(Formerly Editor, “Sind Observer,” Karachi)
The agitation for Pakistan was based on fraud and
conducted by treachery. At the time of the partition of the country last year,
North India was like a powder magazine–many Muslim mosques were arsenals and many Muslim houses secret places
for the storage of guns and ammunition. There was to be a revolt at Delhi as a
result of which the seat of the mighty Moghuls was to be recaptured from the
hands of the non-violent and nerveless Hindu Congressmen and capitalistic Banias,
and Muslim Raj once again established in the country; and in this revolt the
Nizam of Hyderabad had a place assigned to him as the Emperor of India, south
of the Vindhyas. This game was foiled by timely warning and the resolute action
taken by the Government of India and the loyal Hindu and Sikh elements of the
Indian Union.
Mr. Jinnah never forgave himself for this failure
and the terrific discomfiture it brought to millions of Muslims in East Punjab,
West United Provinces and the Rajputana States. Though the biter was deeply
bitten, that taught no lesson to the League Fuehrer. No sooner did he ascend
the Gadi at Karachi than he started his old game of embarrassing the Congress
leaders and creating as many awkward situations and dilemmas for them as
possible in the Indian Union. The man who proclaimed to the world that
partition would mean peace, goodwill, and mutually happy relations and economic
prosperity for all, could not suppress his congenital tendency for mischief. By
clever maneuvers, false promises, and appealing to Muslim sentiment, the Nawab
of Junagadh and a few of his taluqdar satellites were made to accede to
Pakistan, though at no time was there the least likelihood of Pakistan ever
defending Junagadh in the event of the latter getting into hot waters with the
Indian Union. We have witnessed the contretemps. The Nawab of Junagadh
has lost his Gadi and is at present bemoaning his fate at Karachi for becoming
the dupe of Pakistan’s unscrupulous politicians.
Hyderabad and Junagadh were pawns in the hands of
the Quaid-e-Azam, to disrupt and disorganise the Indian Union at a time when it
required peace most to settle down to constructive work and win over tile
Princes of India in support of the New Order. Frustrated in Junagadh, the Pakistan
chiefs planned a grand offensive against Kashmir. A weak and unpopular
Maharajah was at the mercy of Pakistan troops, and the tribesmen were to be
turned over to Kashmir in search of loot. With the disappearance of the
Maharajah, Kashmir was to be a subjugated Province of Pakistan, where the
fierce tribesmen of the N.W.F.P. could be permanently settled, thereby saving
Pakistan from the payment of continual bribes amounting to some crores of
rupees every year. These Frontier Pathans, with food to eat and domesticated in
Kashmir, would in future be a potential source of recruitment for the Pakistan
armies. Thus many birds could be killed with one stone.
This plan was, unfortunately for Mr. Jinnah, foiled
by the Government of India accepting accession, putting Shiek Abdullah in
power, and waging war against the tribal marauders. At Lake Success, Pakistan’s
Foreign Minister, Sir Mahomed Zafrullah Khan, thoroughly misled the Security
Council by making false and unwarranted statements against India. The complainant
(India), as it were, became the accused. But truth, like murder, cannot be said
for long. The Pakistan army is openly fighting the Indian armies, in spite of
Karachi’s barefaced denials, and the Frontier fanatics, who at one time
numbered as many as 80,000, have found the job not so promising by way of loot
and kidnapping fair Kashmiri women, on account of the severe plastering they
received up hill and down dale. While returning to their homes, these marauders
are looting Muslim property and carrying away Muslim women from the Punjab and
the neighbouring districts of the N.W.F.P. The Pakistan Government has learnt
the bitter lesson, that the Frontier Pathan, in the absence of Hindu property
to loot and Hindu women to carry away, is no respector even of his brothers and
sisters in Islam, and deals with them as disgracefully as he dealt with the
Hindus when those unfortunate people were living in good numbers in the settled
and unsettled districts of the north-west.
In Kashmir, as in Junagadh, Mr. Jinnah is not going
to proclaim himself as Badshah. The Security Council’s Commission on India will
soon know the truth of Pakistan’s full complicity in all the horrible deeds
perpetrated by the raiders on the people of Kashmir, Hindu and Muslim, and by
the so-called Azad Kashmir forces, which are nothing but Pakistan’s battalions
in disguise. It is absurd to talk of the division of Kashmir and Jammu between
the two Dominions, though the Pakistan chiefs may welcome it to save their face
before their people. The Government of India should never become a party to any
such outrage, and it is for the people of Kashmir, as the Nehru Government has
always held, to decide their own future in an unfettered manner.
As to Hyderabad, the Nizam was always encouraged to
count upon the support of Pakistan; to make him an independent sovereign ruler,
for which he paid twenty crores of rupees as Mr. Jinnah’s fee. The old
gentleman of Hyderabad will soon find, if he has not already done so, that he
will be Nawab of Junagadh No.2, and that the Muslim League chiefs of Pakistan
would, after making use of a person, invariably throw him on the scrapheap. The
Nizam will be a very lucky man if he saves his kingdom for himself and his
children within the next few months, instead of losing it. Neither the Muslims
of the Indian Union nor those of Pakistan are in a position to help him, and he
cannot create disturbances in India to prop him up on his tottering throne, any
more than he can in Petagonia or Timbuctoo. The Government of India has made
good use of the last few months of negotiations to tighten up its grip and
strengthen its position, and so have the provincial governments on the
borderlands. The economic war of strangulation will teach the Nizam and his
advisers a much needed lesson, and, as to the Razakars, they are a mere rabble
torturing unarmed civilians, but who will be blown to atoms by a modern army
marching against them and their fellow-conspirators. The Government of India’s
patient game, even under provocative circumstances, is not to be condemned by
impatient war-mongers, because New Delhi will not be found wanting when the
time comes to strike and strike effectively. A strong Government can afford to
wait and watch.
When Mr. Jinnah attempted to create internal and
external complications for India, little did he realise that he would be the
victim of more headaches than Nehru has had to bear. The demand for an
independent Pathanistan comprising the N.W.F.P. and the tribal areas can no
longer be scotched by armed intervention and air bombing in Waziristan and
other areas, or by imprisoning leaders like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan.
Afghanistan is behind this tribal unrest, soon to be followed by risings,
because it wants to see established a Pathanistan–a homeland for all Pathans–under one provincial government, preferably under
its dominating influence, if not with itself as the predominant partner. These
Afghan ambitions are not going to be extinguished by bombing the abodes of the
Fakir of Ipi and his friends. A conflagration on the Frontier is not an
unlikely contingency, which will tax to the utmost the resources of the infant
State of Pakistan, and even create an internal convulsion. Even the British, in
the heyday of their imperial power and glory did not light-heartedly enter on
Frontier expeditions, on account of the enormous expenditure involved for a
poor country like India. Pakistan can ill afford to indulge in these costly
luxuries, while having its irons also in the Kashmir fire. It is also not free
from the fear of India invading its territory; and hence it is that, day in and
day out, Pakistan leaders din into the ears of their people that they are
surrounded on all sides by enemies, and that their infant State can only be
saved by submitting to the Fascist dictatorship of their Fuehrer, who alone
created the State, and who alone can take it out of its dangers, himself being
the gift of Allah to his people.
Internally, Pakistan is not quite a happy family.
The enthusiasm of its people when the State was founded last year has
evaporated. You cannot feed a people always on slogans of hatred. The Hindu
‘enemy’ is nowhere in Western Pakistan. He has gone away to India to save
himself from a fearful and haunted life in an Islamic State under medieval
Shariat laws. Now these Pakistani patriots have started quarrelling among
themselves, having nothing more to do. Provincialism is here in a worse form
than in the Indian Union. The Sindhi is fighting the Punjabi, and the Punjabi
is fighting the Pathan and the Bengalee. The domination of the Punjabi
Mussalmans is feared and detested by the lesser Mussalmans outside the
enchanted circle–they who are ‘the
lesser breeds’ outside the law.
The final selection of Karachi as the capital of
Pakistan, against the unanimous wish of the people of Sind, has created a good
deal of heart-burning. Though the Sindhis have submitted to force majeure,
the last word has not yet been said on this controversy. Within less than
twelve months, the Sindhis have had enough of Pakistan, and in their hearts they
cry to be saved from it. They have gained nothing, but lost almost everything
by becoming parties to Pakistan–their homes, their fields and factories, and their towns and cities
which are full of the refugees and other unassimilable population. It is the
Punjabi Muslims who are the ruling clique–the new Nazis, dominating as a powerful caste, and living as a class
apart. These barriers are producing their evil fruits, and hence the insistence
of the Pakistan chiefs on Islamic ‘brotherhood’ irrespective of Province, as
though the Punjabi Mussalman who rules the roost in Pakistan will ever change
his skin and his spots. You cannot get a more arrogant, hot-headed,
provincial-ridden and self-conceited person than the Punjabi Mussalman. And it
is he who sets the tone to the Pakistan administration. He has filled the
central secretariat; his nominees are everywhere in the Pakistan provincial
services; and the army is nearly one hundred per cent Punjabi. Even the mighty
Quaid-e-Azam is no match to this powerful bureaucratic Punjabi ruling clique,
just as every British Viceroy had in his day to bow before the occult force
called the Indian Civil Service.
In a few years, Sind will not be the old Sind with
its Sufi culture and mutual toleration, on account of which the Hindus lived
for centuries on good terms with their Muslim neighbours. The Hindus have left
and are leaving, and the Sindhi Muslims will, in the course of time, neither
have a name, nor a habitation on account of being swamped by successive waves
of Punjabis and Frontiermen. Their happy valley will no longer be the abode of
Hindu-Muslim culture and Sufi toleration. The great Sind cities have already
gone out of the hands of the Asal Sindhis, and the rural areas are
slowly being inundated by the refugees from the north and the west. The old
beautiful Sind, as we know it, is gone. The new Sind will be a pure Punjabi
colony.
In East Pakistan and West Punjab, selfish
provincialism is not less rampant. There are parties and parties and Socialism
is also making headway. The zamindars of West Punjab and East Bengal have
powerful official backing.
Pakistan itself is evolving into a Fascist State
under one dictator. “One Fuehrer, one country, and one community”–that is the slogan of the League Fascists. The Pakistan
Constituent Assembly meets once in a blue moon, and at the rate at which it is
going, I would be surprised if it completes its work within ten years. The
League Dictator is not at all anxious to see a new constitutional government
installed within a reasonable period of time. He has concentrated all powers in
his hands and his word is law: Anyone who dares cross his path is marked out
for political slaughter. No Nazi Dictator ever ruled with as much authority as
the Quaid-e-Azam, backed up as he is by the Punjabi Muslim army and civil
service. He simply cannot tolerate opposition or any rival near his throne.
That is the greatest danger to Pakistan. As dictatorships cannot be bequeathed,
as soon as Mr. Jinnah ceases to exist, the Pakistan State will show signs of
tumbling down. There is no other man strong enough to wield the sceptre of
power as he did, and there is no man great enough as he to exact obedience.
Baluchistan is governed in the old way, as under
the British, and there is not even the semblance of a democratic
administration. The Baluchis are protesting and are as dissatisfied as the
Sindhis. Mr. Jinnah has taken over Baluchistan and all tribal areas under his
direct administration, which means one-man rule, pure and simple. British
despotism is not dead, but fully alive and kicking in Baluchistan as in the
tribal areas.
It is enough if the Government of India keeps
strong and its powder dry. The Pakistanis themselves will one day cry aloud for
reunion, unable to maintain their separate State, politically and economically.
The Government of India need not force the pace and appear to be intriguing
against Pakistan. The very force of circumstances will bring the ball to its
feet and there will be a reunited India. The forty millions of Union Muslims
have seen within this one year, how much they have lost by their plumping for
Pakistan foolishly, how they have weakened themselves and are of no consequence
today at the Centre and in the Indian Provinces, and how their position will
deteriorate economically and politically as time goes on unless there is
reunion. The chickens of Pakistan are coming home to roost, so far as the
Indian Union Muslims are concerned; and they are asking themselves how
short-sighted they were in estranging the majority community in India by the
wine of Pakistan going to their head. Philip drunk has become Philip sober, and
repentance is the beginning of wisdom.
We are told that Pakistan has balanced its budget,
and that is due to that miracle-worker called Mr. Ghulam Mahomed, said to be
the ‘financial wizard’ of Pakistan. There is no miracle nor wizardry about his
performance. He simply taxed people right and left to balance the budget, and
is spending about 75 per cent of the State’s revenue on the military alone.
This is too much for a poor and infant State. There are in no hopes of the
Provinces getting any subventions from the Centre for their nation-building
activities. In the Union, Madras alone gets nine crores from the Centre. On the
contrary, the sales tax has been made a Central subject in Pakistan with the
promise of a moiety of the collections being paid to the Provinces; and the
Provinces get little or nothing from the Centre. They are being starved out by
the best sources of revenue being appropriated by the Central Government.
On the 15th of August both the Dominions will
celebrate their Independence. Both claim to have passed through the most
difficult period of their existence, although the difficulties ahead are not
less formidable. Both look forward to the future with some degree of hope and
confidence. The very fact that thousands of Indian Union Mussalmans, who went
to their Pakistan paradise, are now returning to their original homes,
thoroughly disillusioned and disgusted, is proof that Pakistan is not the
heaven it was promised to be and Hindustan is not the hell that Muslim Leaguers
had painted it to be.
Everybody hopes that the two Dominions may live in
peace and be mutually helpful without coming to a clash. But I have my serious
doubts. Faced with internal convulsions and external dangers and a fast
depleting treasury, and faced too with the need of imposing much more taxation,
the Pakistan clique may take a deep plunge and create war. That was what the
Tsars and Imperialists of old had done, and that is what their Fascist
successors will do when faced with the calamity of annihilation.