May 19, 2002

Ian Talbot recalls the closing years of Khizr Tiwana’s political career in pre-Partition Punjab

THE law and order situation continuously deteriorated during the weeks which followed the collapse of the coalition ministry. The British had barely restored order in the Rawalpindi and Multan divisions, when serious disorders swept the Gurgaon district. More than fifty villages were destroyed in the fighting between the Meos and Jats which spread over 1000 square miles of countryside. Initially only just over 300 troops could be spared, with the result that several areas temporarily slipped out of British control.

Despite the imposition of martial law, communal conflict raged in Lahore from April onwards. By mid-July over 700 Hindu and Sikh homes had been burned down. This followed the destruction of 4000 Muslim shops and businesses in the walled area of Amritsar earlier in March. The unreliability of the police in both cities cast a sombre shadow. Jenkins also had the disquieting experience of having his telephone tapped and confidential information passed on to Muslim League politicians.

Mountbatten interviewed Khizr on May 3, 1947 to sound out his opinion on the partition plan. The former premier reiterated that the British should not be a party to any ‘suicidal’ vivisection of the Punjab. ‘Once a division was announced,’ he declared, ‘re-unification would become almost impossible.’ Khizr prophetically warned that the Sikhs would never join Pakistan and that a decision to split the Punjab would mean civil war. He concluded by arguing for the inclusion of the option of a free Punjab with an agreement or agreements with Hindustan and Pakistan about defence, in any referendum question on the province’s future?

During the following week, Khizr had a number of unofficial meetings with Jenkins at Barnes Court, Simla. He simultaneously issued a statement to the press offering to act as a link between the Muslim League and the minorities so that a government could be formed. This came to naught, as Jenkins anticipated, ‘since the Muslim League leaders have no sense at all, and Tara Singh is almost hysterical’.

The Tiwana heartland did not escape the violence which followed Khizr’s resignation. Muslim ex-servicemen faked a Hindu attack on a mosque in Khushab on the night of 10-11 March to provide a pretext for assaults on the town’s large non-Muslim population. Despite the efforts of a local peace committee, there were widespread attacks on temples and property with an estimated loss of Rs 800,000. The violence spread from Khushab to the surrounding villages. The temple in Kund village, eleven miles away, was razed to the ground. Although Khizr could no longer protect the minorities’ interests at the provincial level, Hindus who had relatives at Kalra and the other Tiwana estates now sought refuge there, trusting that this would bring them security.

The eventual partition of August 1947, however destroyed the era of communal cooperation in the Tiwana properties of Kalra, Khizarabad, Mitha Tiwana, and Khwajabad. In the absence of both Khizr and Allah Bakhsh, their Hindu and Sikh inhabitants suffered the same fate as minorities elsewhere in the Punjab. Sultan Shah, the mukhtar of the villages of the Khizarabad stud farm estate, led out the Hindus on the pretext that they would be safely escorted to Sargodha. A mob assaulted them in a pre-arranged attack which left no survivors. The bodies of women and children were later seen floating in the canal. Pir Mehr Chand Shah, the head mukhtar of Allah Bakhsh’s estate, forcibly brought sixty Hindu villagers to a Sargodha mosque for conversion. They were later rescued by Gurkhas. Family retainers also joined in the looting of the bazaar in Kalra village and the ransacking of the temple which Umar had constructed.

There were attacks on the Hindus and Sikhs throughout the Khushab tehsil. The wealthy Batras of Girot and Mitha Tiwana resisted for two days. Ultimately, 23 members of the family were arrested on false murder charges. They were safely evacuated only after expending huge sums of money to buy off their accusers. Bhagat Ram Chand, for example, handed over Rs.35,000 in hard cash.

Mokam Singh, a well known Sikh landowner of the thal, suffered a more nightmarish fate. He led the resistance to the Muslim attack on Roda village. When the defenders, ammunition finally gave out, the settlement was overrun by a mob which beheaded him. His severed head was transfixed to a spear and paraded as a war trophy from village to village. News of the violence in the Khushab tehsil, spread as far as Nairobi. Glancy writing from there, commiserated with Khizr that ‘all the Hindus and Sikhs have been frightened into leaving Kalra. Much personal suffering was hidden by such anodyne expressions. But what happened at Kalra was just a microcosm of the hate-filled violence throughout northern India.

The most striking evidence of the passing of the old order at Kalra however, was the strange episode which occurred at the end of September 1947 involving Jiwan Khan, head of its langar. In the absence of any male members of the family he staged what amounted to a mini coup d’etat. He took over the running of the estate and forbade the retainers to allow the Tiwana women folk to leave.

On the second day Fateh Khatun smuggled out a message for assistance through one of her maids who feigned pregnancy and required her husband to accompany her on a call of nature to the fields. The man walked the four miles to Jhawarian where he went by tonga to Chak Muzzafarabad.

Once Ahmad Yar Tiwana was told of what had happened, he hurried off to Jhawarian thana police station where constables were sent to release Fateh Khan and the other ladies. No case was registered against Jiwan Khan because it would involve a loss of face. When Khizr later heard of the episode he generously forgave the retainer who escaped lightly with a fine.

Khizr remained in Simla until Independence. Shortly afterwards he travelled to Europe from Bombay. The ostensible reasons for his departure were to visit his son at Cambridge and to accompany Allah Bakhsh who needed hospital treatment for his throat cancer. Khizr naturally also wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and vengeful Muslim League politicians.

Khizr initially lived with Nazar at Montello House, 77 Holbroke Road, Cambridge. Early in 1948, Nazar quit his studies at Pembroke College in order to watch over the family property. His father moved to the Athenaeum Court Hotel in Piccadilly which thereafter became his residence whenever he was in London. He was joined by Fateh Bibi and Malik Ghulam Muhammad Khan Ali from the Kalra entourage. Khizr’s sense of political ‘betrayal’ did not embitter his personal relationships with old India hands. True to his upbringing he continued to feel comfortable in the company of such former officials as Stuart Abbott, Sir Evan Jenkins, R.A. Butler and Lord Linlithgow. He also met Churchill who was then the celebrated Leader of the Opposition.

Khizr continued the correspondence with Glancy which had commenced soon after he had left Government House. ‘I think you are wise to keep out of the Punjab for some time,’ Glancy wrote to his former pemier in January 1948, ‘until crazy boys like Mumtaz (Daultana) have time to cool down. He also advised Khizr against following him to East Africa. ‘The Indians here are not your class at all,’ Glancy declared, ‘they’re mostly Kathiawaris and Gujaratis and Ismailis from Bombay and certain number of Khatri Sikhs. You’ll have few friends among them and I’d think you’d be badly bored.

Shortly before Khizr left London for Pakistan, Glancy counselled, ‘I should say your best plan is to lie low in Kalra for the present and decline to be involved in any form of party politics.” The former premier of the United Punjab did not in fact enter Pakistan until October 1949. He then arrived on his favourite Pan Am airline at Karachi under the assumed name of Dr Khan.

Khizr was in fact the only member of the erstwhile Coalition Ministry not to pursue an active political career in the post-Independence era. Why did he not make his way in Pakistani politics, unlike other Muslim Unionists? He of course had more of a Unionist past to live down. For as premier, he had come to symbolize the ‘treachery’ of the Unionist party in Muslim League propaganda. The campaign against the Ministry had become increasingly personalized from 1944 onwards. But the main reason for his life taking a diametrically opposite path, to say Qizalbash’s after Independence, lay both in his own diffidence and the factional political alignments of the Shahpur district.

Umar, it will be recalled, had pushed his son into politics in 1937. Khizr was never consumed by the pursuit of power, nor was he a political animal. He also stuck stubbornly to his principles which he would not compromise for the sake of expediency. Moreover, he was dispirited by the declining family fortune and did not want to divert his energies away from its restoration. The attempt to establish the Shahpur textile mill, however, ended in financial ruin. Indeed, the enterprise’s collapse shortly after his death probably provided the motive for the murder of his fourth wife Rehana who had taken over its management.

Khizr thus turned his back on the few opportunities to reenter public life which came his way. He could, for example, in 1953 have entered Mohammad Ali Bogra’s ‘cabinet of talents’ which included Dr Khan Sahib the former ‘renegade’ Congress premier of the Frontier.

Khizr’s political re-emergence would in any case have been difficult because of the factional political scene in Shahpur. Once the mass mobilization of the Pakistan movement subsided, politics in this, as in other, districts reverted to its former pattern. If Unionism could claim to have survived Pakistan’s emergence, it was in the return of a local politics dominated by powerful landholders and biradari networks. The uneasy relationship between Khizr and Feroz Khan Noon after the events of 1945-7 complicated the re-establishment of a powerful Noon-Tiwana faction. The greatest obstacle, however, was provided by the alliance between the Qureshis (the Tiwanas’ long time local rivals) and the Daultanas.

Mian Mumtaz Daultana had placed himself at the head of the Muslim League campaign from 1944 onwards. He demonstrated a similar singlemindedness in his efforts to hound the Nawab of Mamdot out of office from 1948 onwards. Shaukat assisted him in this as in his earlier anti-Unionist campaign. Daultana feared Khizr as a potential opponent, he therefore used his ministerial powers to discourage his political comeback.

Apart from the general Unionist skeleton in his cupboard, Daultana held over Khizr a threat of investigation into alleged ‘misappropriation’ of Zamindar a League funds. Petty harassments included the withdrawing of all arms licences for the Kalra employees.

During a tour of the Sargodha district in November 1950, Daultana publicly announced that the Kalra Great Canal along with smaller Tiwana canals would be taken over by the government. This threat was finally enacted in 1954. Khizr was not compensated for the loss of his private canals in contravention of Section 47 of the Punjab Minor Canals Act of 1905. Nazar was still engaged in litigation regarding this at the time of writing.

 

Excerpts from

Khizr Tiwana: the Punjab Unionist Party and the partition of India

By Ian Talbot

Oxford University Press, 5 Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal, Karachi-75350. Tel: 021-4529025.

Email: ouppak@theoffice.net

ISBN 0-19-579551-2 259pp. Rs495

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