Daily Times

On Friday February 16, 2013, I arrived in the Indian Silicon Valley, Bangalore from Mumbai. I was now in the Karnataka state deep down in south India. The very talented journalist and writer, Aakar Patel, received me very warmly. I had been reading his articles in the Pakistani and Indian media and found them delightfully well researched and very crisply crafted. He has oftentimes, with great courage, presented a fairer and more-balanced picture of Pakistan in the India media. Patel and Tushita, also an accomplished journalist, are a young couple who left Mumbai for Bangalore to enjoy a better quality of life, and I must say it was a very wise decision. Their hospitality was truly generous. A major Muslim mosque and attached park complex is just some 400 metres from their place. We discussed that there is hardly a place in India where the azaan is not within hearing distance. On Sunday there was a large gathering at the park where people come for relaxation and socialising.

Bangalore is situated on the Deccan plateau, which I believe extends from Maharashtra into Karnataka. It is the most well-maintained and successful city of India. Although the fifth largest city of India, one does not feel the congestion one experiences in other Indian cities. Its central areas are comparable to European standards.

In the afternoon I gave my first lecture at the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) on Monday. In south India, interest in the Punjab partition was not great so I was invited to speak on my new book, Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011). It turned out to be a very attentive and lively audience. People were anxious to find out what could be the reason for such deep antipathy between India and Pakistan. I told them that while we in Pakistan must demand changes in our curriculum that were inimical to friendship with India, there was the need to combat stereotyping of Pakistanis as extremists in the Indian media.

Early next morning Patel took me on a walking tour of colonial Bangalore with its beautiful bungalows and government buildings and large trees. The tour is arranged every Sunday and is an excellent introduction to the rise of Bangalore as the favourite city of the British in south India, presumably because of the cool climate. The guide turned out to be extremely well informed and congenial. I had not realised until then that Aurangzeb’s thrust southwards reached even Bangalore and in fact beyond. Later, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan briefly ruled over Bangalore. The British wrested it away on March 21, 1791 from Tipu Sultan in the Third Anglo-Mysore War. I also learnt that an Englishman Captain McClintock of the British Indian Army (the mother army of both the Indian and Pakistani armies) invented the Bangalore torpedo, an explosive device used for blowing up booby traps and barricades. It has been used extensively in warfare, including the first and second world wars.

A young man who was on the tour started talking to me. He told me that he belonged to a Muslim Memon family of Bangalore and had joined the walking tour with a view to learning more about his city. The conversation with him gave some idea of the multifarious businesses in which the Muslims have an interest. On the whole, Indian Muslims are a poor community but in south India it is better because communalism is not part of the regular political landscape.

I then left for a holiday in Mysore and Seringapatam. On February 21, I gave a talk at the up and coming Azim Premji University. There my host was Dr Chandan Gowda, whose generosity and kindness touched me deeply. Azim Premji, one of the wealthiest men of India, is a Bohra Muslim. The campus is still under construction. Professor Sethi who introduced me turned out to be Punjabi. His family were refugees from Rawalpindi, so the Punjabi connection came to life. The question and answer was once again very animated and stimulating. I got the distinct feeling that Pakistan is now considered a separate and distinct entity but the Indians could not understand why so much terrorism emanates from there. I tried my best to argue that Pakistan is itself the biggest victim of terrorism but that can hardly be an argument to consider such behaviour as normal.

Many Muslim students attended my lecture and some came and talked to me later. I could sense how the partition of India had left them permanently in the lurch and they were keen for an early India-Pakistan rapprochement. This point needs to be emphasised strongly in India-Pakistan rapprochement initiatives.

Many retirees settle in Bangalore. Among them is my senior friend of many years, Shri Bhisham Kumar Bakhshi, who grew up in Rawalpindi and was 13 at the time of partition. His story of migration in 1947 is included in my Punjab partition book. Mr Bakhshi is the gentlest of human beings I have met. Although of Brahmin extraction, I have always found him to be one of the strongest opponents of the caste system. He still spoke in his Potohari dialect. Twice he has visited Rawalpindi and on one occasion, his ancestral village outside Rawalpindi.

I met a gentleman at a party I went with Patel, whose grandfather was from Balochistan. I gathered the family had some business in Balochistan before the partition. Bangalore, Aakar Patel, Mr Bakhshi, India and Pakistan — life is a strange journey and one doesn’t know where one could land up one day and who one might meet.

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