A NATION STILL SCARRED BY THE CARNAGE OF ITS BIRTH
Taimur Khan recounts the story of his grandfather and the horrors he experienced as one of the millions of Muslims who reluctantly left their home in India for a new life in a new country
It was August 11, 1947, three days before the Indian subcontinent was hastily divided by the departing British Raj. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the dapper barrister who led a movement for Pakistan’s independence in the name of India’s Muslims, had just been sworn-in as Pakistan’s governor general.
In his first address to the newly formed constituent assembly in the capital of the country he had helped to will into existence, Jinnah set out his vision to be carved out of the jewel in the crown of Britain’s empire.
Jinnah and his All-India Muslim League had rallied Muslim elites behind a movement that first sought a federal India with semi-autonomy ensuring the rights of Muslims.
The Indian Congress Party rejected this power-sharing idea and eventually it was agreed to partition the subcontinent into two states – one larger country of Hindu-majority territories, and the other of provinces to the east and west where Muslims were more numerous.
Planning by British authorities and the mapping of borders was quick and sloppy, and left the overwhelmingly Muslim territories of Jammu and Kashmir under Indian control – a decision that has plagued the two countries ever since – and deferred self-determination for Kashmiris indefinitely.
India inherited the well-functioning apparatus of the colonial state, along with the wealth of state coffers and a military. Jinnah was left to scramble for money, the basics of a military, and the acquiescence of royal houses who owned theterritory necessary for the creation of Pakistan.
After all this, on the cusp of nationhood, Jinnah had come to Karachi to be sworn in as Pakistan’s first leader.
Jinnah was a minority within the subcontinent’s Muslims. He was anglicised and liberal, like Jawaharlal Nehru
While Hindu-Muslim violence had flared over the previous year, there were no plans for minorities on either side to migrate. The Congress and Jinnah had sought political backing from minorities, and a Hindu official presided over the swearing-in.
Jinnah was a minority within the subcontinent’s Muslim multitudes, who were mostly Sunni, and predominantly Punjabi, Pushtun and Bengali. He was an Ismaili Shiite from Gujarat, anglicised and liberal, much like his Congress rival, Jawaharlal Nehru.
“In course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shiites, Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on will vanish,” Jinnah said in his first speech as Pakistan’s leader.
“You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place ofworship in this state of Pakistan.
“Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”
His utopian vision proved, sadly, to be but just that and a year later, Jinnah died. As successive regimes tried, to varying degrees, to subsume deep divisions beneath an Islamic identity, his first address was largely scrubbed from official narratives.
Within days of official independence, violence broke out on both sides of the new borders. More than six million Muslims and five million Hindus and Sikhs left their ancestral home and at least a million people were slaughtered in the process.
My grandfather supported the idea of Pakistan but never imagined a life there. In the First World War, his father fought for Britain against Germany in the trenches of France, and then against his fellow Muslims in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan.
My grandfather followed his father, joining Military College Jehlum, an academy for Muslim officers. But a sense of injustice at the treatment meted out by his British commanders drove him away and he eventually became a civil engineer.
He worked for the colonial state in the United Provinces of northern India, and as momentum gathered for independence he was made aide de camp for the nawab of the Loharu princely state.
He recalled that after August 14, confusion reigned. He saw his former neighbours act in ways he could not comprehend. He is still shaken, 70 years later.
One day he took a jeep and a contingent of soldiers sent by a neighbouring Hindu royal to protect the nawab. A localbutcher told the soldiers his daughter had been kidnapped by neighbours and took them to the house. My grandfather said they found the girl, who had been raped repeatedly.
Later, my grandfather and the awab’s sons organised the removal by train of Muslims to Pakistan. Somemade it across the border, others did not. He moved with the nawab back and forth between Pakistan and India many times in those months.
One night on the Pakistani side, they met a group of Sikh men, badly beaten and terrified. They were being held by a Pushtun tribal militia, who planned to execute them.
The awab pulled rank, loaded the Sikhs into his jeeps and set off toward India. As soon as they crossed the border, the men jumped out of the moving vehicles and ran.
Other moments are unforgettable for different reasons. At the end of the evacuation, my grandfather and the nawab were probably the only Muslims left in the town, and it happened to be Eid. Alone, they went to the Eidgah to pray. One of the soldiers protecting the nawab, a Hindu, did salat with them, a profoundly moving act of solidarity, and perhaps a warning to bystanders.
The awab moved to Jaipur, and my grandfather and his young wife with him. But it only delayed his inevitable move to Pakistan to rejoin his parents.
The train stopped a mile from the border, and he and my grandmother, who desperately wanted to stay in India, walked the rest of the way. Gangs of young men were waiting, and took whatever valuables the refugees carried as Indian security forces looked on.
My grandmother’s jewellery was returned to her because, in a bizarre twist of fate, one of the Indian soldiers recognised my grandfather. My grandparents walked on, to start their lives again in Karachi.
Seventy years and three or four generations later, it is unclear what lessons Partition still holds.While Pakistan and India have evolved along very different paths, the outcomes dont look particularly different.
The intolerance that fuelled the bloodshed in 1947 is still there in the DNA of both sides. In New Delhi, a populist Hindu nationalist party has replaced a dynastic party. Mob attacks and killings of minorities and low-caste Indians have become a daily outrage.
Pakistan is no less troubled. Politics is infused with the anger and resentment of a growing middle class. Although religious parties lose out in elections to large provincial parties run by elites promising patronage to largely impoverished voters, it hardly matters.
State policies, migration to the Gulf and broader ideological trends in regional Muslim-majority countries have pushed Pakistani society steadily right.
Pakistan’s economy has
grown steadily over the past decade and its fitful democratic system has taken root, with a second consecutive transfer of power in national elections due next year.
The military still plays an outsize role in politics, and dominates foreign and security policy that is constitutionally the duty of the government, but the prospect of another period of military rule is diminished.
Parliament has secured crucial advances such as the empowerment of provincial governments.
The growing urban middle class mistrusts politicians, and a vibrant and chaotic national media reflects and amplifies their views. But it is this class that now feeds the increasingly independent judiciary and the military.
The youth of Pakistan– twothirds of the country’s 200 millionaire under 25 – are the most politically engaged generation since the early 1970s. A deal with China will see about US$56 billion (Dh205.69bn) invested ininfrastructure that will establish Pakistan as the link between China and the Arabian Sea.
On the, external debt is rising, exports are falling, the income earned by workers in the Gulf is not enough to cover the budget deficit and there is not the growth needed at home to provide enough jobs for young Pakistanis, even if cities such as Karachi and Lahore, and the quickly expanding provincial towns, feel flush with cash and entrepreneurial energy.
But instability is also increasing across the region, with no end in sight for the conflict in Afghanistan, increased tension with India and nowthe crisis among Pakistan’s long-time partners.
Who can predict what the next 70 years will bring?