Daily Times

On March 2, 2013, I left Delhi for Chandigarh. It was the first on my list of cities I would visit and deliver lectures on the partition of the Punjab. During 2003-2005, I had been in the Indian Punjab and Haryana several times to do field research for my Punjab partition book. I was to speak twice in Chandigarh, in between visiting other places as well. My first host was Sardar Naininder Singh Dhillon, a successful potato farmer and entrepreneur and a Rotarian. My old school friend, Khalid Haider from Jhang is also a potato farmer and a very active member of the Rotary movement. It is through his good offices that I had come into touch with Mr Dhillon.

The sun had set and it was quite dark when the train pulled into the Chandigarh central. My host extended a traditional welcome and after exiting from the station we met his twin brother and another gentleman. He turned out to be a Pakistani, Mr Kausar Rizvi. Mr Rizvi is also a potato farmer. He belongs to the family of the late Justice Jameel Hussain Rizvi of the Lahore High Court. I knew Justice Rizvi hailed from the hamlet Samana of the former Patiala state. Apparently, the Rizvis had continued to visit their ancestral abodes after the partition and were staying with the Dhillons.

To my very pleasant surprise, Mr Dhillon turned out to be a man of letters and a voracious reader. He presented me a book on how Sikhism and Sikh leaders had been depicted in Persian texts. Mr and Mrs Dhillon made every effort to ensure that I enjoyed maximum comfort and felt at home. They even traced the Virk family, formerly from a village of Sheikhupura district, but now settled in Kurukshetra, Haryana. I was able to inform them that their very dramatic but tragic story had been published in my book along with pictures.

On March 3, I spoke at the Press Club. Exactly 66 years earlier, the Sikh leader, Master Tara Singh, had waived his kirpan on the steps of the Punjab Assembly in Lahore that day and given a call to finish off the Pakistan demand. It is conventionally considered the trigger to widespread rioting that engulfed some major cities of the Punjab and subsided with thousands of Sikhs being killed in the Rawalpindi rural areas. I told the audience that Master Singh had made that rash speech only when towards the end of the Muslim League agitation of January 24-February 26, 1947, violence had crept in and a number of Sikhs had been killed.

The question and answer session was very spirited as was expected in a Punjabi milieu. I realised that the Indian government has not yet placated the Sikhs who continue to nurture strong negative feelings about the 1984 slaughter of their co-religionists in Delhi and other parts of India in the wake of the assassination of Mrs Indira Gandhi. I strongly recommend Jaspreet Singh’s latest novel, Helium, to understand the Sikh trauma caused by the one-sided killing of their community members, in which the complicity of top Congress leaders and government officials was a shameful reality. Uma Chakravarti and Nandita Haskar’s report on the Sikh riots in Delhi is a damning critique of those pogroms.

On the other hand, there is a deep aversion to the highhanded approach of the Khalistani separatists who victimised those Sikhs who did not agree to their separatist politics. This is particularly true in the rural areas where the Khalistanis matched the brutality of the Indian security forces with their own violent methods. In any case, the most intense exchange of arguments I had was with two pro-Khalistan Sikh intellectuals. They considered Gandhi and Nehru as the masterminds of the partition of India while Jinnah was for them the victim of that plot. I responded by drawing their attention to their leaders in 1947, Master Tara Singh, Giani Kartar Singh, Sardar Baldev Singh, the Maharaja of Patiala and others who were convinced that Mohammad Ali Jinnah wanted to divide India. They did not accept Jinnah’s very generous conditions that if they supported his demand for the partition of India and opted to remain in Pakistan, he would grant them any safeguards they wanted. Jinnah wanted the whole of Punjab but a partitioned India and that did not appeal to the Sikh leadership. The Khalistanis, it seems, had not done their homework on the 1947 Punjab partition.

Next day, March 4, I left for Amritsar and then went to Jullundur before returning to Chandigarh on the 6th. This time around I was taken care of by Professor Surinder Singh and Professor Mahendra Gaur of the History Department at the Punjab University (created out of the Hindu and Sikh staff and students of Punjab University, Lahore, in 1947). They were extremely courteous and their expertise on the people’s history of the Punjab was phenomenal. Such occasions are invaluable for academics on both sides of the Punjab to learn from one another. Our discussions were enriched when senior advocate Rajinder Chhibbar joined us. Hailing from Lahore originally, he was in Rawalpindi in 1947. Once again the partition events became the focus of our conversation.

On March 7, I gave a lecture to the Social Science faculty and students at the Punjab University. The presentation was more academic and I was extremely pleased to note that the hall was packed and many students and faculty had come to listen to me. In the question and answer session I was specifically asked to explain the role of the Punjab communists in 1947. I told them that the Communist Party of India had supported the Pakistan demand, something that was accepted by the ‘Muslim communists’ who joined the Muslim League campaign for Pakistan while the Sikh comrades were opposed to it. However, when the partition riots took place, Communists on both sides did their best to save lives.

The visits to Chandigarh were most rewarding indeed.

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan; Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University; and Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at:billumian@gmail.com