GOODWILL MISSION TO PAKISTAN

By K. NARASIMHA RAO, B.A., B.L.

(Chairman, Municipal Council, Masulipatam)

The Federation of All-India Local Authorities has recently sponsored a Goodwill Mission to Pakistan. The Federation is a representative organisation comprising about 1468 Municipalities and corporations, about 678 District Boards and thousands of Panchayats in the twenty-two States of India. It was formed about seven years back under the name and style of “All-India Local Bodies Conference” and Sir Gulam Hussain Hidayatulla, the Premier of Sind, was the first President. After Partition, Srimathi Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was elected as President, and while going out to Russia as Indian Ambassador, she entrusted the work to Sri R. K. Sidhwa, M P., and an ex-Mayor of Karachi City Corporation. But ere long Sri Sidhwa himself became a Deputy Minister at the Centre, and he laid down the office only after the General Elections in 1952. A conference of elected representatives of the various Local Bodies in India was held at Madras in April 1953, and Sri Sidhwa was re-elected President of the Federation unanimously, by the one thousand and odd delegates who attended the conference from the different States.

The Goodwill Mission left Bombay for Karachi on the 25th November last year, under the leadership of Sri Sidhwa, and came back to India on the 5th December, after touring Karachi and the province of Sind. Besides Sri Sidhwa, Mrs. Sulochana Modi, M.A. member of the Bombay Corporation, Major Bamji, a representative of the Parsi community, Mr. Md. Tahir, a Muslim M.L.A., and myself constituted the Mission.

Karachi, reputed to be one of the finest cities in the East, is now the Metropolis of Pakistan and the seat of both the Central Government and the Provincial Government of sind. Like Delhi it has been constituted into a separate Province, and negotiations are progressing on the question of compensating the Sind Government for developing Hyderabad (Sind) as the Provincial Capital.

We were really surprised by the enthusiasm and cordiality with which we were received in Karachi and Sind, both at the Government level and by the cross-section of the people we met. Our Mission has evoked a spurt of goodwill and spontaneous enthusiasm for restoration of friendly relations between the two Governments and the people. At the various gatherings we addressed, sentiments of friendship were expressed freely and un-equivocally, and we were assured that after the frightful happenings of the post-Partition era, conditions had really settled down and there was a resurgence of popular opinion in favour of establishing friendly relations with India. Emphasis was laid on the restoration of trade between the two countries and when Mr. Mohamed Tahir, one of us, frankly but delicately pointed out that if Pakistan was importing coal from South Africa, wheat from Argentina, matches from the U.S.S.R. and Czechoslovakia, and several other consumer goods from distant European countries at uneconomic prices, it was the people of Pakistan who paid through the nose and that a friendly India could export all these and more with a reciprocal arrangement and at economic prices, he was loudly cheered and applauded. Similarly when Sri Sidhwa said that the heart of the masses on both sides of the Border was sound and it was only the leaders and the intellectuals who were trying to keep apart the two countries, for their selfish ends, his speech drew a spontaneous applause from the gathering, which consisted primarily of intellectuals and leaders of politics and business. Not content with merely appreciating the effort of our Mission, they assured us at different levels that such exchange of Missions would go a long way in restoring friendship and that they, in their turn, would send a Mission to India after June 1954. Even the Pakistan Prime Minister, Mr. Mohammed Ali, appreciating this gesture of ours, remarked that things had been allowed to drift over these five years and more, and an attempt has to be made at some time or other to check this drift, and that he would lend his moral support to the exchange of such Missions more frequently, as, in his opinion, restoration of goodwill and friendship between the people is bound to have a salutary and chastening effect on the Governments also.

One thing that impresses a visitor most is the rapid pace at which Pakistan is trying to build up her industries. Karachi City which did not have a single textile mill prior to Partition, now has over 32 textile and 16 allied textile mills in full commission, with seven more under construction. The Sind Industrial Trading Estates, Karachi, a Government organisation, has acquired and earmarked an area of 4250 acres of land in the city for industrial purposes, and 100 factories of all types and trades are now working, with 29 more under construction and 153 yet to come up. With their labour colonies, and smoking chimneys, they constitute a fully developed city by themselves.

Similarly in Hyderabad (Sind), textile mills–the largest with 50,000 spindles–a razor factory and a glass factory have been constructed. The Government has been helping these industries in several ways, and, to afford protection to the nascent textile industry, has put an embargo on import of cloth. But the price of cloth in Pakistan is so frightfully high and the cost of living has risen so steeply, that the Government have now decided on importing cloth worth 4 crores of Rupees, at Government level, against which decision the mill magnates and the Press are putting up a stiff fight.

Agriculturally also Pakistan is advancing swiftly. The Sukkur Barrage over the Indus River, which had turned the desert of Sind into a fertile valley of plenty, supplies perennial water to 7 lac acres of rice fields, 8 lac acres of cotton fields, and 11 lac acres of wheat fields, with a total acreage of 38,66,251 under both Karif and Rabi cultivation. The Barrage, constructed prior to Partition, is a marvel of engineering skill and efficiency, and is the biggest single irrigation project in the world. The seven canals which take off a total discharge of 46,617 cusecs of water per second are estimated to irrigate 5.25 million acres, and the channels themselves run to a length of 6473 miles. The Barrage with the canals involved a capital outlay of 20 crores and had yielded a return of 9.3% even by 1945-47. But the Lower Sind area is not served by this scheme and hence the Sind Government is now putting up another barrage near Kotri known as the “Lower Barrage Scheme”. The masonry construction of 67 spans of 60 feet each is almost complete, and the earthern Dam has yet to be put up to turn the course of the river, and to send it coursing through the Masonry Dam. Though the scheme is scheduled to be completed by about 1960, water will be supplied by about the middle of 1954 to Kalri-bagar canal which supplies water to the Lower Sind area. Yet another project for producing Hydro-Electric power from the Sind waters is in the final stages of scrutiny, and is planned to be built up with foreign aid.

The question of prime importance and interest to us in India is the position of the Minorities in Pakistan. Minorities constitute about 14% of the total population of Pakistan and 25% of the population of East Bengal. Prior to the Partition, there were over 3 lacs of Hindus as against 4 lacs of Muslims in Karachi City. But we find hardly 4000 caste Hindus, 20,000 belonging to Scheduled castes, and 5000 Parsis in Karachi City, which has now a population of over 14 lacs. Similarly in Hyderabad and Sukkur which had a predominantly Hindu population, we find very few Hindus today. The Sindhis by nature are a peace-loving and good-neighbourly lot, and it was the evacuees from the Punjab and other parts of India that were mainly responsible for forcing out the Minorities. But it must be said to the credit of the Sindhis, that they could avoid the massacres and spoliation that had blighted the Country-side in the Punjab. The few that have stayed back remained under the protection afforded by the local populace, and their representatives who met us assured us that normal conditions have been restored and that they are getting on well. But in the Services, there are practically no representatives of the Minorities, and in Sind, in particular which was formerly manned by efficient officers and other ranks, this depletion is still having its effect on efficiency in administration.

At several places we visited, the question was repeatedly put by well-meaning Moslems with sincere feeling and perplexity as to why the Minorities, especially the Hindus, were still leaving Pakistan.

The post-Partition events left an indelible mark on the minds of the Minorities, and the recent happenings at Lahore aimed at the Ahmediya Moslems have a depressing and a foreboding effect. Though the Mulla Board has been negatived, the Constitution names Pakistan an “Islamic Republic”, in which Moslems alone are entitled to nationality. Maulana Sultan Ahmed, President of Jamait-i-Islami Pakistan, recently declared that his party would stand for declaring all non-Muslims as ‘Zimmy’. According to the Quoran there are two types of ‘Zimmy’, by conquest and by agreement, and they are debarred from military duty. The Maulana stated that the ‘Zimmy’ should hold no responsible post and could only be returned to the Legislatures to protect their sectional interests. This party consisting of Mullas has a deeper base amongst the refugees, and this is but a sample of unrestrained propaganda carried on in Pakistan by religious leaders, fanatics and self-centred politicians, who vie with each other for establishing the undisputed rule of the Quoran and the Sunnah according to their light and tenets. The cry of “Islam in danger” is not infrequently resorted to by them to divert the attention of the masses, and there is no knowing when the match would ignite the powder keg. The masses are an inflammable material as of old, and no one can foretell when and how the conflagration flares up. Like the desert wind, the trouble starts in a corner and suddenly encompasses a whole area with inevitable fatality and fury, and dies down with equal abruptness, leaving behind a maddening heartache and a trail of destruction and devastation. Those who read the signs on the wall, live under the shadow of uncertainty and perpetual fear.

Added to this, there has been a sharp cleavage amongst the rank and file of the Muslim League Party, which alone counts in Pakistan; and this cleavage had been accentuated by the assassination in broad daylight of Mr. Liaquat Ali Khan, the former Premier and heir to Quaid-E-Azam Jinnah. A whispering campaign is being insidiously carried on by each group against the other as being responsible for this open assassination, and influential dailies like ‘The Dawn’ and ‘Evening Star’ have taken up the fight against the Government. The Government have retaliated by withdrawing all official patronage from these papers, and this has further sharpened the cleavage in the ruling party Mr. Altaf Hussain, the influential Editor of ‘The Dawn’ is out for a fight and has sworn to unseat Noon and Gurmani from their positions of Power. In this affray no stick is too small to beat the opponent with. The two groups vie with each other to capture the masses, by distorted propaganda and by misquoting the Quaid-E-Azam and the Prophet. This bitter feud has an unsettling effect on the Minorities.

The sincerity and the refreshingly broad outlook of the Premier, Mr. Mohammed Ali, is a green spot in this desert expanse, but it is felt that he is not fully secure in his grip over the party or the people, and, at any rate for sometime to come, he cannot but depend on the stalwarts of the party. But it is generally appreciated by all sections of the people that, in the interests of the country, his hands should be strengthened, but till such time as he is firmly established the feeling of insecurity is bound to be there.

The recent overture of Pakistan for military aid from America has its repercussion on the people. Any situation which sharpens the tension between India and Pakistan casts a gloomy spell over certain sections of the people. The British have already bases in Cyprus, Suez, Bagdad and the Jordan, and America has contrived to secure for itself bases in Dhorum-Amer in Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the Middle East, besides its bastions in Alaska, Formosa and the Philippines. In their intense anxiety to complete the belt of bases round the girdle of the U.S.S.R. and China, and to strengthen the flanks of Iran, the sick man of the Middle East, America is bent on securing a foothold in West Pakistan.

Karachi has two aerodromes, that can service Jet fighters within easy range of the Caucasus and the Drigh Road Aerodrome is ranked as the largest in the Far-East. Gilgit in occupied Kashmir is an alluring base not to be neglected, and the American extremists in the Republican Party are out to get them all at any cost. It is equally natural for India to look askance at this sudden change in the balance of power in the East, and apprehend danger to Kashmir and even to its own borders in the present context of things, and Pandit Nehru has not minced words in denouncing this alliance. All the level-headed countries of the Middle and Far East are appalled at the frightening prospect opened up by this sudden and determined move of America, and the cold war, so distant to us, is now upon us. This tension, in its wake, has brought a sense of uneasiness amongst the Minorities across the Border.

But whatever happens, it cannot be denied that efforts should be made to build up understanding and goodwill on both sides of the Border, and let us hope that the small effort now made by our Mission in this direction will bear fruit and better the condition of the people in both the countries and eventually contribute to an understanding between the two Governments.

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