughly between 1890s and 1930s, through the construction of one of the largest network of perennial and non-perennial irrigation in the western part of Punjab and that this was an experience not shared by any other region in South Asia. This feat of physical engineering, motivated by the needs of the colonial administration, was coupled by a huge experiment in social engineering that had a strong caste aspect. The land of all the bars or do-abs — situated between two rivers — had to be levelled as it was typically in the shape of gigantic mounds, and made cultivable.

The colonial masters knew enough about the social system here to realise that the low caste workforce at the disposal of the traditional big landowners — all belonging in most cases to upper castes — was incapable of performing this huge task because it worked on the basis of begaar, unpaid labour, and had no incentive to undertake it. Therefore, they invited the middle-caste groups traditionally involved in tilling agricultural land — Jats, Khatris and Arains among others that were given a semi-respectable title of ‘agricultural castes’ — to do this work and offered as economic incentive small packets of land, 50 to 100 acres, to them in return. This necessitated transfer of population from elsewhere in western and eastern parts of Punjab — those who were later called ‘abadkars’. The land so prepared for cultivation was declared to be ‘Crown Land’, i.e., property of the British Empire, which monopolised the sole right to allot or auction it to achieve its political and economic goals. Apart from the land that was bound to be given to these ‘agricultural castes’ to make the land usable, and emptied of the original inhabitants, the ‘Janglis’ — the remaining huge areas were either allotted to the traditional big landowners, military personnel, recruited and commissioned from the region and those who provided the colonial army with horses and materials, or auctioned to rich classes that had acquired the ability to buy land through trading in agricultural produce contracting for civil works and so on.

It is concluded from Dr Imran Ali’s research and other sources that apart from the relative empowerment of ‘agricultural castes’ located at the middle rungs of the traditional caste hierarchy, the colonial masters saw to it that the feudal system in the region got more entrenched, the Empire’s ‘war effort’ during the two world wars was fully supported through men and material and a general atmosphere of loyalty to the Empire and political quietism prevailed in Punjab, resulting in the smooth flow of grain and industrial raw material to Britain through the port at Karachi. A railway line was laid specifically for this purpose linking these new lands with the port. New mandi towns such as Lyallpur and Sargodha were brought into being to regulate the flow of the agricultural produce to local and international markets.

Even this relatively small empowerment of the middle castes was to produce interesting consequences. As shared with me by my friend and well-known Dalit activist Anoop Kheri, on the basis of his close empirical observation throughout the northern part of the subcontinent, wherever land-holdings are relatively small and owned by middle castes, the physical infrastructure is better looked after and the indicators of social progress — education, health and general upward mobility — show a better trend. On the downside, the middle caste landowners, for instance Jats in the case of Punjab, are too obsessed with the new-found improvement in their own caste and economic status to care much for the environment or the groups of unprivileged people that fall below them in caste hierarchy.

Now, keeping in view this background of the ‘creation’ of millions of acres of ‘new’ land, the dynamics of its allotment and sale by the colonial administration and the politics of identity that assumed the specific character that it did in Punjab, during the period preceding the 1947 Partition, we can begin to realise that the riots and ethnic cleansing that took place in its wake, too, had their victims and beneficiaries.

Considering the portion of the ‘new’ land that was allotted and sold to Sikhs and Hindus under different categories that may fall anywhere between 25 to 35 per cent of the total, changed hands at the time of Partition and came to Muslims; the traditional feudal landlords, the ‘old’ abadkars and the new mohajirs from what became East Punjab. It can be safely concluded that in the case of this agricultural property located in western Punjab, Sikhs and Hindus were the losers. The same goes for the huge trading interests and properties owned by Sikhs and Hindus in the region. Muslims, clearly, were the beneficiaries.

The case of terrible human suffering — mass murders, rapes, kidnappings, individual and mass suicides, forced conversions and dislocation — all three religious groups had victims as well as beneficiaries and perpetrators. It is, therefore, unwise to consider all Sikhs, Hindus or Muslims of Punjab as either victims or perpetrators. Each of these three groups is divided into these two categories.

The land and the business associated with it might have worked as a strong motive for the planning and execution of the massacres and cleansing. And, as unfortunate series of riots — between different religious, ethnic, linguistic or sectarian groups — shows, there is no such thing as ‘spontaneous’ riots or their ‘automatic’ or ‘natural’ retaliation. Each incident of mass murder, rape and looting does require some degree of planning and a band of motivated, suitably trained and armed criminals to execute it.

The motivation on the part of the planners of partition riots on our side of Punjab may very well have included the landed and other properties. This point may go some distance to explain why the scale of Partition massacres in other areas of the present Pakistan, for instance Sindh, did not match what happened in Punjab.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th, 2012.

Dr Indu Agnihotri of the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi, in her paper published in the Indian Economic Social History Review (1996) under the title “Ecology, land use and colonisation: The canal colonies of Punjab”, summarises the huge project as follows: “The over 13 million acres irrigated by the new schemes covered all or parts of the districts of Shahpur, Jhang, Gujranwala, Multan, Montgomery and Lahore, Lyallpur and Sheikhupura, in all of which lay the Colony tehsils, as they were known. Of these, the last two districts were carved out of previously existing districts in 1904 and 1920 respectively, in view of the tremendous influx of population into these districts.”

Dr Imran Ali, in his paper referred to in my last column, describes the “new schemes” in more detail. Here I summarise and quote from his paper so that we could familiarise ourselves with the contours of a complex story of human planning, endeavour and manipulation.

In the earliest project, Sidhnai Colony in Multan District, it was some Sikh Badechah Juts from Amritsar District who in 1886, tried out the soils. When cultivation was found to succeed, the future of the colony was ensured, and there was no shortage of applications for grants … Of the total land allotted, 80 per cent went to Muslims, mostly from Multan, Lahore and Amritsar Districts. The remaining area of 20 per cent was allotted to Hindus and Sikhs … numbering around 300 with an area of 57,000 bighas, coming predominantly from Lahore and Multan Districts.

Sohag Para Colony, with an allotted area of around 90,000 acres, was situated in Montgomery District and was settled in 1886-88. Jat Sikhs obtained 38 per cent of allotted area, or around 29,000 acres.

Lower Chenab Colony in the Rechna Doab, with an allotted area of over two million acres, was colonised between 1892 and 1905, with further extensions in the late 1910s and 1930s, and entirely took up the newly created Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) District, carved out of Gujranwala, Jhang and Lahore Districts. Jat Sikhs obtained 38 per cent of allotted area, or around 29,000 acres. There were 484 such grantees. Thirty-seven Khatri Sikhs from Rawalpindi District were allotted 3,500 acres, or 45 per cent of colony land. Their average size of holding was 95 acres, indicating landlord origins. These grants were linked to a very major land grant of 7,800 acres, or 10 per cent of colony land, allotted to Baba Sir Khem Singh Bedi, who was also from Rawalpindi. Bedi belonged to a family of Khatri Sikhs claiming descent from Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith. The British believed that the family’s holy status gave it political influence in the Sikh community; and it had also supported them during the struggle of 1857. Two-thirds of the land went to immigrant allottees. These were Muslim and Sikh Jats, Muslim Arains apart from other Hindu and Sikh castes. A very sizeable intake of Sikh settlers from central Punjab occurred in the Rechna Doab. Since the major portion of soldiers in the army came from Punjab, military considerations continued to be an important underlying influence on land utilisation in the canal colonies.

Chunian Colony, with an allotted area of 103,000 acres, was situated in the southern part of Lahore District. It was settled in two stages, between 1896-98 and 1904-06. Grantees were predominantly from within Lahore District, among them Jat Sikhs were the best represented. In the area colonised in 1896-98, they comprised around 35 per cent of grantees. Around 12,000 acres were sold by auction, 5,000 acres were allotted in ‘civil’ grants to retired government officials. And 2,000 acres were allotted to military pensioners, whose share was to increase significantly in later colonies.

In the Lower Jhelum Colony, the military presence was far more pervasive. Larger holdings, known as Yeoman Horse-breeding (ghori-pal) grants, were allotted to members of elite rural families. They were required to maintain several mares (ghoris), at the rate of 40 acres per mare. Developed between 1902 and 1906, the colony was situated in the Shahpur District, with its headquarters in the newly founded town of Sargodha. Like its predecessors, the colony was originally intended to be settled with civilian colonists, to be drawn from north-western Punjab, a predominantly Muslim region. The feeling had grown that too much land had passed to central Punjab and to non-Muslims … Agitations demanding the termination of horse-breeding, or at least relief from primogeniture, periodically shook the colony. The growing discontent against horse-breeding was often centred around Sikh villages, where Akali and Congress sentiments found sympathy. But the military prerogative was such that the British held on to horse-breeding, till it was finally abolished in 1940.

Nili Bar Colony was situated in the Montgomery (now Sahiwal) and Multan Districts. The scheme covered approximately 800,000 acres of land with perennial irrigation, and 260,000 acres with non-perennial irrigation. The unique feature of Nili Bar Colony was that over 360,000 acres, or 45 per cent of perennially-irrigated land, was reserved for sale by auction. Thus for their numbers Sikhs, as well as Hindus, did obtain a disproportionate amount of land, an indication of their stronger economic standing.

The above facts may not be able to present anything resembling a complete picture; they are still useful as they indicate the kind of pressures under which a rapid change was being forced into the society in western Punjab. In Dr Agnihotri’s words, “the extension of canal irrigation meant throwing the weight of the Imperial Regime behind pushing settled agriculture. This marked the extension of the long arm of the state into the very nature and rhythm of life as well as changes in their actual and perceived status”.

Like all such huge interventions, the process had its beneficiaries and victims. The direct victims were the original inhabitants, derogatively called ‘janglis’, who were dispossessed in most senses. Another victim was the environment itself, the degradation of which affected many communities. There were political fallouts, too, which will be discussed in this space later.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 21^st, 2012.

The readers’ response to my last column in the series exploring the theme of the 1947 Partition riots in Punjab, “Punjab riots, sacrifices and jihad” (June 15) — as indeed to Khaled Ahmed’s piece on Major-General (retd) Khadim Hussain Raja’s recently published book on the events of 1971 in East Bengal (July 7) — points to, among other things, a feeling of unease and impatience on the part of a some comment writers. Such readers, as I have pointed out before, would rather these ‘unpleasant’ subjects be treated as closed transactions and not touched upon again and again as they tend to disturb the conclusions such people have already arrived at.

What is forgotten by these comment writers is that looking at and reassessing past events is an ongoing process which individual researchers and writers find worthwhile in order to get a realistic view of our present. Those who think otherwise would be better advised to simply ignore it.

Last week, I gave an example of the care Ishtiaq Ahmed exercises before drawing a conclusion about a certain sequence of events. To think that the quotes from his book, which cover less than half a page of this 600-page work of formidable social research, were meant as its ‘summary’ would be incorrect as well as unfair. As Dr Tariq Rahman rightly pointed out in his review of the book, the conclusions reached in it “can only be contested by someone who has as formidable a knowledge of this subject as Ishtiaq Ahmed”. He further says, “If we have to exist at all, especially when we are nuclear-armed nations, we need to come to terms with the ghosts of 1947 in order to build a South Asia on the model of the Schengen states.”

What I meant to emphasise through the quotes was that Ishtiaq Ahmed would take great pains to maintain his objectivity by consulting all relevant sources; in the case I mentioned — the massacres in and around Rawalpindi in March 1947 — these included not only the report issued by the All India Congress Committee, but also observations from someone like Justice Muhammad Munir, not to mention the author’s own attempts at visiting the area and interviewing eye-witnesses and victims (who, obviously, live elsewhere). When the good justice — who was appointed to the Punjab Boundary Commission not by the Indian National Congress but by the All India Muslim League and later became the chief justice of Pakistan, not India — wrote in his book that “[t]he disturbances broke out in March 1947 in the district of Rawalpindi and the adjoining areas and the Muslims were the aggressors,” it would take a very obstinate mind not to see the obvious.

But the fact remains that no single book, not even the formidable research undertaken so successfully by Ishtiaq Ahmed, can automatically solve the riddle of the 1947 riots for everyone. It can only serve as a valuable contribution to a quest already going on in an individual citizen’s mind which tries to make sense of the collective past and its connection with the present.

As for myself, the fact brought out by this and other research on the subject that Punjab, unfortunately, suffered the unique case of the Partition riots and total ethnic cleansing on both sides of its dividing line, leads to a further, deeper question: why Punjab?

Here, I would like to introduce another unique fact of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, involving Punjab, which is usually not taken into account when discussing the Partition events. Dr Imran Ali, in his paper “Sikh Settlers in the Western Punjab during British Rule”, summarises some of the findings of his doctoral research published under the title, “The Punjab under imperialism, 1885–1947” on the colonisation of millions of acres of hitherto uncultivated agricultural land situated in the western Punjab under perennial irrigation. This was also something unique to Punjab as no other area in undivided British India underwent this experience.

Dr Imran Ali writes: “These landed resources were transferred predominantly to the more ‘superior’ rural groups: those that were incumbent landholders and were categorised as ‘agricultural castes’ under the Land Alienation Act. The importance of the military in this province was amply reflected in the large, and indeed disproportionate, areas reserved for military functions and personnel. The social origins of grantees and soldiers were similar: both came from the rural elite and the upper levels of village society. The strengthening of these groups had a pronounced impact on the political economy of the Punjab. This was indicated by the relative weakness of nationalism and the continued vibrancy of the British-supported and landlord-led political formation of the Punjab National Unionist Party. Non-landed rural groups also moved to the canal colonies, but they remained as subtenants, labourers or jajmani servitors. Commercial groups also obtained major benefits from agricultural colonisation, with the substantial increase in trade, agro-processing and agricultural credit. Professional elements also benefitted, from expansion in state employment and increased demand for services. Most of these were non-Muslims and they emigrated to Indian territory at Partition. Sikh and Hindu agricultural owners and workers, largely the families of earlier migrants from the east, also had to move to India. This infusion of human skills must have contributed to the vibrancy of agriculture and the secondary sector in post-1947 north-western India. However, the prospect of losing valuable landed and commercial assets, held by their brethren in western Punjab, must have disconcerted agrarian groups in central Punjab during partition. This feeling of losing such major resources could have been an important factor behind the killings and human suffering that accompanied the division of the province.”

It is worth exploring how this particular experiment in social engineering contributed to the sowing of the seeds of discontent among the various groups in Punjab, which was mercilessly exploited during the decade preceding the Partition by political forces bent upon dividing the population on the lines of religious identity.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 14^th, 2012.

I must begin by apologising to readers for the absence of the last two Saturdays, although it was hardly my fault.

Coming back to Ishtiaq Ahmed’s book The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (OUP, 2012), what sets it apart from the usual one-sided, ‘nationalistic’, vested-interest-driven accounts of the ‘sacrifices made for freedom’, and puts it into the category of sincere attempts at finding out and facing what actually happened in cities, towns, villages and hamlets where normal human beings resided, is that he bases his conclusions on the accounts of the victims and witnesses of those events, and that he does not hesitate to acknowledge facts, even if they fly in the face of the officially sanctioned ‘truth’. In this, he is encouraged by the deeply personal pain, I am sure, that he shares with Saadat Hasan Manto, on that the ‘non-state actors’ — that acted swiftly and brutally to serve the rationally chalked out agenda of influential people above them — were never made to suffer any trial or punishment by the state they created. On the contrary, they were accorded the status of ‘freedom fighters’.

Punjab was the single province which suffered the fate of total ethnic cleansing in the wake of the bloodiest riots that took place at the time of partition. This fact became more, not less, relevant because of the subsequent developments, including the fact that in December 1971, after the 25-year-long aberration of East Bengal being a part of the uncomfortable new state ended, Punjab turned into the majority province with concentrated power at all significant levels. Punjab’s experience, and the worldview born out of it, was generalised as the ‘national ideology’ — notwithstanding that several of its features are alien to the other units of the federation.

Ishtiaq Ahmed agrees with other fact-finders that the beginning of ‘the process’ were the March 1947 massacres that took place in and around Rawalpindi. This was what triggered a chain of destruction and suffering that culminated in the attainment of the ‘national’ goals. Let me give you a sample of the evidence collected and carefully weighed by him. First an excerpt from the report of All-India Congress Committee that he quotes on page 174-5: “These were not riots but deliberately organised military campaigns. Long before the disturbances broke out secret meetings were held in mosques under the leadership of Syed Akbar Khan … ex-MLA, Capt. Lal Khan of Kahuta, Tehsildar and Police Sub-Inspector Kahuta, Maulvi Abdul Rehman and Kala Khan MLA, in which jihad… was proclaimed against the minorities and emissaries were sent out to collect volunteers from the rural areas…. The armed crowds which attacked Kahuta, Thoa Khalsa, and Nara etc. were led by ex-military men on horseback… armed with Tommy guns, pistols, rifles, hand grenades, hatchets, petrol tins and even carried field glasses…. First of all minorities were disarmed with the help of the local police and by giving assurances on oaths on the Holy Quran of peaceful intentions. After this had been done, the helpless and unarmed minorities were attacked. On their resistance having collapsed, lock-breakers and looters came into action with their transport corps of mules, donkeys and camels. Then came the ‘Mujahideens’ with tins of petrol and kerosene oil and set fire to the looted shops and houses. Then there were Maulvis… with barbers to convert who somehow or other escaped slaughter and rape. The barbers shaved the hair and beards and circumcised the victims. Maulvis … performed forcible marriage ceremonies. After this came the looters, including women and men.”

Justice Muhammad Munir who represented the Muslim League on the Punjab Boundary Commission and later served as Chief Justice… had the following to say about the riots in Rawalpindi: “The disturbances broke out in March 1947 in the district of Rawalpindi and the adjoining areas and the Muslims were the aggressors. I spoke to the Quaid-e-Azam about this telling him that it was a bad augur and he should either go himself to Pindi or send some responsible member of the Muslim League to assure the minorities that in Pakistan, if it ever were established, the will have equal rights…. He agreed with me and …replied in a bold and confident manner, ‘Let me get into the saddle and you will not hear any nonsense of the kind.’ However, he ordered Mamdot to go there personally for the purpose….” (P.173)

Ishtiaq Ahmed adds: “It is to be noted that neither Jinnah nor any other leading Muslim Leaguer issued a public statement condemning the atrocities in Rawalpindi. I have checked the main English language newspapers, the Pakistan Times and The Tribune, and found no statement by any Muslim leader on the Rawalpindi riots. In the Jinnah Papers as well, there is nothing on the Rawalpindi riots; nor did any Punjab-level leader of the Muslim League issue a condemnation.”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 7^th, 2012.

First, a little digression to respond to a rather long comment on the web version of my previous column from my friend Dr Kamran Asdar Ali.

Mohammad Hasan Askari used to write a regular column “Jhalkian” in the Urdu monthly Saqi, published originally from Delhi and later, after Partition, from Karachi, under the editorship of Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi. These columns were collected in two volumes; the latter volume was titled Takhleeqi Amal aur Usloob. In this book, one may find Askari’s columns belonging to the second phase, justifying and supporting the promulgation of the Public Safety Act Ordinance (1948) and praising the adoption of the Objectives Resolution (1949). He even wrote a longish piece in support of the notoriously high-handed Qayyum Khan ministry in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (then called NWFP) imposed on the province after the elected provincial government led by the Congress and headed by Abdul Jabbar Khan (publicly known as Dr Khan Sahib) was dismissed on August 22, 1947 by the provincial governor on the advice of the first governor general of Pakistan.

Furthermore, Askari wholeheartedly supported the 1947-48 war between Pakistan and India as “Jihad-e Kashmir”. He even recommended that those who thought it was not a Jihad should be stopped from saying so for a period of 50 years, when, in his opinion, the Pakistani state would have become stable (mustahkam) enough to allow dissent. Later, in a letter addressed to Mohammad Tufail, editor of Nuqoosh, Lahore, he even termed the 1965 war a “Jihad”.

A correction is also in order. The short-lived journal jointly edited by Manto and Askari was called Urdu Adab, and not Pakistani Adab as Dr Asdar Ali has mentioned. Whatever else he has written in his comment is not relevant to the point I have tried to make.

Which is as follows. Askari’s case illuminates the fact that the kind of politics that reigned supreme in the newly-created state was deeply connected to the ‘national’ narrative about Partition and the heinous riots and ethnic cleansing that accompanied it. Upholding this kind of politics required one to accept without question that official line. It was adopted by the powerful ruling classes as the state policy and was gradually developed and refined by intellectuals like Askari and many others as the ‘national’ myth.

We are all too familiar with this neat narrative as it is fed to our youth through textbooks and other reading material and promoted by numerous ‘patriotic’ publications all the time. Put briefly, it states (i) that Partition was the result of a mass struggle (although in fact it wasn’t), (ii) that ‘lakhs’ of Muslims sacrificed their lives, honour (‘sacrificing honour’ being a euphemism for the incidents of rape) and property in the struggle (that ‘lakhs’ of Hindus and Sikhs too suffered the same fate is not mentioned at all), and (iii) since the ‘enemy’ is bent upon destroying ‘us Muslims’, our state is facing a constant, unending threat to its security, hence the need to prepare for Jihad.

This is the phenomenon that Dubravka Ugreši, the renowned and justifiably controversial Croatian writer from the — bloodied, partitioned and cleansed — former Yugoslavia, calls “the culture of lies” in which we get accustomed to believing as truth the lie created and promoted by the group we identify with. About her ‘identity’, she writes: “A few years ago my homeland was confiscated, and, along with it my passport. In exchange I was given a new homeland, far smaller and less comfortable. They handed me a passport, a ‘symbol’ of my new identity. Thousands of people paid for those new ‘identity symbols’ with their lives, thousands were driven out of their homes, scattered, humiliated, deprived of their rights, imprisoned and impoverished. I possess very expensive identity documents. The fact often fills me with horror. And shame. My passport has not made me a Croat. On the contrary, I am far less that today than I was before.”

Now, coming back to Ishtiaq Ahmed’s detailed book on the Partition riots in Punjab, I wanted to make the above point to show why, in my view, a detailed, stubbornly objective work based on unbiased research and first-person accounts done by him could not be undertaken by a social scientist living and working in Pakistan. Which is not to say that there has not been valuable academic research on events leading up to Partition and those followed by it. Here, I must mention Imran Ali and Mohammad Waseem, to name only two. Dr Imran Ali’s pioneering work on the establishment of the canal colonies in West Punjab and Sikh migration from East Punjab during the first half of the 20^th century, and Dr Waseem’s research on the Muslim migration from East Punjab at the time of Partition and their settlement in West Punjab provided me the historical background and foreground, respectively, against which to read and appreciate Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed’s work.

I intend to share with you in this space during the coming weeks my meagre reading on the subject of the Partition riots and the tentative conclusions I draw from it to show how Ishtiaq Ahmed’s book makes a very valuable addition to it. To my mind, a work dealing with such a sensitive, painful and multifaceted subject can be judged by an honest intention at the outset to not cover up a specific group’s share of crimes just because the writer happens to be from that group — powerful or otherwise. Before I go into details, I must say that I found his book an honest work from that personal standard. 

(To be continued)

Published in The Express Tribune, June 16^th, 2012.

Why should we insist on ascertaining the facts related to the partition violence in their actual historical context? Some of the comments my previous column and its response from Mr Haider Nizamani received seem to express impatience with the necessity of carrying on a debate about the unpleasant — indeed horrendous — events that took place 65 years ago. Forget and forgive, they suggest, and move on.

We — as a nation state — seem to have actually striven from the very start to forget the details and replace them with a smooth nationalistic narrative convenient for the powerful. But our experience as citizens makes us feel that forgetting historical events does not really help, as events have a habit of influencing what follows them even at a distance of long years and decades. As for forgiveness, one could raise a simple question: who should we forgive and for what? Isn’t it necessary to know what actually happened, where and how, before we can identify those who were responsible and decide to forgive them?

I, for one, am not against acts of forgiveness and making amends. Also, when we are dealing with crimes and cruelties of such intensity committed by a large number of individuals, most certainly aided and abetted by a smaller number of those that could have had vested interests, ascertaining the facts alone becomes too long and eventually an incomplete process, rendering the exercise to find perpetrators and bring them to justice meaningless. As post-apartheid South Africa painfully learned, the only practical course left in such circumstances is to know the truth, so that a community of people could move on in an informed way towards reconciliation.

As a party to a bloody human conflict and dislocation that took place on such a great scale, when we forgive ‘others’, are we declaring them guilty and ourselves not only innocent but also generous victims? If, on the other hand, we forgive those amongst us who actually perpetrated the crimes, are we admitting to a collective guilt?

These are some of the questions that Saadat Hasan Manto’s birth centenary this year, provides a fitting moment for us to explore. If we want to understand what happened afterwards, we must try to understand what that conscientious, sensitive and deeply humanist creative writer was saying during the months and years following those traumatic happenings — massacres, rapes, abductions, individual and mass suicides, honour killings, forced migrations (uncontrollable at first, agreed and planned after mid-August 1947), relief efforts, recovery and exchange of abducted women, resettlement of dislocated communities and individuals, allotment and transfer of land and other forms of property and power to new owners, and so on.

The drive to suppress the truth, treat the whole thing as a closed transaction and silently accept the official line as the ‘national’ perception has been as old as Manto’s insistence on knowing and accepting the bitter truth. In his lifetime, one proponent of this delusional point of view was Mohammad Hasan Askari, the critic, who took a line exactly opposite to Manto’s view about most political events that took place early in the life of the new state — imposition of the gagging Public Safety Act, adoption of the Objectives Resolution, persecution of dissenting political movements such as Abdul Ghaffar Khan’s Surkhposh Tehreek and the communists, banning of a large number of newspapers and periodicals, launching of a ‘holy war’, and so forth. Askari’s tribe has ever since been multiplying and getting more powerful and influential as our national Ghairat Brigade.

Unlike Manto, who saw the partition riots as a great injustice done to Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Askari defined them in the general and conveniently vague terms of  ‘a great national tragedy of Muslims’ — which is so much less than the whole truth that it has to be called a lie. In the following years, nevertheless, it was destined to become the official truth greatly helped by the state devices of political and cultural suppression including writing of textbooks as well as efforts on the part of independent intellectuals like Askari who took it upon themselves to rewrite the past and spin-doctor the present to serve their individual and group interests.

There has, however, been a steady and unbroken line of individual researchers and academics who never abandoned the quest for knowing the truth and who tried to find, contexualise and analyse shreds of truths of our national life. Manto’s centenary is the time to remember and feel gratitude towards people like Eqbal Ahmed, Zamir Niazi and K K Aziz who furthered in their own specific ways what Manto had initiated.

Another such individual is the historian Ishtiaq Ahmed whose detailed work of formidable, objective research has recently come out as the book titled The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-person Accounts (Karachi: OUP, 2012). Born in the Temple Road area of Lahore, Ishtiaq Ahmed ‘grew up listening to elders who would describe some of the events that took place’ in that locality. The curiosity born in him during his childhood grew with him and in 1999, the invitation to a conference in the UK initiated the process of academic research that took him in subsequent years to interview the victims and witnesses of the partition riots residing on either side of the Wagah border and elsewhere and read and analyse a great number of secondary sources. His association with Stockholm University in Sweden freed him from the debilitating limitations imposed by a fiercely anti-academic environment back home on the one hand, and, on the other, made it possible for him to travel everywhere in India and Pakistan to conduct his research.

Ishtiaq Ahmed’s book is necessary reading for anyone who is interested in finding out what happened in the towns and villages of Punjab during those unfortunate months and understanding the significance of those events in their historical context. It deserves to become a part of our national discourse to make it more informed.

(To be concluded)

Published in The Express Tribune, June 9^th, 2012.

In one of the endnotes to his outstanding essay titled The partition of India and retributive genocide in the Punjab, 1946–47: Means, methods, and purposes Paul R Brass, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the author of a number of important books and articles on ethnic politics and collective violence in South Asia, remarks: “The absence until very recently — and even now the very meagre presence — of serious research on what happened during the partition is regrettable… It has meant that the partition exists as a disastrous (for the Indian side) disjuncture in the arrival of the Indian state on the world scene and, on the Pakistan side, as a regrettable but necessary catastrophe that made possible the creation of the Pakistan state. But the sharpness and horrific character of the partition has made it appear as a kind of terrible accident that cannot be fit into the perceptions of the people of India and Pakistan concerning their past and future.”

The return to this highly revealing academic essay was occasioned by the recent publication of an interesting newspaper article “Manto and Sindh” (Dawn, May 27) by Mr Haider Nizamani. The writer correctly points out the marked difference between the ways Sindh and Punjab (the two provinces of present-day Pakistan as well as the two multi-ethnic, multi-religious larger communities on either sides of the border) experienced collective violence and mass migration at the time of Partition. As such, Nizamani justly complicates and questions what is taken as the dominant ‘national’ narrative of the 1946-47 violence that needs to be seen exclusively belonging to Punjab based on its unique experience, during and after Partition.

Sindh, clearly, did not undergo the kind of “retributive genocide” and the consequent total ethnic cleansing that the partitioned Punjab suffered. Nizamani argues that the experience of Punjab at the time of Partition should not be generalised as that of other parts of the present federation that do not share in full measure the high level of anti-non-Muslim rhetoric and fascination with the so-called ‘Pakistan ideology’ and its resultant militarism.

Nizamani expresses satisfaction on the fact that “Sindh has no equivalent of Saadat Hasan Manto as a chronicler of Partition. And the absence of a Manto-like figure in Sindhi literature on that count is good news. It shows the resilience of Sindh’s tolerant culture at a time when Punjab had slipped into fratricidal mayhem”. However, it was Manto who made a point similar to the one put forward by Brass and which we can benefit from even today, when the compulsions of domestic identity politics have created at least three competing historical narratives held by Punjabis, Sindhis and the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs of Sindh respectively.

Manto says: “Both Hindus and Muslims were being massacred. Why were they being massacred? There were different answers to the question; the Indian answer, the Pakistani answer, the British answer. Every question had an answer, but when you tried to unravel the truth, you were left groping.”

Let us begin with the ‘Mohajirs’ in Sindh — the community that I happen to belong to — who are as diverse a lot as any other in our country. As a result of a series of political decisions of inclusion and exclusion, they define themselves as the people (and their descendants) who migrated into Sindh mainly from UP/MP, Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Hyderabad, although the first category seems to dominate the rest culturally and politically.

It is interesting to note that those who came from East Punjab even to Sindh are excluded from the list; the popular community narrative nevertheless takes exclusive ‘credit’ for the ‘sacrifices’ made as a result of the Partition massacres that uniquely took place in the East and West Punjab! The ‘Mohajir’ narrative — as well as the current demand for ethnic division of Sindh being raised by a minority among them — is, therefore, more easily dismantled and shown to be wanting than the other two competing ones.

The current Sindhi narrative of the Partition events is not so seamless and impregnable either, as it is no less shaped by the event that occurred afterwards. True, the kind of violence that shook the two parts of Punjab was not experienced by Sindh as it decided to join Pakistan and a large part of its Hindu population left without being massacred. But the period in question was no less traumatic for the Sindhi Hindus who were made homeless.

Mohan Kalpana, the renowned Sindhi fiction writer, notes in his autobiography, “India’s freedom brought me no joy and in the last 35 years I have never once offered salutes to the Indian flag. I always found this freedom lacking and I never participated in the Independence Day celebrations. It reminds me that on this day we were dispossessed of our country.”

Nizamani goes on to present a rather uncomplicated explanation: “The violence against Sindhi Hindus and their mass migration to India was a tragic loss scripted, orchestrated and implemented by non-Sindhis in Sindh.” However, there are historical references that seem to question this view.

One such reference is a quote from Mohammad Ayub Khuhro, when he held the portfolio of Public Works in the Sindh ministry after the 1946 elections. He is quoted by Parsram V Tahilramani in his 1947 book Why the Exodus from Sind: Being a Brief Resume of Conditions Responsible for Exodus of Hindus, Sikhs and Harijans from Sind as saying: “Let the Hindus of Sind leave Sind and go elsewhere. Let them go while the going is good and possible; else I warn them that a time is fast coming when in their flight from Sind, they may not be able to get a horse or an ass or a gari or any other means of transport.”

Tahilramani is clearly of the view that their exodus was the result of a concerted campaign conducted by the leaders of the Sindh Muslim League during and after the 1946 elections.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 2^nd, 2012. 

Let’s temporarily come out of our latest feverish national dilemmas — whether the final word would be spoken by an elected or an unelected functionary of the state in the matter of the prime minister’s disqualification — and consider the significance of this question in other areas of our national life. This question deeply informs our smaller, personal choices that are much more important to our individual and family lives than larger-than-life national issues.

Consider, for example, the choice before a young Muslim parent of a girl child when she turns three: whether or not to arrange for her education. There was a time when the question was summarily decided by a professional religious adviser — in the negative. I have decided to use the past tense while writing the previous sentence but not without some reluctance, for just two weeks ago, I saw a small booklet being sold in Karachi’s Urdu Bazaar. The author of the booklet — a tiny part of an avalanche of recent Urdu publications on this and other important subjects — has no doubt in his mind that teaching English to your girl child is equivalent to letting her lose her haya (‘modesty’), which is seen as the single most important — perhaps the only — value her life holds.

I used the past tense — even perversely enjoying my reluctance in making this tiny, insignificant grammatical choice — because I realise that although the pious and self-righteous author of the blessed booklet is absolutely sure that he has the authority to interpret the divine law to draw the conclusion that he does, he has little choice but to put his fatwa through one devilish device of modernity — the printing press — in his effort to convince his literate readers not to send their female offspring to a school where they have a danger of being exposed to the language of the immodest.

Also, I realise with a satisfaction no less perverse than my above-mentioned reluctance that a great majority of Karachi’s citizenry today decide to educate their daughters to whatever level they can materially afford to, despite the cocksure maulvi enjoying the divine right to make such choices for them. It may be because they are bombarded with such fatwas only through printed words, mosque loudspeakers, religious TV channels and other modern means of communications that they still have the luxury to decide whether their daughters can do with or without the haya that the maulvi talks about in his written or oral sermons.

Can we say that this is a small, apparently insignificant, example of life overtaking law — religious law in this case — or at least one particular interpretation thereof?

Many other people. e.g., those who suffered life in Taliban-occupied Swat not so long ago, have a rather narrower choice. Not only were they exposed to another modern variety of communication technology — the famous FM radio station which was aptly called the ‘Mullah Radio’ as long as it remained alive — but an even more effective way of convincing them to follow the right path: girls’ schools were routinely and most convincingly blown up using state-of-the-art devices that put to “the constructive use” the explosive technology reportedly invented by Alfred Nobel.

Even the city folk — who are urbanised only to the extent and as a result of their migration from backwaters to urban Pakistan — have the choice to decide about the personal fate of their daughters, based on their own priorities. This, thanks to the fact that our Islamic Republic is perpetually and anachronistically reluctant to decide that getting modern education is a fundamental right of every child — male or female — that cannot be usurped even by his/her parents or guardians, let alone the guardian angels advising them on religious law, which — being a complete code of life — is supposed to be the basis of every single decision affecting the life of a minor or adult citizen.

This, to my mind, is important. More important than the fate of another elected chief executive whose conduct has been found questionable by those who think they enjoy the authority to decide in this matter. The parents of a girl — a child or an adult — seem to have much more unquestioned authority in our society than the unelected organs of the state can ever dream of. Once the girl child turns an adult, her haya grows up into the family’s izzat which is to be protected by its authoritative counterpart, ghairat; both sacred words translated, rather inaccurately but interestingly, as ‘honour’. This event occasionally leads to the parents, or other family or tribe members, of a young woman deciding whether she should be killed for her questionable conduct.

I present below two small, insignificant news items involving the murder of young Pakistani women that have been all but ignored by our political and social commentators.

On April 30, 2012, Zahra, 24-year-old widow of Faizan — famously killed by the American contractor Raymond Davis on January 26, 2011 — and her mother Nabeela, 50, were allegedly shot dead by Zahra’s father, Shehzad Butt, at their house in Johar Town, Lahore. The house was purchased with the sacred blood-money coughed up — under the Islamic law of Qisas and Diyat — by some philanthropist on behalf of the American killer. The din this second series of murder of Pakistani citizens produced was, if I am not wrong, a wee bit less audible than the electronic frenzy we were subjected to for more than a year previously. Zahra’s life as a Pakistani citizen was apparently less valuable (her mother can be dismissed as mere collateral damage) than those extinguished by someone not having the same kind of authority as her father.

A few days ago, Alesha informed a court in England that she witnessed her Pakistani parents, Iftikhar and Farzana, suffocate her elder sister Shafilea (who was 17) to death in 2003. The parents, if found guilty, will certainly be punished.

We cannot be sure about Shehzad Butt. Pakistani judges are known to be lenient with men who murder their women for ghairat.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 26^th, 2012.

In his important book Identity and Violence (2006) the renowned contemporary thinker Amartya Sen describes himself as follows: “I can be, at the same time, an Asian, an Indian citizen, a Bengali with Bangladeshi ancestry, an American or British resident, an economist, a dabbler in philosophy, an author, a Sanskritist, a strong believer in secularism and democracy, a man, a feminist, a heterosexual, a defender of gay and lesbian rights, with a non-religious lifestyle, from a Hindu background, a non-Brahmin and a non-believer in an afterlife (and also, in case the question is asked, a non-believer in a ‘before-life’ as well).” For Sen, a person’s identity is a product of his or her “choices” rather than his or her “immutable attributes”.

In most parts of rural or semi-urban Sindh, when a person who appears to be from a particular region of the province is asked to define himself with a typical question: “Pan kair ahio?” (‘Who are you?’), he knows from his cultural experience what exactly the questioner is interested in finding out; he knows that the question is not the same as when he is asked to disclose his identity while, for example, trying to gain access to a government office. The first thing the person trying to answer the question is supposed to come up with is the name of his caste or tribe. The question that generally follows the first one is “Kathe vetha ahio?” (literally, ‘Where do you sit’? meaning, ‘Where do you reside?’)

If the questioner has sized the person up and recognised him as someone connected with agriculture in one of various ways of working using his two hands, the person is expected to tell the name of the owner of the land on which he works and where he and his family are ‘allowed to stay’. The person’s own name comes — if it does at all — only afterwards.

The above sequence of questioning can be generalised for most geographical areas of present-day Pakistan that still retain the traditional tribal/semi-tribal and feudal/semi-feudal characteristics but have been increasingly feeling the pressure of change in the shape of urbanisation. And, as a consequence, the answer to the same basic question (‘Who are you?’) has to be slightly modified depending on the attributes of the particular situation.

Ever since ‘identity’ became the recognised basis of politics in our part of the world — precisely, from the latter half of the 19^th century onwards, when the new ways of communication put a particular group of people face to face with people from ‘other’ groups that appeared to be quite different from themselves — the outward question (‘Who are you?’) and its inward counter-question (‘Who are we?’) have been asked, debated, answered, emphasised, negated, accepted, rejected and so on, endlessly, without a break.

The same primary question, when asked in an urban setting in Pakistan today, can produce a variety of interesting answers. In such situations, a person’s identity can be a sum total of several aspects: ethnic, linguistic, religious, sectarian, caste, geographical origin, and so forth, with one of these overriding others. In a large number of cases, educational or professional background becomes the first thing a person chooses to introduce himself or herself with. There can also be, in a few cases, at least, when some personal ‘choice’ overtakes all the ‘immutable’ attributes and one hears such unconventional self-introductions like “I’m a gay painter”.

However, in most cases still, one or another ‘immutable’ attribute actually makes some of the most important decisions concerning one’s life as a member of a social group — choice of a spouse in an arranged marriage, deciding who to vote for in elections (when and if they take place), choosing how, where and in what manner one’s dead body would be taken care of — and, indeed, in some traumatic situations, whether or not one would be allowed to die a ‘natural’ death.

One may try to see this perpetual questioning of the traditional kind — getting more than a little non-traditional with the passage of time — in the background of the process of a vast and deep socio-economic change we have been going through and participating in with our individual and collective decisions. One could sense in it a captivating and revealing tug of war between people’s ‘chosen’ and ‘immutable’ attributes. The egalitarian nature of the most (though by no means all) significant advances in technology push their makers and users towards the distant but inevitable goal of individualism and democracy.

Some such technologies experienced by the various groups of people in the subcontinent within the first fifty years — roads, railways, water-channels, printed papers, books and schools — prompted smaller groups of people to align themselves with other groups with whom they felt they had something in common. It was a political need as each group of people wanted to secure its access to the new kinds of resources born out of the new technologies.

The groups that had privileged access to traditional resources (landowners, noblemen, owners of knowledge and literacy — all belonging to the so-called upper castes) were quicker and more successful in making alliances with their likes by emphasising certain common attributes of identity and suppressing (or temporarily ‘forgetting’) certain differences. You must have heard leaders of different hues and colours urging a large (imagined) community of people like this: “Is waqt hamain aapas ke sab ikhtalafat bhula kar muttahid ho jana chahiye” (‘At this time we should forget all our differences and get united’). The trouble is that forgetting the differences is not the same thing as addressing them; something consciously, temporarily can, at some other time, spring back and start playing its role.

In any case, such privileged, upper caste groups and their alliances across variously defined geographical or other areas tried with a high degree of success to impose their own political (religious, sectarian, ethnic, linguistic) agenda upon the groups below them — traditionally unprivileged and dispossessed mainly due to their caste status.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19^th, 2012.

Some people have reacted with displeasure to the quotation from Ramcharitmanas in my previous column. In my view, the feeling of discomfort that mention of the two-liner attributed to Tulsidas seems to induce may be rather misplaced. It is only a coincidence that a reference to such an idea — which we seem to find outrageous today — was discovered in a specific literary-religious text authored by a historical person; one could otherwise find any number of such gems of  ‘folk wisdom’ that are current in the languages we use.

There is a similar saying (akhan or kahavat) in Punjabi — suitably rhymed and all, though not attributable to any specific author — that goes like this: Jat, bakra, bayl te bad-kirdar naar/charain bhukkhe bahle, rajje karan vigaar (a Jat, an ox, a goat and a woman of a bad character/ it’s better to keep all four starved, as they‘ll make trouble if allowed to have a full meal). I found it on page 195 of the collection of proverbs, Saade Akhan, compiled by Dr Shahbaz Malik and published by Dawn Book Society, Lahore, in 1978. The interesting book had an incomplete version — covering alphabetically from alif to jeem — 10 years earlier with an even more interesting title: Sau siane, ikko mat (A hundred wise men and a single wisdom).

If we could rise above our own caste biases, we would easily see how there is outrage to such offensive wisecracks only when the social group being targeted has become sufficiently empowered in a particular milieu in the course of changing times. People from the same group would find it entirely acceptable to humiliate those that they consider below them in caste hierarchy. You wouldn’t hear many voices of protest at the wholesale contempt and verbal violence meted out to social groups such as jangli, mirasi, julaha, nai, choorha, teli, kanjar, and even tarkhan. (One would recall the backhanded compliment, tarkhan da puttar or  ‘son of a carpenter’, given to Ghazi Ilamdin — an unlettered hero of many educated persons — by Allama Iqbal — a member of a Shaikh clan converted from Pundits of Jammu who had monopolised knowledge for centuries.)

Seen from another angle — as indicated to me by Nadir Ali, a respected Punjabi writer during a conversation — such insulting proverbs and sayings are coined and made current as a reaction from entrenched, higher groups against a low social group attempting a rebellion or having the potential of attaining a higher economic status.

According to this view, one finds a great sense of resentment and hostility against, for example, julahas or weavers, who were seen as attaining a level of prosperity as a result of the cotton cultivation in the northern plains made fertile by the vast and newly-built canal network. In the earlier two phases of the British colonial onslaught, first their indigenous industry and trade had been destroyed and then, after the 1857 rebellion was crushed, they were forced to migrate and scatter in far off places in the subcontinent.

I would like to look at the above-mentioned akhan from two angles. One, people of the highest caste — Brahmins and Syeds — were relatively fewer in the doabs of the Western Punjab that came to be called canal colonies. The dominant Hindu upper castes were Banias and Khatris. Jats — both converted to Islam and Sikhism — who came to dominate the agricultural scene, were traditionally counted among shudras or kammis as they were among the social groups that worked with their hands. As an aside, the making of these canal colonies with its attendant migration and resettlement of people in large numbers, was a great feat of social engineering as well, and, to my knowledge, its impact on the politics of Punjab in the first half of the 20^th century — rabid polarisation on religious lines, bloodiest communal riots and most successful ethnic cleansing at the time of Partition, etc — is yet to be fully recognised.

The second, less area-specific and deeper way of analysing the mat — ‘wisdom’ — inherent in the proverb targeting Jats (and women breaking the rules of sexuality) as representatives of low social classes — is to recognise how, in our societal tradition, restricting access to resources — water, food, shelter, education, employment, social interaction and so on — constitutes the most basic form of social stigmatisation and violence. The belief that members of human groups, usually on the basis of their birth in a specific group, have an innate level of right to access and use the resources available in their environment, seems to survive to this day.

Consider a simple expression that you are likely to overhear being used in a jovial or hostile tone at a public place even today: tere piu ne vi kadi chicken khada si? (Had even your father ever eaten chicken?) This directly means that if you do not by birth belong to the social group traditionally allowed to consume better food (or use any other resource), you must be imitating or aping the lifestyle of that higher group. It is common knowledge that in our rural areas and many parts of our urban centres, where caste system still survives as the basis of social organisation, lower caste people suffer many such social restrictions.

Dr BR Ambedkar analyses such social practices, and the strong belief underlying them, in his marvellous treatise The Annihilation of Caste. He mentions how consumption of certain food items has traditionally been considered ‘a mark of high social status’.

Such rules governed whether a person would be allowed to wear shoes, dress in clothes of his choosing, mount a horse, draw water from the common well and so on. Not only are our villages spatially divided to impose social segregation on certain groups, even our cities force them to live in their ghettos such as Kumharwara, Dhobighat, Sweepers’ Colony and so forth — away from the gaze of people who have perfected the art of imitating the shurafa and learned to deny the existence of caste in society.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 12^th, 2012.