It is surprising that G.M. Syed, who once invited the Indian Muslims to come and settle in Sindh, would one day become so dead set against them
THE All-India Muslim League (AIML)’s 31st session at Karachi, in late December 1943, was the last AIML session to be held before its bifurcation into the Pakistan Muslim League and the Indian Union Muslim League at the AIML Council meeting at Karachi on December 14-15, 1947. At this session, G.M. Syed gave a welcome address as chairman of the reception committee, wherein he had held out an open invitation to Indian Muslims to come over to Sind and extend to Sindhi Muslims their “helping hand”.
In an impassioned appeal to the Muslim Diaspora in the subcontinent, Syed had argued, inter alia, “...the non-Muslims of this land (of Sindhu), in spite of the fact that they share common interests with us, are joining hands with the non-Muslims of Hind (India) and want to make the inhabitants of this land slaves, only for the reason that the majority of inhabitants are Muslims. Under the circumstances, it is the duty of every Muslim of Hind to help us to make our native land free and independent. I, of course, greatly appreciate the efforts that the Muslims of Hind have put forth in furtherance the Pakistan Movement, but I think these are not enough.... The people of this land are prepared to make sacrifices, and the conditions here are favourable; all we need is sincere workers and capital... You can help us greatly in meeting these two needs.... If people from Gujarat and Bombay could go out to the Frontier to establish Hindu dominance there, could we, too, not repose some hope in your friends? Our future is interwoven with your future. Whatever high stations in Hind you may occupy, I ain’t sure they will not be permanent without the stability of our homeland. Your integrity in India will mainly depend upon the stability of our National State.
“...you Muslims of India can help us a lot. The inhabitants of this land mostly belong to the agricultural profession, and are very backward in trade and industry. Your money and experience could remove this drawback. We are prepared to afford every facility for this with a view to making your way easier. We have already started the campaign of ‘Buy from Muslims’ so that Muslims may be encouraged to take to trade. Thanks to Almighty God, this movement has produced good results, and now only experience and capital can perfect this scheme. It is hoped you would be good enough to extend to us your helping hand in this direction.”
But, then, why this appeal at this juncture? Because, despite Sind’s separation from Bombay in 1936, and despite all the premiers being Muslim since 1937, the Muslims continued to groan under Hindu domination in the economic, commercial and academic fields as well as in administration. Though constituting 75 per cent of the population, the Muslims comprised but two per cent among the upper classes. The Hindus owned 50pc of the land and paid nearly 80pc of the total income tax contributions (Vazirani, Sindh Assembly, March 7, 1944). Equally disquieting 87pc of Muslim families were indebted to moneylenders (Sindh Agricultural Commission, 1936). In the administration as well, Muslim presence was dismally low (only 27pc). Even minimally qualified Muslims were not available to fill in the posts, despite the introduction of a quota system (27 March 1947). Muslims filled in less than 17pc of posts in the junior clerks category, not to speak of higher categories, in the Sindh PWD in March 1947. Suhail Lari (An Illustrated History of Sindh) has laboriously documented numerous facts and figures which index Muslim Sindh’s plight, and which got exacerbated with time.
The population ratio, the only edge the Muslims had over the Hindus, had also come to be seriously disturbed by the large Hindus influx from Rajasthan, Kutch and Gujarat. The Hindus had already come to dominate, even population-wise, the urban areas in Sindh (e.g. Karachi, Hyderabad, and Sukkur). To quote Maneck Pithawala, a Parsi scholar, in 1936, “there is now a Hindu majority, instead of a Muslim one, in Karachi. Similarly, the proportion of Muslims to the total population in Sindh had also declined, whereas that of Hindus had increased. It is quite likely that in future years Sindh, like Karachi, may turn into a Hindu majority province at this rate (ours)”. And their discriminatory policies had begun to hurt the Muslims all the more grievously.
In Karachi, for instance, Lyari, inhabited by the poor Muslims, was given on a year-to-year lease so that the KMC was not obliged to provide them with basic amenities such as water, electricity and the construction of roads. Shikarpur Colony, Jamshed Road and adjacent areas, inhabited by affluent non-Muslims, were given on a 99-year lease which required the KMC to provide such amenities. If only because of the growing agitation of the Muslim League, Muslims were allowed to use the “Eidgah Maidan” on Bunder Road for two hours for mass Friday prayers for the first time in late 1945, and according to Sindh Police Intelligence reports, agitation for the acquisition of the Maidan was continuing during September-October 1945. Entry to higher educational institutions, manned by Hindu, was difficult, obliging the affluent ones to go all the way to Aligarh. Out of 130 successful Sindhi candidates in various Engineering examinations of the University of Bombay in 1935, only 9 were Muslims.
This was the background to Syed’s passionate appeal. The response came four years later, coinciding with the en masse migration of Hindus and Sikhs, shortly after Pakistan’s emergence. This exodus was deliberately engineered by the Congress President, Acharya J.B. Kripalani, who was of Sindhi origin, to turn Pakistan into a failed state, soon after her birth. The Hindus were told that Pakistan was bound to collapse in six months’ time, eventuating in their triumphant return, to reclaim their lands and belongings, and even supreme political power.
The Muslims that came in at this juncture represented the cream of the Muslim Diaspora. Later they were joined in by industrialists, entrepreneurs and businessmen of all categories, a considerable number of them on an appeal by Jinnah, and the Aga Khan to invest in, and build, Pakistan. A vacuum had been caused by the en masse migration, from not only Sindh but the entire West Pakistan, of Hindu and Sikh entrepreneurs, bankers, businessmen, traders, shopkeepers, officials, university, college and school teachers, artisans, construction workers and others, which was sought to be filled in by the immigrants. Not only in Sindh, but, also in Punjab and NWFP. And but for the capital, the expertise and the talent made readily available at this critical juncture, Pakistan might well have collapsed. To quote Shahid Javed Burki (State and Society in Pakistan, 1971-77): “The great in-migration of talent and skills formed the critical mass for Pakistan’s first great leap forward.”
As G.M. Syed had said, a considerable number of “Hind” Muslims had occupied “high stations” in India. Likewise, Adamjees, Ispahanis, Bawanys, Valikas, Dawoods, Habibs, Rahimtoolas, Laris, Fancys, Hyesons, Delhi Saudagaran and others had flourishing businesses in India. Nor were they in any immediate danger of being dislodged either. (For that matter, some of the divided families still run over there some of their residue enterprises, though on a smaller scale.) Thus, they came in, along with other immigrants, to build fledgling Pakistan, laboriously and with dedication, just as the Jews in the Diaspora streamed into Israel soon after its establishment on May 15, 1948. Chaim Weirmann (d. 1952), David Ben Gurion, Moshe Sharette, Gdda Myers, Aruba Eban, Moshe Dayan and a host of others who had built fledgling Israel into the most formidable state in the Middle East, even outdistancing the entrenched Egypt — they had all come from the Jewish Diaspora.
Just like the in-coming Diaspora Jews, the Muslins immigrants who had flocked to Pakistan during 1947-48 were not impelled by any profit motive. Alter all, what resources and economic infrastructure did Pakistan have at the time to get them impelled by such a motive? Rather, they were impelled by what David McClelland calls “achievement motivation”. They brought with them capital, talent and skills, and helped to create resources and infrastructure and institutions, wherever they got themselves settled. Indeed, by the early 1950s, the mohajirs were able to bring about an industrial revolution in Pakistan which in 1947 accounted for less than five per cent of the subcontinent’s total industrial units. No wonder, Shahid Javed Burki of the World Bank considers their contribution in the building of Pakistan both substantial and significant. The immigrants served as agents of modernization in the Daniel Lerner sense, causing, above all, social mobility, a lessening of stratification, an opening up of class structure and social change.
As Lerner has shown in the Passing of the Traditional Society (1958), modernization and urbanization go together. In Pakistan as well, the immigrants flocked to the urban centres, not only in Sindh, but throughout East and West Pakistan. Unfortunately, the Sindhi rural population, failed to take advantage of the new avenues offered by industrialization around Karachi and other urban areas till the early 1970s, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s Sindhi-card politics made it too tempting for them. Even now, there are more Punjabi and Pathan workers, artisans, etc, in Karachi than Sindhis. Punjabi and Pushto-speaking population has registered an increase of 0.88pc and 2.95pc respectively, in Karachi, between 1951 and 1981, while Sindhi and Urdu-speaking population had decreased by 2.34pc and 6.21pc respectively, during the same period. Together, the Punjabi and Pakhtuns comprised 22.35pc — i.e. almost one-quarter — of Karachi’s population in 1981.
This sociological process G.M. Syed could not fathom for some obvious reasons. Nursed and nurtured in a feudal climate and being inherently ethnocentric and supremely oblivious of the dynamics of the urbanization and modernization processes, he simplistically, if not deliberately, attributed the inundation of the urban centres by non-Sindhis to the coming of Pakistan. And he conveniently and deliberately opted for a spell of amnesia, ignoring the stark fact that he had himself invited the Indian Muslims in the first place — first in December 1943 and then in October 1945. He had then pleaded with them to come over and rescue the Sindhi Muslims from the suffocating clutches of Hindu domination.
