One Year After Partition

(Formerly Editor, “Sind Observer,” Karachi)

QUAID-E-AZAM Mohammed Ali Jinnah is one of those restless persons whose overvaulting ambition is likely to be his undoing and the misfortune of his gullible countrymen,–duped and dragooned into suicidal courses.

The agitation for Pakistan was based on fraud and conducted by treachery. At the time of the partition of the country last year, North India was like a powder magazine–many Muslim mosques were arsenals and many Muslim houses secret places for the storage of guns and ammunition. There was to be a revolt at Delhi as a result of which the seat of the mighty Moghuls was to be recaptured from the hands of the non-violent and nerveless Hindu Congressmen and capitalistic Banias, and Muslim Raj once again established in the country; and in this revolt the Nizam of Hyderabad had a place assigned to him as the Emperor of India, south of the Vindhyas. This game was foiled by timely warning and the resolute action taken by the Government of India and the loyal Hindu and Sikh elements of the Indian Union.

Mr. Jinnah never forgave himself for this failure and the terrific discomfiture it brought to millions of Muslims in East Punjab, West United Provinces and the Rajputana States. Though the biter was deeply bitten, that taught no lesson to the League Fuehrer. No sooner did he ascend the Gadi at Karachi than he started his old game of embarrassing the Congress leaders and creating as many awkward situations and dilemmas for them as possible in the Indian Union. The man who proclaimed to the world that partition would mean peace, goodwill, and mutually happy relations and economic prosperity for all, could not suppress his congenital tendency for mischief. By clever maneuvers, false promises, and appealing to Muslim sentiment, the Nawab of Junagadh and a few of his taluqdar satellites were made to accede to Pakistan, though at no time was there the least likelihood of Pakistan ever defending Junagadh in the event of the latter getting into hot waters with the Indian Union. We have witnessed the contretemps. The Nawab of Junagadh has lost his Gadi and is at present bemoaning his fate at Karachi for becoming the dupe of Pakistan’s unscrupulous politicians.

Hyderabad and Junagadh were pawns in the hands of the Quaid-e-Azam, to disrupt and disorganise the Indian Union at a time when it required peace most to settle down to constructive work and win over tile Princes of India in support of the New Order. Frustrated in Junagadh, the Pakistan chiefs planned a grand offensive against Kashmir. A weak and unpopular Maharajah was at the mercy of Pakistan troops, and the tribesmen were to be turned over to Kashmir in search of loot. With the disappearance of the Maharajah, Kashmir was to be a subjugated Province of Pakistan, where the fierce tribesmen of the N.W.F.P. could be permanently settled, thereby saving Pakistan from the payment of continual bribes amounting to some crores of rupees every year. These Frontier Pathans, with food to eat and domesticated in Kashmir, would in future be a potential source of recruitment for the Pakistan armies. Thus many birds could be killed with one stone.

This plan was, unfortunately for Mr. Jinnah, foiled by the Government of India accepting accession, putting Shiek Abdullah in power, and waging war against the tribal marauders. At Lake Success, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Sir Mahomed Zafrullah Khan, thoroughly misled the Security Council by making false and unwarranted statements against India. The complainant (India), as it were, became the accused. But truth, like murder, cannot be said for long. The Pakistan army is openly fighting the Indian armies, in spite of Karachi’s barefaced denials, and the Frontier fanatics, who at one time numbered as many as 80,000, have found the job not so promising by way of loot and kidnapping fair Kashmiri women, on account of the severe plastering they received up hill and down dale. While returning to their homes, these marauders are looting Muslim property and carrying away Muslim women from the Punjab and the neighbouring districts of the N.W.F.P. The Pakistan Government has learnt the bitter lesson, that the Frontier Pathan, in the absence of Hindu property to loot and Hindu women to carry away, is no respector even of his brothers and sisters in Islam, and deals with them as disgracefully as he dealt with the Hindus when those unfortunate people were living in good numbers in the settled and unsettled districts of the north-west.

In Kashmir, as in Junagadh, Mr. Jinnah is not going to proclaim himself as Badshah. The Security Council’s Commission on India will soon know the truth of Pakistan’s full complicity in all the horrible deeds perpetrated by the raiders on the people of Kashmir, Hindu and Muslim, and by the so-called Azad Kashmir forces, which are nothing but Pakistan’s battalions in disguise. It is absurd to talk of the division of Kashmir and Jammu between the two Dominions, though the Pakistan chiefs may welcome it to save their face before their people. The Government of India should never become a party to any such outrage, and it is for the people of Kashmir, as the Nehru Government has always held, to decide their own future in an unfettered manner.

As to Hyderabad, the Nizam was always encouraged to count upon the support of Pakistan; to make him an independent sovereign ruler, for which he paid twenty crores of rupees as Mr. Jinnah’s fee. The old gentleman of Hyderabad will soon find, if he has not already done so, that he will be Nawab of Junagadh No.2, and that the Muslim League chiefs of Pakistan would, after making use of a person, invariably throw him on the scrapheap. The Nizam will be a very lucky man if he saves his kingdom for himself and his children within the next few months, instead of losing it. Neither the Muslims of the Indian Union nor those of Pakistan are in a position to help him, and he cannot create disturbances in India to prop him up on his tottering throne, any more than he can in Petagonia or Timbuctoo. The Government of India has made good use of the last few months of negotiations to tighten up its grip and strengthen its position, and so have the provincial governments on the borderlands. The economic war of strangulation will teach the Nizam and his advisers a much needed lesson, and, as to the Razakars, they are a mere rabble torturing unarmed civilians, but who will be blown to atoms by a modern army marching against them and their fellow-conspirators. The Government of India’s patient game, even under provocative circumstances, is not to be condemned by impatient war-mongers, because New Delhi will not be found wanting when the time comes to strike and strike effectively. A strong Government can afford to wait and watch.

When Mr. Jinnah attempted to create internal and external complications for India, little did he realise that he would be the victim of more headaches than Nehru has had to bear. The demand for an independent Pathanistan comprising the N.W.F.P. and the tribal areas can no longer be scotched by armed intervention and air bombing in Waziristan and other areas, or by imprisoning leaders like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Afghanistan is behind this tribal unrest, soon to be followed by risings, because it wants to see established a Pathanistan–a homeland for all Pathans–under one provincial government, preferably under its dominating influence, if not with itself as the predominant partner. These Afghan ambitions are not going to be extinguished by bombing the abodes of the Fakir of Ipi and his friends. A conflagration on the Frontier is not an unlikely contingency, which will tax to the utmost the resources of the infant State of Pakistan, and even create an internal convulsion. Even the British, in the heyday of their imperial power and glory did not light-heartedly enter on Frontier expeditions, on account of the enormous expenditure involved for a poor country like India. Pakistan can ill afford to indulge in these costly luxuries, while having its irons also in the Kashmir fire. It is also not free from the fear of India invading its territory; and hence it is that, day in and day out, Pakistan leaders din into the ears of their people that they are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and that their infant State can only be saved by submitting to the Fascist dictatorship of their Fuehrer, who alone created the State, and who alone can take it out of its dangers, himself being the gift of Allah to his people.

Internally, Pakistan is not quite a happy family. The enthusiasm of its people when the State was founded last year has evaporated. You cannot feed a people always on slogans of hatred. The Hindu ‘enemy’ is nowhere in Western Pakistan. He has gone away to India to save himself from a fearful and haunted life in an Islamic State under medieval Shariat laws. Now these Pakistani patriots have started quarrelling among themselves, having nothing more to do. Provincialism is here in a worse form than in the Indian Union. The Sindhi is fighting the Punjabi, and the Punjabi is fighting the Pathan and the Bengalee. The domination of the Punjabi Mussalmans is feared and detested by the lesser Mussalmans outside the enchanted circle–they who are ‘the lesser breeds’ outside the law.

The final selection of Karachi as the capital of Pakistan, against the unanimous wish of the people of Sind, has created a good deal of heart-burning. Though the Sindhis have submitted to force majeure, the last word has not yet been said on this controversy. Within less than twelve months, the Sindhis have had enough of Pakistan, and in their hearts they cry to be saved from it. They have gained nothing, but lost almost everything by becoming parties to Pakistan–their homes, their fields and factories, and their towns and cities which are full of the refugees and other unassimilable population. It is the Punjabi Muslims who are the ruling clique–the new Nazis, dominating as a powerful caste, and living as a class apart. These barriers are producing their evil fruits, and hence the insistence of the Pakistan chiefs on Islamic ‘brotherhood’ irrespective of Province, as though the Punjabi Mussalman who rules the roost in Pakistan will ever change his skin and his spots. You cannot get a more arrogant, hot-headed, provincial-ridden and self-conceited person than the Punjabi Mussalman. And it is he who sets the tone to the Pakistan administration. He has filled the central secretariat; his nominees are everywhere in the Pakistan provincial services; and the army is nearly one hundred per cent Punjabi. Even the mighty Quaid-e-Azam is no match to this powerful bureaucratic Punjabi ruling clique, just as every British Viceroy had in his day to bow before the occult force called the Indian Civil Service.

In a few years, Sind will not be the old Sind with its Sufi culture and mutual toleration, on account of which the Hindus lived for centuries on good terms with their Muslim neighbours. The Hindus have left and are leaving, and the Sindhi Muslims will, in the course of time, neither have a name, nor a habitation on account of being swamped by successive waves of Punjabis and Frontiermen. Their happy valley will no longer be the abode of Hindu-Muslim culture and Sufi toleration. The great Sind cities have already gone out of the hands of the Asal Sindhis, and the rural areas are slowly being inundated by the refugees from the north and the west. The old beautiful Sind, as we know it, is gone. The new Sind will be a pure Punjabi colony.

In East Pakistan and West Punjab, selfish provincialism is not less rampant. There are parties and parties and Socialism is also making headway. The zamindars of West Punjab and East Bengal have powerful official ing.

Pakistan itself is evolving into a Fascist State under one dictator. “One Fuehrer, one country, and one community”–that is the slogan of the League Fascists. The Pakistan Constituent Assembly meets once in a blue moon, and at the rate at which it is going, I would be surprised if it completes its work within ten years. The League Dictator is not at all anxious to see a new constitutional government installed within a reasonable period of time. He has concentrated all powers in his hands and his word is law: Anyone who dares cross his path is marked out for political slaughter. No Nazi Dictator ever ruled with as much authority as the Quaid-e-Azam, ed up as he is by the Punjabi Muslim army and civil service. He simply cannot tolerate opposition or any rival near his throne. That is the greatest danger to Pakistan. As dictatorships cannot be bequeathed, as soon as Mr. Jinnah ceases to exist, the Pakistan State will show signs of tumbling down. There is no other man strong enough to wield the sceptre of power as he did, and there is no man great enough as he to exact obedience.

Baluchistan is governed in the old way, as under the British, and there is not even the semblance of a democratic administration. The Baluchis are protesting and are as dissatisfied as the Sindhis. Mr. Jinnah has taken over Baluchistan and all tribal areas under his direct administration, which means one-man rule, pure and simple. British despotism is not dead, but fully alive and kicking in Baluchistan as in the tribal areas.

It is enough if the Government of India keeps strong and its powder dry. The Pakistanis themselves will one day cry aloud for reunion, unable to maintain their separate State, politically and economically. The Government of India need not force the pace and appear to be intriguing against Pakistan. The very force of circumstances will bring the ball to its feet and there will be a reunited India. The forty millions of Union Muslims have seen within this one year, how much they have lost by their plumping for Pakistan foolishly, how they have weakened themselves and are of no consequence today at the Centre and in the Indian Provinces, and how their position will deteriorate economically and politically as time goes on unless there is reunion. The chickens of Pakistan are coming home to roost, so far as the Indian Union Muslims are concerned; and they are asking themselves how short-sighted they were in estranging the majority community in India by the wine of Pakistan going to their head. Philip drunk has become Philip sober, and repentance is the beginning of wisdom.

We are told that Pakistan has balanced its budget, and that is due to that miracle-worker called Mr. Ghulam Mahomed, said to be the ‘financial wizard’ of Pakistan. There is no miracle nor wizardry about his performance. He simply taxed people right and left to balance the budget, and is spending about 75 per cent of the State’s revenue on the military alone. This is too much for a poor and infant State. There are in no hopes of the Provinces getting any subventions from the Centre for their nation-building activities. In the Union, Madras alone gets nine crores from the Centre. On the contrary, the sales tax has been made a Central subject in Pakistan with the promise of a moiety of the collections being paid to the Provinces; and the Provinces get little or nothing from the Centre. They are being starved out by the best sources of revenue being appropriated by the Central Government.

On the 15th of August both the Dominions will celebrate their Independence. Both claim to have passed through the most difficult period of their existence, although the difficulties ahead are not less formidable. Both look forward to the future with some degree of hope and confidence. The very fact that thousands of Indian Union Mussalmans, who went to their Pakistan paradise, are now returning to their original homes, thoroughly disillusioned and disgusted, is proof that Pakistan is not the heaven it was promised to be and Hindustan is not the hell that Muslim Leaguers had painted it to be.

Everybody hopes that the two Dominions may live in peace and be mutually helpful without coming to a clash. But I have my serious doubts. Faced with internal convulsions and external dangers and a fast depleting treasury, and faced too with the need of imposing much more taxation, the Pakistan clique may take a deep plunge and create war. That was what the Tsars and Imperialists of old had done, and that is what their Fascist successors will do when faced with the calamity of annihilation.