THE MAKING OF EXILE

by NANDITA BHAVNANI

  PAKISTAN

  CHAPTER 15

  Inundated

  Accommodating Refugees

  In the year 622, hearing of a plot to assassinate him, the Prophet Muhammad left Mecca secretly and journeyed to Medina: This was the Hijrat. Those who accompanied the Prophet on this journey were known as muhajirs, while the citizens of Medina who received and helped them were known as ansaars. Now in 1947, the Muslims who had travelled from India to Pakistan also took on the name of muhajir, with its connotations of escape from persecution as well as of Muslim brotherhood and relief, dating from Islam’s earliest history. While Indian Muslims in West Punjab and East Bengal assimilated to a great extent with their fellow Punjabis and Bengalis, those from other parts of India – mostly from present-day Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh – simply grouped together under the overarching, imagined category of ‘muhajir’.1 They disliked the other terms that the local people used for them. Panaahgir, or refugee, was perceived as derogatory, while Hindustani identified them as Indian and not Pakistani.

  Initially, Sindhi Muslims also viewed themselves as ansaars, and gave help enthusiastically to the refugees from India. Even the family members of senior Sindhi Muslim politicians helped arrange food and clothing for the muhajirs. Salman Akhtar*, then a young boy of 12 in Shikarpur, recalls:

  In Shikarpur, in those days, I remember that we used to cook cauldrons of food at home and take them to the railway station to receive the muhajirs. We would meet them at the station, and take them to empty Hindu houses. We would give them extra quilts, beds and surplus items in our houses. We used to feel, ‘Our muhajir brothers have arrived.’ We felt like we were ansaars. There was lots of excitement in those days. All people are subject to illusions. We too had a lot of illusions then.2

  Yet, like other Partition refugees, the muhajirs brought with them a sense of entitlement: They felt that they had sacrificed more than others for the new nation, and now the nation ‘owed’ them. This did not endear them to the Sindhi Muslims. Moreover, as Penderel Moon, then minister in the Bahawalpur state, puts it, ‘the feelings of pity and sympathy which they had initially evoked had become deadened by repeated excitation.’3

  Soon after Independence, the Pakistan government found itself reeling under the refugee problem; close to 40,00,000 Muslim refugees had migrated from India. According to one report, only 1,50,000 Muslims remained in East Punjab; the rest had crossed the border.4 According to Penderel Moon, the West Punjab government, mistakenly thinking that most of the available agricultural land had already been allotted to East Punjabi refugees, felt that it could not accommodate refugees from outside Punjab. (This misapprehension was later shed when it was found that there was ample land to accommodate a far greater number of refugees, and that after meeting all just claims, there were lakhs of surplus acres.5) Moreover, Punjab had to deal with a high degree of communal violence, which had petered out only by late October 1947.

  However, Muslim refugees were pouring into Pakistan not only from East Punjab, but from various other parts of North India. At an inter-dominion conference at Lahore in early October 1947, Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, made a public statement saying that Pakistan was willing to take refugees only from East Punjab, and East Punjab princely states like Patiala, Nabha, Jind and Faridkot. At this time, there were rumours in Pakistan that there was a plot on the part of the Indian government to destabilise Pakistan by flooding it with Muslims. When Liaquat Ali Khan publicly protested against this ‘conspiracy’ and expressed a willingness to accept only Punjabi refugees, it naturally created a great uproar not only among Muslims in other parts of India who also wanted to migrate to Pakistan, but also among other Muslims who felt that this was contrary to the very idea of Pakistan. Liaquat Ali was compelled to immediately claim he was misquoted. He then ‘clarified’ that he meant to say: ‘While Pakistan would not refuse shelter to any Muslim settler, it must refuse in any way to facilitate abandonment by Muslims of their homes and properties in India outside East Punjab.’ He also asserted that if India were to ‘create conditions’ leading to the mass exodus of Muslims other than from East Punjab, Pakistan would resist this.6

  Even on the ground, there was considerable xenophobia among Punjabi Muslims. Today it has become a muhajir legend that non-Punjabi refugees from India who attempted to disembark from their trains at Lahore or other stations in West Punjab were told that Pakistan lay yet ahead.

  Both the NWFP and Baluchistan included large tracts of inhospitable mountainous terrain, which were not conducive to settling vast numbers of refugees. East Bengal was already dealing with its share of refugees, mainly from West Bengal, but also from Bihar and United Provinces; in any case it was far too remote and difficult to access from West Pakistan. This left Sindh, which had several features to its credit in 1947: a relatively low density of population, a foodgrain surplus in an era of scarcity, the promise of more arable land as more barrages and canals would be built over time on the Indus, as well as an atmosphere of relative calm and orderliness. Moreover, Sindh possessed Karachi, capital of the new nation. As a result, most non-Punjabi Muslim refugees were ‘shunted’ down to Sindh. Sindh was also meant to absorb some Punjabi refugees, since Punjab had received a ‘surplus’ of 12,00,000 refugees. This ‘surplus’ implied the excess of incoming Muslim refugees over emigrating Hindus and Sikhs, and the then prevailing philosophy was that any province could comfortably accommodate only as many refugees as those minorities who had migrated.7

  By the end of 1947, the Sindh government found it difficult to accommodate the constant stream of non-Punjabi refugees who were still coming to Pakistan. In early July 1947, Yusuf Haroon, president of the Sind Provincial Muslim League, had made a public statement that he expected about 23,000 muhajirs to come to Sindh over the next six months; it would be a problem to find homes for them.8 Yet, by mid-September, muhajirs were pouring into Karachi alone at the rate of about 500 per day. There were already 11,000 muhajirs in the city; by the end of the year, this figure would climb to nearly 3,00,000. Even Hyderabad was home to about 2,00,000 muhajirs by June 1948.9

  Another bone of contention was the issue of finances. The Sindh government, already cash-strapped in the process of setting up the central government and rehabilitating refugees, was obliged to make a loan of Rs 30 crores to the Pakistan central government, till India paid over cash balances of Rs 55 crores. The Sindh government’s surplus had already mutated into an alarming deficit. Although stamp receipts and land revenue had increased owing to the large-scale transfer of property, excise revenue had fallen, since most of the trade licence holders were Hindus who had migrated. Pakistan had received international aid for refugee relief from the UK, the US, Australia, the Red Cross and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Khuhro had also launched the Premier’s Fund for the rehabilitation of refugees in Sindh. Jinnah appropriated the funds collected in the name of this fund for his Quaid-i-Azam Fund. This had an added sting: It was expected that the Quaid-i-Azam Fund would be used mostly for the rehabilitation of refugees in the Punjab.

  In early January 1948, a conference of the premiers of all the West Pakistan provinces was held to determine how many refugees would be resettled in each province. The Pakistan central government began to persuade the Sindh government to accept 2,00,000 more refugees; 6,00,000-7,00,000 had already arrived in Sindh. Ultimately on 17 January, Khuhro asserted that Sindh could not accept more than 1,00,000 refugees. When he was reminded that Karachi had become the gateway to Pakistan and that, after the carnage on the trains, travelling by steamer to Karachi was the only safe way by which Indian Muslims could enter Sindh, Khuhro reportedly replied: ‘True, but they do not go out.’ When accused of leaving Indian Muslims to the ‘mercy of the Indian Dominion’, Khuhro retorted that Muslims in India were not the responsibility of the Pakistan government.10 By this time he had become extremely unpopular among the muhajirs and the muhajir pres
s, notably the Dawn, whose editor Altaf Husain had begun a diatribe against him. When, barely a week later, the West Punjab government announced that it would send ‘as many refugees as possible’ by bullock cart to Sindh, Khuhro stuck to his guns, insisting that Sindh would take only 1,00,000.11 This was despite the fact that Sir Francis Mudie, the governor of West Punjab, had recently taken him on a tour of cholera-afflicted refugee camps in Ferozepur and Walton to pointedly demonstrate the plight of the refugees there. A few days later, Khuhro’s refusal to accept more than 1,00,000 refugees was described as ‘meaningless’ by Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan, the central minister for refugees and rehabilitation. Khan, himself a Punjabi, maintained that the centre would be the decision-maker and would ensure the prompt rehabilitation of all the refugees.

  Having lived as a minority in India, many muhajirs in the years before Partition had stressed their Muslim identity, not their ethnic identity. Now this Muslim identity had little meaning in a country where 98 per cent of the population was Muslim. Hence the muhajirs stressed their ‘Pakistani’ identity and deplored Sindhi protest as ‘un-Islamic’ or ‘narrow provincialism’, as an act that undermined the important task of nation-building.

  At the end of January 1948, a cabinet meeting was held to consider the ‘gigantic problem’12 of resettlement and rehabilitation of muhajirs. When pressed to accept 5,00,000 more muhajirs, Khuhro claimed that Sindh could accept no more refugees. He was openly criticised for his attitude. The gulf between the Sindhi Muslims and the muhajirs was clearly widening.

  The Samoi

  There is great commotion in the royal court of Tamachi, the Jam of Thatta, with people rushing back and forth, whispering excitedly about the Samoi, the seven holy men who have arrived here to convey to the Jam some exceedingly important news. Once Jam Tamachi enters and the court falls into a hushed silence, the seven saints walk in. They enter in single file, with calm faces and their heads held high, an unfathomable light in their eyes.

  They used to be fishermen once, these seven men, until fate overtook their lives. The renowned saint of Multan, Makhdum Bahawal Haq had come to Thatta to visit his murids, his disciples. But his followers had changed since he had seen them last, and now they wanted more than the blessing of his presence; now they wanted to partake directly of his holy virtues. And so, in the custom of that age, they plotted to kill him, so that they may eat his flesh and make his radiance their own.

  But Shaikh Jeev, a loyal disciple, uncovered this macabre plot and elected to sleep in the saint’s bed that night, sacrificing himself instead. The murids, unaware, killed him and cooked the corpse. But at the very last minute, they could not bring themselves to eat him. Repenting, they cast the vessel with his remains into the Sindhu. It floated downstream till it was discovered by seven fishermen. They consumed the vessel’s contents, ignorant of what they were doing, and were immediately transformed into saints.

  And here they are now, in Jam Tamachi’s court, on the verge of their announcement. ‘Under your capital,’ they inform him, ‘is the head of a snake, whose tail reaches all the way up to Delhi. As long as it doesn’t move, Sindh need fear nothing from Hind.’ At the king’s request, they fasten the snake’s head by plunging a skewer into the ground, and the Jam breathes easy.

  ‘What rubbish!’ laugh the people of Thatta. ‘Whoever heard of a snake so long! Let’s pull the skewer out and see if there’s any blood on it.’ The Jam, doubting his earlier innocent faith, foolishly orders the skewer to be pulled out again. When it emerges, dripping scarlet, the crowd steps back, gasping with horror and dismay. The Samoi proclaim that now that the serpent has moved, Sindh has lost its talisman of protection forever.

  Clouded in fury, the Jam orders that the seven saints be beheaded. But, as each head rolls off the axe, the decapitated bodies slowly rise up. Now, there are seven beings again, the Hapt-Tan, seven ‘headless bodies’, each chanting a black verse of doom. They predict the bursting of dams, the drying up of rivers, and the invasion of warriors thundering in on horseback to fight long and bloody battles.

  Then the headless corpses walk in single file to the banks of the Puran river, where they finally collapse, lifeless. Their graves still stand there today.

  Disenchantment, Disagreement

  Jam Tamachi’s fears of invaders conquering Sindh came true 20 years later when his kingdom was vanquished by Arghuns from Central Asia. For many centuries, Sindh was ruled by outsiders. The Arghuns were followed by their cousins, the Tarkhans, and later by the Mughals. The native Sindhi Kalhoras ruled Sindh for a short while in the 18th century, after which the Talpurs from neighbouring Baluchistan took over, until they too were conquered by the British.

  Even during the colonial period, Sindhis were wary of ‘outsiders’ exercising power in their homeland. More than once, the British had mooted the idea of separating Sindh from the Bombay Presidency and merging it with Punjab, but the Sindhis, wary of becoming vassals of the Punjabis, had rejected the idea.

  When the Sukkur barrage was completed in 1932, the vast swathes of agricultural land in Sindh that could now be watered were given by the British to settlers brought in from the Punjab, since Sindh was considered to be under-populated, and since the British considered Punjabis to be better skilled and more hardworking than Sindhi peasants. These Punjabi landlords in Sindh preferred to import peasants from their native Punjab to till their lands, rather than local Sindhis. There were also many Punjabi Muslims in the Sindh provincial civil services, who gave preferential treatment to their fellow Punjabis.

  Consequently, a certain degree of anti-Punjabi sentiment had developed among the Sindhis, especially among Sindhi Muslims, in the 15 years before Independence, during which these Punjabis – both Muslim and Sikh – lived in Sindh. In June 1947, on the very eve of Partition, Mohammed Ibrahim Joyo, the Sindhi writer and intellectual, wrote prophetically of the spectre of Punjabi Muslim domination in the expected state of Pakistan.13 By the time Pakistan was born, Punjabi Muslims had already occupied a comfortable share of both the military as well as the bureaucracy.

  By early 1947, Sindhi Muslims had also become aware of fissures in their relationships with other ethnic Muslims, and there was even talk of Sindh becoming an independent sovereign state. Yet, the idea of Pakistan had given birth to much enthusiasm among Sindhi Muslims, and they had extended much help and hospitality to the early muhajirs. However, rifts began to develop between the two communities soon after Partition.

  There were several bones of contention between the Sindhi Muslims and the muhajirs. The Sindhi Muslim elite now found that the Pakistan central government was dominated by muhajirs and Punjabi Muslims. Jinnah, the governor-general, was an ethnic Gujarati while Liaquat Ali Khan, the first prime minister, was from Karnal in East Punjab. The muhajir leadership, mostly Muslim League stalwarts, had been at the forefront of the Pakistan movement in undivided India, especially in areas which were now in Independent India. Consequently, they felt entitled to dominate the central government of the new nation.

  During Pakistan’s initial years, Sindhi Muslim leaders did not play a significant role in its political landscape. During the preceding seven years – from the Lahore Declaration of March 1940 to Independence in 1947 – most Sindhi Muslim politicians had been so engrossed in internecine battles for power that they had had little time for or interest in the affairs of the Indian Muslim League at a countrywide level. This, combined with the fact that the Muslim League had seriously established its presence in the Sindh Assembly only as late as in the beginning of 1947, had led to the total absence of Sindhi Muslims in the central government. (Apparently, Khuhro had been offered a portfolio in the central government, but it came attached with a condition that if he turned it down, no other Sindhi Muslim would be offered the portfolio. Khuhro decided not to accept, as this would have meant his giving up the premiership of Sindh.) A. D. Mani, a Hindu right-wing journalist who visited Karachi in 1947, observed:

  […] the Muslim League leaders have taken ca
re to see that the key positions are manned by the Punjabis. […] The Punjabi is far more educated than the Sindhi Muslim, or the Frontier Muslim. Secondly, he is trusted by the League more than the Sindhi Muslim or the Frontier Muslim. The Sindhi Muslim has been notoriously volatile, changing sides often and endangering the prestige and the strength of the Muslim League.14

  As a result, the Sindhi Muslim elite found themselves being increasingly sidelined when it came to decision-making in Karachi. This was particularly galling for them, considering their initial enthusiasm for the idea of Pakistan, as also the fact that this was taking place on their home soil. Given the low rate of education among Sindhi Muslims, Sindh’s representation in the central government bureaucracy was also negligible. These issues were decried by the Muslim League members of the Sindh Assembly, who declared that if this were to continue, smaller provinces such as Sindh, Baluchistan and NWFP would become ‘vassals’ of the larger provinces of Punjab and East Bengal. They wanted preference for Sindhi Muslims in employment in the provincial government services.

  A spirit of federation was hard to come by in the Pakistan central government, which was severely dominated by the Muslim League. As the historian David Gilmartin points out:

  While Pakistan had stood during the 1940s as a symbol of moral order, transcending the divisions among Muslims, the Pakistan state that emerged in 1947 generally saw its task not as one of integrating diversity, but rather one of imprinting its authority onto a new and intractable territory.15

  The Sindhis made their objections known quite vociferously. As a result, the central government was obliged to make a concession to Sindh in early 1948 and take Pirzada Abdus Sattar in the cabinet as minister for food, agriculture and health.

  After the Karachi Pogrom

  When three ships carrying about 4,000 muhajirs from Bombay arrived in Karachi harbour on 7 January, there was a fear that the arrival of newly uprooted and traumatised refugees, at the end of a long and arduous journey, would incite fresh violence in the city after the carnage of 6 January. Hence, two of the ships were not allowed to dock for over 20 hours; the refugees were then taken immediately to the railway station where they were put into goods wagons and transported straightaway to Hyderabad, before they could even be given a meal. (One of the incoming muhajirs reportedly asked: ‘Is it Karachi or are we still in accursed Hindustan?’)16