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 9th, 2012.
COMMENTS (38)
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@V.C.Vutani
You are crying in the wilderness.The audience have left the podium long time ago.
I look forward to your detailed narratives and research on these pages in coming days. You are doing great service to this cause and our collective future. Kudos to you.
@Mr Bhutani I went to times of india and reads whole article of miss sonya farah it was good write specially Mahindra and Muhammad of Ludhiana.
I am agreed with Mr Bhutani, North indian muslims screwed themself by making two diffrent education system after 1857 war of freedom and then lost the track of occupiers given govt jobs and they realised and build it Ali garh University and that class made pakistan...
@afatqiamat, a good summarization of the events by you. The history taught and accepted in Pakistan is so diametrically different from the facts leading upto partition and there after.
Furthermore, Askari wholeheartedly supported the 1947-48 war between Pakistan and India as "Jehad-e Kashmir". He even recommended that those who thought it was not a Jehad should be stopped from saying so for a period of fifty 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 "Jehad".
A correction is also in order. The short-lived journal jointed edited by Manto and Askari was called "Urdu Adab", not "Pakistani Adab". The latter was the name of another periodical launched by Sibte Hasan in the 1970s from Karachi. He was assisted in its editing by Saeeda Gazdar and Fahmida Riaz.
@Babloo: Hahaha! That shows your mindset. You also need to objectively analyse your own history.
@ashar: 'the passion for prominence is a basic instinct of humans and history has shown that when people did not find any opportunity to satisfy their instinct they often resorted to ga against the prominent ones'. So will that also apply to Baluchistan. Correct?
Amidst all this, nobody should lose track of the currently undergoing annihilation of Hindus in Bangladesh.
People also need to know that the notion that millions of Pakistanis gave their blood for freedom is simply not true. The death happened during transfer of population after independence and it happened on both sides.
In the freedom movement from the British, Congress leaders went to jail for many years at a stretch, Gandhi, Sardar Patel, Nehru, Tilak and some like Lala Lajpat Rai even lost their life. Thousands of COngress followers also went to jail. There is not ONE member of Muslim league that went to jail for even one full day.
Dear Moderator,
Perhaps my earlier intervention was too long. Here is a slightly shorter version. I have written op-eds for your pages before and would not have sent this if I did not forcefully disagree with Ajmal Sahab's equating Askari, a little known but brilliant figure... with the the Islamist tendencies today.
Kamran Asdar Ali
My response
While there is much that I agree with Ajmal Kamal Saheb, his position on Mohammad Hasan Askari in this and previous articles seems a bit harsh. It is true that in the immediate post-independence moment, Mohammad Hasan Askari (1919-1978) was one of the major critics of the Progressives. There is also reason to believe that the emergent Pakistani State may have found fodder in Askari’s writings or for that matter also in the essays by Dr. M D Taseer (Salman Taseer’s father and Faiz’ brother in law), against the communists. Yet we need to be a bit more cautious before linking Askari to the “imposition of the gagging Public Safety Act, adoption of the Objectives Resolution ------- banning of a large number of newspapers and periodicals, launching of a ‘holy war’. This kind of a claim of “guilt by association” cannot be sustained by serious historical analysis.
Askari’s is an important voice in the history of Urdu criticism, which cannot be easily bracketed into an ideological straight jacket. Indeed, Askari soon after independence had started arguing for a specifically Pakistani literature and found the Muslim progressives within the literary movement were alienated from their own cultural history and also not committed to the idea of Pakistan itself. This was a major charge that he pushed in his writings of the time with much force. Yet in the same period, he complains in his writings against the negative attitude of the Pakistani state against intellectual and creative production through various forms of censorship, propaganda and coercion. Askari argues that only in a society that is based on social justice, economic progress and the defense of individual freedoms can arts and cultures flourish. Within this context, in his early essays, he was opposed to how the state was using Islam to subdue politicians and create consent (also see Intizar Hussain’s memoirs in which Askari is shown to maintain his right to criticize the Progressives, but was not willing to give the government this right. Chiraghon Ka Duhan,48).
Further, in contrast to Ajmal Sahab’s claim, he and Sa’dat Hasan Manto in 1948 (this was a time when the Progressives and the CPP condemned Manto, N. M Rashid, Meeraji and others, as being obscene and perverted writers) together brought out a Urdu literary magazine, Pakistani Adab. Further, Askari also wrote a very erudite introduction of Manto’s collection of partition short stories, Siah Hashye (1948). Mohammad Hasan Askari’s intellectual trajectory took many twists and turns until his death in 1978. He remained eclectic in his intellectual tastes ( in the early 1960s he criticized Mumtaz Shireen for her anti Soviet remarks in an introduction to a book of her own essays) and by the 1970s had moved politically to a more narrowly defined Islamic oriented political position and converted to a more pan-Islamic notion of Muslim history. Yet, we should not use Askari’s later years to understand how he thought and wrote in the late 1940s. There is much more, and this intervention is not to resurrect the reputation of a particular individual, we can have differences of opinion, but we need to at least give some credence to history.
About Muslims leaque
The First Point of its Charter was " ...Loyality to the Queen...."
it was patronized by the British , also it claimed to be the sole representative , and that claim Nose dived in the 1936 elections , when it won 2 out of 84 seats in the Muslim Majority Province of Punjab , and 19 out of 129 Seats in the Muslims Majority Province of Bengal .
that when Jinnah made a Pact with Sikandar Hyat , ...who belonged to another breed of British Loyalist aka feudals , by the Feduals too are a British Construct , correct me If I am wrong , but before British , that is during the Mughal or Sikh ERA we hardly find any feudal in their present form . and this coalition , using relgion and Language with full blast of Propaganda did the damage .... FUD [ Fear , Uncertainity and Deception ...using two more D , disinformation and distortion ] is a time tested and very successful strategy ... the Direct Action day in Bengal was the rehearsal , it succeeded , and was then replayed in Punjab ,with the Pindi Massacers of 5000-7000 Sikhs , and that ignited a irreversible process of communal violence in the Muslim Majority Province of Punjab in which accordingly some 600,000 to 800,000 Punjabis killed each other , this figure is the estimate Mr Ishatiq Ahmed himself has given in his Magnum Opur researched book , Punjab : Bloodied and Partitions , other wise else where the figure is as high as 10 lac , and that is beside the 9.2 Million that were forcefully displaced. , also Jinnah was in consultation with the Sikh Leadership for an amicable solution to their problem , see sikhs were scattered all over Punjab but except for a few Eastern Punjab areas , no where in majority ...so this problem was being discussed , and then Pndi happened , or was the engineered ...?? this is the question that needs another honest answer , else imagine , Sikhs now have their Mecca in One country and Madina in another country ... ironic isn't it ...
@Babloo sahib I agree , the percentage you qouted are comparative and relative , bottom line from an area which had about 18-20% non muslims over all , the percentage is now down to about 2-3% at Max .
and the need to revisit the Partition is real , the half truth , distortions, deceptions , twisting of FACTS had to be put straight , else we will always be trapped in Illusions .
The following can be exhibit no 1, in the truth and reconciliation commission.
Pakistan First Law & Labour Minister, J.N. Mandal's Resignation Letter
Mr. J.N. Mandal, Minister for Law and Labour, Government of Pakistan On 8th October, 1950
(addressed to 1st PM of Pakistan , Mr Liaqat Ali khan ).
Who better to chronicle the politics of 1947-1950 period that a cabinet minister of Pakistan ?
http://www.mayerdak.com/root/jnmandal.htm
@Ali Tanoli sahab, I have great respect for Mr Ishtiaq Ahmed and have corresponded with him. I have not yet read his book. The thrust of his research is in recording the horrendous stories of partition on both sides of the border and that is a commendable exercise. He has skirted the issue of which party had the political goal of communalizing the electorate and inciting communal hatred which led to the riots that he is recording.
@afatqiamt sahab, The numbers you quoted, say 1/2 the story. Of the 7 million who migrated to Pakistan, they made only 12-13% of India's 55-60 million muslims in 1947. 85-90% of Indian muslims continued to stay in India. Today muslims in India number 150 million plus and are 14-15% of population..
Of the 7 million Hindus and Sikhs and more since then, that migrated to India from Pakistan, made 80-85% of all hindus and sikhs in West Pakistan. West Pakistan had a population of about 50 million in 1947. Hindus and sikhs, numbering about 10 million, made 20% of the population of West Pakistan in 1947.
So you can see, as a % of native population, the migration of minorities from W Pakistan was of horrendous proportions as compared to from India. The reasons are exactly the same that defined the politics of Muslim league and partition.
@Babloo sahab, Get the book of Mr Ishtiaq Ahmed and then starts commenting more than now.. @Ajmal sahab, Great write sir totally agreed and one more thing peoples like Abdul Ghafar Khan (Serhadi Ghandi) and sindhi Hero G,M Syed were forgotten by our historian by the state request they were great heros of freedom fight against occupation of brit.
The exodus of non-Muslims [ Hindus as well Parsis } is no exaggeration , infact various accounts suggest 14.5 Million people were uprooted during partition .
9.2 Million in Punjab about 4.5-4.7 either way , from East to West and from West to the Eastern part
3.2 Million in Bengal
and 1.2 Million in Sindh
the difference between the Exodus in Punjab and Bengal from Sindh is the Time
in Punjab and Bengal it took place in the 46-47 ERA
in Sindh It started after 47 Karachi saw its First Curfew in Jan 48 , when the incoming zealots killed about a 1000 or so non Muslims , the narration were already there , they are re surfacing now , that created Fear hence Exodus , the worst was these Non Muslims belonged to the Educated Middle Class of Sindh , and that void and vacuum and Loss has never been filled so far , or compensated because the new comers instead of filling that gap , created their own insulated cocoon of self contained existence ,hence the Urban Rural divide which actually translates into the ethnic divide , effect of which can be seen now .
@ashar:
What do you call not being able to vote, not being able to hold any elected office, and what do you call the “blasphemy laws”. Burying your own head in the sand is fine but getting rest of the world to follow you in burying their heads in the sand is not going to happen, is it.
You need to read a lot more diverse range of books instead what is taught in your schools. Whenever you dismiss lifetime works from the likes of Mr. Ishtiaq Ahmed; it shows your ignorance. On the other hand, I appreciate Mr. Ajmal Kamal point out the book, so I could get it from Amazon, if the author didn’t mention the book I wouldn’t have known.
Read Indian Summer by Alex Von Tunzelmann, it is an easy read, quite interesting.
Trying to wipe out history by hiding it is like throwing a dead body in the sea, it is going to come ashore sooner or later. Same goes for lies and deception. Remember the following:
I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could. Mahatma Gandhi
@David Smith:
We here in Pakistan will have to go through a lot more before we can even imagine reeducating anyone. We dream of taking back andalusia without even knowing why it fell in the first place. It is beyond our abilities to tell that many of the Andalusia ummayad princes were killed by the Fatimids or that the largest library there was destroyed by the Taliban of that era. When the whole foundation is based on falsehood, there is very little a truth commission can accomplish. Education has no place here. Only faith suffices for us.
From Wali Khan's Facts are Facts,
"The Elections of 1946: Provincial elections were held in February 1946. The Congress got a significant majority vote and an absolute majority in the Assembly. The British were visibly upset when the Congress won the Muslim seats. The League concentrated all its efforts in District Hazara, where it won eight out of nine seats. The British even tried every tactic, including delegating special officers, to ensure a few more seats for the League. For example, the Deputy Commissioner of Bannu as well as his wife toured the district and whenever anyone invited him for a meal, he always asked that his wife be presented with a scarf! This is a euphemism for "Vote for the Muslim League!" The wealth of the Princely States and efforts of Mullahs and Khan Bahadurs were all directed towards promoting the League. For the British, this was an embarrassing defeat. The Muslim League won only one seat from the entire district of Mardan, which belonged to Sir Mohammad Akbar Khan. Similarly, one seat was won from Peshawar, two from Bannu, and none from Kohat."
Has anything changed since in the way the establishment and its leagues(now PTI) work.
@Ejaaz " so what will we do when we find.....falsehood?" Reeducate the Ashars (above) of the world!
Sometime back there was an extract from Air Marshal Asghar Khan's memoirs in which he wrote that while he was flying back to Pakistan in the night, he could make out the border as villages were on fire on the eastern side of the border. The implication being that on the western side peace was reigning supreme. It goes to the credit of the Air Marshal that when this was pointed out, he said that he did not mean to imply unilateral violence. Whether he has made any corrections in his memoirs is not known. And this is how recording of history is skewed.
Remarkable insight and the honesty of purpose shines throughout.
As an aside, is it still possible to have a 'Truth and reconcilliation commission' adopting the South African model with active cooperation and encouragement from both Pakistan and Indian government. But then, off hand I can't think of a person having the stature of Desmond Tutu in whole of Pakistan and India.
In a way, the main cause of partition were the frist provincial elections held in British India in 1936. Congress won all over India, from Peshawar to Kerela. Muslims voted for candidates belonging to Congress, who were mostly Muslims in Muslim majority areas. The candidates of Muslim league were defeated by muslim candidates of Congress. The electorate was not communalized. There were no riots. For Muslim league of Jinnah to win, they needed muslims to support candidates of Muslim league on communal line and not vote for secular candidates of Congress, hindu or Muslim. The communalization of politics started after 1936 completely changed the picture and in 1945 provincial elections, the Muslim league candidates of Mr Jinnah did much better in Muslim majority areas. Communalization of electorate was the key to electoral success for leaders of Muslim league. That ended in partition, 2 states with two different ideologies.
For everyone universe started 4.5 billion years ago. However, for Muslims it started with the onset of Islam. How can they record history when they can not associate themselves with their pre-Islamic period? Same is the problem with Pakistan. Most Pakistanis simply can not associate themselves with pre-1947 India. Irrespective of such articles, Pakistan will continue to be blind to correct history.
@Babloo: Please read the essay again as that is not the thrust of this piece. Let us keep the discussion focused as it creates unnecessary distraction and loss of academic spirit.
I agree with you to carry this discussion on academic level in pursuance of truth.since you are writing on this tragedy i want you to make comment on this claim that "we have sacrificed 2 million people for the creation of Pakistan" as you said that all this started after mid of august 1947 though some people claim that might have happened in pindi before that. please discuss also how many lives were lost in fighting gora saheb or congress to get Pakistan? probably none. people have right to know this fact also. so all the loss of life, followed the law of uninteneded consequences. loss of life was not for the creation of Pakistan.
The best and perhaps only way to understand the history of India and Pakistan since 1947 is to understand the politics of partition. Upto 1935, over whelming majority of Hindus and muslims had never even heard the word Partition. Indian Muslim league of Mr Jinnah did very badly in state elections , because the Muslim candidates from muslim majority areas belonging to Congress won. You need to read that line again. Muslim candidates, from Muslim majority areas, belonging to congress won. The big leaders from the muslim community belonged to Congress. Its that defeat that prompted leaders of Indian Muslim league to introduce religion into politics and ask for vote in the name of religion. The rest as they say is history soaked in blood.
Fact No 1 : Congress and Hindus did not want partition. So it was in there political interest that differences between Hindus and Muslims were narrowed and not politicized. Communal harmony was in political interest of Congress and its leaders Gandhi and Nehru because they argued Hindus and Muslims can live equally in a secular democratic state, with equal rights for all citizens. Fact No 2: Indian Muslim League under Mr Jinnah wanted partition and a Muslim majority state. Increasing political differences between Hindus and Msulims and causing communal tension was in there interest as it re-inforced there political argument that Hindus and Muslims cannot live together in a Hindu majority state. All actions of Congress and Indian Msulim league and India and Pakistan after partition, have followed directly from the ideology each adopted at its birth.
So what will we do when we find out that we have been building on a falsehood? The Ghairat Brigade is now the majority rapidly moving towards Talibanisation. Our future is coming into focus. We will be talibanised, and at moment our falsehoods of the past will become ground truths. Those who can remember or even think of the events of 65 years ago will be all gone and rewriting of History by Askari and company will be complete.
Haider Nizamani sb. has placed historical facts, drawn the attention of the intellectuals whose direction has always remained in one way, along with the some segment of Media personnel, since decades, particularly attitude of Urdu Press. As you have mentioned in your article " Forget and forgive, they suggest, and move on". It is hard fact, so I also favour your opinion, this should done and behaved.
But today's political situations are dramatically changed in context of economical desperation, so things should be clear, I like the ideas and high lighted article of Mr. Haider Nizamani, which has politely explained situations, as in Punjab still same thinking and attitude is continue, being having majority vote in Pakistan parliament fears of real Public of Sindh are not wrong.
Things and real relation stands long when our minds will be clear.
Glad that you have finally recognized the other works on partition particularly of Dr. Ishtiaq Ahmed. Last time you did not take into account anything beyond Paul Brass' article in Journal of Genocide Studies, and one had to draw your attention to those works. With all due respect, I would request both you and Mr. Nizamani to stay focused on academic aspect of the discussion and not to mix polemics with the issue. I have lot of respect for Sadat Hasan Manto both as a fiction writer and as a social critic, but we should not forget that he was not a historian. His focus on Punjab is quite understandable since he saw the happening with his own eyes and was quite disturbed.
I agree 100% with Mr Ajmal Kamal on the issue of facing the facts of history and not suppressing them. For me, the pre-requisite to reconciliation, is acceptance of the following fact by Pakistan that Muslim Leage , under the leadership of Jinnah, ran a communal campaign, were masterminds of the horrors of the day of direct action and saw communal frenzy as convinient to their goal of establsihing a state for Muslims.
I think the only history we have to play with is the history of making of Pakistan. why not he leave his chandar gapat moria stance and dig out the history of fall of muslims in Andalas that might give substantial food for thought to pakistani youth.
The story of exodus of hindus from sind is an exageration of highest order. There has been no persecution of hindus after independence, in fact the travelling across the border has been a routine case for many years and those were mostly hindus who have been doing business through it. Still we have towns having ninty percent hindu population at border areas of Pakistan in Sindh. The main reason of thier seld exile would be the business opportunities since they were linked with Bombay and that city fell with India after partition.
Nizamani has tried to distort the history and so our author want to follow. Something has be kept in mind, the passion for prominence is a basic instinct of humans and history has shown that when people did not find any opportunity to satisfy their instinct they often resorted to ga against the prominent ones.
"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."
That's the tragedy of Pakistan in a nutshell, isn't it?