Pakistan: A Hard Country (48 page)
As independence approached in 1945 – 7, the Unionists col apsed under the triple blows of Muslim League agitation for Pakistan, Sikh agitation for a Sikh-dominated province or even independent state (something that was to resurface in the Sikh extremist rebel ion against India in the 1980s), and the refusal of Jawaharlal Nehru and the Indian National Congress to accept a confederal India with a semi-independent position for Punjab. Exacerbated by the haste of the British withdrawal, and some perverse decisions by the Radcliffe boundary commission, the result was the appal ing bloodletting that gripped the province after March 1947, and resulted in a crescendo of violence in the weeks fol owing independence and partition in August.
In the resulting massacres on both sides, between 200,000 and 1
mil ion people lost their lives in Punjab and Bengal (modern scholarship tends to support the lower figure), and more than 7.5
mil ion Punjabis became refugees. The human cost is commemorated in innumerable memoirs and writings, including the greatest piece of fiction yet to come from Pakistan, Toba Tek Singh by Saadat Hasan Manto. Lahore, which had been in the middle of the northern belt of Sikh and British Punjab, was left almost on the Indian frontier – something which has contributed to its inhabitants’ obsession with the Indian threat. In the 1965 war the Indians came close to capturing the city.
The ethnic impact of the migration from India on Pakistani Punjab was far less than on Sindh, where the migrants came from completely different parts of the British Indian empire – in Punjab, refugees were settled among fel ow Punjabis. The scale of the movement however was immense. Out of the more than 7.25 mil ion people who moved from India to Pakistan, 5.28 mil ion moved from east (Indian) to west (Pakistani) Punjab. After 1947, these refugees made up just over 25
per cent of the population of Pakistani Punjab, one of the highest proportions of refugees in an area in recorded history.
This forced migration built on already existing Punjabi traditions of peaceful economic migration to develop new land and new businesses, which already under the British had taken hundreds of thousands of Punjabis to settle in the new canal colonies of Sindh (which were created in the 1930s, two generations after those of Punjab) and to work as shopkeepers and artisans in Balochistan.
From the 1950s on, these traditions took hundreds of thousands more to the terraced houses of Leeds, Leicester and Oxford.
The east Punjabi refugees of 1947 brought two things with them to their new homes in west Punjab (mostly homes and lands abandoned by fleeing Hindus and Sikhs). The first was relative economic and social dynamism created by the shock to their old settled ways.
Because they moved to another part of the same province, and en masse as whole vil age communities, the element of disruption was less than in the case of the Mohajirs in Sindh.
Nonetheless, the experience of being uprooted, and the consequent undermining of the old landowning elites, meant that the Punjabi migrants also were to some extent shaken out of their old patterns.
Those who were unable to find land in the countryside settled in the cities, entering new trades and professions. This strengthened the element of independence and egalitarianism already present in some of the northern Punjabi castes – especial y the Jats, who like to say of themselves, ‘The Jats bow the knee only to themselves and God.’
The other thing that the refugees natural y contributed was a particularly intense hatred and fear of India, which remains far stronger in Punjab than in Sindh or the NWFP – just as on the other side of the new border, Hindu refugees from west Punjab came to play an especial y important role in anti-Muslim politics. This fear has helped strengthen the refugees’ identification with Pakistan, and therefore that of Punjab as a whole. Of the educated Punjabi migrants, a high proportion joined the officer corps. They played a particularly prominent role under General Zia-ul-Haq – himself from Jul undur in east Punjab, like his ISI commander, General Akhtar Rehman. A majority of the leadership of the violently anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba Islamist militant group (now al ied in revolt with the Pakistani Taleban) have also been from east Punjab.
The refugees therefore played a vital role in creating what Abida Husain has cal ed, with some exaggeration, ‘Pakistan’s Prussian Bible Belt’: that is to say, the combination of tendencies towards economic dynamism, social mobility, militarist nationalism and Islamist chauvinism to be found in northern and central Punjab.
These tendencies, and the overal impact of the refugees, have been qualified however by much older traditions in Punjab, a mixture exemplified by the city of Lahore. As noted, the headquarters of Islamist radical groups are close to the city. The main headquarters of the Jamaat Islami party, Mansura, is in one of Lahore’s suburbs. Yet Lahore also contains numerous shrines of saints, including one of the greatest not only in Pakistan but in South Asia, Data Ganj Baksh, the object of a Taleban terrorist attack on 1 July 2010.
Data Ganj Baksh (original name Abul Hassan Ali Hajvery) was an eleventh-century Sufi preacher from Ghazni in Afghanistan who played a key part in converting people in northern Punjab to Islam. His shrine became famous for miracles, and for many centuries he has been the most beloved of Lahore’s many saints. ‘He is our very own link with God,’ I was told by Mukhtar, a worshipper at the shrine from Mianwali in western Punjab near the border with the NWFP.
However, the shrine now looks much less like an ancient inner-city shrine than it did when I first visited it in the 1980s. Then, like most old shrines, it was surrounded by houses, and you approached its gate through a narrow crowded lane. The buildings of the mosque dated back to Mughal times and were far too smal for al the worshippers from Lahore’s immensely expanded population. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, therefore, when Nawaz Sharif was chief minister of Punjab, he rebuilt the shrine at immense cost, including the creation of a strikingly modernist mosque by a Turkish architect, an underground parking lot, and a huge forecourt on the edge of a main road, to create which several streets of houses had to be bought up and demolished.
This says something very interesting about overlapping Punjabi identities and the relationship between religion and politics. Like many traditional Punjabi commercial families, the Sharifs are by origin Kashmiris who moved to Punjab centuries ago. In 1947, they migrated from east Punjab to Lahore, where Nawaz Sharif was born in 1949.
Partly from older family tradition, and partly perhaps because of the impact of migration, Nawaz Sharif’s father joined the Ahl-e-Hadith, a religious tradition with strong Wahabi leanings. This is an affiliation which later strengthened, and was strengthened by, Sharif ties to Saudi Arabia, where Nawaz Sharif’s father went into business after Z.
A. Bhutto nationalized his industries in the 1970s, and where Nawaz took refuge after being overthrown by Musharraf. Nawaz Sharif therefore has been widely suspected of sympathies with radical Islamist theology.
However – presumably in order to consolidate their position in their new home, Lahore – Nawaz Sharif’s family married him to a girl from a leading Kashmiri family of Lahore’s Old City. In a reflection of this Old City culture, Kulsum Sharif is the niece of Bohlu Pehlewan, an Indian wrestling champion before partition. Like most of the old Kashmiri families of Lahore, her family are by tradition Barelvi Sunnis, and fol owers of Lahore’s saints and especial y of Data Ganj Baksh. In a sign of the way that al egiance to the saints often cuts across sectarian divides, she named their two sons Hassan and Hussain – the two greatest names of the Shia tradition.
It may be assumed, therefore, that Mrs Sharif and her family had some impact on Nawaz Sharif’s decision to spend a fortune (admittedly of state money) rebuilding the shrine of Data Ganj Baksh.
A political calculation was also no doubt involved – the desire to increase Muslim League support among the saint’s fol owers in Lahore and elsewhere. In an amusing example of jumping on the bandwagon (or possibly Mr Sharif trying to kil two birds with one stone), fol owers of another, modern Lahori Sufi saint (mentioned in Chapter 4), Hafiz Iqbal, claimed that their saint was actual y responsible because he appeared to Mr Sharif in a dream and told him to help his brother Data Ganj Baksh.
Whether this story was initiated by Hafiz Iqbal’s fol owers in order to appeal to the Sharifs, or the Sharifs in order to appeal to Hafiz Iqbal’s fol owers, I cannot say (nor of course would I wish for one moment to discount the idea that saints could in principle appear to Mr Sharif).
The point however is that religion and politics are deeply intertwined in Lahore – but in ways that often cut clean across what at first sight are people’s formal religious affiliations.
Another famous example of a Punjabi, and especial y Lahori, tradition that spans religious divides is that of the Basant festival (from the Sanskrit word for spring), which takes place in February. This Hindu festival is supposed to have been incorporated into popular Muslim practice by medieval Sufi saints. It is celebrated in Lahore and elsewhere in Punjab by the flying of a multitude of brightly coloured kites.
In consequence, Basant is natural y hated by the puritan reformers of the Deobandi and Wahabi traditions. However, official moves in recent years to restrict the celebration of Basant have been mainly due to a different, rather depressing cause, namely, the tradition of coating the strings of kites with ground glass, so as to cut the strings of rival kites.
Every year, a number of people (especial y children) are kil ed or injured when cut strings fal back to earth, or when they bring down electricity wires.
PUNJAB’S REGIONS
Geographical y and economical y, one can divide Punjab into three main regions (though blurring together at the edges and with numerous subdivisions within them). The first, north-central Punjab, contains Lahore, the old agricultural areas along the rivers, and most of the new canal colonies created by the British. It has Punjab’s (and Pakistan’s) most productive agriculture, which also benefited more than any other area of Pakistan from the ‘Green Revolution’. In the first half of the 1960s, agricultural growth in the main canal colony districts of Faisalabad, Multan and Montgomery (Sahiwal) increased by 8.9 per cent a year, and these three districts alone came to account for almost half of Punjab’s entire agricultural production.7
Although water shortages today pose a growing and possibly even existential threat to Pakistan, it should be remembered that, as the canal colonies demonstrate, water is also something in connection with which men in the past have achieved great triumphs in this region.
This was true not only of the original construction of the canals by the British, but also of their tremendous extension by the new Pakistani state in the 1950s. This included, among other things, the construction of the Tarbela reservoir and dam, the largest earth-fil ed dam in the world.
Final y, when in the 1960s the canals began to produce a crisis of waterlogging and salination in the canal colony areas, the state took quite effective action to drain the land, improve the efficiency of the canals and limit over-use of water. Salination is stil a problem in parts of Punjab and Sindh, but it is a limited one – unlike the over-use of aquifers, which if it continues unchecked wil render parts of Pakistan uninhabitable. These past achievements are another sign that Pakistan is not the hopeless case that it is so often made out to be.
What it achieved once it can achieve again, given leadership, a recognition of the problem, and a little help from its friends. Whereas in the past Pakistan and especial y Punjab were wel ahead among developing countries in terms of water storage, in recent decades both have fal en behind badly as a result of under-investment and political wrangling over dam construction.
As of 2004, Pakistan had only 150 cubic metres of water storage capacity per inhabitant, compared to 2,200 cubic metres in China. The contruction of smal earthen dams to trap rainwater has improved the situation somewhat in the years since then, but Pakistan is stil far behind India in water storage, let alone China and the developed world.8
The farmers of the canal colonies have for more than a hundred years demonstrated their versatility and commercial drive. This was shown again by the speed with which they adopted many of the techniques of the Green Revolution. It should in principle, therefore, be possible to get them to adopt more water-efficient ways of growing crops. The problem is that this would almost certainly require them to be pushed towards water efficiency by water-pricing – and this is such a political y explosive subject that no government, civilian or military, has so far been wil ing to touch it. Nonetheless, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility, at least once people begin to see real agricultural disasters starting to develop elsewhere as a result of water shortages.
Alongside Lahore, the central region contains Punjab’s greatest industries, centred on the textile centre of Faisalabad (founded by the British as Lyal pur) and other cities. The importance of the great ‘feudal’ landowning families in this region has been greatly reduced in recent decades, and its politics are dominated by smal er landowners and new families risen through commercial success or (corrupt) government service. This region is closely linked to Kashmir, from where the families of many urban Punjabis (including the Sharif family) original y migrated. This has helped cement the commitment of many people in this region to the struggle against India in Kashmir. Punjabi speakers from Pakistani Kashmir also dominate the Pakistani diaspora in Britain.