Daily Times

When I opened my facebook account on Sunday morning, April 15, 2012, to check what was going on in cyberspace, the message at the top was, “Rest in peace dear Cecil… what a loss.” For a moment, I held my breath, hoping that the Cecil mentioned was someone else and not Group Captain Cecil Chaudhry (August 27-April 13 2012). Alas, the obituary was about the group captain.

Cecil and I had been in contact for years. For some time now, our communications had been on and off, though he was on my weekly list. Some months ago, he wrote an email to me with regard to a review of the Indian edition of my book, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First Person Accounts (RUPA, New Delhi, 2011). The reviewer, Lahore-born Rajinder Puri, had referred to Cecil’s father, veteran press photographer of The Pakistan Times of Progressive Papers Ltd, Mr F E Chaudhry (still alive at over 102). Chacha Chaudhry, as he is known, had been an importance source for two important stories that appeared in my book. They were of the clash between Mian Iftikharuddin and the SSP Lahore on January 24, 1947, when the police raided the premises of the Muslim League head office at Laxmi Chowk; the second that an English CID officer Mr Savage used to incite Hindus and Muslims to attack each other.

Unfortunately, in the Indian edition, the initials of Chacha Chaudhry had wrongly been given as A T Chaudhry. Cecil wondered if the mistake could be corrected in the Oxford University Press edition that was due in 2012. I promised to rectify the error and indeed the OUP edition released recently gives the correct name: F E Chaudhry. I wrote to Cecil to inform him that the book was now published and he could get it from the OUP bookshop in Lahore.

I did not hear from him and that was unusual. I was thinking of writing to him any day now to find out if he had seen the book with the correct spelling of his father’s name. And then the laconic obituary confirmed my worst fears. Cecil had died bravely fighting lung cancer, I learnt.

Group Captain Cecil Chaudhry was a 1965 war hero. As an ace Sabre fighter jet pilot, he had taken part in many battles with his Indian counterparts. For his bravery, he was awarded the Nishan-e-Jurat. He told me that many years later he met an Indian pilot in Baghdad whom he had shot down during one of the dogfights. In the 1971 war, he was awarded Tamgah-e-Jurat.

I met Cecil in April 2003. He lamented that had he not been a Christian, his promotion to higher rank would never have been denied. It reminded me of Othello the Moor who famously exclaimed, “I have done the state some service, and they know’t.” He blamed General Ziaul Haq for his narrow-minded policy of discriminating against non-Muslims in the Pakistan armed forces. Previously Christians were found in both the police, especially traffic police, and the military, but not anymore. He also deplored Z A Bhutto’s nationalisation of Christian schools and colleges, which had not only meant plummeting of educational standards, but also closing down those very few avenues where educated Pakistani Christians could find employment.

We met at the St Anthony’s High School, Lahore. It was my alma mater as it was Cecil’s though he was my senior by some years. He was principal of the school. I was coming back after 41 years. Everything seemed so familiar, as if I had just returned after a long slumber; only things seemed smaller, the playgrounds especially.

I interviewed him for another book of mine, The Politics of Group Rights: The State and Multiculturalism (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2005). He received a signed copy of the book from me with a lot of compliments to him. In it, he tells the story of the sad plight of the minorities in Pakistan.

In 1998, when India and Pakistan tested nuclear devices and jingoism on both sides was at its worst, some of us decided to network with likeminded Pakistanis and Indians to advocate peace and denuclearisation of South Asia. I invited Cecil Chaudhry to join the Pakistani committee that we had formed and he immediately did so.

Cecil became a champion of peace between India and Pakistan and on several occasions, he was part of Pakistani delegations that visited India or in the reception committee welcoming Indians to Pakistan. He told me that the most touching event was when he could visit the Ambala Cantonment Church to apologise for accidently dropping a bomb on it in the 1965 war.

One day, when a dispassionate and true history of Lahore and Pakistan is written, the services of the Christian community would be given its proper recognition. There is hardly any worthwhile leader of Pakistan who did not go to school to one of the schools run by church missions. The Christians made outstanding contributions to the establishment of hospitals. They also uplifted and conferred dignity on people generally despised and degraded by a mainstream class and caste-conscious society.

All the three Christian members of the Punjab Assembly, the Speaker, Diwan S P Singha, Joshua Fazal Din, and C E Gibbon voted in favour of the Muslim League on June 23, 1946, when the future of Punjab was put to the vote. The Christians, as ‘People of the Book’, expected better treatment in Muslim Pakistan than in caste-ridden India. Pakistan proved to be a chimera. Christians have been the main victims of the draconian blasphemy laws, including brutal murders by fanatics.

The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South AsianStudies, National University of Singapore. His latest publication is: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012; New Delhi: Rupa Books, 2011). He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com