Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan: Resettlement in Punjab, 1947–1962 9780415738668, 9780203729700

Table of contents :
Cover
......Page 1
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Map......Page 10
Tables......Page 11
Image......Page 12
Acknowledgements......Page 13
Abbreviations......Page 16
Glossary......Page 17
Note on transliterations and translations......Page 19
Introduction......Page 22
The 1947 March to May communal violence and the early flows of refugees......Page 34
Translating the ‘big political ideas’ at stake into practice......Page 38
Moulding both personal and political identities out of the Partition mayhem......Page 43
Moving towards freedom......Page 46
Making sense of the official narrative and figures......Page 49
‘There’s no place like home’: the politics of intimacy, domesticity and resettlement among West Punjabi refugees......Page 66
Liminalities of citizenship: refugee camps and temporary structures......Page 67
Elective affinities: refugees, homes, domesticity and belonging......Page 72
From homes to towns and cities: refugees and the negotiation of urban space and identity......Page 79
Something old, something new and something borrowed: the rural resettlement of refugees in Pakistani Punjab......Page 86
3 Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness and the resettling of Partition refugees in everyday Pakistani Punjab......Page 100
Overthrowing the king: challenging Pakistani bureaucracy’s strengths......Page 101
Powerful friends, influential acquaintances: conceptualising Pakistani bureaucracy......Page 108
Ersatz bureaucracy for people on the brink of marginality......Page 112
Turning political? Administrative failures and political demands......Page 117
Pawns in a political game: refugees, electoral rules and competitions and the politics of West Punjab’s stability......Page 126
Pieces at the beginning of the game: engineering a new electoral system......Page 127
The king’s jewels: defining parties’ dynamics......Page 132
With friends like these . . . : checkmating political rivals......Page 138
The after-match party of the 1951 elections......Page 144
Self-portraits in spherical mirrors: Partition refugees and the elaboration of the ‘basic (dis)order’ of Pakistan......Page 154
All that glitters is not gold: refugees, resettlement policies and the challenge of creating an everyday state......Page 155
Until death tears us apart: Pakistan, India and the resettlement of refugees in West Punjab......Page 166
All for one and one for all: creating a nation, levelling down differences......Page 170
Conclusion......Page 180
Appendix: note on primary sources......Page 186
Index......Page 192

Citation preview

Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan

The Partition of India in 1947 involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and the Punjab, based on district-wise Hindu or Muslim majorities. It displaced between 10 and 12 million people along religious lines. This book provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the resettlement and rehabilitation of Partition refugees in Pakistani Punjab between 1947 and 1962. It weaves a chronological and thematic plot into a single narrative, and focuses on the Punjabi refugee middle and upper-middle class. Emphasising the everyday experience of the state, the author challenges standard interpretations of the resettlement of Partition refugees in the region and calls for a more nuanced understanding of their rehabilitation. The book argues the universality of the so-called ‘exercise in human misery’, and the heterogeneity of the rehabilitation policies. Refugees’ stories and interactions with local institutions reveal the inability of the local bureaucracy to establish its own ‘polity’ and the viable workability of Pakistan as a state. The use of Pakistani documents, US and British records and a careful survey of both the judicial records and the Urdu and Englishlanguage dailies of the time, provides an invaluable window onto the everyday life of a state, its institutions and its citizens. A carefully researched study of both the state and the everyday lives of refugees as they negotiated resettlement, through both personal and official channels, the book offers an important reinterpretation of the first years of Pakistani history. It will be of interest to academics working in the field of refugee resettlement and South Asian History and Politics. Elisabetta Iob is a historian currently based at the Department of Social Sciences and Politics, University of Trieste, Italy. Her collaborations include the Centre for Peace and Security Studies, Lahore, Pakistan, and the local branches of the Ministries of Interior and Defence, Italy. Her research interests focus on Pakistan’s socio-political history and culture.

Royal Asiatic Society Books

Editorial Board: Professor Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway, University of London (Chair) Professor Tim Barrett, SOAS, University of London Dr Evrim Binbaş, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Anna Contadini, SOAS, University of London Professor Michael Feener, National University of Singapore Dr Gordon Johnson, University of Cambridge Professor David Morgan, University of Wisconsin–Madison Dr BMC Brend Dr R. Llewellyn Jones MBE The Royal Asiatic Society was founded in 1823 ‘for the investigation of subjects connected with, and for the encouragement of science, literature and the arts in relation to, Asia’. Informed by these goals, the policy of the Society’s Editorial Board is to make available in appropriate formats the results of original research in the humanities and social sciences having to do with Asia, defined in the broadest geographical and cultural sense and up to the present day. For a full list of titles, please see: www.routledge.com/asianstudies/series/RAS The Man in the Panther’s Skin Shota Rustaveli Translated from the Georgian by M. S. Wardrop New Foreword by Donald Rayfield Studies in Turkic and Mongolic Linguistics Gerard Clauson New Introduction by C. Edmund Bosworth

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Royal Asiatic Society Books: Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt Series The Royal Asiatic Society’s Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt Fund, established in 2001 by Princess Fazilé Ibrahim, encourages the growth and development of Ottoman studies internationally by publishing Ottoman documents and manuscripts of historical importance from the classical period up to 1839, with transliteration, full or part translation and scholarly commentaries. Grievance Administration (Şikayet) in an Ottoman Province The Kaymakam of Rumelia’s ‘Record Book of Complaints’ of 1781–1783 Michael Ursinus

Refugees and the Politics of the Everyday State in Pakistan Resettlement in Punjab, 1947‒1962

Elisabetta Iob

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Elisabetta Iob The right of Elisabetta Iob to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-73866-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-72970-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Map Tables Image Acknowledgements Abbreviations Glossary Note on transliterations and translations Introduction 1

Memories, swords, blood and freedom: when independence came to India and Pakistan

ix x xi xii xv xvi xviii 1

13

The 1947 March to May communal violence and the early flows of refugees 13 Translating the ‘big political ideas’ at stake into practice 17 Moulding both personal and political identities out of the Partition mayhem 22 Moving towards freedom 25 Making sense of the official narrative and figures 28 2

Camps, homes, towns and villages ‘There’s no place like home’: the politics of intimacy, domesticity and resettlement among West Punjabi refugees 45 Liminalities of citizenship: refugee camps and temporary structures 46 Elective affinities: refugees, homes, domesticity and belonging 51

45

viii Contents From homes to towns and cities: refugees and the negotiation of urban space and identity 58 Something old, something new and something borrowed: the rural resettlement of refugees in Pakistani Punjab 65 3

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness and the resettling of Partition refugees in everyday Pakistani Punjab

79

Overthrowing the king: challenging Pakistani bureaucracy’s strengths 80 Powerful friends, influential acquaintances: conceptualising Pakistani bureaucracy 87 Ersatz bureaucracy for people on the brink of marginality 91 Turning political? Administrative failures and political demands 96 4

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes

105

Pawns in a political game: refugees, electoral rules and competitions and the politics of West Punjab’s stability 105 Pieces at the beginning of the game: engineering a new electoral system 106 The king’s jewels: defining parties’ dynamics 111 With friends like these . . . : checkmating political rivals 117 The after-match party of the 1951 elections 123 5

Constituent Assembly and neighbours

133

Self-portraits in spherical mirrors: Partition refugees and the elaboration of the ‘basic (dis)order’ of Pakistan 133 All that glitters is not gold: refugees, resettlement policies and the challenge of creating an everyday state 134 Until death tears us apart: Pakistan, India and the resettlement of refugees in West Punjab 145 All for one and one for all: creating a nation, levelling down differences 149 Conclusion

159

Appendix: note on primary sources Index

165 171

Map

1

Punjab

xix

Tables

1.1 Refugee population in the Divisions and Districts of West Punjab 1.2 Economic groups and occupation of self-supporting muhajirs aged over 12 years old (excludes a) Defence Service and b) economically inactive persons) 1.3 Number of abducted women and children per district 1.4 Gazetted and non-gazetted field staff sanctioned for rehabilitation

30 31 32 35

Image

1

Plaque present in the ancestral home of Ata ul-Haq Qasmi’s family, Amritsar

164

Acknowledgements

While writing this book, I incurred an endless list of intellectual debts. First and foremost, I am indebted to all those Pakistanis who have made Lahore and Pakistan more generally my second home. Among them, there are two families listed here in no order. First, many thanks to the Elahis. Begum Hameed Elahi silently showed me where the power of Pakistani women lies and shared with me her own story as a refugee. Zil very kindly allowed me to stay with his family during the Eid festivities, and to share with them moments that should have remained private. I owe Naveed for not only being a model of courage, but also for his words that I keep repeating to myself every single time my ghosts from the past come to haunt me: “Liz, I expect you to overcome all this”. He also gave me one of the best involuntary compliments I have ever received: “You are like a Pashtun [man]”. Despite his usually hectic schedule, Saeed always found the time to come to rescue me from the most complicated situations. The claim that, without him, this book would simply not have been possible is no exaggeration. ‘Your Majesty, many thanks for opening many doors for me, trusting me, and for everything else’. I am indebted to Asma, Ghina, Huma, Ruet, Saif, Seerat, Sijjal, Sukhan, Yahya and Yureed for their patience. Many thanks as well to Khurram Nawaz Bhinder, Dr Saeed Elahi’s personal secretary. Khurram patiently dealt with my endless list of bureaucratic problems and, let us be honest, my opinionated stubbornness in having my say in their solution. Most importantly, I owe him his self-proclaimed status of my elder brother, and the smile he managed to draw from me on a Lahori morning when the unthinkable knocked twice on my door. No words will ever be enough to thank Sumaira Noreen and Faheem Ul Islam. They were truly my second family when my family was miles away from me. In a very difficult moment during my stay in Pakistan, they welcomed me with outstretched arms, and made me feel protected and safe. I found in Sumaira, the sister I have never had. I really look forward to sharing – once again – smiles, long hugs, late night confessions, manuscript blues, chai and slices of cake seated on the carpet of her sitting room. Ali Usman Qasmi answered thousands of random questions and provided critical feedback on several parts of these chapters. He has always been good at talking about Pakistan’s past and present events. Still, it is his courage as an historian that has always been a constant source of inspiration. The picture that concludes this

Acknowledgements xiii book belongs to his family. It was taken by his father Ata ul Haq Qasmi during a trip to his ancestral home in Amritsar. I thank him for allowing me to reproduce it here. At the University of the Punjab, Lahore, I am indebted to all my MPhil students. They challenged – at times vehemently – many of the ideas behind this book, forcing me to reconsider my arguments. I have to acknowledge that having Pakistan explained by a young gori should have been really difficult to accept for them. What I learnt from them is, I am sure, much more than what they eventually learnt from me. Many thanks to Sohail Sattar, and the support staff of the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies and the Department of Gender Studies. In Pakistan I am also indebted to Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan, Prof. Qalb-i-Abid and Massarat Abid, Prof. Azra Ali, Prof. Tahir Kamran, Prof. Muhammad Zakria Zakar, Prof. Mujahid Kamran, Shahid Durrani, Dr Ashraf Chohan, and Shireen and her daughter. Special thanks are due to Dr Muhammad Waqas, UMT (Lahore), who, during a late spring afternoon, just sat and listened to me. An entire army of chief librarians and librarians made my research pleasant and, as it frequently happens in Pakistan, ‘sweet’. All the cups of tea, cakes and chats I shared with them at the University of the Punjab, Punjab Civil Secretariat Library, Government College Library, Punjab Public Library, Punjab Assembly Library, Quaid-i-Azam Library and the BZU Library facilitated my archival research. Prof. Mahmood Shaukat kindly allowed me to look through his private archives. In Multan, I express my thanks to Maria and Nishtar Nazir for their love, tenderness and support. At Royal Holloway, University of London, I am indebted to my PhD supervisor Prof. Sarah Ansari, for her patience, support and criticism. My advisor, Prof. Francis Robinson, always reminded me that there was a ‘bigger picture’ I had to take into consideration. Many thanks are due to Prof. Ian Talbot, Prof. Anatol Lieven, Dr John Miles and the other members of the RHUL Academic Writing Group, Dr Markus Daechsel, Dr Francesca Chiarelli, and to Marie-Christine Ockenden and Stephanie Surrey for their administrative help. The staff of the National Archives, Kew, the India Office Library and Records, the British Library, the British Red Cross Museum and Library and, the Victoria and Albert Museum were my most powerful allies. My thanks to Dorothea Schaefter, Alison Ohta, Lily Brown, Jenny Bonnar, Emma Tyce, and my anonymous reviewers at Routledge, Apex and the Royal Asiatic Society. In the UK, Jean and John McDonnell proved to be more than the usual landlords. This book is indebted to the calm and the peace of their house and ‘zoo’ that led to the drafting of many parts of it. In the United States, I need to acknowledge the help provided by the staff of the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park (MD), as well as thank Lynne and Don Lewis, together with their M. and Z., for their warm hospitality during my stay there. Sorayya Khan gave me a copy of her book Five Queen’s Road, whose characters allowed me to grasp the essence of the life of Pakistani houses. In the transnational rooms of the world wide web, thanks also to the staff of Dissertation Reviews, with particular reference to Dr Berenice GuyotRechard and Dr Yaqoob Khan Bangash. In Italy, special thanks are due to Prof. Diego Abenante. As my BA and MA supervisor, he introduced me to the history of Pakistan and the joys of research.

xiv Acknowledgements Diego has always been a great source of moral support, Sicilian humour and academic companionship. I am indebted to the Faculty of Political Science, University of Trieste for having appointed me Honorary Research Fellow. Federico G. Lasconi helped me to sharpen my forensic eye. Although he would not have agreed with a single word of this book, I need to acknowledge the impact that the lessons of the late Prof. Enrico Fasana had on my perception and interpretation of events. Alberto Terasso first taught me what a piece of news was: his advice proved to be very useful while spotting curious stories out of an apparently eventless day. All the staff of the local branches of the Italian Ministries of Interior and Defence forced me to find the practical implications that this research entailed. There, my special thanks are to Capt. Bordone, Lgt. Colonna, M.llo Longhino and M.llo Straulino. Francesca Dellamore, Daniele Zaetta and Mara Saponaro reminded me that there was a life beyond this study, and coped with a ‘ghostly’ friend. Now, Mara, you are allowed to get married: let the fun begin! Massimiliano Raber patiently coped with my hopeless computer illiteracy. Last but not least, my final and truly heartfelt ‘thank you’ to my parents, Manuela and Adriano Iob, my brother Davide, Edda and Adelina Scarsini, Ivan Bettuzzi and to all the other members of my typical overprotective and extended Italian family. Their love and support was the real engine of the machinery behind this book. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom in terms of its Doctoral Award (Open Competition), a fellowship from the Friendly Hand Charitable Trust, United Kingdom, and travel grants from the Hanns Seidel Foundation, Islamabad and the Department of Politics in Social Sciences, University of Trieste, Trieste. On a far less scholarly or serious note, many thanks also to Bruce Springsteen. His songs provided the musical background that allowed me to keep my mind on the drafting of this book. The number of books piled up in Prof. Francis Robinson’s office has always been a very powerful visual reminder of what I want to achieve in life and, most importantly, on how to achieve it. If there is a person who first taught me the relevance of culture and intellectual curiosity, that person is my late grandfather Esterino Scarsini. I hope that wherever he is now, he is – as usual – moved to tears. I am sure that he would be really happy to share the dedication of this book with Sumaira and Faheem’s daughter. Ayesha’s cheerfulness and open-mindedness are representative of the promise of a tolerant and peaceful Pakistan that no institution should ever be allowed to betray. Opinions, views, errors and omissions are, needless to say, my own.

Abbreviations

BRCMA CEP CRO IOR IT/OT MDRR MLNG NAP NARA NDC NWFP PCSL PML(N) PPL PPMS PPP PTI RSS SSCR UKHC UKNA UPL V&A WB

British Red Cross Museum and Archives, London Custodian of Evacuee Properties Commonwealth Relations Office India Office Library and Records, British Library, London Inward Telegram/Outward Telegram Multan District Records Room, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan Muslim League National Guards National Archives of Pakistan, Islamabad National Archives and Records Administration, College Park (MD) National Documentation Centre, Islamabad North-West Frontier Province (present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) Punjab Civil Secretariat Library, Lahore Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz Punjab Public Library, Lahore Private Papers, Prof. Mahmood Shaukat, Lahore Pakistan People Party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations British High Commission National Archives, Kew Gardens (London) University of the Punjab Library, Lahore Victoria and Albert Museum Archives, Textiles and Dresses Department, London World Bank

Glossary

alim (pl. ulama) Muslim scholar learned in the Quran anjuman association anna one-sixteenth of a Rupee arthis traders atta flour bahir external world; domain of the material biraderi kinship group chak village crore ten millions dharamsala rest house for Hindu pilgrims fitna sedition; chaos or fragmentation ghar home; inner self gharana lit., those of the house, close relation ghee clarified butter ghutti rituals of initiation of newborns into their families goonda lit., lout or bully gurdwara Sikh temple holi Hindu religious spring festival imam supreme leader of the Muslim community; among Shiites, referred to Ali and his descendants izzat honour; prestige; reputation jamabandi revenue records (land) jora long blouse kafila caravan; group of persons travelling together kafir miscreant kamin craftsmen and labourers who earn their living by supplying landlords with goods and services katcha makeshift; temporary khair good act kirpan sword owned by all Sikhs as a part of their faith ‘symbols’/rituals lakh one hundred thousand lambardar village headman lathi wooden stick

Glossary

xvii

maghreb time of the daily fourth ritual prayer makaan building that hosts a home maulvi Muslim scholar learned in the Quran; title used by an alim mohalla neighbourhood muezzin person who calls Muslims to prayer from he minaret of a mosque muhajir hist., someone who, in 622, joined the Prophet as he migrated from Mecca to Medina; in Pakistan, usually used to refer to all Partition refugees muharram first month of the year in the Islamic calendar murid follower of a pir nani maternal grandmother naqshbandi affiliate pir whose spiritual lineage traces back to the homonym sufi order paratha flatbread patwari administrative officer at tehsil level pir Sufi saint purdah practice among women of living in separate rooms; fig., seclusion qabza derina long-time possession raj rule; empire sajjada nashin lit., one who sits on the carpet, head of a pir family salat ritual prayer performed five times daily, one of the five pillars of Islam seh parta assessment list shakra malikana particular type of rent contract sharia Islamic law sufi Muslim mystic tabbar unit of kinship groups, ranging from a mononuclear family up to threegeneration lineally-related kinsmen taziya processional miniature tombs tehsil administrative subdivision of a district thana police station, used also to identify an administrative subdivision zamindar landowner; landholder

Note on transliterations and translations

Urdu, Hindi and Arabic words have all been italicised and transliterated. This book makes use of a simplified mode of transliteration without the use of diacritical marks. For place names, transliteration contemporary with the sources has been maintained.

Map 1 Punjab Source: Massimiliano Raber

Introduction

That the 2015 wedding season in Lahore was not like the usual ones became clear on 25 December. As Narendra Modi – Prime Minister of India – landed in Lahore to attend the wedding of Nawaz Sharif’s granddaughter, local social butterflies understood that no outfit worth years of children’s fees in prestigious private schools, floral arrangements or star-studded celebrations would stand comparison. The Pakistani Prime Minister had just presented Mehr-un-Nisa Safdar with a place in history and a footnote in international relations textbooks. Brides-to-be were livid. Months of preparations and hard study had just fallen through. Ladies who had not made it to Sharif’s guest list had almost certainly a bad hair day. Designers showed the white flag and started to focus on their lawn collections. The dismay of those moments would echo in their admittedly heavy-patterned textiles and subsequent flurry of buying by Lahoris. After all, embracing the lessis-more policy after what had happened that afternoon in Raiwind was not a viable option for anyone, fashionistas included. Modi’s visit to Lahore came after months of talks between the civil chancelleries of the two sworn enemies. Negotiations had culminated in India’s External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj visiting Pakistan in early December. On that occasion, it was a backstage diplomatic event that attracted the attention of many journalists. Shamim Akhtar – Nawaz Sharif’s mother – was, the Hindustan Times reported, to be credited for India and Pakistan’s attempts at resuming negotiations. During Swaraj’s private meeting with the Sharif family, she “referred to India as ‘my country’ several times and told Swaraj that she had been born in Bheem ka Katra in Amritsar in undivided India.”1 Begum Muhammad Sharif still “had a grudge that she could never visit her “watan” [homeland] [India] after Partition.”2 The personal private history of Pakistani Punjab’s Partition refugees was publicly interwoven with the public and political history of Pakistan even earlier in 2012. The relevance of this event was far less important but, nevertheless, interesting. On 5 April that year, on an otherwise business-as-usual and humdrum political evening, the then President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari hit the headlines with a declaration that caused an almost immediate uproar. Addressing the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) Executive Council at the Governor’s House in Lahore, he argued that his opponents, the Sharif brothers, “were living [in Lahore] as migrants”.3 According to local press reports, Zardari further rubbed the salt into

2

Introduction

the wound by referring to the funeral of their father at Data Darbar.4 The reactions of both the family and party members were immediate. Maryam Sharif – Nawaz’ daughter – tweeted: “Guys, do you see [sic] Zardari’s statements on TV channels. Wish he had kept this side of him hidden”.5 For his part, the Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah voiced the opinions and the mood of the affiliates of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML(N)). “I cannot even believe” – he declared to The Express News – “that such shameful remarks were given by the president. It seems like he has gone mad”.6 The unsigned editorial that the then PML(N)-leaning newspaper The Nation published a couple of days later came as a bit of a surprise. “President Asif Ali Zardari” – in its opening words – has mocked his main political rivals, the PML(N), calling the party leaders [. . .] emigrants. Whether he meant this just politically, as they were, he said, camping in Lahore, which was actually PPP territory, or personally, when he said that they had to take their father’s corpse to Data Darbar to raise a funeral congregation, the Sharif brothers should realise that they have brought it [upon] themselves. Indeed, Zardari’s statement followed on from the equally harsh campaign that the PML(N) had conducted against the PPP central government in the early months of 2012. Nevertheless, in this case, the columnist failed to tune properly into the mood of a certain section of the local society, whose feelings and emotions were made clear to me by one of its members. Sons of two people who migrated from Amritsar to Lahore as a result of the 1947 communal disturbances, Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif belong to the large ‘family’ of those muhajirs or Partitionrelated refugees who had settled in the Pakistani Punjab. The words of the PPP leader thus wove private and public narratives into a single political plot. Never before – my interlocutor confided in me – had this specific element of the Punjabi refugee community’s identity been brought to the public domain in such a rude manner and made it so overtly political.7 Both the personal and community histories of the Partition refugees who resettled in West Punjab differ substantially from the experience of those muhajirs who eventually ended up in Sindh. There, Urdu-speaking migrants have been involved in a longstanding and at times violent ethnic clash with the Sindhi majority and eventually founded their own political party.8 By contrast, in West Punjab, refugees are generally thought to have trodden a relatively smoother path towards their assimilation within the local social fabric. Post-Partition literature on the history of the Pakistani Punjab has consistently portrayed this resettlement as “relatively well-planned and therefore quick and orderly”.9 A common language and cultural background, it is argued, helped to prevent them from fomenting harsh arguments and retreating into potentially stubborn ethnic differences. But this assertion duplicates government narratives of the time, and relies heavily on the current socio-geographical mapping of Partition refugees and their families on land by taking for granted their historical accuracy.

Introduction 3 Shamim Akhtar’s leaked conversation with the Indian Minister of External Affairs and PML(N) reactions to Zardari’s remarks contrast starkly with these mainstream scholarly interpretations. In practice, Partition refugees in Punjab have developed their own political identity. And in recent years, it has found in the PML(N) its standard-bearer. The founding fathers and almost all the upper echelons of this party are first- or second-generation Partition refugees whose personal stories leave deep footprints on the land on which they daily walk and, at time of writing, rule. This book therefore aims at revealing the nature of this contradiction and what actually happened behind the scenes of what with hindsight might appear to have been a well-planned and thought-through process of refugee resettlement. It focuses on the common experiences of hundreds of thousands of middle- and upper-middle class Partition refugees who, in 1947, took refuge in a state that they perceived to be their new homeland but who, unlike the Sharif family, never made it to the columns of national and international newspapers. In particular, it casts light on the manifold recesses of their everyday experience of the state, and the ways their lives permeated – and were permeated by – the major events of history. ***** Pakistani Punjab’s Partition migrants frequently rubbed their eyes as ‘big’ events and prominent persons swam before them. They often appeared not to be in control of either their own fate or, for that matter, the fate of other individuals. Nevertheless, their lives have left their mark on history and, needless to say, history has left its mark on them. Their feelings and emotions shaped both the sense of belonging to a nation and the attachment to a specific form of governance.10 Pakistan’s political history stems from an intricate weaving together of such histories and stories. The apparently chaotic cluster of ideas, interactions, reactions, personal opinions and objects that filled the life of each and every individual made an imprint on the so-called ‘major’ history and politics. The ‘everyday’ – meant here as the routine activities and daily practices that were undertaken by ordinary refugees in their interactions with Pakistani institutions – carved out temporal and spatial room for both individual creativity and sub-cultural resistance.11 It was within these domains that migrants’ day-to-day realities met with ‘big political ideas’ in a creative and even revolutionary state-building (and questioning) process.12 In her recent The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India, Michelutti forces us to add a new, essential nuance to the debate.13 By lifting the curtain on the grassroots mechanics of Indian democracy, she highlights the subtle processes by which activities that are associated with the governance of India are embedded in the local socio-cultural practices of ordinary people. Her ethnographic exploration of the low- and middle-ranked Yadav caste and its engagement with the political ideas of democracy lays bare the mutual dualities of the politics of the everyday state. The latter is not merely about the impact of the men of street on abstract political ideologies. It also deals with what happens when those abstract ideologies reach the realms of each and every individual.

4

Introduction

Michelutti succeeds in leaving her imprint on the emerging but still rather cloudy interpretative picture of the everyday state. Indeed, in spite of them claiming it as their own research field, researchers – especially those involved in area studies – have failed to be as forceful and consistent as Michelutti when outlining their own definition of an everyday state and revealing its twofold nature.14 One, however, should not blame them. As they interact with it on a daily basis, citizens themselves come up time and again against the elusive and fuzzy nature of the state.15 After all, rulers and ruled are, as Mbembe argues, intimately involved in a mutual indeterminate, equivocal, impromptu and mediated relationship.16 The state – to cite Gupta who follows hot on Mbembe’s heels – stands as a by-product of specific historical moment. It moulds the interplay between politics and the governed, on one side, and the governors’ representations of it, on the other.17 In a Louis XIV-style bout of enthusiasm, it can be then argued that, for all the vagueness of their definitions, the state is the everyday and the everyday is the state. The argument of this book stems also from the idea that Pakistan has not been a failed (or failing) state. Lieven convincingly argues Pakistan’s stability and resilience in the face of an apparently contradictory weakness of the civil government itself.18 It is, he maintains, a negotiated State: political power, authority and sovereignty are the result of an endless process of mediation. Elsewhere, literature – admittedly rather scattered – has labelled such political systems as patronage democracies/regimes, but it has never taken account of their potential for standing as a distinct politico-historical category.19 An intellectual legacy of a number of pieces of research on the so-called Northern American ‘Gilded Age’ is that patronage political systems have traditionally been conceived as a dysfunction of either democratic or autocratic regimes.20 In both mainstream popular and learned analyses of political, institutional and administrative apparata, corruption together with power are associated with clientelism and patronage. Area studies historians and political scientists, such as Chattha and Myrdal among others, have mainly stuck to the traditional sociological literature, and described South Asian clientelism and practices of bureaucratic favouritism in terms of corruption. Channelling public resources through patronage networks is understood by them as a primarily dishonest and fraudulent conduct.21 Indeed, a common thread runs through the scholarly-led routinisation of corruption and patronage practices in South Asian societies.22 Both bribery and patronage are discussed within the mainstream analytical framework that regards them as an abuse of public power or office for private gain. Still, as Piliavsky has rightly pointed out, patronage is a pervasive, morally accepted, vital form and social normal across many South Asian countries.23 The ethnographic analysis of patronage practices has further highlighted the far more elaborate, autonomous and multi-faceted performative nature of their everyday fulfilment in their daily overlapping with state activities. Therefore, arguing for the historiographical autonomy of patronage democracies/regimes (or negotiated states) allows researchers to grasp more fully the complexities, subtleties and dynamics of Pakistan’s political life. Politics is consequently judged by the standards of local stake- and shareholders, actors as well as those taking occasional

Introduction 5 ‘walk-on’ parts. To a certain extent, ideas of power, authority and institutions become tinged with new nuances that can challenge the traditionally applied definitions of institutions, bureaucracy, electoral policies and corruption.24 It must be further noted that patronage draws upon the identity between state and community. In South Asia, individuals and social groups are, by their very essence, ‘institutions’. Their notional counterpoising against the state is, methodologically speaking, problematic, if not fallacious.25 Playing by the rules of the ‘old-boy network’ is first and foremost a situated knowledge. It demands command of the multi-layered dimensionality of local state authorities. Refugees’ integration into the fabric of West Punjabi society after 1947 provides an excellent thematic and analytical framework. It allows for a careful investigation of the mutual interactions between the ‘high politics’ and everyday experience of state and party institutions. The dawn of 15 August 1947 entailed for both the administrative and political cadres the need to – albeit partially – start at zero. The postcolonial state itself appeared to be everything but an ontologically coherent monolith. Chatterji, Kaur, Roy and Zamindar have in their various studies recently shed light on more nuanced popular perceptions of the socio-political and institutional structures of power that resulted from refugees’ daily interactions with the early post-independent South Asian state(s).26 The establishment of an independent India and Pakistan was a liminal moment. Its liminality has made of the events that surrounded the withdrawal of the British raj a window into the multi-faceted dimension of the state and its institutions vis-à-vis the everyday perception of local citizens. Ordinary citizens, local parties and authorities had to learn how to act as citizens and how to participate in the institutional life of an independent state. As many Pakistanis put it, Pakistan itself was a muhajir.27 It therefore shared the very same joys and sorrows of those millions of refugees who, back in 1947, found their new home across its borders. So, what if the widely accepted argument of a smooth and successful resettlement of Partition refugee in West Punjab is challenged? What happens if we acknowledge this process for its socially and politically disruptive outcomes? And to what extent does the refugees’ troubled history of rehabilitation affect our understanding of the early years of Pakistan’s political history? ***** Finding an answer to these questions, readers should be warned, is an obstacle course. Indeed, source limitations have played an important part in shaping the approach undertaken by this book. This is also the reason why claims herein made may appear – at times – not properly evidenced. Still, declaring the ‘documentary end’ of West Punjab Partition refugees’ history would not only be a fatal miscalculation, but also set a dangerous precedent in the much needed and still unfolding scholarly process of drafting of Pakistan’s troubled history. Kaur’s PhD on the resettlement of Partition refugees in Indian Punjab makes anyone focusing on the mirror phenomena in the Pakistani wing of the region frankly envious.28 Her bibliography details a long list of primary sources that represent a forbidden dream for historians who are used to working in Pakistani party, federal and provincial

6

Introduction

archives. In 1958, the banning of all political parties, the requisitioning of their records and the freezing of their assets immediately followed the imposition of martial law over the whole of Pakistan. Thereafter, with the only exception of the so-called Freedom Movement Archives (mainly pre-1947 all-India and provincial Muslim League Records), remaining party papers and their location appear to lie in the realm of the unknown. The government records that are available in Islamabad and Lahore and which specifically deal with the topic under scrutiny can be almost counted on the fingers of one hand. This apparent paucity of official documents can be attributed in large measure to the early difficulties of the bureaucratic and institutional apparatus of the state in handling the humanitarian crisis. As argued, to a certain administrative degree, the birth of an independent Pakistan meant starting from scratch. Doing things took priority over rationalising decisions. Authorities frequently scribbled reports on the edges of newspapers that, it goes without saying, were not kept for archival purposes.29 Up to the mid-1950s, district and provincial officials did not file documents, decisions and receipts.30 Reportedly, patwaris (administrative officers) who were supposed to serve the Pakistan Administration Service and then the 1950-onwards revamped Civil Service of Pakistan in West Punjab’s rural districts, did not turn up and instead deserted their offices.31 All this has resulted in a scarcity or, at times, lack of proper detailed documentary evidence of resettlement plans undertaken whether at district-, town- and village-level. For instance, a list of locally kept documents on and around the rehabilitation of refugees in Multan District can be found in a recently published catalogue.32 But a simple cursory glance of them reveals that nothing – or nearly nothing – has survived either the early deficiencies of the Pakistani institutions or the wearing effect of time. The case of Multan is not an isolated one. The Lahore Improvement Trust (the present-day Lahore Development Authority) holds no documentary evidence of the period under scrutiny. For his part, Chattha, working on developments elsewhere in the Punjab during the same timeframe, recently came up against similar problems. “Archival sources in Sialkot and Gujranwala are scattered” – he claims in his study – “and have been moved continuously”, making, the access to district- and tehsil-level sources an “intricate problem”.33 Bearing in mind the problems associated with retrieving district-level sources, this book brings together official Pakistani documents with US and British records and a careful survey of both the judicial records and the Urdu and English-language dailies of the time. If read against the grain, diplomatic correspondence provides an invaluable window onto the everyday life of a state, its institution and its citizens. In their daily interactions, attachés met local political and institutional figures and influential representative of the local society. They carefully listened to their complaints as well their demands. Their letters, reports and memoranda meticulously recorded popular discontent, politicians and ministers’ moves and, why not?, gossip. With respect to local newspapers, this book draws consistently on the Lahore edition of the Pakistan Times. Its readership – members of the well-educated Punjabi urban bourgeoisie – is frequently omitted from the existing narrative on refugee resettlement whose rhetoric instead tends to focus on less privileged

Introduction 7 individuals and groups. Relying on the Pakistani English and vernacular press of the late 1940s and early 1950s entails a certain amount of calculated risk: conspiracy theories, conflicting interpretation of events and unchecked information dominated local newspapers and magazines alike. Their own struggle for survival further trapped journalists, editors and government authorities in a dangerous vicious circle. As the joint-editor of the Weekly Guardian of Lahore pointed out in a private conversation with a US representative in the city in early July 1951, “the Government control[led] the entire supply of newsprint of Pakistan and [. . .] [could] withdraw all government-sponsored advertisements whenever it wishe[d]”.34 Therefore, sticking to institutional views, reports and narratives was, in many cases, a life-saving daily routine. Censorship, charges of corruption and partisanship notwithstanding, the press and local courts constitute an invaluable source of details and stories. The number of sources used in this book that can be traced back to so-called oral history is relatively small. This was a deliberate choice. The aim here was to break down that wall of silence, denials and dissonances up against which researchers usually come.35 Sometimes less is more. For those who went through it as refugees, Partition was unquestionably a distressing experience. Re-ordering the jigsaws of sleepless nights hidden under stacks of corpses, relatives brutally butchered and women raped on public highways, with an unknown foreign researcher can be a source of understandable discomfort.36 This is particularly true if the researcher in question is interested in feelings, emotions and political ideas. For their part, questionnaires – no matter whether structured or semistructured – trigger a curious mechanism that pushes interviewees to please their interviewer. The idea of meeting the same person several times and finally ‘being accepted as one of the family’ may certainly be challenged on the grounds of the very necessary detachment that a historian is asked to have. Nevertheless, in a trust-based society such as Pakistan, it puts interviewees at ease by engaging them in an open and frank debate on the issues at stake. ***** This book weaves a number of chronological and thematic plots into a single narrative. Its investigation focuses on the middle and upper-middle class refugees, and the struggles that led to their resettlement (and self-resettlement) in Pakistani Punjab. It challenges the idea that their members were by no means overcome by the dreadful events of Partition as well as the widely accepted argument that their rehabilitation was carefully and swiftly planned and implemented. As they trace the development of the politics of the everyday state among the muhajirs of the Pakistani Punjab, the chapters in this book question the assumed homogeneity of government resettlement practices, the ability of the local bureaucracy to act as an independent political powerbroker and local parties and institutions’ failure to establish a workable political system in Pakistan’s formative years. Chapter One introduces the study by framing the migration of Partition refugees within its historical context. It chronicles the communal violence of early spring to late summer 1947, and the initial flows of refugees that this produced. It

8

Introduction

also provides an overview of the debate that has so far surrounded Partition, the birth of Pakistan and the humanitarian emergency it entailed. Chapter Two goes on to explore the ways in which this refugee community elaborated its sense of belonging to a state, and the houses, cities and rural villages in which they were resettled. From reception camps to temporarily allotted houses or huts that they constructed themselves, migrants became involved in an intricate hotchpotch of emotions that deeply affected their process of integration into the local social fabric, and the development of their own political, individual and group identity. As government-led rehabilitation practices literally tore apart entire biraderis (kinship groups), they went through a process of social and notional re-elaboration that allowed migrants to make their mark on the urban and rural history of the province. The disruption of traditional hierarchies and balances of power undoubtedly made an impact on the bureaucratic management of the humanitarian crisis. Chapter Three accordingly delves into the weaknesses of the new bureaucracy in Pakistani Punjab as it grappled with trying to (re-)assert its own authority over local society and to resettle millions of people on lands in the province. As a result, it challenges more widely accepted definitions of corruption by re-framing patronage practices within the kind of institution-building processes that exist in trust-based and highly-personalised societies such as that of Pakistan. Chapter Four continues the arguments of the previous chapter by re-framing the substantial weakness of the Pakistan bureaucracy within the context of the 1951 provincial elections and the laying of the early foundations of local political and party stability. As civil servants and politicians engaged with and exploited each other, the local arena lived up to both old and new expectations. The relevance of kinship ties, ordinary people’s struggle for securing the (usually) scarce means of livelihood and party dynamics merge here together in an analysis of the early shaping of Pakistan’s electoral policies and the instilment of an everyday idea of belonging to a nation. Chapter Five addresses the nature of Pakistani institutional ‘(dis)order’. At a moment when debate over the future constitutional shape of the Pakistan state stagnated, day-to-day reality supplanted any form of learned discussion. A close emotional attachment to charismatic figures, censorship and the partisanship of the press, and Pakistan’s troubled relationship with India and regional rivalries are here depicted as proactive – albeit dysfunctional – constituents and constitutional parts of the new state.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Hindustan Times (online edition), 22 December 2015 (accessed 31 May 2016). Ibid. The Express Tribune (Karachi), 6 April 2012. Nawa-i-Waqt (Lahore), 7 April 2012, and The Nation (Lahore), 6 April 2012. http://twitter.com/maryamnsharif (accessed 29 June 2012). The Express Tribune (Karachi), 6 April 2012. Conversation with the author, 8 April 2012. Due to his/her prominence and the possible implications of his/her declaration, the interviewee remains unnamed.

Introduction 9 8 On this point see O. Verkaaik, Migrants and Militants: Fun and Urban Violence in Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 9 M. Waseem, “Muslim Migration from East Punjab: Patterns of Settlement and Assimilation”, in People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Postcolonial Migration, eds. I. Talbot and S. Thandi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 70. See also, I. Chattha, Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration, and Development in Gujranwala and Sialkot (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011); I. Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar, 1947–1957 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006); M. Waseem, “Partition, Migration and Assimilation: A Comparative Study of Pakistani Punjab”, in Region and Partition: Punjab, Bengal and the Partition of the Subcontinent, eds. I. Talbot and G. Singh (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 203–27. 10 L. Auslander, Cultural Revolutions: The Politics of Everyday Life in Britain, North America and France (Berkeley: California University Press, 2009), p. 1. See also E. Renan, “What Is Nation?”, in Nation and Identities, ed. V. P. Pecora (London: Classic Readings, 2001), pp. 162–77. More recently, Judith Farquhar, Qicheng Zhang and Michael Skey have explored similar themes. See J. Farquhar and Q. Zhang, Ten Thousands Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (New York: Zone Books, 2012); M. Skey, National Belonging and Everyday Life: The Significance of Nationhood in an Uncertain World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011). 11 S. Willis, A Primer for Daily Life (London-New York: Routledge, 1991). 12 N. Ries, “Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror”, New Literary History, 33, 4 (2002), p. 732. See also, S. L. Fogg, The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 13 L. Michelutti, The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2008). 14 This is, for instance, the case of the contributors to a special issue of Contemporary South Asia. See Contemporary South Asia – Special Issue: Experiencing the State from the Margins: Ordinary Politics and Spaces of Possibility, 19, 3, 2011. 15 S. Ismail, Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters; Encountering the Everyday State (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. xxxiii–iv. The contentiousness of the State is a philosophical and politological classic. See, for instance, M. Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); T. Mitchell, “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics”, American Political Science Review, 85, 1 (1991), pp. 77–99; T. Osborne, “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Century”, in Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Rule, eds. A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), pp. 99–121; M. Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 111–40. 16 A. Mbembe, “Prosaics of Servitude and Authoritarian Civilities”, Public Culture, 5, 1 (1992), p. 132. 17 A. Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics and the Imaged State”, American Ethnologist, 22, 2 (1995), p. 353. 18 A. Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 12–16 and 23–9. 19 See, K. Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Heads Counts in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); K. Chandra, “Why Voters in Patronage Democracies Split Their Tickets: Strategic Voting for Ethnic Parties”, Electoral Studies, 2 (2009), pp. 21–32. 20 See, for instance, S. J. Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (New York: Arno Press, 1965). Still, the most vivid account of those years is M. Twain, The Gilded Age (London-New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1915). 21 I. Chattha, “Competition for Resources: Partition’s Evacuee Properties and the Sustenance of Corruption in Pakistan”, Modern Asian Studies, 46, 5 (2012), pp. 1182–211;

10

22

23

24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36

Introduction G. Myrdal, “‘Corruption as Hindrance to Modernisation in South Asia”’, in Political Corruption: Concepts and Contexts, eds. A. J. Heidenheimer and M. Johnston (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), pp. 265–80. S. Corbridge and S. Kumar, “Community, Corruption, Landscape: Tales from the Tree Trade”, Political Geography, 21 (2002), pp. 765–88; A. Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries”, pp. 373–402; C. Jeffrey, “Caste, Class, and Clientelism: A Political Economy of Everyday Corruption in Rural North India”, Economic Geography, 78, 1 (2002), pp. 21–41. A. Piliavsky, “India’s Demotic Democracy and Its Depravities”, in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. A. Piliavsky (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 159–60. See also B. Jaurengui, Provisional Authority. Order, and Security in India (Chicago-London: Chicago University Press, 2016), pp. 33–59. On this point, see W. Gould, Bureaucracy, Community, and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). Corbridge and Kumar, “Community, Corruption, Landscape”, pp. 766–7. J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); R. Kaur, Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007); H. Roy, Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1962 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); V. F. Y. Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Conversation with Prof. Tahir Kamran, Southampton, 11 April 2011. K. Kaur, “Riots, Refugees and Rehabilitation: A Case Study of Punjab 1946–56” (Ph.D. diss.: Punjabi University (Patiala), 2012). A. Albinia, Empire of the Indus: The Story of a River (London: John Murray, 2009), pp. 14–15. A-2, 8 October 1947, NND 765024, NARA, and Punjab Assembly Debates, 2 March 1954, PCSL. Punjab Assembly Debates, 8 March 1954, PCSL. A. A. Ali, J. A. Salyana and S. M. Awan (compiled by), The Collection of Multan Record: Pre- and Post-Independence Official Documents of Punjab, 1852–2004 (Multan: Royal Holloway University of London with the collaboration of Bahauddin Zakariya University, 2010). Chattha, Partition and Locality, pp. 15–16. Similarly, Hull argues that, in Islamabad, “it [. . .] [is] much easier to [. . .] read what are called ‘current files’, that is, not archives, but active files and other documents that [. . .] [are] currently in use”. See M. Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California, 2012), p. 28. Memorandum of Conversation, 9 July 1951, NND 897209, NARA. I. Talbot, “Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourse, Denials and Dissonances”, Modern Asian Studies, 45, 1 (2011), pp. 109–30. Conversation with Dr Saeed Elahi, Lahore, 14 February 2010.

Bibliographical references Ackerman, L. D. Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York. New York: Caroll and Graf, 2005. Albinia, A. Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River. London: John Murray, 2009. Ali, A. A., Salyana, J. A., and Awan, S. M., comp. by. The Collection of Multan Record: Pre- and Post-Independence Official Documents of Punjab, 1852–2004. Multan: Royal Holloway University of London with the collaboration of Bahauddin Zakariya University, 2010.

Introduction 11 Auslander, L. Cultural Revolutions: The Politics of Everyday Life in Britain, North America and France. Berkeley: California University Press, 2009. Barry, A., Osborne, T., and Rose N., eds. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, NeoLiberalism and Rationalities of Rule. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Chandra, K. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Heads Counts in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. “Why Voters in Patronage Democracies Split Their Tickets: Strategic Voting for Ethnic Parties”, Electoral Studies, 28 (2009), pp. 21–32. Chattha, I. Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration, and Development in Gujranwala and Sialkot. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. “Competition for Resources; Partition’s Evacuee Properties and the Sustenance of Corruption in Pakistan”, Modern Asian Studies, 46, 5 (2012), pp. 1182–211. Chatterji, J. The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Contemporary South Asia. See Contemporary South Asia – Special Issue: Experiencing the State from the Margins: Ordinary Politics and Spaces of Possibility, 19, 3, 2011. Farquhar, J. and Zhang, Q. Ten Thousands Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing. New York: Zone Books, 2012. Fogg, S. L. The Politics of Everyday Life in Vichy France: Foreigners, Undesirables, and Strangers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Foucault, M. Surveiller et Punir. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Gould, G. Bureaucracy, Community, and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s. Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Heidenheimer, A. J. and Johnston, M., eds. Political Corruption: Concepts ad Contexts. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Hull, M. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. BerkeleyLos Angeles: University of California Press, 2012. Ismail, S. Political Life in Cairo’s New Quarters: Encountering the Everyday State. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Jaurengui, B. Provisional Authority: Police, Order, and Security in India. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Kaur, K. “Riots, Refugees and Rehabilitation: A Case Study of Punjab 1946–56”. Ph.D. diss., Punjabi University, Patiala, 2012. Kaur, R. Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. Mandelbaum, S. J. Boss Tweed’s New York. New York: Arno Press, 1965. Mbembe, A. “Prosaics of Servitude and Authoritarian Civilities”, Public Culture, 5, 1 (1992), pp. 123–45. Michelutti, L. The Vernacularisation of Democracy: Politics, Caste and Religion in India. New Delhi: Routledge, 2008. Mitchell, T. “The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics”, American Political Science Review, 85, 1 (1991), pp. 77–99. Pecora, V. P., ed. Nation and Identities. London: Classic Readings, 2001. Piliavsky, A., ed. Patronage as Politics in South Asia. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Skey, M. National Belonging and Everyday Life: The Significance of Nationhood in an Uncertain World. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Ries, N. “Anthropology and the Everyday, from Comfort to Terror”, New Literary History, 33, 4 (2002), pp. 725–42.

12

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Roy, H. Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1962. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013. Talbot, I. Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar, 1947–1957. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. “Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourse, Denials and Dissonances”, Modern Asian Studies, 45, 1 (2011), pp. 109–30. ——— and Singh, G., eds. Region and Partition: Punjab, Bengal and the Partition of the Subcontinent. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Talbot, I. and Thandi, S., eds. People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Postcolonial Migration. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Taussig, M. The Nervous system. London-New York: Routledge, 1992. Twain, M. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. London-New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1915. Willis, S. A Primer for Daily Life. London-New York: Routledge, 1991. Zamindar, V. F. Y. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

1

Memories, swords, blood and freedom When independence came to India and Pakistan

As Jinnah defined it, the Punjab represented the cornerstone of Pakistan. Here his party, the Muslim League, fought one of its most interesting political battles in order to defeat its local competitor, the Unionist Party, in the key 1945–6 elections. Taken as a proof of the League’s power and its declared aspiration to be the sole representative of Indian Muslims, the outcome of this electoral campaign shook the local political arena. It indeed challenged the traditional affiliations that had consolidated in the province over the previous decades. Ideas of religious identity and a lethal overlapping of politics and religion provided the raw ingredients for both the 1945–6 League victory and the different bouts of violence that rocked the Punjab after the withdrawal of Khizr Tiwana’s ministry in February 1947. Partition-related communal clashes relied heavily on the value of the symbols ‘handled’ by social actors during the spring and the summer of 1947. The circumstances involved in the early fluxes of migrants and then in later journeys towards what refugees perceived to be safer places or their new home emphasised the relevance of the meanings that local society attached to the political ideas at stake and violence. The first section provides an overview of the events and the scholarly informed debate on and around the independence of India and Pakistan. Attitudes, opinions and clashes are treated here as both a medium and a message. It reveals the plot of the deployment of the March to June communal clashes, and accounts for the early flows of refugees. The second and third sections focus on individual experiences of communalism, the indeterminateness of the political ideas at stake during the early summer of 1947, and the subsequent re-negotiation of both the religious and civic identities of local communities in the Punjab. The chapter then concludes with an overview of the legal and political framework of the resettlement and the rehabilitation of refugees in West Punjab.

The 1947 March to May communal violence and the early flows of refugees The Governor of Punjab, Evan Jenkins, entrusted the Khan of Mamdot with the task of forming a new Cabinet at 11:40 am on 3 March 1947. A single-party ministry that counted on the miscellaneous support of single individuals within the

14

Memories, swords, blood and freedom

Assembly, would not, Jenkins warned him, last long. Daultana’s only response was to ask the Governor’s blessing in this new Muslim League enterprise.1 “[You can] count on help from me if [. . .] [you get] into difficulty, but I could do very little unless the Muslim League [. . .] [take] a reasonable line and [. . .] [are] prepared to help themselves”, countered the British official.2 As news spread across Lahore, Hindus and Sikhs started tearing down Muslim League flags. Some of them even marched towards local police stations and set them on fire.3 The long spring and summer of 1947 had just begun. Demonstrations, fires, killings, disrupted communications, assaults on trains and deserted streets crammed with corpses were poised to become a common scenario throughout 1947 Punjab. Violence would, as Brass, Kaur, Khan and Talbot have all argued separately, result from an exceptional political mobilisation around the conflicting demands for an independent India and Pakistan.4 The heated debate on Khizr Tiwana’s government and the achievement of two independent states – rather than Hinduism, Islam or Sikhism per se – then pushed growing numbers of people to take up arms. Shortly after Tiwana’s resignation in early March, rioting broke out in the Amritsari suburbs of Chown Nohli, Holi Bazar and Kitra Jamal. Businesses and commercial premises were systematically looted and burnt, and 40,000 persons were made homeless, with total damage assessed at Rs. 5–8 crores.5 Although only slightly affected by the destruction of properties, other important Punjabi cities – Lahore, Multan and Rawalpindi – experienced similar bouts of communal violence. All violent conflicts resulting in and from the political and geographical division of a land, Deschaumes and Ivekovic have reminded us, draw on well-rooted socio-historical dynamics. Partition – they warn – restructures “the sources of conflicts around borders, refugees and diasporas”.6 Overtly political, the 1947 early spring riots combined Hindu and Sikh opposition to the establishment of a Muslim League raj over the Punjab with some of the elements that had previously featured in conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s. As in the past, religious festivals, processions and recognised symbols were part and parcel of the wider picture of events that was being sketched out in the all-India scenario. In early 1947, a number of Sikh associations were planning to take part in Holi processions in Lahore and across the whole of the Punjab.7 In April, a riot broke out in Amritsar after the ritual Friday prayers.8 Sikh holy books were burnt in Muzzaffargarh, and cases of Sikhs having their beards and hair forcibly cut were reported in Rawalpindi, Attock and Jhelum Districts.9 Mosques, temples and gurdwaras (Sikh temples) thus provided both the target and the starting point for communal violence. Places and symbols were conceived in terms of their fluid and dynamic dimensions: they were far from being static cognitive symbols.10 No matter if reasserted within a new political context and message, the participation of supposedly ‘enemy’ communities in processions or the desecration of holy books unquestionably aimed at provoking religious identities. Local disturbances and their religious symbols were drawn into a complex process involving the re-elaboration of previous clashes alongside newly created reasons for conflict. In the spring of 1947, the overall religious

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15

cosmology still retained the meaning that previous communal clashes had established, albeit reshaped around a new political demand and the consequent reactions of political leaders. From 1945 onwards, politics and religion had intertwined in an increasingly intricate plot. The call for an independent Pakistan alongside India embodied the porosity of the borders demarcating the two. Likewise, the ambiguities of Indian and Pakistani nationalism themselves became an ordinary ‘thing’. As such, they came to be part of the everyday life of the local people, thereby impacting on their choices and acts. Within this multi-faceted framework, religious groups and leaders read meaning into political events and concocted their counterattacks along these lines. “[Rioting] was communal in its essence and had as its purpose the domination of the Punjab by Muslims”, the Sikh leader Master Tara Singh set down in black and white in February 1947.11 Victims often perceived attacks as a direct religious provocation, and publicly portrayed the religious ‘other’ as the aggressor. Muslims along with League leaders in turn blamed Hindu and Sikhs as the sole instigators of communal clashes.12 For their part, Sikh leaders similarly claimed that communal outbursts and League agitation were orchestrated as a targeted attack against their community.13 Unsurprisingly, the defence of their gurdwaras and the attachment to Guru Gobind Singh became key issues in Sikh public campaigns and publications. In order to establish Pakistan, the atrocities committed on Sikhs in the Punjab since 5th March 1947 have not come to light because of censorship on news. [. . .] Oh Sikhs! Read this and think yourself. What have you to do under the circumstances? In your veins, there is yet the blood of your beloved Guru Gobind Singh Singhji. Do your duty! incited a five-sheet pamphlet that, in early April, passed from Sikh hand to Sikh hand.14 Elsewhere, Sikh leaders linked such feelings to their own claim for territorial sovereignty in any future postcolonial institutional arrangements.15 Nevertheless, the communal clashes between March and May 1947 possessed their own particular traits that anticipated and, to some extent, even constituted a preparation for the summer Partition-related rioting. A massive militarisation of the everyday got underway across the whole of the Punjab, notably in the Lahore and Amritsar districts.16 The smuggling of arms and ammunition – mainly imported from the NWFP and the Tribal Areas – grew steadily.17 Paramilitary associations such as the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Muslim League National Guards (MLNG) doubled their efforts alongside their membership.18 The province also experienced a further privatisation of the traditional state-held monopoly over the legitimate use of violence. Groups of persons as well as single individuals – in some cases not attached to any political or religious group – embarked upon an extensive production and accumulation of ammunition, firearms and bombs.19 The results could at times be comically tragic. Hundreds of persons died while squeezing homemade incendiary devices into soda water bottles.20 But the

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scramble for arms formed part of a targeted activity of paramilitary associations and newly created ‘private armies’ as well as a reaction to the growing sense of insecurity and mistrust towards the local police. Retired and employed officers alike took an active part in the disturbances.21 For their part, both the League and the Congress had allegedly inaugurated a widespread under-the-table campaign to delegitimise the local police force.22 Local people, in this context, often resorted to self-defence as a way of overcoming the partiality (or rumours of it) of those institutions that were deputed to the maintenance of law and order. These early substantial changes in the structural approaches of Hindu, Muslim and Sikh associations – as well the organisation of illegal para-military training courses for ordinary persons – paved the way for subsequent Partition-related clashes. As elsewhere in British India, they helped to mould the reactions of Punjab’s main political figures and the different communities involved.23 Frequent calls for action by political leaders further embittered the months that preceded and followed the resignation of the Khizr Tiwana ministry. In August 1946, Gandhi had reportedly accepted the eventual inevitability of a bloodbath.24 For his part, Jinnah had requested Muslims to “make every effort to prepare and organise the community” as a reaction to the dangerous fallout from all-India negotiations over the subcontinent’s future constitutional arrangements.25 At the grassroots level, control over the worsening communal situation slipped through the fingers of party notables and influential individuals. Those who were fanning the flames of communalism found themselves face-to-face with the horror of their strategies’ consequences.26 In Campbellpur – Jenkins reported – local “Muslim sections [. . .] were extremely sulky and some of [. . .] [their members] are beginning to be frightened”.27 Violence, its organisation and its tools acquired new and more ‘familiar’ faces. Passers-by, neighbours, fellow citizens and even friends all became potential aggressors and started to be treated with suspicion. In mid-April, the intercession of a Muslim mutual acquaintance in a quarrel between two Hindu kamins in Hodal resulted in a communal clash with a roll call of 10 deaths and 32 persons injured. In response, a Rs. 1 lakh fine was levied and the suspension of certain trading licences imposed on the whole area.28 A state of ‘flag war’ was said to exist among all the different local communities. In many Punjabi towns, the hoisting of white flags on the roofs of the houses signposted the presence of a Muslim family and sent out a clear message for Muslims belonging to neighbouring villages.29 They not only identified those buildings that should not be attacked, but also marked out new social boundaries within suburbs, villages and towns. Meanwhile Hindus and Sikhs cut Muslim League flags into a thousand pieces and ripped up the badges of the members of Jinnah’s party.30 Likewise, Muslims were enraged when the Congress flag was raised on public buildings.31 People engaged in further unusual competitions. Lahore appeared to be infested by a pack of jackals “howling at the moon”:32 slogans of defiance and war cries echoed from within houses and across rooftops from dusk to dawn. This was, in Pandey’s words, violence in its more disguised form.33 The 1947 spring clashes erupted simultaneously and, for the first time, went on – significantly – to encompass the Punjabi countryside as well. Communal

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violence first blighted rural areas in the outskirts of Rawalpindi in mid-March 1947. Armed with lathis (wooden sticks), agricultural implements and homemade arms, the villagers of the Taxila-Gujar Khan-Kahuta triangle set their suburbs alight.34 Gunshots would thereafter ricochet across the Attock, Jhelum and Multan districts.35 Life in many parts of the province was, needless to say, brought to a standstill. As this wave of disturbances rippled through the rural areas of the province, local officers and the police found it increasingly difficult to reckon with a widening situation of terror and violence. The provincial authorities, Jenkins recorded in his correspondence with the Viceroy Mountbatten, had “little experience of dealing with such disturbances”.36 The almost complete disruption of the communication networks further hampered efforts to impose order, and generated urgent demands for supplementary efforts.37 A subsequent inquiry into the conduct of local post and telegraphs offices during the March rioting revealed that their staff had made no effort to maintain the service.38 Those people who could afford a telephone had appeared to be quite reluctant to use it. Rumour – later confirmed – had it that calls were intercepted and information then passed on to political leaders.39 It was now that the first waves of refugees started pouring into the streets and the hastily prepared temporary reception structures. Violence, fear and buildings reduced to smouldering wreckages persuaded individuals that it was too dangerous to live as a minority in ‘rival’ religious majority areas.40 A large army-run camp in the Rawalpindi Cantonment area hosted about 40,000 displaced persons.41 In the comparatively smaller Jhelum District, the local authorities had to accommodate around 6,000 refugees made homeless by communal disturbances.42 Overall numbers, it seems, were even higher. All those who had been given a temporary bed in charitable institutions or relatives’ homes were missing from the official roll call.43 Furthermore, the March to May migrations remained primarily an urban phenomenon. Towns were not only badly hit by communal bouts, but, in a curious twist of fate, they also came to be seen as the first port of call for the many displaced persons involved.44 Partition was both at the threshold and already there.

Translating the ‘big political ideas’ at stake into practice I am glad to inform the House that the plan contained in the announcement which I am about to make, including the offer of Dominion status to one or two successor authorities, has been favourably received by all three parties represented at the conference held by the Viceroy with the Indian leaders during the past two days.45

On 3 June 1947 Prime Minister Attlee entered a House of Commons where a sense of sharp expectancy mingled with high excitement. Westminster was hosting a debate that would sanction the beginning of the end of the colonial era and affect the course of world history. The austere and attenuated calm of the Lords’ Chamber clashed with the hasty political manoeuvring and the images of a subcontinent literally being torn apart by the flames of communalism.46 The

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announcement of the Indian subcontinent’s partitioning marked the point of no return in its political and communal history. Partition, the idea of it, was – and would be – a key watershed in South Asian and imperial history. As with other such momentous events, it lay at the heart of intense debates among local political figures, not to mention those conducted later on by historians, socio-political scientists and anthropologists. Soon after Attlee’s announcement, an odd feeling of ‘making the best of a bad job’ crept over both the local arena and civil society back in the Punjab. Caution soon made way for mutual claims, reclaims, allegations and contrasting emotions. An increasingly lethal combination of enthusiasm, indifference, nervousness and excitement poisoned the late Punjabi spring of 1947.47 One could not please everybody, after all. In the Punjab, the so-called ‘3 June Plan’ was greeted by the anger of the Sikh community, the approval of Muslims and Hindus who were resident in their respective religion-majority districts and the serious concerns of those who lived as minorities within all the different administrative units. Nevertheless, for the ordinary man and woman of the province, the news is unlikely to have come as a real bombshell. “The plan”, the Governor of Punjab recorded, “had no discernible effect on communal relations”.48 The atmosphere – especially in Lahore – remained very tense: communal clashes persisted without showing any sign of either worsening or improving. The future possible manoeuvrings of local political leaders, however, catalysed the attention of the local public sphere. Their jockeying – as scholars who have analysed these months from a high politics perspective would argue – provides an extremely interesting window onto the broader withdrawal of the British raj. How would Jinnah – Jalal wants us to ponder – finally exploit the creation of Pakistan that he had been using as a ‘bargaining tool’ in his talks with British authorities?49 Conversely, as Indian nationalist historians suggest we consider, how would the Congress react to Muslim League tactics that had forced its party leadership to opt for partition?50 What was the role of Islam in shaping the demand for Pakistan and the fulfilment of the two-nation theory?, asks bin Sayeed, succumbing to a quintessentially Pakistani temptation to prioritise the role of religion.51 The Partition Plan raised many more questions than it answered. Its vagueness on the geographical and ‘factual’ identity of two independent ‘successor’ states – India and Pakistan – increased the climate of uncertainty, and left local leaders with an important gap to plug. A sense of anxious waiting spread through party seats, militants and ordinary people across the whole province. On 23 July, the partition of the Punjab would be decided in its assembly. The reactions of provincial social and political exponents were then much awaited. Their manoeuvring and decisions – as historians have revealed in their local studies on Partition and its fallout – would make (or break) the Muslim League, its associates and Pakistan itself.52 As the events of 1947 unfolded, a curious discomfort marked the Punjabi narratives on its future institutional set-up. Locally – at a provincial level – the history of the Pakistan movement did not weight in favour of politicians and government representatives. In high circles meetings, the ‘P-word’ had always been a hot potato that passed from hand to hand without anyone being either able or willing

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to handle it. Back in late August 1942, for instance, influential non-Muslim politicians Chhotu Ram and Sardar Singh had urged the then Governor of the Punjab Glancy not to release any declaration as regards ‘Pakistan’.53 Sikander, one of the Punjab’s leading Unionists, for one had long hoped that first the war and then discussions on the future constitutional shape of the subcontinent would discourage Jinnah from pursuing this political aim.54 Grassroots politics and militancy, however, had modulated on a quite different pitch. “Amongst the Muslims of the province, your name [Jinnah’s one] is magic. The League must take advantage of this wave of feeling in favour of Pakistan”, Malik Barkat Ali – patron of the Muslim Student Federation – had proudly announced in his late 1941 July letter to the League’s leader.55 The image of ‘Pakistan’ that the Muslim Student Federation was popularising across the Punjab left very little room for misunderstandings. Speeches that had appealed to the rank and file presented the possible partition of British India as a fait accompli. The methods and channels through which Muslim League students’ plans were thwarted during this period serve as indicators of their success among particular social groups. In 1942, the Jullundhur District Magistrate issued a caution to all those Muslims who had been planning to organise or attend the League’s forthcoming conference in Phillaur. Special orders would allow the meeting to take place, provided that the question of ‘Pakistan’ and the Lahore resolution were not discussed. “It should not be mentioned” – the caution stated – “that the Mussulmans and the Hindus [are] two separate nations and that therefore the Mussulmans of those provinces where they are in a majority [have the] right to secede from the Centre”.56 The idea that the average Muslim had attached to the ‘P-word’ thus deeply resonated with Attlee’s comments cited above. Pakistan for a growing proportion of them had come to mean some kind of Partition, and increasingly partition on the basis of religion. It was no surprise then that the 3 June Plan was welcomed by a popular disregard for the impact it might have on individual lives. Muslims who ran into each other in Lahore’s markets and parks chatted briefly over the issue.57 By contrast, they seemed more critical of the behaviour of local League leaders.58 The latter appeared to be groping in the dark. Apparently the symptoms of that curious mutism that had been affecting the main Punjabi politicians since the early 1940s were proving difficult to treat. While anti-Pakistan rallies were organised across the whole of the region, it remained a taboo to discuss the interrelations between Partition and Pakistan, at both the lower-rank political and institutional level.59 Even when, in early May, the unmentionable word first appeared in an official meeting, indeterminateness reigned supreme.60 Key Punjabi politician, the Khan of Mamdot kept postponing the release of any formal declaration. Doubts and questions over the immediate institutional future of the Punjab, and likewise the formation of a special Partition Committee, remained unanswered for days. “The summons should not issue until the Muslim League Council has ratified. [Mamdot] thinks ratification [of the Partition Plan] almost certain. [. . .] will consult his colleagues and let me know his final opinion when he has done so”, recorded a frustrated Governor of Punjab.61

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During informal meetings with their supporters, Punjabi leaders agreed on the idea they did not agree on anything. Local Congress representatives flattered themselves that they had pushed Muslims into a corner. Sikhs had little choice but to trust to the Boundary Commission’s decisions.62 Publicly Master Tara Singh maintained his previous standing, inciting Sikhs to carry on their fight in defence of their own community and its existence “until [their] object was obtained”.63 Muslim League associates meanwhile triggered a rumour that the 3 June Plan was the result of Jinnah’s stroke of genius. Jinnah himself voiced the dissatisfaction of many Muslims by highlighting the differences between the Muslim League platform and the British plan. In the words of the League newspaper (still operating out of Delhi) Dawn, “the Muslim nation can never reconcile itself to the act of vandalism which truncated Pakistan”.64 For his part, Nehru tried to focus the debate on the summer’s rioting and looting. At the same time as he blamed British officers for their failure to handle communal violence, he praised the efficiency of local Congress ministries in containing disturbances in the regions that they controlled. Nehru’s line of reasoning here implied a subtle narrative that would become both a leitmotiv and a widely accepted explanation for the Government of Punjab’s inability to restore law and order in its towns and villages.65 The inability of the Muslim League to manage the government apparatus in the Punjab was contrasted with the supposed efficiency of the United Provinces’ authorities in tackling the 1947 communal breakdown. In the political jargon of the time, this argument turned into an opportunity for the Congress and its followers to challenge Jinnah, the League, the latter’s supposed suitability to rule Pakistan, and the idea of Pakistan itself. To some extent, it subtly reversed the grassroots campaign policy that Jinnah’s party had put forward during its efforts in the early 1940s to root itself politically among the Punjabi electorate. In the words of Malik Barkat Ali, Muslims had “changed [. . .] [their mind] because [. . .] [their] experience of the Congress-governed provinces from July 1937 to October 1939, when they were in power, shattered all our confidence in the good faith of our Hindu countrymen”.66 After all, the shift from the Muslim League support of a united India to the cause of Pakistan – whatever the ‘P-word’ had meant in those years – had been closely connected with perceived misgovernment of that Congress-ruled province during the late 1930s. Political parties and leaders – no matter whether from the United Provinces or the Punjab – tended to go back on their words. Appeals for a normalisation of social relationships went hand in hand with an undercover abetment of conflicts. Peace committees started to crop up in towns and villages across the whole of the Punjab.67 Still, in many ways, they were doomed to failure even before they had been founded. At negotiating tables and in everyday ‘social transactions’, their founding fathers instigated communal attacks on the one hand, and “made no efforts to maintain peace” on the other.68 As the official timeframe of the path towards independence was revealed and agreed, the everyday and familiar face of communal violence showed its true colours. New shapes, voices and whispers added to the stories of those months. Ordinary people’s experiences of violence and events progressively dominated

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the scene, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, would inspire the emergence of a historyfrom-beneath analysis of Partition-related developments.69 Attacks made an impact on the solidarities existing between different religious communities by fuelling a climate of mistrust, hate and fear. Places, buildings and people acted as prisms through which high politics came face to face with popular understandings of the political ideas that were at stake in those months. Cases of the poisoning of water sources made the simple act of drinking a glass of water into a spring from which mutual communal allegations poured.70 Bombs thrown at people resting on roofs turned sleep into a nightmare. Private houses stored arms, bombs and other incendiary material, losing thereby their traditional image of being safe and protective places.71 Any moment that triggered a process of normalisation in people’s lives came under attack. The ability to carry on a normal life slipped away. In early May, the Senate Hall of the University of the Punjab was crammed with striking students. According to their elected representatives, communal fury was proving a nervewracking ordeal. Their demand was the postponing of their fast-approaching examination session.72 Many of them were certainly looking for excuses for their laxness. Nevertheless, the British Governor in Lahore admitted, “students belonging to the Pindi, Lahore and Amritsar divisions have [had an] anxious time and can reasonably ask for a postponement”.73 Workers on their way to factories or craft workshops were further targets for 1947 violence. In less than 24 hours in late June, for instance, two assaults targeted Hindu and Muslim workers in Lahore.74 In the same place, just a few weeks earlier, an attendant had been stabbed at the petrol pump where he worked during the rush hour.75 Attacks and assaults not only aimed at destroying the economic wealth of opposing communities but also at paralysing towns, cities and villages through acts that hindered the resumption of normal living conditions. Only a few shops and offices ran a partial service with reduced staff and scanty resources. The supply and the demand for food, fruit and vegetables were severely affected, as deliveries by suppliers were frequently delayed. To top it all, the provision of clean drinking water and adequate sewage disposals fell to an all-time low.76 The stoppage of almost all financial activities short-circuited the very basis of the whole credit system and encouraged smuggling and the black market to flourish. Single individuals and small groups constituted the basic building blocks of the 1947 upheavals. Accounts of these months are packed with information on incidents, assaults and murders inflicted by a single person or bands of no more than six or seven members. “People seem to have discovered during the actual riots how easy is to burn the average building in an Indian city. [. . .] Our first problem was” – Jenkins admitted in June 1947 – “[ . . . ] to deal with stabbing and burning – not by crowds or even groups of people but by individuals”.77 Arms could be easily collected from those that lay near dead bodies or were to be found in many abandoned properties and houses.78 Incendiary material became an important easily accessible tool for a large number of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, frequently causing deaths and injuries even among its inexperienced makers. But single persons or small groups should not be viewed as belonging to an irrational

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and unstructured mass unleashing its violence in a moment of temporary madness. Targets were often carefully selected, as no one stabbed “his victim without choosing his moment carefully”.79

Moulding both personal and political identities out of the Partition mayhem On 23 June 1947 the Punjab Assembly met in Lahore under curfew. Police precautions and barbed-wire barricades isolated the building from the clashes taking place just a few meters away. The agenda that day focused on the momentous vote on the partitioning of the province. The members of the province’s western wing initially opted for a united Punjab. Nevertheless, the rejection of the Khan of Mamdot’s motion on the same issue by the eastern group sealed the geographical division of the Punjab into two halves. The spaces within which the identity of Punjabis now had to be reasserted added a new and relatively clearer dimension. The withdrawal of the British raj would entail the geo-political division of the province as well the partition of the subcontinent. As the summer of 1947 approached, Punjabis’ newly acquired future political identity was increasingly structured around boundaries that split social groups along the dividing line of ‘us’ versus ‘them’.80 All the communities of the Punjab relied – once again – heavily upon their religious experience. Shrines, mosques, temples and gurdwaras, along with religious fairs or rites, constituted the main inanimate targets of the July–August 1947 fury. Identity, its expression and assertion, dealt unavoidably with spatiality. Places now came to be identified with the definition of the national self. In other words, they were the support on which the elaboration of individual identities and performances relied.81 In Verka in mid-July, a bomb exploded among a group of Muslims gathered in a mosque for their salat (prayers), causing one dead and five injured.82 A few weeks before, a toll of five killed and a hundred wounded had been the result of a blast during a Muslim fair in Mandhan. The slaughter of pigs, cows and individuals, and the eventual exposure of their corpses in temples, acted as warning to all those who were still alive. In early July, the attack on a Muslim shrine in Jullundhur that was visited by Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs alike, mirrored the radicalisation of local religious sentiment of belonging and fervour. Sufi (Muslim mystic) lodges had long represented a shared social place. In many cases, they had also established themselves as the fulcrum around which the social harmony of the local communities had rotated. In a private conversation with the Punjab Governor, a Muslim League notable from Campbellpur admitted that the Punjab was reaping the harvest of the early 1940s rooting of the Pakistan idea and, what he termed, “the extreme communalism of the election campaign of 1945–6”.83 From the 1920s onwards, as Hasan and Gilmartin have both demonstrated, elections had proved to be of great importance in the conceptualisation of individuals’ political self across the subcontinent.84 These exercises called for a redefinition of at least two ‘identities’: one as a group within the South Asian context and one within the colonial

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structure of power. The 1945–6 electoral campaign, for its part, had further exacerbated the polarisation of religious identities. Pirs (sufi saints) and sajjada nashins (heads of a pir’s family) had left the Unionist Party in increasing numbers to support Jinnah’s platform. In the Muslim League, as Gilmartin argues, they “found [. . .] a political and platform which allowed them to maintain their political and religious connections and at the same time to express their religious concerns in politics”.85 Public appeals, leaflets, mural posters and publications testifying to this switch were issued in great numbers and reached a wider and growing audience. Increasingly animated by religious leaders, the political debate had been imbued with a rhetoric that, especially in rural areas, made the Muslim League campaign equal to a peculiar religious movement.86 A vote for Jinnah’s party was not granted on the basis of people’s own perceived identity and opinions. Yet, the adherence to its political platform in these elections was regarded as a proof of Muslim-ness and as an “act of incorporation in the body of Islam”.87 This weaving together of the religious and the political dimension also enriched the provincial arena with new integrating rituals. The vernacularisation of the messages of religious and political leaders, along with the ideas about an independent India and Pakistan, implied a re-elaboration of traditional and new symbols, identities and antagonisms. Unquestionably, the high politics of political developments affected how the various Punjabi communities looked at each other and interacted on an everyday basis. Normative patterns of behaviour expectations and the day-to-day projection of the lives of millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims onto the local public area were refashioned along new lines. Indeed, the new political context within which the British raj, the Muslim League, the Congress and various revivalist associations framed events broke the mould of local people’s image of their own social existence and relationship with others.88 The socio-political dynamics of 1947 translated into the co-presence of both religious and civil symbols as the main targets of attack. In early July, a group of Muslims assaulted a Public Works Department van that was announcing the imposition of the curfew on the city of Gujranwala.89 On 13 July, late at night, the beating of two on-duty constables rocked a small village in Jullundhur District.90 A couple of days later, the local Police Recruitment Centre was set alight, and the Muslim League flag replaced the Union Jack that was flying on its mast.91 For their part, MLNG scoured the streets of Lahore while local police officers stood by, unable – or unwilling – to react.92 Bombs frequently highlighted the extent of popular mistrust in the local judiciary. In late July, an incendiary device exploded outside the Session Court in Amritsar where two murder cases that had occurred during the spring disturbances were being heard.93 New symbolic ways of understanding the world thus challenged old ones in a continuous process of definition and re-definition of both public and private identities and spaces. With independence looming, attacks on trains registered a steady increase in number and ferocity. In late July, Jullundhur and Hoshiarpur districts reported four attacks in less than three days.94 The need to build up an early administrative apparatus able to handle the immediate institutional needs

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of a new state pushed Muslim League leaders into organising large-scale transfers of bureaucratic cadres by train via the Punjab. During the second week of August, one such train with many prospective Pakistani employees on board was attacked a few kilometres outside Bhatinda. The assault resulted in four persons killed and 20 injured.95 The carefully-planned choice to conduct a swift campaign of onslaughts on the so-called ‘specials’ was, it seems, an attempt to undermine those foundations that would have allowed Pakistan to stand on its own feet. Former President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf adds a further nuance to the general picture. His is a “story of a middle-class family, a husband and wife [Musharraf’s parents] who left Delhi with their three sons. [. . .] The little boy [Musharraf himself] [. . .] remembered his father’s anxiety about a box that he was guarding closely. It was with him all time. He protected it with his life, even sleeping with it under his head, like a pillow. There were” – Musharraf reveals – “700,000 rupees on it, a princely sum in those days. The money was destined for the foreign office of their new country”.96 Attacks on trains were carried out along military-style lines. A first wave of saboteurs shot at train roofs with the aim of driving out their passengers. As soon as grenades hit the coaches, the real massacre began: attackers drew their kirpans (swords) and other swords to proceed to the killing itself.97 The numbers of people that were involved in single attacks, arson and robberies amounted now to a few thousands. Up to five thousand Sikhs – armed with spears, bombs and guns and led by a retired army officer – raided a Muslim village.98 Hence, the 1947 summer violence acted as a wave that occasionally hit and withdrew by spreading from urban settings to rural areas. In a curious twist of fate, it was in the countryside that it reached its peak and assumed its most organised guise. In late June, a couple of miles far from Phillaur, Jullundhur District, an attack that was perpetrated by a well-organised group of Sikhs caused the death of 14 Muslims and injured as many.99 Meanwhile, the rural areas of Amritsar were swept up in the same communal fury: over there the death toll on one occasion amounted to 33 people in less than 12 hours.100 The devastating effects of this June–early August communal violence were an apanage of the banality of an evil that has forced historians and socio-political scientists to delve into the dictionary of human atrocities. Deciding on whether this rioting was a case of temporary madness, ethnic cleansing, nationalist fratricide, genocide or, even, a new form of violence has given rise to controversy and fuelled scholarly disagreement.101 For their part, perpetrators, heroes and victims were paradoxically in the laps of the gods of small figures. The daily proportion of deaths to the overall population of the region was surprisingly low. As the Governor of the Punjab in a private letter to the Viceroy, “Casualties are running between 50–100”.102 However, while not particularly frequent, bombs that targeted crowded places took the lion’s share of the toll of dead and injured. That was, for instance, the case of the already-cited explosion that, in late July, rocked the area in front of the Session Court in Amritsar and resulted in 48 injured consisting of passers-by, demonstrators and employees.103 In most cases, the 1947 summer communal bouts turned into a surreal manhunt. “Raids” – Jenkins pointed out – “caused

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most casualties but there were many individual attacks”.104 In Bharowal, on the hot and dry night between 3 and 4 July, a group of Sikhs shot a Muslim who was irrigating his fields.105 Even local well-known personalities were not spared. On 31 July, Ashiq Hussain – the former Unionist Minister – was killed at a road post after squabbling with the sentry.106 Twenty-four-hour reports of the everyday life of the citizens of the districts of the Punjab clearly exemplify the magnitude of communal clashes. On 2 August, the list of dead and wounded in Amritsar City totalled 12. In the local rural areas, gunfire and stabbings brought about the death of two Sikhs in Vairowal and Ghavinda. A further person – a Muslim – was injured as a result of a bomb explosion near Tarn Taran.107 Three days later – on 5 August – Jenkins recorded no more than 24 casualties in the districts other than Amritsar.108 Putrefying corpses lying on the streets among the garbage being eaten by animals, the brisk smell of blood and wrecked houses represented the other side of the summer violence. Starvation, fear, despair, hopelessness and anger carved out socio-geographical spaces wherein the dialogue among social actors was almost impossible.109 Unsurprisingly, the result was the deconstruction of all things familiar.110 Traditional points of reference vanished together with the usual everyday experience of the self. In early July, some Sikhs attacked their neighbours, injuring 11 people.111 A bomb hit the Hindu-run Crown Cinema at Bhati Gate, Lahore and caused the death of 15 persons among its usual clientele of lower-class Muslims.112 Unquestionably, the so-called communal of war of succession was “dissolv[ing] old loyalties and created new ones, and [. . .] produced many symptoms of a revolution”.113 And once Partition itself arrived, loyalties – both old and new – and symptoms would be fully unveiled.

Moving towards freedom As he addressed his audience at the Council Chamber of the Sindh Legislative Assembly in Karachi on 11 August 1947, Jinnah did not let his feelings show at all. He did not even seek the eyes of his beloved sister Fatima who was sitting in front of him. Rather he talked “quietly and unemotionally like a lawyer arguing a case”, the correspondent from The Times of London recorded, towering over the 50 newly elected members of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly.114 Pakistan, he advised them, would be a state where individuals who belonged to religious minorities were to be “citizens with equal rights and obligations”. Complete religion freedom would be granted, modelling the new state on the British separation of the religious and political spheres. Ironically, at that very minute, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were quite literally conquering towns and villages by fire and sword. After all, Pakistan and India were now two independent states whose borders had been neither announced nor internationally acknowledged as yet. It was violence that in several areas – those thought to be quite close to the yet-to-be-revealed border – carved out spaces and sketched out the future geography of the region. During the week that preceded independence, Lahore and Amritsar were set on fire. Mainly inhabited by Hindus

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and Sikhs, the walled city of the ‘Paris of East’ was almost completely burnt out up to the Muslim mohallas (neighbourhoods). Similarly, fires and attacks razed the Muslim suburbs of Amritsar to the ground.115 The result was, unsurprisingly, an almost complete exodus of all those who perceived that their religious identity put their lives at high risk. On 21 August, about 30,000 Hindus and Sikhs, who had previously lived in the shadow of Lahore’s Badshahi Mosque, were believed to have already reached the Indian Punjab.116 Apparently, their departure, like that of the 70,000 Muslims who were trekking westwards, had the discernible effect of appeasing local communitarian rivalries.117 “Improvement in Amritsar and Lahore maintained”, the British High Commissioner in Lahore telegraphed to the London headquarters in late August 1947 with a certain amount of relief.118 In those villages and small towns whose future geographical status was a matter under discussion at the negotiating table of the Boundary Commission, disturbances snowballed into full-scale riots. In the rural areas of Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Jullundhur, Hoshiarpur and Ludhiana districts, attacks, arson and reprisals showed no sign of abating even after pockets of refugees had left their suburbs.119 It might have been supposed that tempers would have cooled as soon as the proceedings of the Radcliffe Award were released on 17 August. “Whatever the fault of the award by the Boundary Commission, both the Governments of India and Pakistan had to abide by it and there was no question of making a protest”, declared League politician Ghazanfar Ali Khan.120 In the Congress headquarters, the outcome of the negotiations was said to be accepted as a “settled fact”.121 Official declarations such as these, however, only scratched the surface of the general popular mood. A long editorial published in Dawn summarised the real-life discussions within the lower ranks of the Muslim League. “Even a cursory glance to them [Commission’s papers]” – it stated – shows that these reports have been drafted in the most cowardly fashion and do not possess the essential characteristics of a legal judgement. [. . .] Let us make it perfectly clear that even if the Government accepts this territorial murder of Pakistan which is miscalled a judicial award, the people will not.122 For its part, The Hindu opted for a far more ironic twist. “There is” – its columnist argued – “something [. . .] [true] in his [Radcliffe’s] plea that when the Bengal Commission was taking evidence he had to study the Punjab records, and when the Punjab Commission was taking evidence he had to study the Bengali records”.123 The publishing of the Boundary Award not only further exacerbated communal tensions but also gave them an even more marked political twist. “The crisis in the Punjab is changing in character. [. . .] The chief problems now are large-scale looting on both sides of the frontier and sporadic attacks on the minority communities as they evacuated on foot, trucks, and by railway”, reported a correspondent from The Times.124 Despite issuing soothing statements on an almost daily basis, Indian and Pakistani leaders appeared unwilling to cast off the chains of the vicious circle of retaliation. “Our State is not” – Nehru declared in late August after having

Memories, swords, blood and freedom

27

toured the Punjab – “a communal State [. . .] I have been assured by Liaquat Ali Khan [by now the Prime Minister of Pakistan] that this is also the policy of the Pakistan Government”.125 Reassurances notwithstanding, the political and party narrative on and around violence played on a multi-faceted argumentative fabric. In everyday conversations, the development of a spirit of reconciliation was subject to an equally powerful act of appeasement from the counterpart.126 Apparently, Pakistani authorities turned a deaf ear to the hundreds of angry appeals – in Nehru’s words, “threats of war and of ex-termination of Sikhs” – that appeared in local newspapers Dawn and Zamindar.127 An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. During his visit to Amritsar in late September, the words of the Deputy Prime Minister of India Patel acted as a wake-up call for the local inhabitants and refugees. “If you do not have faith in Pakistan Government [on the exchange of population] or its people” – he argued in polemic fashion – “you can hold your hands for week and see what happens. If they do not observe the truce in the right sprit the world will know who the breakers of laws of humanity are”.128 “If only [. . .] politicians would not interfere with the practical work, the army and civilians would get on far better with the job”, confided Kondem Subbaya Thimmayya, commander-in-chief of the Punjab Boundary Force, to a British attaché.129 East and West Punjab presented a scene of an endless flow of millions of persons who, according to contemporary sources, literally clogged streets, towns and villages. Party propaganda that aimed at pushing individuals away from their homes and into reception camps met with rumours of a Sikh rearmament policy and plans for the founding of their own state.130 Meanwhile contradictory messages and appeals further inflamed public feelings. Leaders of majorities encouraged minorities to express their loyalty to the state, making clear to them that there would be no room for their political representatives in future institutions.131 Attacks on refugee kafilas (caravans), ‘special trains’ and temporary camps plunged the entire Punjab into further chaos and violence. A group of armed Sikhs attacked a Muslim column in the outskirts of Amritsar in early September, killing and injuring 90 persons. On the very same day, a train packed with refugees was halted between Jullundhur and Karpurtala. The assault resulted in death toll of 70 casualties.132 A couple of weeks later, an uninterrupted two-hour siege of another ‘special’ to Pakistan resulted in a similar bloodbath, with a mob of RSS members and Sikhs killing more than 1,000 Muslim travellers.133 Meanwhile, in the Pakistani Punjab countryside, groups of Muslim peasants conducted their own bloody raids on Hindus and Sikhs who were on their way to India.134 Held to ransom by the early bouts of nationalism, women were raped on public roads frequently in front of their own relatives. Their future of pain and shame was all mapped out for them. The tents and the makeshift huts of temporary refugee camps soon replaced refugees’ previously cosy and comfortable houses. From the perspective of the Punjabi Muslim migrant community, its long journey towards resettlement and rehabilitation had just begun. From the very outset, their integration tested the capabilities of both the federal and provincial politico-administrative machineries. British and local officers drew up eyewitness reports of the institutional

28

Memories, swords, blood and freedom

management of the humanitarian emergency.135 Crammed camps, angry refugees, the spread of medical diseases and the need to provide food and assistance demanded immediate action and exceptional organisation skills. Still, as Ansari has alerted us in relation to the neighbouring province of Sindh, the task of accommodating millions of refugees and integrating them into the local socio-economic fabric was not a mere administrative headache.136 Rather it threatened to undermine the foundations on which Pakistan was to be built, and, to a certain extent, it affected how early ideas of national solidarity were elaborated. The superimposition of an artificially bureaucratic notion of citizenship on regions and local inhabitants encouraged what Ansari calls an ethnicisation of the public sphere. Individuals – no matter whether locals or refugees – became actively involved in a process of either re-construction or protection of wellconsolidated identities. A fierce competition for resources, as Talbot has alerted us in relation to the Punjab, embittered the relationship between ‘natives’ and the migrant community.137 The former believed that government decisions were mainly refugee-oriented. By contrast, refugees frequently accused locals of taking the bread out of their mouth by illegally seizing evacuee properties. Kilometre-long kafilas and overcrowded camps entailed the urgent need to reckon with the economic and political costs of the rehabilitation of millions of uprooted persons. But this happened at a moment when federal and provincial authorities were asked to think over and fund the (re-)construction of an independent state. After all, even the ruling party, most of its staff and its platform, and the idea of Pakistan were themselves peculiar refugees. The four pieces of the jigsaw – the management of the humanitarian crisis, nation- and state-building processes, and the duty to avoid bankruptcy – were now required to fit snugly together, a challenge that proved hard to achieve.

Making sense of the official narrative and figures To place refugee experiences in their proper perspective, it is necessary to provide an overview of the official Pakistani state discourse that emerged on their rehabilitation, and also to identify the main migratory flows as well as the places, both urban and rural, where Partition refugees were resettled. Figures and statistics on the number of refugees who fled into West Punjab are widely acknowledged for their unreliability, and still represent a bone of contention between India and Pakistan. The collapse of the administrative machinery threw into confusion any attempt to keep accurate demographic accounts of the comings and goings of persons across the region. In early September 1947, the local correspondent for The Times of London registered that “more than 1,000,000, and possibly as many as 2,000,000 people” were trekking either eastwards or westwards in search for a safer place in which to live.138 “No reliable estimate” – pinpointed the new Governor of West Punjab Francis Mudie a month later – “can be formed of the numbers who have yet to come from East Punjab. It may be 3,000,000. It may be 4,000,000”.139 Apparently, only 20% of the displaced persons who were temporarily hosted in West Punjab reception camps could be properly identified and recorded.140 Nevertheless, some kind of

Memories, swords, blood and freedom

29

a consensus has been reached on the idea that the number of refugees who resettled in West Punjab amounted roughly to 5,500,000.141 But despite this general agreement, the figures still need to be handled with extreme caution. They do not take into account, for instance, the thousands of Indian Muslims who crossed clandestinely the Punjabi border from India. According to a later Pakistani Minister of the Interior Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani, between 1948 and 1953 an overall total of 441,721 persons illegally entered Pakistan.142 Officials within West Punjab’s Rehabilitation Department similarly admitted that 1,000 to 1,500 illegal aliens a month crossed the border with India into Pakistan.143 Things become even more complicated when refugees from the so-called nonagreed areas are brought into play. On 19–20 September 1947, an inter-dominion ministerial conference decided that the resettlement of persons who were fleeing from the disturbed areas of East Punjab and local princely states would take priority over the evacuation of muhajirs from any other (now) Indian regions. With infringements of the agreement, however, it is highly likely that the arrival of non-agreed areas refugees further diminishes the accuracy of calculations. Apart from anything else, it muddles up possible discussion on the geographical origins of this refugee community. Understanding where refugees were resettled or where they resettled themselves can prove even more controversial. The present mapping of their presence in Punjabi towns and villages, whose socio-geographical coordinates are frequently taken as proof of the homogeneity of the rehabilitation practices and therefore exploited as ‘documentary evidence’ and research tools in many historiographical analyses, does not reflect their original ‘first destination’ on the Pakistan side of the new border. According to the West Punjabi Board of Economic Inquiry’s statistical review of the distribution of the migrant community and the 1951 Pakistan Census, the ‘strongholds’ of the refugee resettlement were the districts of Lahore, Lyallpur (present-day Faisalabad), Montgomery (presentday Sahiwal) and Multan.144 There, refugees exceeded by far the five-lakh units (see Table 1.1) and accounted – especially in the headquarter towns – for an overall average of 56.5% of the local population.145 In line with all-Pakistan statistics, around 90% of the refugee community lived in the Punjabi countryside.146 The litmus test of this trend lies in the number of muhajir workers whose jobs related to the primary sector. Indeed, 64% of the selfsupporting refugee workforce was on duty on the local fertile agricultural lands (see Table 1.2). But available statistics – lies, damn lies – register neither the places of origin nor the number of extended families that eventually found a new home in these districts. They merely draw a numerical and, therefore, largely static picture of events, and arguably serve little useful purpose to those more interested in the subtleties of ongoing processes of social change. A rare exception to this paucity of data is a 1954, albeit partial, list of Muslim abducted women and children that provides each and every refugee’s place of origin (see Table 1.3).147 Nevertheless, the 1948 West Punjab Refugee Census reveals that, out of the total refugee population who poured into the Pakistani Punjab, 4,197,000 persons

1.723.580

Source: Census of Pakistan – 1951, 1951.

Total

Campbellpur Gujrat Jhelum Mianwali Rawalpindi Shahpur

Gujranwala Lahore Sheikhupura Sialkot

299.145 745.078 309.890 369.467

Rawalpindi Division

Lahore Division 38.121 135.676 52.376 46.672 106.262 207.256 586.363

Table 1.1 Refugee population in the Divisions and Districts of West Punjab

Dera G. Khan Jhang Lyallpur Montgomery Multan Muzaffargarh

Multan Division 35.740 138.649 986.236 713.050 646.151 78.559 2.598.385

Bahawalpur Rahim Yar Khan

Bahawalpur State

372.866

298.140 74.726

Source: Census of Pakistan – 1951, 1951

Cultivation Animal Husbandry Other Agriculture Forestry/Fishery Mining/Quarrying 7 Manufacturing 976 Building Construction/Utilities 266 Trade/Commerce 181 Transport/Shipping/Port 87 Services Post/Telecom. 21 Education 4,002 Medical Services 3,504 Municipal Services 895 Domestic/Personal Services 41 Religion/Art/Public 4,097 Information Other/Not Classified 284 27 2,544 326 2,274 1,484 1,059 307 143 36,557 442 182 1,449

6 2,007 460 12,128 186 20 70 60 540 99 8 118

455

6 17 5 11 1

3 574 9 119,456

1,077,334 39,586 5,962 106

1,325

131 5 16 1,081 899 24

143 179,531 5,829 1,698 9,780

129,684

52 26 54 198 9,121 257

89 9,196 479 4,745 2,862

5,612

21 112 30 6778 73,008 62

23 800 117 1,011 2,157

20

Technical/ Administrative/ Clerical/Office Sales Agric./Fish Skilled Unskilled Service Other Professional Managerial Workers Workers Workers Operatives Labourers Workers

Table 1.2 Economic groups and occupation of self-supporting muhajirs aged over 12 years old (excludes a) Defence Service and b) economically inactive persons)

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Memories, swords, blood and freedom

Table 1.3 Number of abducted women and children per district East Punjab Ambala Amritsar Ferozepore Gurdaspur Gurgaon Hissar Hoshiarpur Jullundhur Kangra Karnal Ludhiana Rohtak Simla

Patiala and East Punjab States 133 232 455 141 10 74 92 95 20 40 165 30 3

Faridkot State Jind State Kapurthala State Nabha State Patiala State

Other 38 85 57 162 1056

Delhi Province Other States in India Other Places in India Jammu and Kashmir State

30 43 18 401

Source: Government of West Punjab, Supplement to the List of Muslim Abducted Women and Children in India and Jammu & Kashmir State – Part III, Lahore, 1954

came from the East Punjab Districts; 682,000 from the East Punjab States; 202,600 from the Jammu and Kashmir; 191,600 from Alwar; 91,200 from the Delhi Province; 28,400 the United Provinces; and some other 93,600 from other regions of India.148 The combination of these latter figures with those of the earlier 1941 Census of India reveals a clearer – albeit still rather cloudy – picture of the districts of origin of those 4,197,000 muhajirs who arrived from the eastern wing of the Punjab. Torn apart by the 1947 communal violence, the districts of Karpurtala, Gurdaspur, Amritsar, Jullundur and Ferozepore – whose Muslims, by the time of the 1941 Census of India, accounted for respectively 56.4%, 50.2%, 46.5%, 45.6% and 45.1% of the local inhabitants – registered a steady decrease of their Muslim population.149 Arguably, a fair number of refugees came also from the districts of Ludhiana, Gurgaon, Hoshiarpur, Ambala, Karnal and Faridkot, where Muslims comprised an overall average of 32.6%.150 Once again, any data extrapolated from the 1948 West Punjab Refugee Census must be treated with extreme caution. In practice, their calculation resulted from an ‘educated guess’ being made of the number of urban refugees settled in the province plus the product obtained by multiplying an estimated five-member family by the number of claims for an eventual allotment of agricultural land that had been submitted to the local provincial Revenue Department.151 The thoroughness of the screening of bogus applications and their subsequent systematic ‘writing off’ is unclear. Indeed, from the very early stages of the post-1947 resettlement process, refugees in West Punjab demonstrated a strong penchant for exaggerating their claims and submitting multiple forms for multiple allotments.152 The actual magnitude of the problem cannot be calculated, though estimates in one case suggest that some 80% of the 3,000 submitted applications for refugee allowances were either bogus or highly inflated.153 On 16 December 1952 the then Minister for Rehabilitation

Memories, swords, blood and freedom

33

and Colonies Fazal Ilahi Piracha left a list of multiple allotments of West Punjabi evacuee urban properties on the table of the local provincial Assembly Hall.154 Unfortunately, it has not survived the merciless march of time, nor the troubled history of local archives in Pakistan. The curious case of those “wealthy Muslims from India, [who were] uncertain to return their Indian citizenship or become Pakistanis” nonetheless applied for – and eventually were allotted – either an urban or a rural evacuee property, lacks in factual accuracy.155 The very same problem applies to all those lands, houses, businesses and factories that were illegally occupied by locals and refugees alike during the chaotic early months of Pakistan’s independence.156 After all, the scramble to grab as many profitable evacuee properties as possible was not restricted to members of the refugee community alone. Legally entitled to apply for the allotment of all kinds of evacuee property whenever the restoration and maintenance of the economic life of Pakistan made this necessary, local inhabitants also started to compete for the allocation of local business and industrial premises and houses.157 In their own particular battle, they were, according to available sources, spurred on by a deep feeling of resentment at “the newcomers [who were] obtaining land and lodgings they themselves would like”.158 By early March 1954, according to a not-particularly reliable statistical survey published in Dawn, the number of allotted evacuee urban houses now in locals’ hands amounted to 22,670 (out of 160,010) and the number of evacuee shops to 23,375 (out of 160,010).159 As regards factories, government data released in 1948 suggested that non-refugees ran 244 out of the 2,911 evacuee registered and non-registered factories of the West Punjab. Numbers in reality could, however, have been higher as West Punjabi authorities reported, some locals ‘exploited’ and nominated refugees in order to secure an evacuee property for themselves.160 A couple of official documents published in the mid-1950s – namely The Manual of Instruction – Part I and II and the Resettlement of Refugees on Land in the Punjab – Part XII and XVI – go a long way towards unlocking the secrets of the official Pakistan state discourse regarding the resettlement of refugees in West Punjab.161 In the eyes of the local politico-institutional apparatus, the linchpin of the humanitarian emergency prompted by Partition was primarily the management and the eventual allotment of all the urban and rural properties left behind by Hindus and Sikhs during the late summer and the autumn of 1947. The federal Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation Khwaja Shahabuddin showed his hand during a question and answer session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in late September 1950. The schemes, he pointed out, that the Government had been enforcing up to then were “(1) the temporary allotment of land to agricultural refugees; (2) allotment of evacuee houses; (3) allotment of evacuee shops; (4) grant of maintenance allowance to deserving refugees; (5) establishment of cottage industries by the Pakistan Refugee Rehabilitation Finance Corporation; [and] (6) schemes for establishing satellite towns or colonies for absorbing the overflow of the bigger towns”.162 Appointed immediately after Independence, the Custodian of Evacuee Properties was tasked with the preservation of all the aforementioned possessions and

34

Memories, swords, blood and freedom

the safeguard of the original owners’ rights and interests. During the fifth InterDominion Conference held in Karachi in January 1949, the Indian and Pakistani authorities succeeded in reaching an agreement on the transfer, sale and exchange of movable evacuee properties, thereby leaving the Custodian with the sole responsibility of managing the immovable ones. He was supposed to compile and maintain a complete record of abandoned shops, businesses and houses, and to liaise with evacuees, his counterpart in Jullundhur and the Indian government.163 The Custodian of Evacuee Properties, however, was only a tiny cog in the bigger resettlement machine. Federal and provincial ministers for refugee resettlement quickly took over the ‘political reins’ of both rehabilitation policies and practices. Friction between the centre and provinces being an everyday routine affair, Joint Refugee Councils were established first in the Punjab (1947) and then in Sindh, East Bengal and the NWFP (1948).164 Usually attended by the Prime Minister, the Ministries for Finance and for Refugee Resettlement, Pakistan, and the concerned provincial Governors, Chief Ministers and Ministers for Refugee Rehabilitation, their meetings aimed at harmonising acts and ordinances and coordinating policies. But if Ministers and Joint Councils were supposed to be the brain behind the reintegration of the muhajir community, all the employees of the Rehabilitation Department represented the brawn (see Table 1.4). At the top of the organisational structure of the Department, the Head acted as Resettlement Secretary to the West Punjab Government, and was assisted by a Deputy Secretary and an Under-Secretary. In the West Punjab districts of Lahore, Sialkot, Multan, Rawalpindi, Lyallpur, Montgomery and Gujranwala, a Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner was appointed to polish off resettlement policies in loco. In the remaining districts – where the number of refugees was relatively low – Deputy Commissioners fulfilled the ex-officio function of Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioners.165 Entrusted with the task of allotting houses, shops and unregistered factories, they also sat on the West Punjab Rehabilitation Board and West Punjab Allotment Tribunal. While the West Punjab Rehabilitation Board was tasked with the allotment of all registered and important unregistered factories and ice factories, the West Punjab Allotment Tribunal supervised the allocation of the shops on the Mall in Lahore as well as houses with a rent of Rs. 300/month in Lahore and of Rs. 100/ month in all other districts.166 Overall, the distinction between urban and rural resettlement was the only selected criterion for identifying premises and redistributing them among claimants. Soon after Independence, the federal authorities became more and more ‘exercised’ about what they perceived to be the high correlation between the survival of Pakistan as a state and the economic recovery of the Punjabi countryside.167 According to contemporary estimates, the land on which refugees were to be resettled amounted to 3,064,625 acres. By the kharif harvest of 1948, all the holdings of those non-Muslim landlords who employed Muslim tenants were reduced so as not to exceed eight acres per family. This government act meanwhile extended the amount of land that was available for resettlement purposes to 4,030,274 acres. A further 113,893 acres of Crown land was added to the final

1

3

8

1

1 1 1

1 1 1

1

2

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 16

11 1 3 2 3 2 2 1 1 2 4 2 3 1 1 1 40

16 1 1 2 3 1 1 1 1 1 4 4 4 1 2 1 44

17 2 4 1 3 2 1 4 2 1 8 2 2 3 2 3 57

17 2 4 5 6 2 4 2 2 3 5 5 6 2 4 3 72

69 10 24 22 35 15 17 19 13 17 46 21 20 18 14 16 376 2

2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 15

5 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 35 1

1

1

1

292 26 43 62 77 35 34 29 27 32 82 67 75 28 31 24 964

435 46 84 99 133 61 63 60 50 60 155 106 115 57 58 52 1634

*Others: Assistant Accounts Officers, Superintendents, Head Clerks, Steno-cum-Readers, Assistants, Senior and Junior Clerks, Typists, Accountants, Accounts Cashiers, Assistant Cashiers, Cashiers, Daftries [sic] and Peons

Source: Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II, Lahore, 1949, Appendix II, Statement A and B

Lahore Sheikhupura Sialkot Gujranwala Rawalpindi Jhelum Gujrat Shahpur Mianwali Attock Multan Lyallpur Montgomery Dera G. Khan Muzaffargarh Jhang Total

Assistant R. District R. R. Officers Deputy R. Assistant R. Inspectors Assistant R. S.D.Os District Overseers Provincial Inspectors Others* Total Deputy Tube well Officers R. Officers Inspectors Engineers Town Resettlement Commissioners Officers Planners Commissioners

Table 1.4 Gazetted and non-gazetted field staff sanctioned for rehabilitation

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Memories, swords, blood and freedom

calculation.168 Finally, in 1949, the development of the so-called Thal Project – a revamped pioneering plan that aimed at enhancing the irrigation system of the Thal desert area in South Punjab – increased the available rural land by 660,000 acres.169 Re-allotting the fertile lands of the West Punjab was not however only a matter of redistributing available acreage. It first and foremost involved the physical transfer of all self-declared refugee agriculturalists to their plots. As by early 1948 no record had yet been exchanged with India, early temporary allotments were made by consulting the list of voters compiled for the 1945–6 elections.170 In 1948, The West Punjab Refugee (Registration of Land Claims) Ordinance was hailed as the milestone in the resettlement of refugee in the Punjabi countryside. Owners of land and those tenants who had a right of occupancy under the Punjab Tenancy Act, 1887 and section 3 of the Colonisation of Government Land, 1912, were thereby solicited to submit their claims for compensation. The Act provided for the appointment of Settlement and Assistant Settlement and Registration Commissioners, and represented as the “first step towards a large-range policy for the allotment of [land] rights [. . .] as opposed to the temporary cultivating possession.”171 Later, following the promulgation of the Registration of Claims (Displaced Persons) Act in 1956, refugees from non-agreed-areas were allowed to submit their claims for all the land that they had behind in regions other than the East Punjab. Local authorities, however, would take until late 1961 to process their applications.172 For their part, urban resettlement practices showed a higher degree of formal sophistication. Houses and shops were divided into four classes: class A, for all those premises with rents above Rs. 100/month; class B, for those with rents above Rs. 50/month up to Rs. 100/month; class C, for all houses and businesses with rents above Rs. 25/month up to Rs. 50/month; and class D for properties with rents up to Rs. 25/month.173 Houses and shops were allotted to so-called bona fide claimants for an initial six-month period that could eventually be extended up to 1 January 1952.174 The re-allocation of unregistered factories was on four-year basis, while that of registered factories was “until otherwise ordered by the Rehabilitation Commissioner (General), West Punjab”.175 In their attempt to curb the overcrowding of urban areas, the West Punjab authorities initially planned to repair damaged buildings. The lead in this restoration process was taken by the Lahore Improvement Trust. As early as February 1949, it sketched out a project for the repair of the damaged areas between Shahalmi Gate and the Bawli Sahib within the walled city of Lahore under the ‘legal umbrella’ of the recently-approved West Punjab Damaged Areas Ordinance, 1948. From then onwards, improvement trusts cropped up in almost every town of the West Punjab, and similar projects were implemented.176 The urban housing shortage being so acute, these Improvement Trusts immediately developed and took in hand the idea of satellite towns in the years from the mid-1950s up to the fall of Ayub Khan’s regime in the late 1960s. Self-contained units on the edge of the main refugee-saturated Punjabi towns, satellite towns were graded according to scale of A to D based on their cost and size. In 1963, local builders were

Memories, swords, blood and freedom

37

working on 42 building sites of as many satellite towns – many of which located in the former province of West Punjab – throughout West Pakistan.177 In one of them, namely the Lahore Township Scheme, the total investment in its 28,700 residential plots and 10,000 one-room quarters amounted to some Rs. 79.2 million.178 In the purple rhetoric of one of Ayub Khan’s pamphlets, satellite towns were supposed to provide “not only accommodation but also employment and other facilities to the millions of uprooted men and women, giving them a sense of belonging and assimilation in their new homeland”.179 In April 1954, the Pakistani Government put forward a joint-scheme for cash compensation for all the properties that refugees had left behind in India during the stormy summer of 1947. As “the [. . .] period from 1955 to 1958 was more or less a period of inaction”, the Displaced Persons (Compensation and Rehabilitation) Bill was later amended in 1958 in order to “make [. . .] [compensation] workable in a smooth and rational manner”.180 Reportedly, by 1963, compensation was being paid to all those refugees, orphans, widows and aged persons whose claim did not exceed Rs. 5,000.181 ***** This chapter has delved into the records of the communal upheavals and the early flow of migrations that rocked the region of the Punjab between the early spring and the late autumn of 1947. With the aim of framing this study in the historical context of the years leading up to independence and partition and their aftermath, its sections have chronicled the progressive embitterment of communal relations, a continuous process of negotiation and re-negotiation of the political ideas at stake and the flow of refugees. Individual sections also have highlighted the interplay of historical correspondence between local ‘mainstream’ communal conflicts and Partition violence, the commonly held and politically perceived indeterminateness of the idea of Pakistan, individual everyday dimensions of the conflict and the ‘lethal’ encounter between the ‘big ideas’ at stake, the common perception of the average Punjabi of that time and the official narrative on and around the resettlement of the refugee community.

Notes 1 Jenkins to Wavell No. 652, 3 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D 977/16, IOR. 2 Ibid. 3 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secraphone Message, 4 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D 977/16, IOR. 4 P. Brass, The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India and Pakistan (Seattle-London: University of Washington Press, 2003) p. 13; Kaur, Since 1947, pp. 27–8; Y. Khan, “Out of Control? Partition Violence and the State in Uttar Pradesh”, in The Deadly Embrace: Religion and Violence in India and Pakistan, 1947–2002, ed. I. Talbot (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 40; Y. Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New-Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2007); I. Talbot, “The 1947 Violence in Punjab”, in The Deadly Embrace, p. 3.

38

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5 The Times (London), 10 March 1947. 6 R. Kumar, “Settling Partition Hostilities: Lesson Learnt, the Option Ahead”, in Divided Countries, Separated Cities, p. 15. 7 Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 27/G, 5 March 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR, and Jenkins to Wavell No. 33/G, 7 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D. 977/16, IOR. 8 Jenkins to Mountbatten No. 79/G, 11 April 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 9 The Times (London), 19 March 1947 and Note by Jenkins to Mountbatten, 16 April 1947, R/3/1/90, IOR. 10 V. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca-London: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 96. 11 Master Tara Singh quoted by Mr. Akhtar Hussain in G. D. Kholsa, Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading up to and following the Partition of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 98. 12 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 70/G, 24 March 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR, and Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 662, 31 March 1947, MSS.EUR.F 200/124, IOR. 13 Jenkins to Wavell No. 654, 9 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D 977/16, IOR, and Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 663, 9 April 1947, R/3/1/176, IOR. 14 Enclosure to Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 663, 9 April 1947, R/3/1/176, IOR. 15 Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 35/G, 8 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D. 977/16, IOR, and Note to Jenkins to Mountbatten, n.d., MSS.EUR.D 200/124, IOR. 16 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 675, 15 May 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. 17 Document enclosed to Abbott to Abel – D.O. No. G.S. 206, 7 April 1947, R/3/1/176, IOR. 18 Punjab FR Second Half of May 1947, L/P&J/5/250, IOR, and Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 675, 15 May 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. 19 Jenkins to Wavell No. 653, 7 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D. 977/16, IOR, Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 675, 15 May 1947, IOR, and Jenkins to Colville No. 100/G, 21 May 1947, IOR. 20 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 666, 30 April 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. 21 Abott to Abel – D.O. No. G.S. 213, 12 April 1948, R/3/1/176, IOR. 22 Memorandum – Enclosure to Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 699, 4 August 1947, ff. 212–37, R/3/1/89, IOR. 23 S. Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). 24 Inward Telegram No. 1796/s, 27 August 1946, PREM 8/541/5, NAKG. 25 The Times (London), 31 August 1946. 26 Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 30/G, 6 March 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 27 Jenkins to Wavell – Secret No. 657, 17 March 1947, IOR. 28 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 657, 17 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. 29 Ibid. 30 Jenkins to Wavell – Secraphone Message, 4 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D 977/16, IOR. 31 Partition. The Day India Burned, BBC documentary, 2007. 32 The Times (London), 18 March 1947. 33 G. Pandey, Routine Violence. Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 8. 34 Jenkins to Wavell No. 654, 9 March 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR and Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 36/G, 9 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D 977/16, IOR. 35 Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 38/G, 10 March 1948, R/3/1/189, IOR. 36 Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 39/G, 8 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. 37 Jenkins to Wavell – Secret No. 657, 17 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. 38 Jenkins to Wavell – Secret No. 655, 14 March 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. 39 Ibid.

Memories, swords, blood and freedom 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70

39

The Times (London), 29 March 1947; I. Talbot, Divided Cities, p. 44. Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 66/G, 21 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 62/G, 19 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. Jenkins to Wavell – Secret no. 662, 31 March 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. The Times (London), 12 March 1947. The Times (London), 4 June 1947. The Commons Chamber has been destroyed on the very last day of the Blitz. The foundation stone of the new hall would be laid down in 1948. In the meanwhile, the MPs met in the Lords Chamber. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 120/G, 6 June 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR; and K. A. Abbas, “Who Killed India”, in India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom, ed. M. Hasan (Delhi: Roli Books, 1995), Vol. II, p. 235. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 683, 15 July 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. A. Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). See, for instance, S. Mahajan, Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2000). K. B. Sayeed, Pakistan: The Formative Phase, 1857–1948 (Karachi: Pakistan Publishing House, 1960). S. Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sindh, 1843–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992); D. Gilmartin, Empire and the Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); F. Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); I. Talbot, Punjab and the Raj, 1849–1947 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1988). Glancy to Linlithgow, 27 August 1942, R/3/1/64, IOR. Glancy to Linlithgow – D.O. No. 401, 10 July 1942, R/3/1/64, IOR. Malik Barkat Ali to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, 21 July 1941, PPMS. Malik Barkat Ali to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, 30 May 1942, PPMS. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 119/G, 5 June 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR and Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 120/G, 6 June 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 118/G, 4 June 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 39/G, 10 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Top Secret No. 667, 1 May 1947, MSS.EUR.F 200/130A, IOR. Note from Jenkins to Mountbatten, 6 June 1947, MSS.EUR.F 200/122, IOR. See also Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 680, 6 June 1947, MSS.EUR.F 200/122, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 683, 15 June 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. The Times of India (New Delhi), 5 June 1947. Dawn (Karachi), 4 June 1947. See, for instance, Khan, “Out of Control?”, pp. 38, 47–52. The Indian Annual Register, Calcutta, 1942, Vol. II, p. 230. Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 33/G, 7 March 1947, MSS.EUR.D 977/16, IOR. Note from Jenkins to Mountbatten, 16 April 1947, ff. 12–6, R/3/1/90, IOR. See U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); S. Mayaram, “Speech, Silence and the Making of Partition in Mewat”, in Subaltern Studies IX: Writing on South Asian History and Society, eds. S. Amin and D. Chakrabarty (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 150/G, 27 June 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR, and Jenkins to Mountbatten, 30 June 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR.

40

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71 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 133/G, 16 June 1947, L/P&J/663, IOR; Jenkins to Abell – Telegram No. 146/G, 26 June 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 72 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 666, 30 April 1947, R/3/1/178, IOR. 73 Ibid. 74 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 138/G, 20 June 1947, IOR; The Times (London), 21 June 1947. 75 The Times (London), 7 June 1947. 76 Jenkins to Wavell – Telegram No. 29/G, 6 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. 77 Jenkins to Mountbatten, 25 June 1947, R/3/1/176, IOR. 78 Jenkins to Abell – Telegram No. 141/G, 23 June 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 79 Jenkins to Mountbatten, 25 June 1947, R/3/1/176, IOR. 80 C. Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 32. 81 K. Hetherington, Expression of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics (LondonThousands Oak-New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1998), p. 105; R. Shields, “Individuals, Consumption Cultures and the Fate of Community”, in Lifestyle Shopping: the Subject of Consumption, ed. R. Shields (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 99–113. 82 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Confidential No. 191/G, 24 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 83 Jenkins to Wavell – Secret No. 657, 17 March 1947, R/3/1/89, IOR. 84 D. Gilmartin, “A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election Process in Colonial Punjab”, Comparative Histories and Societies, 40, 3 (1998), pp. 415–36; M. Hasan, “Communalism in the Provinces: A Case Study of Bengal and Punjab, 1922–1926”, Economic and Political Weekly, 5, 33 (1980), pp. 1395–401 and 1403–6. 85 D. Gilmartin, “Religious Leaders and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab”, Modern Asian Studies, 13, 3 (1979), p. 514. 86 Ibid. 87 B. D. Metcalf and T. R. Metcalf, A Concise History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 211. 88 C. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23. 89 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 162/G, 5 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 90 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 176/G, 15 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 91 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 181/G, 17 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 92 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 228/G, 12 August 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 93 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Confidential No. 96/G, 28 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 94 Abott to Abell, 1 August 1947, ff: 244, R/3/1/157, IOR. 95 The Times (London), 11 August 1947. See also IT from UKHC to SSCR, 12 September 1947, DO 142/416, NAKG. 96 P. Musharraf, In the Line of Fire: A Memoir (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006), p. 12. 97 The Times (London), 25 August 1947. 98 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 194/G, 26 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 99 Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 206/G, 1 August 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. 100 Ibid. 101 See, S. Ayar, “August Anarchy: The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947”, in Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence, eds. D. Low and H. Brasted (New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1998), pp. 15–39; I. Ahmed, “Forced Migration and Ethnic Cleansing in Lahore in 1947: Some First Person Accounts”, in People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Postcolonial Migration, eds. I. Talbot and Singh (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 96–142; I. Copland, “The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan”, Past and Present, 160 (1998), pp. 203–39; J. Francisco, “In the Heat of a Fratricide: the Literature of India’s Partition Burning Freshly”, in Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and

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102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

41

the Partition of India, ed. M. Hasan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 382; A. B. Hansen, Partition and Genocide: Manifestation of Violence in Punjab, 1937–1947 (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2002); D. L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2002). Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 219/G, 8 August 1947, MSS.EUR.F 200/123, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 96/G, 28 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 218/G, 7 August 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 162/G, 5 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 206/G, 1 August 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 209/G, 2 August 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 213/G, 4 August 1947, L/P&J/8/663. IOR. N. Thrift, “Immaculate Warfare? The Spatial Politics of Extreme Violence”, in Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence, eds. D. Gregory and A. Pred (New York- London: Routledge, 2007), p. 275. On this point, see C. Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 166/G, 7 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Jenkins to Mountbatten – Telegram No. 185/G, 21 July 1947, L/P&J/8/663, IOR. Memorandum – Enclosure to Jenkins to Mountbatten – Secret No. 699, 4 August 1947, ff. 212–37, R/3/1/89, IOR. The Times (London), 12 August 1947. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 642, 21 August 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 683, 21 August 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. The Times (London), 20 August 1947. OT from UKHC to CRO No, 667, 27 August 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 642, 21 August 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. Reactions to the Boundary Commission Award (III), 22 August 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. Reactions to the Boundary Commission Award (II), 19 August 1937, DO 133/59, UKNA. Dawn (Karachi), 18 August 1947. The Hindu (Madras), 19 August 1947. The Times (London), 5 September 1947. The Times (London), 20 August 1947. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 813, 23 September 1947, DO 133/60, UKNA. Aide Memoire Signed by Pandit Nehru of Point to Be Discussed with Liaquat Ali Khan, 19 September 1947, DO 133/60, UKNA. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 897, 1 October 1934, DO 133/60, UKNA. Uncoordinated Punjab Refugees Tour, n.d., DO 133/60, UKNA. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 697, 4 September 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA; OT from UKHC to CRO No. 818, 23 September 1947, DO 133/60, UKNA. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 1035, 20 October 1947, DO 133/60, UKNA. OT from UKHC to CRO No. 762, 15 September 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. Indian New Chronicle (New Delhi), 26 September 1947; OT to UKHC to CRO No. 881, 29 September 1947, DO 133/60, UKNA. The Times (London), 2 September 1947. See, for instance, Government of India – Minister of Information and Broadcast, Millions on the Move. The Aftermath of Partition, Delhi, 1948; M. S. Randhawa, Out of the Ashes: An Account of the Rehabilitation of Refugees from West Punjab in Rural Areas of East Punjab (Chandigarh: Public Relations Department, 1954); R. Symons, In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942–1949 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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136 S. Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005). 137 Talbot, Divided Cities. 138 The Times (London), 5 September 1947. 139 The Times (London), 17 October 1947. 140 Uncoordinated Punjab Refugee Tour Notes, n.d., DO 133/60, UKNA. 141 Appendix A, File No. B50, NAP. 142 First Session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly – Despatch No. 849, 14 March 1953, NND 938750, NARA. 143 Recent Developments in Refugee Rehabilitation and Resettlement in the Punjab, 12 July 1951, NND 938750, NARA. 144 Board of Economic Inquiry (West Punjab Government), A Statistical Review of the Distribution of Refugees in West Punjab, Lahore, n.d., Mudie Papers, Mss EUR F164/147, IOR and Census of Pakistan – Table of Economic Characteristics (West Pakistan), Vol. VII, 1951, UPL. 145 Ibid. The number of refugees in Lahore (Corporation) was of 363,954 (out of a total population of 849,333), in Montgomery of 31,633 (out of 50,185), in Lyallpur of 124,343 (out of 179,127) and in Multan of 93,586 (out of 190,122). 146 A. G. Raza, Resettlement of Refugees on Land – A Review, 6 June 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. See also W. M. Phillips Jr., “Urbanisation and Social Change in Pakistan”, Phylon, 25, 1 (1964), p. 37. 147 Government of West Punjab, Supplement to the List of Muslim Abducted Women and Children in India and Jammu & Kashmir State – Part III, Lahore, 1954, MDRR. 148 Recent Developments in Refugee Rehabilitation and Resettlement in the Punjab, 12 July 1951, NND 938750, NARA. 149 Census of India – 1941, Vol. VI, New Delhi, 1941, IOR. 150 Ibid. 151 Recent Developments in Refugee Rehabilitation and Resettlement in the Punjab, 12 July 1951, NND 938750, NARA. 152 UKHC (New Delhi) to UKHC (Karachi) – Ref. P/69, 9 August 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA. 153 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II (Lahore, 1949), Chapter VIII, p. 1, PCSL. 154 Punjab Assembly Debates, 16 December 1952, PCSL. 155 UKHC (New Delhi) to UKHC (Karachi) – Ref P/69, 9 August 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA. 156 A-1, 4 January 1949, NND 765024, NARA. 157 On locals’ entitlement to claim an evacuee property, see Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II, pp. 6–7, PCSL and West Punjab Government Letter No. 2300 – Reh. 49/1678, 10 March 1949, PCSL. 158 A-1, 4 January 1949, NND 765024, NARA. See also Talbot, Divided Cities, pp. 157, 163–4. 159 Dawn (Karachi), 3 May 1948; Punjab Assembly Debates, 8 March 1954, PCSL. 160 West Punjab Government Letter No. 2300 – Reh. 49/1678, 10 March 1949, PCSL. 161 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II; PCSL and Government of West Pakistan, Resettlement of Refugees on Land in the Punjab – Part XII and XVI (Lahore: PCSL, 1956). 162 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 30 September 1950, PCSL. 163 Sind Observer (Karachi), 15 January 1949. 164 Pakistan Constituent Assembly, 20 March 1953, PCSL. 165 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II, Chapter I, p. 1, PCSL. 166 Ibid., Chapter III, p. 3.

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167 Extract from the Pakistan News for the period February 18 to February 24 1948, n.d., DO 142/440, UKNA. 168 A. G. Raza, Resettlement of Refugees on Land – A Survey, 6 June 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 169 Government of West Punjab, The Thal Development Act, 1949 (Lahore, 1949); Government of West Punjab, The Thal Development Act, 1950 (Lahore, 1950), MDRR. 170 Ibid. 171 Lahore Despatch No. PHC/43/48 – Pol. 10980/48, 27 September 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 172 Rehabilitation and Works Division, 1958–1963 – Five Years of Revolutionary Government, n.d., p. 9, PCSL. 173 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II, Chapter II, p. 2, PCSL. 174 West Punjab Government Letter No. 2300 – Reh. 49/1976, 10 March 1949, PCSL. 175 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II, Chapter III, pp. 4–5, PCSL. 176 Talbot, Divided Cities, pp. 116–23. 177 Rehabilitation and Works Division, 1958–1963 – Five Years of Revolutionary Government, n.d., p. 9, PCSL. 178 Ibid. 179 1958–1964: Years of Progress, 1965, p. 16, PCSL. 180 Rehabilitation and Works Division, 1958–1963 – Five Years of Revolutionary Government, n.d., p. 7, PCSL. 181 Ibid., p. 8.

Bibliographical references Amin, S. and Chakrabarty, D., eds. Subaltern Studies IX: Writing on South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Ansari, S. Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sindh, 1843–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. Life after Partition: Migration, Community, and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Brass, P. The Production of Hindu and Muslim Violence in Contemporary India and Pakistan. Washington, DC-Seattle-London: University of Washington Press, 2012. Copland, I. “The Further Shores of Partition: Ethnic Cleansing in Rajasthan”, Past and Present, 160 (1998), pp. 203–39. Das, S. Community Riots in Bengal, 1905–1947. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991. Deschaumes, G. G. and Ivekovic, I., eds. Divided Countries, Separated Cities: The Modern Legacy of Partition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. Gilmartin, D. “Religious Leaders and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab”, Modern Asian Studies, 13, 3 (1979), pp. 485–571. ———. Empire and the Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ———. “A Magnificent Gift: Muslim Nationalism and the Election Process in Colonial Punjab”, Comparative Histories and Societies, 40, 3 (1998), pp. 415–36. Gregory, D. and Pred, A., eds. Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence. New York: Routledge, 2007. Hansen, A. B. Partition and Genocide: Manifestation of Violence in Punjab, 1937–1947. New Delhi: India Research Press, 2002.

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Hasan, M. “Communalism in the Provinces: A Case Study of Bengal and Punjab, 1922– 1926”, Economic and Political Weekly, 5, 33 (1980), pp. 1395–401 and 1403–406. ———, ed. India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997. ———, ed. Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hetherington, K. Expression of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics. London-Thousands Oak-New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1998. Horowitz, D. L. The Deadly Ethnic Riot. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2002. Jalal, A. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Kaur, R. Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. Khan, Y. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2007. Kholsa, G. D. Stern Reckoning: A Survey of Events Leading up and Following the Partition of India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989. Low, D. and Brasted, H., eds. Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1998. Mahajan, S. Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India. New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 2000. Menon, R. and Bhasin, K. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Metcalf, B. D. and Metcalf, T. R. A Concise History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Musharraf, P. In the Line of Fire: A Memoir. London: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Nordstrom, C. Shadows of War: Violence, Power and International Profiteering in the TwentyFirst Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pandey, P. Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Phillips, W. P. “Urbanisation and Social Change in Pakistan”, Phylon, 25, 1 (1964), pp. 33–43. Robinson, F. Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces’ Muslims, 1860–1923. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Sayyed, K. B. Pakistan: The Formative Phase. Karachi: Pakistan Publishing House, 1960. Shields. R., ed. Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption. London: Routledge, 1992. Symons, R. In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan, 1942– 1949. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Talbot, I. Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar: 1947–1957. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———, ed. The Deadly Embrace: Religion and Violence in India and Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007. Talbot, T. Punjab and the Raj 1849–1947. New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1988. ——— and Thandi S., eds. People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Post-Colonial Migration. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Taylor, C. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Tilly, C. The Politics of Collective Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Turner, V. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. IthacaLondon: Cornell University Press, 1974.

2

Camps, homes, towns and villages

‘There’s no place like home’: the politics of intimacy, domesticity and resettlement among West Punjabi refugees Amidst walls of flames, tears, and the smell of death blended with those of latrines and life, millions of refugees flocked along the roads that brought them to what they perceived would be their new institutional and personal homes. As soon as they crossed a border that, at the dawn of India and Pakistan’s independence, was not properly demarcated, refugees were accommodated in temporary camps and structures. These places turned quite quickly into an arena where collective grievances were voiced and expressed.1 Tents, makeshift huts and night shelters revealed their potential to disrupt refugees’ personal and emotional lives, and to act as a fertile ground where new individual feelings of belonging to a wider political community could blossom. The contamination of public and private spaces and the subsequent tension between the inner, personal and outer, worldly selves wove all these sentiments together. They carved out spaces for the migrants’ elaboration of their new identity as they tried to become better integrated into their new – local – social, political and institutional milieus. Likewise, homes – the search for, the life in or the lack of them – proved very important in moulding the formation of an everyday political and institutional identity. Frequently relegated at the backdrop of anyone’s life and politics, houses in fact embraced both the social and personal experience of their inhabitants. Indeed, they represented the building blocks of the personal and social identity of all uprooted persons. Houses epitomised their deep-seated malaise that resulted from the need to establish anew an intimacy with the surrounding environment and the contradictory feeling of alienation that resulted from the allocation of an evacuee property. Homes and houses became an emotional and physical space within which many refugees contested government-led plans of resettlement. The state’s inability to fulfil what they perceived as its duties encouraged a disenchantment among refugees that materialised itself in a perceived lack of intimacy with the surrounding environment and a troubled process of negotiating their citizenship. Lahore, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Multan as well other towns and small rural villages across the whole of Pakistani Punjab became embroiled in seemingly endless

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processes of negotiating identity, belonging and power taking place between lawmakers, on the one hand, and refugees as well locals, on the other. This chapter accordingly seeks to map the attempts of West Punjabi migrants to become better integrated into the local social and economic life. Focusing first on temporary reception structures and then on houses, towns and rural villages, its different sections explore the ways refugees (re)negotiated their domesticity, their individual and family identity, and their social capital in their new homeland. They also investigate how far refugees, their claims and their protests contested and moulded government plans of rehabilitation and resettlement.

Liminalities of citizenship: refugee camps and temporary structures Lahore, December 1947. The sun dipped below the horizon. The amber colours of the sunset and a slight fog enveloped the city. A crackling loudspeaker allowed the muezzin’s voice to reach even the remotest area of the Walton Road temporary refugee camp. It was maghreb time. Thousands of refugees left their tents and lined up for their evening prayer amidst mud and washing just hung up to dry. Supported by tumbledown structures and furnished with boxes and trunks, these tents were the temporary houses provided to hundreds of thousands of citizens now belonging to the newly created state of Pakistan. An area of approximately 8 × 7ft stored the meagre belongings, the feelings and the hopes of a six-member family who had just left Jullundhur, India. The bundle of tents, the management of the time and space, and the structuring of social life in Walton Road as well as in many other refugee camps across Punjab, framed the boundaries of both public and private life along new lines. In effect they ushered in new ways for people to establish their identity in relation to the wider society. Camp managers, officers and displaced persons themselves re-charted the traditional course of everyday domestic behaviour and interpersonal relations. For its part, the, at times haphazard, geography of the refugee camp challenged the traditional organisation of their personal, domestic space. Those spaces were tiny and, at the same time, vast. Angela Limerick, a British Red Cross officer, landed in Lahore on 19 February 1948. Her visit produced emotional scars that would last for years. In 1957, Angela was still “too haunted by the thought [and the memories] of those unfortunate refugees to be able to do justice to the meal [served on her flight to Lahore]”.2 The scene that met her eyes at the Walton Road camp in the late winter of 1948 was one of devastation and composed sorrow. The rain was pouring down. Huddled together for warmth, refugees sought shelter in open sheds and tents made of rags. Under some ownerless bullock carts, makeshift cooks were preparing their lunch, blending together traditional ingredients, mud, rain and, most probably, their own tears as well.3 “It seem[ed] impossible that human beings should have the desire to live in [such] conditions”, commented Limerick without concealing her distress.4 Inclusion within refugees’ private affairs and exclusion from their public life typified the human experience of the camp.5 Domesticity had been a clear-cut

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notional and physical domain from whence individuals rarely and with difficulty offered up to the so-called ‘outside world’ their secrets, intimacy and feelings.6 Now, the intimacy of a married couple going about their daily routine – previously safely hidden from prying eyes – was brought, whether they liked it or not, into the open. Sections of about 40 x 15ft housed 80 or more persons in either tents or barracks.7 The process of redefinition of the social and personal sphere affected rites of birth, death and burial. The delivery of a baby was a moment that was shared with unknown persons, if not the whole camp.8 Likewise, ghutti rituals – the initiation of the newborn into their families – brought back to many parents’ minds the memories of the fathers or uncles who had lost their lives during the dreadful journey to Pakistan, or whose whereabouts were unknown. Infants frequently licked milk on the fingers of persons they would not meet anymore. Their future tantrums would never be followed by the traditional “whose ghutti did you get?”. The answer would have reopened an old wound that time could not heal. Death and life, public and private, became intimately entwined. The dislocating effect of Partition had ripped apart the familiar and community ties that had traditionally comforted the deceased’s relatives. The subsequent lack of the extended family’s support accentuated feelings of isolation. Nevertheless, this loneliness of sorrow walked alongside the phenomenon of mass grief: one person’s bereavement was that of any other refugee’s loss. The murmurs of prayers that had previously been recited behind closed doors for the three-day period of mourning now became a commonplace buzz in the background of refugees’ lives in camps. The mechanical arms of bulldozers excavated communal graves and unfamiliar hands filled them in with earth.9 For all their efforts, authorities and staff members in these Punjabi refugee camps were only partially able to minimise the effects of such intrusion and marginalisation. It recalled a “Dante’s Inferno or some of the mediaeval pictures one sees of the nether regions”, the British Red Cross officer recorded in her diary.10 Refugees’ faces were – quite literally – twisted with pain. They “had a tragic haunting look in their eyes which one can’t easily forget”.11 Occasionally, a frightened feverishness flared in their misty eyes, and turned into howls of rage. Fellow residents and journalists frequently eye-witnessed emotionally charged scenes of despair. A fit of hysterics was the heart-breaking soundtrack that accompanied the visit of a correspondent from The Times of London to a refugee camp in Lahore in late August 1947. A woman appeared to be possessed by the devils of a devastating grief. The camp was echoing with bloodcurdling screams. Only the soothing, chanting melody of the call for prayer was able to fill the woman’s deep, inner black hole and restore peace across the lines of tents and huts.12 As Limerick continued, “on the waste land on either side of the road [Ferozepore Road, Lahore] was a continuous stretch of graves for practically the whole distance”.13 Stacks of corpses showed up among huts and tents, and marked off the areas intended to accommodate refugees from the other suburbs of cities and towns. Mass and individual graves were strung out along the axis of refugee camp premises, and frequently identified these temporary facilities as specific geographical locations. For all its macabre substance, circumscribing those

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areas – even through tombs – was meant to establish a distinction between insiders and outsiders, and a consequent principle of order with a shared set of rules.14 Institutions took for granted that, in West Punjab, the preconditions of any kind of regulation and its related implementation were fulfilled. Indeed, both camp and government authorities assumed that normality and everyday life ruled supreme across town and villages.15 In fact, in the immediate aftermath of Partition, no city or village bustled with even a remote semblance of normalcy and order. Everyday life in many ways was brought to a standstill. Beyond the fences of refugee camps, the closure of industrial concerns and banks were matched by disruptions to transport, communications and health services. The number of scheduled and non-scheduled banks dropped by approximately 80%, and, in March 1948, Pakistan’s railway services reported a loss of Rs. 1.97 crore.16 Poor and ineffective general administrative arrangements thus imported a sense of alienation from everyday normal life into many of West Punjab’s temporary camps. In turn, this translated into camps becoming overcrowded as well as multiple or triple registrations of the same family in different temporary facilities. Calculations very frequently did not add up. Multan Qila Camp provides the most striking case. Its overall capacity was estimated to be nearly 80,000 refugees. Yet, in August 1948 the demand for food rations stood at more than double this figure.17 Meteorological quirks over the region were the harbingers of further difficulties. The summer of 1947 was exceptionally long, hot and dry. The balmy breezes of the monsoon rains held off. Pakistanis, as Singh powerfully recounts in his fictional Train to Pakistan, felt that this was a sacrifice to atone for their sins.18 When the heavens opened, floods and cold snaps hit the region hard. Temperatures dropped sharply and persistent rains did not stop for days. Warm clothing and proper bedding were in short supply. The price of coal, coke, wood and fuel rocketed. In camps, food – widely acknowledged to be a symbolic and primeval source of security – proved insufficient. Misery, havoc and monotony reflected the feelings of starvation, apathy and work-shyness that crept over many refugees. Refugees became, C. E. Gibbon would defiantly recall seven years later during a parliamentary debate, “wanderers on the face of earth. [. . .] [They were] like little ants going from one ant hole to another trying to pick up a crumb of bread or a little garment of clothing. [. . .] On thousands of hearts great sorrows and great anxieties rest[ed]”.19 How did these emotions impact on nation- and state-building processes? Unpredictability and the occasional eruption of violence were the hallmark of the social and political lives of refugees. News reports of incidents and protests taking place on camp premises and in towns echoed across the whole of the Punjab on almost a daily basis.20 As early as March 1948, a group of refugees demonstrated in front of the Punjab Assembly and joined hands with other protesters.21 In late August that year, persons lodged in Dher Pindi camps went on hunger strike and attempted to march into Lahore’s city centre. In Multan and Bawli, refugees violently attacked census officers and opposed the collection of their data.22 The mere mention of the name of refugee leader Rao Khurshid Ali Khan – well known

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for his ability to keep camps in a state of semi-rebellion – threw officials into a panic and rendered their nights without sleep. His arrest in August 1948 generated a rumpus in Montgomery, where some 50,000 protesting refugees clashed with the local police.23 Such demonstrations unquestionably cemented social solidarity among their participants and helped them keep hardships and claims under the spotlight.24 Still, the political dimension of refugees’ acts did not stop at the threshold of mere recrimination in pursuit of better living conditions. Their public protests lifted the curtain on the not-so-obvious feelings of loneliness that seemingly consumed many migrants. Marches, attacks and hunger strikes drew attention to their inability to draw on patronage, that is to say the most effective, less time-consuming and widely exploited way to access public resources.25 Refugees’ ills then went largely beyond the deprivation of material goods to encompass the more intangible loss of their traditional sociabilities and livelihoods. Refugees’ responsiveness to ideas about injustice made them embryonic activists citizens.26 By carving out their space as distinct from other pre-existing local identities, migrants found their own ways of being political, of channelling their claims, and, in ultimately, of developing their own ideas of belonging to a state. The anger that resulted from the violation or the perceived violation of a right, Gellner reminds us, spoke also of the sentiment of belonging to a wider national community.27 “The greatest and most important claim which the refugees [. . .] [had] against this Government is to be given a home, to be given food, to be given clothing; because” – Gibbon would assert in March 1954, voicing the pleas of temporary structures’ inhabitants – “but for the sufferings and sacrifices of the refugees, there would [have been] no Pakistan”.28 New sites and scales of struggle were introduced, and new and extended lines between outsiders and insiders started to be delineated. A member of a religious association in correspondence with his mother house in the United States reported: Disgruntled refugees in the villages and in the camp just near us, have used the rumours as their opportunity to threaten and frighten our Christians. This was interpreted as an effort to get them to leave their homes and the meagre lands they are working so they, the refugees, may take possession. [. . .] The threats of the refugees here in Montgomery camps are directed not so much at the Christians as against the town officials and the world in general.29 Previously, the transfer of Hindu-owned deposits from banks in Lahore had resulted in angry migrants targeting the local District Commissioner’s car.30 What the press sympathetic to the government hastily labelled as psychological disorder was actually a political demand that – it should be noted here – was not at this stage attached to any kind of religious or theological claim or rift. Even the local authorities implicitly acknowledged the political nature of refugees’ demands and feelings. Protesting migrants were frequently condemned as anti-State. Voicing their complaints and translating their emotions into words similarly meant swelling the ranks

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of “certain dangerous lines of anti-State propaganda”.31 Government representatives were duly outraged at Saadat Manto’s poignant short stories. In early September 1948, his “obscene writings” had already dragged him through the court twice.32 Khol Do (Open it!) got his editor Ahmed Qasmi into trouble for, as the official note made it clear, “the story in question would [have] hamper[ed] the government’s efforts for the recovery of abducted women”.33 As the full integration of refugees into the West Punjab’s socio-economic fabric became a necessity, the political nature of their protests became much more evident. The complexity of the tangle in which institutions and citizens were caught up, exploded. Camps proved to be just the tip of the iceberg. Many thousands of refugees were accommodated elsewhere, in either civil or religious hospitals, school buildings and homes for women and orphans. In Lahore, patients in Mayo Hospital outnumbered the usual bedspace by approximately one thousand units.34 Surgical cases resulting from the 1947 atrocities and migration engulfed its operating theatres as well as those of many other hospitals. The acute shortage of trained personnel further deepened the medical crisis. Large numbers of high and middle schools put aside desks and blackboards and served instead as temporary reception centres. Local civil jails hosted centres for abducted women, where iron bars functioned as front doors and the usual call of residents as the doorbell. Leaks in the institutional reception network were plugged through refugees’ self-managed construction of mud huts and occupation of empty houses. In early October 1947 official estimates warned of the presence of about 200,000 migrants who had settled within West Punjab without government sanction and who were then proceeding to travel back and forth between camps and the middle of towns and cities in the region.35 In the summer of 1948, in the old city of Lahore, the collapse of a crumbling roof claimed 18 lives from among refugees who had – without government approval – occupied the area.36 The fury of the summer of 1947 and the increasingly frequent floods had turned buildings into a fragile conglomerate of houses of cards. Refugees could not once more restrain their anger as they were faced with the umpteenth confirmation of their precariousness. Nearly 2,000 persons targeted the offices of the Lahore Municipality, badly damaging its contents and a couple of cars. Local authorities tried to take immediate counter-measures by emptying some 3,000 tumbledown houses and relocating the families concerned in schools, go-downs and parks. Still, contingency plans did not break the refugees’ reserves. For all the efforts of the authorities, tension and discontent remained palpable and widespread among refugees. In late 1948, this dissatisfaction went as far as to seriously threaten the stability of the Khan of Mamdot’s West Punjab ministry.37 The losses, hardships and sufferings undergone in their dreadful journey to Pakistan permitted all refugees, whatever their immediate circumstances, to claim the kind of morality that turns groups into communities. It also allowed them to use their newly established refugee identity and association with each other to claim that a home was an inalienable right for the citizens of a state.38 Refugees who rushed to the Municipality of Lahore aimed at opposing the delays that were making the early allocation of houses almost impossible, and,

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in the last resort, at shaping government policies. In late 1948, after an informal meeting with the Minister for Resettlement and Rehabilitation of Refugees, Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan, Angela Limerick recorded that, despite governmental enthusiasm, rehabilitation plans did not “consist of much more than getting some of the refugees out of the camps and into the village, but without taking any adequate steps to get them on their feet or established in any trade or occupation”.39 The ongoing continuous rationing of a wide range of basic resources together with acute shortages of trained personnel in key sectors dealing with the reintegration of displaced persons further exacerbated the problems associated with local living conditions and hampered the deployment of resettlement projects and plans. By checking through the lists of shortages of materials and jobs published in local gazettes of those years, one actually experiences almost first-hand a Pakistani society that seemed to be starting from scratch. Food grains, building material, chemical and surgical instruments, paper, electrical goods, coal, coke and medicines, all were added to the list of the items that had to be requisitioned and rationed.40 Wanted – Dead or Alive: civil, electrical, mechanical, wireless, sound and marine engineers, chemists, surgeons, radiologists, pathologists, nurses and bacteriologists, published the West Punjab Gazette in early March 1948.41 A whole social imaginary thus had to be reshaped and reframed. Of course, the interplay between local social interactions and the weaving of mutual normative expectations was inextricably interwoven with both a spatial and a narrative dimension.42 Houses and huts would in time replace camps and temporary structures, and the anguish of the creation and re-creation of respectively a state and a social imaginary thus became tangible and visible.

Elective affinities: refugees, homes, domesticity and belonging In the aftermath of independence, West Punjabi homes were piled high with all the emotions and the dynamics that the search for, and the life in, them triggered in terms of reconstructing a social imaginary. “Oi, b***ch*d, you’re living in my f***ing house!”, thundered a threatening Martland in a room in Mecklenburgh Square, London, more than 60 years later.43 Martland and Ahmad had met by chance and became good friends thousands of miles away from their home countries. Each of them was respectively an Indian and a Pakistani child of that midnight hour in August 1947 that changed the course of South Asian events. Ninety Upper Mall, Lahore, is the address of a so-called evacuee property that, having been vacated by Martland’s family in 1947, was allotted to Ahmad’s grandparents in 1959 thanks to the help and intercession of the then Punjab Inspector General of Police Qurban Ali Khan. Like many other middle- and upper-class refugees, Ahmed’s grandparents had probably previously been temporary residents of friends’ houses and rented flats at exorbitant prices. They eventually found a place of their own, more than a decade after crossing the border into Pakistan. Resettlement and compensation in this way were two sides of the same problem. As Ahmad went on, “families that had

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opted to migrate to Pakistan were compensated, if that is the correct term for this situation, for what that they had left behind”.44 Special registers that were progressively filed with the Custodian of the Evacuee Properties recorded meticulously all the entries on forms that refugees were required to complete in order to claim the value of their immovable properties left behind in India and in this way to get a house allotted in West Punjab.45 Information such as the extent of share or interest of the evacuee, estimated value of the property, amount of mortgage and dates of auction and sale list serial numbers was the kind of evidence that refugees were asked to supply.46 This level of detail provided on these forms, however, was not replicated in the attention given to allocating housing, which was done on a much more ad hoc basis. Numbers very often did not work to the refugee’s advantage. According to Pakistani sources, Muslims who poured into West Punjab far outnumbered Hindus and Sikhs who had fled to India. The wave of looting and fires that accompanied the Partition of the subcontinent had severely damaged entire mohallas, leaving hundreds of streets unviable and thousands of houses unfit for use. A total of 105,367 out of the 106,010 evacuee houses in the towns and cities of Pakistani Punjab were classified as “not easily reparable”. Crumbling walls, uneven floors and broken window frames made most of these buildings little more than heaps of rubble.47 Despite government optimism with regard to its resettlement schemes, endemic delays in the clearance of temporary structures left their mark on refugees’ feelings of anxiety, precariousness and disillusionment.48 In late 1948 the afore-mentioned bundles of sticks and well-worn tents were still sheltering about 400,000 refugees distributed in camps across the whole of the Punjab.49 Among them were around 2,500 refugees from non-agreed areas who were lodged in Bawli camp and who, on a foggy winter’s day of early 1951, took to the streets of Lahore. Their march towards the Wagah border and their attempt to reach India voiced their concern about the need to feel truly at home.50 The claim to a roof over their heads was closely linked to the idea of taking part, and being involved, in a wider project of both a nation- and a state-in-the-making. Indeed, the conceptualisation of a sense of belonging to Pakistan meshed with the elaboration of a physical and emotional domesticity. If their obstinate refusal to take part in census data gathering exercises had previously marked the desire of refugees from non-agreed areas to be considered as equal citizens of the newly created state, the political significance of their protest over the lack of proper accommodation now flagged up disillusionment with the early projects of national integration. ‘Squatter’ and ‘jhuggi’ would soon replace the label of ‘refugee’, and the model of katcha mud houses – imported by rural migrants into urban centres – would draw an effective ‘border’ around their domestic lives. Refugee self-resettlement on land arranged itself into a structured and proper business. Squatter and refugee entrepreneurs together with community leaders asserted their power and ‘sovereignty’ over the illegally occupied plots: no property could be sold or transferred without their approval on prices and future allottees.51 Frequently demolished by

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calamities or town development authorities without any proper notice and offers of alternative accommodation, huts epitomised this precariousness through the possibility of them being rebuilt in the same place almost overnight.52 The chance of acquiring a safer and more solid building was by no means the promise of stability and intimacy with the surrounding environment. An aura of weirdness enveloped the sense of relief that usually followed the allotment of a house. “There was a dinner service on the dining table and, in a study in an annexe in the back, a glass of water lay on a desk as if someone had just risen to answer the phone. ‘I told them I didn’t want a house like this’, my grandfather told me”, explains Ahmad while drawing his readers into his family’s inner feelings.53 The idea of a mutual contamination of personal spaces came into play. Muslim hands opened front doors whose inlays finely entwined Sanskrit characters with images of Hindu deities. Mere kilometres away, in East Punjab, Hindu or Sikh eyes decrypted Qur’an verses that had been carved over the doorstep. Furniture in rooms, dishes and glasses in cupboards and clothes in wardrobes, traced the taste of unknown persons. The familiar and reassuring smiles of those portrayed in pictures and paintings adorning domestic walls turned into emotionless exhibitions of artists’ talent. I met Mian at the Punjab University Guesthouse on a Sunday afternoon in early February 2010. His parents had migrated to West Punjab way back in 1947. “My family and I have always lived in Model Town”, he claimed during our conversation.54 His upper-class status and the history of the ‘posh’ Lahori suburb corroborated his account. I did not doubt that he was telling me the truth. Nevertheless, when I met him again during a second research trip to Lahore in December 2010, the plot thickened. One afternoon he took me back to the Walled City of Lahore. We had already been there a couple of days earlier. No wonder that this visit to the suburb came as a bit of a surprise. As we reached the first alley running parallel to Circular Road, Mian drew his car up along a block of houses. “Do you see that building? It’s the house that my family was first allotted in the 1940s”, he told me under his breath me by pointing his finger at the direction of one such finely carved front door.55 Mian’s reticence about his past stemmed from a complicated blend of feelings. “Look at the front door. That’s Hindi. Have you ever wondered what those words mean?”, I asked him. He mumbled something I could not catch, and dissolved into tears. A hush fell over us. My question had struck a raw nerve. Mian’s reaction spoke strongly of the whirl of emotions that perturbed him as well as many other refugee tenants, many years after Partition itself. Resettlement policies had undermined the traditional relationship between the built environment and human ties. In that handful of square meters, the road and the home stood in no contradiction. They were both non-places, where the intimate sociability of the home was torn apart.56 The cruel spirits that, in an ancient tradition, roamed the streets at night, were now invading private houses as well. Rooms were replete with the ghosts of previous inhabitants, ready to assail refugees at any time and remind them that they were living someone else’s life. Not even outlining children’s eyes with kohl would have kept those evil presences at the bay.

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Mian and I touched upon our December trip to the Walled City once again in March 2013. Our conversation frequently switched from English to Urdu. Reconstituting the emotional life of the families of Partition refugees can be an exercise in patience and linguistic sensitivity. As he put it to me, the arbitrariness of the process of allocating available evacuee properties had allotted Mian’s family simply a makaan (building). Its ‘four walls’ within the Old City were a mere structure with a roof. It lacked that intimate and affective substance that had bound together his family in East Punjab and which would later turn an anonymous building in Model Town into a ghar or home.57 A persistent feeling of domestic space being violated framed the tapestry of the refugee’s life. Ali’s nani (maternal grandmother) treasured the keys of her house in Amritsar for the rest of her life.58 Those keys unlocked something more than a front door. They provided access to the repository of authoritativeness and self.59 The late-1940s government-enforced requisition of stocks and commodities from private houses was, most certainly, a blow for her. The fact that personal properties were then transferred to those temporary structures that were put to use as lodgings for fellow, less fortunate refugees was not much of a consolation. What was happening in front of Ali’s grandmother in West Punjab was highly likely to be taking place in her previous home now on the other side of the border. The ideological threshold of the inviolable had been crossed. Mian’s parents and Ali’s nani will have run their eyes over the hundreds of call for tenders that were published monthly in Pakistani newspapers in the late 1940s and early 50s. In February 1955, the National Bank of India, Ltd. auctioned the stocks that had been stored in Messrs Bija Mall premises in the iconic Mela Ram Building in Lahore. “Large stocks of crockery, cutlery, glassware, earthenware, kettles and other miscellaneous stores of Messrs Bija Mall, Mela Ram, evacuee, will” – the classified advertisement read – “be sold by public auction at 63, G. T. Road, opposite Railway Good Office, Lahore on Monday 14th February 1955”.60 But it was not only goods that went under the hammer in mid-February that year. Household items comprised the building blocks of any family’s identity. Cups, glasses and plates were traditionally stored in closets scattered throughout the different rooms of a house. Their mere mentioning evoked carefully safeguarded intimate domestic geographies that, through the allocation of the rooms of the same building, had signposted social distance within refugees’ extended household in East Punjab or the United Provinces.61 Personal belongings also constituted one of the basic units out of which refugees’ own identity was built. Sixty-three years later, Begum Khan had very clear recollections of how, in her closet in Jullundhur, clothes were arranged.62 Her gesturing was powerfully evocative. Mrs Khan meticulously drew in the air with her fingers her wardrobe’s hooks and shelves. Her knotty hands kept touching clothes that now existed only in her memory. Her wardrobe was not a mere locked repository of possessions and secrets. Hidden among her joras in East Punjab was the money that Begum Khan and her mother used to keep for their family weekly shopping and home-helpers’ salaries. Drawers and interstices guarded her domestic power, authority and, in the last resort, life.

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As the clock struck midnight on 14/15 August 1947, the reins of Begum Khan’s domesticity slipped out of her hands. They were taken over not only by unknown Hindu and Sikh persons in Jullundhur, but also – and quite surprisingly – by the Pakistani state itself. The late-1940s and mid-1950s institutionalisation of women’s domesticity resulted from Begum Khan’s fellow upper- and upper-middleclass women’s perceived duty to join with state and non-state organisations in the resettlement and the rehabilitation of the migrant community. “Today your country needs you as ever before” – urged the influential and widely respected Begum Shah Nawaz as early as September 1947 – “You are the real soldier of Pakistan [. . .] Your helpless sisters await for your aid”.63 The boundaries of the recognition of women’s traditional domestic activities were now pushed towards the new field of the private, public and voluntary institutions that were emerging everywhere across the whole of the Punjab. “I mention women, because after all they are the managers of the household” – Begum Shah Nawaz insisted once more in December 1947 – “Let the women of Pakistan prove that they are good managers”.64 This invitation, issued by this Muslim League stalwart, triggered off a process that aimed at turning female domesticity into what the advertisement of the Royal Pakistan Naval Nursing Service quite eloquently called something “more”.65 Many local middle- and upper-class women appeared to warmly welcome this new – at times sudden – turn in the elaboration and the perception of their everyday life. After all, Pakistan Times reader ‘Keen Eyes’ made it clear, “times [had] changed and the girls of today [were] not content to play the same servile and silent role as their mother and grandmother [had done]”.66 Women quickly threw themselves into education- and health-related work. Immediately after its foundation in 1948, the local Fatima Jinnah College for Women in Lahore could boast a waiting list comprising 550 candidates.67 On the opposite side of the street, the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital’s Training School for Nurses reckoned with a similar roll of potential trainees.68 Between 1948 and 1960, the number of Muslim students who enrolled at Kinnaird College – the first women’s higher education institution in colonial Punjab and the local breeding ground of future teachers – registered a ten-fold increase in its intake as compared with the previous decade.69 Women’s enthusiasm was palpable. One ‘Housewife’ was a regular contributor behind the weekly column that the Sunday supplement of the Pakistan Times devoted to its female readers. It was she who, in October 1954, turned their feelings into words. There must be – she commented in relation to the launch of the Social Service Diploma at the University of the Punjab – like any other job, a compulsion about it, [and it must not depend on] whether Begum sahib feels like it today, whether the cook is well or sick; [. . .] whether the car is free; [. . .] whether Mrs A. likes Mrs. B. [. . .] Let us open another channel for our women and girls who need it, and let us acknowledge social work as an essential public service.70 Even local and foreign companies acknowledged Mrs A., Mrs B. and Housewife’s public service. Their advertising campaign in newspapers and glossy

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magazines made women’s domestic life into a paragon of public virtue. Dalda Vanaspati celebrated those smiling women who cooked their wholesome parathas (flatbread) and restored their son’s energies with their ghee (clarified butter).71 Through its beautiful model and mother, Dettol reminded female customers that no house was a proper home without their disinfectant.72 Still, in turning what had been a private and homely intimacy into something ostentatiously public, well-known individuals, institutions and companies helped to bring many refugees’ worst nightmares to life. Laying the ghosts of their own past was by no means easy task for persons like Ali’s nani or Mian’s parents. “Home. The very thought of home threatened to shatter their [refugees’] sanity just as a storm threatens to uproot trees”, reveals a fictional character in Intizar Hussain’s Kishti (Ark).73 Refugees’ sobs resonated even across the impersonal, austere halls of the Punjab Assembly. “[The Minister of Rehabilitation has] treated these poor unfortunate human beings like cattle.” – declared C. E. Gibbon in an emotionally charged speech – Not one of them [. . .] can rest at night, not one of them knows where to lay his worried head, never does he know when the axe of the Rehabilitation Department is likely to descend on his collar. [. . .] If we come before this House and we express such emotions it is because we have observed such gruesome and such sufferings on the part of these unfortunate people.74 In refugee eyes, the procedure of re-allotment was an utter lottery.75 The rationale behind resettlement plans and government decisions may have been outwardly simple and sensible: “People” – the Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation, Pakistan Dr Ishtiaq Hussain summed up in 1953 – “[should live] in proper shelters. [. . .] [There is not] any other criterion of the success of the scheme”.76 Nevertheless, an initial first-come-first-served method of allocating evacuees’ houses and a subsequent assignment of urban premises on a provisional basis deepened the sense of insecurity and alienation that had already crept into the mindset of many migrants. The immediate and tangible effect of this mood was the progressive decay into which large numbers of buildings irremediably fell. As allottees refused to take charge of the repairs and the upkeep of their allotments, houses teetered on the brink of collapse. Famous addresses were by no means immune. Iqbal’s former residence at 94/A McLeod Road, Lahore, was first declared evacuee property and then occupied by a family of refugees. The progressive deterioration of its structure over the following years threatened the safety of the occupants to such an extent that the Lahore Corporation eventually demanded its demolition.77 The poor conditions of the evacuees’ properties caused recurring front-pages headlines that screamed out their warnings. “Evacuee homes in state of despair. Many refugees may become shelterless in Punjab”, announced the Pakistan Times in the midst of the torrential 1950 monsoon season.78 “Refugees living in subhuman conditions”, bawled an emaciated kid strolling along Mall Road in Lahore while trying to sell the same newspaper to passers-by in early January 1955.79 The

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provincial Government then felt the need to intervene. The local Public Works Department (Buildings and Roads Branch) established two Rehabilitation Circles. As from late 1955, their employees planned and carried out much-needed ordinary and extraordinary repairs in all the damaged residential houses of the Punjab.80 Maintenance work, rents and permanence of the allotment were the indissoluble and lethal combination of elements that spoilt remaining furnishings, frames and walls, and they swayed refugees’ sense of attachment to a physical space. For many, a straightforward and simple equation lodged in their minds. Realising no return from the rent of the houses that they had abandoned in India, refugees contended that neither payments nor repairs were due for the premises allotted to them in West Punjab.81 The All-Parties Refugee and Rehabilitation Board immediately championed their rights and their struggle for a home away from home. “The Board is of the opinion that the present Government policy of realising arrears of rent [. . .] is against the solemn assurance and promises given by the Government”, read the resolution they passed during their meeting in early December 1954.82 The tortuous and self-contradicting logic of the motion perfectly reflected refugees’ confused emotional defence of their refusal to pay their rent or carry out the necessary repairs. “The Board” – the resolution went on, letting the authorities understand that ultimately refugees would be willing to pay what due – “demands that full cost of repairs made after the rent arrears is to be paid to the allottees”.83 Equally, their feelings and ideas of belonging engaged in a tongue-twisting fight fraught with danger and contradictions. Pakistan embodied the reality that ‘home’ had turned out to be powerless in arranging for them the ‘home away from home’ that they desired. It was the first federal Minister for the Resettlement and the Rehabilitation of Refugees Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan who, in November 1954, translated refugees’ feelings into words. Hundreds of uprooted persons had crammed into his department office in Karachi, and still called on him upon his return from his missions abroad. Furthermore, his recent appointment as High Commissioner to India allowed him to experience first-hand the rehabilitation of India’s own refugees. Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan commented then on resettlementrelated events from the standpoint of a first-hand witness to history. “[The] hatred and suspicion that followed [. . .] Partition could not last forever” – he declared – “[. . .] People in both countries would welcome opportunities to their former homes and acquaintances”.84 The offices of the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi were literally swamped with thousands of letters from Indian evacuees who reportedly wanted to “re-establish contacts with their past homes”.85 The relaxation of Pakistani visa rules in late 1954 probably resulted from Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan’s efforts to meet the wishes of Indian Partition migrants to be – albeit briefly – back at home in West Punjab. On the occasion of an IndiaPakistan cricket match held in Lahore in January 1955, the Pakistani foreign mission issued no less than 15,000 visas.86 Indian refugees were indeed eager to meet their old friends in their former home. As they would declare in their note of thanks after their visit, they “were feeling deficient and deprived of the pleasant company of [. . .] [their] friends left behind in Pakistan”.87 For the first time in South Asia’s long and chequered sporting history, the sport itself – cricket – was

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pushed into the background. Pakistanis and Indians marched hand in hand along the Mall. The slogans “Pakistan Zindabad” and “Hindustan Zindabad” reverberated around the very same streets where, back in 1947, people had wished India and Pakistan a speedy decline, if not total failure.88 The match proved to be “a reunion of the hearts”.89 The warm, fond embrace between a Sikh man and a Pakistani journalist at the Wagah border epitomised the spirit of those days. The reporter approached the Indian national and his three children as they were leaving Pakistan. “What are your impressions?”, he asked them innocently.90 The father could not utter a word. Instead he held the journalist, and burst into tears. It was one of his young daughters who articulated his feelings. “Can’t we live here again?”, she implored.91 On the western side of the border, students and sport teams had brought pressure to bear on the Punjab Government to renegotiate with India the terms for the issuance of visas.92 The employees of the newly established Passport Office in Lahore were looking over the hundreds of applications that intending visitors to India had submitted to them. In fewer than two months, more than 2,000 Lahore District-resident refugees had made their way to the branch that Government of Pakistan had opened at the Roberts Club in early August 1954.93 There could be no surprise then that, when the occasion arose, refugees literally overflowed back into East Punjab. As a local saying puts it, jehri mauj chhaju de chobare, na oh Balakh na Bukhare (East or West, home is best). In early April 1955, in similar fashion, a hockey match between teams representing the East and West Punjab police forces finally gave many refugees from Pakistan the chance to re-enter the neighbouring state. More than 65,000 refugees rushed to the Indian diplomatic representation in Lahore in order to secure one of the reduced-rate visas now available to them. They reportedly wanted to meet old acquaintances and overcome the nostalgia of past and familiar places.94 The 1955 spring peace between India and Pakistan was the formal expression of a widely-felt need to feel ‘at home’ and visit, if not retrieve, their former domestic space.95

From homes to towns and cities: refugees and the negotiation of urban space and identity On top of such challenges, how could lodgings allotted on a temporary basis ever be worthy of both physical and emotional affection? “The news appearing in a recent issue of your newspaper that an ordinance regarding the quasi-permanent allotment of urban immovable properties will be promulgated shortly is most welcomed”, commented with relief ‘A refugee’ in his letter to the editor of Lahore’s Pakistan Times.96 Administrative requirements by the early 1950s had dragged many refugees into an exasperating battle of nerves. Requests for the allocation of any evacuee property had to be first substantiated and then verified through proper documents and revenue records. Within this bureaucratic framework, claimants grappled with the need to trace the papers that they had left or lost in East Punjab. Government desks were packed with Devanagari-written files that almost no civil servant was able to translate.97

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Houses and belongings left behind in India had been or were being apparently sold at insignificant prices, while, as a Dawn editorial eloquently entitled ‘Shall We Only Talk?’ alleged, “in Pakistan the Hindu evacuees were reaping a rich harvest” as they sold off their holdings before leaving.98 Fuelled by repeated difficulties and setbacks, refugees’ souls and minds came to be permeated with deep feelings of resentment and bitterness towards India.99 Yet, paperwork duties were just a symptom of a wider malaise. Opponents of the government scheme of permanent resettlement revealed the silent illness that affected many people who had embarked on the journey from what had become India in 1947. “To cancel the existing allotments and orders, the new ones would amount to robbing lakhs of people of their habitation and livelihood”, warned one of them who concealed himself behind the frequently used pseudonym ‘A refugee’.100 A deep-seated anxiety paralysed his thoughts. The habitation that ‘a refugee’ feared losing was something more than just the bricks and mortar to which he returned after work. Rather it incorporated all the immaterial yet vital ‘galaxies’ of relationships, balances and hierarchies that filled his life and allowed him to break the silence of anonymity to become part of a pattern of mutual expectations and trust. The feelings of both of these ‘A refugee’ resembled a hall of mirrors: what one longed for, the other one feared to lose. After touring the region in the aftermath of Partition, a correspondent from The Times of London discovered that refugees’ economic and material losses were accompanied by the even more distressing break-up of their social and living patterns.101 Indeed, entire biradari, tabbar and gharana – essential social units of local Punjabi society – had been ripped apart. Disorientation then further sharpened as the allocation process began and households underwent dramatic, and often involuntary, changes. Houses that had previously sheltered extended or joint families were now fragmented. The re-distribution of available empty apartments among needy refugees followed the unfamiliar method of one flat or, at times, just one room per applicant. In most cases, allottees were not related to, and did not know, each other.102 Even some of the early housing schemes charted an urban geography that heightened social anonymity. In September 1950, the Department of Supply and Development, Pakistan, placed an order with the British company Aluminium United Ltd for two-room, pre-fabricated aluminium buildings, far too small for most family units.103 The fragmentation of houses and flats that had previously sheltered joint- or extended families resulted in the further deepening of refugees’ individual alienation and the progressive tearing apart of their patronage networks. But if some refugees managed to adapt to their new circumstances, most of them deliberately violated regulations and resettlement plans. An official of the US Embassy at the time recorded that “the main difficulty is that of keeping refugees settled. There is a natural tendency to seek to settle in village groups as they came over”.104 Their identity was substantiated through these old or newly created relationships that provided them with a ‘survival kit’ in what was still a highly-personalised and trust-based society: credentials of reliability, solidarity and stability.105 Renouncing or rejecting them would have been suicidal.

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Congested towns and cities further exacerbated the migrants’ situation. The mid-1950s housing crunch made rent prices soar. A refugee who looked to rent a three-bedroom house in Charing Cross, Lahore, could be asked to face a rise of an astonishing 84.8%.106 Jokes on the subject proliferated. ‘Look here, young man, you must either pay your accounts or leave the home’ – ‘Thank you very much, my last landlady made me do both’, stated one of them. Still, above and beyond such economic concerns, many migrants registered a stubborn resistance to any kind of relocation. As soon as new accommodation was allotted to them, subtenants rather than proper allottees often took possession of the dwellings.107 As the years rolled on, jobs – no matter whether ‘under the table’ or legal ones – and newly negotiated sociabilities delineated the borders of the rather uncertain geography of migrants’ everyday lives. If new allotments spelt the loss of ‘traditional’ livelihoods, then people immediately relinquished their proprietary or tenant rights.108 The hundreds of stories from the margins that appeared on local newspapers were powerful reminders to many refugees of the need to counter any plan that would threaten their social capital. Hussain Tassawwar was not one of those thousands of persons whose hard-luck stories never hit the headlines. Rather he was one of the most wanted men in the district of Lahore. Journalists meticulously reported his social background every single time his ‘heroic’ deeds became the talk of the town. He was – news accounts recorded with a pinpoint accuracy that resulted from a prior consultation with police informers – a refugee from the United Provinces.109 Police records were a testament to Hussain’s social status.110 As a refugee, he had to carefully (re)negotiate his social accountability and identity on a daily basis. In the early 1950s, Hussain founded a gang, and quickly made a name for himself as a terror of the local telecommunication services. His venture was cracking the Lahori market of red-brown metals. The inaccessibility of Pakistan’s own deposits in Baluchistan and the Himalayas made copper extraction a very risky gamble. Local manufacturers had little option but to rely on cheaper imports. On paper, the trade was lucrative, with an overall import value of Rs. 19.2 lakh in 1953.111 Hussain clearly believed himself to be the right person in the right place at the right time. His idea of reselling the copper that his group extracted from stolen phone cables was the most cost-effective way to invest in this emerging market. In late 1954, the popularity of the Tassawwar gang crossed geographical lines. Thefts were committed not only in the suburbs of New Anarkali and Chah Miran in Lahore but also in the neighbouring town of Shahdara.112 Everything was going to plan. Hussain’s persona retained an aura of heroism. The manufacturing of copper through theft demanded physical strength, courage and cunningness. Vigour, bravery and cleverness gave his goondas (lit., lout or bully) mythical stature, and neatly distinguished them from petty criminals.113 The business even achieved economies of scale in terms of patronage. By the mid-1950s, Hussain was patron to four ‘employees’.114 Belonging to his gang lent his partners his very same aura of heroic grandeur, both on and off their ‘theatre of operations’. Yet Hussain incautiously pitched his ambitions too high. The relationship between policemen and well-established goondas is very often based on

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patronage. Condoning or punishing crime usually results from a process of negotiation over social order. Police offer thieves protection in exchange for information and, at times, a helping hand in local conflict resolution and mediation.115 The area over which the legal authority of a patron officer extends coincides with the safe theatre of a goonda operation. Hussain and his partners were arrested in early October 1954.116 He had bitten off more than he could chew. His story still taught many refugees an important lesson. Defending the social identity that they had difficulty regained with difficulty, was a life-saving imperative. In December 1954, the Government of the Punjab unveiled a plan for the construction of a yet to be identified number of housing units in Lahore.117 The scheme targeted those refugees who still lived in squatter or squatter-like conditions. The early draft of this project raised ‘false hopes’ among many displaced persons who worked as domestics for old and new Lahoris. In particular, its vague reference to “one-room quarters in different localities of Lahore” was open to misconstruction.118 Refugees convinced themselves that their new dwellings would be erected on the lands that they were already occupying.119 Rumours quickly turned into something approaching a manifesto for their claims. The provincial government in turn felt the need to batten down the hatches. In a strong-worded note, it ruled out the chance of carrying out refugees’ wishes in relation to its new housing scheme. “There is” – the press release trenchantly pointed out – “some misunderstanding in the mind of squatters about their future [. . .] The Government cannot undertake the construction of such quarters where the refugees are at the present squatting.”120 Part of the problem lay in the economy of the middle- and upper-class households. Domestic help generated a monthly cost of around US$ 100.121 Their families lived in nearby mohallas. An eventual relocation would have spelt unemployment. Furthermore, bearers, sweepers, cooks, gardeners and drivers accounted for much of the social prestige of their employer. With some of them coming from rural landholdings owned by the head of the household, their presence in large numbers buttressed his authority not only within the urban circles but also back in rural ones as well.122 Hence, the early schemes to re-organise refugees’ housing arrangements risked leaving honour, reputation and patronage networks out of the calculation that was supposed to make its mark on ideas of urban resettlement and development. It posed enormous direct risks and hazards for the refugees’ newly – negotiated sociabilities and, more prosaically, their wealth. Society columns were packed with reports of servants’ wrongdoings. In early October 1954, the 16-year old Usman was a conversation piece in many gettogethers and ladies’ parties in Model Town, Lahore. He – “a refugee from the United Provinces”, as the newspapers meticulously reported – had stolen his employer’s jewellery.123 As a weeping Begum Adbul Hamid would later declare to the local police, the haul was worth Rs. 689. Alongside the deployment of resettlement and relocation plans, Lahore witnessed a steady increase in murders and burglaries. According to official reports, serious and petty crimes doubled in number.124 It is likely that Begum Hamid’s friends eased her sorrow by reminding her that, at least, she had not joined the ranks of the murdered. In 1953, the numbers

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of homicides rose to 1,248 from the 1,151 registered in Punjab during in previous 12 months.125 Neighbourhood safety was the litmus for solidarity, non-anonymity and kinship homogeneity.126 Crime rates further substantiated refugees’ fears, and highlighted the failure of the government on the market of resettlement policies. In 1976 Farhat Oulzan, an urban geography research student at the University of the Punjab, exposed the secrets of the urban development of Lahore in a PhD dissertation that remains one of the few available comprehensive studies on the subject.127 This superimposition of the mappings of both commercial and industrial activities and the refugee concentration in different areas across the years traces and provides reasons for the apparent oddities of local urban planning that followed Partition. In the mid- and late-1950s, the Lahore Improvement Trust embarked on a series of housing developing schemes that initially pushed the city’s boundaries more and more north- and west-wards. It was there and along the other main thoroughfares that refugees’ businesses, workshops and factories sprung up, setting Lahore’s new economic life in motion. Indeed, it was often the case that refugees managed not to forfeit that strong penchant for economic vitality and dynamism that would draw a distinction between them and local Punjabis for years to come.128 Many of them attended the hundreds of public and private training centres and professional colleges that literally mushroomed across the whole province in the years after 1947. Benefiting from a complex combination of fee concessions and stipends, members of the Punjab’s refugee community undoubtedly seized the opportunities that a lack of trained personnel and the urgent needs of a state in-the-making offered them.129 In 1949 one B. Khan Kakaji, refugee from Amritsar, put pen to paper and wrote to the US Consulate. An employee of the Irrigation Department in Lahore, he was eager to set up a business in the textile sector. Yet, as his subsequent interview with the American attaché revealed, he lacked both experience and bank references.130 Was this the impromptu attempt of a reckless aspiring entrepreneur? Oulzan suggests otherwise. His guided tour of the newly industrialised urban fringe of Lahore allows us to catch a retrospective glimpse of refugee ventures in the area. His meticulous survey of lands and their functional use discloses the real extent of the history of successes and failures of refugee entrepreneurship. The laissez-faire policy that inspired government acts and ordinances up to 1958, the frequent shortages of raw materials and commodities, and the interplay of the foreign exchange mechanisms brought about the apparently self-contradictory development of the retailing industry. Shops, stores and markets sprang up in all those areas where the concentration of refugees on land was particularly high.131 Groceries, workshops, canteens, milk and fodder shops topped the list of their commercial specialisation.132 In officials’ eyes, the construction of new housing schemes in the parts of the city where refugee businesses were mushrooming would prove to be a real boost to Lahore and its new beautification plans. The shaping of Lahore’s society – official pamphlets read – depended on the successful implementation of new real estate schemes aimed at tackling both the housing and the refugee emergency.133 By order of the government, architects and planners had to design all satellite

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towns as self-sufficient and self-contained units. As a digest published by the Rehabilitation and Works Division made clear, “the concept of better housing is all embracing and covers such facilities as public health [. . .] and provision of amenities for recreation”.134 Apparently, as such schemes revealed, the local administration had learned from its past mistakes. It was finally taking the hoary problem of the development of the provincial capital and giving it a new twist. After a decade of planning failures, the urban space was now legally and politically conceived as a microcosm of interdependent personal networks. Making Lahore, its old city and the new suburbs vibrant meant establishing functional, viable communities. Local authorities identified the careful “consolidation not only of housing and related development, but also the manner by which the people [were] used to make a living” as pre-requisite of any successful scheme.135 The construction of social centres in all satellite towns was the boast of the whole plan. In the words of the US architectural advisor posted at the American Embassy in Karachi, “the social centre may be [. . .] described as similar to a national community set up by the inhabitants themselves to look after their affairs [. . .] and by which they can prove, in a practical way, that they are able to use their own efforts in serving themselves and in raising the standards of their community”.136 Accordingly, redesigning the ‘Paris of the East’ as well as the other Punjabi towns also became synonymous with safeguarding refugee and local geographies of personal relationships and daily encounters. Nevertheless, shortages of raw materials and industrial goods together with the lack of skilled labour proved to be major obstacles in the way of the implementation of these urban development plans. Contractors’ difficulties in obtaining replacement parts resulted in the depletion of the already limited stocks of building materials and in frequent one to four week-long closing of local factories.137 Furthermore, most employees who were working in construction lacked the necessary qualifications to carry out ambitious projects. Despite a growing interest in pre-fabricated blocks, construction methods dated back to the early 1940s. Pillars and roofs were constructed through wooden poles and with no mechanical equipment.138 For their part, local entrepreneurs suffered from the “mania of quick grow rich tendency and as such without investing ample capital”.139 Investments in new urban housing sites were quite low down in their companies’ list of priorities. Applying for government funding meant resigning to the idea of filing for bankruptcy. Coffers were empty. Development, non-military costs were covered only by foreign funding and loans, small savings, profits of government enterprises and repayments of loans by local municipalities.140 Inevitably, perhaps, floundering construction companies put the bulk of their capital expenditures on potential buyers’ account. Property prices advertised in local newspapers were indeed – and unsurprisingly – higher than the average house price. As soon as, in the very late 1950s, new or repaired properties in satellite towns started to become available, it was immediately clear that most refugees could not afford them. Despite the fact that the sale of urban sites and houses operated on the basis of a quota reserved

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for refugees, their prices often went far beyond the Rs. 5.000 limit of affordability and, hence, prevented low- or no-income persons from any kind of purchase.141 When the full details of this picture became apparent, the Lahore Improvement Trust diverted most of its projects and funding from the urban fringe to the city centre.142 But, even there, what seemed like an unbridgeable gulf between authorities’ and refugees’ view of the urban space surfaced. Both the federal and the provincial government, and the local Improvement Trust, envisioned Lahore as a spatial symbolic cosmology. Its (re-)design was rooted in their firm, mainstream, belief that planning, architecture and buildings visually and tangibly signified institutions and their ability to assert power over communities. It further substantiated nation-building processes, and the idea that attractiveness and productivity where bywords of progress. Dr Muhammad Baqir – a local notable – put the official narrative in a nutshell during a ceremony that, in 1956, followed the renaming of part of chowk Nawab Sahib after the Urdu writer Muhammad Hussain Azad. “All great nations” – he declared – “revered the names of their great men [. . .] There could be no national consciousness [. . .] without that. All other countries took particular interest erecting memorial and setting up museums, art rooms, libraries and other cultural centres in memory of their illustrious men”.143 Hence, “the planned use [. . .] of [. . .] community buildings, transport and utilities and services” – government pamphlets further pinpointed in the late 1950s – “[needed to] help create attractive, functional and productive villages, towns and regions”.144 Unsurprisingly, then, there were schemes, albeit still awaiting approval, that provided for a National Art Gallery, a theatre and a museum to be built along the stretch of the road that skirted the Patiala Estate. Removed from Charing Cross, the effigy of Queen Victoria made the best of itself in the Central Museum along with many other “relics of the past”.145 Institutions funded the widening of the Mall as a way to reduce traffic congestion. In 1960, the construction of some new public toilets near the University of the Punjab was particularly welcome. Previously Lahore had possessed “only 26 public lavatories which [. . .] [were] locked from sunset onwards, [leaving people with] no adequate alternative [. . .] but to spoil other people’s walls”, commented the city’s Civil and Military Gazette with a touch of sarcasm.146 The situation was serious but by no means hopeless, or, at least, this was what some refugees thought. In the mid-1950s, in the city of Lyallpur (later renamed Faisalabad), an enterprising group of refugees combined forces and embarked upon the building of new houses at their own cost in order to solve the local paucity of accommodation facilities and endemic delays in the implementation of both private and public-funded housing development schemes. After years of delay, cooperative societies finally gained a new impetus. Lyallpur entrepreneurs’ advertisements were soon placed in local newspapers together with of those of hundreds of other similar business organisations across the whole of the urban Punjab.147 Cooperative properties, Talbot has established, attracted attention mainly from among middle-class Punjabi and governmental officers. High costs prevented most refugees from any investment.148 If truth to be told, a quick inspection of the

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different houses that were advertised by both housing and commercial cooperatives reveals that size and price diversification made flats and houses relatively affordable even to low income persons. Groups of urban homeless persons frequently organised themselves into cooperatives, whose buildings reproduced, on a larger scale and on unexploited evacuee land, the mainstream local architectural mixture of housing facilities and business premises. Indeed, in 1957 an UN officer noticed that “in Lahore squatters’ settlement [. . .], some 350 weavers ‘resettled themselves’ in a cohesive working, community of comparatively well-built brick building in which they live, weave, and sell their products through a cooperative organisation”.149 Both the economic cycle and the production line were in refugees’ hands. Established and run by them, such businesses employed mainly refugee labour.150 Arguably they sealed themselves along the new yet old ties of family and blood. While the blood was the same that had been shed during the events of 1947, the family was the one that had learnt to care for its members after Partition, whether in camps, the offices of the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Department, jhuggi clusters or evacuee properties.

Something old, something new and something borrowed: the rural resettlement of refugees in Pakistani Punjab Refugees’ self-reaffirmation of their social capital and patronage networks replicated itself in similar fashion in the fertile and much sought-after lands of the post-Partition Punjabi countryside. In the space of the 60-year period that spanned the decades from 1880 to 1940, the southern rural areas of West Punjab had experienced one of most imposing projects of social and agricultural engineering of the British raj. In these so-called canal colonies in particular, the introduction of modern cultivation and irrigation facilities had proceeded in tandem with a progressive shaping of those human characteristics that eventually culminated in rational homines oeconomici able to maximise crops and profits.151 M. L. Darling’s earlier words – “men all connected by common descent, all physically fit to take up a life in a new country under considerable difficulties, all hard up for land” – now epitomised the quintessence of the new Punjabi agricultural workers or tenants.152 Almost 10 years later, although the quantities of available materials and the quality of migration fluxes had changed, social and farming operators produced an almost identical result. Willing, it seemed, to sell their soul to the devil, refugees tussled with each other in order to secure a foothold in the renowned fertile and fruitful lands of West Punjab. A persistent lack of thorough administrative controls over declarations on forms allowed migrants to turn their hands to agriculture and subsequently to secure an allotted property. Local notables awarded medals of honour to all those hundreds of artisans, shopkeepers and merchants who turned overnight into supposedly professional agriculturalists. Sheikh Muhammad Rashid, who would later rise to fame as Baba-e-Socialism, publicly praised their entrepreneurial spirit. Refugees’ “practical experience”– M. L. Darling

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should not worry – “ought to be regarded as sufficient training to make a person good cultivator”.153 But did refugees in West Punjab have any real prospect of success as they embarked on a project that gave the impression of being beyond their actual means and possibilities? The post-1947 depreciation of the price of paddy was a testament to a suffering agricultural economy.154 Evacuee rural properties demanded substantial technical investments and high levels of professionalism and expertise in return for almost guaranteed high profits. After 1947, the rural circle of production and consumption was on its knees. Before Partition, Hindu arthis (traders) had funded the wide network of Muslim cottage workers and artisans who manufactured raw agriproducts. Theirs had also been the hands that held the reins of the commercial part of the supply chain. Likewise, the exodus of Hindus and Sikhs severely harmed the local cloth trade. The supply chain could not count anymore on traders who previously had contributed to a significant expansion of the cotton goods market. Furthermore, Cyril Radcliffe’s Boundary Commission had handed over the keys of the city of Amritsar to the new Indian authorities. The Golden City held an unrivalled position in the cloth sale sector. The fears were now that the far less developed markets of Multan and Lyallpur could not survive the keen competition with their Indian counterpart.155 On a different level, the departure of thousands of non-Muslims left a vacuum in the social life of many Punjabi rural villages. Persons and rooted social hierarchies bore no relation to social and physical spatiality, and vice versa. New, unknown individuals owned – on paper just temporarily – evacuee homes, shops and fields. Thousands of well-trusted Prakash were no longer there to repair agricultural machinery or run local markets. So were their houses and workshops. Places and persons were at variance with well-established collective and individual ideas of physical and social distance.156 Newcomers and natives alike had to re-negotiate status, social proximity and distance. Both refugees and locals now found themselves in uncharted territory. Someone’s good character as well as his ability to do something both had to be demonstrated. The traditional and multilayered system of social organisation of time and space could be restored only when proofs of individual and family respectability were publicly exhibited. Rural labour markets had been always structured around the narrow and closed circuit of the village where the interplay of demand and supply together with the subsistence economy had flourished. The long-established and well-engrained image of villages as economic and social self-sufficient units was now at stake. In 1955 many departmental officers of the West Pakistan Government received a copy of The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report on their desks. While sipping their umpteenth tea of the day, they would have leafed through its chapters and finally seized upon the condition of the agricultural market and the magnitude and limitations of the cooperative movement. The discussions and the deliberations of the committee, established in 1951, had taken place in an atmosphere of tension. As the proceedings revealed, “in the meetings held, the Committee had to spend a lot of time in considering the various controversial issues with which

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it was faced”.157 The diplomatic jargon dropped shrewd readers a hint that the debate had been heated, someone had stormed out slamming the door or plotted his most cruel revenge. After all, Punjab’s fertile lands drove Pakistan’s economy, and were the repository of zamindars’ power and influence. In the early 1950s Punjab farming cooperative societies sprung up at impressive rates and registered an overall membership of 1,100,000, out of whom nearly 770,000 were refugees.158 Their members enjoyed the effective support of government authorities that put them on a “fast track” to funding and re-distribution of resources. The Punjab’s Minister of Revenue preferentially granted the allocation of the sought-after Crown lands and leases on tube-well sinking to small landholders and landless tenants who were members of cooperatives.159 For their part, these cooperative ventures frequently developed as a stimulus to the enhancement of local infrastructures or, in some cases, even taking the shape of a village within the village itself. In the lapse of time between January 1951 and April 1955, more than 6,000 houses, 70 adult education centres, 10 mosques and about 270 hand pumps were built in connection with this cooperative activity in rural Punjab.160 The economically strategic sectors of both the rice and cotton cultivation fell within the jurisdiction of the Cooperative Department, which ran 112 rice husking mills and 24 cotton plants across the province as a whole.161 The cooperative motto was simple and trenchant: “popularise Pakistan’s products”.162 From the early 1950s onwards, Pakistani Punjab witnessed a curious process of appropriation or, at times, proper ‘usurpation’ of symbols for marketing purposes. Oddly enough, the local advertising industry even found itself in the awkward position of chasing the success of foreign companies in terms of exploiting the economic potential of the P-word. In late 1952, with great fanfare Dalda Vanaspati advertised its Pakistani production in local newspapers.163 Similarly, the Multiple Industries Pakistan, Ltd., took great pride in its local supply of Double Kola, a “beverage of Switzerland bottled in Pakistan”.164 The road to hell was, however, paved with good retail intentions. Despite the formal dynamism of both cooperatives and private companies, the Punjabi economy kept grinding to halt. Heads of the households and their helpers who intended to purchase their goods in local markets were defenceless in the face of the weekly halving of their spending power. Inflation-adjusted wages had fallen since independence, and prices skyrocketed. One pound of sugar required half of an average middle-class daily wage. The cost of cloth for domestic manufacture rose by as much as 35% after 1953.165 Factories themselves operated below usual capacity. Controlled prices and ration cards attempted to make up for endemic shortages for, as the Heinz mission to Pakistan found out, “some commodities are simply not available at any price, other are available at what must be termed ‘black market’ prices”.166 The matter had been troubling not only Pakistani institutions but also many middle- and upper-middle-class women. Despite their heartfelt attempts to support the local economy, many of them confessed to local newspapers that the prohibitive prices of Pakistan-produced wares repeatedly dampened their enthusiasm. The high cost of production of many goods frequently resulted from a

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tortuous process of manufacturing. Locally based cooperatives first exported Punjab-grown cotton in order for it to be spun and then re-imported it as fine yarn. Local women could not help but detect a trace of puzzling irony in the whole process. “Why, they asked, shouldn’t we spin our fine yard here? No machinery, says the shopkeeper”.167 Still, in the many get-togethers they attended across town, “she had heard that certain industrialists whose names are household words are building enormous factories. What is in the factories, [then]?”168 A US officer proffered a solution to this headache. “There is [. . .] – he argued in the mid-1950s – “another cause of the growing poverty of the resources and the production in the country, when the right types of people are not encouraged at all, with the result that so many useful brains and bodies are simply wasted”.169 Apparently both Lyallpur and Sialkot districts confronted the rearrangement of the hierarchies and delicate balances that had traditionally imbued ideas of local prestige and power. The unwillingness of past and present zamindars to portion out and share their properties mirrored the close identification between their own lands and their prestige, honour and influence over local society.170 It is no surprise then that those groups of landowners who disclaimed their rights over their lands in Lyallpur and Sialkot in order to set up a joint-cooperative society with their tenants immediately hit the headlines. This news sounded so shocking that the local US representative asked his officers to double-check the information. “The assertion that ‘a number of landowners in Sialkot and Lyallpur have surrendered their proprietary rights [. . .] in favour of cooperatives set up by them’ has been checked and found to be true”, noted down the still sceptical functionary.171 Zamindars – the then Chief Minister, Punjab Malik Feroz Khan Noon confirmed in 1955 – had indeed started “selling out [their] lands because of the[ir] feeling that the days of landlordship were rapidly coming to an end”.172 In fact, the US attaché’s scepticism was by no means groundless. The cooperative movement, which gained momentum in the early and mid-1950s Punjab, adapted mainstream cooperative policies to suit the needs of local society. In the words of a 1955 Inquiry Committee Report, “the real cooperative principles were neither followed nor was it possible to do so in a time of emergency”.173 The more it changes, the more it is the same thing. Admittedly power relationships withstood any kind of substantial transformation during this period. Landowners – although frequently themselves only temporary allottees of evacuee land – kept their properties firmly in their hands and structured their partnership with their tenants and kammis along existing ‘traditional’ lines.174 When in 1954 the Government of Punjab vested in them the right to eject tenants, refugee allottees exposed through their behaviour the social patterns that had come to underpin their enterprises. As the umpteenth refugee writing to the Pakistan Times hiding his identity under a pseudonym condemned, “A crisis is impending in this Province because of the threatened mass ejectment of refugee tenants. Reliable statistics will show that refugee tenants constitute more than half the entire number of refugees. If such a huge body of refugees are ejected, it would mean an unprecedented crisis in the Punjab”.175 Correspondents of the Pakistan Times were by no means scaremongers. The hundreds of letters they addressed to

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the editors of Pakistani newspapers presented the wider public with reality. Rather theirs was an attempt to ‘humanise’ the war of figures that was being fought over by the Government and members of civil society. According to a survey drawn up by the Deputy Secretary, Rehabilitation (Land) A. G. Raza, land that – before Partition – had been owned and cultivated either by non-Muslims or owned by non-Muslims, and cultivated by Muslims, amounted to 3,064,652 and 2,269,818 acres respectively.176 Figures such as these suggested that landlords and tenants were playing for high stakes. Still, it was the Kisan Committee that made the first move on 1 December 1954. In a press note, Chaudri Mian Khan – the President of its Shahpur branch – declared that about 3,000 tenants had already been ejected from his district as a result of the newly introduced ordinance. This move on the part of the peasant movement was a very shrewd one. It created the context within which government statements were issued and, most importantly, assessed. Nothing was left to chance, not even the district that the Kisan Committee picked for its case study. In Shahpur, the concentration of refugees on land was not particularly high.177 Logic suggested that the measure had little significant impact on the life and balances of power of the area. So when, on 2 December, the Punjab Minister of Revenue revealed that, according to official data, about 15,000 tenants had been ejected from the provincial countryside, many in the province raised their eyebrows.178 No one was so naïve as to take the Kisan Committee’s data as gospel truth. Still, the discrepancy cast doubt on government honesty about the actual social fallout from their decision-making. All the same, the government authorities merely ratified a social attitude and a modus operandi that had manifested itself years before and had reached its zenith during the late August 1951. Then, 72 Muslims were charged with murder, attempted murder, arson and dacoity in connection with a communal flare-up in Matta, resulting in a death toll of 11 Christians.179 Apparently, the circumstances behind the riot were shrouded in mystery. On the spur of the moment, word got out that it “was due to the relation between a Christian boy with a Muslim girl”.180 Nevertheless, the ‘truth’ soon began to emerge. “The real cause of the trouble – declared Joshua Fazal Din, a prominent Christian member of the Muslim League – “was primarily economic [. . .]. The refugees find the locals stand between them and their dream of prosperity”.181 Indeed, the relationship between rural locals and refugees passed through troubled waters throughout the early and mid-1950s. The temporary ownership contracts covering evacuee properties had rent payment clauses that were based on the division of the crops. On paper, the system of taxation disproportionally favoured refugees. The provincial exchequer charged local individual allottees rents at a rate of six times the land revenue, twice what their refugee counterparts were asked to pay.182 The rationalisation plan of the Punjabi rural evacuee and government waste properties imposed a further strain on well-oiled social hierarchies. Before 1947, the cultivation of all temporary lessees’ lands had been farmed out to middlemen who, in turn, drew on the manual labour of local tenants. The redistribution of evacuee properties and the strengthening of cooperative societies that followed

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Partition led to a reorganisation of both working conditions and work relations. The provincial Cooperative Department encouraged newly founded refugee cooperative societies to enrol local tenants automatically as members: “it was not” – government officials noted – “[. . .] advisable to oust them and create new problems”.183 However, despite the good intentions, rifts between local tenants and refugee lessees and landlords did not take long to emerge. In refugee eyes, the fanfare that accompanied the founding of new cooperatives was in fact a stalking horse. Their accountants returned the verdict: fiscally speaking, cooperative societies represented a ‘legalised’ fraud. The government gave special tax treatment to all cooperatives. Tenants owed societies half their annual crop. In turn, societies had to pay one-third of the total produce into the provincial coffers, that is, two-thirds of their own share of the profits.184 Many refugee members claimed to be bowed down by the burden of excessive taxation. In their view, the crop reserve to be set aside for tax purposes was “unduly large”.185 What was even worse was that cooperative associates believed that their substantial ‘investments’ in the public good produced no appreciable, personal returns. “Whatever portion is [. . .] taken away from [. . .] [us] [. . .] ultimately [goes] either to Government or some outside agency”, their representatives maliciously commented during meetings with the Cooperative Inquiry Committee.186 The short- and medium-term agricultural credit of independent Pakistani Punjab largely depended on the ability of cooperatives’ banks to grant loans. Up to December 1953, the widespread network of Punjabi cooperative banks had already granted 87,633 loans for a total amount of Rs. 4,636 lakhs.187 They were small fiefdoms that sustained the local – vital – economy of patronage. Directors and their boards personalised loans to such an extent that local social and – quite frequently – even extended family power dynamics and balances were preserved.188 Nevertheless, the release of funds from the State Bank of Pakistan was usually subject to delay, and their distribution was inequitable.189 Furthermore, in 1955, it became known that the Government was determined to close all the cooperative societies operating in West Pakistan.190 This time there would be no room for negotiations. Earlier on, agriculturalists and traders had successfully lobbied local authorities and forced them to repeal a very similar provision.191 Still, “now that the emergency [. . .] [was] over,” – reasoned the members of Cooperative Inquiry Committee – “there [. . .] [did] not exist the same justification with which the central co-operative banks [had] started these activities”.192 The only concession that the authorities were willing to make was a three-year phased closure with an annual, progressive 30% reduction in bank activities.193 Refugees under these circumstances felt justified in resorting to civil disobedience. ‘All’s fair in war’ was their attack strategy. Many allottees incorrectly filled in their income tax returns by concealing the actual annual produce of their lands. Others more impudently came to a private, informal, agreement with acquiescent government officers.194 But these short-term arrangements failed to strike at the root of the problem. Wealth, the Punjabi adage goes, should not be shared either with the State or non-family members. This was particularly true if, as in

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the case of tenants, cooperative affiliates showed no loyalty to their immediate superiors.195 Migrants were also aware that, soon after the termination of all cooperative bank programmes, their one and only line of credit lay in the hands of Pathan money lenders, whose rates of interest were regarded as exorbitant, and the means through which they recovered money as “ruthless and unscrupulous”.196 Furthermore Pathan loan agreements contained ‘safeguard clauses’ that affected allottees and landlords’ properties. Loans were frequently advanced on the understanding that lenders could claim a pre-emption right on part of the annual harvest with charges that were lower than the market rates.197 Creating familyrun and staffed small ‘empires’ proved to be the most cost-effective way open to refugees seeking to take full control of their businesses, comfort and power. It cut the economic and social costs of state provisions that migrants saw as inequitable. Consequently refugee zamindars and allottees decided to start hiring their relatives, loyal friends and members of their extended families.198 Cooperative societies and landowners flouted tenancy agreements, and ejection notices dispossessed locals from both their lands and sources of income. Biraderi, the byword for power and authority, bred both resistance to, and the elaboration of, a new idea of social change. This situation set off a ripple of prudent relief among donor international organisations. In his 1958 report for the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Sir Herbert Steward warmly welcomed what, in the dry language of economics, was “the consolidation of holdings [. . .] carried out largely on voluntary basis”.199 Indeed, by employing family members and loyal acquaintances, refugees avoided – albeit, at times, just formally – the fragmentation of lands. The process of consolidation remained in its early stages, and official data were not available. Still, forecasts suggested that, in the two-year period between 1955 and 1957, around 334,550 acres of land had been saved from non-cost effective forms of management.200 The machine of the rural economy was back on track. If they wanted things to stay as they were, things had indeed to be changed. ***** This chapter has revealed the gradual steps taken by West Punjabi refugees towards the elaboration of their own civic responsibility and the negotiation of their personal and collective identity. Present-day terrestrial coordinates of the demographic concentration of this migrant community within the towns and villages of Pakistani Punjab are therefore the by-products of an historical stratification that progressively crystallised across the years. Ranging from temporary structures to homes, factories and agricultural co-operatives, this chapter has investigated the different facets of refugees’ acts of citizenship, their expectations of the new state, and their contested feelings of belonging to a wider community of local towns and villages. By revealing the apparent and perceived silence of the state, it has engaged with ideas of urban and rural belonging, community and citizenship as these were perceived and re-elaborated by Partition refugees in the process of establishing new lives for themselves and their families

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in Pakistan. Building on this understanding, the following chapter moves on to explore the potential of refugee family and blood ties in terms of the social capital that allowed them, often if not always, to get the better of the local bureaucracy in the years following Partition.

Notes 1 Talbot, Divided Cities, p. 179. See also P. Mountbatten, India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens during the Transfer of Power (London: Pavilion 2007); Symons, In the Margins of Independence. 2 1594/29, R-N-4, BRCMA. 3 ACC 1594/9, BRCMA. 4 Ibid., and 1940s/Pakistan/Services: Pakistan relief (photos), BRCMA. 5 B. Dilken and C. B. Lausten, The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp (London-New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 58. 6 H. Papanek, “Purdah in Pakistan: Seclusion and Modern Occupations for Women”, Journal of Marriage and Family, 33, 3 (1971), p. 518. 7 ACC 1594/9, BRCMA. 8 1940s/Pakistan/Services: Pakistan relief (photos), BRCMA. 9 Letter from UKHC to CRO, 13 October 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. 10 1594/9, R-N-4, BRCMA. 11 ACC 1594/9, BRCMA. 12 The Times (London), 26 August 1947. 13 1594/9, R-N-4, BRCMA. 14 Dilken and Lausten, The Culture of Exception, p. 18. 15 On this point, see C. Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 13. 16 Commercial Relations and Exports Departments – Board of Trade, Overseas Economic Surveys: Pakistan: Economic and Commercial Conditions in Pakistan (May 1950), 1951, pp. 58, 110. 17 A-17, 28 August 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 18 K. Singh, “Train to Pakistan”, in Memories of Madness: Stories of 1947 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002), p. 3. 19 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 20 Report from UKHC – POL 7730/48, 27 March 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 21 Ibid. 22 A-17, 28 August 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 23 Ibid. and Reuters – Indian and Pakistan services, 30 August 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 24 Talbot, Divided Cities, p. 179. 25 J. de Wit and E. Berner, “Progressive Patronage? Municipalities: NGOs, CBOs and the Limits to Slum Dwellers Empowerment”, Development and Change, 40, 5 (2009), pp. 927–47. 26 E. Isin, “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship”, in Acts of Citizenships, eds. E. I. Isin and G. M. Nielson (London-New York: Zed Books Ltd., 2008), pp. 38–9. 27 E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalisms (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 1. 28 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 29 Letter to Mr. Cootes, 9 June 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 30 Enclosure in Karachi Despatch No. 77, 22 November 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. 31 The Times (London), 26 August 1948. 32 A-18, 3 September 1948, NARA. 33 Ibid.

Camps, homes, towns and villages 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67 68

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1594/9, R-N-4, BRCMA. A-2, 8 October 1947, NND 765024, NARA. A-17, 28 August 1948, NND 765024, NARA. Political Alignments in the West Punjab – Confidential No. 25, 28 November 1948, NND 765024, NARA. On this point see P. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 53–78. 1594/9, R-N-4, BRCMA. West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 4 September 1947, UPL. West Punjab Gazette, 5 March 1948, UPL. C. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23. The Express Tribune (Lahore), 29 August 2010. Ibid. First appointed by the West and East Punjab authorities in late August 1947, the Custodian of the Evacuee Properties took over the ‘property of all abandoned properties and was tasked with their care and protection’. See Sind Observer (Karachi), 15 January 1949. West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 16 December 1947, UPL. Dawn (Karachi), 3 May 1948. IT to CRO – Opdom No. 27, 1–7 April 1948, DO 142/438, UKNA; Political Alignments in West Punjab – Confidential No. 25, 28 November 1948, NND 765024, NARA. Political Situation, West Punjab – July 1948, 2 August 1948, NND 765024, NARA. Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 11 January 1951. Squatters and Squatting – Extract from the Draft Report of the UN Housing Mission to Pakistan, 1957, NND 948832, NARA. On governmental action towards the elimination of refugee shantytowns see Punjab Assembly Debates, 5 May 1952, PCSL. The Express Tribune (Lahore), 29 August 2010. Conversation with the author, 8 February 2010. Interviewee’s name has been changed to maintain anonymity. Conversation with the author, 10 December 2010. On this point, see B. Verschaffel, “The Meaning of Domesticity”, The Journal of Architecture, 7, 3 (2010), pp. 288–90. Conversation with the author, 28 March 2013. Conversation with Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, Lahore, 1 November 2013. A. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 28 and 43; P. Chatterji, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 120. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 9 February 1955. On the allocation of rooms as a way to understand family dynamics in an extended household setting, see M. A. Mughal, “Times, Space and Social Change in Rural Pakistan: An Ethnographic Study of Jhokwala Village, Lodhran District” (Ph.D. diss. University of Durham, 2014), p. 182. Conversation with Dr Usman Khan and mother, Lahore, 22 November 2010. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 25 September 1947. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 10 December 1947. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 15 February 1955. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 11 May 1955. 1594/9, R-N-A, BRCMA. Ibid.

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69 M. Maskiell, “Social Change and Social Control: College Educated Punjabi Women, 1913–1960”, Modern Asian Studies, 19, 1 (1985), p. 63. 70 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 17 October 1954. 71 Dawn (Karachi), 26 December 1952; Jang (Lahore), 4 April 1957. 72 Mirror (Karachi), December 1955. 73 I. Hussain, “Kishti”, in A Chronicle of a Peacock, ed. I. Hussain (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002), pp. 88–9. 74 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 75 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 5 December 1954. 76 Pakistan Constituent Assembly (Legislature) Debates, 24 March 1953, PCSL. 77 M. Baqir, Lahore: Past and Present (Delhi: Low Prices Publications, 1984), pp. 261–2. 78 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 12 August 1950. 79 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 10 January 1955. 80 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 16 December 1954. 81 Recent Developments in Refugee Rehabilitation and Resettlement in the Punjab, 12 July 1951, NND 938750, NARA; Pakistan Times (Lahore), 6 August 1954. 82 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 5 December 1954. 83 Ibid. 84 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 25 November 1954. 85 Ibid. 86 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 3 February 1955. 87 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 31 January 1955. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 3 February 1955. 91 Ibid. 92 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 19 December 1954. 93 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 8 October 1954. 94 Pakistanis Pour into India by the Thousands, 6 April 1955, NND 938750, NARA. 95 See also Talbot, Divided Cities, p. 69. 96 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 14 November 1954. 97 Punjab Assembly Debates, 1 March 1953, PCSL. 98 Dawn (Karachi), 3 July 1949. 99 Immovable Property Legislation in Pakistan – Despatch No. 524, 16 February 1955, NND 938750, NARA. 100 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 20 August 1954. 101 The Times (London), 20 January 1948. 102 Refugees Claims Settlement Operations, A Review – Despatch No. 574, 7 January 1960, NND 948832, NARA; Extract from Report from Deputy UKHC – POL 10208/48, DO 142/440, UKNA. 103 Housing and City – Town and Country Planning, 4 October 1950, NND 948832, NARA; Letter from V. K. White, Chairman Easter United Company, Inc., 25 February 1952, NND 907969, NARA. 104 A-1, 4 January 1949, NND 765024, NARA. 105 M. Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 31–5. 106 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 29 October 1954. 107 Punjab Gazette, 22 August 1952, UPL and Squatter and Squatting – Extract from the Draft Report of the UN Housing Mission to Pakistan, 1957, NND 948832, NARA. 108 Air Rail, 11 September 1953, NND 907969, NARA; Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 26 January 1951. 109 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 7 October 1954. 110 S. Das, “The ‘Goondas’: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld through Police Records”, Economic and Political Weekly, 29, 4 (1994), p. 2878.

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111 Board of Trade – Commercial Relations and Export Department, Overseas – Economic Survey: Pakistan (London, 1955), p. 200. 112 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 7 October 1954. 113 A. Piliavsky, “Patronage and Community in a Society of Thieves”, Contribution to Indian Sociology, 49, 2 (2015), pp. 137–8. 114 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 7 October 1954. 115 A. Piliavsky, “A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53, 2 (2011), pp. 298, 303–4. 116 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 7 October 1954. 117 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 23 December 1954. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Post Report – Lahore, 18 September 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 122 Lieven, Pakistan, pp. 216–17. 123 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 8 October 1954. 124 A-29 – November in West Punjab, 6 December 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 125 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 23 November 1954. 126 Mines, Private Faces, Private Voices, pp. 34–5. 127 F. Oulzan, “The Urban Fringe of Lahore City: A Functional Study” (Ph.D. diss.: University of the Punjab, 1976). 128 Lieven, Pakistan, p. 274. 129 Punjab Gazette, 25 January 1952, UPL; Punjab Legislative Assembly Debates, 13 March 1952, PCSL. 130 Telegram No. 18, 28 April 1949, NND 765024, NARA. 131 Oulzan, “The Urban Fringe of Lahore City”, pp. 180–97. 132 Ibid., pp. 337–58. 133 1958–64 – Years of Progress, n.d., PCSL. 134 The Rehabilitation and Works Division, Five Years of Revolutionary Government, 1958–1963, n.d., PCSL. 135 Airmail to John C. Bell, Architect, FOA (Karachi), 11 September 1953, NND 907969, NARA. 136 Architectural Advisor, American Embassy (Karachi) to Fazal K. Khan, Deputy Secretary, Minister of Refugees and Rehabilitation, 19 January 1956, NND 897209, NARA. 137 Report of the Heinz Mission to Pakistan, n.d., NND 897209, NARA; The Economic Situation and Request for Aid, n.d., NND 897209, NARA. 138 Housing and City – Town and Country Planning, 4 October 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 139 ICA Action & File – The Need for Housing in Pakistan, 1995, NND 897806, NARA. 140 Economic Situation and Prospect of Pakistan – AS 69, Vol I, 2 September 1958, IBRD. 141 Punjab Gazette, 22 August 1952, UPL; Squatter and Squatting – Extract from the Draft Report of the UN Housing Mission to Pakistan, 1957, NND 948832, NARA. 142 Oulzan, “The Urban Fringe of Lahore City”, pp. 145–325. 143 Baqir, Lahore, p. 260. 144 Ayub’s Manifesto Undertakings, n.d., PCSL. 145 Baqir, Lahore, p. 249. 146 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 27 October 1960. 147 It is interesting to note here that, up to 1956, the names of the cooperative members who had fled from East Punjab were always followed by the caption ‘refugee’. See issues of the Pakistan Times (Lahore), 1952–56. 148 Talbot, Divided Cities, p. 122. 149 Squatters and Squatting – Extract from Draft Report of the UN Housing Mission to Pakistan, 1957, NND 948832, NARA.

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150 Dawn (Karachi), 22 January 1957. 151 D. Gilmartin, “Migration and Modernity: The State, the Punjabi Village and the Settling of the Canal Colonies”, in People on the Move, pp. 3–20; I. Talbot, “The Growth of the Muslim League in the Punjab, 1936–47”, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 10 (1982), pp. 5–24. 152 M. L. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (Lahore, 1920), p. 116. See also D. Abenante, La colonizzazione di Multan: Islam, potere, istituzioni nel Punjab sudoccidentale (Trieste: EUT, 2004), pp. 162–7. 153 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 22 November 1954. 154 Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report (Lahore, 1955), p. 14, MDRR. 155 Ibid., p. 15. 156 On this point, see Mughal, “Time, Space and Social Change in Rural Pakistan”, pp. 166–8. 157 Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report, p. 4, MDRR. 158 Cooperative Movement Spreading in Punjab – Despatch No. 215, 24 May 1952, NND 907969, NARA. 159 Punjab Assembly Debates, 1 December 1954; Pakistan Times (Lahore), 2 December 1954. 160 Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report, p. 26, MDRR; Economic Summary for week of June 24th-30th, 1955, 1 July 1955, NND 938750, NARA. 161 Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report, pp. 19–20, MDRR. 162 Board of Trade – Commercial Relations and Exports Department, Pakistan: Economic and Commercial Conditions in Pakistan (May 1950) (London, 1951), p. 88. 163 Dawn (Karachi), 26 December 1952. 164 Mirror, September 1959. 165 The Economic Situation and Pakistan Request for Aid, n.d., NND 897209, NARA. 166 Report of the Heinz Mission to Pakistan, n.d., NND 897209, NARA. 167 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 28 November 1954. 168 Ibid. 169 Agricultural Crisis in Pakistan, n.d. (mid-50s), NND 897806, NARA. 170 Z. Eglar, A Punjabi Village in Pakistan: Perspectives on Community, Land and Economy (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 59–65. 171 Cooperative Movement Spreading in Punjab – Despatch No. 215, 24 May 1952, NND 907969, NARA. 172 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 24 January 1955. 173 Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report, p. 20, MDRR. 174 Recent Developments in Refugee Rehabilitation and Resettlement in the Punjab, 12 July 1951, NND 938750, NARA. 175 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 6 December 1954. 176 A. G. Raza, Resettlement of Refugees on Land – A Review, DO 142/440, UKNA. 177 See p. 30. 178 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 3 December 1954. 179 Lahore Despatch No, 42, 21 December 1951, NND 842430, NARA; Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 14 December 1951. 180 Telegram No. 30, 24 August 1951, NND 842430, NARA. 181 Government’s Action Lessens Muslim-Christian Tensions over Matta Incident, 4 September 1951, NND 842430, NARA. 182 Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report, p. 25, MDRR.

Camps, homes, towns and villages 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200

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Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 40. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – Department of Operations (South Asia and Middle East), Agricultural Development in Pakistan, 2 September 1958, AS69 – Volume 2, Annex to Report No. AS-69a, WB. Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report, p. 39, MDRR. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid. Ibid., p. 73. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – Department of Operations (South Asia and Middle East), Agricultural Development in Pakistan, 2 September 1958, AS69 – Volume 2, Annex to Report No. AS-69a, WB. Memorandum of Conversation – Confidential, 18 August 1951, NND 842430, NARA; Government’s Action Lessens Muslim-Christian Tension over Matta Incident, 4 September 1951, NND 842430, NARA. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – Department of Operations (South Asia and Middle East), Agricultural Development in Pakistan, 2 September 1958, AS69 – Volume 2, Annex to Report No. AS-69a, WB. Ibid.

Bibliographical references Abenante, D. La colonizzazione di Multan: Islam, potere, istituzioni nel Punjab sudoccidentale. Trieste: EUT, 2004. Baqir, M. Lahore: Past and Present. Delhi: Low Prices Publications, 1984. Chatterji, P. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Darling, M. L. The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt. Lahore, 1920. Das, S. “The ‘Goondas’: Towards a Reconstruction of the Calcutta Underworld through Police Records”, Economic and Political Weekly, 29, 4 (1994), pp. 2877–9 and 2881–3. de Wit, J. and Berner, E. “Progressive Patronage? Municipalities: NGOs, CBOs and the Limits to Slum Dwellers Empowerment”, Development and Change, 40, 5 (2009), pp. 927–47. Dilken, B. and Lausten, C. B. The Culture of Exception: Sociology facing the Camp. London-New York: Routledge, 2005. Eglar, Z. A Punjabi Village in Pakistan: Perspectives on Community, Land and Economy. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gellner, E. Nations and Nationalisms. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Hussain, I. A Chronicle of a Peacock. New Delhi: Penguin, 2002. Isin, E. I. and Nielson, G. M., eds. Acts of Citizenships. London-New York: Zed Books Ltd., 2008.

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Lieven, A. Pakistan: A Hard Country. London: Allen Lane, 2011. Maskiell, M. “Social Change and Social Control: College Educated Punjabi Women, 1913–1960”, Modern Asian Studies, 19, 1 (1985), pp. 55–83. Mines, M. Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1994. Mountbatten, P. India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens during the Transfer of Power. London: Pavillon, 2007. Mughal, M. A. “Times, Space and Social Change in Rural Pakistan: An Ethnographic Study of Jhokwala Village, Lodhran District”. Ph.D. diss., University of Durham, 2014. Oulzan, F. “The Urban Fringe of Lahore City. A Functional Study”, Ph.D. diss., University of the Punjab, Lahore, 1976. Papanek, P. “Purdah in Pakistan: Seclusion and Modern Occupations for Women”, Journal of Marriage and Family, 33, 3 (1971), pp. 517–30. Piliavsky, A. “A Secret in the Oxford Sense: Thieves and the Rhetoric of Mystification in Western India”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53, 2 (2011), pp. 290–313. ———. “Patronage and Community in a Society of Thieves”, Contribution to Indian Sociology, 49, 2 (2015), pp. 187–211. Schmitt, S. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985. Singh, K., Hasan Manto, S. and Sahni, B. Memories of Madness: Stories of 1947. New Delhi: Penguin, 2002. Symons, R. In the Margins of Independence: A Relief Worker in India and Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Talbot, I. “The Growth of the Muslim League in the Punjab, 1936–47”, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, 10 (1982), pp. 5–24. Talbot, I. Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar: 1947–1957. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006. ——— and Thandi, S., eds. People on the Move: Punjabi Colonial and Postcolonial Migration. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Taylor, C. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Verschaffel, B. “The Meaning of Domesticity”, The Journal of Architecture, 7, 3 (2010), pp. 288–90. Vickery, A. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

3

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness and the resettling of Partition refugees in everyday Pakistani Punjab1

Lahore, Civil Secretariat courtyard, the mid-1950s. Sat on a warm doormat, a petition-writer filed an appeal for the umpteenth time. A refugee was standing in front of him with the hope of getting the better of the local bureaucracy and having a property allotted. A few miles ahead, another refugee, camped in a school, was drafting a letter. He would hide his identity under the pseudonym ‘Desperate’. Both refugees shared the same emotional condition. Institutional and political efforts notwithstanding, they felt that the state as embodied by its civil service was marginalising their experiences and needs. As explained in Chapter One, on paper, resettlement and rehabilitation plans stood out for their well-oiled mechanisms and apparently flawless rationale. Commentators such as Goodnow, Alavi, Kennedy and Waseem would argue that the sophistication of the Pakistani bureaucracy, its discretionary powers and pervasiveness resulted from its evident overwhelming and oppressive superiority in handling administrative headaches as compared with other politico-institutional institutions.2 In their view, national decision-making processes and power were firmly in the hands of state employees who effectively acted as a collective organisation for the common good.3 In 1950 the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan signed the Nehru-Liaquat Ali Khan Pact, in which they restated their commitment to give all those Partition refugees who returned home by December 1950 their former properties. This diplomatic deal, however, put Pakistani authorities in a difficult position, for the local bureaucracy was still unable to serve its existing citizens, let alone returnees. On paper, the Pakistan Civil Service had what it took to deal with the shock waves that the migration of millions of people sent through the local economy and administration.4 But, thus far, its attempts to re-assert state authority over a slippery reality had proved an uphill struggle rather than a series of emphatic victories. Indeed, a careful analysis of the everyday lives of millions of West Punjabi Partition refugees and the day-to-day administrative management of their emergency suggests that the Pakistani bureaucracy was not a monolithic and independent institution. Refugees reactively and proactively swayed officers in favour of a successful resolution of their administrative disputes. Bribes, the day-to-day nurturing of relationships of friendship with high-rank officials or politicians, and chains of

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mutual favours all belong to the performative repertoire of anecdotes that surrounded and underpinned administrative courses of action. Practices of both patronage and corruption were – Jeffrey would rightly point out – processes rather than events.5 This chapter accordingly investigates the difficulties – the processes – faced by West Punjabi civil servants as they grappled with the humanitarian crisis and the resettlement schemes in the years following Partition. It challenges standard images of the Pakistani bureaucracy as an organised political body, and argues that patronage dynamics were a key part of the institution-building machine that was operating in Pakistani Punjab by the mid-1950s.6 First, it critically explores the difficulties that the local bureaucracy encountered when tackling the postindependence humanitarian emergency. It then outlines how both citizens and the state exploited patronage as a morally accepted and socially sustainable tool in post-independent institution-building processes. Finally, it contextualises Pakistani definitions of ‘corruption’ by placing it within its ‘local’ environment, revealing how and to what extent the bureaucratic steel frame was imitated at grassroots level so that even marginal men could enjoy the ‘administrative support’ of ersatz patronage networks.

Overthrowing the king: challenging Pakistani bureaucracy’s strengths After independence, patterns of patronage and networks of authority within administrative departments and among the various branches of different provincial bureaucratic institutions had to be reconstructed and weighed up. As an attaché on the staff of the British High Commissioner observed, “the administration in rural areas [. . .] largely collapsed”.7 The absence of the state as embodied by its bureaucratic apparata was in some cases a matter of fact. Officers appointed to West Punjabi rural district subdivisions were frequently caught red-handed as they deserted their offices and disregarded their responsibilities towards their fellow citizens. “Most of the patwaris in the Province [of Punjab]” – the widely respected Muhammad Afzal Cheema informed the provincial Minister of Revenue in March 1954 – “do not reside at their respective headquarters in the rural areas and are not available to such members of the public who are desirous of seeing them”. 8 The ‘chief of the Cheemas’ was an influential member of the Provincial Assembly representing Lyallpur IX. Cheema’s constituency as well as the whole district was plagued by administrative chaos. His was a desperate attempt to open government eyes to the sorry state of the peripheral branches of the bureaucracy. Hafiz Bashir Ahmad was a local entrepreneur, and was part of Cheema’s circle of patronage. In December 1953, he applied for the allotment of a small evacuee factory in Jaranwala. The local Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner not only kept postponing his final decision indefinitely, but also did not carry out the orders of his most immediate superior: “The instructions [of the Rehabilitation Commissioner] are lying [. . .]” – an irritated Hafiz reported to the Pakistan Times in

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 81 1955 – “with the Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner, Lyallpur, but he has not moved an inch from his original position. [. . .] A subordinate officer has decided to ignore the order of his superior officers”.9 In Lyallpur, as elsewhere in Punjab, senior officials seemed unable to keep their subordinates on a sufficiently tight leash to coordinate their work and guide them in the intricate challenges of a state-in-the-making. Reports of junior appointees who “had gone astray” piled up on government desks.10 Previous smooth-running hierarchies and linkages had been almost completely torn apart: classmates, former superiors and juniors were no longer those figures on whom others were able to count at times of need.11 News coming from the local outposts frequently raised eyebrows in government circles: time and time again the authorities were “disappointed to receive unfavourable reports about certain divisional, regional and district officers”.12 Insubordination and lack of trust fuelled further uncertainty in a moment when all administrative officers adjusted to life in a new institutional and political set up. “I quite agree” – the then provincial Minister of Revenue comes to our aid – “it is very difficult for a man on the top as Minister [. . .] to [efficiently] deal with these details [conflicts among differently-ranked civil servants]”.13 The main resource of the Pakistan Civil Service – its workforce – showed indeed no commitment to effective collective action. Its employees’ errant and chaotic behaviour hampered the fostering of a sense of hierarchical connection to others, and of communal belonging to an institutional community. As a result, the geography of the bureaucratic power was patchy and uneven. In the rural areas of Attock, Mianwali, Jhang, Muzzaffargarh and Gujrat, the micromanagement of refugees’ lives brought further to light Civil Service’s inability to act communally and in organised fashion. Officers’ absenteeism and disrespect for their higher authorities had been posing enormous problems to the drafting of the assessment lists of all evacuee and common land plots. By early 1956, despite the repeated instructions sent out by the administrative headquarters in Lahore, no substantial improvement was recorded with respect to the estimates of the value and the planning of how to collect the rents of evacuee lands.14 “It has not been possible to ascertain as for how many harvests the demands have so far been created”,15 complained the Secretary Administration to the Rehabilitation Commissioner, West Pakistan. Local civil servants won out over any central bureaucrats’ attempts to get a grip on the local society and its institutions. “The instruction” – the West Pakistan Rehabilitation Commissioner almost implored district officers – “may also be brought to notice of the local officers”.16 The upper echelons of the local bureaucracy were by no means victims of the circumstances. The reputation of the institutions they were heading pivoted solely on them.17 The “Government regret [sic] to note” – the federal Minister of Interior pointed out in 1956 – “that senior officers have failed in their duty to [. . .] report [. . .] the conduct of officers who do not play the game. [The] Government expect [. . .] [sic] all superior officers to keep a watchful eye on the private and public conduct of their subordinates”.18 Central authorities had just rolled out a new scheme of administration that aimed at creating a sense of corporate responsibility

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through a substantial delegation of powers to divisional, regional and district officers. Devolution was, of course, offset by enhanced responsibilities and a demand for a U-turn over disciplinary actions. The “Government” – the note went on – “wish [sic] to emphasise that the transfer of a bad officer is no remedy. [. . .] In all cases of private and public misdemeanour, it is the duty of the superior officers to correct and guide their subordinates”.19 The lower bureaucratic echelons could have easily – and rightly so – held it against their higher-ranked colleagues that things went round and round. Producing order out the refugee crisis and the pressing demands of a state-in-the-making called first and foremost for the enactment of new sets of laws and regulations. The performance of low- and mid-ranked officials hinged on their superiors’ ability to carefully define the context within which all units were supposed to act.20 After independence, all the socio-political and economic entries in the dictionary of the administrative everyday tasks had indeed to be re-written with new meanings. Still, officials almost immediately abdicated their responsibility and control over the setting out of a sensible and consistent frame of reference for their subordinate staff. The pioneers of the West Punjabi bureaucracy “started off by passing a number of silly orders”.21 Furthermore, critical areas of administrative intervention were left under-regulated, if not unregulated at all. In early 1956, the Civil Service had not fully legally explored the intersections of family law with the legislation on evacuee properties.22 If available, lists were not only inconsistently compiled but also packed with mistakes. The non-regulation of corporeal hereditaments had indeed resulted in “duplicate, enhanced or otherwise unentitled [sic] allotment of evacuee properties” to the heirs of deceased refugees.23 The repercussions of this bureaucratic impasse reverberated around society. At the grassroots, fragmentariness and hierarchical conflicts transmuted into the inability of the local Civil Service to act as a force that aimed at stabilising the relationship between the state and its citizens. For all the thinness and simplicity of the ‘administrative literature’ on (and around) resettlement and rehabilitation,24 refugees as well as institutions frequently turned to judges to have bureaucratic acts dashed off and laws or ordinances proofread. Legal experts had to cyclically put forward new interpretative views that harmonised laws, balances of power and socio-institutional dynamics.25 “The true answer to the point depended on the meaning to be ascribed to the word ‘left’ and also the place of ‘residence’ occurring in the provision”,26 noted the honourable Mr Justice Ahmad as he opened one such hearing in 1961. Imdad Ali Malik was at loggerheads with the Settlement Commissioner (Policy), Lahore, over the allotment of an evacuee property in the city. The ordinance at issue was the 1958 Displaced Persons (Compensation and Rehabilitation) Act, which defined a ‘displaced person’ as any person who, on account of the setting up of the Dominions of Pakistan and India, or on account of civil disturbance in any area now forming part of or occupied by India, has, on or after the first day of March, 1947, left [. . .] his place of residence [. . .] and has subsequently become a citizen of Pakistan or is residing therein.27

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 83 An employee of the Government of India, Imdad had been transferred to Calcutta from his home village Arup near Gujranwala in 1945. His opting for Pakistan in early August 1947 entailed a further relocation and eventually the allotment of an evacuee house in Model Town, Lahore. In 1959, he exercised the right of preemption open to all displaced persons on their thus far temporarily allotted premises. When reviewing Imdad’s application, the local authorities noticed a couple of irregularities. Imdad’s West Punjabi roots challenged his legal status. He was, officials claimed, a Pakistani non-displaced person by birth. The court ruled in favour of the conviction of the petitioner, and the order of allotment was countermanded. Most importantly, the verdict institutionally sanctioned the civil service’s inability to clearly set out the terms according to which citizens as well as its own staff were supposed to act.28 Imdad was apparently suffering from an administrative personality disorder. Under the existing bureaucratic legal framework, he was a refugee as “being previously domiciled in India, [. . .] [and having] taken refuge in Pakistan from any part of India by reason of the disturbances arising out of the setting up of the Dominions of India and Pakistan”.29 Yet, as the Honourable Justice Ahmad pointed out, Imdad could not be considered a ‘displaced’ person. The limitations of the resettlement and bureaucratic practices as they stood by the late 1950s were rising inexorably to the surface. Government departments issued countless correction slips to amend – at times even just issued – ordinances, orders and acts. Their oft-repeated opening lines ‘substitute the following for the existing clause’ and ‘add the following clause’ echoed officers’ behind-closeddoors babbling over the management of the refugee emergency. The offices of the Pakistan Civil Service were in a state of chaos. In 1959 the Punjab Co-operative Bank Ltd. took legal steps to assert its proprietary right over its joint-stock company.30 As its head office in Amritsar and its West Punjabi branches were mostly closed, the Custodian of Evacuee Property had declared it an evacuee property in late December 1947. The sudden 1949 right-about turn on the status of joint-stock companies further unravelled the Co-operative Bank’s legal status. Once again, the nature of the problem pertained to the lexicon of the resettlement and rehabilitation practices and the strictly related bureaucratic shortfall in authoritativeness. On one view, properties, which had already become evacuee [. . .], continued to be evacuee under the doctrine of transaction past and close. On the other view – the judge summed up in his abstract – the definitions being declaratory in nature, properties [. . .] could not continue to be evacuee, for this would render the new definitions nugatory to some extent.31 The Cooperative Bank’s administrative headache was the umpteenth curious case of a bureaucratic definition that did not adequately describe the nature of the reality that it was supposed to regulate efficiently. The Resettlement and Rehabilitation Department had indeed proved unable to exercise its own exclusive right to make consistent, timely decisions over those of its citizens in the interest of an organised, collective operation.32 After independence, the banking sector grappled with the lack of trained and well-prepared clerks.33 The Punjab Co-operative

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Bank did not opt for the closing of its Pakistani branches. But like many other employers, it was in no position to take on fresh manpower and give its affiliates a new start in business. Laws, ordinances, memoranda and internal circular letters simply failed to keep pace with the diverse fallouts and implications of the Partition events. As the Cooperative Bank vs. CEP lawsuit exposed, rehabilitation authorities frequently got into difficulties while exercising their own exclusive right to make consistent, timely decisions over those of citizens in the interest of an organised resettlement. The ex-post regulation of the fallouts of the refugee emergency used to be a daily occurrence, if not a common practice. Even before its approval, there had been uproar over the government act that vested refugees with the right to eject tenants from their allotted evacuee properties. Both tenants and (provincial) landlords expected officials to have meticulously planned the transition and taken the necessary bureaucratic countermeasures. They hoped against hope. Complete confusion reigned in all administrative offices. Such was the chaos that the Rehabilitation Commissioner had to “order that [the] status quo should [have] be[en] retained till the end of June 1956, so far as the question of [the] ejectment of tenants of evacuee lands is concerned”.34 Terms, conditions and guidelines were frequently amended almost overnight. “Some landlords under the Rehabilitation Scheme” – warned a 1956 memorandum by finally absorbing the above-mentioned 1955 act – “may have instituted regular suits for the ejection of their tenants under the Provincial Tenancy Laws”.35 Those regular suits could be used as scrap paper as their effectiveness was now subject to the approval of different, new authority. “The Rehabilitation Commissioner [. . .] has been pleased to order that” – the memorandum went on – “all such suits and plants should be returned to the landlords’ allottees and tenants concerned, along with the relevant documents [. . .] for presentation before the Rehabilitation Authority concerned”.36 New forms – usually released several months apart – invalidated automatically, and retrospectively, earlier ones. Any attempt on the part of the bureaucracy to fight citizens’ resistance to comply with regulations through legal deterrence was then doomed to fail.37 The reaction times of government departments always seemed to lag far behind the expected – desirable – schedule. Following the promulgation of the 1954 Registration of Claims (Displaced Persons) Ordinance, claimants for urban agricultural properties were asked to fill in fresh documents, as formerly-submitted application sheets were now no longer valid.38 Yet, as a refugee from Sialkot complained in his letter to the Pakistan Times, “the details of this slow and lengthy process [. . .] are so far a sealed box, so far as the refugees are concerned”.39 Indeed, the West Pakistan Director of the Public Relations would only divulge the new bureaucratic requirements two years later in early February 1956.40 And in 1958, it all had to be done all over again when the drive to pick up vitiated applications, and then the promulgation of a martial law order once again instructed refugees to re-submit all their claim forms.41 At the bottom of their notices, resettlement as well as public relations authorities seemed to be signing an almost unconditional surrender. Delays and misleading, or easy-to-bypass, guidelines charted

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 85 the administrative inability to alter citizens’ social environment, factual knowledge and, therefore, behaviour.42 The Pakistani bureaucracy’s ability to secure compliance during this period was neither functional nor generalised.43 In Lahore, on 1 July 1954, ‘One Concerned’ raised his voice against a notification issued by the Punjab Industries Rehabilitation authorities. Set procedures granted the allotment of industrial properties only to those applicants who could show documentary proof of their evacuee premises left behind in India. Yet, what if “the properties of a migrant from East Punjab was burnt and demolished altogether?”, countered ‘One Concerned’.44 Oddly enough, even the procedures for the temporary allotment of houses, industrial premises and shops themselves were only formally finalised in early March 1949, that is once most of the properties concerned had already been occupied or allocated.45 Conformity to regulations, ‘One Concerned’ and the refugee from Sialkot both suggested, resulted more often than not from hearsay on rehabilitation and rehabilitation practices. Ultra vires decisions and the excessive use of powers were the order of the day in almost all the departments that dealt with refugee resettlement. Power is, Martin claims, a relational attribute that establishes clear-cut hierarchical statuses.46 In post-independent Punjab, the frantic activity of the local bureaucracy was mired in anarchy. Any plan to shake up administrative cadres after their initial fragmentariness and disorganisation was a no mean task.47 In 1956, the honourable Justices Kayani and Ali tripped up the Lahore Rehabilitation Commissioner on the question of the separation of powers.48 The rehabilitation authorities encroached on the judiciary’s territory by breaching a law that gave them only limited powers of review of deeds and ordinances. Writ petitions and review applications, the Court pointed now out, differed substantially from each other, and the administration of justice was up to judges. A couple of years later, in the light of the promulgation of a new act, the Custodian felt the need to further clarify the responsibilities that fell within the scope of his institutional remit. As he adjudicated in the case between Ghulam & Co. and the Urban Secretary Rehabilitation Commissioner, the Custodian asserted his sole right to partition evacuee and non-evacuee jointly-owned properties and businesses.49 Then in 1959, it was the rehabilitation authorities’ turn to take their revenge when their strained the institutional relationship with the Custodian surfaced once again during a hearing of appeal chaired by Shabir Ahmad and Masud Ahmad.50 The power to pass an order of allotment belonged to the officers of the Rehabilitation Department as of right, ruled the two judges as they quickly dismissed a case that found the Custodian guilty of acting beyond his powers. Institutional overlaps and clumsy missteps laid bare the administrative powerlessness when confronted with citizens’ needs. The day-to-day organisation of refugee-related policies slipped quite frequently through civil servants’ fingers, placing the bureaucracy’s intrinsic weaknesses on public view. Endless lists of civil suits and cases further engulfed the administrative machinery of the offices of the deputy commissioners of the evacuee properties. In spite of the border with India being sealed, evacuees who had left for East Punjab were summoned to

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appear in front of local administrative courts to claim their rights over movable and immovable properties. The number of cases was so high as to push officials first to timetable and then to serve the writs for hearings on only a week’s notice.51 Mian Mumtaz Muhammad Khan Daultana – the then Chief Minister of Pakistani Punjab – revealed the extent of the collective bureaucratic headache when introducing the annual 1953–4 budget to the Punjab Assembly. Figures were staggering. A total of 1,100,000 claims had to be evaluated and 160,939 objections checked.52 It should be noted, however, that in post-independence Pakistan, mathematics was not an exact science. In 1951, officials of the Revenue Department – by then partially in charge of resettlement practices – proudly announced that the early screening of the 1,100,000 applications for West Punjabi Hindu and Sikh evacuee properties had been successfully completed.53 A couple of years later, no less a person than the Chief Minister would candidly deny these figures by admitting that the settled claims were instead 722,803.54 The final report of the Claims Organisation balanced the accounts. Established by the 1955 Registration of Claims (Displaced Persons) Act, the Claims Organisation was tasked with verifying both the measurement and the street value of refugees’ immovable urban properties left behind in India. By May 1961, it would apparently be dealing with about 386,000 files.55 This was more or less the same number of claims that squared the accounts of both the Revenue Department and the Chief Minister. According to Daultana, Pakistani civil servants were tasked with closing them by December 1952. In reality, they would only polish off the job some nine years later. The screening of refugees’ claims, however, proved to be only the first bureaucratic step in the whole process of allotment of the evacuee properties. In the early 1950s, the meticulous work of comparison between the original revenue records and refugee declarations remained at its planning stage.56 India’s sending of Hindi-written records combined with the lack of a proper legal and bureaucratic framework gave officials and clerks on the Pakistani side of the border a watertight excuse.57 In 1957, the Pakistan (Administration of Evacuee Properties) Act finally broke the deadlock by first acknowledging the urgency of the matter and then providing the necessary tools to speed up the whole process.58 No matter how detailed the guidelines were, refugees did not simply tick the boxes. As a consequence, their problems frequently dragged on for years. The allocation of evacuee lands to claimants who held long-time possession contracts and paid a bai shera malikana rent remained a bureaucratically outstanding controversy up to the early months of 1956.59 It was only in February that year that the provincial rehabilitation commissioner lent his helping hand to local officers by providing them with clearer administrative instructions. Likewise, the wait took forever for refugee tuberculosis patients, invalids, orphans and old people. Their social position was not given state recognition until 1953, and their legal status finalised a couple of years later.60 For their part, it took until 1960 for the West Punjabi families of 50 government officials who had either been killed or permanently injured during the 1947–8 communal upheavals to receive their compensation.61 Commissioners’ mismanagement of refugees’ everyday needs revealed the levels of disorganisation as the administration made efforts to achieve a collective

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 87 goal.62 It was then hardly surprising that in the years following Partition refugees in West Punjab turned to alternative ways when it came to getting the better of the local bureaucracy. The Pakistani bureaucracy had completely lost touch with the grass roots of its very own organisation. The malleability and the adaptability of the rules and the forces that stimulated and underpinned everyday life in local Punjabi society were ready to take up the challenge and compete with ‘official’ institution-building processes.

Powerful friends, influential acquaintances: conceptualising Pakistani bureaucracy Refugees frequently felt misunderstood in terms of their needs and aspirations, as well as their personal experiences. Hence, migrants often resorted to hunger strikes, sit-ins and demands for judicial inquiries in order to channel their dissatisfaction and to keep their hardships in the spotlight. In 1950, in the Mianwali district, some of them grouped together and threatened to take to the street in protest against recurrent delays in the implementation of local resettlement schemes.63 In 1954, the All-Pakistan Muhajir Board solicited the judiciary to probe into many malpractices that were recorded within the Rehabilitation Department.64 Government authorities were accused of backtracking on their earlier promises. The road to the refugees’ bureaucratic hell was paved with a huge number of institutional good intentions. A draft ordinance, for instance, that aimed at establishing special tribunals and entrusting them with the task of delving into civil servants’ corruption had been put on the back burner as early as 1948.65 Likewise, no trace remained of those appeals and orders that had called on the Pakistani administration to handle the refugee emergency with care. Phantom parliamentary commissions of enquiry met to discuss civil servants’ mismanagement of resettlement plans and eventual related disciplinary actions.66 A sense of frustration, which combined powerlessness with loneliness, literally poured into and out from the pages of local newspapers. In 1954 an anxious Syed Ikhitiar [sic] Abbas Naqvi put pen to paper to denounce his hardships for the benefit of the readers of the Pakistan Times. “I and my family are living on the streets and do not know how we shall linger in this miserable state. Our luggage and clothes are lying sealed in a room of the house from which we have been ejected”,67 he glossed at the end of his letter to the editor. Syed’s cousin – head of the household and initial allottee of these premises – had been granted some agricultural land in distant Multan. But while his cousin moved to southern Punjab, Syed with some other members of his family opted to remain in Lahore. When the notice of ejectment was issued, the latter immediately found themselves trapped in the maze of the Pakistani bureaucracy. Their attempts to address rehabilitation officers fell on deaf ears. The newly appointed allottees had already taken possession of the house, and the dusty streets of Lahore remained the only shelter available to Syed’s family. What further complicated Syed’s frustration was that the premises had apparently been allotted to an employee of the Rehabilitation Department well before

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the hearing of the appeal in front of the District Commissioner. Syed hinted cryptically what other refugees denounced overtly. “I am one of those thousands of refugees who on arrival in Pakistan did not occupy any house illegally and have from time to time applied to the rehabilitation authorities, but due to the lack of influence, still remain without any permanent shelter”,68 ‘Another Affected’ made it clear a few months later. His documentary evidence notwithstanding, the rehabilitation authorities had repeatedly rejected his application for the allotment of an evacuee property in the city. Importantly, Syed and ‘Another Affected’ were refugees who could not brag about helpful acquaintances within the administrative and bureaucratic circles. Like many other migrants, they found themselves having to re-map the chart of their personal relationships and, thus, their social accountability and role within society more widely. As institutions panicked and proved unable to assert their authority, the allocation of resources started to live up to very peculiar expectations. The then West Punjab Rehabilitation Commissioner and Secretary to Government captured this on paper in early March 1949. “[The West Punjab] Government consider[s] that the absence of adequate staff of the proper calibre and the lack of clear cut instructions in regard to [the] policy [of allotment of properties and lands] are largely responsible for this state of affairs”, he recorded while introducing his remarks on rehabilitation practices and policies.69 Personal identity and links with influential individuals topped the list of the selective criteria that administrators and resource holders usually applied in order to redistribute available assets.70 In its formative process of reformulation within an independent state, the Pakistani bureaucracy was itself shaped around personal and informal systems of resource allocation. As the adjudication on the Khadim Mohy ud-Din v. Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner case made it clear, the resettlement of refugees had to be subordinated to “personal qualities” (emphasis added) and not objective, impersonal criteria.71 Trust, reliability and reputation – ideas and attitudes to be found at very heart of many public and private transactions – all had to be reframed and regained after the dislocation generated by Partition. Hence, the institutional and the social tangle mirrored and nourished each other. Where connections between friends, relatives and influential persons – the fabric of so-called social capital – were quickly and successfully restored, gaining access to resources and services turned out to be more straightforward and easier.72 Refugees and employees fought tooth and nail to defend the socio-bureaucratic power that they had to re-negotiate on a daily basis. The reform of the Punjabi Department of Resettlement and Rehabilitation in 1955 handed its officers on a silver plate the chance to reveal and defend the constituent guidelines framing the course of action taken by members of the local bureaucracy. As early as December 1954, civil servants treated the future transfer of jurisdiction of many resettlement policies from the Rehabilitation to the Revenue Department with scepticism, if not an undercurrent of anger. One “X.Y.Z.” from Lahore was one of them. Despite his pseudonym, divining X.Y.Z.’s job was not too difficult. His December 1954 letter to the editor of the Pakistan Times showed a mastery of the workings of government departments that only an insider could possess. The

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 89 announced rationalisation of the department that specifically focused on the refugee crisis would entail both the transfer and the lay-off of many members of staff. “This will cause” – X.Y.Z. predicted – “[. . .] a headache to the Government”.73 A word that X.Y.Z. obsessively repeated in his complaint, “retrenchment”, was, for him, the root of all evil. Officials risked failing to comply with the tacit clause that their contracts implied. In 1949, Rehabilitation Department directives had made it clear that values of friendship and guidance had to guide the activities of its employees.74 Dangers of a socio-bureaucratic paralysis thus lurked beneath the surface of a reform move that, on paper, did not look particularly dangerous. Patronage connections represented a form of historical knowledge that civil servants, refugees and locals took many years to regain. They relied on carefully negotiated, time consuming attempts at defining people’s sense of belonging to a community and wider society.75 X.Y.Z., however, knew how to work out the problem. “It is requested that” – he suggested – “if some of the retrenchment cannot be avoided, the retrenched persons should be absorbed in the new office of the Claim Commissioner which is going to set up very soon”.76 His was a brilliant stroke of genius. Re-employing redundant rehabilitation officers within the claim commissionerships in effect meant assigning them the very same task as before. Citizens and office holders’ ‘friendships’ and power would remain undamaged. The chance to make use of patronage and influence, especially when public resources were relatively close at hand, was arguably the privilege of the province’s elite. “There was a [refugee] friend of mine who had not had a house the last five years. [. . .] I had his case examined by the Department and I found that he deserved accommodation”,77 nonchalantly admitted the Punjab Minister of Revenue, Muzaffar Ali Khan Qizilbash, during a session of the Provincial Assembly. Shaikh Sadiq Hassan – a Punjabi member of the Constituent Assembly – likewise owned up to having submitted a couple of property claims to the Rehabilitation Department on behalf of his friends.78 In contrast, however, having been handed to lower-ranking officials without any ‘greasing [of] their palm’, the applications of Sadiq’s friends were rebuffed.79 In the capacity as ‘engines’ driving the everyday dimension of human relations, the dynamics of personal connections were exploited to plug gaps and shortfalls in the local bureaucracy. Highly placed individuals as well as members of the provincial and federal governments slipped their wish lists to equally high-ranking officials who, in turn, referred these requests to subordinate employees.80 Protection, political accommodation and a friendly hand in case of future need were the implied trading currency.81 Elections and their related campaigns became the marketplace where power was negotiated. Indeed, on the eve of polls, civil servants’ declarations of support for their preferred candidates reportedly reverberated around the halls of many Punjabi public offices.82 Once patronage deals were struck, the interested parties took all necessary steps to get the exchange of favours off the ground. “If a poor refugee sa[id], ‘I am not prepared to vote for you [such and such politician]’, then up c[ame] the Rehabilitation Inspector with a big notice that under rule so and so, please vacate your house within 7 days”.83 But this heavy trading on the patronage market did not imply any direct or blatant payment

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of bribes. The status of the individuals involved and the privileges connected with them instead acted as a reliable guarantee of future rewards or help.84 Seemingly, any traces of politicians’ ‘charitable’ intercessions were always removed from local administrative records. Muzaffar and Sadiq’s confessions made no waves. There was no general outcry from the press as well. Framing bureaucratic procedures as chains of politico-administrative favours made it very difficult for anyone to substantiate charges of corruption. “An officer [. . .] [was] presumed to be guilty” – the Civil Services Prevention of Corruption Rule, 1953 pointed out – if (1) he ha[d] a general and persistent reputation of being corrupt and (2) if he or any family of his dependants or any person through him or on his behalf [was] in possession of properties which he [could not] satisfactory account; or pecuniary resources for which he [could not] sufficient explanation or he [had] assumed a style of living [. . .] above his means.85 A cash transaction constituted the only offence that was legally ascribable to corruption charges. The 1957 Representation of the People Act and a couple of internal memoranda further governed civil servants’ work and conduct during elections. Officers were warned in them against canvassing, interfering, misusing their influence or taking part as candidates in any electoral competition.86 On the other hand, no paragraph or clause specifically censured the exchange of favours as unlawful. The language of mutual indebtedness had clearly become a legally acceptable idiom in which the state and its citizens could negotiate the outcome of bureaucratic headaches. The expression ‘as I lack influence’ flagged both the social marginalisation of refugees and their strong feeling of being neglected. Unofficial estimates suggested that the number of migrants who could neither count on nor brag about influential acquaintances amounted to about three million.87 Theirs felt like a life full of suffering, both moral and physical. At the grassroots level, the provincial bureaucracy and, therefore, the state in its local guise frequently came across as structurally violent. Their day-to-day management of administrative practices did not provide many thousands of citizens with access to resources that, technically speaking, belonged to them by right. It formally sealed the inability of refugees to aspire to what many other fellow citizens seemed to access with ease.88 “Through the courtesy of your esteemed columns may we draw the attention of the high-handedness of an officer of the Rehabilitation Department?”, implored three ‘Sufferers’ from Lahore in early January 1955.89 The pen name with which these refugees signed off their letter to the editor was explanatorily eloquent. These particular ‘Sufferers’ had just been evicted from their one-room homes in a building in the Lahore suburb of Krishnan Nagar. Properties formerly allotted to them now belonged to a man who, reportedly, was the father of a Deputy Rehabilitation Officer, and was already in possession of five rooms in the very same building. “This Deputy Rehabilitation Officer recently managed” – ‘Sufferers’ went on – “to get himself appointed in Lahore. Immediately after his

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 91 arrival here, he started taking steps to eject three families”.90 But eviction was not really the main cause of their pain. Their joint hardship resulted much more from the indifferent arbitrariness and carelessness of the process.91 “There is no justification for disturbing us now labelling us as ‘unauthorised occupants’”, revealed these three families by opening their hearts to thousands of unknown readers.92 Common people vulgarised their intense sentiment of marginality by talking about ‘have gots’ and ‘have nots’.93 “A real genuine and respectable family of refugees has been leading a miserable life for the last seven years”, complained one Muhammad Rafique from Lahore with regard to this distinction.94 He and his family had left for West Punjab from Amritsar, where they had run a jewellery shop. Their resettlement in Pakistan meant the beginning of daily pilgrimages to the offices of the Rehabilitation Department in order to secure the allotment of a commercial activity. As he did not move in the fashionable circles of the local administration, Muhammad’s efforts were doomed to be wasted. Even civil servants themselves could face an unexpected shortfall in effective networks of patronage relationships. Despite a number of provisions intended to introduce an administrative fast-track system, the process of allocating an evacuee property remained an uphill struggle for many former Indian Civil Service employees.95 One particular correspondent ‘Muhajir’ exposed in a letter to the editor of the Pakistan Times the vicissitudes involved in being a government employee in a desperate need for a house. As his posting in Lahore came through, ‘Muhajir’ had to find and pay for accommodation amidst the housing shortages and skyrocketing rents of the mid-1950s. His letter went straight to the heart of the matter. “How does the Government propose to repay his [refugee’s] loyalty and sufferings”,96 he asked. The hardships he had undergone surely demanded some kind of compensation. Yet the replies of the Pakistani state kept falling far short his as well as other refugees’ expectations. Living on the fringe of the society, Muhammad and ‘Muhajir’ had little option but to rely on those people, or connections, who promised to open the door to the offices of the Rehabilitation Department.

Ersatz bureaucracy for people on the brink of marginality Muhammad and ‘Muhajir’ no doubt passed one another in the streets surrounding the Punjab Civil Secretariat in Lahore. It was precisely along these urban byways that the marginality resulting from the combination of intrinsic bureaucratic weaknesses and elitist dimensions of the institutionalisation of the everyday surfaced and became a byword for bribery and corruption. Refugee attempts at making the leap from a position of marginality to entering the upper circles of ‘administrative society’ appeared to be a total failure. ‘I would [. . .] request the postal authorities to expedite the verification of my saving bank account so that [the] early payment of the amount can be made to me. It is needless to add that being old and poor I am desperately in need of money’,97 implored Imam-ud-Din writing from the Lahore suburb of Qila Gujjar Singh.

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A retired teacher from Amritsar, he had been tilting at the windmills of the post offices to have his own money transferred from India. I – the aforesaid Muhammad Rafique from Lahore [continued in his letter] – respectfully request the Minister of for Rehabilitation to consider my case, [. . .] provide my unfortunate family with some means of supporting. I am confident that the Minister for Rehabilitation will give his most sympathetic consideration to my case.98 But Muhammad’s trust was about to be betrayed. His heartfelt plea together with thousands of other appeals to local ministers and highly placed officials often went unheard. Under these circumstances, refugees had no choice but to pin their hopes on petition-writers and the army of middlemen located in the courtyard of the provincial Civil Secretariat. In July 1954 a well-placed observer leaked to the Pakistan Times some interesting though not particularly exclusive information.99 In some cases, former low-rank officers charged with corruption, petition writers served as a bridge between clerks in the Rehabilitation Department and those whom the collective imagination labelled as ‘touts’ or, more evocatively, rassangirs (lit., cattle thieves). The role of latter highlighted the absolute need for and relevance of a reliable network of influential acquaintances in the multi-layered processes of allocation of resources. They would approach refugees and introduce themselves as someone who ‘really mattered’ and made things happen for their followers.100 Theirs was not influence peddling. Touts were indeed “regular employees” of influential low and middle-ranked officials and powerful families, who respectively extended them protection and, most importantly, a network of reliable contacts within the relative administrative departments.101 These intermediaries interceded first with petition writers and then with clerks either in the local rehabilitation office or records room. Refugees, thanks to their intercession, were eventually issued with documents where scribbles such as ‘forwarded to the A[dditional].D[eputy].C[ommisioner]’ or ‘please consider it favourably’ were far from empty words. Petition writers’ notes pinpointed the identity of refugees’ referees within the Rehabilitation Department, and identified the bureaucratic framework within which their cases would be negotiated.102 Theirs was a Cadmean victory, however.103 References to corporate identities distanced records (and therefore refugees) from any identifiable functionary.104 Still, ‘have-not’ migrants possessed the sense of enjoying the sweet smell of the bureaucratic success. Annotations on documents kicked off – at least on paper – the formal negotiations between them and the Rehabilitation Department. The backstage behaviour of a minority over time turned into the public representation of the everyday life of hundreds of thousands of persons, with entry tickets coming in the shape of bribes to officials and agents.105 Parliamentary debates present a quite vivid perspective on the workings of this informal, ersatz institution that operated in the front courtyard of the Civil Secretariat in Lahore. In their speeches, members of both provincial and federal assemblies drew their inspiration from the thousands of stories they heard from citizens during their daily

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 93 interactions. In late September 1953, Syed Hassan Mahmood – the then Chief Minister of Bahawalpur and a member of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly – gave voice to his constituents and their daily struggles with the Pakistan Civil Service. “It is said and commonly said” – he reported to his fellow member of the federal assembly – “these days that officers and employees of Government have a reached a stage when they now say: ‘Hum tankwahain laite hain daftaron main ane ke lyie aur kam karne ke lyie ham paisay laite hain’” (We draw the salary for coming to the office and we charge entire service for doing the work).106 Bribes became the ‘gratification’ due to officers in order to speed up bureaucratic decision-making.107 One A. M. was a low-ranked official at a Deputy Rehabilitation Commissionership in central Punjab.108 In late November 1954, the Anti-Corruption Department had him arrested on the charge of “accepting Rs.50 as illegal gratification”.109 The accused, according to the crime news report, had allegedly “accepted the money for favourable consideration of an application of allotment”.110 This was by no means an isolated event. The whole system was so arranged as to generate its own peculiar economies of scale. In the mid-1950s, at the provincial level, it employed 1,383 gazetted and non-gazetted officers within the bureaucratic cadres of provincial government as well as thousands more people within the informal sector.111 The high standard of living enjoyed by civil servants was visible for the all world to see. Mailboxes in the heads of office were packed with citizens’ complaints about officers being caught red-handed living far beyond their Rs. 600/monthly incomes. Many employees of the local civil service were known to indulge in the guilty as well religiously controversial pleasure of alcoholic drinks. And, as internal memoranda made it clear, “if a Government servant is addicted to drinking [. . .] it has to be assumed that the officer is corrupt since, in these expensive days, addiction to wine is impossible within the salaries of Government servants unless they have princely private incomes”.112 Other civil servants could be seen roaming through provincial streets in their brand new and very expensive cars.113 This public display of newly acquired wealth gave them stature among fellow citizens as well as their colleagues. Government departments became the stage for officers’ shows of affluence. “The Government has received reports that a number of civil officers have adopted a high standard of living. [. . .] There exists in officers a tendency to compete with each other in solid life [. . .]. In some cases” – senior officers expressed concern at a situation that had apparently spiralled out of control – “these circumstances provide a major incentive to corrupt practices”.114 Nevertheless, refugees appeared to consider this peculiar administrative economy as part and parcel of ordinary life and their relationship with local-level bureaucrats. They indeed quickly spotted these administrative loopholes, and cunningly used them to their advantage. In 1954, the provincial Ministry of Revenue began – albeit just partially – taking charge of the rehabilitation and resettlement of refugees. Muzaffar Ali Khan Qilzilbash was the political leader of the helm of the Treasury. At various times during the term of office of the 1951–1954 legislature, he had also been taking the portfolios of Minister of Rehabilitation and Refugees, Colonies, and of Development Coordination. Everything Qizilabash said was then

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rooted in first-hand experience. His early March speech at the Punjab Assembly provided important insights into the bribe market and the socio-economic dynamics that allowed it to survive and flourish. “There is” – he declared – “a refugee, he comes along, he has got some money and he tempts the lower staff. Somebody wants to improve his position and this vicious circle continues”.115 Employees, middlemen and users lived then in symbiosis within this closed circuit wherein public resources were redistributed.116 Loosening the constraints of this network of mutual relationships, balances of power and hierarchies proved to be an uphill struggle for both provincial and federal authorities. Appeals that called for cooperation on the part of citizens as well as civil servants were the corollary of any attempted far-reaching reform.117 Political and institutional authorities spurred civil servants on not to live beyond their means as this could have “serious consequences for the individual as well as for the nation”.118 In similar fashion, “corrupt officials in government departments [who] are sucking the people’s blood” were harshly criticised in scathing editorials published in local newspapers such as Musulman and Anjuman.119 Not even the increase in penal sentences in the early 1950s and the later provisional transfer of the capital city from Karachi to Rawalpindi in the early 1960s made civil servants and brokers worry.120 In the late 1950s, the Minister of Interior tried to jump in at the deep end. It launched a movement that aimed at eliminating “the baneful effects of [officials’] overspending and artificially high standards of living”.121 The strategy was cunningly subtle. The campaign targeted not only civil servants themselves but also their ambitious (and, most probably, even more high spending) wives. “The Women Voluntary Group [. . .] [should have] induce[d] ladies to cut down waste in dress, food and entertainment. Some steps [. . .] [had] been taken to popularise the movement [. . .] particularly [among] Government servants”.122 For all government efforts, even this campaign miserably failed. Touts and, to a certain extent, petition writers blunted the sense of guilt that might have tormented bureaucrats or the man in the street. By transacting their business, these brokers triggered a subconscious mechanism of shame-displacement that allowed officers and citizens alike to blame someone else for the act.123 After all, bribes were under-the-counter payments that were released to a third party. The publicly invisible and the formally ‘not-known’ had no moral or legal costs. Moreover, they did not even exist either as immoral acts or criminal offences. Paradoxically, those bureaucratic cadres who were involved in this twin market even made some kind of capital out of their name officially appearing on public records, legal deeds and newspapers. Knowing to whom one could turn for help made the job easier for everyone and safeguarded the subsidiary administrative process of social control.124 Journalists reporting civil servants’ judicial ups and downs indulged in very careful descriptions of officers’ social background. Refugees would not then find it particularly difficult to pinpoint the identity and the location of accommodating officials. In early January 1955, Punjabi police carried out a wave of arrests among government employees in the refugee-saturated district of Lyallpur. B. A. was duly arrested on charges of forgery. The city’s news desk did not spare its readers any detail. Indeed, as a small paragraph of the

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 95 Pakistan Times meticulously recorded, B. A. was a patwari in the chak (village) No [. . .] G. B.125 Likewise, C.A.L. stood accused of B. A.’s very same crime. A bigwig, C.A.L. was a lambardar (headman) in the chak No. [. . .], thana (administrative sub-district) Saddar District. Officers and politicians provide us with much-needed insight into the final stages of the whole process. Ejected from a house that he had apparently illegally occupied, a clerk from the Revenue Department immediately turned to the person concerned. “What happened was that he talked to the other fellows of the Department, entered the house and came with a fait accompli and said, ‘I belong to the essential service and need a house’, just say ‘Allotted’”,126 the West Punjab Minister of Revenue, revealed, without flinching, to the Punjab Assembly. It was only when officers were threatened with a substantial reduction in their salaries and privileges that they made themselves heard. With the postindependence austerity measures of the early 1950s harming their material interests, clerks and other administrative government employees orchestrated a two-week ‘pen down’ strike that, in mid-March 1951, knocked out the whole of the Punjab.127 The wish lists of local officers and middle-ranking officials encompassed a wide range of claims. Among them, a guaranteed education for their children stood out in sharp relief against the more usual demands for higher wages or a pension plan.128 This vociferous protest on the part of civil servants working for the Government of Punjab appeared to meet with the approval of some local observers. It was, in their view, a way to break the bonds that nourished the vicious circle in which low salaries were in inverse ratio to corruption.129 The monthly wages of lower-rank officials were unquestionably low, falling within the pay range of Rs. 50–Rs. 120.130 The new generation of civil servants even had to earn enough money to cover the costs of their apprenticeship. Their hiring was subject to a compulsory three-month practical training that, as it was written in black and white in the advertisements, candidates had to pay out of their own pocket.131 In fact, the patronage structures that supported the Pakistani administration as well as its popular counterfeit duplication in the streets surrounding Anarkali were very much a socio-cultural problem. Mohammad Ali Bogra – Prime Minister and Minister for Defence and Commerce – demonstrated in 1953 just how far he had his finger on the pulse of the problem during a session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. In reply to a question, he pointed out that “Corruption [. . .] [had] to be fought on at all fronts. Corruption [. . .] [had] to be fought in schools and colleges, in university and even in public life of this country”.132 “I am not putting the blame on any individual [. . .]. I agree that it was the mentality which has got to be changed”, Muzaffar Ali Khan Qizilbash echoed a year later from the benches of the Punjab Assembly.133 In spite of what seemed like a friendly society, preferential treatments and cronyism were poisoning the early life of Pakistan’s still-in-the-making civil society.134 Their tentacles extended dangerously into the sensitive realm of the state and provincial economies. The full extent of the financial damage was unknown. Yet, according to US sources, so-called malpractices in the early 1950s resulted in substantial cash deficits for both the provincial and

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federal exchequers.135 The cancer that was consuming the administrative life of the Punjab surfaced even in the language of the everyday. Ordinary citizens often referred to the resettlement and rehabilitation offices as the “Carbuncle Department”.136 Nevertheless, it was the everyday with its challenges and needs that attracted much of the refugees’ attention.

Turning political? Administrative failures and political demands As provincial civil servants bungled their attempts to carry out a speedy redistribution of evacuee properties, honour, reputation, power and spheres of influence were on the line almost on a daily basis. Rehabilitation practices frequently threw migrant attempts to rebuild their networks of relationships and influence into confusion. In 1952, the Garden Allotment Committee in Lahore was, for instance, directed to re-distribute vegetable and flower patches “to villages and chaks other than those where they have applied for allotment of land under the Rehabilitation Settlement Scheme”.137 Temporary allottees of evacuee premises that were reserved for public purposes were now evicted through official orders released by central rehabilitation authorities.138 The vicissitudes of Muhammad Siddiqui’s family were worthy of one of the finest Lollywood films.139 A refugee from India, Muhammad and his relatives were temporarily allotted a property in the village of Qadirpur Rawan in Multan district. As the years rolled on, members of his family either passed away or moved elsewhere. Apparently, only Mst Bashiri, widow of Muhammad’s paternal uncle, stayed behind and fought tooth and nail not to hand over the allotted premises. Another refugee together with a legal gap in the resettlement scheme, however, prevented the realisation of Mst Bashiri’s dreams. In early 1953 the provincial authorities regulated the status of refugee widows, unmarried daughters and minors in relation to evacuee properties.140 Unfortunately, as it could not be applied retrospectively, this amendment did not benefit Mst Bashiri. Her notice of ejectment had been served a year earlier, and her portion of land already allotted to someone else. Likewise, the laws of inheritance as embodied either in the Shari’a or in the customary justice system could not be fully implemented. Allotments resulted from a legal and bureaucratic conveyance, and no refugee had a vested right to obtain them: The argument – pointed out the honourable Mr. Justices Ahmad, Ali and Changez during a different hearing – that on the demise of the right-holder his heirs, whether under custom or Personal Law [Personal Law (Sharia Act), 1948] became vested with the estate and therefore, were entitled to allotment of property in Pakistan in their own right and not as help has no force.141 A particular kind of ‘honour killing’ – in this case, attacks against land possession rights or exploitation – was bureaucratically committed all across the Punjabi countryside. The agricultural lands bordering on chak No. 13/1-L, Okara, Montgomery District, were the scene of the crime that the Honourable

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 97 Mr Justice Changez investigated in 1957. It was there that the honour and the social reputation of Rao Zia-ud-Din and Muhammad Umar risked meeting its end.142 Rehabilitation practices and functionaries were immediately put on trial. They were suspected of re-drawing the borders of both Rao and Muhammad’s allotted lands by re-distributing 10 acres of them to one Muhammad Khan through a procedure of revision and adjustment of early assigned allotments. Tit for tat assaults on Muhammad Khan’s honesty assumed the quality of a malicious character assassination and spread across Montgomery District.143 For their part, Rao Zia-ud-Din and Muhammad Umar filed an appeal to the local additional rehabilitation commissioner and asked for records to be verified accurately. The legal battle snowballed. Officials revoked allotments, the local police launched an inquiry, and petitions or complaints piled up. The umpteenth case of administrative authorities – those of the Rehabilitation Department – acting in excess of power was revealed. Still, Rao and Muhammad went to court in order to preserve their own prestige and honour and not to discover a bureaucratic blunder. As local authorities levelled off and wound down resettlement schemes, they had to reckon with the resistance of particular groups of refugees and their determined attempts to preserve what they had regained with difficulty. Feelings, concerns and worries translated into the stronger sense of being part of a social group in need of special attention and protection. It was in courtrooms in particular that refugees sought a clear-cut demarcation of new social boundaries and claimed their exceptional status. As a result, judges and lawyers were frequently called upon to smooth out disputes and in effect attempt to constitute an impersonal and equitable socio-administrative order. Habibullah Butt – a refugee resident in House No. 124 in Market Road, Rawalpindi Cantt – shielded his own peculiar self by a number of defence mechanisms, including the transfer of his desires and emotions to a judging authority.144 His own four walls were the ground on which the Pakistani bureaucracy gauged the success of its own ability to respond to the challenge of bringing together refugees’ expectations towards the state and institution-building processes. The Governor General of Pakistan himself had leased these premises from their original evacuee owner back in October 1947. Habibullah had been allotted them when he was appointed to the local M. S. Branch as officer supervisor. In 1954, his retirement imminent, both the military estate officer and the local district rehabilitation commissioner asked him to surrender the property. The subsequent lodging of a writ petition to the High Court opened a proverbial Pandora’s box by revealing the extent of the confusion that existed among bureaucratic cadres and within institutions in relation to their specific roles and responsibilities. Which institution could claim the right to issue a notice of ejectment? In accepting the petition, the High Court argued the inappropriateness of the military authorities sending out the ejection notice. In spite of claiming a lease from the Rehabilitation Department, the Minister of Defence himself could not wield the actual power to eject. Yet the appeal judgment upset the situation. According to its ruling, the military authorities were fully entitled to eject Habibullah, as the rehabilitation officers exercised no control over the property other than the collection of

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rent. Habibullah himself became dizzy in his attempt to unravel his legal and personal problems. Indeed, his early petition was filed against the Ministry of Defence in the belief that it was the local Deputy Resettlement Commissioner who had allotted him his house. It was to this latter authority that, after having been unable to document this process of allocation in the court of first instance, he turned in order to seek the allotment of the premises in question. Nevertheless, as the Supreme Court decided, Habibullah “had himself been requesting the military authorities from time to time to effect repairs on the premises”.145 In 1951, Muhammad Sharif summoned Muhammad Iqbal and Amid-ud-Din to appear before him. Muhammad had filed a lawsuit against Amid over a controversy that resulted from a perceived breaking of the 1949 Punjab Rent Restriction Act. During the hearing, one of the litigants raised objections to refugee exceptionality which the judging authority eventually rejected. In the abstract of the judgement, it was clearly stated that regularly appointed refugee allottees “were no better no worse than the non-Muslim tenants [. . .] accepted as tenants by the owners themselves on payment of certain fixed rent”.146 Both Muhammad and Habibullah had effectively upgraded their social status to a political demand. The evacuee property ‘hot potato’ was now in the hands of the local politicians and members of both Punjab and Pakistan Constituent Assembly. ***** Social and material transactions taking place in the everyday life of the Indian subcontinent tend to be durable, hierarchical and asymmetrical in nature. Negotiating deals – even bureaucratic ones – was (and is) socially and morally acceptable in the eyes of both citizens and institutions. At the very moment when the Pakistani state and its administrative cadres failed to establish clear rules and regulations, patronage networks institutionalised as part and parcel of ordinary social dynamics. This pattern was clearly visible as far as the urban-, upper- and middle-class readership of the Pakistan Times was concerned. Well versed in English, they never resorted to the word ‘corruption’ to describe their everyday interactions with the local bureaucracy. Theirs were stories of patronage, shortfalls in social capital and the ability to re-establish individual networks of powerful contacts. As the years rolled on, this institutionalisation of the needs of everyday life reproduced – at administrative level – the very same dynamics of marginalisation that dominated the realm of social relationships. Only those who could count on or boast about influential acquaintances successfully assumed the upper hand over their fellow citizens as they negotiated everyday basic resources. Consequently, those who felt themselves to be on the margins of society had to dash for cover. Indeed, ‘have-not’ refugees took part in and contributed to the duplication of the administrative steel frame wherein the economy of bribery flourished and which carefully safeguarded its own survival. If read against the grain, these daily struggles to overcome social marginality and difficulties did not spell self-reliance.147 Rather their narratives re-stated – once again – the centrality of dependence on the support of reliable patrons. No matter whether he was well off or not, no refugee was an island.

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 99 As old and newly appointed civil servants grappled with the refugee emergency, cases of ultra vires decisions, excesses of power and inapplicable legal frameworks exposed the inability of the Pakistani bureaucracy either to exert any kind of influence over Punjabi society or to act as an organised and organising political corpus. In this moment of institutional weakness, the new administration missed a golden opportunity to extend its control over local society through the realisation of its own will over the – at times just passive – resistance of other social actors in the province.

Notes 1 This chapter was first presented as a paper at the 2011 BASAS Annual Conference held in Southampton. I am indebted to my fellow panellists for their comments. 2 H. Alavi, “Class and State in Pakistan”, in Pakistan: Roots of Dictatorship: The Political Economy of a Praetorian State, eds. H. N. Gardezi and J. Rashid (London: Zed Press, 1982), pp. 40–93; H. Goodnow, The Civil Service in Pakistan: Bureaucracy in a New Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); A. Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); C. Kennedy, Bureaucracy in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1987); M. Waseem, Politics and the State in Pakistan (Lahore: Progressive Publishers, 1989). 3 On this point, see also K. D. Jackson, “Bureaucratic Polity: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Power and Communications in Indonesia”, in Political Power and Communications in Indonesia, eds. K. D. Jackson and L. W. Pye (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 3–22. 4 On this point, see P. Potter, India’s Political Administrators (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 117 and 143; M. Tudor, The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 27–9. 5 C. Jeffrey, “Caste, Class and Clientelism: A Political Economy of Everyday Corruption in Rural North India”, Economic Geography, 78, 1 (2002), p. 22. 6 See, for instance, Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence; Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India (Durham-London: Duke University Press, 2012); Hull, Government of Paper. 7 Copy of Report from H. S. Stephenson, 25 August 1947, DO 142/416, UKNA. 8 Punjab Assembly Debates, 7 March 1954, PCSL. 9 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 7 January 1955. 10 S&GA Dept-Letter No. CB-3/150–56, 3 June 1956, MDRR. 11 P. Oldenburg, India, Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 38. 12 S&GA Dept-Letter No. CB-3/150–56, 3 June 1956, MDRR. 13 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 14 D.O. No. 314–56/1430-R(G), 25 January 1956, MDRR, and Memorandum No. 3511–56/2924-R(G), 1 May 1956, MDRR. 15 D.O. No. 314/56/1446-R(G), 25 February 1956, MDRR. 16 Memorandum No. 1591–56/1685-R(P), 17 May 1956, MDRR. 17 S. Kakar, The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytical Study of Childhood and Society in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 40–1. 18 S&GA Department Letter No CB-3/150–56, 3 June 1956, MDRR. 19 Ibid. 20 On this point, see Parsons, “On the Concept of Political Power”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107, 3 (1963), p. 243.

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30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness Copy of the Report from H. S. Stephenson, 25 August 1946, DO 142/416, UKNA. Memorandum No 782–56/1002-R(P), 10 March 1956, MDRR. Ibid. The whole body of laws and ordinances that the Government of the Punjab and the Department of Resettlement and Rehabilitation issued in those years, are collected in three handbooks titled The Manual of Instruction and Resettlement of Refugees on Land in the Punjab. See Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual, PSCL. Government of West Pakistan, Resettlement of Refugees on Land in Punjab, Lahore, 1956, PCSL and West Pakistan Rehabilitation Resettlement Scheme with Instructions Issued Thereunder, Karachi, 1957, PCSL. H. Heller, La sovranità ed altri scritti sulla dottrina del diritto e dello Stato (Milan: Giuffrè, 1987), pp. 384 and 395. Writ Petition No. 107/R/1961, MDRR. Ibid. On the definition of authority as the ability to define situations, see Parsons, “On the Concept”, p. 243. Government of Pakistan – Ministry of Refugees and Rehabilitation, Ordinance No. XVIII/1948, 18 October 1948, PCSL. See also West Punjab Government Letter No. 2300-Reh-49/1676, 10 March 1949, PCSL and Form No. Reh. VI-Appendix B, n. d., PCSL. Writ Petition No. 513/1959, MDRR. Ibid. Parsons, “On the Concept”, p. 243. Ref. No. PHC 29/47, 7 December 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. Immediate No. 1979–56/1235-R(P), 6 April 1956, MDRR. Memorandum No. 884–56/794-R(P), 25 February 1956, MDRR. Ibid. On this point, see also M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: John Wiley, 1967), p. 117. Memorandum No. 11900–55/483-R(P), 1 February 1956, PCSL. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 18 September 1954. Memorandum No. 694–54/532-R(P), 7 February 1956, PCSL. Despatch No. 652, 5 May 1961, NND 948832, NARA. M. Stoppino, Potere e teoria politica (Milan: Giuffrè, 2001), pp. 149–50. On power as a means of acquiring control of the factors in effectiveness, see Parsons, “On the Concept”, pp. 237–8. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 20 July 1954. West Punjab Government Letter No. 2300-Reh. 49/1676, 10 May 1949, PCSL. R. Martin, “The Concept of Power: A Critical Defence”, The British Journal of Sociology, 22, 3 (1971), p. 243. The Times (London), 26 February 1948. PLD 1956-Lah 642, MDRR. PLD 1958 (Cust.)-Lah 3, MDRR. PLD 1959-Lah 284, MDRR. Punjab Gazette, 29 September 1950, UPL. Punjab Gazette, 20 March 1953, UPL. Recent Development in Refugee Rehabilitation and Resettlement in the Punjab, 12 July 1951, NND 938750, NARA. Punjab Gazette, 20 March 1953, UPL. Despatch No. 652, 5 May 1961, NND 948832, NARA. Punjab Gazette, 20 March 1953, UPL. Punjab Assemby Debates, 1 March 1953, PCSL. Despatch No. 753, 6 May 1957, NND 948832, NARA.

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 101 59 Memorandum No. 11900/55-R(P), 1 February 1956, PCSL. 60 Punjab Government Letter No. 963–54/995-R(L), 27 January 1954, PCSL, and Memorandum No. 1500–56/1740-R(L), 6 March 1956, PCSL. 61 Despatch No. 511, 27 June 1960, NND 948832, NARA. 62 M. Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 53. 63 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 14 August 1950. 64 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 14 September 1954. 65 Confidential No. 25, 28 November 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 66 Memorandum, 8 January 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 67 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 30 July 1954. 68 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 2 October 1954. 69 Memorandum No. 2300-Reh-49/1676, 10 March 1949, PCSL. 70 Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, p. 35. 71 Khadim Mohy ud-Din v. Deputy Rehabilitation Commissioner, 1956, MDRR. 72 Conversation with Dr Usman Khan and mother, Lahore, 22 November 2010. 73 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 27 December 1954. 74 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual of Instruction – Part I and II, p. 1, PCSL. 75 M. Mines, “The Political Economy of Patronage, Preeminence and the State”, in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, p. 89. 76 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 27 December 1954. 77 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 78 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 4 April 1953, PCSL. 79 Ibid. 80 A-1, 4 January 1949, NND 765024, NARA. 81 F. Allum, Camorristi, Politicians, and Businessmen: The Transformation of Organised Crime in Post-War Naples (Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2006), pp. 184–201. 82 Memorandum No. 4/9/58-SELL, 22 May 1958, MDRR, and S&GA Dept.-Endst. No. S(R) 1–18/58/SOXIII, 9 June 1958, MDRR. 83 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 84 W. F. Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 240–6. 85 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 14 September 1953, PCSL. 86 Representation of People Act, 1957 – Sections 105–110, 1957, MDRR, Memorandum No. 4/9/58 – SELL (Government of Pakistan – Cabinet Secretariat), 22 May 1958, MDRR, and S&GA Dept.-Endst No, 1–18/58/SOXIII, 9 June 1958, MDRR. 87 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 24 August 1954. 88 On this point, see Gupta, Red Tape, p. 6. 89 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 15 January 1955. 90 Ibid. 91 Gupta, Red Tape, p. 22. 92 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 15 January 1955. 93 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 24 August 1954. 94 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 17 October 1954. 95 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual, Chap. 3, and Form No. Reh. VIAppendix A and B, n. d., PCSL. 96 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 15 September 1954. 97 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 4 December 1954. 98 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 17 October 1954. 99 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 17 July 1954. 100 Ibid. See also Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, p. 36. 101 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 24 September 1953, PCSL.

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102 B. Jaurengi, “Police and Legal Patronage in Northern India”, in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, p. 199. 103 A victory that damages the winners as much as the vanquished. 104 M. S. Hull, “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy”, Language & Communication, 23 (2003), pp. 300–1. 105 E. Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 28–82. 106 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 24 September 1953, PCSL. 107 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 22 November 1954. 108 The identity of the officer has been anonymised due to the impossibility of verifying the final outcome of the formal inquiry. 109 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 22 November 1954. 110 Ibid. 111 Despatch No. 129, 2 November 1959, NND 948832, NARA. 112 S&GA Dept. Memo No. S(R)2–18/56, 2 November 1956, MDRR. 113 Ibid., and S&GA Dept. Memo No. S(R) 2–5/57, 9 February 1957, MDRR. 114 S&GA Dept. Memo No. 832/59/AS, 4 March 1953, MDDR. 115 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 116 G. Falcone and M. Padovani, Cose di Cosa Nostra (Milan: BUR, 2004), p. 93. 117 Despatch No. 87, 16 August 1960, NND 948832, NARA. 118 Memorandum No. 20/2/59-Public, 4 July 1959, MDRR, and S&GA Dept. Endorsement No. S. VIII-3–102/59, 15 July 1959, MDRR. 119 Despatch No. 229, 5 October 1953, NND 938750, NARA. 120 Despatch No. 54, 5 January 1961, NND 948832, NARA, and Despatch No. 229, 5 October 1953, NND 938750, NARA. 121 Office Memorandum No. 20/2/59-Public, 4 July 1959, MDRR and S&GA Dept. Endorsement No. S. VIII-3–102/59, 15 July 1959, MDRR. 122 Ibid. 123 J. P. O. de Sardan, “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa”, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 37, 1(1999), pp. 34–8. 124 A. Blok, “Peasants, Patrons, and Brokers in Western Sicily”, Anthropology Quarter, 42, 1 (1969), p. 155. 125 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 21 January 1955. 126 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 127 Punjab Government Workers’ Strike, 19 March 1951, NND 948832, NARA. 128 Strike of Punjab Patwaris Ends, 19 March 1952, NND 938750, NARA. 129 Ibid. 130 Rehabilitation Department of West Punjab, Manual, Appendix I. 131 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 14 October 1954. 132 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 23 September 1953, PCSL. 133 Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954, PCSL. 134 Falcone and Padovani, Cose di Cosa Nostra, p. 93. 135 Strike of Punjab Patwaris Ends, 19 March 1952, NND 938750, NARA. 136 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 4 April 1953, PCSL. 137 Memorandum No. 5371-R(L), 23 April 1952, PCSL. 138 Memorandum No. 7070-R(L), 7 September 1953, PCSL. 139 Supreme Court-Civil Appeal No. 69/1958, MDRR. 140 Memorandum No. 831-R(L)-Government of Punjab, 5 February 1953, PCSL. 141 PLD 1960-Lah 834, MDRR. 142 Miscellaneous Civil-Writ Petition No. 486/1957, MDRR. 143 Ibid. 144 Civil Appeal No. 93/1958, MDRR. 145 Ibid. 146 PLD 1951-Lah 27, MDRR.

Patronage, bureaucratic unruliness 103 147 On refugee resettlement and self-reliance see also R. Kaur, “Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-Colonial State in India’s Partition”, Cultural and Social History, 6, 4 (2009), pp. 429–46.

Bibliographical references Allum, F. Camorristi, Politicians, and Businessmen: The Transformation of Organised Crime in Post-War Naples. Leeds: Maney Publishing, 2006. Blok, A. “Peasants, Patrons, and Brokers in Western Sicily”, Anthropology Quarter, 42, 1 (1969), pp. 155–70. Corbridge, S. and Kumar, S. “Community, Corruption, Landscape: Tales from the Tree Trade”, Political Geography, 21 (2002), pp. 765–88. de Sardan, J. P. O. “A Moral Economy of Corruption in Africa”, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 37, 1 (1999), pp. 25–52. Falcone, G. and Padovani, M. Cose di Cosa Nostra. Milan: BUR, 2004. Figgis, J. N. and Laurence, R. V., eds. Historical Essays and Studies. London: Macmillan, 1907. Gardezi, H. N. and Rashid, J., eds. Pakistan: Roots of Dictatorship: The Political Economy of a Praetorian State. London: Zed Press, 1982. Goffman, E. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990. Goodnow, H. The Civil Service in Pakistan: Bureaucracy in a New Nation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964. Gould, W. Bureaucracy, Community and Influence: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s. London: Routledge, 2012. Gupta, A. “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State”, American Ethnologist, 22, 2 (1995), pp. 373–402. ——— Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India. London-Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Heller, H. La sovranità ed altri scritti sulla dottrina del diritto e dello Stato. Milan: Giuffrè, 1987. Hull, M. S. “The File: Agency, Authority, and Autography in an Islamabad Bureaucracy”, Language & Communication, 23 (2003), pp. 287–314. ——— Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2012. Jackson, K. D. and Pye, L. W., eds. Political Power and Communications in Indonesia. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Jalal, A. The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Jeffrey, C. “Caste, Class, and Clientelism: A Political Economy of Everyday Corruption in Rural North India”, Economic Geography, 78, 1 (2002), pp. 21–41. Kakar, S. The Inner World: A Psycho-Analytical Study of Childhood and Society. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981. Kaur, R. “Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-Colonial State in India’s Partition”, Cultural and Social History, 6, 4 (2009), pp. 429–46. Kennedy, C. Bureaucracy in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Martin, R. “The Concept of Power: A Critical Defence”, The British Journal of Sociology, 22, 3 (1971), pp. 240–56. Mines, M. Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

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Oldenburg, P. India, Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths. London: Routledge, 2010. Parsons, T. “On the Concept of Political Power”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 107, 3 (1963), pp. 232–62. Piliavsky, A., ed. Patronage as Politics in South Asia. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Potter, P. India’s Political Administrators. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1986. Stoppino, M. Potere e teoria politica. Milan: Giuffrè Editore, 2001. Talbot, I. Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar, 1947–1961. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2007. Tudor, M. The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Waseem, M. Politics and the State in Pakistan. Lahore: Progressive Publishers, 1989. Weber, M. Economy and Society. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978. Whyte, W. F. Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

4

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Pawns in a political game: refugees, electoral rules and competitions and the politics of West Punjab’s stability It is impossible [. . .] to settle even one refugee because every refugee is a pawn in their political game; every refugee means a vote for the Muslim League. (C. E. Gibbon, Punjab Assembly Debates, 10 March 1954)

Lifting the curtain on the struggles of West Punjabi refugees – as they negotiated their resettlement after 1947 – opens up new avenues for interpreting the early years of Pakistan. For one thing, it allows us to understand this period rather differently to how it is viewed by those historians and political scientists who have focused on the assumed failure of the Pakistani state.1 Rather, as this book highlights, during the period following independence, developments taking place in the Punjab paved the way for the establishment of Pakistan’s own particular workable – and hence surprisingly ‘stable’ – political system. The electoral and party manoeuvrings that accompanied and resulted from the 1951 provincial elections and related debates on the adequate representation of refugees within the local Assembly provide us with a lens through which to observe this phenomenon. The arrival of millions of migrants unquestionably affected the strength of the electoral bases of nearly all the refugee (and non-refugee) politicians.2 In the run-up to the 1951 provincial elections, the relationship between the province’s administrative cadres and its political actors was shaped by their attempts to define and re-define their roles within the frame of a newly established independent state. Both the local bureaucracy and politicians exploited one other in their attempts to secure the upper hand over Pakistani Punjab society. The hurly-burly of interferences and interactions was, therefore, mutual. It resulted in a corpus of regulations and political practices that, by being socially sustainable, contributed over time to the political stabilisation of a working West Punjab political arena. As these ‘rules’ were first discussed and then established, local parties and factions started their jockeying for sought-after electoral and post-electoral success. A careful examination of these political manoeuvrings reveals, however, that the independence of Pakistan did not mark an entirely new phase in the life of West Punjab’s party politics. The need to milk the state apparata in

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the search for limited resources together with well-engrained ideas of loyalty and political opportunism merged with attempts to rise to the challenges of re-integrating millions of persons and a nation-in-the-making. The provincial Muslim League showed itself to be responsive to these dynamics. Certainly, its landlord-dominated cadres, the decision to separate party careers from government ones and the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951 did weaken the position of the party.3 Still, they did not amount to the coup de grace that resulted in the paralysis of the early Punjabi political, party and parliamentary system. Like all electoral campaigns, those of the 1951 provincial polls aimed at checkmating opponents and overcoming hurdles. Vigorous criticism of electoral irregularities have tended to overshadow the impact of such elections on what was still the frail postcolonial structure of a both a nation- and a state-in-the-making.4 In order to pursue their respective objectives, candidates and voters needed to make contact with each other. Amidst heated, sometimes perilous debates over national symbols, the role of religion in Pakistan and calls for some kind of Islamisation of the public sphere, traditional religious figures bestowed behind-the-scenes help on many of the candidates. Pirs and sajjada nashins, having been relegated to relative obscurity thanks to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reformism, resumed their path towards greater prominence that the political struggles of the late colonial period had offered them. Indeed, they used their influence once again to put politicians – especially refugee ones – on course to renew contact with their voters. The sections in this chapter accordingly focus on the engineering of the electoral system that informed the 1951 provincial elections, and the ways in which interactions between the bureaucracy and local politicians resulted in a workable party system. As they explore how refugees negotiated political identity and party affiliation, they also focus on the electoral and political strategies exploited by the Muslim League to defeat its opponents and maintain power in the province.

Pieces at the beginning of the game: engineering a new electoral system Chalie, chae pien. Let’s go, let’s have a tea. Gathered over a cup of tea, Qutab Din and Rao Khurshid Ali Khan were engaged in an animated discussion. A long, silent pause anticipated a frank and friendly handshake. The agreement was finally made and the informal contract signed. Qutab Din, prospective candidate for the constituency of Montgomery VII, and Rao Khurshid Ali Khan, powerful refugee leader and former member of the Punjab Assembly, set the seal on their electoral alliance. This decision, however, was by no means easy and painless. Indeed, Qutab Din “after giving anxious thought to the pros and the cons of the case [. . .] was of the opinion that Rao Khurshid Ali Khan’s votes would come to [. . .] [him] and [. . .] [his] to Rao Khurshid Khan in pursuance of the pact”.5 Both of them were fully aware of the value and the eventual impact of refugees’ votes

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 107 on the course and the outcome of the impeding elections scheduled to take place in the province in late March 1951. Frenzied political manoeuvring had pushed the whole West Punjab to fire and sword shortly after 14 August 1947. In the autumn of 1947, refugee leaders, new and old politicians alike, scoured almost all the camps and temporary structures to be found in West Punjab. Thorough manhunts went hand in hand with their attempt to mould government policies and achieve the much desired and congenial resettlement of refugees on land in the province. A refugee-saturated Punjab now faced the urgent need to re-accommodate the bulk of the migrant community by sharing this burden among all its districts and the neighbouring regions. Government projects – mainly based on a first-come-first-served method of allocating evacuee properties – were biased against the eventual re-election and preservation of any political ascendancy, let alone refugees’ chances of benefiting from the perks of a political system that had for long relied on patronage relationships. It was, as Post has argued in relation to another former part of the British empire, both a semantic and linguistic problem. The political dynamics of patronage demanded the representative to speak the same social ‘language’ as his constituents and to share the same ‘ethnic’ background.6 Unsurprisingly, then, former representatives of East Punjabi constituencies who were now members of the newly restructured Punjab Assembly pressured the Pakistani authorities into a district-wise resettlement of refugees, and hampered the dispersal of either within the province or their transfer to Sindh, Baluchistan and the NWFP.7 Indeed, these plans were not intended to turn swords into ploughshares. As a worried British Deputy High Commissioner based in Lahore warned in late 1948, their crusade against a non-district based rehabilitation was resulting in far more aggressive and resentful refugees.8 Nevertheless, the formal and institutional acceptance of the criterion of the much anticipated assignment of evacuee dwellings along district lines did not soothe politicians’ nerves, but rather paralleled a much more fluid and slippery reality. After all, the resettlement or self-resettlement of refugees had already started. A prospective and further dis- and re-location did not represent an economically and socially sustainable and viable option.9 The laborious task of re-consolidating entire biraderis and spheres of patronage influence was further affected by the lack of a reliable system of identification, scarce means of communication and the hurried compulsive scramble for shelter that involved almost all refugees. The case of Meo refugees, for instance, stood out as paradigmatic. In July 1949 they were reportedly scattered across West Punjab despite their request for a homogenous rehabilitation.10 The ‘linguistic units’ of fidelity and solid relationships between any local leader and his followers – building blocks of local political discourses – needed then to be partially reworded so as to retain their significance and power. Any attempt to solve the problem in theory was simply hopeless. Relatively inexperienced and new to electoral competitions, West Punjab held one of the earliest elections to take place in independent Pakistan.11 In a curious twist of fate, the so-called Punjabi school of public administration turned into the first laboratory within which Pakistani democratic aspirations were tested. It was, as Wilder has pointed out, one of those attempts at legitimising the status

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quo through an adaptation of all possible democratic needs to the supremacy of bureaucracy that would eventually shape both federal and provincial political histories in the years to come.12 By April 1951, as the counterpoint voice of Ahmad suggests, almost half of the newly elected members of the Punjab Assembly would owe a favour to a public servant.13 But grassroots politics and manoeuvrings bespoke of a far more elaborate and multi-faceted reality. Politics and bureaucracy exploited one another’s weaknesses in a repeated process of identity negotiation and re-negotiation within the newly created institutional framework of what was now an independent state. In early 1949 former members of the Punjab Legislative Assembly, current members of the Central Constituent Assembly, together with the secretaries of local boards and public associations, were asked to answer a long questionnaire that a newly established committee had just submitted to them all. Questions 4 and 5 stood out as being of crucial importance. Question 4 stated: Do you think it would be possible to secure adequate representation of refugees in the Legislative Assembly in West Punjab if the basis referred to question 3 [franchise qualifications based on taxation, education, service in the Armed Forces and, in the case of women, status of their husband]? In case you are of the opinion that it would not be possible to secure for refugees representation commensurate with their numbers on this basis, what other basis do you suggest for achieving the object?14 Question 5 raised the political and electoral stakes further by asking whether or not “it would be proper to prescribe different and concessional franchise qualifications for the refugees for the next general elections”.15 The problem was far from being trivial. Electoral systems lie at the very heart of institutions – and, in the last resort, even decision-making processes. District Boards and small town Committees initially co-opted refugees through the replacement of those of their members who had departed to India.16 Immediately after independence, the transfer of parliamentary seats from East to West Punjab had taken place on the basis of a similar principle and methodology. By 1951, the upcoming scheduled elections presented Punjabi politics with a fait accompli of the absolute need for careful considerations and mulled-over evaluations. Interviewees and Committee members eventually tabled a three-option draft that attempted to solve the electoral and political quandary. Separate electorates and multi-member constituencies with or without a reservation of seats for refugees were the formulas that, according to these proposals, had to be weighted up in order to secure an adequate representation of the various different sections now comprising Punjabi society.17 The Committee, however, rejected almost immediately the idea of multi-member constituencies without reserved refugee seats. Refugees were sure to cast their votes only in favour of refugee candidates and de facto prejudice the result of the polls. This would – as stated in the proceedings – clash with the institutional efforts to bridge the gulf between locals and newcomers by socially and politically acknowledging, and thus deepening, the rift.18 Bets

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 109 were now taken on the two remaining solutions. A curious bungle beckoned on the horizon. Both refugees’ separate electorates and multi-member constituencies would institutionally ratify precisely the social split that Pakistani institutions were trying to mend amidst tremendous difficulties and setbacks. Regardless of the outcome of negotiations, these two options would herald a realignment of urban and rural power and hierarchies along new lines. New powerbrokers who owed their position to resources other than land would then emerge and play a leading role in the local political scenario.19 The related debate on a possible revision of the franchise further brought the relevance of the question to the fore. Unable to prove their property, wealth or educational credentials, the bulk of the refugee community risked being kept out of the electorate and off the candidate rolls. Feelings thus ran high, and Punjabi public opinion split over the issue. The possible or likely implications of the introduction of adult franchise will have influenced the declarations, disclaimers and rectifications that resulted from the Committee’s deliberations. Never did a day pass but Imroze and Pakistan Times hammered away at their campaign that trumpeted unrestricted adult suffrage as the cornerstone of Pakistan’s future democracy.20 For its part, the West Punjab Union of Journalists tagged its support on the abolition of all landlord constituencies and the debarment of landlords from labour seats.21 On the other hand, opponents to an extension of the electorate feared that the committee was biting off more than it could actually chew, and urged it to bring the matter to the Constituent Assembly. Someone went as far as to drag in the Qur’an in order to support their arguments.22 The thrill and the trepidation involved in these debates were the sort that usually haunt a person who is about to take a leap in the dark. All these ingredients looked set to ‘ginger’ up Punjabi politics as soon as the Committee published its findings and final recommendations. The mirrors of Sheesh Mahal at Lahore’s Shahi Qila were the images that everyone had in mind when commenting on the results of independent Pakistan’s first experiment in electoral engineering. Assessing whether the choice of two-seat constituencies with a reserved seat for refugee candidates and the adult franchise mirrored or, by contrast, reflected indefinitely the reflection of the strengths and weaknesses of local customs proved to be a herculean task. Member constituencies perfectly matched the features and the needs of what remained a highly personalised Punjabi society. The candidate-ballot mechanism – one available ballot to be cast for a single candidate – established a direct relationship between candidates and voters that was informed by particularistic benefits and incentives.23 Playing by the rules – both formal and informal – was apparently a child’s game for all social actors. Candidates could now credibly promise their constituents to “take as much [public] money as [. . .] [they could] and spend it on [. . .] [their] supporters and in this way rule the country”.24 Tracking down the basic elements of the local political system instead was the real challenge that lay ahead. The Punjabi Bait ul-Mal – as an idealist Shaikh Sadiq Hassan polemically remarked in a later speech to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly – had to feed not only politicians but also, and most importantly,

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their supporters.25 Benefits and incentives needed therefore to be targeted to specific individuals or groups. On the eve of 1951 elections, patronage and kinship were the elements that potential candidates were trying to blend. Ostensibly the requirements and wishes of influential local leaders shaped the physical borders of the newly designed constituencies by cutting across their natural administrative and territorial boundaries.26 The electoral bureaucracy, it would seem, had finally bowed to the demands of local politics and the geopolitics of the newcomers’ rehabilitation. No matter whether they intended to run for refugee or ‘normal’ seats, all future members of the Punjab Assembly would unquestionably have to worm their way into refugees’ affections. The feverishness that followed the announcement of the Committee converted itself into an almost desperate hunt for electoral alliances. Refugees’ resettlement, or self-resettlement on land, had shifted anyone’s ground, and no candidate felt safe. Elections would be fought and eventually won inch by inch in every constituency. Potential candidates had to put their shoulder to the wheel and further step up the intensity of South Asian historically typical door-to-door campaigns.27 Qutab Din and Rao Khurshid Ali Khan made a contract with each other with this reality in mind. The pact, as proceedings pointed out, could be regarded as a “blindfold transfer of one’s influence in favour of the other”.28 Interestingly enough, by forming an alliance with the powerful contestant of a non-reserved seat, Rao Khurshid Ali Khan – whose arrest in 1948 had mobilised no less than 50,000 supporters29 – revealed a substantial reduction in his electoral basis. The fluid dynamics of the resettlement of refugees spared no one. Many other potential candidates and refugee leaders across West Punjab were engrossed in similar negotiations and political transactions.30 For all three contracting parties – candidates, refugee representatives and, although frequently unwittingly, voters themselves – it could be a win-win situation. The transfer of spheres of influence ensnared votes in a trap of checks and double-checks. Indeed, would-be members of the provincial Assembly and the refugee leadership alike banked on the sheer weight of numbers. Blocs of voters would seal the former’s fate and provide the latter with the necessary power to thwart any broken promise. Both the electoral system and the agreements that political actors were signing thus led to a peculiarly Punjabi self-enforcing equilibrium of group voting.31 The plank on which the system rested was the number of incentives that pushed voters and candidates to participate in their mutual political and personal shares. Reportedly money and material benefits defined the parameters within which elections or re-elections were negotiated.32 On the understanding that mutual trust was the indissoluble clause, electoral ‘contracts’ were subsequently signed on this basis at all different levels. The everyday face of paternalism surfaced here and became tinged with the nuances of the ma-bap relationship. Politicians interacted with their voters by empathising with their needs and hardships within an intricate framework of emotional situations that mirrored the father/son bond. The economy of this post-1947 Punjabi electoral system was consequently far from being impersonal and modelled only on market dynamics. Punjabi politics after independence continued to be moulded from a combination of personal

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 111 biraderi ties and the influence of charismatic community leaders. Alongside the brokering over respective sphere of influences a particular party-led diaspora of candidates emerged and attempted to keep pace with the concomitant dispersal of refugees in their resettlement or self-resettlement efforts. In the constituencies of some of the most refugee-saturated towns in West Punjab, it was often rumoured that candidates for the reserved seats who were likely win the day easily had previously taken up residence elsewhere. Abdul Hamid was one of them. “Hamid Khan [. . .] living at Women Home, Female Jail – Lahore [. . .] do declare” – his nomination form for the constituency of Sheikhupura VII read – “I am a refugee within the meaning given in clause (a) of Sect. 2 of the Punjab Legislative Assembly Election Act, 1950”.33 Sajjad Ali Khan, Zafar Hussain, Abdul Aziz and Altaf Mohy ud-Din – all resident in Lahore – were others who followed hot on his heels, in the constituencies of Gujranwala II and II and Sialkot IX and V respectively.34 By early 1951 it was clear that politicians and bureaucracy had begun a fight that was – and would be – informed by feelings of mutual exploitation, interdependency and perceptions of superiority. As regards the upcoming electoral competition, bureaucrats and party workers armed with their tactics and tricks now yielded the floor to local politicians. Political platforms still had to be drafted and time was getting short.

The king’s jewels: defining parties’ dynamics Biraderi politics and the influential representatives of old or new power brokers dominated the run-up to the Punjab’s 1951 elections. Still, candidates were required to demonstrate their strength publicly and test their own political platforms.35 Roads, squares and parks became the places where anyone could measure the pulse of local citizens on topics that were inflaming public opinion. The number of knots of people who gathered around politicians bowing and scraping was a measure of the success of new and old personalities in party conventions and reunions. At first glance, an apparent steadiness reigned supreme within the ranks of almost all parties. At its annual Council meeting held in Karachi in late January 1949, the Muslim League appeared to be lacking in direction. All 10 resolutions that were passed during its proceedings turned out to be empty hackneyed slogans that dealt mostly with trifling matters.36 According to rumour-mongers, the League – the party that had guided Pakistan towards its independence – was in its death throes. The doubleentry bookkeeping of its members revealed a haemorrhaging of persons that, at least on paper, frustrated any attempt to root the party across the whole of Pakistan. In reality, League notables had acknowledged the political implications flowing from the achievement of an independent state, and so were beginning to reorganise their party. Initially working in a small room of a private house with scant resources and personnel, the League was now establishing provincial and federal secretariats and various other organisational units for itself.37 Its presence had to be tangible. Offices and party officers were the most obvious public representations of the party and, as such, offered a powerful argument in support of its power.38

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Political groups, in the wake of independence, had also to compete for access to resources that had previously been at the disposal of the colonial authorities.39 A year before its 1949 annual meeting in Karachi, the Muslim League had been dissolved. Both the (re-)foundation and the reorganisation of the ‘new’ party were in Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman’s hands.40 Central to the new Muslim League putting down roots was, needless to say, the recruitment of members. Khaliquzzaman assigned the distribution of newly issued enrolment forms to the provincial branches of the party. Provincial organisers took over a task that was far from simply clerical. Indeed, it entailed the recruitment of affiliates, brokers and party workers who, in their respective positions, would hold the power to negotiate the allocation of state resources to different levels of local society. If reports can be trusted, the Punjab chapter lived up to the challenge. By all accounts, forms were handed out only to handpicked workers and supporters. “Very few were given out” – revealed Dawn in December 1949 – “to those who did not enjoy the support of the custodian of the blank forms”.41 The party leadership sought then to re-attain power and access public resources through the consolidation of personal loyalties. Not only was loyalty a test of social and party allegiance, but, since independence, it had also become the only criteria of selection for the establishment of the League. Loyalty, the Working Committee warned, had to be “undivided”.42 Those Muslim Leaguers who were found to support any other political group as a way to “secure [more] power and mould public opinion”, would be immediately expelled.43 At the last count in early March 1949, the West Punjab branch could claim 1,183,593 affiliates.44 But, reportedly, a still-to-be identified number of them were bogus members.45 In fact, subscription rolls recorded only the numerical strength of upper rank local associates. The dozens of followers who bound themselves to supporting each and every affiliate (and therefore the party) through ties of trust and obligation, were neither counted nor included in official statistics. The Punjabi Muslim League was purposely organisationally thin, and its official membership carefully selected and limited. Its leadership knew that deploying the brute force of numbers was not a mandated precondition for success.46 Instead what made the Muslim League into a mass party was its ability to give its cadres enough political, public space within which to maintain power and eventually redistribute resources among those whom they supported through patronage.47 In the Punjab, the condition of the Muslim League did not particularly concern all-Pakistani party notables. All the same, as the discussions at the 1949 Council meeting continued, a couple of people were remained aloof and spoke in whispers. One of them could be clearly heard complaining about the party’s “failure to put forward any concrete substitute for the pre-Partition attitude of militant agitation”.48 “[I am wondering] whether the League has any further useful function to perform in Pakistan”, reasoned the other, voicing a concern that would later be echoed frequently in British diplomatic correspondence.49 Its organisational efforts notwithstanding, the Pakistan Muslim League was apparently struggling to draft a clear political platform that was able to touch – once again – the hearts of

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 113 Pakistani citizens. Nevertheless, laying too much emphasis on party postcolonial manifestos would be a fatal miscalculation. The leadership knew that their deliberate programmatic vagueness resulted (and would result) in the kind of political flexibility that all parties need in patronage socio-political systems.50 The Punjab Muslim League was in practice a combination of splinter groups, factions and personal rivalries. Just tracing the complicated dynamics and in-fighting that characterised the late 1940s and early 1950s party was enough to threaten anyone’s sanity. The sanity most at risk was, of course, that of foreign observers and commentators. In the Punjab and, more broadly, South Asia, politics and party dynamics failed to follow the widely acknowledged and well-codified rules of traditional political theory.51 Factional jockeying was both the essence and the spice of Pakistani political life.52 Those local persons who had a vested interest in early postcolonial Pakistani politics were not taken in by appearances. At a liminal moment of the history of both the party and the new state, the increase in the personal influence of each and every Muslim League associate was the only manifesto that really mattered, and all the Council delegates were willing to debate.53 The seats that Hindus and Sikhs had left vacant in both local and provincial institutions, and the political opportunities that a state-in-the-making was creating, were sought-after perks. By the end of the 1940s, there had been no official final word regarding when the government would call either national or provincial elections. Nevertheless, the party was already embroiled in its members’ jockeying for power and their own place in the sun. Lobbying for a party slot at the elections implied a time-consuming hunt for allies. The distribution of party tickets was set to map the geography of power, hierarchies and party order throughout post-1947 Punjab.54 Politicians, party notables and middlemen were all playing for high stakes. Unsurprisingly then, participants from the Punjab attended the party convention in Karachi with the stated aim of having their ambitions backed by central party notables.55 These all-Pakistan party leaders had the Midas touch. For all its intangibility, their backing was a very valuable, if not at times the only, asset that allowed low-ranked officials to keep a grip on power as it was negotiated at the grass roots.56 Influential Muslim Leaguers were not charitable societies. Their patronage spelt, in turn, either the consolidation or the expansion of their own electoral base. Outside the country’s new nerve centres, even the average Punjabi-in-the-street showed some disregard for the programmatic and ideological weaknesses of the party. His support and, eventually, his vote hinged on his ability to secure material benefits through the good offices of Muslim League associates.57 Any news coming from the party provincial headquarters was immediately read against the grain of the umpteenth settling of scores between its different factions or local politicians’ attempts to increase their own clout.58 Still, refugee politicians’ minds were in turmoil. The Muslim League’s hazy agenda did not identify – even remotely – the party as the advocate of any particular group. The unstated aim was, of course,

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to present the League in a good light as the unifier of the nation. Yet, the party line more or less cut the migrant community and its needs out of any debate. Very scant formal reference was made to the topics that were dear to refugees’ hearts, namely the ending of the province’s existing land tenure arrangements, the containment of rampant corruption and widespread nepotism, and the right to a fair trial.59 An all-embracing but cloudy party agenda was a function of factional manoeuvring, but it turned into a concession for the League’s political opponents as well. Indeed, refugee political representatives considered this an early warning and a further confirmation of their future underrepresentation within those party and government ranks that implied the actual management of patronage. The party and institutional rift between the centre and the province was widening day by day. Punjabis had returned empty handed from the 1949 Muslim League Council, while their representation within the Constituent Assembly and the civil service did not mirror the actual weight of the most populous Pakistani province.60 The oft-repeated slogans “Pakistan [is and will be] the first biggest Muslim state” and the “fifth largest state in the world” were hollow promises for which migrants had no need.61 Furthermore, the reservation of provincial assembly seats were no guarantee of meaningful representation in those nerve centres that dealt with the refugee crisis on a daily basis.62 Pro-ruling party refugee associations felt themselves to be in deep water. The authorities had gone too far. It was Sirdar Abdus Sattari Faruqi, President of the All-Pakistan Muhajir League, who voiced their fears. Migrants’ pledge of support for the Muslim League “at any cost” in fact came at a price.63 “The Central and Provincial Governments” – he threatened in a veiled manner – “had not efficiently worked for the rehabilitation of refugees”.64 Faruqi’s understated warning was a reminder of refugees’ mounting frustration and, most importantly, conditions for winning their backing. Migrants regarded shifting alliances as much likely measure of last resort, should not the League affiliates showed some regard for their demands.65 Opposition politicians quickly jumped on the Muslim League bandwagon to launch their counter-attack. The past, present and future policies of the ruling party on the resettlement of refugees – the secretary of the Punjab Communist Party claimed – had turned into a fiasco.66 Whether in public or in private, opponents looking to erode Muslim League power did not mince their words. On 29 June 1949, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy entered the packed Lahore YMCA. Members and guests of the West Punjab Union of Journalists were waiting for his speech. Shortly after taking the floor, Suhrawardy asked those present to switch their recorders off.67 No word of his speech had to get out. Nevertheless, a British officer from the local High Commission who had slipped into the venue managed to note down a summary of what he had to say. “[Suhrawardy] shocked his mixed audience by stating that whilst refugees families were being compelled to sell their bodies of their womenfolk for bread, yet two such exalted statesmen as Zafrullah and Shahabuddin should announce that [. . .] Pakistan had completely solved its refugee problem”, the functionary

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 115 reported to his High Commissioner.68 The Bengali politician with all-Pakistan ambitions was just back from the refugee-saturated Punjabi city of Sialkot. Over there, Suhrawardy had witnessed “the great industries of that city were [. . .] in decay and dissolution, [and] the [refugee] workers [were] standing idly in the streets”.69 In his view, “the present mixture of contempt, cynicism and indifference [towards the refugee plight]” could be tolerated no longer.70 In the Punjab, Suhrawardy sought to challenge the prevailing position of the League through the exploitation of an ethnic political platform.71 Reportedly, he struck home. Refugees almost immediately crowned him as the champion of their grievances.72 His bitter criticism of the policies of the party in power and his call for “a vigorous solution of the refugee problem” caused widespread embarrassment among many League associates.73 Some of them had been no prophets in their own land. Indeed, since early 1948, they had been complaining vociferously about ministerial mismanagement of the humanitarian crisis and its fallout on the basis of party support.74 The latent potential of refugees’ discontent to undermine the power of the League was also crystal clear to a cunning old fox of Punjabi politics. In 1950, the Khan of Mamdot broke away from the party to found his own Jinnah Muslim League. Mamdot attacked Daultana’s party for its failure to adopt and implement consistent affirmative action policies on refugee resettlement in the province.75 Indeed, no one knew the state of affairs of refugee rehabilitation policies as thoroughly as Mamdot, Chief Minister of the Pakistani Punjab between 1947 and 1949. Furthermore, he, whose Ministry had tottered from one refugee protest to another and (according to an infuriated Jinnah) had showed no interest in their fate, was fully aware of the potential and the strength of refugees as a political and electoral basis.76 The Khan of Mamdot relied on his widely acknowledged reputation as a former party and institutional insider as a way to expose the ruling party. The League, he went on arguing while turning a blind eye to his personal rivalry with the ambitious Daultana, not only forgot to implement the promises made by the Quaid-i-Azam to the people, they have also failed to stand by the future program he laid before us. [. . .] To end unemployment and poverty and to guarantee education and health is the guiding principle and duty of a good government. The League Government has failed to perform this duty.77 The party and the executive, he argued, had failed to fulfil the expectation of the founding father of Pakistan. Their policies had been a disappointment for locals and refugees alike. How could they ever, the Khan of Mamdot implied, place themselves in the leadership of the country once again? In January 1951, amidst general astonishment, Suhrawardy announced that his Awami League had just merged with Mamdot’s Jinnah Muslim League to form the Jinnah Awami League.78 Since the foundation of Suhrawardy’s Awami League in March 1950, frenzied negotiations had been underway between its leader and

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the almost all the splinter groups operating within the Muslim League.79 Iftikharuddin and Shaukat Hayat had been identified as potential natural allies. At first sight, the merger between the Mamdot and Suhrawardy parties was an abrupt coup de théâtre. What bound together this odd couple was neither love at first sight nor an interesting case of opposites attracting. A small handbook on the post-1951 elections’ political dynamics of the Pakistani Punjab provides a much-needed solution to this enigma. Here, the Jinnah Awami League was described as the result of the merger of “Mamdot’s group [. . .] of landed gentry and moderate religious leaders [with] Suhrawardy’s [. . .] combination of refugees, orthodox Muslims and disappointed Muslim Leaguers”.80 A quick spot-the-difference exercise reveals the foundations on which the alliance was based. Both parties were ‘newcomers’ to the Punjabi political arena. Their status indicated a lack of integration within local communities, and a very limited, urban electoral base. Their merger broadened their respective core constituencies. Mamdot and Suhrawardy also had their eye on the large percentage of middle-class and unprivileged citizens who, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, would be entitled to vote. The wind of another electoral campaign imbued with religious symbolisms swept through the whole of Pakistani Punjab. On 17 July 1950, some 10,000 persons rallied at the Delhi Gate in Lahore under the banner of the Jamaat-i-Islami, visibly flagging up the relevance of an Islamic agenda to the local community.81 Exploiting the refugee-local split as a way of gathering support and votes would lead almost certainly to a personal debacle. The reservation of seats made it somehow politically and electorally irrelevant. Refugees themselves appeared to have had their religious sensitivity further sharpened. Prominent welfare associations that were rooted in Islam had been plugging many of the gaps present in the government schemes of resettlement. The Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam (Association for the Service of Islam) had stepped up its efforts, and its orphanages and education institutions were working at full stretch.82 Mamdot himself had handed over a share of refugee rehabilitation to the Jamaat-i-Islami and was now wooing Maududi and his followers again.83 Thus for the Jinnah Awami League, the contribution of moderate religious leaders and orthodox Muslims was worth its weight in gold. It put Mamdot and Suhrawardy in a stronger position. Gaining votes from that large section of the wavering local middle- and low-middle class voters who were new to electoral competitions, was now – albeit just formally – within their grasp. Seasoned Leaguers, however, were not concerned by the manoeuvring of the Jinnah Muslim League and the Awami League. From the very outset, Liaquat Ali Khan appeared self-confident, at times even bold. He immediately numbered his opponents’ political groups among the “mushroom parties” that sprung up almost overnight across the Punjab.84 Affiliates could sleep peacefully. Mamdot and Suhrawardy’s chances of success depended heavily upon their party’s potential to act as a sui generis ‘charitable institution’. Their power to steal supporters from the Muslim League was linked to their ability to redistribute benefits and resources – especially limited ones – among constituents.85 By opting out of the

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 117 Muslim League and consequently alienating all government support, Mamdot drastically reduced his room of manoeuvre. Suhrawardy’s non-Punjabi origins guaranteed that he lacked a firm grip on local networks of connections and alliances within the bureaucracy and state agencies. The reactions of Punjabi notables to the movements on the political front supported the idea that Liaquat Ali Khan was on the side of the angels. The Muslim League had really nothing to fear from its rivals. Despite Mamdot being their long-standing representative, almost all influential Punjabi zamindars did not follow him out of the League to support his new political venture.86 Allowing them access to government ears and hence to shape official land policies, the Muslim League umbrella was a far safer shelter for their assets. Local landlords were not the only ones who decided to carry on their own good fight within the party ranks. Abdul Sattar Khan Niazi was the leader of a religious spin-off group, the Khilafat-e-Pakistan. His former presidency of the Punjab Muslim League Student Federation and the Punjab Muslim League meant that he was one of the most influential politicians of the whole Punjab. Having joined the Awami League in 1950, he quickly turned his back on Suhrawardy and the Khan of Mamdot as soon as he saw which way the wind was blowing. As he slammed the door in their faces, he made it clear that “the League organisation should not [have been] allowed to play second fiddle to a lethargic Ministry which requires close vigilance by the parent organisations”.87 For their part, refugees watched Mian Iftikharuddin’s moves closely. Immediately after stepping down as the West Punjab Minister of Refugees and Rehabilitation following a row with Mamdot over tenancy reforms, Iftikharuddin had decided to remain within the League ranks. As the provincial elections approached, Iftikharuddin showed no interest in breaking his pledge of allegiance to the League. This allowed him not only to act as an annoying goad, but also to reassure his vote bank as far as his future political leverage was concerned.88 Iftikharuddin brought his followers round to joining his leftist pressure group inside the League.89 This, together with the Khilafat-e-Pakistan, would remain a real thorn in the Muslim League’s side in cities with high refugee-concentrations such as Lahore and Lyallpur in the months to come.90 No matter how political and social actors translated and understood them, socialism and religious conservatism were by no means polar opponents in late 1940s and early 1950s Punjab. As party hierarchies and balances of power revolved around the centre of gravity of personal or group interests and the redistribution of resources, politicians were gearing themselves ready to fight the length and breadth of the Punjab.

With friends like these . . . : checkmating political rivals His emissaries had done a really good job. As they announced to him that the Pir of Alipur had agreed to endorse his campaign, Muhammad Munir – candidate for the refugee seat in Sialkot X – could not hide his relief. The Pir of Alipur had played a vital role in the crucial 1946 elections. Head of one of the most important and renowned revivalist shrines in the whole of the province, he had devoted his

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energy to supporting and spreading the demands of the Muslim League.91 For Muhammad Munir having the Pir on his side was, thus, a great advantage. He felt that he had victory in his grasp. The personalisation of the political and campaign mechanisms that had been the hallmark of political developments among Punjabi Muslims during the Pakistan movement was again taking place up and down the province. If, in the earlier 1946 elections, pirs had channelled their support into rooting the Muslim League and of the idea of Pakistan among the rural masses, now they turned their hand to personally backing individual candidates. The slogan that the Pir of Alipur, together with other local religious leaders, coined for Muhammad Munir was simple, straightforward and, in subtle ways, morally persuasive. Casting a vote for his protégé in 1951, it seemed, would save anyone from eternal damnation and the displeasure of God.92 In the constituency of Gujrat XII things did not change. Then another key figure from the 1945–6 campaign decided to take the field once more. A Naqshbandi Sufi with close connections to the Ahle-Sunnat-o-Jamaat Ulama and a devoted supporter of the Quaid-i-Azam, Pir Jamaat Ali Shah defected to the ‘enemy’ and joined the ranks of the Jinnah Awami League. If his followers did not support its candidate Saeed Muhammad, they would incur his curse as well as that of the divine. In order to make his position even clearer, Pir Jamaat Ali Shah published a small leaflet to be distributed among his murids (followers). Its title – Ilahi Wajib ul-Azadi (‘On the Divine Duty of Freedom’) – spelt its contents. A vote for Mamdot and Suhrawardy’s candidate was described here as a “true service to the cause of Islam”.93 With a couple of different ingredients, the same recipe was even tested on Jhang III’s constituents. A tiny Shia majority village not far from Athara Hazari hosted a three-day meeting that was organised under the auspices of the Majlis-i-Izzar.94 As widely expected, voters were asked to respect the feelings of God and their imams. Voting for Abid Hussain Shah would tip the balance of the Divine Justice in favour of the salvation of their souls. In a context where politics was not for the faint-hearted, this exploitation of religious symbols along personal lines all too easily became a two-edged sword that opened new wounds on the body of a nation-in-the-making. Muhammad Arif Khan from the constituency of Jhang-I knew a thing or two about the dangerous dynamics that were inflaming the whole of the Punjab. Pir Khwaja Allah Bakhsh of Shujabad, Pir Qasim Ali Shah of Farid Mahmood Kahtia and a few maulvis lent a helping hand to its candidate Mian Faiz Muhammad. They started touring the villages of the constituency to support his candidacy, and held even a number of meetings in their shrines and mosques. Slogans that branded Shias as kafirs (unbelievers) and the enemies of Islam and Sunnis informed the bulk of their campaign in favour of their chosen nominee.95 Pakistan was advancing down a dangerous road. As it approached its fourth birthday, and with the only exception of its national flag and its currency, Pakistan was still searching for the ‘civic’ everyday symbols able to instil a sense of belonging to a wider community. RGA radios were – most probably – the only everyday symbol that spoke, at grassroots level, of the

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 119 Pakistan-ness to the housewife of a Peshawari neighbourhood, a passer-by in Quetta and a landlord in Karachi. “Built and tested in Pakistan for good listening in Pakistan’s climate”, as their advertisements claimed, they bound people together by turning Pakistan and its national community into a reassuring and tangible reality. Journalists of the Pakistan Broadcasting Service reported stories from Lahore, Khairpur, Kuchlak or Mardan. Unknown people in Multan sympathised with strangers in Badin in their sorrow, shared the joy of a family in distant Mardan and tried to live up to the very same political ideals of an activist in Mirpur. Nevertheless, Pakistan’s state emblem was still under discussion. Likewise, the words of the national anthem had yet to be revealed. In March 1950, during the state visit of the Shah of Iran, it had been played without lyrics. Pakistanis themselves seemed to agree on the idea that they did not agree on almost anything as regards their civic everyday symbols. “It is difficult” – ‘Housewife’ candidly admitted in her weekly column in the 21 November 1954 Sunday supplement of the Pakistan Times – “in a country such as ours, where there are so many races, where even the people of different provinces can be distinguished by dress, to lay down a hard and fast rule about national dress”.96 How dare you?, in a fit of a pique Ameen Tareen contended from Karachi in his late April 1955 letter to the editor of the very same newspaper. “The P[akistan]I[international]A[irlines] hostess” – he argued in relation to a recent decision of PIA’s officers – “will not wear ‘shalwar’ and ‘kameez’ but will instead use shirts while on duty. [. . .] The PIA authorities have evidently forgot that they are managing a Pakistani airline”.97 The protracted institutional and social babbling on the definition of Pakistan’s shared civic symbols of nationhood cleared the way for the exploitation of religious platforms. Mian Faiz Muhammad’s constituency acted as a mere sounding board. Jhang was a district where the migration of thousands of Partition refugees had resulted in a substantial reframing of its socio-demographical dynamics.98 In this context, the speeches of Pir Allah Bakhsh and Pir Qasim Ali Shah deserve to be taken seriously. In Jhang, their words defined the conceptual boundaries of Pakistani nationhood in exclusive terms. But in order to understand their actual relevance, we need to go back again to the 1945–6 provincial elections when Islamic symbolism had shaped the electoral campaign thanks to the activity of local pirs and sajjada nashins. These local religious leaders, as Gilmartin has pointed out, anticipated the future identity of Pakistan by first understanding and then spreading the idea of a religious and Sharia-based state.99 In those pre-independence months, a vote for the Muslim League also became a byword for Punjabi Muslim-ness. “Bhai, – local voters commented after having cast their vote – “if we did not vote for the Muslim League we would have become kafirs”.100 Now, in early 1950s Punjab, the shaping of everyday political identities was leading to a progressive ethnicisation – or, to put it better – a perilous sunni-isation of social relations and nation-building processes. Kafirs, as Pirs Bakhsh and Ali Shah made clear, were now Shias. Ghostly shapes loomed out of the ‘foggy’ debate centred on the relationship between religious infidelity, votes, ideas of belonging to a wider community and nationhood.

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Pirs Bakhsh and Ali Shah as well as the maulvis who supported Mian Faiz Muhammad not only hinted at dilemmas that would trouble Pakistan in future years, but they also instilled a specific everyday idea of belonging to both the local and national community. Their mosques and their shrines were far from being mere places of worship. They were potent forums of socialisation, where adherents performed religious rituals as well as more prosaic deeds.101 What happened in those premises was considered as khair, or a good act. In Jhang, refugees and locals could not ignore the dangerous logic that this twist entailed. At grassroots level, treating Shia neighbours – most of them locals – as infidels and ‘son-of-a-lesser-god’ members of the Pakistani nation was an award for religious bravery. God would certainly reward them with it in the afterlife. It must be noted that the district of Jhang was by no means an exception. Similar trends and ideas had surfaced elsewhere in the province immediately after the withdrawal of the British raj. The late 1940s and early 1950s Punjab had indeed experienced a progressive radicalisation of a peculiar deviation that re-framed national identities and dynamics along sectarian lines. Since the early months of Pakistan’s independence, Sir Girja, Secretary General at the Indian Minister of External Affairs, had repeatedly expressed his concern to his foreign counterparts at the marked “emphasis upon religion [Sunni Islam] as the basis of Pakistan”.102 Local Christians uttered the very same cry of pain and fright. “The community [Christians]” – recorded a journalist from The Times of London as early as January 1948 – “[. . .] is being persecuted and maltreated by those who believe that Pakistan should be completely Islamic and by rabid nationalists who associate the Christians with the British [. . .] and contend that Christians should not be allowed to remain in Pakistan”.103 Institutional figures, even at the highest levels, were no defenceless onlookers. In the early 1950s, the then Chief Minister of the Punjab toured his province to popularise the Grow More Food programme. During his speeches, foreign observers recorded, he “preached that Pakistan was achieved to enable Muslims to live according to their rights”, that the Ahmadiyas were bringing the Prophet into contempt and that therefore “we have no place for them”.104 Apparently, even the colours that the Electoral Commission picked to identify each party and the boxes in which ballots for them would eventually be cast were chosen to serve a very similar purpose. “The yellow colour [. . .] [associated with Sikhs] seems to have been deliberately assigned to us, as it enabled the Muslim Leaguers to vilify our candidates and to identify them with Sikhs and anti-Pakistanis [emphasis added]. This propaganda has some effect on ignorant villagers”, complained opposition politician Suhrawardy in a memorandum to the US authorities.105 Through the demarcation of a ‘border’ that separated insiders from outsiders in relation to cultural differences based on religion, this process of re-elaboration of the self proceeded inevitably to an early ethnicisation of social relations within the newly created national community.106 On a different level, the tendency to personalise electoral campaigns set the scene for a further strengthening of voter-representative bonds and for a stabilisation of the whole provincial political system. Trust, reputation and direct

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 121 knowledge of the individuals involved were the values that underpinned the intricate network of personal relationships within local society.107 On the eve of an election that was to be conducted on the new and wider basis of adult suffrage, pirs and sajjada nashins ‘anointed’ these principles as a way of administering electoral ‘transactions’. The jockeying for political power on the one hand combined with limited material resources on the other enthroned these local religious leaders as mediators and reliable guarantors of any interaction between a candidate and its constituents. The machineries that had safeguarded the British colonial system of political control could be seen to be operating once again. As in earlier times, religious leaders channelled political change by providing the means that were necessary for local society to learn to live with it.108 The body politic was thus playing by the same, well-known and probably reassuring rules that had informed the everyday life of people living under colonial rule. Terms, conditions and eventual rewards were clear and familiar to all. One Saeed, a refugee from Jullundhur, might have been a devotee of the Pir of Alipur but was probably a perfect stranger to Muhammad Munir. In turn, Munir’s face may have just been an anonymous image on the glossy billboards that Saeed noticed plastered across his suburb in the constituency of Sialkot X. The wheel was destined to turn full circle thanks to the intercession of the pir, who, by repairing the fabric of biraderi that Partition events had torn apart, represented a key point of intersection between Saeed and Muhammad’s personal and public lives. This system was not, of course, free from flaws and imperfections. As a consequence, candidates in the 1951 provincial elections deployed a wide range of remedies to counteract any possible threats to their success. On the day of the poll, private transport companies and van owners did a roaring trade. With their prices revised upwards, professional and makeshift drivers alike roamed around local constituencies to give a lift to the nearer polling station to those people whose names were on the lists with which they had been previously supplied by politicians.109 Surprisingly, however, the form of the ballot paper and voting procedures proved to be the real aces up the candidates’ sleeves. The counterfoil of every ballot paper stated the constituency, the number of the polling station and the number of the voter on the electoral roll.110 If voting was supposed to be confidential, then these details turned it into an open secret. Secrecy was further violated when, by sticking to the regulations printed on the outer foil, voters cast their “ballot paper in the ballot box of the colour allotted to the candidate for whom [. . .] [they wished] to vote”.111 As troops of party agents and workers literally garrisoned the entire network of West Punjab polling stations, no one could afford to renege on a promise.112 Electoral laws put an official seal on the rise of the socially well-rooted and favoured-based dynamics of mutual interdependency, ways of administering politics and the relationship between representatives and voters. This expedient allowed potential members of the Punjab Assembly to keep a very tight rein on the patronage mechanisms of punishment/reward at precisely the time when the introduction of adult suffrage and the arrival of millions of refugees called for a re-negotiation of hierarchies and balances of power.113 The high cost of activities that would have curbed opportunistic behaviour, was

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kept to a minimum. Candidates could afford the luxury of scrutinising the behaviour of each and every individual. Extrajudicial solutions were sought and implemented on several occasions across the whole province both during the campaign and on election day itself. Candidates easily by-passed legal requirements, frequently asserting the supremacy of a play-it-dirty politics over a bungling bureaucracy. “How do you get an elephant into a voting booth? Register him!”, urged a poster that was famously commissioned by the US Democratic Party.114 But in early 1950s Punjab registering a voter was easier said than done. The labyrinthine swarm of rules and regulation that governed the inclusion of individuals in the local electoral rolls produced very hastily prepared records. In Ward No. 9, Gujranwala, for instance, all the 22,000 persons who were entitled to vote were listed in alphabetical order but no clear information was provided with regards to their residence.115 Proper identification of voters was thus almost impossible. Unfamiliar to local people and to each other and unable to prove their identity through proper evidence, refugees not surprisingly represented the weakest link in the chain and a muchexploited loophole for cunning politicians.116 As they arrived at their local polling stations, many refugee voters found that their names had been left out of the rolls or witnessed ‘psychic’ phenomena such as dead men apparently walking and, even more importantly, voting.117 Some were allowed to vote well after the time limit or by, contrast, they discovered that unknowns had cast their vote on their behalf.118 In this electoral struggle, some members and supporters of the opposition parties were illegally detained and women brutally intimidated.119 The day of the election result in early April 1951 promised anger, relief, smiles and a few surprises. When the whistle for full time was blown, the Muslim League was leading by 143 seats to 54.120 By late July 1951 the curious political phenomenon of shifting alliances in order to suit personal needs had taken a heavy toll among the ranks of the Opposition parties, and resulted in a swelling of the Muslim League membership within the Assembly by 23 seats.121 No one however escaped his own fate or the future that he had carefully made for himself. Pirs and sajjada nashins hit the bull’s eye once more. Muhammad Munir, Abid Hussain Shah and Saeed Muhammad all won easy victories over their opponents.122 For their part, even biraderis did not fail to live up to the expectations of those voters and candidates whose family networks and alliances had survived the fury of Partition and subsequent resettlement policies. Abdul Hamid Khan, Sajjad Ali Khan, Zafar Hussain, Abdul Aziz and Altaf Mohy ud-Din would proudly cross the threshold of the building designed by Bazel M. Salune and take oath as members of the Punjab Assembly.123 Ejected in early 1951 from the Muslim League and thus deprived of the protection that the party granted its members and the followers of its members, Iftikharuddin and his new Azad Pakistan Party secured a single seat and an unsatisfying 2.4% of the total votes cast.124 Nevertheless refugees had unquestionably reshuffled the pack and altered the composition of the Assembly. At least 11 out of the 21 members who had benefited from the transfer of seats back in 1947 had either renounced the opportunity to run a campaign or lost their seats.125 Similarly, the refugee-saturated cities of Lahore,

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 123 Lyallpur, Jhang, Rawalpindi and Sialkot demanded a substantial re-focussing of the lenses through which hierarchies and balances were observed in both ‘normal’ and reserved-seats.126 A revamped provincial Assembly was thus undoubtedly a gamble with both the future and the past in terms of the fulfilment of electoral promises and members’ need to come to terms with their new role and responsibilities as state actors. Settlings of scores and blood feuds would steep Punjabi party politics and the region in blood. It was all about letting things take their course.

The after-match party of the 1951 elections In late 1952 the malaise of two zamindars and prominent members of the Punjab Assembly, Syed Naubahar Shah and Nasrullah Khan, reminded parliamentarians and fellow Muslim League associates of previous agreements and undertakings.127 The 1952 Punjab Tenancy (Amendment) Act and the party debate over possible reform of the tenant-landlord relationship were bitter bills to swallow. A vociferous campaign marked by vicious declarations and by the retaliatory decision to withdraw wheat from local markets and smuggle it to India was gaining momentum and meeting general approval among many Punjabi landlords and Muslim Leaguers. Reportedly at least 30 party members were ready to join the ranks of these two dissident zamindars and erect barricades in order to protect their interests from any further attempt to reform the primary sector.128 When Syed Naubahar Shah threatened to resign, Daultana caught him on the wrong foot and ordered his and Nasrullah Khan’s expulsion from the Muslim League. It was one of those cases when someone is used as a mouthpiece. Syed Naubahar Shah and Nasrullah Khan’s isolation from the party was tantamount to a marginalisation from the political nerve centre and to a debarment from their ‘right’ to milk the state apparata and effectively mould government policies. Other landlords and members of the Punjab Assembly received Daultana’s message loud and clear. The potential revolt was put down and, as an officer at the British High Commission in Lahore reported, “held in check at least for the time being”.129 But both Syed Naubahar Shah and Nasrullah Khan signed their own political death warrants. Their flirtatious attempts to climb onto the bandwagon of the Jinnah Awami League ran into the buffers of Suhrawardy’s resolute disapproval.130 The skyrocketing prices of atta (flour) and other food grains were lending weight and quality to the political platforms of all the opposition parties. In February 1952 the Jamaat-i-Islami, the Azad Pakistan Party and the Communist Party combined their efforts with the Islam League to organise a march in protest at the government’s inability to tackle the emergency.131 An 8,000-strong attendance spotlighted the potential of the issue in terms of both electoral and party successes.132 The sabotage of the Punjabi markets that had been concocted by the two ejected zamindars partially contributed to the price rise and epitomised the extent of outright resistance to any agrarian reform. Consequently, opposition leaders were not willing to lose popular support by taking Syed Naubahar Shah and Nasrullah Khan on board.133

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Despite the intrinsic weaknesses of his party, Suhrawardy’s sun did not appear to be about to set. Sir Khizr Hayat Tiwana, whose surname spelt decades of Punjabi political history, recorded that the year 1952 ended with authority of the leader of the Jinnah Awami League rapidly growing.134 The redistribution of taxpayers’ money was arousing widespread malcontent among rural refugees. The refugee tax was, the leader of the opposition Muhammad Afzal Cheema revealed during a parliamentary debate, being “spent in haphazard manner”.135 The government kept infringing the fundamental law of state patronage. The provincial Exchequer “collected [money] in one pool and then [. . .] spent it on the refugees in the whole Province”.136 The material benefits of a dedicated financial resource very rarely trickled down to the rural migrant community. Refugees grumbled loudly to their elected representative. For their part, provincial ministers stammered excuses. Nevertheless, sometimes even the most experienced politicians like Tiwana could make a mistake. From the very beginning, the Pakistani press showed a certain knack of gossiping and plotting conspiracies. Rumours now circulated that the strains within the coalition between Khan of Mamdot and the Bengali politician Suhrawardy were shaking the Punjab branch of the Jinnah Awami League to its roots.137 It was no secret that the appointment of Suhrawardy to the Cabinet would have calmed down his polemic against the government.138 The cracks that were damaging the coping stone of the alliance started to appear in the public domain in April 1953 and set the tone for speculations that would fill newspapers over the following days. The Khan of Mamdot rebuffed Suhrawardy’s nomination as a member of the party’s Working Committee, sending his political companion in arms into a rage.139 A couple of interesting pieces of news and a fresh proposal coming from the Punjab Muslim League headquarters were the straws that eventually broke the camel’s back. Under the pressure of the fallout of the 1953 antiAhmadiya riots,140 Daultana stepped down as both Chief Minister and President of the Punjab Muslim League. Firoz Khan Noon took his place and immediately sketched out his own course of action. His political platform was encapsulated by the introduction of a method of allotment of evacuee agricultural lands that stuck closely to the shares of the properties that refugee landlords had left behind in India.141 Suhrawardy vehemently rejected the proposal as, in his own words, this “was done at the expenses of the poorer refugees”.142 He then went too far and urged a nationalisation of all landed property. Unsurprisingly, the statement brought the situation within the Jinnah Awami League’s ranks to breaking point. Mamdot, who felt very exposed, stormed out, slamming the party’s door behind him. In the early years of Pakistan’s history, political love affairs rarely lasted for a long time and old flames were rekindled quite frequently. In November 1953 Mamdot made his triumphal return to the Muslim League. A convention of the Punjab Jinnah League, which had returned to the land of militant politics after two years of inactivity, voted for the amalgamation of the party with the Muslim League and allowed its 17 members of the Punjab Assembly to cross the floor.143 Politically speaking, Suhrawardy had become a marked man. In September 1953 a few notable Punjabi political leaders declared that the distinction between

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 125 ‘locals’ and ‘refugees’ had become meaningless by then.144 All those black flags that welcomed the leader of the Jinnah Awami League to Lahore on 1 May 1954 brought his political experience at the provincial level to an end, and forecast the continuing marginalisation of refugees’ claims and needs from mainstream party debates.145 ***** This chapter has argued that the early years of Pakistan’s political and parliamentary history cannot be viewed as an ‘abject failure’.146 If considered and analysed as a closed-unit system, the province of the Punjab was caught up in dynamics that progressively stabilised the political and institutional arena. The mutual interplay of party dynamics, electoral rules and local socio-anthropological features produced the ‘antibodies’ that protected the body politics from the germs of instability and unruliness. Indeed, the resettlement and rehabilitation of refugees on the lands of West Punjab provides us with an excellent prism through which this phenomenon can be carefully observed. With both institutional actors and civil society reflecting upon the representation of Partition refugees within the Punjab Assembly, politicians and bureaucratic cadres played up their mutual interdependency. The dislocation that had resulted from the migration of millions of people and the scramble for limited public resources had prompted politics and bureaucracy to increase their reliance on patronage values and personal ties. Consequently playing by the rules of politics meant playing by the rules of the local society. Traditional religious figures such as pirs and sajjada nashins added the icing on the cake by channelling political change and helping to provide viable political platforms. Still, was this enough to create a nation and instil a sense of belonging to it?

Notes 1 T. Ali, Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); M. Ayoob, “Dateline Pakistan: A Passage to Anarchy?”, Foreign Policy, 59 (1985), pp. 154–73; C. Baxter, ed., Pakistan on the Brink: Politics, Economics and Society (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004); R. Jahan, Pakistan: Failure in National Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); A. Kapur, Pakistan in Crisis (London: Routledge, 1991); A. H. Nadeem, Pakistan: The Political Economy of Lawlessness (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002); P. Oldenburg, India, Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths (London: Routledge, 2010); J. B. Owen, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); F. Shaikh, Making Sense of Pakistan (London: Hurst & Co, 2009). 2 M. Waseem, Politics and the State in Pakistan (Lahore: Progressive Publishers, 1989), pp. 112–13. 3 Jalal, The State of Martial Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); S. Mahmood, “Decline of the Pakistan Muslim League and Its Implications (1947–54)”, Pakistan Journal of History and Culture, 15, 2 (1994), pp. 68–89; Y. Samad, A Nation in Turmoil: Nationalism and Ethnicity in Pakistan, 1937–58 (New Delhi: Sage, 1995).

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4 This is, for instance, the case of T. Kamran, “Early Phase of Electoral Politics in Pakistan: 1950s”, South Asian Studies, 24, 1 (2009), pp. 257–82; M. Waseem, Democratisation in Pakistan: A Study of 2002 Elections (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 10. Sayyed Vali Reza Nasr attempted to plug this gap in his 1998 on the history of the Jamaat-i-Islami in independent Pakistan. His analysis is nevertheless restricted to the aim of his research. See, S. V. R. Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i-Islami of Pakistan (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 116–46. 5 Punjab Gazette, 29 February 1952, UPL. 6 K. Post, The Nigerian Federal Elections of 1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 391. 7 Extract from UKHC (Lahore) Report – POL 9324/48, 4 July 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 8 Extract from Report from Deputy UKHC (Lahore) – POL 10384/48, 30 December 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 9 Political Situation in West Punjab – July 1948, 2 August 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 10 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 3 July 1949. 11 The very first elections had been held in the princely states of Khairpur and Bahawalpur in 1949. 12 A. R. Wilder, The Pakistani Voter: Electoral Politics and Voting Behaviour in the Punjab (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 17. See also Jalal, The State of Martial Rule, p. 193. 13 I. Ahmad, Pakistan General Elections: 1970 (Lahore: South Asia Institute [University of the Punjab], 1976), p. 7. 14 West Punjab Gazette, 5 August 1949, UPL. 15 Ibid. 16 West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 23 April 1949, UPL and West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 26 April 1949, UPL. 17 West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 28 October 1949, UPL. 18 Ibid. 19 W. Singer, “Women’s Politics and Land Control in an Indian Election: Lasting Influence of the Freedom Movement in North Bihar”, in India Votes: Alliance Politics and Minority Governments in the Ninth and Tenth General Elections, eds. H. A. Gould and S. Ganguly (Boulder-San Francisco-Oxford: Westview Press, 1993), p. 183. 20 See issues of Imroze (Lahore) and Pakistan Times (Lahore), January–November 1949. 21 Prospects for Refugee Representation and Democratic Elections in the West Punjab – Confidential No. 23, 4 March 1949, NND 765024, NARA. 22 Ibid. 23 P. Norris, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behaviour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 230–1. 24 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates (Legislature), 4 March 1953, PCSL. 25 Ibid. 26 Government of Pakistan, Electoral Reforms Commission Report (Karachi, 1956), p. 1, PCSL. 27 On the relevance of personal meetings and door-to-door campaigns in South Asian electoral contests, see K. Subha, Karnataka Panchayat Elections 1955: Process, Issues and Membership Profile (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1997), p. 27. 28 Punjab Gazette, 23 February 1953, UPL. 29 Infra, p. 85. 30 Punjab Gazette, 23 February 1953, UPL. 31 K. Chandra, “Counting Heads: A Theory Voter and Elite Behaviour in Patronage Democracies”, in Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic

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32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

Accountability and Political Competition, eds. H. Kitschelt and S. I. Wilkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 93. Punjab Gazette, 20 February 1952, UPL. Punjab Gazette, 20 February 1951, UPL; West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 23 June 1950, UPL. Punjab Gazette, 20 February 1951, UPL. S. I. Wilkinson, “Explaining Changing Patterns of Party-Voter Linkages in India”, in Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition, eds. H. Kitschelt and S. I. Wilkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 126. Pakistan Muslim League. Meeting of the Council – POL 12044/49, 24 March 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. IT to CRO – OPDOM No. 17, 3 May 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. M. Mines, “The Political Economy of Patronage, Preeminence, and the State in Chennai”, in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, p. 43. H. K. Ullah, Vying for Allah’s Vote: Understanding Islamic Parties, Political Violence and Extremism in Pakistan (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014), p. 36. Dawn (Karachi), 28 December 1949. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Pakistan Muslim League. Meeting of the Council – POL 12044/49, 24 March 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. Dawn (Karachi), 28 December 1949. R. Gunther and L. Diamond, “Species of Political Parties: A New Typology”, Party Politics, 9, 2 (2003), pp. 171–6. Ibid. Pakistan Muslim League. Meeting of the Council – POL 12044/49, 24 March 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. Ibid. Ullah, Vying for Allah’s Vote, p. 49; N. van de Walle, “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: The Evolution of Political Clientelism in Africa”, in Patrons, Clients and Policies, pp. 62–3. On this point, see also C. Spiess, “Epilogue: Rethinking Party Theory in the Light of South Asian Experience”, Political Parties in South Asia, eds. S. K. Mitra and C. Spiess (West Point, CT: Praeger Books, 2004), p. 331. Ullah, Vying for Allah’s Vote, p. 19. Extract from OPDOM No. 42 (Part II) from UKHC (Pakistan) – POL 127/C/2/3, 12 November 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. K. Chandra and C. Parmar, “Party Strategies in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly Elections, 1996”, Economic and Political Weekly, 32, 5 (1997), p. 215. A-1, 4 January 1949, NND 765024, NARA. S. I. Wilkinson, “Explaining Changing Patterns of Party-Voter Linkages in India”, in Patrons, Clients and Policies, p. 126; K. Subha, Karnataka Panchayat Election 1995 (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1997), p. 28. Chandra, “Counting Heads: A Theory of Voter and Elite Behaviour in Patronage Democracies”, pp. 90–1. The Muslim League, West Punjab – Despatch No. 385/451, 12 June 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA; Letter from C. W. Lewis, Jr. to H. A. Doolittle, Esq., 28 September 1948, NND 958418, NARA; Internal Politics – Despatch No. 118, n.d., NND 842450, NARA. Analysis of Communist Propaganda in Pakistan in 1951, 25 February 1952, NND 842430, NARA.

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60 Jalal, The State of Martial Rule, pp. 82–3. 61 Communist Party Activities – Despatch No. 136, 23 March 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 62 On meaningful representation, see K. Chandra, “The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur”, The Journal of Asian Studies, 59, 1, 2000, pp. 43–6. 63 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 18 January 1951. 64 Ibid. 65 Report of the Heinz Mission to Pakistan, n.d., NND 897209, NARA; Communist Party Activities – Despatch No. 136, 23 March 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 66 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 10 August 1950. 67 Speech of Mr. Suhrawardy given at Y.M.C.A. (Lahore) under the auspices of the West Punjab Union of Journalists, 29 June 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Political ethnicity is understood here as defined in K. Chandra, “What Is an Ethnic Group?”, Party Politics, 17, 2 (2011), pp. 151–69. 72 Despatch No. 389/1504 – POL 15204/1949, 15 July 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. 73 Ibid. 74 Communist Party Activities – Despatch No. 136, 23 March 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 75 Resignation of the Khan of Mamdot from the Muslim League and the Formation of Jinnah Muslim League, 1 November 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 76 Mudie Papers, MSS. EUR F.164/19, IOR. 77 Resignation of the Khan of Mamdot from the Muslim League and the Formation of Jinnah Muslim League, 1 November 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 78 Political Handbook of the Lahore Consular District, n.d., NND 938750, NARA. 79 Extract OPDOM No. 22, 31 October 1950, DO 35/3178, UKNA. 80 Ibid. 81 Peace Week in Lahore, 28 July 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 82 Child Welfare Organisation in Pakistan – Despatch No. 303, 1957, NND 948832, NARA. The Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam was founded in 1884 by Khalifa Hameedud-Din. In its wide network of schools and orphanages, Muslim girls were taught mathematics, the Quran, Urdu and crafts. Many prominent Muslim Leaguers patronised its activities. 83 Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, pp. 116–28. 84 Resignation of the Khan of Mamdot from the Muslim League and the Formation of Jinnah Muslim League, 1 November 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 85 Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, p. 57. 86 Internal Politics – Despatch No. 118, n.d., NND 842450, NARA. 87 A-29, 6 December 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 88 Political Alignments in the West Punjab – Confidential No. 25, 28 November 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 89 Communist Party Activities in Pakistan – Despatch No. 136, 3 March 1948, NND 765024, NARA; Despatch No. 386 (451), 12 July 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. 90 Despatch No. 386 (451), 12 July 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. 91 Gilmartin, Empire and Islam, p. 214. 92 Punjab Gazette, 15 February 1952, UPL. 93 Punjab Gazette, 7 March 1952, UPL. 94 Punjab Gazette, 15 February 1952, UPL. 95 Ibid. 96 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 21 November 1954.

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 129 97 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 24 April 1955. 98 On this point, see M. Waseem, T. Kamran, M. A. Ali and T. Riikonen, Dilemmas of Pride and Pain: Sectarian Conflict and Conflict Transformation in Pakistan: Working Paper 48 (Birmingham: Research and Development (Research Program) – International Development Department [University of Birmingham], 2010), pp. 51–72. 99 Gilmartin, “Religious Leaders”, pp. 516–17. 100 Metcalf and Metcalf, A Concise History, p. 241. 101 Mughal, “Time, Space and Social Change in Rural Pakistan”, pp. 175–80. 102 Memorandum of Conversation, 31 October 1949, NND 897209, NARA. 103 The Times (London), 26 January 1948. 104 Report on Pakistan, 18 May 1953, NND 897209, NARA. 105 Punjab Elections of 1951. A criticism of Suhrawardy – Enclosure No. 1, 5 June 1951, NND 842430, NARA. 106 On this point, see also F. Barth, “Introduction”, in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Cultural Difference, ed. F. Barth (Boston: Little Brown, 1969), pp. 15–16. 107 Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, pp. 49–58. 108 D. B. C. O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 179–89. 109 Punjab Gazette, 15 February 1952, UPL; Punjab Gazette, 22 February 1952, UPL. 110 West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 23 December 1950, UPL. 111 Ibid. 112 Punjab Gazette, 22 February 1952, UPL. 113 R. A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 16; J. H. Whyte, “Landlord Influence at Elections in Ireland, 1760–1885”, English Historical Review, 80 (1965), pp. 740–9. 114 Poster commissioned by the Republican Party, National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Centre – Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 115 Punjab Elections of 1951. A criticism of Suhrawardy – Enclosure No. 1, 5 June 1951, NND 842430, NARA. 116 Ibid. 117 Punjab Gazette, 15 February 1952, UPL. 118 Punjab Elections of 1951. A criticism of Suhrawardy – Enclosure No. 1, 5 June 1951, NND 842430, NARA. 119 Punjab Gazette, 15 February 1952, UPL; Punjab Gazette, 22 February 1952, UPL. 120 Elections in Pakistan, 24 April 1956, NND 937328, NARA. 121 M. R. Afzal, Political Parties in Pakistan, 1947–58 (Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies, 2001), Vol. I, p. 99. 122 Punjab Gazette, 2 April 1951, UPL. 123 Ibid. 124 The Dawn (Karachi), 30 March 1951. 125 Punjab Gazette, 2 April 1951, UPL. 126 Ibid. 127 Extract from Lahore Report 25/52, 19 December 1952, DO 35/5153, UKNA. 128 Internal Politics – Despatch No. 118, n.d., NND 842450, NARA. 129 Extract from Lahore Report 25/52, 19 December 1952, DO 35/5153, UKNA. 130 Ibid. 131 Riot in Lahore – Despatch No. 146, 27 February 1952, NND 842430, NARA. 132 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 25 February 1952. 133 Extract from Lahore Report 25/52, 19 December 1952, DO 35/5153, UKNA. 134 Extract from Lahore Report 24/52, 5 December 1952, DO 35/5152, UKNA. 135 Punjab Assembly Debates, 2 March 1954, PSCL. 136 Ibid.

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137 Extract from Fortnight Report from UKHC (Lahore) for the Fortnight ending on 5th May 1953, 5 May 1953, DO 35/5152, UKNA. 138 Extract from Lahore Report 3/53, 5 January 1953, DO 35/5152, UKNA. 139 Extract from Lahore Report, 24 April 1953, DO 35/5152, UKNA. 140 On this point see, D. Abenante, “The Roots of Political Instability in Pakistan: The Anti-Qadiani Controversy, 1949–1953”, Sociologia, 3 (2000), pp. 3–21; A. U. Qasmi, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (London-New YorkDelhi: Anthem Press, 2014). 141 Extract from Lahore Report II, 4 June 1953, DO 35/5152, UKNA. 142 Ibid. 143 Extract from Fortnight Report from Acting Deputy HC (Lahore) for the Fortnight ending 1st December 1953, 1 December 1953, DO 35/5153, UKNA. 144 Dawn (Karachi), 3 September 1953. 145 Lahore Report Nr. 39, 7 May 1954, DO 35/5153, UKNA. 146 I. Talbot, Pakistan: A Modern History (New York-Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 126.

Bibliographical references Abenante, D. “The Roots of Political Instability in Pakistan: The Anti-Qadiani Controversy, 1949–1953”, Sociologia, 3 (2000), pp. 3–21. Afzal, M. R. Political Parties in Pakistan, 1947–58. Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies, 2001. Ahmad, I. Pakistan General Elections: 1970. Lahore: South Asia Institute (University of the Punjab), 1976. Ali, T. Can Pakistan Survive? The Death of a State. Harmondsworth: Penguin,1983. Ayoob, M. “Dateline Pakistan: A Passage to Anarchy?”, Foreign Policy, 59 (1985), pp. 154–73. Barth, F., ed. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organisation of Cultural Difference. Boston: Little Brown,1969. Baxter, C., ed. Pakistan on the Brink: Politics, Economics and Society. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004. Chandra, K. “The Transformation of Ethnic Politics in India: The Decline of Congress and the Rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party in Hoshiarpur”, The Journal of Asian Studies, 59, 1 (2000), pp. 26–61. ——— “What Is an Ethnic Group?”, Party Politics, 17, 2 (2011), pp. 151–69. ——— and Parmar, C. “Party Strategies in the Uttar Pradesh Assembly Elections, 1996”, Economic and Political Weekly, 32, 5 (1997), pp. 214–22. Dahl, R. A. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. Gilmartin, D. “Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab”, Modern Asian Studies, 13, 3 (1979), pp. 485–517. ——— Empire and Islam. Punjab and the Making of Pakistan. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. Gould, H. A. and Ganguly, S., eds. India Votes: Alliance Politics and Minority Governments in the Ninth and Tenth General Elections. Boulder-San Francisco-Oxford: Westview Press, 1993. Gunther, R. and Diamond, L. “Species of Political Parties: A New Typology”, Party Politics, 9, 2 (2003), pp. 167–99.

Punjab Assembly, party seats, electoral boxes 131 Jahan, R. Pakistan: Failure in National Integration. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972. Jalal, A. The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kamran, T. “Early Phase of Electoral Politics in Pakistan: 1950s”, South Asian Studies, 24, 1 (2009), pp. 257–82. Kapur, A. Pakistan in Crisis. London: Routledge, 1991. Kitschelt, H. and Wilkinson, S. I., eds. Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Mahmood, S. “Decline of the Pakistan Muslim League and Its Implications (1947–54)”, Pakistan Journal of History and Culture, 15, 2 (1994), pp. 68–89. Metcalf, B. D. and Metcalf, T. R. A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Mines, M. Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Mitra, S. K., Enskat, M., and Spiess, C., eds. Political Parties in South Asia. West Point, CT: Praeger Books, 2004. Mughal, M. A. “Time, Space and Social Change in Rural Pakistan: An Ethnographic Study of Jhokwala Village, Lodhran District”, Ph.D. diss., University of Durham, 2014. Nadeem, A. H. Pakistan: The Political Economy of Lawlessness. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Nasr, S. V. R. The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama’at-i-Islami of Pakistan. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Norris, P. Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. O’Brien, D. B. C. The Mourides of Senegal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Oldenburg, P. India, Pakistan, and Democracy: Solving the Puzzle of Divergent Paths. New York: Routledge, 2010. Owen, J. B. Pakistan: Eye of the Storm. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Piliavsky, A., ed. Patronage as Politics in South Asia. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Post, K. The Nigerian Federal Elections of 1959. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. Qasmi, A. U. The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan. LondonNew York-Delhi: Anthem Press, 2014. Samad, Y. A Nation in Turmoil: Nationalism and Ethnicity in Pakistan, 1937–58. Delhi: Sage, 1995. Shaikh, F. Making Sense of Pakistan. London: Hurst & Co., 2009. Subha, K. Karnataka Panchayat Election 1995: Process, Issues and Membership Profile. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1997. Talbot, T. Pakistan: A Modern History. New York-Basingstone: Palgrave, 2005. Ullah, H. K. Vying for Allah’s Vote: Understanding Islamic Parties, Political Violence and Extremism in Pakistan. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2014. Waseem, M. Politics and the State in Pakistan. Lahore: Progressive Publishers, 1989. ——— Democratisation in Pakistan: A Study of 2002 Elections. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006. ——— Kamran, T., Ali, M. A., and Riikonen, T. Dilemmas of Pride and Pain: Sectarian Conflict and Conflict Transformation in Pakistan Working Paper 48. Birmingham:

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Research and Development (Research Program) – International Development Department (University of Birmingham), 2010. Whyte, J. H. “Landlord Influence at Elections in Ireland, 1760–1885”, English Historical Review, 80, 317 (1965), pp. 740–60. Wilder, A. R. The Pakistani Voter: Electoral Politics and Voting Behaviour in the Punjab. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1990.

5

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Self-portraits in spherical mirrors: Partition refugees and the elaboration of the ‘basic (dis)order’ of Pakistan As talks on the new Constitution plodded on into the 1950s, the everyday interaction between institutions and state authorities within Pakistan and across the border with India took the centre-stage by replacing the Constituent Assembly. The early – cloudy – engagement of local authorities with wider debates over the role of institutions, foreign policy and the consolidation of a national community frequently softened the resilience of the particular social structures that underpinned local politics and its electoral dynamics. The difficulties of the federal and the provincial government in facing up to nation- and state-building processes have been acknowledged for their ‘centripetal effects’. “There is a deep-seated jealousy and an aberrant inferiority complex” – pointed out a US attaché in a 1956 memorandum – “among many Pakistanis over India’s abilities and achievements”.1 These feelings, coupled with the paranoid fear of an imminent fatal attack from India, paved the way for the forming of (what Jalal has described as) a state of martial rule.2 Pakistan’s obsessions, self-perceived weaknesses and bungled attempts to dovetail its multiple and composite identities reverberated through the day-today management of the persisting humanitarian crisis that was Partition and the subsequent need to resettle millions of refugees. Rehabilitation practices almost immediately became sucked into the competing narratives on Pakistan’s polity and ‘ship of state’, and hence affected the ways in which local authorities instilled a sense of belonging or feelings of citizenship. The need to accommodate millions of destitute persons mingled with a quest to re-define the system of government, the morbid attachment to charismatic political figures, the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and freedom of the press. It largely contributed to the shaping the underlying basic norms and order – perhaps even the only ones that have survived coups d’état and revisions – that in time informed the drafting of the Constitutions of Pakistan.3 Contrary to popular belief, India and Pakistan’s dispute over Kashmir did not provide the tinder for the early, and enduring, rivalry that emerged between India and Pakistan. Refugees and their places of origin and/or status became the very first serious test of South Asian regional stability.4 ‘Manichean’ distinctions

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between migrants from agreed and non-agreed areas and the mapping of evacuee properties operated as the prism through which Pakistan’s paranoia and troubled relationship with India during this period was revealed. The diplomacy of the unspoken subtleties that balked any hope for a peaceful settlement of the controversies that divided the two newly created independent states, set the pace for the troubled future of regional relations. In addition, the idea of Pakistan from the outset had to compete with the resistance of pre-existing local identities and provincial feuds. As the burgeoning numbers of refugees spilled over and were relocated to neighbouring provinces, the federal authorities had to rule with an iron rod in order to instil a stronger feeling of belonging to a wider national community among both ordinary citizens and the country’s various provincial authorities.5 Coalescing these different sections and groups was a mandatory element of institutional attempts at consolidating the Pakistani nation. All for one and one for all. Pakistan, its nation and state institution could not wait. The sections in Chapter Five first explore the ways in which the resettlement of Partition refugees in West Punjab made an impact on the relationship between the central and federal authorities, institution-building processes, the militarisation of the everyday and the forming of an informed public opinion and public sphere. They then contextualise the 1950s need to tackle the humanitarian emergency resulting from Partition within the larger framework of India and Pakistan’s mutual establishment of diplomatic relations, and the attempts to harmonise relationships between the different provinces of the newly established state.

All that glitters is not gold: refugees, resettlement policies and the challenge of creating an everyday state The office was tiny and slightly claustrophobic. Heaped up everywhere, stacks of paper sent out a clearly perceivable musty smell. A civil servant took his eyes off the newspaper. “Speak of the devil, and he is bound to appear”, he mumbled. It was a day of informal meetings at the Punjab Assembly. A Minister had just entered the room to collect a copy of those documents that he needed. As he sneaked a look at the newspaper, the member of the provincial Cabinet understood immediately what the functionary who was in front of him thought. He too had read that day’s edition of Dawn while having breakfast. The first couple of lines had been enough to spoil his appetite and his day. Both the Pakistan and the Punjab provincial governments were therein severely reprimanded for their inability to cope with the crisis that had arisen from the massive migration of millions of persons.6 In these early post-Partition days, the refugee emergency was a stark but accurate reflection of the state of affairs that existed within the institutional nerve centres of West Punjab and the rest of Pakistan. The columnist who set down his thoughts and his firm rebuke in a vitriolic editorial touched a raw nerve. Government authorities were mishandling attempts at sharing the burden of rehabilitating the refugees. The tension between the Pakistan and the West Punjab Cabinet was

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 135 palpable. No later than November 1947, three provincial ministers crossed swords with the central government and threatened to resign. The repeated interference by the centre in the management and early resettlement of the refugees had sent Punjabi authorities into a rage.7 One of them actually threw in the sponge and resigned. The situation, Mian Iftikharuddin revealed in his letter of resignation on 2 November 1947, was excruciating. He – the provincial Minister of Resettlement and Rehabilitation of the most affected region – claimed to have no “full control over his own department [. . .] and had not had a free hand in the shaping of refugee policy”.8 The desire of central institutions to shape and control resettlement policies – his j’accuse went on – tied him and his officers down to unreasonable decisions.9 All things considered, as Iftikharuddin’s line of reasoning implied, it was the West Punjab government that was paying the bill – admittedly a huge one – for refugee rehabilitation. Projections left no room for doubt or speculation. By the end of March 1950, the West Punjab Exchequer would have to pay out more than Rs. 80,000,000 for the maintenance and the early accommodation of Partition refugees.10 Unofficial reports claimed, however, that the figures might have been higher. Local districts did not keep any record of the financial sacrifices they were making to fund the rehabilitation of the migrant community.11 Ministers candidly admitted that they had lost count of the expenses they had incurred in the early months of independence.12 “The Government” – revealed one of them – “did everything they could regardless of cost [. . .] using up [even] their food reserves”.13 The drastic fall in local revenues placed a further strain on those provincial public finances that would soon run up an astonishing Rs. 68,500,000 debt.14 For their part, grants-in-aid and loans that were being released by central authorities were mere tiny drops in the bucket. In March 1950, the Government of Pakistan set the bar for its funding at Rs. 30,750,000.15 The sum met less than half of the ‘officially’ declared financial needs of the Punjabi cabinet. Needless to say, the frequent waves of indecision regarding resettlement expenditures and policies led by the mid-1950s to a nerve-wracking demarcation dispute. “You try to transfer your responsibility to the Centre and the Centre transfers the responsibility to you and you go on hoodwinking the people [refugees] from the start to finish”, an irritated C. E. Gibbon accused the then Chief Minister Malik Firoz Khan Noon.16 His was a call to duty and maturity. Federal and provincial authorities frequently acted like two pushy aunties who were competing for their own share of family power. “There was no discipline” – noted Hector Bolitho during a meeting with US consular authorities – “no two members of government ministers or permanent service men worked together, because they could not trust each other”.17 Unsurprisingly perhaps, this whirl of mutual allegations and institutional skirmishes dragged down even those agencies that were being set up to smooth over difficulties and controversies. Established in October 1947 with the declared aim of coordinating the rehabilitation policies, the Pakistan-Punjab Joint Refugee Council soon turned into the umpteenth battlefield where the two contenders challenged each other to a duel.18 The institutional ‘memorandum of association’ of this joint authority did not bode well by having a considerable embryonic

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vice of form. Admittedly, it justified any eventual misuse of power on the part of the central authorities. Invested with the power of asking provincial officials to submit reports without previous authorisation from the provincial minister, the Joint Refugee Council attracted the wrath of West Punjabi authorities.19 Ministers banged their fists on the table, and perceived institutional sin found their transgressors out. In late March 1948 Chief Minister of the Punjab, the Khan of Mamdot pointed his finger at the Federal Minister for the Resettlement and Rehabilitation of Refugees, Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan, who was accused of taking action without previous consulting his provincial counterpart.20 As expected, broadsides over personal political rivalries and rumours of ‘palace conspiracies’ would foul the institutional debate and allow the matter as well as the problems to fester. In spite of the eventual release of soothing statements, the aggrieved would not forget but rather come out with the new ‘old story’ of jurisdictional limits at the earliest opportunity.21 And precisely this happened in 1956. The President of Pakistan – as that year’s Constitution spelt out – authoritatively reserved the right to give directions to and legislate on behalf of a province, should “the security or economic life of Pakistan or any part thereof, [. . .] [be] threatened [. . .] by internal disturbances beyond the power of a Provincial Government to control”.22 The comedy of errors and manners played out by members of the Constituent and provincial assembly reverberated around the attempts by the Pakistani state to instil a sense of institutional belonging among the refugees. “The [refugees] are now an essential and valued element in our life” – Daultana made it clear in February 1952 – “and it must be our constant and sacred endeavour to heal from the soul the sting of the memory of unspeakable suffering, both of body and mind, which they have undergone”.23 His words cunningly echoed the speech that he had delivered as Minister of Finance in the same room back in 1948. Now, in his capacity as Chief Minister, Daultana reaffirmed his commitment to the rehabilitation of refugees. As he pointed out in his somewhat purple prose, “every year that has passed since, every year with its own history of sufferings heroically borne and of endeavours magnificently justified has confirmed [. . .] [him] in the views and the hopes [. . .] [he] then expressed”.24 His pledge as well as those of past and present governments to put an end to refugees’ hardships never appeared to be far-fetched. They had been materialising in the hundreds of channels through which funding flowed into refugee pockets. Fee-waiver concessions and stipends for students or substantial rebates on rents and taxes aimed at not leaving any refugee lagging behind.25 Under the shadow of Anarkali’s tomb, a committee of local officers arranged marriages for abducted women who were hosted in temporary structures.26 The profiles of “unmarried [men] or widowers with no issues [. . .] [and] no more than 30 years of age” were screened and then matched with those of unfortunate girls “particularly trained in cooking, sowing and laundry”.27 The wellknown and legendary slave lady was getting her own peculiar revenge. Provincial government employees and prominent politicians turned into careful matchmakers and made the rooms of the Punjab Civil Secretariat into a marriage bureau. The provincial scheme of protecting refugees’ access to their welfare was, however, not in line with the federal one. “The Government [of Pakistan]

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 137 believes” – the then Federal Minister of Refugees and Rehabilitation Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi hit back in 1953 – “that the refugees should be able to stand on their own feet and not be dependent upon any system of dole whatever its shape may be”.28 Since the very early years of independence, the Government of Pakistan had proved unwilling to back the dependency culture that the measures of its provincial counterpart – although frequently unwittingly – encouraged. After all, even God helps those who help themselves. The Pakistan Refugee Rehabilitation Finance Corporation Ordinance Act was only one among the hundreds of laws that embodied this motto and the rationale behind federal attempts at moulding refugees’ sense of belonging to a wider institutional community. Promulgated in 1948, it set up a fund to advance the rehabilitation of all artisan refugees.29 Yet, as the British High Commissioner found out after a careful examination of the twists and turns of the act, the Corporation would not benefit those persons who had no capital to invest and were unable to offer proper financial credentials.30 Nevertheless, federal officials did not set great store by the intrinsic weaknesses that dogged Pakistan during this period. This made their institutional projects for the local society mere wishful thinking. The building blocks of the socio-institutional architecture that the Government of Pakistan was trying to build proved – in practice – unable to handle day-to-day office routines, let alone sharing the burden of ambitious federal state- and nation-building processes.31 Litmus test of the federal government institutional efforts, the Refugee Rehabilitation Finance Corporation proved to be an utter failure. By January 1954, local refugees and societies had claimed less than one-quarter of the whole Rs. 3-crore allocated fund.32 Shortfalls in administrative personnel and the lack of a reliable and widespread network of both senior and junior officers added further fuel to the fire of the demarcation disputes that inflamed the relationship between the Centre and the province of West Punjab. The resettlement of millions of refugees was, as a journalist from The Times of London observed, a problem of “gigantic proportions [. . .] which [was] completely beyond the capacity of the civil authorities to handle”.33 “Hastily improvised” and “lacking in essential components” were the labels that foreign observers recurrently affixed to the federal and provincial governments.34 Both the executive and the legislative apparata were themselves well aware of the problem, and worked to remedy the situation by devolving pockets of power and authority to their fellow State bodies as well as to representatives of civil society. Calling for the creation of an institutional solidarity fund in effect disguised an admission of state powerlessness. Unsurprisingly, the result was a total mess regarding responsibilities, competences and roles. In August 1947 local magistrates – deemed to be ‘special’ – handed over the control of the towns of West Punjab and the restoration of the law and order therein to the military.35 Officers in uniforms looked after abducted women across the whole of the province. Military-run refugee temporary structures mushroomed and surpassed in efficiency those that were administered by the civilian authorities.36 Reportedly, the army – at times – failed to honour its commitments. Tribesmen and policemen found themselves frequently compensating for the omissions of the

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military and so ensured the security of ordinary citizens.37 The Pakistan Army’s reckoning with the post-Partition humanitarian emergency also diverted its attention from the tasks that were naturally in keeping with its institutional role. In 1948 an undeclared war was being fought along the border of West Punjab. Terror gripped the cities of Lahore and Sialkot. Local residents’ conviction that Indian troops were about to invade Pakistan grew stronger day by day.38 The air could have been cut with a knife. Movements of troops ricocheted from one side of the frontier to the other and frequently exposed the weakness of Pakistan’s countervailing moves. On the Indian side of the frontier, slit trenches, gun emplacements and troop movements added spice to life in neighbouring villages and towns.39 For all that, Pakistan experienced a “complete lack of any similar warlike measures” as even the stronghold of Lahore was believed to be “untenable in case of large scale attack from across the border”.40 On 17 September 1948, only a handful of policemen were left to patrol the village of Viamian in Lahore District and put up a six-hour fight with the Indian platoons that were stationed in Lulakot and Pulkanjiri.41 Diplomatic chancelleries started taking the necessary steps to evacuate their own citizens. The British High Commission confidentially asked the European Residents Association to prepare its large network of affiliates for the immediate evacuation of their women and children.42 The Pakistani state had – almost immediately – started waiving its claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Supported by the ruling party, local authorities deputed part of their duty to defend the country to private citizens. On the defence front, some of the accounts from the proceedings of the 14 September 1947 meeting of the Punjab Muslim League read like an admission of both party and institutional powerlessness. Notables and affiliates passed a resolution that called for the removal of the restrictions on the issuing of gun licences, the fortification of the eastern border and the establishment of compulsory military training for all male Pakistani citizens.43 From then onwards, institutions would keep the matter a closely guarded secret. Nevertheless, it was a member of the West Pakistan Assembly for Lahore District who brought once again the issue to the fore during a Question and Answer session in late September 1957. Chaudhri Mehtab Khan had been first elected as a member of the Punjab Assembly for the constituency of South East Gurgaon in 1945. In 1951, having moved to Pakistan, he contested and eventually won the Lahore-II reserved seat for refugees. Like all experienced politicians, Mehtab Khan said a lot without giving too much away. It had recently come to his knowledge – he claimed during a parliamentary inquiry, hiding his actual very good knowledge of the matter – that those refugees who had been re-settled along the border areas of the former West Punjab had received “a sufficient quantity of arms for their defence”.44 The Chief Minister’s sheltering behind state secrecy was almost equal to an admission of guilt. The everyday life of those people – mainly refugees – who lived along the West Punjab side of the border and the incidents that occurred there on what seemed like a daily basis were banned talking points in almost all public debates. Common citizens were frequently mere pawns in an everyday game of diplomatic

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 139 skirmishes. In October 1948, a Sikh Sub-inspector of the Indian Police detained two employees of the Civil and Military Gazette. The two Pakistanis had headed to India on a business trip via the Wagah border. They were arrested in Amritsar during routine controls on the charge of holding a visa with what reports of that time called a vice of form.45 Karachi’s calls for their immediate release fell on deaf ears. The Lahore Deputy Commissioner’s retaliatory decision to take into custody a number of Sikhs felt like a masterstroke. It led to the release of the two unlucky Pakistanis. Still, the countermove revealed that persons residing along (or crossing) the border were – nothing more, nothing less – “monnaie d’échange”.46 The experience of the border itself could prove at times surreal, alienating and disorienting for both federal and provincial authorities and the average Pakistani. Until January 1960 the partitioning line between Pakistan and India that ran alongside the districts of Lahore and Montgomery was neither fully drawn nor mapped out yet.47 India and Pakistan would take a further year to implement the 1960 agreement and finally exchange areas and, in time, new refugees. Monsoon floods frequently diverted the course of the rivers and re-charted the uncertain geography of the Radcliffe Award. This was the experience of those citizens who had been resettled on the Pakistani borderland but in 1950 found themselves to be – almost overnight – on the Indian-side of the river Sutlej.48 When asked to supply facts and figures on Indian incursions into their territory, Pakistan’s authorities usually hid behind professional confidentiality.49 The Chief Minister of West Pakistan Sardar Abdur Rasheed Khan was no exception to the rule. Nevertheless, the case and the dust that Chaudhri Mehtab Khan had raised did not risk failing through lack of proof. Smuggling and activities “prejudicial to the economy and security of Pakistan” appeared to have become the favourite pastime and, in many cases, a proper job for many refugees who had been resettled near the border defence zone.50 Back in 1951 the Government of West Punjab had backed the creation of the so-called Qaum Razakars.51 These voluntary groups had been given the task of tackling rising crime and instilling a sense of discipline by means of the institutionalisation of a number of spontaneous associations that had previously cropped up across the region in defence of the country. For all the government’s efforts to make the border into an impermeable membrane, fluidity and porosity ate away at the film that was meant to protect Pakistan from any incursion and illegal activity.52 However, the perceived feeling of inadequacy on the part of the authorities did not stop at the consequent militarisation of the everyday or the delegation of part of its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence to private citizens and paramilitary associations. In August 1948 the Government of West Punjab fell back on the Punjab Public Safety Act to rein in the local press and curb criticism.53 Twelve months later, its renewal met with total indifference and surprisingly tame acquiescence.54 The Punjab Public Safety Act quickly became a powerful weapon in the hands of the ruling party. Local authorities used it to choke off political rivals and dissenting voices.55 Even getting to know and forming an opinion on events were at times very difficult, if not impossible. The Government regularly served pre-censorship orders to newspapers, magazines and any other periodical.

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The publication of news items that related to given topics depending on political circumstances were strictly prohibited, and so was “any criticism thereon on the form of [. . .] comments, statements, cartoons, pictures or any other form unless [. . .] approved by the Censor’s office”.56 Publishers and columnists had no option but to bow to such demands and pressures. All the same, dissenters resorted to ingenious strategies to show their dissent from government diktats. In the mid1950s, the Pakistan Times erected signposts that guided its readers through the intricacies of prohibitions and censorship. At the bottom of its front page, a curious article list box detailed with pinpoint accuracy the news items that the newspaper was unable to publish or comment. Readers were, at least, warned about what the authorities considered too dangerous to debate. “With all due desire for liberty of press” – the conventional formula that recurred in summons read – “the Government [. . .] [can not] tolerate [. . .] attacks on officials”.57 As might be expected, even legitimate criticism of government policies was frequently interpreted as a “sabotage of government plans” or “false and indiscriminate accusation against government officials”.58 The Punjab Censor’s Office had a devil of a job negotiating both moral and ‘political’ decency. The list of publications its employees had to monitor was endless. Apparently, it encompassed even the private correspondence of all ordinary citizens.59 In 1956 a US attaché took the trouble to make a list of the directly and indirectly governmentcontrolled publications. These latter were meticulously recorded, he claimed, “in [the following] descending order of control”: Radio, textbooks, imported films and literature, Pakistani films, the local English and vernacular press and religious publications had to be all carefully scrutinised and eventually blacklisted.60 Pakistani newspapers and journalists were not certainly powerful enough to tell people what to think. Still, they had the power to allow common citizens to gain their own insight into the surrounding socio-political environment by drawing up lists of topics to be discussed.61 Provincial authorities felt that the circulation of competitive narratives on events was a luxury that a state-in-the-making could not afford. Their approach towards the local press betrayed a patronising attitude that was inherent in many politicians’ sense of self. In Punjabi political circles, explaining – at times as bold as brass – the “real facts of life regarding government policies” to people was the key attribute that distinguished successful leaders from newcomers. It had first call even on implementing policies themselves.62 Government tentacles reached into every nook and cranny of the newsprint supply chain. The provincial Minister for Information institutionalised the practice of ‘mutual collaborative relationship’ on a larger scale in late December 1950 and early January 1951. During a high-level meeting, Khwaja Shahabuddin instructed the Director of Public Information and the Directorate of Public Affairs “to compensate papers which suffered in sale because of maintaining a sober and sympathetic attitude towards the Government”.63 Terms and conditions for accessing government subvention could not have been clearer. The news industry owed its own survival to the authorities. As the joint editor of the Lahore-based Weekly Guardian candidly admitted to US embassy staff, “no newspaper in Pakistan can remain fully independent of [the] Government”.64

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 141 Publishing companies were very close to saturating the market. In the early 1950s, more than 270 newspapers were published in the city of Lahore alone.65 Unsurprisingly, most of them had then a very limited circulation, and could not balance their accounts. The threat that provincial authorities could “withdraw all government-sponsored advertisements [and grants] whenever it wishe[d]” hung over editorial staffs like a sword of Damocles.66 Another major challenge for journalists and publishers was the tight grip that the government had on the main distribution channel in the market. Institutions were avid readers. As a part of its anti-illiteracy drive, the government purchased thousands of newspaper copies to be distributed in schools, hospitals and jails.67 Vetoes and, at times, political complicities and rivalries further jeopardised the process of forming an opinion on events. In early 1949, rumours spread that the popular and influential Nawa-i-Waqt owed the Khan of Mamdot a debt of gratitude. Apparently, through the intercession of the former Chief Minister, this Urdu daily had had been allotted a new and modern evacuee-owned press, and moreover its editor could enjoy some plots of agricultural land.68 The allocation of evacuee property – needless to say – came at a price. The fallout on the electorate was devastating. In the words of Suhrawardy, it “suppress[ed] the organisation of [the local] public opinion”.69 In early November 1954, during a press conference with foreign correspondents serving in Pakistan, General Iskander Mizra candidly admitted that “the masses [. . .] [were] overwhelmingly illiterate [and] not interested in politics”.70 The promises implied by the transition from subjects to citizens proved quite difficult to fulfil. In the long run, it is always better to own up to our own mistakes. No sooner said than done. The ‘betrayal’ was put down on paper in the 1956 Constitution and later absorbed by the 1962 one as well. In them the right to freedom of speech, expression and association was subject to “any restriction imposed by law in the interest of the security of Pakistan, [. . .] public order, decency or morality”.71 For their part, the insecurity of Pakistan as a state face with a huge refugee emergency was mitigated through a curious proliferation of committees, subcommittees and advisory boards. Keeping an exact count of all the institutions that specifically dealt with their resettlement was almost impossible. One of the last-ditch attempts to break the back of the continuing emergency was made in early 1953. On 20 February the provincial Punjab Cabinet constituted the Rehabilitation Consultative Committee for the purpose – it was stated – of “advising the Government in matters relating to the resettlement of refugees on land under the Rehabilitation Settlement Scheme”.72 The members of the existing Rehabilitation Advisory Board gave a nervous and surprised start, and thought about pleading the crime of lese-majesty. Their Board had been set up in 1951 when it had been similarly tasked with advising government authorities on “the existing policy and procedure for the allotment of agricultural lands to refugees and [. . .] [eventual] modifications as may bring about an expeditious and satisfactory settlement of refugees”.73 The Central Rehabilitation Advisory Committee similarly turned up its nose at the news. So too did its provincial branch that had been operating since 12 January 1951 and was supposed to advise the Government of Punjab “on

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matter relating to [the] refugees rehabilitation”.74 This newly established Rehabilitation Consultative Committee was therefore the umpteenth body with which refugees and bureaucrats had to interact. The Head of the Central Committee could not help but think that his daughter’s wedding was less crowded than any other meeting with the administrative paraphernalia that had been deputed to take care of the resettlement of the migrant community. Rather to everyone’s sympathy, local people frequently complained about both the central and provincial governments’ mediocrity.75 Levels of tax compliance mirrored and measured the success of the Pakistani administration in instilling a sense of belonging to a wider institutional community among its citizens. In the early spring of 1953, the annual renewal of the Muhajir Fund Cess Bill loomed large on the agenda of the Punjab Assembly. Established in 1948, a 2 anna/Rs. tax was levied on all the lands of West Punjab to support the rehabilitation and the resettlement of Partition refugees.76 Five years later, C. E. Gibbon flew into a fury at the Minister for Education Sardar Abdul Hamid Khan Dasti who was in charge of introducing extensions to the terms of the 1948 West Punjab Fund Cess Act to the provincial Assembly. “The Muslim League at the Centre and in the provinces [. . .] have made the life of every respectable, God-fearing and law abiding citizen, intolerable”, the elected representative from the constituency Pakistani Christian and Anglo Pakistani III exclaimed.77 The solution that he put forward was quite radical. In his view, the existing food crisis on one hand, and the recurrent heavy taxation on certain sections of the society on the other, provided enough ground for what he called the “imperative necessity” of a revolution.78 Gibbon’s code of ethics on taxes epitomised the widespread notion of a mistrusted authority that was blundering in its attempt to integrate people’s preferences into its own political system.79 Indeed, Gibbon voiced the personal insecurity that many refugees felt as they negotiated their own collective share of state resources and, therefore, their own civic identity. ‘One concerned’ – a refugee student from the University of the Punjab – was one of them. On 1 February 1955, the Pakistan Times published his story in the letters to editor section. “About four or five years ago,” – his letter started – “the Central Government imposed an additional income tax known as the ‘Mohajir Tax’ to help the rehabilitation of refugees. This tax was very extensively collected from high and low”.80 Part of the raised tax was intended to help fund the scholarships for all deserving undergraduate and postgraduate refugee students of the province. “However” – the student went on – “during the current year the Central Government has not allocated the grant for refugees’ scholarships to the University of the Punjab so far”.81 ‘One Concerned’ certainly trotted out hackneyed arguments that presumed a positive correlation between the cost of paying taxes and obtaining tangible benefits in return. Nevertheless, his appeal raised a burning issue. None of the dozens of institutions that were working on the refugee rehabilitation seemed able to solve his simple problem. How could they ever think – his argument suggested – that they would solve more complex situations? And, if the central authorities’ plans were frequently unsuccessful, what was then point of paying taxes?

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 143 Allegations of inefficiency coupled with, in particular, perceptions of a total absence of proper federal executive and legislative bodies.82 A lethal combination of unelected officials lacking in a proper electoral basis, initial scanty economic resources and confusion over roles and responsibilities made almost all federal institutions impermeable to those patronage and paternalistic dynamics that were instead gaining ground at the provincial level. The glaring inconsistencies of the central government ushered in an almost morbid popular attachment to charismatic political figures.83 The 1935 Government of India Act – in effect the first provisional constitution of Pakistan – had been written and then promulgated to suit the needs of the colonial political infrastructure.84 When Pakistan emerged as an independent state, the whole fabric of previously established hierarchies, spheres of authority and systems of formal rules frayed and started to live up to very different institutional and personal expectations. Clear echoes of the absolute need for a re-alignment of the equilibrium of powers were to be found once again in the resettlement and rehabilitation of the migrant community. Ahmad E. H. Jaffer, an eminent refugee from Poona and member of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly, pointed this out in mid-March 1953. “The refugees from India who are here and who have left properties at the other end are not asking for any charity or dole from Government”, he proudly opined during an animated discussion with the Federal Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation.85 By claiming his as well as other refugees’ rights to be treated not only as displaced persons but also as citizens, Jaffer called the Pakistani authorities to order and urged them to face up their responsibilities as representatives of an independent state. The process of transition from a colony of the British Empire to a sovereign country had created an administrative, political and relational vacuum wherein the seeds of charismatic dynamics could easily germinate.86 Pakistani leaderships conformed to the local idea of eminence. In turn, this flowed from a person’s ability to be the first among his equals and make ‘things’ happen for his followers.87 The formalisation of charisma as a constituting component of Pakistan’s new institutions started immediately after independence. Muhammad Ali Jinnah headed or, at least ostensibly headed, all the voluntary organisations and relief funds that took over the task of refugee rehabilitation.88 The vernacularisation of their activities left no room for doubts and turned the wheel full circle. Names and their meticulous knowledge represent the essence of all highly personalised societies and form the basis for leader-centred institutions.89 Attaching names and, thus, persons to institutions and associations provided these latter with both a clearly identifiable identity and a position within the complex local social ladder. In the eyes of the ordinary man in the street, it was accordingly Jinnah rather than the charities concerned who solved the riddle of their personal difficulties and made ‘things’ happen. A decade later, Muhammad Ayub Khan would attempt to win back refugees’ hearts after his coup d’état in October 1958.90 Lt. Gen. Azam Khan took over the ministerial portfolio for the Rehabilitation of Refugees and launched a vigorous campaign to expedite their overdue resettlement. A so-called Evacuee Intelligence Bureau and a Martial Law Regulation initiated a ‘witch hunt’ of bogus claimants

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and hidden evacuee properties.91 Personal and household properties worth Rs. 17,000,000 were recovered from friends and extended families in India.92 A plan for compensation – in both cash and properties – was set up to benefit all those refugees who had not been allotted a house or any land.93 Repeated visits to towns and villages and a tight grip on the activities of his departmental staff further enhanced his reputation among the refugee masses of former West Punjab. Indeed, Azam Khan’s administrative endeavours resonated with the idea of Pak Jamhouriat (Pure Democracy) that reverberated in many government publications and speeches at this time.94 Government authorities toured the whole of West Pakistan with the stated and ambitious aim of making personal contact with all citizens and demonstrating what they touted as their genuine commitment to serve the wider national community. As a part of the anti-corruption drive, division and district offices were frequently visited by staff members of the Chief Secretariat, and nearly 1,500 officers were removed from service or reduced in rank.95 Unquestionably, this was music to many refugees’ ears. They had been weeping metaphorical bitter tears at precisely the evils that Ayub Khan’s administration was now promising to stamp out. Indeed, the new course of political events appeared to rend the silence of that marginality to which some refugees had been relegated, by encouraging a self-reacquisition of their sense of responsibility. Apparently free from the dead-weight burden of administrative malpractices, displaced persons felt that they could finally regain control over their lives and the lives of their dearest ones.96 Decisions over their belongings and their future now seemed to be – however partially – in their hands and liberated from the constraints of the bureaucratic ‘oddities’. This newly acquired refugee self-awareness set in motion that mechanism of ‘action-causation’ lying at the very heart of the local idea of responsibility and social order. As they were accountable for their own actions, refugees could now take on the responsibilities for their families and biraderi too.97 Some of them disclosed these same feelings to Ayub himself during his tour of the former West Punjab in late 1959. Ceremonial arches, placards and thousands of persons chanting and waving their flags welcomed the new President to Multan on 17 December. According to the local accounts, “the tremendous mass upsurge and enthusiasm [. . .] was reminiscent of the heydays of the Pakistan movement”.98 A group of refugees was there ready to address Ayub and expressed their gratitude for finally being able to get the better of Pakistani bureaucracy and secure an allotted property.99 The new anti-corruption campaign and legislative framework, however, had already highlighted numerous lacunae. Chief Justice Cornelius would make these even more evident in a speech during a dinner hosted by the Lahore Rotary Club on 12 August 1960. Women whose earrings sparkled as they turned their heads and men with perfectly oiled hair entertained the distinguished guest. “The present pertinent laws [ . . . ]” – the Chief Justice pointed out over a mutton karahi – “debar citizens from ventilating their grievances before competent authority and thus could be made to ‘stifle’ prosecution of a corrupt public servant”.100 The Anti-Corruption Department was certainly able to inquire quite quickly into citizens’ reports of corruption against public servants. Yet, the

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 145 majority of the cases rarely had a judgement passed on them as the heads of departments still had to authorise the prosecution of their accused employees. Nevertheless, Ayub’s reputation among ordinary Pakistan citizens appeared to be unblemished during the early years following the 1958 coup. The Central government freed Rs. 569 crores for the development of new housing plans for, as Ayub Khan’s manifesto suggested, “urbanisation [. . .] [was] a sign of progress”.101 New schools, dispensaries, banks, seed suppliers and cooperatives sprung up in union councils across the most refugee-saturated towns and villages of former West Punjab.102 In Jhelum new roads were constructed and old ones covered with asphalt.103 Boosting education, cooperative associations and agriculture meant broadening the horizons of refugees as well as those of locals through an extension of their idea of ‘community’ into new social and spatial areas. As Ayub toured extensively the districts of the country, he established himself as its most eminent political figure, and both sanctioned and cemented the development of the new ‘national’ body.104 Bunting, chants, ceremonial arches, huge crowds gathered along the roads to cheer the President. The idea itself of a journey within a specific domain were all part of a repertoire that owed its substance to religious processions whose transit through the streets and squares of newly established suburbs marked both the acceptance and the accession of their inhabitants into the wider and historically rooted social community. Likewise, Ayub’s arrival in towns and villages proved to be a rite of passage together with an initiation rite for the majority of Partition migrants. Hence, the inauguration of new residential units, hospitals or schools was used to spur refugees to “shake off the feeling that they were refugees”.105 The never-ending disputes between the centre and the peripheries of the political power, the ‘committee complex’ and charismatic figures in this fashion established themselves as the fundamental norm of Pakistan’s everyday institutional life. But as a new state, Pakistan also needed to project itself internationally and become an active agent within the realm of the international relations. To many in Pakistan it seemed that India was lying in wait for it.

Until death tears us apart: Pakistan, India and the resettlement of refugees in West Punjab It was 11 September 1948. The Gymkhana Club was hosting one of its renowned dinner dances that night. A couple of women with their hair backcombed were dishing the dirt on the new lover of that official who was having a word with a European High Commissioner. “Nest of vipers”, the cuckolded wife muttered between her teeth as she eavesdropped on their conversation. As the District Commissioner entered, the room fell silent. His face was as black as thunder. He cleared his throat and announced that Jinnah had just passed away.106 On 12 September Lahore was like the city of the dead. The sensitive body of the newly established nation sank into a coma that that would last for days. Offices, shops, banks and factories remained closed and everyday life was brought to a standstill.107 The millions of Pakistanis who mourned the death of their leader staged

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an elaborate collective ceremonial that nourished their national consciousness and spoke of their identity to the outside world.108 In a curious twist of fate, Jinnah’s demise coincided with the capitulation of the Nizam of Hyderabad in distant Deccan. In Lahore, mourners mingled with those demonstrators who were calling for immediate retaliatory action against India.109 Unsurprisingly, one of the most well-attended memorial services was the military parade held in the local Cantonment area. The last post and the firing of a 31-gun salute topped off the march-past and sounded a clear warning to the neighbouring state.110 An unknown number of persons, probably in the hundreds of thousands, crowded around the Chief Minister of Punjab, the Khan of Mamdot after another commemorative ceremony shouting anti-Indian slogans. A couple of hours earlier some of them had reached the Governor’s House and asked for his permission to personally attack Amritsar.111 Fear and dismay were ugly beasts. There was an uncomfortable atmosphere in the relationship between India and Pakistan. For months, on the western side of the Wagah border, rumours had been floating around about India’s plans to “destroy [Pakistan’s] national being, either by force of arms or strangulation in order to effect [the] complete Hindu domination of the Subcontinent”.112 Conspiracies quickly turned into paranoia. Now that the father of the nation was no more, the obsessions of thousands of orphaned Pakistanis materialised in the shape of panicking crowds. Refugees, their resettlement and their rehabilitation on land in West Punjab had been setting the tone for the way in which the two states and their citizens thought of themselves and their mutual relations. It was – diplomatic sources recorded in their unpoetic yet effective language – a “log-jam, each dispute blocking the way for the settlement of the others”.113 Indian and Pakistani authorities harboured strong feelings of mutual resentment. “The leaders of the Indian National Congress [. . .] are deeply resentful of the Pakistan independent movement”, noted US authorities in their memoranda.114 For their part, Pakistanis “[knew] this feeling”. They “[were], in turn, resentful of it” as well, most probably just to keep up.115 At the negotiating table, their bitterness translated into policies of institutional mutual duplicities and remarkable volte-faces. Leaders on both sides publicly nodded their consent to pave the way for a well-managed transfer of liabilities, persons and properties.116 Yet, their respective diplomatic corps frequently allowed negotiations to fall through and hindered provincial governments in their efforts to facilitate the transfer of refugees from East to West Punjab and vice versa. It was, in the words of US analysts, a “symptomatic [. . .] inability of the Dominions to cooperate” that transmuted into an almost complete lack of any joint approach to the resolution of refugee emergency.117 “The Government of India and the Government of Pakistan have [. . .] decided that the movement of these people [. . .] is to have first priority. They have agreed to co-operate with each other on this matter to the fullest extent and to ensure that the movements in both directions are completed with the greatest possible speed”, read the joint statement that Liaquat Ali Khan and Nehru released to the press after an inter-ministerial conference held on 19–20 September 1947 in Lahore.118 The words, however, were doomed to fall on stony ground. Three weeks later,

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 147 the ‘Paris of the East’ would host another summit meeting that aimed at attending to the humanitarian crisis. At it, the idea of a military-managed evacuation of those pockets of refugees who were waiting to reach their perceived homeland from across the whole of the East and West Punjab was almost immediately ruled out.119 For their part, the Pakistani representatives were strongly opposed to regular timetabled meetings at either central government or provincial level. The formula that settled the dispute between the two contestants turned out to be a masterpiece of diplomatic rhetoric. Ministers would have met at both levels “on ad hoc basis if there was sufficient demand”.120 What was supposed to qualify as ‘sufficient demand’ was a secret that died with the two premiers, Liaquat Ali Khan and Nehru. Both leaders unquestionably reacted to the news that they were receiving from the ‘front’. Rumour had it that the phenomenon of forcible conversion was driving India to restrict the passage of Muslim women to West Punjab through an introduction of a ‘special’ permit-system.121 In retaliation, Pakistani troops were hindering the extraction of pockets of Hindu and Sikh refugees from the districts of Attock, Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Gujrat and Sialkot. Nehru flew off the handle. As he raged against the behaviour of the neighbouring state, he went as far as to hint at military intervention.122 After all, it was the Indian Prime Minister himself who had previously declared that the refugee emergency was “a situation which is analogous to war and [. . .] [they were] going to deal with it on a war basis”.123 Feelings ran even higher when diplomatic representatives and ministers moved on to the delicate subject of the distinction to be drawn between refugees from agreed or non-agreed areas. On 20 September 1947 both India and Pakistan concurred that the priority was to be given to the transfer of the evacuees between the two wings of the Punjab, the only exception being Pakistan’s government servants in other Indian regions.124 From then on, the difference between agreed areas and non-agreed areas migrants would become the constantly debated topic among both local and foreign observers and journalists. The situation spiralled almost completely out of control and West Punjab in particular turned into a powder keg that was about to explode. Diplomatic accords notwithstanding, in early October 1947 trains that were loaded with refugees from non-agreed areas in India were still reaching the towns of Pakistani Punjab.125 Provocations were far from over. Indian representatives likewise enraged their counterparts on other occasions. Later on, during an umpteenth conference, they tabled a report containing aggregate figures of refugees from both East Punjab and the western United Provinces. Pakistani authorities raised their voice in an attempt to jog the memory of the Indian envoys about their recent agreement. Yet, the latter’s only answer was to ask Pakistan to state publicly that it would not have made Muslims from western UP welcome.126 Pakistan unquestionably had its back to wall: refusing to accommodate these refugees would be the same as disavowing the basis of the country’s struggle for independence and life. Even the prudent British High Commissioner went as far as to comment that “Pakistan will be sabotaged by the deliberate sending of ex-Punjab Muslims to the Punjab instead of getting the miserable refugees from East Punjab”.127

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Psychological warfare had broken out. It was a no-holds-barred contest that would touch on everyone’s respective sore points. Pakistan’s jealousy and sense of inferiority camouflaged a deep-seated feeling of mistrust.128 Negotiations were tantamount to those everyday aspects of life and politics that banked heavily on personal relationships. It was indeed the lack of faith – virtually a criminal offence in all trust-based societies – that informed this Pakistani paranoia and paralysed attempts at regional cooperation.129 In a context where persons exist only if their reliability and honesty are publicly displayed, talks like those on evacuee properties resembled, and proved to be, an uphill struggle. The so-called ‘cold war’ of the subcontinent in many ways revolved around the value, transfer by sale or exchange, and the utilisation of both movable and immovable properties that had been left behind by refugees in both wings of the Punjab.130 Unofficial estimates put the monetary worth of Hindu and Sikh lands, houses and other permanent commodities at around Rs. 250,000,000.131 The figure was staggering. An eventual request for reimbursement could have sent Pakistan and its economy into free fall. By comparison, the sum of Rs. 20,000,000 that India would have owed to the authorities based in Karachi was regarded as chicken feed.132 Indo-Pakistan talks regarding evacuee properties hit a snag not only over a possible future demand for compensation but also on the mapping of these properties. A leaked government document dropped hints that Pakistan’s authorities had set their sights on including lands and houses lying outside East Punjab within the agreement.133 Sparks flew as soon as the press entered into the controversy. Allegations that the Government of Pakistan was concocting a campaign to devalue the immovable evacuee properties appeared on the pages of the Hindustan Times of New Delhi.134 Between the lines, the law of retaliation was invoked. Dawn raised the stakes by encouraging “the timid doubter [to take into consideration] the Satanic provisions of some of the Ordinances promulgated by the Provincial Governments of India”.135 The administration at issue was that of the United Provinces. Apparently, it had just passed an ordinance that forced those Muslims whose relatives had fled to Pakistan to relinquish their immovable possessions, despite them remaining resident in India. Sins were finally finding political institutions out, and even Pakistan’s authorities were no saints. The bank accounts of shops and businesses were progressively blocked as they were now considered ‘intending properties’.136 The bureaucratic definitions of evacuees, refugees and ultimately of Indian or Pakistani citizens as well were proving unable to make sense of this multi-faceted, slippery and complex reality. Any news concerning evacuee properties usually cast a chill over the governments of India and Pakistan alike. Authorities avoided each other in order not to deal with the topic. The Pakistani Minister for the Rehabilitation and the Resettlement of Refugees came under attack from foreign chancelleries for his prolonged and deafening silence.137 At the negotiating table, India and Pakistan shared the same non-verbal language. Refusing to meet in order to negotiate resources and commodities meant repudiating their identity and eminence, and, in turn, denouncing their unreliability and dishonesty.138 It was an institutional and, even more important, personal non-acceptance of the counterpart and its institutional

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 149 representatives. In mid-June 1949 Nehru’s patience wore thin. The Indian Prime Minister threatened to cause all current negotiations to fail should the question of evacuee properties not be given high priority on the ministers’ agenda.139 A conference was finally held in Karachi on 25–26 June 1949 and, in the stentorian language of press releases and joint statements, ratified that India and Pakistan were a married couple legally separated but still living together in the same evacuee property. The fortunes of the affair would drag out for years, have their peaks and troughs, but never be properly settled. Indeed, the march of time confused the issue. As a result of the overcrowding that followed the early resettlement of refugees in the Punjab countryside, the whole of the region experienced a rapid fragmentation of a great number of its agricultural lands.140 To top it all, family disputes and alterations in the condition of buildings made decisions over value and ownership even more complicated and, it goes without saying, negotiations almost impossible.141 Negotiations on evacuee properties and the transfer or status of the refugees touched raw and very sensitive nerves. Their fallout failed to disappear without trace from the elaboration of an everyday sense of belonging to a wider community, and instead intermingled with long-term consequences for internal regional hierarchies and identities.

All for one and one for all: creating a nation, levelling down differences Refugee resettlement and rehabilitation tested the stability as well as the institutional relationships that existed between the Punjab and other regions of Pakistan’s western wing. The responsibility for the initial reception of millions of displaced persons unquestionably fell mainly on West Punjab. It almost brought the new province to its knees and verging on the brink of social collapse. An estimated surplus of about 1,600,000 refugees tipped the argument in favour of a re-distribution of people to the neighbouring provinces of Sindh, Baluchistan and the NWFP.142 On 4 December 1947 delegates from the country’s different regions met in Lahore with the aim of sorting out the problem. The talks were not promising. Neither the official nor the off-the-record agenda of those who were sat at the negotiating table tallied. The representatives of West Punjab aimed at the transfer of no less than one million people to Sindh, Baluchistan and the NWFP.143 Sindh’s officials, by contrast, firmly kept their cards close to their chest. For their part, both Baluchistan and the NWFP opted for a cunning wait-and-see strategy. This give-and-take manoeuvring left a nasty taste in everyone’s mouth. 100,000 refugees would soon head towards the NWFP, while 25,000 of them would reach the region of Baluchistan. The princely states of Bahawalpur and Khaipur did their share of work by accepting nearly 75,000 displaced men and women. Apparently, the federal capital Karachi had agreed on accommodating up to 500,000 persons.144 Doubts were however cast upon the real intentions of the Sindh authorities. “Whether or not Sindh is really willing to take 5 lakhs is doubtful”, wrote British Deputy High Commissioner in Lahore, S. H. Stephenson, in the margin

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of his letter to the Commonwealth Relation Office.145 His remarks were far from short-sighted. In February 1948, the Chief Minister of Sindh Muhammad Ayub Khuhro ate his own earlier words and brushed aside the possibility of a relocation of more than 100,000 West Punjabi refugees to his province.146 The reaction of Pakistan’s central authorities was instantaneous. Ghazanfar Ali Khan stigmatised Khuhro’s about-turn as mere ‘provincialism’ and ordered the Sindhi authorities to collaborate with both the federal and provincial governments.147 The embryo of Pakistan’s cohesion and unity was at stake. Pakistan had been made. Making Pakistanis was now the new imperative. It had recently come to the ears of the Minister of Resettlement and Rehabilitation of Refugees that a violent campaign against Sindh – orchestrated mainly by local politicians and refugees leaders – was underway in the transit camps of the West Punjab.148 Anti-Sindh sentiments were taking root at an increasing rate among the displaced persons who were still housed in these temporary structures. Some of them refused to move to the neighbouring province while others quickly made their way back to the ‘Land of the Five Rivers’ after having been resettled in Sindhi towns and villages.149 Seen through the eyes of Pakistani leaders, having recourse to authoritarian measures was, for all their deplorability, the only workable solution. The need to establish a harmonious relationship among the different parts of the country’s western wing was not the only trouble that loomed up in the long march towards a ‘chemical synthesis’ of reliable and reactive citizens and institutions out of the composite legacies of the British empire. In September 1953 both the federal government and the Pakistan Constituent Assembly revived the debate over the hoary and as yet unsettled problem of the distinction between refugees from agreed and non-agreed areas. “The Government is [. . .] aware that the distinction, in whatever form it exists, is a source of dissatisfaction to the refugees coming from the non-agreed areas of India”, admitted the Federal Minister for the Resettlement and Rehabilitation of Refugees during a Question and Answer session.150 As the chance to criticise the neighbouring state was too good to miss, he went on by attacking India: “India” – he declared – “never implemented the Agreement of 1949 under which the distinction arose as far as Pakistan was concerned. The Government of Pakistan have adhered on this formula [. . .] but the question of his [sic] abolition is under active consideration”.151 Acting with traditional – local – split-second timing, Muzaffar Ali Khan Qizilbash – the Minister for Revenue in the West Punjab Cabinet – made the views of its government plain in early March 1954. “The House [West Punjab Assembly] has also passed a resolution and we had also written that this distinction should not be removed”, he replied to a question that Shameem Ahmad Khan from the refugee-reserved seat of Lyallpur VIII had posed him.152 The cut and thrust of the debate was marked by political and parliamentary rhetoric for the very simple reason that the difference between migrants from agreed and non-agreed areas had de facto already been withdrawn. At the grassroots level, the border between the two had always been quite porous. Those refugees from non-agreed areas who belonged to the upper classes or had important acquaintances within the ‘administrative circles’ had

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 151 already freed their lives from the hurdles of allotment ordinances and practices.153 The 1951 provincial elections in West Punjab further clinched the controversy by not first discussing and then providing for a reservation of seats for them.154 The introduction of the One Unit system in 1955 would finally bring this drama to an end. As Nawa-i-Waqt damned in a long editorial published on 19 July 1954, the “clouds of provincialism [. . .] had begun to obscure the Pakistani nation”.155 Strong feelings of attachment to local identities were finding their way into the body of a nation- and a state in-the-making, and set back any constitutional attempt to get to the bottom of a balanced representation of Pakistan’s rich and composite social tapestry within the federal assembly.156 The idea of amalgamating the four parts of the western wing into a single unit entailed, in turn, careful re-consideration of all their constituencies. In July 1954 the Government of Punjab appointed the Delimitation Committee to re-map the electoral geography of the region. As their power tottered, local politicians flew almost immediately into a panic. Party politics whipped itself into a state of frenzy. The Muslim League Refugees Consultative Committee strongly opposed the withdrawal of reserved seats, as the resettlement of refugees had not as yet been completed.157 A 12-member delegation of refugee members of the Muslim League was formed, and asked to meet the Ministers of the Central Government in an attempt to present the list of their continuing grievances.158 The editorial offices of local and national newspapers were deluged with letters from distinguished as well as less famous readers. Oddly enough, the whole debate took place against a background of continuing institutional attempts to instil a sense of belonging to a wider community. Just as Radio Pakistan broadcast the national anthem for the first time and Pakistanis were welcomed to screenings in cinemas across the country, the bulk of the refugee community in West Punjab kept demanding official acknowledgment of their specific identity. Back in 1951, the creation of two-member constituencies had been linked to the plan for a quick rehabilitation of the migrant community. Yet, as Ahmad Mahsud Said – Muslim League associate from Lyallpur – highlighted in his July 1954 letter to the Pakistan Times, “if the position [is to] be examined today, it will be found that no more than 40% of the rural resettlement has been completed so far and that the urban resettlement has not started”.159 For his part, Jalil Ahmad Khan – President of the Refugee Association of Gujranwala District – revealed just how far the co-option of the refugees in municipal institutions had taken on the shape of an uphill struggle. Run without any reservation of seats, the 1954 elections of the Gujranwala Board District had recently represented a bitter pill for the members of the local migrant community to swallow. Indeed, refugees had secured only five out of the 38 available places by a very narrow majority.160 “Not until the refugees have been properly resettled and their peculiar problem satisfactorily solved should be the reserved seats be allowed to be abolished”, warned the chairman of the association.161 Mian Muhammad Shafi, however, struck a discordant note. A member of the Punjab Assembly representing the refugee-reserved seat of Montgomery VII, Shafi strongly opposed the initiative of his party fellows. “I wholeheartedly and

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emphatically oppose” – he argued – “the move for the simple reason that what they seek to achieve is not the protection of the rights of the refugees but the perpetration of a privileged class amongst Punjabis who would not be eligible to sit in the House”.162 The ‘mystery’ was finally unravelled. By polemically pointing his finger at the dualism between rights and privileges, Shafi revealed the tension between new and old biraderi links and patronage dynamics on one hand and a national community and big ideas on the other. As he continued, “the refugee problem under the present circumstances can not be solved to the doomsday [sic] and no amount of representation given to the so-called leaders of the refugees in the Provincial Assembly can alleviate their distress”.163 Metaphorically speaking, the still-in-the-making nation of Pakistan was mirrored in the condition of thousands of its women, whose alleged infidelity, so it was argued, was having devastating effects on the happiness of conjugal life and the whole fabric of local society. Protecting their chastity came to be perceived to be an institutional duty.164 On 14 October 1955 Mian Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani was sworn in as the governor of the new province of West Pakistan. Muhammad Munir – Chief Justice of the Federal Court – chaired the ceremony and sealed the beginning of a new institutional era.165 Following the report of the Demarcation Committee, the seat reservation for refugees who had been resettled in Punjab was abolished. Frequently compared to a woman, Pakistan could itself be regarded as trying to preserve its ‘national chastity’ by levelling down identities and nationalisms. As the Prime Minister made clear while introducing the 1956 Constitution, those of my friends who use phrases carelessly, who talk of ‘nationalities’ [. . .] I would earnestly request them to desist. We are yet in a formative stage and even though the idea of Pakistan Nationalism, the idea of our common culture of one country and one people, shines bright, yet there are spots here and there, dark spots, where germs of disruption can thrive.166 ***** This final chapter has explored and highlighted the basic and ‘immaterial’ norms and rules that underpinned and inspired Pakistan’s early legal system and institutional life. Provincial and federal authorities alike could not ignore the challenge of rehabilitating millions of displaced persons, the vast majority of whom were to be found in West Punjab. Their provisions, ordinances, mutual trips and botched attempts to tackle the emergency supplanted, it has been argued here, the rather lazy debates of the Constituent Assemblies. An ominous attachment to charismatic political leaders, the curious proliferation of committees and boards, and restrictive attitudes towards the freedom of speech have been revealed as constituent – albeit dysfunctional – elements of both the institutional fabric and the ‘fundamental principles’ of Pakistan’s early political history. The ‘intimate’ implications of the negotiations between India and Pakistan on the resettlement of refugees from both agreed and non-agreed regions and on evacuee properties lift the curtain on the historical roots of those deep-seated feeling of resentment that, 60 years later, still reverberate through the discussions of Partition refugees

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 153 and their relatives. As migrants negotiated their role as citizens, their vicissitudes moulded the process of elaboration of a national identity. The dispute on the transfer hundreds of thousands of migrants to Sindh framed indeed the official and popular narratives on the elaboration and the consolidation of the idea of Pakistan as a nation.

Notes 1 Office Memorandum, 10 October 1956, NND 897209, NARA. 2 Jalal, The State of Martial Rule. Ayesha Jalal has inspired a number of studies on the military-imbued outward appearance of Pakistan’s institutional identity. See, for instance, H. Haqqani, Pakistan. Between Mosque and Military (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005); S. Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008); and A. Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy (London: Pluto, 2007). 3 On the idea and the definition of basic norm (Grundnorm), see H. Kelsen, Verteidingung der Demokratie: Abhandlungen zur Demokratietheorie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006); H. Kelsen, Reine Rechtslehre. Einleitung in die rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008). 4 Talbot, Pakistan, p. 112. 5 Ansari, Life after Partition. See also, S. Ansari, “Partition, Migration and Refugees. Responses to the Arrival of Muhajirs in Sind during 1947–8”, South Asia, 18 (1995), pp. 95–108. 6 Letter of UKHC (Karachi) Archibald Carter, KUB, KCIE, Joint Permanent under Secretary of State, 29 December 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. 7 The Times (London), 11 November 1947. 8 Political Alignments in the West Punjab – Confidential No. 25, 28 November 1947, NND 765024, NARA. 9 Ibid. 10 Partial Text of Statement by Dr Mahmud Husain, Deputy Finance Minister, on the Status of Refugee Rehabilitation, n.d., NND 948832, NARA. 11 Punjab Assembly Debates, 2 March 1954, PCSL. 12 A-2, 8 October 1947, NND 765024, NARA. 13 Ibid. 14 The Times (London), 22 October 1947; Partial Text of the Statement by Dr Mahmud Hussain, Deputy Finance Minister, on the Status of Refugee Rehabilitation, n.d., NND 948832, NARA. 15 Facts and Figures on Refugee Relief and Rehabilitation, 19 October 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 16 Punjab Assembly Debates, 19 March 1954, PCSL. 17 Pakistan, n. d., NND 897209, NARA. 18 Pakistan Constituent Assembly, 20 March 1953, PCSL. 19 Political Alignments in the West Punjab – Confidential No. 25, 28 November 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 20 IT to CRO – Opdom No. 25, 25–31 March 1948, DO 142/438, UKNA. 21 IT to CRO – Opdom No. 29, 8–14 April 1948, DO 142/438, UKNA. 22 Art. 129 Const., Constitution of Pakistan, 1956, PPL. 23 Punjab Assembly Debates, 29 February 1952, PCSL. 24 Ibid. 25 Punjab Assembly Debates, 12 March 1952, PCSL; Punjab Assembly Debates, 18 December 1952, PCSL.

154 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65

Constituent Assembly and neighbours Pakistan Times (Lahore), 10 December 1954. Ibid. Pakistan Constituent Assembly, 17 March 1953, PCSL. The Gazette of Pakistan, 9 April 1948, PCSL. UKHC to SSCR, 16 April 1948, DO 142/438, UKNA. Children Welfare Organisation in Pak – Despatch No. 303, 1957, NND 948832, NARA. Board of Trade – Commercial Relations and Exports Department, Pakistan: Economic and Commercial Conditions in Pakistan (May 1954) (London, 1955), pp. 122–3. The Times (London), 25 August 1947. The Times (London), 26 February 1948. Telegram, 20 August 1947, NND 765024, NARA. The Times (London), 20 January 1948. The Times (London), 26 February 1948. Telegram No. 3, 14 January 1948, NND 959418, NARA. A-23, 30 September 1948, NND 765024, NARA. Ibid. Ibid. Telegram No. 3, 14 January 1948, NND 959418, NARA. Telegram No. 15, 23 September 1947, NND 765024, NARA. Provincial Assembly of West Pakistan Debates, 20 September 1957, PCSL. A-24, 29 October 1948, NND 765024, NARA. Ibid. West Pakistan-India Border Talks – Despatch No. 41, 25 August 1961, NND 948832, NARA. Memorandum No. 1661–56/1403-R (P), 17 April 1956, PCSL. A-29, 6 December 1948, NND 765024, NARA. West Pakistan Martial Law No.9, dealing with the Properties in and Residents of the Indo-Pakistan Border Areas – Despatch No. 123, 24 March 1959, NND 948832, NARA. Punjab Gazette, 18 May 1951, UPL. West Punjab Gazette, 22 October 1947, UPL. The Times (London), 26 August 1948. Confidential, 31 August 1949, NND 765024, NARA. Prospects for Refugee Representation and Democratic Elections in the West Punjab – Confidential No. 23, 4 March 1949, NND 765024, NARA. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 26 October 1954. A-17, 28 August 1948, NND 765024, NARA. Ibid. Conversation with Dr Massarat Abid, Lahore, 20 January 2010; and Secret PHC/20/49 – Police Administration in the West Punjab, May 1949, DO 35/3178, UKNA. Office Memorandum, 4 December 1956, NND 897209, NARA. E. F. Shaw, “Agenda-Setting and Mass Communication”, Gazette – International Journal for Mass Communication Studies, 25, 2 (1979), p. 96; D. Roberts, “Nature of Communication Effects”, in The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, eds. D. Roberts and W. Schramm (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 371. USIS Program in Pakistan and the Need for the Government of Pakistan to go to the People, 4 December 1956, NND 897209, NARA. Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under the Punjab Act II of 1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953, Lahore, 1954, p. 338, PPL. Memorandum of Conversation, 9 July 1951, NND 897209, NARA. Pakistan Times (Lahore), 23 November 1954.

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 155 66 Memorandum of Conversation, 9 July 1951, NND 897209, NARA. 67 Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under the Punjab Act II of 1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953, Lahore, 1954, p. 338, PPL. 68 A-9, 8 February 1949 NND 765024, NARA. 69 Civil and Military Gazette (Lahore), 3 July 1949. 70 General Mirza’s views to the Foreign Press on Democracy’s Experience in Pakistan and the Separate Roles of Religion and Politics – Despatch No. 266, 6 November 1954, NND 938650, NARA. 71 Artt, 8–10 Const., Constitution of Pakistan, 1956, PPL. 72 Punjab Gazette, 20 February 1953, UPL. 73 Punjab Gazette, 18 May 1951, UPL. 74 Punjab Gazette, 12 January 1951, UPL. 75 The Times (London), 26 February 1948. 76 West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 26 January 1948, UPL; Punjab Gazette, 22 February 1952, UPL. 77 Punjab Assembly Debates, 31 March 1953, PCSL. 78 Ibid. 79 R. W. McGee, “When Is Tax Evasion Unethical?”, Policy Analysis No. 11 Working Paper (International and Technical Consultant Inc., 1996); A. Mummert and F. Schneider, “The German Shadow Economy: Parted in United Germany?”, FinanzActiv, 58 (2002), pp. 287–317. 80 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 1 February 1955. 81 Ibid. 82 Conversations with Dr Ahmad Ejaz, Lahore, 29 January 2010, and Dr. Usman Khan and mother, Lahore, 22 November 2010. 83 The Times (London), 26 February 1948. 84 P. Newberg, Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 14–21. 85 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 17 March 1953, PCSL. 86 S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building. Selected Papers (Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 48–54. 87 M. Mines, “Individuality and Achievement in South Indian Social History”, Modern Asian Studies, 26, 1 (1992), pp. 129–56. See also M. Mines and G. Vijayalakshmi, “Leadership and Individuality in South Asia: The Case of South Indian Big-Man”, Journal of Asian Studies, 49, 4 (1990), pp. 761–86. 88 The Times (London), 17 October 1947; The Times (London), 26 February 1948. 89 Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, p. 58. 90 Conversation with Dr. Usman Khan, Lahore, 22 November 2010. 91 Refugee Claims Settlement Operations. A Review – Despatch No. 574, 7 January 1960, NND 948832, NARA. 92 Government of Pakistan, The Rehabilitation and Works Division, 1958–1963: Five Years of Revolutionary Government, 1963, p. 3, PCSL. 93 Ibid., p. 2. 94 Pak Jamhouriat was the title of a weekly leaflet that was published in the early1960s by the Ministry of Information and National Reconstruction. See New Government of Pakistan Publications – Despatch No. 18, 15 August 1960, NND 948832, NARA. 95 West Pakistan Chief Secretary Reviews Year’s Achievements in Provincial Civil Service – Despatch No. 129, 2 November 1959, NND 948832, NARA. 96 Conversation with Dr Usman Khan, Lahore, 22 November 2010, and Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, Lahore, 18 March 2010. 97 Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, pp. 179–83. 98 Summary of the Press Reports on President Ayub’s Speaking Tour in the Lahore Consular District – Despatch No. 183, 24 December 1959, NND 948832, NARA.

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99 Ibid. 100 Spotlight on Corruption among Public Servants: Chief Justice Cornelius Suggests Introduction of Administrative Tribunals – Despatch No. 87, 16 August 1960, NND 948832, NARA. 101 Government of Pakistan, Ayub’s Manifesto Undertaking, n.d., PCSL. 102 Basic Democracies: Fortnightly Review – Despatch No. 88, 6 October 1961, NND 948832, NARA. 103 Basic Democracies: Their Role is in the Making – Despatch No. 289, 21 October 1960, NND 948832, NARA. 104 Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, pp. 80–3. 105 Summary of Press Reports on President Ayub’s Speaking Tour in the Lahore Consular District – Despatch No. 183, 24 December 1959, NND 948832, NARA. 106 Lahore Mourns for Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah – Confidential No. 69, 14 September 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 107 Telegram, 14 September 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 108 A. C. Mayer, “The Funeral of the Emperor of Japan”, Anthropology Today, 5, 3 (1989), p. 5. 109 Reaction in Lahore to the News of the Capitulation of the Nizam of Hyderabad – Confidential No. 72, 20 September 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 110 Lahore Mourns for Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah – Confidential No. 69, 14 September 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 111 Ibid. 112 Memorandum, n.d., NND 897209, NARA. 113 Analysis – Memorandum of Conversation, 9 July 1951, NND 897209, NARA. 114 Secret No. 304, 6 August 1949, NND 897209, NARA. 115 Ibid. 116 The Times (London), 5 September 1947. 117 India-Pakistan Relations since August 16, 1947, n.d., NND 897209, NARA. 118 OT from UKHC to CRO No. 805, 21 September 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. 119 The Times (London), 9 October 1947. 120 Discussion between Prime Minister, Pakistan and Indian Government Representatives at Lahore on 5th October 1947, 8 October 1947, DO 133/60, UKNA. 121 Extract from Report from Deputy UKHC (Lahore) – POL 8015/48, 2 May 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 122 Note for the Registry – POL 6304/48, 24 January 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 123 IT from UKHC to SSCR, 11 September 1947, DO 142/416, UKNA. 124 OT No. 85, 21 September 1947, DO 133/59, UKNA. 125 Extract from Acting UKHC Report, 3 October 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. 126 Extract from Enclosure to Despatch No. 64/47, 20 October 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. 127 Ibid. 128 Secret No. 304, 6 August 1949, NND 897209, NARA; Office Memorandum, 10 October 1956, NND 897209, NARA. 129 Memorandum, n.d., NND 897209, NARA. 130 Extract from Opdom No. 133 (Part II) from UKHC (Pakistan), 25 August 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA. 131 Despatch No. 67(677) – Office of the UKHC (Karachi), 3 February 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA; Political Situation in West Punjab, July 1948, 2 August 1948, NND 765024, NARA. 132 Meeting of Indo-Pakistan Punjab Partition Implementation Committee – Despatch No. 511, 27 June 1960, NND 948832, NARA. 133 Despatch No. 67 (677) – Office of the UKHC (Karachi), 3 February 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA. 134 Extract from Opdom No. 25 (Part II) from UKHC (Pakistan), 25 June 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA.

Constituent Assembly and neighbours 157 135 Dawn (Karachi), 3 July 1949. 136 Further Pakistan Violations of Inter-Dominion Agreement, 25 August 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA. 137 Extract from Opdom No. 27 (Part II) from UKHC (Pakistan), 15 July1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA. 138 Mines, Public Faces, Private Voices, pp. 35–43; Subha, Karnataka Panchayat Elections 1955, p. 27. 139 Extract from Opdom No. 26 (Part I) from UKHC (India), 11 June 1949, DO 35/2994, UKNA. 140 Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 2 December 1952, UPL. 141 Conversation with Dr Saeed Elahi, Lahore, 14 February 2010; Movable EP Agreement with India – Despatch No. 384, 19 December 1953, NND 938750, NARA. 142 Brief Summary of the Refugee Problem, 12 August 1950, NND 948832, NARA. 143 Extract from a Report from H. S. Stephenson, ESQ, Lahore to Sir Grafftey-Smith – Ref. No. PHC 29/47, 7 December 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. 144 Extract from Report from Deputy UKHC (Lahore) – POL 10384/48, 30 December 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 145 Extract from a Report from H. S. Stephenson, ESQ, Lahore to Sir Grafftey-Smith – Ref. No. PHC 29/47, 7 December 1947, DO 142/440, UKNA. 146 Extract from Report from Deputy UKHC (Lahore) to UKHC – POL 6720/48, 1 February 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 147 Extract from Telegram No. 99 from UKHC (Pakistan) – POL 6467/48, 28 January 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA and Extract from Telegram No. 197 from UKHC (Pakistan) – POL 6880/48, 25 February 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 148 Extract from Pakistan News for the period February 18th-February 24th, 1948, 24 February 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 149 Extract from Telegram No. 56 from UKHC (Pakistan) – POL 6208/48, 14 January 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA; Extract from Telegram No. 99 – POL 6467/48, 28 January 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA; A.G. Raza, Resettlement of Refugees on Land – A Review, 6 June 1948, DO 142/440, UKNA. 150 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 23 September 1953, PCSL. 151 Ibid. 152 Punjab Assembly Debates, 2 March 1954, PCSL. 153 Conversation with Rana Muhammad Iqbal Khan, Lahore, 1 December 2010. 154 West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 5 August 1949, UPL; West Punjab Gazette – Extraordinary Issue, 23 December 1950, UPL. 155 Nawa-i-Waqt (Lahore), 19 July 1954. 156 The Political Situation in Pakistan, n.d., NND 897209, NARA. 157 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 4 August 1954. 158 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 17 August 1954. 159 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 26 July 1954. 160 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 31 August 1954. 161 Ibid. 162 Pakistan Times (Lahore), 21 August 1954. 163 Ibid. 164 Gazette of Pakistan – Extraordinary Issue, 20 December 1951, UPL. 165 Inauguration of the Province of West Pakistan – Despatch No. 73, 18 October 1955, NND 938750, NARA. 166 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 8 January 1956, PCSL.

Bibliographical references Ansari, S. “Partition, Migration and Refugees: Responses to the Arrival of Muhajirs in Sind during 1947–8”, South Asia, 18 (1995), pp. 95–108.

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——— Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005. Eisenstadt, S. N., ed. Max Weber: On Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Haqqani, H. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005. Jalal, A. The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Kelsen, H. Verteidingung der Demokratie: Abhandlungen zur Demokratietheorie. Tuebingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006. ——— Reine Rechtslehre. Einleitung in die rechtswissenschaftliche Problematik. Tuebingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. Mayer, A. C. “The Funeral of the Emperor of Japan”, Anthropology Today, 5, 3 (1989), pp. 3–6. McGee, R. W. “When Is Tax Evasion Unethical?”, Policy Analysis No. 11 (Working Paper), International and Technical Consultant Inc., 1996. Mines, M. “Individuality and Achievement in South Indian Social History”, Modern Asian Studies, 26, 1 (1992), pp. 129–56. ——— Public Faces, Private Voices: Community and Individuality in South India. BerkeleyLos Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1994. ——— and Vijayalakshmi, G. “Leadership and Individuality in South Asia: The Case of South Indian Big-Man”, Journal of Asian Studies, 49, 4 (1990), pp. 761–86. Mummert, A. and Schneider, F. “The German Shadow Economy: Parted in United Germany?”, FinanzActiv, 58 (2002), pp. 287–317. Nawaz, S. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008. Newberg, P. Judging the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Roberts, D. and Schramm, W., eds. The Process and Effects of Mass Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1972. Shaw, E. F. “Agenda-Setting and Mass Communication”, Gazette – International Journal for Mass Communication Studies, 25, 2 (1979), pp. 96–105. Siddiqa, A. Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy. London: Pluto, 2007. Subha, K. Karnataka Panchayat Elections 1955: Process, Issues and Membership Profile. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1997. Talbot, I. Pakistan: A Modern History. New York-Basingtoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005.

Conclusion

Lahore, late November 2010. I am surrounded by a deafening silence. I cannot hear a sound, not even the loud noise of the traffic. I look around: there is a tiny mosque on my right and, down there, low in the sky, the railway. A mild breeze stirs the leaves of a couple of trees. Shrubs replace the hundreds of graves that, back in 1947, drew a line between this refugee camp and the city. Indeed, history appears to have stopped short of here, the former Walton Road reception camp. The yet-to-be-completed reinforced-concrete structure of part of the well-known Bab-e-Pakistan makes this barren land into a peculiar free-trade zone. Here, the past does not square its accounts with the present, and vice versa. The conversations that refugees held in these premises and the nearby suburbs still echo in the everyday communication of present-day Pakistanis. Twitter and Facebook turn into a virtual Walton Road Camp, wherein the clock of history has stopped and the betrayed dimension of achievement of independence fully surfaces.1 When, back in April 2010, the then President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari attacked his PML(N) opponents, the Sharif brothers by labelling them as “migrants”, he did not hit out blindly. As the reactions of my interlocutor suggest, he reopened a decades-old wound that both institutionally and personally had never really healed. At various times over the previous 30 years, Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, Nawaz and Shahbaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf – all hailing from a refugee background – had either supported or laid down their own ‘foundation stone’ of this memorial to Partition refugees. This (at time of writing) unfinished monument mirrors the very same ‘broken narrative’ that has trapped the story in and around the post-1947 rehabilitation of the migrant community in West Punjab. This is precisely what this book has attempted to address and re-evaluate. Exploring Lahore – This [Facebook] Album [Chorn Aye Hum Wo Galyaan . . . !!] is dedicated to all those people who lived in Lahore, they left and they never came back. If your Parents/Fore-fathers migrated from Lahore to India, ask them the name of the area/street/bazaar mohalla they used to live. I shall try to capture pictures of those areas. I think it will be a great treat for them [. . .] Asim Iqbal – Well Said this Will be amazing if we share Pictures of our forefathers Home town and also The Pictures of home and street. I Live in Lahore My forefather Migrate [sic] from jalandhar to lahore Love to see the Streets of Jalandhar bazar Muhalla anything from Jalandhar.2

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The history of the resettlement of refugees in Pakistani Punjab is clearly part of the rich tapestry of the places in which they lived and which they regularly haunted. Asim and his relatives are a shining example of this flurry of emotions. His forefathers’ hearts certainly swelled with the pride of Pakistan nationalism but, as Asim inadvertently admits, their “home” was in Jullundhur, India. The elaboration of a sense of belonging to Pakistan stemmed from their early experiences in camps and temporary-allotted houses and businesses. There the essential units of the local society were challenged to such a degree that state institutions were perceived as a trauma and a scandal. Indeed, the dislocation of Partition brought about the ripping apart of entire biraderi, tabbar and gharana and of the local schemes of identification between occupation and position within the social ladder. Despite what government plans and widely accepted narratives have argued, refugees were hardly ever allotted properties on the basis of their own place of origin, familiar ties and previous occupation. Instead, as oral accounts and official sources collected for this book suggest, the current social stratification of Partition refugees and their families in Pakistani Punjab’s towns and villages is a by-product of history rather than an institutionally targeted strategy. The biraderiand place of origin-friendly resettlement schemes that were first publicised by government authorities and have been subsequently assimilated into the historiographical mainstream have been demonstrated here to be mere wishful thinking. Nevertheless, at a moment when ideas of individuality, anonymity and social mobility crept into what remained a highly personalised and hierarchical local society, modernity and tradition intertwined in an intricate plot. The eviction of tenants from allotted evacuee lands and the rekindling of the cooperative society movement mirrored the subtleties of the process of social change taking place during those years. As argued in Chapter Two, the notion of biraderi embodied a ‘modernity’ wherein traditions were reframed within the phenomena of the Punjab’s early urbanisation and the paradoxical questioning of traditional hierarchies. Salman Masood (@SalmanMasood): It’s funny how there is talk of building institutions but practice of personal worship Mohsin Hijazee (@MohsinHijazee): @SalmanMasood – Our inherent paradigm is: individuals build institutions, I[mran]K[han] mostly takes this line. People always looking for a Messiah. Salman Massood (@SalmanMasood): @MohsinHijazee – True. Its deep rooted and based on religoious [sic] connotations too.3 To what extent – the Introduction to this book asked – does challenging widespread interpretations of the resettlement of Partition refugees in West Punjab affect our understanding of the early years of Pakistan’s history? As the Lahore experience that largely informs this exploration of 1947’s longer-term consequences suggests, the socially disrupting fallout of Partition-related events and resettlement practices did not merely shape the private lives of members of the refugee community. Balances of powers and patterns of patronage and authority within administrative departments, and between the latter and society as a whole,

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all had to be re-negotiated. The need to re-assert local structures of authority reverberated through mismanaged attempts to grapple properly with the humanitarian crisis generated by the migration of millions of persons. This book has accordingly highlighted the intrinsic weaknesses of the newly established Pakistan Civil Service. Legacy of the colonially glorious Indian Civil Service, this Pakistani institution appeared not to have sufficient stamina to meet the basic needs of its users, let alone the capacity to put forward what other scholarly literature has often labelled as the ‘bureaucratic polity’. As both the Punjab and the Pakistan state failed (or, to be more precise, never attempted) to enjoin a viable, impersonal administrative and legal framework, it was patronage that assuaged citizens’ fears of being trapped in an endless maze of excesses of powers, ultra vires decisions and impossible-to-meet bureaucratic criteria. Persons – especially relevant and influential ones – turned into institutions. They became, as Mohsin Hijazee would argue, Pakistan’s “inherent paradigm”.4 Their good offices were an essential element for accessing the state and its resources. Both the traditional idea of and on corruption practices are here challenged and re-assessed. Complaints about ‘corrupt officials’ often arose as a result of citizens’ perceived dispossession in relation to other more influential individuals.5 Nevertheless, the progressive institutionalisation of practices of favouritism brought about the transposition of the very same mechanisms of marginalisation that burdened ordinary local men and women in their everyday interactions. Indeed, only a tight-knit minority of the migrant community could count on relevant networks of influential acquaintances that enabled them to negotiate their access to much-needed state resources properly. Far from always stirring up a scandal, patronage and cronyism triggered off a curious process of emulation instead. Along the streets around the Civil Secretariat in Lahore’s Anarkali, so-called ‘touts’, petition writers and accommodating civil servants performed the very same negotiation rituals for the benefit of all those whom society and the government authorities themselves had put in the back row. Bribes combined with empty promises fed refugees’ hopes that their needs would be eventually met, thereby amplifying the process of social polarisation and individual feelings of being relegated to the margins. Raza Rumi (@Razarumi): Amazes me that analysts insult the intelligence of Pakistanis. Families in South Asia are well-knit composite units with shared interests! [. . .] Real tragedy of #familygate: it is not about individuals, heroes (C[hief] J[ustice]) and villains (M[alik]R[iaz]) but about the democratic system & const [sic] governance.6 Elections during the period following Partition provided socially excluded members of the migrant community with a further chance to right perceived administrative wrongs and redeem themselves in society’s eyes. In March 1951, the province of West Punjab held Pakistan’s first elections based on a universal franchise. But the engineering of the electoral rules and the mapping of new constituencies

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culminated in a corpus of regulations that stemmed from well-rooted values and practices. For all its paradoxical nature, the disbanding of entire extended families and their network of influential acquaintances called for the partial enthronement of its political relevance. Instead of levelling down patronage practices, the ad hoc electoral committee and provincial authorities raised these dynamics to be the highest dignities of the state-building process. Playing both politics and institutions by the reassuring rules of society, political stability was an almost predictable outcome. The social sustainability of the chosen electoral system is not the only element that needs to be credited with the relative political stability of the early years of Pakistani Punjab’s history. Raza Rumi will not take it amiss or personally. Yet, examining the campaign that preceded the March 1951 elections suggests that, despite taking the lion’s share and being acclaimed in much academic literature to be the quintessence of Pakistani politics, family and patronage networks were not the only ace up candidates’ sleeves. A substantial share of the votes scraped together by the future members of the Punjab Assembly resulted from promises of material benefits to single individuals who were unrelated to the candidates themselves. The latter being in the position to milk the government in charge for every drop of locally limited (and thus much sought-after) resources, the vote was quite easily conceded. Unsurprisingly then, in 1950s Pakistani Punjab, stability was tantamount to single-party rule. Voters strategically picked only those candidates who, through their party connections, were most likely to mould government policies and eventually satisfy their demands. According to this framework of interpretation, the resettlement of refugees tells a rather different story of party history in post-independence Punjab and institution-building processes. Here, the Punjab Muslim League and, to some extent, Pakistan itself redeem themselves in the eyes of those scholarly interpretations that have accentuated their failure. Moreover, by the standards of its own electorate, the provincial branch of the Muslim League and the local party system were institutions that worked. Insofar as it held sway over the redistribution of state resources and the reins of the provincial exchequer, the sun over the League’s political ‘empire’ was not doomed to set. Classifying Punjabi political parties of the late 1940s and 1950s along the binary distinction of ‘conservative vs. progressive’ is a herculean task, the only exceptions to this challenge being, needless to say, the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the attitudes of local parties towards Islam and its role within the public sphere were often a barometer of either their liberalism or their conservatism. West Punjabi refugees were apparently not infected with the same leftist syndrome the affected their West Bengali counterparts. “Pakistan is nation conscious of its nationhood. Visitors [. . .] are immediately conscious of this awareness of nationality, which is rooted in religious and economic but in many other common interests. Islam has been described as an individual experience creative of social order with implicit legal concepts”, pointed out a correspondent reporting in The Times in early 1948.7 The great majority of refugee candidates for a provincial parliamentary reserved seat tapped into this popular

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mood as a way of beating their opponents and, in the process, ousting Islamist parties. Whether or not this was a winning move, it certainly meant that the political debate drifted towards the troubled waters of religious clashes. Saeed Elahi – Chief Minister, S[hahbaz] S[harif], has announced a special Ramazan Package of 4 billion to provide quality edible at subsidized rates to the people during Ramazan [. . .] Malik Mumtaz Ahmed – Ch Parvez Elahi has announced a similar Ramazan Package. C[hief]M[inister] should ensure not to waste additional amount 4 billion and ads in print and electronic media to gain political leverage.8 The legacy of the resettlement of West Punjabi Partition refugees for the broader political life of Pakistan, it could be argued, inspired the elaboration of the (dis)order that has been underlying the Pakistani constitutional system since the country’s creation. The resilience and the stability of Pakistan as an autonomous patronage political system was by no means a byword for state strength. The problem that Dr Saeed Elahi and Malik Mumtaz Ahmed are discussing here is ‘old hat’. As parliamentary debates over the future constitution and institutional architecture of Pakistan dragged on lazily in the decade after 1947, federal and provincial authorities found themselves without a legal framework that was able to regulate their mutual relationships successfully within a newly established independent state. The result was a total mess as far as responsibilities, roles and power jurisdictions were concerned. Both the Pakistan and the Punjab administrations found themselves trapped in an endless and somewhat curious competition in institutional retaliation. Their policies were not in harmony with each other, and clashes between political personalities marked the grim everyday reality of local institutional life. For its part, the Pakistani press was of no help in shaping a public opinion that had the strength to sting authorities into action. In the face of political quarrelsomeness and inconsistency, Punjabi citizens, and the refugee community in particular, developed a deep attachment to all those institutional individuals who made ‘things’ happen for them. For theirs was a personal and immediate relationship. It did not envisage the kind of party mediation that literature usually ascribes to ‘patronage states’. Top institutional figures were further expected to be actively involved in policy-making processes as, of course, these were interpreted by the local society. As power coalesced around groups, different provincial authorities (for instance, the controversy between Punjab and Sindh over the transfer of overspill refugees) and categories, they were asked to mediate between them and on behalf of the marginal sectors of the local society. ***** Lahore, late November 2010. I am surrounded by a deafening silence. I cannot hear a sound, not even the noise of the traffic. I turn my mind to a picture that I spotted on a friend’s Facebook account. Ali Usman Qasmi’s grandparents were refugees who moved to West Punjab during Partition. The picture depicts a plaque that can be still found at their ancestral house in Amritsar. The stone is split in two.

164

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Image 1 Plaque present in the ancestral home of Ata ul-Haq Qasmi’s family, Amritsar Reproduced with permission from Ali Usman Qasmi

The cleavage is deep. It subtly yet powerfully echoes Zarina Hashmi’s works of art. Most importantly, it perfectly embodies the lasting imprint that story of Ali’s grandparents as well as all their fellow Partition refugees have left on Pakistan’s history.

Notes 1 All the extracts quoted in this conclusion have been taken from either Twitter or Facebook public accounts that everyone can access freely at any time. 2 www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.204513086271032.50546.110914475630894& type=3 (accessed 18 July 2012). 3 http://twitter.com/SalmanMasood/ (accessed 18 July 2012). 4 See p. 281. 5 I am indebted to one of my anonymous reviewers for this comment. 6 http://twitter.com/Razarumi (accessed 18 July 2012). 7 The Times (London), 26 February 1948. 8 www.facebook.com/saeedelahimpa (accessed 18 July 2012).

Appendix Note on primary sources

Great Britain British Library (India Office Library and Records) L/P&J/5/-; L/P&J/7/-; L/P&J/8/L/W&S/1/R/3/1/-; R/4/754 MSS EUR C188/-; MSS EUR C253/-; MSS EUR D977/-; MSS EUR F158/-; MSS EUR F161/-; MSS EUR 164/-; MSS EUR F200/-; MSS EUR F 235/-; MSS EUR F274/-; MSS EUR PHOTOS EUR 347/POS 10760–826/National Archives, Kew Gardens – London DO 35/1112; 35/2591; 35/2994; 35/3042; 35/3049; 35/3157; 35/3178; 35/3181; 35/3189; 35/5048; 35/5107(A); 35/5152; 35/5153; 35/5154; 35/5155; 35/5180; 35/5284–6; 35/5321; 35/5322; 35/5326; 35/8958 DO 106 DO 133/59–61 DO 134/1 DO 142/14; 142/326; 142/334; 142/345; 142/386; 142/390; 142/416; 142/438; 142/440 DO 196/50 FO 371/84241; 371/92869; 371/178272 PREM 8/541/5 T 220/102 British Red Cross Museum and Archives British Red Cross Annual Reports, 1947–1962 Red Cross Quarterly Review, 1947–1962 ACC 1594/9 – Diary of Angela Limerick to the Far East, 19 January-1 March 1948

166 Appendix 1594/29 – Diary of Angela Limerick to Singapore, Malaya, India, Pakistan, Iraq and Ciprus, 12 October-22 November 1957 RCB/1/1/14 – Minutes of the Executive Meetings, 1945–1948 348 – Central Registry File, India and Pakistan, 1965–1976 Unclassified – Photographs of Red Cross relief in refugee camps in Pakistan, 1948 Victoria and Albert Museum Archives – Textiles Department I.S.76–1991; I.S.438–1883; I.S.492–1883; I.S.0795; I.S.1814–1883; I.S.2318–83; I.S.5935/1–4; I.S.7102; I.S.7131; I.S.7273; I.S.8100(B); I.S.8285 T.232–1957 0579(A)/3141; 0693(A); 0783; 5510(C); 6004/5549; 5510c; 7109; 7189/3146; 7235(A)/2958; 7240; 7251a; 7252b; 7255e; 7255e; 7259b; 7314; 8095c; 8178/5934

Pakistan Punjab Civil Secretariat Library – Lahore E1–12 – Government of the Punjab Year Book, 1956; E-33- Resettlement of Refugees on Land, 1 July to 31 December 1954 – Part XIII; E33 – Resettlement of Refugees on Land, January to June 1955 – Part XIV F/B/116 – Post Independence India- Pakistan Boundary Records; F6-B – Budgets of the Central Government of Pakistan, 1947–1952 P69 – Survey of Pakistan Progress, 1955 Q91 – Economic Problems in Pakistan, 1947–1948 Q104–2 – Six Years of Progress in Pakistan, 1951 Pakistan Constituent Assembly Debates, 1951–1957 Punjab Assembly Debates 1947–1952 West Punjab Annual Budget Reports Punjab Provincial Assembly Library – Lahore 333.7153P/PUN-REP – Rehabilitation Resettlement Scheme and Instruction Issued thereunder, 1952 345.5491077/MOH – M. Ashraf, Evacuee and Rehabilitation Laws, 1951 346.549104371/PAK – Manual of Settlement (Law and Procedure), 1964 362.80954914/PUN-REP – Manual of Instructions, Pt. I-II, 1949 University of the Punjab Library, Lahore West Punjab and Punjab Gazette, 1947–1955

Appendix 167 Multan District Records Room (Bahauddin Zakariya University) – Multan Account, finance, revenue records AFR/Sr.#153; Sr.#154; Sr.#159; Sr.#203; Sr.#205; Sr.#240 Army and police records AP/Sr.#57; Sr.#59 Budget records BV/Sr.#2 Law and justice records LJ/Sr.#165; Sr.#169; Sr.#174; Sr.#179; Sr.#180; Sr.#182, Sr.#183; Sr#189, Sr.#193; Sr.#194; Sr#195; Sr.#196; Sr#198; Sr.#202; Sr.#203; Sr.#206; Sr.#209; Sr.#217; Sr.#218; Sr.#222 Law reports LR/Sr.#29–34; Sr.#35–37; Sr.#38–45; Sr.#45; Sr.#48–55, 55–71, Sr.#73–75; Sr.#77–83, 86–93; Sr.#94; Sr.#97; Sr.#98; Sr.#99; Sr.#100–101, 104–108; Sr.#109; Sr.#112–120; Sr.#123–124; Sr.#126–128, 137–139; Sr.#140–146, 148–154; Sr.#147 Miscellaneous BM/Sr.#26; Sr.#30 PGG/Sr.#450 PW-I/Sr.#43 RON/Sr.#138; Sr.#139 MISCELLANOUS/Sr.#149

United States US National Archives and Records Administration (College Park, MD) MLR No. A1 1301; 1303; 1305; 1306; 1534; 5252; 5274; 3636 (Record Group 59) MLR No. NM3 82 (Record Group 319) MLR No. P12 (Record Group 306) MLR No. P161 (A); P 270; P350; P352 (Record Group 469)

168 Appendix MLR No. UD 552; 559; 560; 561; 462; 746; 1340; 1341; 1386; 3063; 3065/A; 3067/UD 3067/A; 3075/UD 3075/A; 3076; 3232 (Record Group 469) Local Identifier 111-LC-40799 (Record Group 111) Local Identifier 263.2191 (Record Group 263) Local Identifier 306-EN-K-T-1100 (Record Group 306) Local Identifier 306-X (Record Group 306) World Bank AS-62a – Report (Restricted) AS69 – Volume 1 (Restricted); Volume 2 (Annex to Report No. AS-69a); Volume 3 AS-77a – Report (Restricted) C-14 L-121 No. E101a – Confidential 67010 No. E-140b. (Annex) – Restricted 67063 No. E213a – Restricted 67142 No. L-165 – Restricted (Appendix III) No. P-32 – Restricted (LN-60 PAK) No. P34 – Restricted (LN-62 PAK)

Official publications Commercial Relations and Exports Department – Board of Trade, Overseas Economic Surveys. Pakistan. Economic and Commercial Conditions in Pakistan (May 1950), 1951 Commercial Relations and Export Department – Board of Trade, Overseas – Economic Survey: Pakistan, London, 1955 Government of India – Minister of Information and Broadcast, Millions on the Move. The Aftermath of Partition, Delhi, 1948 Government of Pakistan, Census of Pakistan, 1951 Government of Pakistan, The Rehabilitation and Works Division, 1958–1963. Five Years of Revolutionary Government, 1963 Government of Pakistan, Ayub’s Manifesto Undertaking, n.d. Government of West Pakistan, The Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report, Lahore, 1955 Government of West Pakistan, Resettlement of Refugees on Land in the Punjab – Part XII and XVI, Lahore, 1956 Government of West Punjab, The Thal Development Act, 1949, Lahore, 1949 Government of West Punjab, The Thal Development Act, 1950, Lahore, 1950 Government of West Punjab, Supplement to the List of Muslim Abducted Women and Children in India and Jammu & Kashmir State – Part III, Lahore, 1954 Rehabilitation and Works Division, 1958–1963 – Five Years of Revolutionary Government, n.d.

Appendix 169 Report of the Court of Inquiry Constituted under the Punjab Act II of 1954 to Enquire into the Punjab Disturbances of 1953, Lahore, 1954 West Pakistan Rehabilitation Resettlement Scheme with Instructions issued thereunder, Karachi, 1957

Private papers Prof. Mahmood Shaukat’s Private Archive – Lahore – Private Correspondence between Malik Barkat Ali and Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Oral sources Dr Massarat Abid, Lahore, 20 January 2010 Dr Ahmad Ejaz, Lahore, 29 January 2010 Begum Hameed Elahi, 10 August 2013 and 10 July 2014 Dr Saeed Elahi, Lahore, 14 February 2010 Dr Ali Usman Qasmi, Lahore, 18 March 2010 and 1 November 2013 Dr Usman Khan and mother, 22 November 2010 Rana Muhammad Iqbal, Lahore, 1 December 2010

Newspapers Civil Military Gazette (Lahore) Dawn (Karachi) Imroze (Lahore) Nawa-i-Waqt (Lahore) Pakistan Times (Lahore) The Times (London)

Index

Ahl-e-Sunnat-o-Jamaat Ulama 118 Ahmad, I. 108 Akhtar, S. 1–3 Alavi, H. 79 Ali, M. B. 19–20 All-Pakistan Muhajir Board 87 Amritsar 1, 2, 14, 23–7, 54, 62, 66, 83, 91–2, 139, 146, 163–4; Amritsar District 15, 21, 24, 26, 32 Anjuman-i-Himayat-i-Islam 116 Ansari, S. 28 Attlee, C. 17–19 Attock 17; Attock District 14, 35, 81, 147 Azad Pakistan Party 122–3 Bab-e-Pakistan 159, 163 Baluchistan 60, 107, 149 bank(s) 48–9, 62, 70–1, 91, 145, 148; Punjab Co-operative Bank Ltd. 83–4 Baqir, M. 64 Bengal 26, 115; East Bengal 34, 162 Bharowal 25 biraderi 8, 71, 107, 110–11, 121–2, 144, 151–2, 160 Bogra, M. A. 95 Boundary Commission 20, 26, 66 Brass, P. 14 British Red Cross 46–7 Campbellpur 16, 22 camps (refugees) 8, 27–8, 45–51, 107, 150, 160; Multan Qila camp 48; Walton Road camp 46–7 censorship 7, 15, 139–40 census 48, 52; Census of India (1941) 32; Census of Pakistan (1951) 29–31; West Punjab Refugee Census (1948) 29 Chatterji, J. 5

Chattha, I. 4, 6 Cheema, M. A. 80, 124 Christians 49, 69, 120 Civil and Military Gazette 64, 139 Civil Services Prevention of Corruption Rule (1953) 90 Communist Party 114, 123, 162 Congress 16, 18, 20, 26 Constituent Assembly 25, 33, 89, 93, 98, 108–9, 114, 133, 143, 150 constitution 133, 141, 143, 163; 1956 Constitution 141, 152 cooperative societies 64–71; Cooperative Department 67, 70; Cooperative Inquiry Committee Report 66–7 corruption 4–5, 7, 79–80, 90–2, 95, 98, 114, 144, 161; Anti-Corruption Department 144–5 Darling, M. L. 65 Dasti, S. A. H. K. 142 Data Darbar 2 Daultana, M. M. 14, 86, 115, 123–4, 136 Dawn 20, 26, 27, 33, 59, 112, 134, 148 Delhi 20, 24, 32, 57 Deschaumes, G. G. 14 Din, Q. 106–10 Displaced Persons (Compensation and Rehabilitation) Act (1958) 82–3 Elahi, S. 163 elections 22–3, 89, 90, 113; 1945–6 elections 23, 36, 119; 1951 elections 105–11, 116, 117–23, 151, 161–3 European Residents Association 138 evacuee(s): Custodian of Evacuee Properties (CEP) 33–4, 52, 83; evacuee houses 33, 51–2, 54, 56, 66, 83;

172

Index

Evacuee Intelligence Bureau 143–4; evacuee properties 28, 33, 45, 56, 58, 65–6, 68–9, 82–6, 91, 96–8, 107, 134, 148–9; evacuee shops 33, 66, 85; Pakistan (Administration of Evacuee Properties) Act (1957) 86 Faruqi, S. A. S. 114 Fatima Jinnah College for Women 55 Gandhi, M. K. 16 Gellner, E. 49 Gibbon, C. E. 48, 49, 56, 105, 135, 142 Gilmartin, D. 22, 23, 119 Goodnow, H. 79 goonda(s) 60–1 Government of India Act (1935) 143 Grow More Food programme 120 Gujranwala 6, 23, 45, 83, 122; Gurjawala District 30, 34, 35, 111, 151 Gupta, A. 4 gurdwara(s) 14, 15, 22 Gurmani, M. M. A. 29, 152 Haq, M. Z. (ul-) 159 Hasan, M. 22 Hashmi, Z. 164 Hassan, S. S. 89, 109–10 Hayat, S. 116 Heinz Mission 67 Hindustan Times 1, 148 Hussain, A. 25 Hussain, I. 56 Hyderabad, capitulation of the Nizam 146 Iftikharuddin, M. 117, 122, 135 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development 71 Ivekovic, R. 14 Jaffer, A. E. H. 143 Jalal, A. 18, 133 Jamaat-i-Islami 116, 123, 162 Jenkins, E. 13–14, 16, 17, 21, 24–5 Jhang 118; Jhang District 30, 35, 81, 119–20, 122–3 Jhelum District 14, 17, 30, 35, 145, 147 Jinnah, M. A. 13, 16, 18–20, 23, 25, 143, 145–6 Jinnah Awami League 115–16, 118, 124–5 Jinnah Muslim League 115–16 Jullundhur 22, 27, 34, 46, 54–5, 121, 160; Jullundhur District 19, 23–4, 26, 32

kafila(s) 27, 28 Karachi 25, 34, 57, 63, 94, 111, 112, 113, 119, 139, 148, 149 Kaur, K. 5 Kaur, R. 5, 14 Kennedy, C. H. 79 Khaliquzzaman, C. 112 Khan, A. 36–7, 143–5 Khan, C. M. 69, 138 Khan, G. A. 26, 51, 57, 150 Khan, J. A. 151 Khan, L. A. 27, 106, 116, 117, 146–7 Khan, N. 123 Khan, R. K. A. 48–9, 106–7, 110 Khan, S. A. R. 139 Khan, Y. 14 Khilafat-e-Pakistan 117 Khuhro, M. A. 150 Kinnaird College 55 Kisan Committee 69 Lahore 1–2, 6–7, 14, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 25–6, 34, 45, 47–9, 52, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61–5, 85, 87, 88, 90–1, 96, 109, 111, 114, 116, 117, 119, 122–3, 125, 138, 141, 145–6, 159–60, 163; Civil Secretariat 79, 91–2, 161; Lahore Corporation 56; Lahore District 15, 21, 29–30, 34, 35, 60, 138–9; Lahore Improvement Trust 6, 36, 64; Lahore Municipality 50; Lahore Township Scheme 37; (the) Mall 51, 56; Model Town 53, 61, 83; Walled City 36, 50, 53–4 Lieven, A. 4 Limerick, A. 46–7, 51 Ludhiana District 26, 32 Lulakot 138 Lyallpur 64, 66, 117, 122–3, 151; Lyallpur District 29–30, 34–5, 68, 80–1, 94–5, 150 Mamdot, Khan of 13, 19, 22, 50, 115–18, 124, 136, 141, 146 Mandhan 22 Manto, S. 50 Matta 69 Maududi, M. 116 Mayo Hospital 50 Mbembe, A. 4 Michelutti, L. 3 Mizra, I. 141 Modi, N. 1 Montgomery 49; Montgomery District 29–30, 34–5, 96–7, 106, 139, 151

Index Mudie, F. 28 Muhajir Fund Cess Bill 142 Multan 14, 45, 66, 87, 119; Multan District 6, 17, 29–30, 34–5, 96 Munir, M. 117–18, 121–2 Munir, M. (Chief Justice) 152 Musharraf, P. 24, 159 Muslim League 6, 13–14, 16, 18, 20, 22–4, 26, 55, 116, 142; Muslim League Council 19, 114; Muslim League Council Meeting (1949) 111–14; Muslim League National Guards (MLNG) 15; Muslim League Refugees Consultative Committee 151; Muslim Student Federation 19; Punjab Muslim League 106–11, 116–19, 122, 123–5, 138 Muzzaffargarh 14; Muzzaffargarh District 81 Myrdal, G. 4 Nawa-i-Waqt 141, 151 Nawaz, S. (Begum) 55 Nehru, J. 20, 26–7, 146–7, 149 Nehru-Liaquat Ali Khan Pact (1959) 79 Niazi, A. S. K. 117 North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) 15, 34, 107, 149 One Unit system 151 Oulzan, F. 62 Pakistan Civil Service 6, 79, 81–3, 93, 114, 161 Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) 119 Pakistan Muslim League (PML(N)) 2–3, 159 Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) 1–2 Pakistan-Punjab Joint Refugee Council 34, 135–6 Pakistan Times 6, 55, 56, 58, 68, 80–1, 84, 87, 88, 91, 92, 94–5, 98, 109, 119, 140 Pak Jamhouriat 144 Pandey, G. 16 Partition 1–3, 5, 14–19, 21, 22, 25, 33, 47–8, 52–3, 57, 59, 65–6, 69–70, 84, 88, 121–2, 133–4, 160–1; Partition Committee 19; Partition Plan 19 Patel, S. 27 patronage 4–5, 49, 59, 60–1, 65, 70, 79–80, 89, 91, 95, 107, 110, 112–14, 121–2, 124–5 Phillaur 19, 24 Piliavsky, A. 4 Piracha, F. I. 32–3 pir(s) 23, 117–19, 121

173

Poona 143 Post, K. 107 Pulkanjiri 138 Punjab Assembly 22, 48, 56, 86, 94, 95, 107, 108, 110, 123, 125, 134, 138, 142, 150, 151 Punjab Public Safety Act 139–40 Punjab Tenancy (Amendment) Act (1952) 123 Qasmi, A. U. 163–4 Qaum Razakars 139 Qizilbash, M. A. K. 89, 95, 150 Qureshi, I. H. 136–7 Radcliffe, C. 26, 66; Radcliffe Award 26 Rashid, S. M. 65–6 Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 15, 27 Rawalpindi 14, 17, 94, 122–3; Rawalpindi District 30, 35, 147 Raza, R. 69 Registration of Claims (Displaced Persons) Ordinance 84, 86 rehabilitation 7–8, 27–9, 55, 66, 84–5, 96, 107, 110, 114–16, 133, 141–2, 146, 149, 151; All-Parties Refugees and Rehabilitation Board 57; Minister for Refugees and Rehabilitation 33, 51, 56, 57; Minister for Rehabilitation and Colonies 32–3; Minister for Resettlement and Rehabilitation 135, 136, 137, 143, 148, 150; Pakistan Refugee Rehabilitation Finance Corporation 33, 137; Rehabilitation Advisory Committee 141; Rehabilitation Circles 57; Rehabilitation Commissioner 34, 79–81, 84–6, 88, 97; Rehabilitation Consultative Committee 141–2; Rehabilitation Department 29, 34–5, 56, 65, 83, 85, 87–8, 90–1, 92, 97; Rehabilitation Settlement Scheme 141; West Punjab Rehabilitation Board 34 Representation of the People Act (1957) 90 resettlement 2–3, 5–6, 28–33, 51–3, 56–7, 87–8, 93–4, 97, 107, 110–11, 114–15, 134–45, 151, 160–2; Pakistan-India relations 146–9; Resettlement Secretary 34; rural resettlement 36, 65–71; urban resettlement 36, 58–65 Roy, H. 5 Rumi, R. 161–2 Safdar, M. N. 1 sajjada nashin(s) 23, 106, 119, 121–2, 125

174

Index

Sanaullah, R. 2 satellite towns 33, 36–7, 62–3 Shafi, M. M. 151–2 Shah, S. N. 123 Shahabuddin, K. 33, 114, 140 Shahpur District 30, 35, 69 Sharif, M. 2 Sharif, N. 1, 159 Sharif, S. 2, 159 Sialkot 45, 84, 115, 138; Sialkot District 6, 30, 34–5, 68, 111, 117, 121, 123, 147 Sindh 2, 28, 34, 107, 149, 150, 153 Sindh Legislative Assembly 25 Singh, K. 48 Singh, S. 19 Singh, T. 15, 20 Sir Ganga Ram Hospital 55 Spring Peace (1955) 57–8 State Bank (Pakistan) 70 Stephenson, S. H. 149–50 Suharwardy, H. S. 115–20, 123–4 Swaraj, S. 1 Talbot, I. 14, 28, 64 Tassawwar, H. 60–1

Times, The (London) 25, 26, 28, 47, 59, 120, 137, 162 Tiwana, K. 13, 14, 16, 124 Unionist Party 13, 23 United Provinces 20, 32, 54, 60, 61, 147, 148 University of the Punjab 21, 55, 62, 64, 142 Vairowal 25 Verka 22 Viamian 138 Waseem, M. 79 Weekly Guardian 7, 140 West Punjab Damaged Areas Ordinance (1948) 36 West Punjab Fund Cess Act (1948) 142 West Punjab Refugee (Registration of Land Claims) Ordinance (1948) 36 Wilder, A. 107 Zamindar (newspaper) 27 Zamindar, V. F. Y. 5 Zardari, A. A. 1, 2, 3, 159