Pakistan News And Discussion-10

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Punjab: beneficiary or casualty of the Partition? </b>
<i> Denuded of its intellectual elites at the Partition, the Punjab, Indian and Pakistani, is ill at ease in modern states, says
Dr Manzur Ejaz</i>
   
Traveling to Jalandhar from Wagah for an international Punjabi conference was no different than going from Sahiwal to Lahore. <b>Thanks to the East Punjab government’s free supply of electricity to farmers there were unending swathes of greenery along the Grand Trunk Road.</b> But I had spoken too soon; road conditions, traffic jams, disregard of traffic rules, and heaps of dirt and refuse along the highway were even worse than in Pakistan. Jalandhar, the major cultural city of East Punjab, fares no better than a middle-sized town of Pakistani Punjab.

Inside the conference hall the situation was no different than one would have experienced in any such gathering in Pakistan. Like all believers in “Pakistan ideology,” <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>a Sikh scholar was arguing in all seriousness that nations should be defined along religious lines. For him, there was no Punjabi nation but a Sikh nation. If he had been Arabic speaking, he might have used the term “Sikh Ummah.” </span>

In the gossip sessions during lunch and dinner intervals the topic of discussion was the Punjab assembly election that had concluded a few days earlier and for which the results were being awaited. <b>Most political observers – and there were plenty of them – agreed that, on average, candidates paid about Rs 2 crore to get a party ticket for the Provincial Assembly. Mind you, we are talking about East Punjab, part of the Indian Union, where elections have taken place regularly and not West Punjab, in Pakistan, where electoral rigging and political corruption are seen to be the order of the day. </b>

Despite thorough land reforms, the vestiges of feudal culture in East Punjab have not given way to a modern-secular society that is so loudly touted in India. The mindset that comes with small land holdings owned by petty farmers has inhibited meaningful social change. The influence of religion, particularly among the Sikh peasantry, is so pervasive that the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), counterpart of the Jamaat Islami or Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, is still the dominant party.<b> Had the Indian Union not intervened to establish the writ of the state, SAD may have implemented the Sikh religious code in East Punjab</b>.

So, despite differing political systems and levels of economic development, Indian and Pakistani Punjab have much in common. These commonalities have their roots not only in the remote past but most crucially in the history of the Partition of India in 1947. The Punjab entire had a common agrarian economy with its snail paced traditional dynamics. But the one fatal element in the socio-cultural stagnation of the Punjab owes to an outcome of the Partition when the entire urban Punjabi elite was forced out of the state and subsequently settled in Delhi or other cities of Uttar Pradesh (UP).

Prior to the Partition, most of the urban elites in Punjab were either Hindu or Sikh. Cultural and business elites from other parts of India were also attracted to the Punjab, particularly Lahore. For example, there were many Bengalis in the legal profession in Lahore or investors in the film industry from Bombay or Calcutta.

<b>Whether good or bad, most urban sectors of the Punjab were run by Hindus and Sikhs. Muslims in Punjab were peasants, workers, feudal landowners or employees in government departments like the police and military. Muslim owned shops in Lahore’s Anarkali and the Mall could have been counted on one hand before the Partition. The urban Muslim middle class was almost non-existent. At the political level Lahore, the Punjab’s largest city, had only two influential political families, the Qizalbash and the Mians of Baghbanpura</b>. Of course Allama Mohammad Iqbal and Chauhdry Barkat Ali were also active in Lahore politics but Hindu politicians overshadowed them, so much so that on the occasion of Gandhi’s Satiagrah and Khilafat movements, Hindu leaders delivered speeches in the Badshahi Mosque after Friday prayers.

The world of literature and art presented a similar scene. Contrary to contemporary belief in Pakistan, there were more Hindu and Sikh Urdu writers in Punjab than Muslims. Against a dozen Hindu-Sikh fiction writers including Krishan Chandar, Ranjidar Singh Bedi and Ram Lal, there were a few Muslim writers like Manto. Playwrights like Balwant Gargi, painters like the legendary Amrita Sher Gill and also the architects were all either urban Hindus or Sikhs. Even modern Punjabi literature, dominated by Muslims until the beginning of the 20th century, was represented solely by exceptional Sikh writers including Amrita Pritam, Mohan Singh and Kartar Singh Duggal.

After the Partition of the Punjab, the entire non-Muslim urban elite headed for Delhi and other UP cities. Ironically, none of them settled in East Punjab because of rampant violence. At the end of the day, East and West Punjab swapped their peasantry.<b> All of Punjab was cleansed of mature elites, which provide the basis of good governance and economic growth. Gone were the intellectuals, traders, the entrepreneurs, bankers and the dreamers.</b>

Punjab, East and West, left with peasants or the new rich who had grabbed abandoned properties by paying nothing, had to start rebuilding society. Most of the urban population in both Punjabs is just two or three generations old and it carries its rustic rural values with it. It is no wonder that both Punjabs are stuck with a traditional religious-cultural ethos, which does not match the requirements of a modern state. It takes centuries for elites to mature and Punjab is waiting for that day.

Dr Manzur Ejaz is an academic living in Washington, DC
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